The Shape of Water

  11

  A PROJECT LEAD enjoys access to every room at Occam but one, and it is here Hoffstetler finds himself: the ladies’ locker room. There are, Slava Bogu, no cameras here; he has come to consider cameras to be gargoyles flapping their wings in the high reaches to report his every move. Hovering at the locker-room door would get him branded as a pervert—acceptable in these final days except for how it would spur further interrogation—so he’d slunk inside, nosed out a bygone shower room filled with supplies, and hidden behind a keep of industrial cleaner.

  A harsh bell marks the close of the overnight shift. He hears the drudging entry of the graveyard shift’s quartet of women. He feels dizzy. It must be the stench of ammonia. Unless it’s panic. The rest of the week, he repeats to himself, is all he needs to last. His first and, he hopes, last lie to Mihalkov was that the syringe had worked and the Devonian was dead, and Mihalkov had rewarded him with details: On Friday, Hoffstetler’s phone will ring twice, and he is to proceed to the usual spot, where the Bison will take him to a ship, and the ship will sail him home, to Minsk, to his waiting parents. Mihalkov had even lavished praise on Hoffstetler for his dauntless years of service. He’d called him Dmitri.

  Hoffstetler tears off his glasses, rubs eyeballs aflame from chemical vapors. Is he going to faint? He focuses on locker-room sounds. He is a cataloger by nature and trade but has done little study in the classification of feminine noises. Silken rustles. Pert snaps. Delicate jingles. Evidence of life that he has never known, but still might, if he can just survive until Friday.

  “Hey, Esposito.” The woman’s voice is of Latin accent and is as harsh as the shift siren. “Did you tell that man we were out there smoking?” A pause for Elisa’s signed or gestured reply. “You know what man. The one that gives you the looks.” Pause. “Well, someone told him that we move the camera. And the only one of us that doesn’t smoke is you.” Pause. “You act all innocent. But you’re not. You watch your back, Esposito. Or I’ll watch it for you, entiendes?”

  Footsteps march away, followed by sympathetic murmurs—Hoffstetler believes they come from the one named Zelda. He holds his breath against fumes, waits for sounds of Zelda leaving Elisa’s side. Instead he hears a rumble from upstairs, the lobby, the day shift beginning to arrive. There is no time. Hoffstetler makes his move, scrambling on all fours across the dank tiles. He peers around a corner. Elisa is sitting on the bench. Zelda stands beside her, combing her hair in a locker mirror. He has to take the chance. He waves a hand to get Elisa’s attention.

  Her head whips in his direction. She is clothed but covers herself reflexively, a leg cocking back, ready to kick. She’s wearing shoes of startling flair—bright sequined green—and the heels crack loud against the tile and Zelda whirls and sees Hoffstetler and her chest expands to scream, but Elisa snatches Zelda’s blouse and springs from the bench, dragging Zelda behind her into the dim aqua glow of the shower, her free hand signing as wildly, no doubt a litany of questions. Hoffstetler lifts his own hands, begging for a moment.

  “Where is it?” he whispers.

  “They’ve got us,” Zelda gasps. “Elisa, they’ve got—”

  Elisa signs curtly to Zelda, something that shuts her up, and then signs to Hoffstetler, gesturing for Zelda to translate.

  Zelda eyes Hoffstetler with misgiving before stating, simply, “Home.”

  “You’ve got to get rid of it. Right away.”

  Elisa signs. Zelda translates: “Why?”

  “It’s Strickland. He’s close. I can’t promise what I’ll tell him if he uses—he’s got that baton—”

  He doesn’t need to know sign language to understand Elisa’s panic.

  “Listen to me,” he hisses. “Do you have means to get it to the river?”

  Elisa’s face drains of emotion. Her head drops down until she stares at her bejeweled shoes, or perhaps the mold of the tiles showing between them. After a moment, her hands rise, torpidly as if attached to weights, and she signs with a mournful reluctance. Zelda translates each fragment as it comes.

  “The dock. Opens to the sea. At thirty feet.”

  Zelda looks at Hoffstetler pleadingly; she doesn’t know the significance of these words but Hoffstetler does. This fragile-looking janitor of incalculable ingenuity must live near enough to the river to get the Devonian to some kind of pier. But that’s not good enough. If the spring drought persists, the creature will be beached there, a flopping fish no better off than being chained to one of Strickland’s posts.

  “Is there anything, anything at all?” he pleads. “That van—you took it away in a van—could you make it to the ocean—”

  She’s shaking her head in childish refusal, eyelashes thick with tears, cheeks and neck splotched red except for two keloid scars that hold a smooth, gentle pink. Hoffstetler wants to grab her by the dress and shake her, rattle that brain inside her skull until the selfishness is knocked clean out of her. But he has no chance: A phone is ringing, it is answered, and the angry woman with the Latin accent is shouting, her voice reverberating from the locker room’s surfaces.

  “Phone call for Elisa? If that isn’t the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. How the hell’s she supposed to take a phone call?”

  “Who is it, Yolanda?”

  The boom is loud enough to pull Hoffstetler from his tarn of consternation. It comes from Zelda, discounted by Hoffstetler as dumbstruck by fear of losing her job or worse. With the situation for the three of them as dire as it has ever been, this woman’s leaping, lioness defense of Elisa hands to Hoffstetler a tiny, precious gift, thinner than cellular membrane, smaller than a subatomic particle: hope.

  Zelda’s brown eyes boil with a warning for Hoffstetler, and then it is she, this time, who takes Elisa by the arm and drags her away. Hoffstetler has no choice but to recede, though not far, knowing he’ll need to escape the locker room before the dayshifters begin filing inside, knowing he’s got three more days of this pressure, knowing he won’t sleep tonight with Elisa uncommitted to the only sensible course of action. It is entirely possible that he’ll never sleep again. He ducks behind the bottles of cleaning fluid while Yolanda’s last few grouses echo.

  “I’m a custodian, Zelda, not AT&T. Jerry? Jeremy? Giles? How am I supposed to remember?”

  12

  EACH OF THE thousands of times Elisa has seen Giles’s apartment, it has been a world of tweed browns and pewter grays. Now it is bright red. Blood on the floor. On the wall. A bloody handprint on the refrigerator. Elisa entered too speedily to sidestep and now helplessly watches her green shoes track red across rug and linoleum. She grabs Giles’s drafting desk for support, sending two cats bounding. She forces herself to study the blood, tries to determine which direction it leads. But it leads every direction.

  Including back out the door. She lopes that way and sees a thin stripe of blood connecting Giles’s door to hers. She bursts into her apartment and there he is, collapsed on the sofa. She rushes to his side, her knees landing on black charcoal sketches accented with red blood. Giles’s face is pale; he blinks in slow motion; he is shivering. His left arm is wrapped, very poorly, in a blue bath towel soaked purple. Elisa looks at the bathroom.

  “He’s not here,” Giles croaks.

  Elisa holds his face in her hands. He is warm, not cold. She questions him with her eyes, and he responds with a weak smile.

  “He was hungry. I startled him. He’s a wild creature. We can’t expect him to act any other way.”

  If she’s going to do it, she tells herself, do it fast. She grabs the towel, unravels the sticky fabric from his arm. Running from wrist to elbow is a slash so spiderweb thin that nothing but the creature’s cusped claw could have carved it. It is deep, still bleeding, but not gushing, and Elisa dashes into the bedroom, rips a clean sheet from a shelf, dashes back, and begins winding it. It’s like a cloth whirlpool enveloping the arm in sea foam—even here, even now, she can’t stop seeing water. Giles winces, but his smile hangs on like a cheap mask. He pu
ts a clammy palm to her cheek.

  “Don’t fret over me, dear. Go find him. He can’t be far.”

  Elisa doesn’t know what else to do. She bolts to the outer hallway, closing the door behind her. It is difficult to see anything but the most garish streaks of blood, but she forces herself and finds a spackle of red tracking a separate path toward the fire-escape stairs. Impossible, she thinks. The creature would be too frightened. Then fanfare blares from the theater below, and it’s not so different, is it, from the records she played in F-1? She runs, crashing down metal steps so fast she feels the vertigo of a plunging elevator, and then she’s tripping through the alley and down the Arcade’s sidewalk, snared by a velvet rope, dazed in the signboard’s brilliance.

  In such light, the spots of blood, only a few now, stand out like scattered jewelry. They lead into the theater. Elisa throws a glance at the box office. Mr. Arzounian mans the booth, but he’s yawning, fighting sleep, and Elisa doesn’t falter. She looks at her feet, those emerald green, thick-buckled, Cuban-heeled Mary Janes, not bad for dancing, and tells herself that she is Bojangles with the TV volume turned down, and she dances past Arzounian as she’s danced past so many woolgathering Occam men.

  The chafed carpet beneath her shoes gives way to Navajo-motif terrazzo flooring. Elisa cranes her neck to the dusty, muraled dome that, according to Mr. Arzounian, greeted celebrities, politicians, and giants of industry in the forties and fifties, back when the Arcade mattered, back before the upper offices were sacrificed to build a couple of rat-trap apartments. Age and disregard don’t mean something isn’t beautiful; Elisa has come to believe this with all of her heart. The lobby, though, is too bright, and Elisa knows the creature will seek darkness.

  Even awash in the film’s coruscating light, Elisa can’t find the back of a single head in any of the theater’s twelve hundred seats. It doesn’t matter: the screen, balcony, and constellations of ceiling lights lend the theater the majesty of a basilica. And hadn’t she worshipped here as a girl? It was here she’d found the raw materials to build a beautiful fantasy life, and it is here where, if she is lucky, she might salvage what is left of it.

  It’s with a pious stoop that she slinks down the aisle. These are the final days of The Story of Ruth, the biblical epic about which she knows nothing except its loudest dialogue and every single music cue. Between peering left and right down shadowy ranks of seats, she passes her eyes over the screen, where a sweaty mob of enslaved men pound rock in a quarry under the bug-eyed glower of a giant pagan statue. So this is Chemosh, the name she’s so often heard rumbling up through the floor. If her creature, too, is a god, then he is one far less frightening.

  She’s hatching nightmares of him wandering downtown Baltimore when she sees a dark shape floundering between the first and second row. She ducks beneath the projector rays. There he is, knees pulled to heaving chest, arms wrapped around his head. Elisa scurries into the row, stealth abandoned, heels clacking, and the creature hisses, a harsh warning she hasn’t heard since her first approach with the egg. It’s a feral noise, and she stops, fear icing her body, no braver than the countless beasts that once showed their bellies to this superior thing.

  Cries of pain caw out, and like the jungle field recordings they blast from speakers, the sound effects of men’s backs whipped while trying to move the stone idol. The creature envelops his head in his hands as if trying to crush his own skull. Elisa lowers herself to her knees and crawls across the gummy floor. The cascading colors of light make kaleidoscopes of the creature’s eyes, and he scuttles back, stumbling to his knees, short on breath.

  A deafening crash and Elisa can’t help but look: Chemosh toppled, pinning a screaming slave. The creature responds with a piteous dog-squeak and dog-shiver. Perhaps afraid that he has caused this onscreen pain, he stops retreating and instead reaches out to Elisa. She slides across the floor and wraps him in her arms. He is cold. He is dry. His gills flutter against her neck, coarse as sandpaper. Thirty minutes, Hoffstetler had warned, that’s as long as he’s got. There’s an emergency exit. It feeds right into the alley. She’ll get him out, upstairs, back to safety. She just wants a few more seconds of embracing this beautiful, sad creature who, in this world, can never be safe.

  13

  HER HAND ACHES from signing “hospital.” But Giles won’t go, and she understands why. Doctors know claw wounds when they see them, and there are protocols regarding animal control: visits to Mr. Arzounian, searches of the Arcade Apartments to make sure a tenant isn’t harboring a dangerous beast. She is, though, and both she and Giles know what the local government does with dangerous beasts: They are taken from their unfit masters and put to sleep.

  So she’d capitulated to Giles’s request and provided him with a guesswork treatment of iodine and bandages. He’d made jokes at every step, his way of making it clear that he wasn’t upset, but it had done little to soothe her. One of his cats, eaten. A wound that will sprout who knows what sort of infection. Giles is old and not especially robust. If something happens to him, it’ll be her fault—her and the heart she can’t contain. Her heart, then, is a wild animal, too, a second living thing to be locked up should animal control arrive at the door.

  Elisa is monitoring Giles, making sure he ingests both the soup and water she poured, when they both hear water dribbling into the bathtub. They stare at each other. One thing they have come to learn is that the creature can move into, out of, and through water without a sound, which means he is warning them, on purpose, that he has stood up. Giles’s hand tightens around his spoon like a shiv, and it breaks Elisa’s heart. Everyone is changing, and none for the better.

  It takes a full minute for the creature to exit the bathroom. He plods slowly, face tilted to the floor, gills flat and submissive, lethal claws tucked out of sight behind his thighs. His finned back is curled in a submissive hunch, and he keeps one shoulder to the wall as if he’s chained himself to one of Strickland’s concrete posts. Elisa is confident that not once in his ageless life has the creature known the misery of regret, and she stands, holding out her arms, as eager to accept his apology as she is reticent to accept her own.

  The creature, afraid to look at her, slouches past her open arms, trembling so badly that scales ping off and land on the floorboards, where they twinkle as brightly as the constellation of lights on the theater’s ceiling. He shuffles across the room like one of Chemosh’s whipped slaves, his head dipping lower until it matches the height of Giles, seated at the table. Giles shakes his head, holds up his hands.

  “Please,” he says. “You’ve done no wrong, my boy.”

  The creature releases his hands from their hiding place and raises them, so gradually that it’s imperceptible, until all ten of his claws, half-retracted into his fingers, snag at Giles’s bandaged arm. Giles looks at Elisa; she stares back, sharing his confusion and hope. They watch as the creature lifts Giles’s arm from the table, as tenderly as if it were an infant, and positions it beneath his downturned face. Despite the creature’s meekness, the pose is disquieting: It looks as if he is about to eat Giles’s arm, like a scolded child forced to finish his dinner.

  What happens is less violent and far stranger. He licks it. The creature’s tongue, longer and flatter than a man’s, extends past his double-jaws and laps at the bandage. Giles’s mouth moves, but he looks too startled to manage actual words. Elisa is no better prepared; not a single letter forms from her dangling hands. The creature rotates Giles’s arm as he licks, wetting the entirety of the bandage until it is soaked to Giles’s skin, until the dried blood is liquid again and the creature is licking it clean. He lowers the glistening arm to Giles’s lap, slowly leans over, and then, like some parting kiss, licks the top of Giles’s head.

  The ritual, abruptly, is finished. Giles blinks up at the creature.

  “Thank you?”

  The creature doesn’t react. It looks to Elisa that he is too ashamed to move. But it has been a long day for a being whose only true comfort i
s inside water: His gills and chest begin to expand and shake. Elisa wants to wash Giles’s arm, reapply iodine, rewrap it in sterilized bandages, but she can’t bear the idea of insulting the creature. She steps close and settles a hand upon his bowed back, gently pushing him toward the bathroom. He allows it, but only in a backward stumble that doesn’t impede his genuflection to Giles. It is the least graceful she’s seen the creature, and she has to tug his arm to get him through the bathroom doorway, a whack from his shoulder joggling the air-freshener trees.