“Strickland?” His voice is mushy, lispy. “Oh, thank you, thank you.”
Richard Strickland reaches down, loops the thumb of his free hand into the hole in Hoffstetler’s cheek, and pulls. Pulls so hard Hoffstetler’s whole body is dragged through the mud. Pain arrives belatedly, full-fleshed and muscular from under a blanket of shock, and Hoffstetler screams, feeling the jagged rip of his cheek, and screams again, and keeps screaming, until the mud being plowed by his shoulder fills his eyes and his mouth and he is blind, and mute, and then nothing at all.
20
RECLAIMING WAKEFULNESS IS leaping into a nightmare. A thunderous roar subsumes everything. Hoffstetler’s eyes whirl upward, expecting needles of rain, but there is a tin roof, hence the roar. He’s on a concrete porch, some sort of outbuilding. He sees thick plaits of rain pound crumbled brick and oxidized steel. He’s still in the industrial park. A shadow lurches across his vision. He blinks liquid from his eyes—rain, blood? It’s Strickland, pacing the length of concrete. He’s gripping something small, a medicine bottle. He upends it over an open mouth, but it’s empty. He curses, whips the bottle into the rain, stares down at Hoffstetler.
“You’re awake,” Strickland grunts. “Good. I’ve got things to do.”
He squats down. Instead of that orange cattle prod Strickland brings everywhere, he’s got a gun, and he pulls the slide and noses it into Hoffstetler’s right palm. The barrel is cold and wet, a puppy’s nose, Hoffstetler thinks.
“Strickland.” As soon as Hoffstetler says it, his mangled cheek, all those severed nerves, scream to life. “Richard. It hurts. The hospital, please—”
“What’s your name?”
He’s been lying for two decades, it’s instinct: “Bob Hoffstetler. You know me.”
The gun discharges. A bullet into cement sounds surprisingly rubbery, a resounding thwap. Hoffstetler’s hand feels swatted. He lifts it. There is a tidy, singed hole through the center of the palm. His instinct is to contract the fingers to see if they still work, for there are thousands of book pages still to flip, scores of analyses yet to write, but instead he revolves it. The exit wound is a ragged starburst serrated by flaps of skin. Blood vessels drape from the hole. He knows it is about to bleed; he presses it against his chest.
Strickland pins Hoffstetler’s other palm with the gun.
“Your real name, Bob.”
“Dmitri. Dmitri Hoffstetler. Please, Richard, please.”
“All right, Dmitri. Now give me the name and ranks of the strike team.”
“The strike team? I don’t know what—”
The gun blasts again, and Hoffstetler screams. He brings his left hand into his chest without looking at it, though he can’t ignore the puff of smoke exhaling from the burnt flesh. His hands, what are left of them, clasp on to each other, while actions Hoffstetler might never again make race through his head: feed himself, bathe himself, clean himself after using the toilet. He’s sobbing now, his tears funneling into the hole in his cheek and gathering salty on his tongue.
“Now look, Dmitri,” Strickland says. “Those guys who came to pick you up, someone’s going to notice they’re gone. Things are moving fast now. There’s nothing I can do about that. So I’m going to ask again.”
Hoffstetler feels the hard barrel of the gun screw into his kneecap.
“No, no, please, no, Richard, please, please.”
“Names and ranks. Of the strike team that took the asset.”
Through the red eruptions of pain, Hoffstetler understands. Strickland believes the Soviets stole the Devonian. Not a single infiltrator like Dr. Hoffstetler, either, but some penetration unit toting high-tech tools as they wriggled through air ducts to collar their quarry. A strange sound escapes Hoffstetler’s throat. It must be a bleat of pain, he thinks, but then another one escapes and he recognizes it as a laugh. It’s funny what Strickland thinks. And here, as the wick of his life burns toward bottom, he can’t think of any more surprising, and welcome, sound on which to end. He drops his jaw and lets the laughter peal, bubbling out blood, slushing out pebbles of tooth.
Strickland’s face goes red. He shoots, and Hoffstetler screams, and he can see from the bottom of his vision the bottom half of his leg sliding across concrete, but his scream mutates right back into laughter, and he’s so proud, and Strickland’s lips peel back and more gunshots follow, his other knee, both elbows, his shoulders, pain detonating until it is not pain at all, just a pure, raw state of being that amplifies the fermata he’s chosen as his final one: laughter. The jolly sound rings from his mouth, the hole in his cheek, the new holes all over his body. Strickland has stood up, is unloading his clip into Hoffstetler’s stomach.
“Names! Ranks! Names! Ranks!”
“Ranks?” Hoffstetler laughs. “Janitors.”
Hoffstetler feels a shot of regret like one more bullet—perhaps he shouldn’t have said that—but he’s too light-headed to think. The stew of his guts runs down the sides of his torso, steam rising from his entrails to curl before Strickland, little fists of protest. He is twirling backward and downward, moving rapidly after a lifetime rooted behind lecterns and desks, and still, stubbornly, he’s a scholar till the end, the words of his favorite philosopher, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin—who but a career academic has a favorite philosopher?—bleeding through the haze. We are one, after all, you and I. Together we suffer, together exist, and forever will recreate each other. Yes, that’s it! A lifetime spent alone doesn’t matter, for he’s not alone here at the end. He is with you, and you, and you, and he wouldn’t have noticed any of it if not for the Devonian. Here is the ultimate emergence, quickened by sacrifice: finding God, that mischievous imp, hiding where we least expected, not in a church, not on a slab, but inside us, right there next to our hearts.
21
WHAT WAS ZELDA doing in the seconds before her front door was kicked in? Before the wood securing the dead bolt disintegrated into daggers and left the chain lock dangling like a mugger-torn necklace? She thinks she was cooking. She often does before heading to work, stocking Brewster with a day’s worth of food. She sniffs bacon, butter, brussels sprouts. There’s music, too, a deep-throated crooner. She must have been listening to it. She wonders if she’d been enjoying herself, if she’d been happy. It seems vital to remember these details, for she’s certain they will be her last.
Until now, the most surreal sight of Zelda’s life was the asset from F-1 staring back at her from Elisa’s laundry cart. It had been so incongruous, that fearsome, brilliant beast situated inside a gray, driveling bed of soiled rags. Even that vision, though, pales against this: Richard Strickland, that horrid man from work, bug-eyed, drenched with rain, spattered with blood, and holding a gun in her living room.
Brewster where he always is when work is scarce, in the Barcalounger at full recline, socked feet propped on the leg rest, a can of beer in one loose fist. Strickland blocks the TV, and Brewster scrutinizes him in mild perturbation, as if the ghoul had appeared behind Walter Cronkite’s news desk instead of inside their duplex. Strickland snorts and spits a flume of spit and rain and blood. He steps over it, smirching the clean carpet with the flat pancakes of mud adhered to the bottom of his shoes.
Zelda doesn’t need to ask why any of this is happening. She lifts her hands before her. She finds she is holding a spatula.
“Nice home you have here.” Strickland’s voice is garbled.
“Mr. Strickland,” she pleads, “we didn’t mean any harm, I swear.”
He frowns at the walls, and for an instant Zelda can see her cheerful decorations through the man’s ferocious red eyes: mendacious trifles, mawkish mementos, idiotic knickknacks commemorating a happy life that could have never been all that happy. Strickland flicks his wrist lazily. The gun barrel smashes the glass of a framed photograph, a lightning-shaped crack splitting the face of her mother.
“Where’d you put it?” He staggers drunkenly. “Basement?”
“We don’t have a basement, Mr. Stric
kland. I swear.”
He slides the gun along a shelf of porcelain figurines. One at a time they drop, shattering on the floor. Zelda flinches with each one: the little accordion boy, the big-eyed deer, the Happy New Year angel, the Persian cat. Just baubles, she tells herself, without real significance, except it’s a lie, they are significant, they are three decades of evidence that she has, on occasion, saved enough money to purchase herself something frivolous, something that simply looked nice, exceptions to the hard rules of knotty steaks, generic cereal, government cheese.
Strickland swivels, his muddy heel grinding porcelain, and points the pistol at her like an accusing finger.
“Sir, Mrs. Brewster. You got a real problem with names.”
“Brewster,” says Brewster. Hearing his name stirs him. “That’s me.”
Strickland doesn’t look at him but waggles his head. “Oh. Right. Zelda Fuller. Zelda D. Fuller. Old Delilah.” He lopes from the wall, halving the distance to Zelda so quickly she drops the spatula. “You never let me finish the story.” He swings his gun arm, obliterating a ceramic vase once belonging to Zelda’s grandmother. “Samson, as I remember it, betrayed by Delilah, blinded and tortured by the Philistines, at the very last second is saved. God saves him.” He punches the gun through cabinet glass, pulverizing her mother’s good china. “Why’s he saved? Because he’s a good man, Delilah. A man of principle. A man who, down to his last little fucking ounce of energy, is trying to do the right thing.”
He backhands the stovetop beside Zelda, flipping a pan and shooting bacon grease atop Zelda’s sign language handbook. The grease sizzles and burns holes through the pages. Zelda feels a blast of indignation. She darts her eyes over her spoiled home, the path of crude destruction doing its best to destroy the memories of every struggle she has overcome. Strickland’s a couple of feet away. The gun might swipe her face next. It doesn’t matter: She lifts her chin as high as she can. She will not be frightened. She will not give up her friend.
Strickland leers at her. A white froth that looks like upchucked aspirin has gathered in the corners of his lips. Slowly, he displays his left hand. Despite the stupefying terror, Zelda recoils from the repellent sight. She hasn’t seen these fingers since she and Elisa had found them on the lab floor. Now the bandage is gone and the operation is exposed as a failure. The fingers are the glossy black of rotten bananas, inflated to the point of rupture.
“God gives Samson back all his strength,” Strickland says. “Gives him back all his power. So that Samson can bring ruin raining down on all the Philistines. He takes hold of the columns of the temple. Like so.”
Strickland stashes the gun in his armpit so that he can pinch the two dead fingers.
“And then? He breaks them.”
Strickland tears off the fingers. They detach as if perforated, with a series of light pops—just like snapping beans, Zelda thinks before screaming. She hears a thud, Brewster dropping his beer, and a zing, the Barcalounger springing to starting position. Strickland’s eyebrows lift in surprise at the brown fluid that geysers two inches from the finger holes before dribbling down his hand like slopped gravy. He considers the two black sausages he’s still holding, and drops them on the kitchen floor. From one of the fingers pops a wedding band.
“It’s Elisa,” Brewster blurts. “Elisa what’s-her-name. The mute. She’s the one that has it.”
The only sounds are the rustle of rain coming through the open door, the yammer of the television, and the soft glug of beer emptying onto the carpet. Strickland turns. Zelda reaches for the stove to keep herself upright, then shakes her head at her husband.
“Brewster, don’t—”
“She lives over a movie theater,” he continues. “That’s what Zelda says. The Arcade. Just a few blocks north of the river. Easy trip from here. Five minutes, I bet.”
The weight of the gun appears to double. Zelda watches it hitch downward until it points at the floor.
“Elisa?” Strickland whispers. “Elisa did this?”
He stares at Zelda, face drawn in shocked betrayal, arms shaking slightly as if in search of a hug to keep him aloft. Zelda doesn’t know what to say or do, and so makes no sound or move. Strickland’s face falls. He pouts at the finger smudged across the linoleum, as if longing to have it back. He breathes for a minute, shallow at first, then more deeply, before raising his head and squaring his shoulders. Military bearing, Zelda guesses, is all this wrecked man has left.
He plods across the carpet, shoes dragging through the mud. He lifts the telephone as if it, too, is of cinder block weight, and dials as if through clay. Zelda stares at Brewster. Brewster stares at Strickland. Zelda hears the pip-squeak report of a man picking up on the other end.
“Fleming.” Strickland’s voice is so lifeless that Zelda shudders. “I was … I was wrong. It’s the other one. Elisa Esposito. She’s got the asset above the Arcade. Yes, the movie theater. Reroute the containment unit. I’ll meet it there.”
Strickland gingerly replaces the receiver into its cradle and turns around. He surveys the glass, the porcelain, the ceramic, the china, the paper, the flesh—so much detritus generated so quickly. His comatose manner suggests to Zelda that he’ll never leave this spot, will become a fixture in her home that she’ll have to glue back together along with the rest of the ruin. But Strickland is a wound watch. Cogs inside of him turn and he moves, shuffling between Brewster and the television and out the open door.
One more lurch and he’s gone, melted into the rain.
Zelda bursts forward and reaches for the phone. Brewster, though, is out of his chair at last, and moves more rapidly than she’s ever seen. The Barcalounger rocks and yowls, abruptly empty, and Zelda finds her husband’s arm held crosswise over the phone.
“Brewster. Please move.”
“You can’t get involved. We can’t get involved.”
“He’s going to her home. Because of you, Brewster! I need to warn her. He has a gun!”
“Because of me we saved our skins. They don’t get your friend, who do you think they blame next? You think they’re just going to forget? Forget the black folks who stuck their noses in? We’re going to repair that door and we’re going to pick up those … things he left on the floor, and we’re going to sit down and watch TV. Just like normal people.”
“I never should’ve told you. I never should’ve said a word—”
“You finish dinner; I’ll find some seltzer to scrub the rug—”
“They love each other. Don’t you remember? Don’t you remember what that was like?”
Brewster’s arm sags. But he does not abdicate the phone.
“I do remember,” he says. “That’s why I can’t let you make that call.”
His brown eyes, so often half-shut and glazed by television strobes, are wide and clear, and in them she can see the reflection of debris left behind by Strickland. In truth, she can see a lot more than that. She can see Brewster’s own history of battling and losing, always losing but never quite quitting, not even when Zelda spins her risky fantasies of quitting Occam and starting her own business. In that way, Brewster is brave. He has survived. He’s still here, surviving. He’s a good man.
But she’s a good woman, or wants to be, and that particular achievement is measured by the distance between the change bowl, where Brewster’s car keys rest, and the gaping front door, and beyond that, the distance between the front door and Brewster’s Ford snoozing in the rain. She knows she can make it; Brewster will be too stunned to follow. She knows she can make it to Elisa’s, too, even in this Old Testament tempest. What she doesn’t know is what good she can do once she gets there, or what will be the aftermath. But such things are always unknowable, aren’t they? The world changes, or doesn’t. You fight for the right things and be glad you did. That, at least, is the plan, the best one Zelda D. Fuller’s got.
22
ELISA KNOWS EVERY leaf of her jungle, every vine, every stone, and detects no malice in the shadow that sl
ides over her. She opens her warm, wet eyes, enjoying the playful resistance of droplets trying to keep individual eyelashes mated. They peel apart, one by one, reluctant and languorous. It is Giles, backlit by living-room light, standing over the tub, smiling gently, and she wonders if the hothouse mugginess of the room is to blame for the tears filling his eyes.
“It’s time, dear,” he says.
She winds her drowsy arms around the dozing creature, unwilling to recall, but unable to stop herself, either, how several hours ago, possibly several millennia, she’d knocked on Giles’s door to beg of him the greatest, most terrible favor. She’d signed her request briskly so that the grief wouldn’t prolong: unlock her apartment before midnight, rouse her from the tub, and ignore any protests she might make. The bathwater she lies in, she notices, has gone cold, yet she has no desire to leave it. It can’t be that late already. It can’t be. She’s had all day, all night to say good-bye to him and she hasn’t even begun.
Giles plants his hands to his knees in order to hunker down, but halts halfway. He’s holding a long, thin paintbrush, fine-tipped for detail, and seems to have forgotten it. Now there’s green paint all over one knee of his trousers. He chuckles, stows the brush into his breast pocket.
“I finished.” He can’t keep the pride from his voice, and Elisa is glad he doesn’t. “It won’t be the same thing as having him. Not even close. But I believe it’s the closest anyone could ever come. And it’s for you, Elisa. You’ll have it to remember him by. Let me show it to you on our way out—show it to both of you. Now, please, sweetheart. It’s late. Won’t you take my hand?”
Elisa smiles, lost in awe over her friend’s head of hair, his face’s boyish brio, his skin’s healthful hue. His aspect is tender, but resolute. She looks at his outstretched hand, the knuckle hair clotted with paint, the fingernails swathed in paint, the cuff of his sweater ringed in paint. She raises a hand from the water. The instant it leaves the creature’s back, he bristles, holds her more tightly. Elisa hesitates, her hand occupying the midworld between her watery wedding bed and Giles’s solid ground, and she doesn’t know if she can bridge the gap.