orning mist, cigarette smoke, his own tired eyes: Through such shrouds Giles spots her half a block away. No one walks like Elisa. He ashes onto the fire escape and folds his arms upon the railing. Clubbed by blasts of wind, Elisa doesn’t make herself a blade, but rather a fist, hulking her upper body past phantom foes, arms linked with invisible rugby cohorts. Her feet, though, operate on a different plane, making long, deft, dancer’s strides in shoes bright enough to bring shining life to the neighborhood’s funereal gray. Shoes are to Elisa, Giles realizes, what his portfolio case is to him.

He stubs the cigarette, goes back inside. He’s up early, showered, and fed for his crucial return trip to Klein & Saunders. He shoos a cat from Andrzej the skull and removes the hairpiece. He stands before the bathroom mirror and centers it, scooches it, combs it. It isn’t as convincing as it once was. The toupee hasn’t changed. He has. It no longer looks right for a man his age to have so thick a mane. But how can he drop the act now? It’d seem to the outside world as if he’d been scalped. On the other hand: What outside world? He stares at the gaunt fossil in the mirror and ponders how he happened into a snare of such contradiction: A man no one looks at worrying about his looks.

A knocking on the front door jars him. He hustles through the apartment, checking his watch. He warned Elisa yesterday that he had an appointment this morning, but she hadn’t given a response. Lately she’s been lost in thought; Giles, dispirited by his reflection, suddenly dreads that she’s been hiding something awful, some untreatable cancer. The knocking is frantic.

Before he can reach the door, Elisa enters, pulling a stocking hat off her head, which fans propellers of staticky hair. Giles relaxes some. Barging in is a robust tradition of theirs, and despite Elisa’s nocturnal calendar and the meager vittles of the underpaid, her cheeks are so red that he’s struck by wistfulness. Under equal exertion, his face would be winding-sheet white.

“Bursting with brio this morning, aren’t we?” he asks.

She’s past him, all but ricocheting off the walls, signing recklessly enough to send columns of old paintings swaying. Giles holds up a finger for patience and closes the door to keep the chill out. When he turns back, she’s still going. Her right hand wiggles—“fish,” he thinks—and she pulls inward from both shoulders—“fireplace,” he thinks; no, “skeleton”; no, “creature”—and then a similar motion, but rounded—“trap,” he thinks, or something like it, though he’s probably wrong, she’s talking far too rapidly. He holds up both hands.

“A moment of silence, I beseech you.”

Elisa sulks her shoulders, glares like a rebuked child, and opens two shaking fists: no specific sign, just the universal gesture for exasperation.

“First things first,” he says. “Are you in trouble? Are you hurt?”

She signs the word like she’s squashing a bug: “No.”

“Wonderful. Can I interest you in Corn Flakes? I only ate half a bowl. Nerves, I’m afraid.”

Elisa scowls. Frigidly, she signs “fish.”

“Darling, I told you last night, I have a meeting. I’m practically out the door. Why the sudden craving for fish? Don’t tell me you’re pregnant.”

Elisa plants her face into her hands, and Giles’s chest tightens. Has his quip made this poor girl, single since the day he met her, cry? Her back convulses—but it’s a hiccup of laughter. When she lifts her face, her eyes remain wild, but she’s shaking her head as if in disbelief of an absurdity he has yet to comprehend. She exhales to calm herself, shakes her hands as if they’re on fire, and gives Giles a steadfast look for the first time. After a second, her mouth tweaks to the right. Giles groans.

“Food in my teeth,” he guesses. “No, it’s the hair, isn’t it? I’ve got it all cockeyed. Well, you took a battering ram to my door before I could—”

Elisa reaches out and plucks beech leaves from both suede coat and sweater, residue of a recent windstorm. Next she turns his bow tie one-hundred-and-eighty degrees. Finally, she pets his temple where real hair meets toupee, though this feels more like an act of affection than a corrective. She steps back and makes the sign for “handsome.” Giles sighs. Here is a woman who can’t be counted on to deliver the unvarnished truth.

“As much as I’d like to be a reciprocal monkey and pick your fur of lice, there is the aforementioned meeting. You wish to tell me something before I go?”

Elisa fixes him with a dour look and raises both hands to signal that she’s about to begin signing. Giles straightens his spine, a student receiving an oral exam. He’s got a hunch that Elisa wouldn’t appreciate a grin right now, so he tucks it under his mustache. His pervading fear, expanding by the year, is that he, a washed-up, never-was, so-called artist and his broken battalion of debilitated cats, are to blame for inhibiting Elisa’s potential. He could improve her life by simply moving out, finding some bland stable of old folks who’d have him in their bridge group. Elisa, then, would be forced to seek out those who might expand her world rather than restrict it. If only he could handle the grief of losing her.

Her signs are slow, deliberate, absent of affect. “Fish.” “Man.” “Cage.” O-C-C-A-M.

“Remedial,” Giles proclaims. “You can go faster than that.”

What follows is as startling as a Miltonesque monologue delivered by a bashful kindergartener. Gone is Elisa’s penchant for searching for the perfect words. Her hands take up the agility typically limited to her feet, and her narrative flows with symphonic clarity, even as it yaws with improvisational zeal. Mechanically, it is breathtaking, and like any well-told story a pleasure to read, even if every plot point pushes the story into a genre darker than Giles prefers. For a time, he thinks she is spinning fiction. Then the details become too unsparing, too mordant. Elisa, at least, believes every word.

A fish-man, locked up in Occam, tortured and dying, and in need of rescue.