The Shape of Water

  He can see Hoyt well enough. How he liked to stand with one hand dandling his medals and the other caressing his extended belly. His eyes half-closed but rarely blinking. A puckish grin wedging through his round cheeks. But he can’t hear him. His memories of Hoyt, all the orders, all the compliments, all the slippery inducements, have been scrubbed of voice. Not mute, not like Elisa, but rather obscured, the same way the redacted words of Hoyt’s Deus Brânquia brief had been obscured by black blocks. They sound like long, hard shrieking and look like redactions: **** *** **** ******.

  Even here, in this lab, he can’t imagine how Fleming could have understood such senseless shrieking from Hoyt. Strickland feels a faintness he hasn’t felt since the high heat of Korea, the even higher heat of the Amazon. Maybe Hoyt heard about the reattached fingers. Maybe Hoyt thinks Strickland has lost his ability to control a situation. And if Strickland loses Hoyt’s confidence, what leverage will Strickland have to sever ties and be free? He blinks hard, looks about, thinks he sees green vines kinking through ventilation grates, green buds nosing from electrical outlets. Is it the painkillers? Or is it real? If he can’t put an end to this experiment, Deus Brânquia will win and the whole city might become another Amazon. Strickland, his family, all of Baltimore will be strangled inside of it.

  He makes a fist, knowing what will happen. Pain slurps like a thick, hot syrup from his infected fingers into his arm, then heart. His vision swims, then focuses with a buchité-like clarity. Hoffstetler’s still got his palm upward, awaiting the keys. He’s still talking, too, about the benefits of the specialized light fixtures, the reels of field recordings. He’s promising to provide Fleming with graphs and data to send to General Hoyt, just as soon as they tuck this poor little creature back into its comfy tank. Strickland bears down. He’s got to get tough, and now.

  He laughs. It’s harsh enough to interrupt Hoffstetler.

  “Data,” Strickland says. “That’s when you type something on a page and all’s a sudden it’s true, right?”

  Hoffstetler’s throat, that reedy, crushable thing, bobs in midspeech. His palm drops and Strickland is glad to see it. Indeed, it fills him with warmth, with hope. Are those Hoyt’s pleased redactions he hears? They seem to softly shriek from the vents of the computer: **** ***, *******. Hoffstetler must hear it, too. He hurries to the tank to indicate one of its bothersome gauges.

  “Twenty-eight minutes. This chronometer tracks the time since the tank is last breached. The asset’s limit outside of water is tracked no further than thirty. We can discuss General Hoyt’s report later. The keys, Mr. Strickland. Do not make me beg.”

  But begging is exactly what Strickland would like to hear. He hunkers down next to the asset, right where Hoffstetler had been. An enjoyable pose, even with Deus Brânquia convulsing so hard that scales speckle Strickland’s shirt. He feels like a cowboy examining livestock that has dropped to the dirt, frothing at the mouth and requiring a shotgun mercy. He traces a finger along the contour of Deus Brânquia’s expanding and collapsing chest.

  “Now take this down for the general, Mr. Fleming. This here isn’t data. This is something you can touch with your own hands. All along the ribs here, you see that? That’s jointed cartilage. It’s like knuckles laced together. The going theory is it separates the two sets of lungs, primary and secondary.” He raises his voice. “Am I getting this right, Bob?”

  “Twenty-nine minutes,” Hoffstetler says. “Please.”

  “Now this cartilage is so thick we can’t get a clean X-ray. Lord knows we’ve tried. I’m sure Bob can tell you how many times. But here’s the bottom line General Hoyt needs to know. If we want to find out what makes this thing tick, there’s no discussing it. We need to crack it open.”

  “For God’s sake.” Hoffstetler’s voice is how it should be. Distant, thin.

  “The Soviets could be down in South America right now, fishing another one of these things out of the river.”

  “Another one? There is not another one of these, not in the world! I promise you!”

  “You weren’t on that boat with me, were you, Bob? Reading a couple books about a river isn’t the same as seeing with your own eyes the miles and miles of it. The millions of things in it. More than that computer of yours can count, I guarantee you.”

  Happy redactions shriek from the computer: *** **** ***, *******! Strickland’s surprised no one else can hear it. Then again, he’s not. No one else has the military background. Strickland can’t understand the finer points of the shriek, but he can feel them in his gut, in his heart. He was, once upon a time, like a son to Hoyt, wasn’t he? Hoyt must be proud, seeing his boy grow into a man like this. Strickland has to fight not to feel proud, too. He swipes at his eyes, just to make sure they’re dry. Maybe he’ll accept Hoyt’s help here, just a little. But he won’t fall under Hoyt’s spell, not again.

  “Thirty minutes,” Hoffstetler says. “I’m begging now. I’m begging.”

  Strickland swivels on one of his heels. Hearing Hoffstetler beg isn’t enough. He wants to lock eyes with him, make him remember this moment. Hoffstetler, though, isn’t looking at him. He’s staring off across the lab, teeth bared and forehead twitching, almost as if signaling a fourth person in the room. Strickland recalls the egg. He doesn’t know why he recalls it. There had been an egg on the floor, hadn’t there? He begins to follow Hoffstetler’s gaze across the lab.

  A gurgling hack blasts from the creature. Strickland looks down, the egg forgotten. Deus Brânquia is seizuring. Scales are being shed by the dozens. An off-white slime bubbles from its mouth. It tenses all at once, as if poked by the Howdy-do, or the machete, whatever the tool might be. Then it passes out. Its full weight slumps into the harness. Urines pools from under it, turning the white slime and red blood a murky orange. Strickland has to stand up to get out of the way. He hears Fleming’s pen and hopes he’s not recording this. It’s disgusting, disgusting, not fit for Hoyt’s consumption. Just as inappropriate, though, would be to let Deus Brânquia die before Hoyt had his say. Strickland digs the keys from his pocket and backhands them at Hoffstetler. Scientists: no coordination. Beneath the shrieking, Strickland hears the keys hit the floor.

  14

  MORNING 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 und
erpaid, 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.

  15

  IRONING: THIS TEDIOUS, humid, cramping drudgery has become the ideal cover for a double life. Richard’s never ironed a shirt in his life. He has no concept of the scale of the task, if it takes half an hour or half a day. Lainie wakes up before dawn, speeds through as many chores as possible, hustles the kids off to school, and then watches the morning news through steam, stretching out the ironing until Richard leaves. The hours she’d bargained for with Bernie Clay run ten to three, allowing her plenty of time to get to work, and also plenty enough to return home and mask the exotic scent of fresh office paper with the pedestrian odors of perfume.

  Richard drives away, the old Thunderbird clanging, and Lainie folds the ironing board she’s been pretending to use for ten, or twenty, or thirty minutes. Lying to a husband is a virus in a marriage, she knows this, but she hasn’t found the right way to tell him. She hasn’t felt such thrill and promise since when? The days of being courted by Richard, maybe, that sharp-suited soldier fresh out of the Korean War? The early days of courting, anyhow; months into dating, at which point betrothal was inevitable, she’d already begun to feel loose gravel beneath her feet.

  Lainie doesn’t let herself dwell on the past. So many parts of her current days excite, interest, and satisfy her, none more than the quick change into the work ensembles she keeps ready in the back of her closet. It’s a new kind of challenge, dressing for a job. She’s taken written notes of the secretaries’ wardrobes. She’s made three separate trips to Sears. Formal, not casual. Handsome, not pretty. Flattering, not frilly. Contradictory objectives, but that’s being a woman. She keeps skirts slim and flannel, collars petaled or bowed, bodices modest and belted.

  The bus ride to work is just as gratifying. Mastering the bodily etiquette of public transport, claiming a seat all her own, snugging into her arms a handbag packed with paratrooper efficiency, and best of all, the cursory but fond eye contact between her and other employed women. They sat alone, but they were in this thing together.

  The men at Klein & Saunders—well, they’re men. For the first week, her rear end was pinched exactly once per day, each time by a different man acting with the smug entitlement of someone choosing the plumpest shrimp from a buffet. The first time, she’d squealed. The second, she’d clammed up. By the fifth, she’d learned the working woman’s scowl enough to get the offender to offer a guilty shrug. She glared at this final pincher long enough to watch him join a group of chuckling backslappers. Her pinched butt burned. The whole week had been some sort of sophomoric contest.

  So she’d set out to win it, to prove she was more than a grabbable ass. No doubt it was the same goal of the agency’s typists and secretaries. Or the ladies on the bus. Or the women who scrubbed floors at Richard’s lab. No matter her mood, Lainie held her head high. She drilled herself on the phone system over lunch. She projected her voice with a confidence that, day by day, she began to believe. The pinching dwindled. The men were kind to her. Then, even better, they quit being kind. They relied on her; they snapped at her when she messed up; they bought her cards and flowers when she saved their skins.

  And at that, Lainie has become adept. It is both science and art, marshaling the parade of egos that crowded the lobby: tycoon execs, TV commercial playboys, yearling models. She learned to dial dead phone lines and improvise baloney to impress clients. “Hi, Larry. Pepsi-Cola had to reschedule to Thursday.” Lainie intuited when to do this. It was like monitoring Richard’s mood before asking for spending money. Of course, these days she didn’t ask; she had money of her own. She was proud of it and longed to share that pride with her husband. But he wouldn’t understand. He would take it as a personal affront.

  Word reached Bernie that his impulse hire was paying off. Last week, he’d asked her to lunch. For the first half hour, he’d been like the rest of them. He’d pressured her to get an adult drink, and when she’d declined, ordered her a G
in Rickey anyway. She sipped at it once to appease him, and he’d taken that as a signal to reach across the table and place his hand atop hers. She could feel his wedding band. She slid her hand away, keeping her smile tight and cold.

  It was like she’d passed a test neither had realized was being given. Bernie took a slug of his Manhattan, and the alcohol appeared to melt the salaciousness into an easy, uncomplicated affection. What must it feel like, Lainie wondered, to be a man and so blithely modify your intentions without fear of consequence?

  “Look,” he said. “I invited you to lunch to offer you employment.”

  “But I have a job.”

  “Yes, a job—a part-time job. What I’m talking about is a career. A full-time position. Eight hours a day, forty hours a week. Benefits. Retirement package. The whole ball of wax.”

  “Oh, Bernie. Thank you. But I told you—”

  “I know what you’re going to say. Kids, school. But you know Melinda in accounting? You know Chuck’s girl, Barb? There’s probably six or seven ladies we’ve got on this deal right now. There’s a day care in the building. You bring them with you bright and early, and there’s a bus that comes around delivers them to their schools like packages. Klein & Saunders picks up the tab.”

  “But why—” She held the Gin Rickey to settle her fidgeting fingers, even considered taking a gulp to settle her pulse. “Why would you do that for me?”

  “Well, heck, Elaine. In this racket, you find someone good, you lock her down. Otherwise, she ends up at Arnold, Carson, and Adams spilling all our trade secrets.” Bernie shrugged. “This is the sixties. A few years from now, it’s going to be a woman’s world. You’ll have every single opportunity a man has. My advice is get ready, position yourself. Get in on the ground floor now. Receptionist today, but who knows? Office manager tomorrow? Down the road, future partner? You got the stuff, Elaine. You’re sharper than half the boneheads in the building.”