The Shape of Water

  He didn’t trust the sound when he heard it. How do you trust anything in the bowels of hell? But it kept on, a reedy whine, and at the bottom of the pile he found a woman. Dead, but rigor mortis had turned her body into a protective cage for her baby. The baby was alive. Some miracle. Or the opposite of a miracle. Uncovered, the baby began to cry. It was loud, just what Hoyt didn’t want. Strickland tried to wipe the Ka-Bar of hair and gristle so he’d get a clean cut. But he was shaking too much to trust himself. And wasn’t that the point of all of this? To trust? In Hoyt? In violence? In war? That bad was good, that murder was compassion?

  There was a puddle. Half rainwater, half blood. Strickland gently pressed the baby’s face into the liquid. Maybe, he prayed, the baby was a miracle. Maybe it could breathe in water. But no such creature existed, not in the whole world. A few twitches and it was over. Strickland, too, wanted his life to be over. He rose to his knees, bodies rolling off his back. Hoyt came to him, cradling Strickland’s head against his round belly and petting his bloody hair. Strickland gave himself over, held on tight. He tried to listen to what Hoyt was saying, but his ears had clogged with blood and tissue.

  “**** ***.”

  Then it was a whisper; now it is a shriek. What he’d done was an atrocity, a war crime that would be on the front page of every paper in the world if it ever got out, and it would fuse him to Hoyt until one of them was dead. Alone in his Occam office, all these years later, Strickland finally understands. The earsplitting wails of Hoyt’s redactions—how had he missed the connection? They are the screams of the monkeys, one and the same. All his life, primal voices have pushed him to accept the mantle for which he’s been groomed. It is why Deus Brânquia had to be captured. It is why the Jungle-god must destroy the Gill-god. No new deity fully ascends until the old deity is slain. He should have listened to Hoyt all along. The monkeys—don’t be scared by their orders.

  Follow them.

  2

  THE 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.

  3

  WHEN DID DEPARTMENT stores replace their overhead lights with supernovas? For how long has the binned fruit wept at its own beauty? At what point did baked goods begin sighing sugary secrets into a cloud that beaded upon her face like happy tears? When did shoppers, those disapproving ladies with bulky purses and rude carts, transform into women who smiled at her, insisted she go first, complimented her on her choices? Perhaps they’d seen what Elisa saw reflected in butcher-counter glass: not a timid huncher hiding her throat scars, but a woman straight of back pointing out the cuts of fish and meat she wanted. Quite a lot of both, the butcher probably thought, but why not? Surely a woman like this had a hungry man waiting at home. And she did. Elisa laughs. She did.

  Not just meat, either. Eggs, loads of them, cartons arranged in her cart in playful crisscross patterns that make other shoppers laugh at her moxie. Bags of salt, too—Hoffstetler’s saline pills won’t last forever. It takes her a while to find these items, but she doesn’t mind. Shopping for someone else is wonderful. Giles had offered to do it, but she’d refused; she felt only she could intuit what the creature needed. She’d used public transit, ignoring uniformed police, reminding herself that they had no clue what she’d done, and gone all the way to Edmondson Village. Zelda has always raved about the shopping-center cornucopia, and she’d been right. Zelda: Elisa has a lot to say to her, and she will, on her next shift—it’s critical she not mis
s a single shift if she hopes to evade suspicion. Thinking of Zelda, Elisa’s heart, already full, presses at the limits of her rib cage.

  She is surprised to find at the front of the store a section of plants and flowers. It draws her in; she lets the reaching fronds and dangling ivy toss across her cheeks. This is what the creature had needed to fill the lab’s bareness and what he needs now to round the bathroom’s sharp edges. She selects the leafiest plants she can find. Two thick, potted ferns; they’ll hide a lot of porcelain and tile. A fan palm with leaves like the creature’s hands; maybe he will feel less lonely? A dragon tree tall enough to reach the lights over the sink; perhaps it will tint the whole room green.

  Piled inside the cart, the leaves tickle her nose, make her giggle. How is she going to get all of this home? She’ll have to buy one of the handcarts she saw near the entrance. An unexpected expense, but what difference will a few more dollars make? Today is the first day of her life she hasn’t counted pennies, and she’s determined to revel in it. She’s as conscious of her big smile as she would be a gaudy hat. She ought to try to temper it. Any cop in his right mind sees a woman this overjoyed about buying groceries, a red flag will rise.

  It’s difficult, and quite amusing, to navigate through the plants in her cart, and upon steering into the checkout aisle, the cart bumps into a standing display. A hundred cardboard air fresheners dance from their hooks. She idles a finger across them. They are shaped like little trees, each advertising a different scent. Pink cherry. Brown cinnamon. Red apple. Several are green. REAL PINE SCENT!, a cellophane package proclaims.

  She doesn’t think her smile can get bigger, but it does. She plucks one from the rack. No—she takes all the green ones off the peg. Six of them. Not much trees for a jungle, but a start.

  4

  EVEN WHEN HIS tears drop to the paper, Giles makes it work, smearing them with the side of his hand, imbuing harsh lines with a fluidic softness resembling that of the creature’s scales. He smiles at this revelation, even as he expects that it is only the first of many to come. Tears, a drop of blood, the touch of saliva from a kiss: The creature would use his magic to turn these substances, too, into art, into grace.

  Giles lifts a hand, spins a finger. The creature shifts to offer Giles yet another angle, stretching his resplendent neck, almost preening. Giles laughs, tastes salt, licks it away, and draws, draws, draws, a starving man at a banquet that he worries the waiters might whisk away. When he begins to speak, he doesn’t notice it; his murmur is the rustle of charcoal over paper.

  “Elisa says you’re all alone. The last of your kind. Something like that.” He chuckles. “Try as I might, I don’t catch everything she says. Naturally I didn’t believe her at all at first. Who would? Then I saw you and, if I may say so, you’re very convincing in person. I hope you can forgive my early reticence. Perhaps even sympathize. What did you think when you first saw the inside of a naval ship or the tank they put you in? I can’t imagine your thoughts were especially flattering to the human race. Things change.”

  The ridge over the creature’s eyes: He draws it mist-gray, defenseless.

  “But then Elisa finds you. And there again, yes? A change. In her, for sure. But also, I suspect, in you? Perhaps we humans are not all so bad? If such a thought has crossed your mind, I thank you, though I’d warn you that it’s a charitable assessment.”

  The cascading plates of his chest, sleek as petals, each one drawn a darker silver.

  “Now that I’ve properly met you, though—oh, I’m Giles, by the way. Giles Gunderson. The custom is to shake hands, but seeing how we’re to the point of bathroom nudity, I think we can forgo that. You see, now that I’ve met you, I find myself circling back to where I began. I’m not certain that I agree with our Elisa. Are you all alone? Are you really? For if you are an anomaly, then so am I.”

  The diaphanous fins drawn ash-cloud gray, the bones black slashes.

  “It’s silly. But I feel as if I, too, were plucked from where I belonged. Or when—perhaps I was born too early. The things I felt as a boy … I was too young to understand them, too out of place or time to do anything about it. Now that I understand? Well, I’m old. Look at this thing. This body I’m stuck inside. My time is ending, even though it feels like I never had a time, not really.”

  The shape of the scalp, the smoothest, feathered strokes.

  “But I can’t be alone, can I? Of course not; I’m not that special. Anomalies like me exist all around the world. So when does an anomaly quit being an anomaly and start being just the way things happen to be? What if you and I are not the last of our kinds, but one of the first? The first of better creatures in a better world? We can hope, can’t we? That we’re not of the past, but the future?”

  Giles holds the drawing at arm’s length. For a character sketch, it’s not bad. And what are character sketches for? Practice for a grander work. Giles chuckles again. Is that what he’s planning? My, he hasn’t felt this precocious in decades.

  He takes a breath and turns the paper toward the tub. The creature cocks his head until his second eye crests from the water. He stares at the sketch, then tilts his head to compare it to his own submerged body. Occam types might insist self-awareness in the creature was impossible, but Giles would tell them different. The creature knows he’s being depicted, and that it’s different from a reflection in a river. This is, in short, the magic of art. To concede the possibility of being captured in this way is to actively collaborate with the artist. By God, Giles thinks, it’s true: They are not so different from each other. Giles might still, under the right light, bathed in the right water, be beautiful, too.

  5

  THE TWO-WHEELED GROCERY cart is more agile than Elisa’s janitorial equivalent, but Baltimore’s sidewalks present a more robust challenge than polished laboratory floors. It’s late afternoon, forever since she’s slept, but she still isn’t tired; cradling the creature in the van seems to have injected her with the opposite of whatever had filled Hoffstetler’s syringe. She is electrified. She got off the bus several stops early so that she could take a scenic walk home, burn off this nervous energy. As badly as she wants to see the creature again, the brine odor of the Patapsco lures her forward, like a child to fresh-baked cookies.

  She wrangles the cart past an off-limits pier and working wharf. There she finds a thin pedestrian jetty. Is it legal to walk it? The last thing she needs is police. But there is nothing suggesting a ban. She walks out onto the river, the shadow of city buildings sliding off her back like a nightgown. There is no fence, no protective posts, nothing but a sign reading NO SWIMMING! NO FISHING! OPENS TO THE SEA AT 30 FT! The idea of fishing has always revolted her, and no one at Home ever taught her to swim, but she understands the sign well enough. Once the water level reaches the 30 FT mark painted on a concrete stanchion—assuming it ever rains again—the canal will provide access to the bay, as well as the ocean.

  Elisa parks her cart and toes the edge of the jetty, closing her eyes against a spluttering salt spray that suggests the day is not as halcyon as she has perceived it. This explains why people on the bus had their collars upturned and their postures locked so as not to feel the chill of their own clothes. It also helped explain why the woman who’d sat across the aisle from Elisa hadn’t noticed her sunny smile until the third attempt.

  The woman had been pretty, everything that Elisa, until the events of the past day, had ever dreamed of being, just how she’d always imagined Julia of Julia’s Fine Shoes. Slim, but with curves enough to fill out a striped flannel dress, the ensemble accented with rhinestone buckles, a matching pin, bracelets, earrings, and wedding ring. Only the blond beehive felt out of date, and that Elisa attributed to the fact that, well, this was a working woman, and working women, as Elisa well knew, were busy.

  When she’d finally caught the woman’s eyes, the woman had hesitated before smiling back; like everyone else, she’d seemed taken aback by Elisa’s gaiety. She’d glanced down at Elisa’s hand, see
ming to take note of the absence of a ring. To Elisa’s surprise, the woman showed not scorn but relief; the smile became less performative, more genuine. Elisa got the sense that, as much as she admired this beautiful, professional woman, the woman admired her even more. Even crazier, Elisa felt she could hear the woman’s primary thought: Do what your heart tells you. At all costs, follow your heart.

  At last, Elisa is doing just that. But here, at the edge of the world, the temperature dropping by the second, Elisa finds herself troubled by the woman’s pinched expression. If a woman who has it all can be so unhappy, what hope has a graveyard-shift janitor, one who can barely make rent, one whose inability to speak cuts her off from most of society, one who happens to have a highly classified amphibious man lying in her bathtub?

  Elisa opens her eyes, turns around, squints north. There is no more doubting it: It is a gray, foreboding day. The proof is in the distant marquee lights of the Arcade, which Mr. Arzounian doesn’t switch on unless it’s dark enough to warrant the expense. Elisa’s stomach seesaws. She can see the Arcade from here, which means the creature is that close to this river. The proximity upsets her. She grabs her cart, wheels it around, heads home as quickly as she can.

  She finds Giles asleep, upright on top of the toilet lid, snoring lightly, his hands caked in charcoal. Quietly, so as not to wake him, she lowers herself to the ratty rug, folds her arms on the tub rim, and nestles her chin into them. She gazes into the creature’s eyes, still bright underwater, and listens to the soft bubbling of his breath. He blinks, a greeting. She unfolds an arm and fins her index finger through the water until it touches the back of his hand. Unexpectedly, he rolls the hand over so that she is touching his palm, her finger the single stamen of a huge, dewy, unfolding flower. Now she listens for her own breath, but hears nothing. Hands are how the two of them talk, but this? This is a touch. Elisa pictures the woman on the bus, how rigidly she sat, touching no one. An absence of fear, Elisa realizes, can be mistaken for happiness, but it isn’t the same thing. Not even close.