he charcoal is a stick of dynamite in his hand. It’s not a tool he uses much. You don’t choose charcoal to depict Etiquette Antiseptic Deodorant Cream or Tangee Summer Rouge. It’s untidy, the opposite of what such products demand, and black makes people wary, not in the mood to buy. Ah, but there was a time when he’d accepted nothing else! He’d used it for nudes, mostly, as charcoal was the rawest instrument and demanded rawness of its subject. Drawing with it was equivalent to witchcraft. Even patches of paper he ignored came to life as angled cheekbones, lifted foreheads, thrust clavicles, the slopes of buttocks, the sides of bellies. Finer features sank into cinder and rose reborn, the story of evolution played out in two dimensions.

He was so young then and unafraid of mistakes, eager to seize mistakes, in fact, as the catalyst of artistic surprise. Giles wonders if he still has it in him. Will his aching old hands impede him from modulating color from black to heather to smoke to fog? Will the tremble of his old fingers prevent him from smudging the texture from burlap to twill to silk to suede? It is one day since the heist; his ears are attuned for police sirens. The only thing to settle his mind, and his hands, is to work. He selects a pencil of medium thickness. It is gummy from decades in a cigar-box coffin. He chips at it with a thumbnail and lowers it to the paper, which lies on the easel, which rests on his lap, which sits on the closed toilet.

The creature watches from beneath bathwater. It is still learning how to breathe the water of the Arcade Apartments, and can do little but roll. This it does rather comfortably, like a young man not ready to leave bed. Giles smiles at it; he smiles at it a lot. First it was to assure the unknowable sphinx that he meant it no harm. Now Giles’s smile is genuine, and he has to laugh. How flat and empty his cats’ eyes now seem! There is so much to be read in the creature’s ever-changing eyeshine. The interest it has in Giles and his colorful array of pencils, not a single one of them a scalpel or cattle prod. How it is coming to trust Giles, perhaps even like him.

No, not it—he. Elisa has been adamant about that, and Giles is happy to comply. It doesn’t hurt that the creature is ravishing, a billion dazzling gems molded into the shape of a man by an artist orders of brilliance superior to Giles. He doesn’t think they make oils or acrylics capable of reproducing such incandescence, nor watercolors or gouache capable of capturing the darker whispers. Hence the route of simplicity: charcoal. Giles says what he recalls of the Hail Mary and makes his first stroke, the S-curve of a dorsal fin.

“There,” he gasps. Then, a chuckle of amazement. “There it is.”

He can’t see the sink mirror at this angle, but he feels he could be thirty-five again, even twenty-five—that bold, that brave. He makes another line, another. Not a work of art, he warns himself, just a sketch, something to get the old juices flowing. Still, he can’t help but feel that these rough lines are the most vibrant he’s made since the day he accepted the job at Hutzler’s, the forerunner to Klein & Saunders, the forerunner to forgetting everything that mattered.

Miss Strickland—Mrs. Strickland—had she been some kind of lipsticked, beehived seer? She’d told Giles the truth. Not only the truth that Bernie didn’t want what he’d come to sell, but that he shouldn’t debase himself in the process. You deserve to go somewhere where you can be proud of who you are, she’d said, and that was here, right here, in the home of his best friend, within touching distance of the greatest living thing he’d ever seen.

Elisa had little information to give about the creature’s origin, but that didn’t matter. Giles senses the creature’s divinity, and practice sketch or not, no artistic charge requires graver attention than that of depicting the sacred. Raphael, Botticelli, Caravaggio—as a young artist, he’d studied all of them in library books and knew the rewards and risks of portraying the sublime. It required personal sacrifice. How else did Michelangelo complete the Sistine Chapel fresco in four years? It’s a joke, comparing himself to Michelangelo, but there is a similarity. Both had access to something the world at large had never seen. Even if the police sirens do come—by God, it has been worth it.

He starts to gesture for the creature to turn slightly, then laughs at the preposterous request. How quickly the portraitist’s prerogative returns! But the creature responds, adjusting so that his left eye rises above the waterline, as if to get a sharper look at the signal. Giles holds his breath, decides to finish the gesture. The creature follows the spinning finger, as he might have followed a winged insect or bird in his native land, calmly appreciative, devoid of hostility. The creature blinks. His gills settle softly.

Then, a willing model, he turns.