lisa suspects she’ll never again know nights of such marvel and delight. Encounters in F-1 are too wondrous to grasp undividedly. She relives them the best she can, in gasping instants, like movie scenes that belong on the Arcade’s fifty-foot screen instead of being glimpsed on Giles’s tiny TV. How the whole pool burns electric blue the instant she enters the lab. The V-shaped current of the creature gliding underwater to meet her. The eggs as smooth and warm as baby skin. The creature’s head rising from the water, his eyes rarely gold now, but softer, human colors, and twinkling, not flashing. The safety lights’ snug, orange glow, like morning in a manger. The massive, bladed weapon of the creature’s hand, signing “egg” with motions gentle enough to stroke a gosling. Facial expressions she’d forgotten she could make: lip-biting excitement reflected in metal surgical tables, big-eyed anticipation reflected in pool water, heedless grins reflected in the creature’s shining eyes. Even daily drudgeries, the frustrating preliminaries to visiting him, are bathed in his radiance. Morning eggs not plopping into her stovetop pot but capering. No more dragging her feet room to room upon waking: she’s Bojangles in the kitchen, Cagney in the bedroom. Her choice of footwear getting showier by the day, sparkling down the Arcade’s fire escape as if the railing is threaded with tinsel. Dancing across Occam’s freshly mopped floors to watch the colors of her shoes gloss like a rising sun over a lake. Zelda giggling at her vivacious mood and remarking that Elisa’s acting like she did when she met Brewster, a comment Elisa deflects while wondering, half-crazy, if that’s exactly right. The scuffed, cat-fur cardboard of LP covers, the twelve-inch square revealed to be the precise dimension of joy. The creature signing “record” before she’s halfway to the pool, standing near the ledge, torso revealed, his chest scales glittering like a drawer of jewelry. The pinching of dust from the record player needle like the wiping of a tear from her eye. Miles or Frank or Hank or Billie or Patsy or Nina or Nat or Fats or Elvis or Roy or Ray or Buddy or Jerry Lee turned into angelic choirs, their every sung word gravid with a history the creature yearns to understand. His lights, his sensational lights, a symphonic reply to the purple glow of crooners, the blue pulse of rock and roll, the dusky yellow of country, the blinking orange of jazz. The touch of his hand, rare but thrilling, when he plucks eggs from her palm. The one time she dares hold nothing at all, and still he reaches out, draws his claws softly down her wrist, curling his hand into her palm as if enjoying the pretend-egg play, and letting her close her fingers around his, for that instant making the two of them not present and past, not human and beast, but woman and man.