he gash in the creature’s side is healing. Each time Elisa visits, in the deadest of hours, she sees a lesser moil of blood following his glide across the pool. Only his eyes are visible, lighthouse beacons casting searchlights across a black sea. He swims right in front of her, and this is progress; no more hiding underwater. Her pulse rabbits. She needed this. She needed him to remember her, trust her. She shifts the heavy garbage bag she carries to the opposite hand. Not a surprising thing for a janitor to carry, though this bag carries anything but garbage.

To die for Chemosh is to live forever! The movie’s muffled cry has become a second wakeup alarm she doesn’t need. She’s awake long before needed, thinking of him, the magnificence no thickness of chain can diminish. Julia’s silver shoes are the only thing to distract her. She’s never late for the bus these days and has plenty of time to cross the street and put her palms to the window glass. She used to feel glass on all other sides of her, too, invisible walls of the maze in which she was trapped. No more: She believes she sees a path out of that maze, and it leads through F-1.

The jungle field recordings aren’t rolling tonight, and she’s done enough tabulating of the lab’s activity, in tiny hash marks at the bottom of her QCCs, to know this means no scientists have stayed late to reset the tapes. Occam is empty, Zelda is busy across the facility, and Elisa toes the red line and holds up the evening’s first egg.

The creature sharpens his arc to drift closer, and Elisa has to resist smiling—that’s giving him what he wants before he earns it. She stands firm, holding the egg upright. The creature floats in place by magic; if he’s kicking to tread water, she can’t see it. Slowly his large hand rises from the pool, water fluming between his forearm spines and through his chest’s etched patterns. The small flexings of his five fingers are like five arms wrapping her in a tight embrace: E-G-G.

She’s breathless behind her grin. She places the egg on the ledge and watches him take it, not with last week’s savage swat, but with a grocer’s discernment. She’d like to watch him peel it, see if he’s improved at that task, but the weight of the garbage bag makes her impatient. Holding as much eye contact as possible, she walks backward until her hip knocks the table of audio equipment. She slides the reel-to-reel player back, moves aside the radio, and opens the lid of the record player.

Elisa is certain the player’s presence is incidental. The gear likely came from a single scientist’s closet, all of it knotted together by tangled wires. She withdraws from the bag the dusty relics of a forgotten young life that she’s kept stashed inside her locker for days: record albums, the ones she quit playing around the time she quit believing she had any reasons left to hear them. She’s brought too many, ten or fifteen, but how was she supposed to know in advance what kind of music this moment would demand?

Ella Fitzgerald’s Songs in a Mellow Mood—would he find the low rumble distressing? Chet Baker Sings—is the beat too sharklike? The Chordettes Sing Your Requests—might he think the room had suddenly filled with other women? Lyrics suddenly seem like a bad idea. She selects the first instrumental album she finds, Glenn Miller’s Lover’s Serenade, and slides it from its sleeve onto the player. She looks back at the creature and makes the sign for “record.” Then she turns on the player, drops the needle, and only then realizes it’s unplugged. She finds both cord and outlet, brings them together—and the band swings to life in blasting brass syncopation, knocking Elisa to her heels. Piano, drums, strings, and horns dive down and soar up, catching the rhythm before a trumpet is let loose above it all like a tossed dove. She looks at the pool, certain that the creature will think she’s betrayed him with an ambush. Instead, he is as still as if the water itself has frozen. The shells of his half-peeled egg float outward, a physical expression of his widening awe.

Elisa lurches to the table, takes the needle from the spinning circle. The trumpet dissevers with a squelch. She musters a smile to convince the creature that everything is fine. But everything is fine. It’s beyond fine: The grooves in his scaled skin are glowing. She recalls a fragment of a news article regarding bioluminescence, a chemical light emitted by certain fish, but she’d imagined it like lightning bugs, soft bulbs in a distant night, not this dulcet simmer that seems to boil from the creature’s center and steep the entire pool from ink black to a radiant summer-sky blue. He is hearing the music, yes, but he’s also feeling it, reflecting it, and from that reflection Elisa can hear and feel the music as she never has before. Glenn Miller has colors, shapes, textures—how has she never noticed?

His lights are fading, though, and she can’t imagine the water without them. She grabs the record player arm and drops the needle—and a saxophone solo wiggles atop the orchestra’s snappy chugging. This time she’s got her eyes on the creature, and his light doesn’t only brighten this water, it electrifies it, imbues it with a turquoise glow that shines off the lab walls like liquid fire. The physical objects of table and records slide from Elisa’s awareness as she is reeled toward the pool, her skin blue by reflection, her blood blue, too, she just knows it. Wherever the creature has come from, he’s never heard music like this, a multitude of separate songs so meshed in joyful unison. The water directly around him begins changing—yellow, pink, green, purple. He’s looking into the air, habituated to sounds having a source, reaching up with a hand as if to cradle one of the invisible instruments into his hand and inspect it, sniff it for magic, taste it for miracles, before tossing it back into the sky to fly again.