arious offices were offered to Strickland. First-floor berths with panoramic views of swooping lawns. He enjoyed spurning Fleming’s largesse by instead insisting upon the windowless security-camera room. He had Fleming install a desk, cabinet, trash can, and two telephones. One white, one red. The room is small, neat, quiet, and perfect. He journeys his eyes across the four-by-four grid of black-and-white monitors. The interchangeable hallways. The sporadic twitch of a meandering night worker. After the occluded views of the rain forest, how relieving it is to see everything all at once.

He peruses the screens. The last time he saw the two janitors now seated right behind him was in the men’s room, he burning with the mortification of runaway urine, they holding their laughter until he left. Different dynamic now, isn’t it? An opportunity to reestablish a proper relationship. He lets his left hand dangle. Gives the janitors a chance to see the bandages, the shape of his reattached fingers. To imagine what they look like underneath. He could tell them. Pretty fucking bad is how they look. The fingers don’t match his hand. They’re putty-colored, stiff as plastic, attached by black thread the thickness of tarantula legs.

Strickland’s only concern is that they can make out his fingers in the dim light. He unscrewed the overheads after moving in, preferring to let the sixteen screens fill the office with a ghostly gray. After the jungle’s salacious blaze, bright lights are as bad as loud noises. F-1 is intolerable. Hoffstetler has begun dimming the lab at night for the creature’s sake, but that’s even worse. The idea that he and the asset share a light sensitivity enrages him. He’s no animal. He left his animal self in the Amazon. He had to if he had any hope of being a good husband, a good father.

Just to make sure they see, he wiggles his stitched fingers. The blood screams, the monitors go hazy. Strickland blinks, tries not to faint. This pain, it’s something else. The doctors gave him pills for it. The bottle’s right there in the desk. Don’t doctors know that suffering has a point? It grinds you harder, sharper. No thanks, doc. Hard candy will do.

Thinking of the sharp, stinging, distracting taste makes him finally turn around. Since Lainie refuses to unpack the boxes from the move, he’d had to dig out the Brazilian candy himself. It was worth it. The bag chuckles like a clean countryside creek when he picks it up. The glassy green ball billiards between his teeth. That’s better. Much better. He exhales over a tongue being playfully stabbed by sugar and drops himself into his chair.

He’s supposed to thank these two janitors. For finding his fingers. That was Fleming’s request. He would have told Fleming to stuff it, but he’s bored. Sitting behind a desk all day. How do people stand it? Takes fifty signatures before he’s authorized to blow his nose. A hundred signatures before he can wipe his ass. It’s a shame not a single idiot MP landed a bullet in the asset during the attack. He’s got half a mind to pick up the Alabama Howdy-do, march into F-1, and fix it so the asset has less life left to be studied. Once Deus Brânquia is gone, he’ll be out from under General Hoyt, back into his wife’s and kids’ lives. He wants that. Doesn’t he? He thinks he does.

Plus, he can’t sleep. Not with this kind of pain. So, fine. He’ll leak some gratitude upon the stupid janitors. But he’ll do it his way, just to make sure they don’t think he’s some overgrown child incapable of not pissing all over the bathroom floor. Anyway, he’s in no hurry to scurry home. The way Lainie looks at him, he can hardly stand it. Like the fingers don’t compare to what the jungle ripped out of him and what he’s tried to hastily sew back together. He’s trying. Can’t she see he’s trying?

He picks up the first of two pulled files.

“Zelda D. Fuller.”

“Yes, sir,” she replies.

“Married, says here. But how is it your husband’s got a different last name? If you’re divorced or separated, that’s supposed to be here.”

“Brewster, that’s his first name, sir.”

“Sounds like a last name to me.”

“Yes, sir. But no, sir.”

“Yes, but no. Yes, but no.” He screws his right thumb into a forehead beset by the pain crawling up his left arm. “Answers like that are going to make this last all night. It’s twelve-thirty. In the a.m. I could’ve called you two here in the middle of the day, make it easy on myself, but I didn’t. Best you can do is return the favor so I can get out of here, go to bed, have breakfast with my kids. That sound all right to you, Mrs. Brewster? I’m sure you have children.”

“I don’t, sir.”

“No? Now why’s that?”

“I don’t know, sir. It just never … took.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Mrs. Brewster.”

“It’s Mrs. Fuller, sir. Brewster’s my husband.”

“Brewster. That’s a last name or I’m a monkey’s uncle. Well, I’m sure you have siblings. I expect you know how it goes with children.”

“I don’t have siblings, sir, I’m sorry.”

“That surprises me a great deal. Isn’t that unusual? For your people?”

“My mother died in childbirth.”

“Oh.” Strickland flips a page. “Here it is, page two. That’s too bad. Although if she died in childbirth, I guess you can’t miss her.”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Silver lining, is all I’m saying.”

“Maybe, sir.”

Maybe. It feels as if two balloons of acid are inflating inside his temples. Maybe they’ll explode. Maybe his skin will fizzle from his face and these girls will get to see his shrieking skull. He presses a finger to the page and converges his wobbling eyes upon it. A dead mother. Implied miscarriages. Some kooky marriage. Doesn’t mean shit. Words are useless. Take General Hoyt’s brief about Deus Brânquia. Sure, it’d explained the mission. But had it imparted a thing about how the jungle gets inside you? How the vines penetrate your mosquito net while you sleep, slithering past your lips, boring through your esophagus, and strangling your heart?

Somewhere there’s a government brief about the thing in F-1, and it’s bullshit, too. What’s inside that tank, you can’t capture it in words. You need all your senses. His had been electric in the Amazon, fueled on rage and buchité. Returning to America had dulled him. Baltimore had put him into a coma. Maybe getting two fingers torn off can wake him back up. Because look at him. Here, in the dead of night, listening to low-paid night crawlers, hired precisely because they are slow, uneducated women, tell him, to his face, maybe.