ear drops onto Giles’s back like a pterodactyl shot from the sky. Occam is Baltimore’s own Bermuda Triangle, and he’s heard the wild rumors, most of which end with the suspicious death or disappearance of a courageous investigator. He feels a nausea. What Elisa is suggesting is far beyond the abilities of two broke deadbeats living above a crumbling movie theater. The fish-man of Elisa’s delusion must be a poor fellow born with physical deformities—and she wants to break him out?

Elisa is a good person, but her life experience is terrifically limited; she’s incapable of appreciating how deep run the fault lines of America’s Red Scare. Undesirables of all sorts risk their lives and livelihoods on a daily basis, and a homosexual painter? Why, that’s as undesirable as they come! No, he doesn’t have time for this rubbish. He has a meeting with Bernie, an advertisement over which he has slaved.

Giles turns away, knowing the gesture will hurt Elisa. It hurts him, too, to the point that he has trouble sliding his revised canvas into the portfolio case. He faces the wall before speaking, a cowardly tactic that prohibits a mute person’s interruption.

“When I was a boy,” he says, “a carnival pitched its tents out at Herring Run. They had a special exhibit, a whole tent full of natural oddities. One of them was a mermaid. I know because I paid five cents to see it. A sizable fortune for a boy in those days, I assure you. And do you know what this mermaid was? It was dead, first of all. All the paintings of some bare-breasted beauty didn’t square with the old mummified thing in the glass case. What it was was a monkey’s chest and head sewed to a fish tail. I knew that. Anyone could see that. But for years I told myself it’d been a mermaid, because I’d paid my money, hadn’t I? I wanted to believe. People like you and me, we need belief more than others, don’t we? Yet in the cold light of day, what was the mermaid? What was it really? Creative taxidermy. That’s so much of life, Elisa. Things patched together, without meaning, from which we, in our needful minds, create myths to suit us. Does that make sense?”

He buckles the case, the smart clicks the very sound of wisdom. He’s got to get going, after all; perhaps this will be the first of many small jiltings he delivers to Elisa like inoculations. He dons a placating grin and turns back around. His grin freezes solid. Elisa’s cold stare brings the outdoor chill gusting back into the apartment, and he shields himself from the spitting frost. She’s signing, bludgeon-hard and whip-fast, a tone he’s never seen her take, certain repeated symbols engraving themselves onto the air like Fourth of July sparklers. He attempts to look away, but she lunges into his line of sight, her signs like punches, like shaking him by the lapels.

“No,” he says. “We’re not doing it.”

Signs, signs.

“Because it’s breaking the law, that’s why! We’re probably breaking the law even talking about it!”

Signs, signs.

“So what if it’s alone? We’re all alone!”

It’s a truth too cruel to be spoken. Giles darts to the left. Elisa moves to block him. Their shoulders collide. He feels the impact in his teeth and stumbles; he has to slap a hand to the door to steady himself. It is, without question, the worst moment the two of them have ever shared, commensurate to a slap. His heart is pounding. His face is flushed. There’s something wrong with his toupee. He pats his scalp to make sure it’s in place; this only makes him blush more. Abruptly, he is near tears. How did things go so wrong so fast? He hears her panting and realizes he’s panting, too. He doesn’t want to look at her, but he does.

Elisa is crying, and still, the signs, the signs Giles can’t help but read.

“It’s the loneliest thing I’ve ever seen.” He groans. “You see? You said it yourself. It’s a thing. A freak.”

Her signs slash and punch. He bleeds and bruises.

“‘What am I, then? Am I a freak, too?’ Oh, please, Elisa! No one is saying that! I’m sorry, dear, but I really have to go!”

There is more signing (“He doesn’t care what I lack”), but Giles refuses to repeat it aloud. His shaking hand finds the knob and pulls open the door. Cold wind crystallizes the single unfallen tear at the corner of each eye. He steps into the drafty hall, catching another sentence (“I either save him or let him die”), but he reminds himself that somewhere in the city is a building, and inside that building is an appointment book, and in that book is his name. That isn’t fantasy; those are facts. He takes a single step away before pausing and must raise his voice from a squeak.

“It’s not even human,” he insists.

They are the words of a quailing old man pleading to live out his days in peace. Before he can angle the portfolio case out of his own way and escape via the fire escape, just as he’s turning away, he catches her signed reply and it feels as if those signs brand themselves into his back, right through his jacket, his sweater, his shirt, his muscle, his bone, deep enough that the words ache like a fresh wound all the way to Klein & Saunders, where they begin their itchy conversion into scars that he’ll be forced to read for the rest of his life: “NEITHER ARE WE.”