All of it shrinks from the long, sulfur-lit driveway of Occam Aerospace Research Center. Elisa presses her cold face to the colder window to make out the illuminated clock on the sign: 11:55. Her shoes touch a single stair on her bound from the bus. The changeover from the busy swing shift to the tiny graveyard shift is chaotic, and it allows Elisa to move quickly, gazelling from the bus and deering up the service sidewalk. Beneath the merciless outdoor floodlights—every light at Occam is merciless—her shoes are blue blurs.
It’s a single-floor elevator ride down, but some of the labs are more like hangars and the trip takes half a minute. The car opens into a two-story staging area, where stanchions direct staff along a narrowing path. Ten feet above the floor, in a Plexiglased observation chamber, stands David Fleming. Born with a clipboard instead of a left hand, he lowers it to review his subjects. It was Fleming who interviewed her for her job over a decade ago, and he’s still here, his hyena scrutiny pushing him up the throat of command year after year. Now he runs the whole building yet still can’t help meddling with bottom-rung employees. Over the equal period of time, Elisa has gone where janitors go: nowhere.
Elisa curses her Daisys. They stand out, which is the point, but there’s a double edge. Her fellow graveyarders are up ahead: Antonio, Duane, Lucille, Yolanda, and Zelda, the first three disappearing down the hall while Zelda searches for her punch card as if choosing from a menu. The cards go into the same slots every day; Zelda is stalling for Elisa’s sake, because Yolanda is behind Zelda and if Yolanda gets a shot, she’ll dawdle at the punch clock to make Elisa one crucial minute late.
It shouldn’t be this cutthroat. Zelda is black and fat. Yolanda is Mexican and homely. Antonio is a cross-eyed Dominican. Duane is of mixed race and has no teeth. Lucille is albino. Elisa is mute. To Fleming, they are all the same: unfit for other work and therefore easy to trust. It humiliates Elisa that he might be right. She wishes she could talk so she might stand on the locker-room bench and stir her coworkers with a speech about how they need to look out for one another. But that’s not how Occam is set up. As far as she can tell, it’s not how America is set up, either.
Except Zelda, who has always been protective of Elisa. Zelda is digging through her purse for glasses everyone knows she doesn’t wear, waving off Yolanda’s gripes about the ticking clock. Elisa decides that Zelda’s boldness must be matched by her own. She thinks of Bojangles and darts off, mamboing through yawners, fox-trotting past coat-buttoners. Fleming will spot her speeding blue shoes, and her behavior will be noted upon a checklist; at Occam, anything beyond a tired slump earns suspicion. Yet in the seconds it takes Elisa to reach Zelda, her dancing frees her from all of it. She rises above the underground and floats as if she’d never left that lovely, warm bath.
9
FOOD RUNS OUT southwest of Santarém. The crew is weak, starving, light-headed. Happy, chattering monkeys are everywhere, mocking them. So Strickland starts firing. Monkeys fall like aguaje fruit, and men gasp in horror. This annoys Strickland. He advances against a gut-shot monkey, machete raised. The soft-furred animal curls into a woeful ball, its hands pressed over its sobbing face. It is like a child. Like Timmy or Tammy. This is like slaughtering children. He flashes back to Korea. The children, the women. Is this what he’s become? The surviving monkeys scream in sorrow, and the sound pins into his skull. He turns away and attacks a tree with the machete until it spits white wood.
Other men gather the bodies and drop them in boiling water. Don’t they hear the monkeys screaming? Strickland scoops up moss, plugs his ears with it. It doesn’t help. The screaming, the screaming. Dinner is rubbery gray balls of monkey gristle. He doesn’t deserve to eat but does anyway. The screaming, the screaming.
The wet season, whatever the fuck they call it, sniffs them out. The cloudburst is hot, like offal splatter. Henríquez quits trying to wipe steam from his glasses. He walks blind. He is blind, thinks Strickland. Blind to believe he could head up this expedition. Henríquez, who’s never fought a war. Henríquez, who can’t hear the monkeys’ screams. The screams, Strickland realizes, are just like those of the villagers in Korea. As terrible as these sounds are, they tell Strickland what to do.
There’s no need to incite a coup. Attrition does the job. A candirú spine fish, agitated by driving rain, darts up the first mate’s urethra while he’s pissing into the river. Three men take him to the nearest town and are never seen again. The next day, the Peruvian engineer wakes up spotted with purple punctures. A vampire bat. He and a friend are superstitious. They’re gone. Weeks later, a torn mosquito net leads to one of the índios bravos being bitten to death, blanketed in tracuá ants. Finally, the Mexican bosun, best pal to Henríquez, is struck in the throat by a bright green papagaio viper. Seconds later, blood spurts from every pore of his body. There’s no hope for him. General Hoyt taught Strickland just where to put the Beretta, right at the base of the bosun’s skull, so that death comes quick.
Then they are five. With guides, seven. Henríquez hides belowdecks, filling his logbook with daymare transcripts. His straw hat, once so crisp, has collapsed into its new role as bedpan. Strickland visits and chuckles at the captain’s erratic mumbling.
“Are you motivated?” Strickland asks him. “Are you motivated?”
No one asks Richard Strickland about his motivation. Until now, he didn’t have an answer. Never gave a shit about Deus Brânquia, that’s for sure. Now there’s nothing in the world he wants more. Deus Brânquia has done something to him, changed him in ways he suspects can’t be reversed. He’ll capture it with what’s left of the Josefina crew—aren’t they vestigios now, too? Then it’s home, finally home, for whatever it’s still worth. He masturbates under a torrid rain, above a nest of baby snakes, picturing silent, tidy sex with Lainie. Two dry bodies shifting like blocks of wood on a boundless veldt of tight, white sheets. He’ll make it back there. He will. He’ll do what the monkeys say, and then it will all be over.
10
ELISA USED TO exchange her fancy shoes for sneakers in the locker room. But it’d felt like a chopping, her hand the hatchet. You can’t clean in heels—that was among Fleming’s maxims the day she’d been hired. We can’t have any slipping and falling. No black heels, either, because there are scientific markings on some of the laboratory floors, and we can’t have them marred. Fleming had a thousand such bromides. These days, though, his attention is mostly elsewhere, and the discomfort of Elisa’s heels has become comfort; it keeps her awake, alive to sensation, if barely.
A long-defunct shower room serves as the janitorial closet. Zelda takes her traditional cart, and Elisa hers, which they stock from shelves they’re expected to keep in three-month supply. Then their eight cart wheels, plus eight more for the mop buckets, reverberate down Occam’s long white hallways like a slow-moving train to nowhere.
They have to be professional at all times; some white-coated men linger about the labs until two or three in the morning. Occam scientists are a strange subspecies of male whose jobs drive them to absolute distraction. Fleming teaches his janitors to promptly exit any lab they find occupied, and it happens periodically. When two scientists finally leave together, they squint in disbelief at each other’s watches, chuckling about the hell they’re going to catch from their wives, sighing at how they’d rather crash-land at their girlfriends’ pads.