“I wish I was. Then I’d be sitting on top a whole hill of cash. Let me tell you. This here ain’t the only Dixie Doug’s. There’s twelve of them. It’s called ‘franchising.’ They send you this brochure, see. Lays out the whole shebang. Paint color, decorations. Dixie Dog, our mascot. The whole menu, even. They do studies. Find out what people like, scientifically. They truck it across the country, and we serve it up.”
“Intriguing,” Giles says.
Brad looks about, then leans closer. “You want to know a secret?”
There is nothing Giles wants more. He’s harbored enough of them to know that receiving a secret from someone else magically lightens both parties’ loads.
“This voice? It isn’t even real. I’m from Ottawa. I’ve never heard a southern accent in my life, besides movies.”
Feelings settle inside Giles, ice into a glass. He may have failed to confirm Brad’s name, but he’ll come away today with a superior prize. One day, he is certain, Brad will share his real voice, some exotic Canadian lilt, and then—well, that will have to mean something, won’t it? Carrying his portfolio bag proudly, waiting on bright green pie, Giles feels more a part of the world than he’s felt in ages.
7
“I DON’T NEED to reiterate to most of you the great lengths some of our best men went to make this possible, and how not all of those men came back to be able to share in the achievement,” Fleming says. “What I do feel a responsibility to address—and I’m glad, frankly, that my janitorial girls are here to hear this—is that this is, without question, the most sensitive asset ever brought to Occam Aerospace, and it needs to be treated that way. I know you’ve all signed the forms, but let me say it again. Top-secret data is not for wives. Not for children. Not for the best buddy you’ve known since you were a kid. This is national security. This is the fate of the free world. The president himself knows your names, and I sincerely hope that’s enough to keep you—”
Elisa’s tensed body seizes at the crunch of a code key into a lock, and it’s not even the lock behind her. Ten-foot double doors on the other side of F-1, which connect with the hallway that feeds to the loading dock, swing open. A helmeted man in military drabs rushes in from either side to secure the doors. They are armed, as are all Occam guards, but not with enigmatic handguns in unemphatic holsters. Large black bayonet rifles are slung across their backs.
A car-length, rubber-wheeled pallet is guided into the lab by a third and fourth soldier. It carries what Elisa, in the first seconds, believes to be an iron lung. Polio was the orphanage’s unexorcisable boogeyman; any child forced to sit through overlong sermons and dry lectures could fathom the horror of being trapped forever in a neck-down casket. This object is similarly podlike but several orders larger, with riveted steel, compression seals, rubberized joints, and pressure meters. Whoever is inside, Elisa thinks, must be gravely ill for even his head to be kept inside the tank. Fleming is on the move, directing the pallet to a cleared space alongside the pool, before Elisa recognizes her own naïveté. Sick little boys do not earn four armed escorts.
The final man through the double doors is buzz cut with gorilla arms and the hulking gait of one suspicious of indoor spaces. He wears a denim coat over roughshod gray twills, and even these garments seem to constrain him. He circles the pod, muttering directions and indicating wheels to be locked, knobs to be adjusted. He doesn’t point at these with a finger. Looped around his wrist is the rawhide strap of a scuffed orange baton ending into two metal prongs. Elisa isn’t sure, but thinks it’s an electric cattle prod.
Both Fleming and Dr. Bob Hoffstetler advance upon the man with right hands outstretched, but the man’s furrowed eyes glare past them, across the length of the lab, directly at Elisa and Zelda. Dual veins fatten his forehead like subcutaneous horns.
“What are they doing here?”
In direct reply, the tank rattles violently upon its trailer and a high-pitched roar typhoons from within, sloshing water and frightening soldiers who expel curse words and bring about their rifles. What looks like a hand, but can’t be, for it’s far too large, slaps against one of the tank’s porthole windows and Elisa can’t believe the glass doesn’t crack, but it doesn’t, and the tank is rocking, and the soldiers are fanning into formation, and Fleming is rushing at the janitors and shouting, and Hoffstetler is wincing at his failure to protect them, and Zelda has two handfuls of Elisa’s uniform, dragging her into the hallway along with their carts, and the man with the cattle prod holds his furious glare for a second longer before dropping his head between his shoulders and turning to face the screaming, captured thing.
8
THE BOXES FROM Florida are a problem. She knows it and promises herself to unpack them, first chance she gets, and that’s an order! She recalls a treasured moment with Richard, years ago now, when she, emboldened by his orgasm, had dared make a sex joke, an allusion to “standing at attention.” In later years, such lewdness from her would repulse him. But that one time, he’d chuckled and checked off the basics of military formation. Heels together. Suck the stomach. Arms along seams. No smiling. That’s the efficiency she needs to emulate. She’s got a utility knife for opening boxes. She’s got Brillo Soap Pads, Ajax with Instant Chlorine Bleach, Bruce Cleaning Wax, Tide Laundry Detergent, and Comet with Chlorinol, all locked and loaded and ready for duty.
She could unpack the boxes in two days if she buckled down. But she can’t. Each time she slits packing tape, it’s like knifing open the belly of a doe. Inside these boxes are seventeen months of a different life. One that had knocked her off the well-trod path she’d been on since she was a little girl: dating, marriage, children, homemaking. Pulling items from those boxes—it’s like ripping organs from that other version of herself, that woman of ambition and energy and promise. The whole thing is silly, she knows that. She’ll get to it. She will.
Only it’s hard with Baltimore right there, right outside the window. After she gets the kids off to school, there’s no resisting. Each time, it happens the same. She puts on her heels for Richard, as seeing her barefoot irritates him—Lainie blames this, too, on the Amazon, perhaps some shoeless tribe that disgusted him. When Richard leaves for Occam, off fly the shoes so that Lainie can scrunch her toes deep into the carpet. Not much grit, not really. A modicum of crumbs, that’s all. Clean enough for now, surely. She gets dressed, goes out, boards a bus.
At first, she’d pretended that she was looking for a church. It wasn’t a lie, not entirely. A family needs a house of worship. Her church in Orlando had been a literal godsend those months without Richard before she’d found her footing. Footing: She needs, again, to find it. Problem is, Baltimore has a church on every block. Is she a Baptist? They’d attended a Baptist church in Virginia. Episcopal, perhaps? She’s not sure what the word means. Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian: Those all sound safe, untheatrical. She takes a seat on the bus, prim of posture, hands folded on her purse, and rolls specific church names over her lipsticked lips. All Saints, Holy Trinity, New Life. She laughs; it fogs the bus window, and she briefly loses sight of the city. How could she choose anything besides New Life?