The Shape of Water

  She folds him into the tub. The lights are off and his face slides underwater, and yet his eyeshine is undiluted. Elisa breaks his gaze to pour salt into the water, but feels him watching. Throughout her life, she has felt men on the street or bus trace her movements. This is different. This is exciting. When she reaches into the tub to swirl the salt, their eyes meet, only for a second, but in that second she reads both gratitude and amazement. The idea is outlandish. She amazes him. How is that possible, when he is the most amazing thing that ever lived?

  Elisa finishes stirring. Her hand is beside his face. Such a small thing to move it, so she does, cupping her palm to his cheek. It is smooth. She bets the scientists never noted this in all their data. They only registered teeth, claws, spines. She caresses him now, her hand gliding down his neck and shoulder. The water has turned him the same temperature as the air, and maybe this is why she doesn’t feel his hand sliding up her arm until he is at the soft, bluish flesh of her inner elbow. His palm’s scales are Lilliputian daggers, nicking playfully at her skin, while his claws poke, never enough to puncture, as they travel her biceps, leaving white scratches in their wake.

  After dressing Giles’s wound, Elisa had changed into a gauze-thin shirt dating back to Home, and when the creature’s hand shifts from her arm to her chest, the cotton soaks instantly, as if by magic. First one breast, then the other, is heavied by the grip of the shirt slicked to her skin. She feels naked beneath his hand, can feel every shiver of her hitching chest, breathless but not because there is anything illicit here. He is always naked before her, and it feels overdue that she join him in this natural state.

  The room incandesces from below. The Story of Ruth, she thinks, the projector cranking up for another screening. But there is no music. It is the creature, his body lights suffusing the water with pink, like flamingos, like petunias, like untold other fauna and flora from a world she knows only from field recordings: reek-reek, chuk-a-kuk, curu-curu, zeee-eee-eee. She arches her back, leaning her full weight into a palm wide enough to cradle her entire chest.

  Somewhere far away, Giles hisses in pain. Elisa realizes her eyes are closed; she opens them. She finds that her whole body has moved. She is bent over the tub so far that her hair dangles into the water. She wants to keep going, tip forward until she drowns as she has drowned so many times in dreams, but Giles is hurt, and it’s her doing, and she needs to treat that wound again, especially after it was licked. With great effort she straightens her spine. The creature’s hand trails down her belly and reenters the water without splash or sound.

  Elisa covers her wet shirt with a bathrobe before moving into the main room. She does not, however, go to Giles. She walks past him, across the apartment’s length, to the kitchen window. She leans her forehead onto it. She presses her hand against it. Her vision blurs, but not because she’s crying. There is water on the window, hanging in small globs on the pane, slugging in wet streaks down the glass. Yes, she might be crying after all.

  It is raining.

  14

  HE TURNS THE dial with his good hand. The images are thin, discolored. Goddamn hunk of junk. Shelled out for it at a place called Kosciuszko Electronics. Is it the cord? The wiring? Did one of his kids spill a glass of juice on it? He has half a mind to bust off the back of the television just to be able to finger the guilty party. He’s stopped by the irrational fear that the TV’s innards will look like the gadget that blew Occam’s circuits, a scorched tangle. He hadn’t been able to identify that. What makes him think he’ll be able to diagnose this?

  Or it’s the weather screwing with the signal. All this time in Baltimore and he swears this is the first rain he’s seen. It’s been pelting all day. There’s an antenna on the roof, an arachnid thing like one of the space-capsule transceivers he’s glimpsed at Occam. It’s tempting to climb onto the roof to tinker with it, right there in the rain. Watch the storm thicken and roll. Laugh at lightning. Be in the sort of danger a man can understand.

  Instead, there’s this. Living-room ruins. A family struck by lightning, provided you know where to check for burn marks. Tammy’s droning on about a puppy. Timmy wants to watch Bonanza. Lainie’s twaddling about gelatin parfait, some orange glop she’s proud of despite having dumped it from a box. All their meals come from boxes these days. Why is that? Strickland knows why. Because she’s gone most of the day, doing who knows what. He shouldn’t have come home. He should have slept another night at the office. After all, General Hoyt had called Occam only four hours ago. Worse—he’d called Fleming. And the message relayed had been clear as glass.

  Strickland had twenty-four hours to find the asset before his career was over.

  What does over mean? Court-martial? Military prison? Worse? Anything was possible. Strickland got scared. So he’d climbed into his busted-up Caddy, the one people at Occam, he swears, are starting to whisper and laugh about, and driven it home. Soon as he’d arrived here, Fleming had called. He’d done what Strickland asked and trailed Hoffstetler like a pro. Shouldn’t have surprised Strickland. Fleming is a dog, after all, and a dog has a nose for shit. Fleming says he’s got photographs of Hoffstetler in an unfurnished house packing up belongings. He’s got Hoffstetler linked to a Russian attaché called Mihalkov. Deus Brânquia might still be in the country, even the city. Strickland needs to be out there, right now, in the night, in the rain, finding the creature, ending all of this, fulfilling his destiny.

  Instead, he keeps cranking the dial. Where the hell is Bonanza?

  “Bonanza’s for adults,” Lainie says. “Let’s keep it on Dobie Gillis.”

  Strickland flinches. He must have muttered it aloud. He glances at Lainie. He can barely stand the sight of her. Yesterday, she came home with new hair. The beehive gone as if chopped by an Amazon machete and replaced by a smoother style, an S-wave curled girlishly at the neck. But she’s not a girl, is she? She’s the mother of his children. She’s his goddamn wife.

  “But Dad said we could watch Bonanza!” Timmy cries.

  “If Timmy gets to watch Bonanza,” Tammy reasons, “then I should get a puppy.”

  Dr. Kildare. Perry Mason. The Flintstones. Same three shows, a couple of dead channels. It’s all he sees. He feels a tremor of thunder. He looks to the window. Nothing to see but rain, exploding against the glass like bugs on a windshield. Except the guts keep being washed away. His guts, too. His career, his life. This lampoon of American bliss. Gelatin fucking parfait, imaginary puppies, a Western program that’s nowhere on the dial.

  “Nobody’s getting a puppy,” he says. “You know what happens to puppies? They become dogs.”

  Doctor, lawyer, caveman. He’s getting the characters on the channels confused with his own reflection in the screen. He’s the doctor, he’s the lawyer, he’s the caveman. He’s the one regressing, devolving. He can feel it in the crumbling away of his civility, the rise of primitive bloodlust. Scalpel, gavel, club.

  “Richard,” Lainie says, “I thought we said we’d at least—”

  “Dog’s a wild animal. You can try to domesticate it. You can sure as hell try. But one day, that dog’s going to show its true nature. And it’s going to bite. Is that what you want?”

  He wonders. Is Deus Brânquia the dog? Or is he?

  “Dad!” Timmy’s flapping his arms. “You just passed it!”

  “What did I say, Timmy?” Lainie scolds. “That show’s too violent.”

  People dying on the surgical slab, people dying in jail, an entire species dying out. The three channels spin faster. Ghost channels, too, phantom signals, purgatories of unclaimed static. He can’t quit turning the dial.

  “Bonanza’s not violent,” he snarls. “The world’s violent. You ask me, it’s the right thing to watch. The only thing. You want to learn to be a man, Tim? Then you need to learn how to look a problem in the eye and solve it. Shoot it in the face if you have to.”

  “Richard!” Lainie gasps.

  The dial breaks. Snaps off right in his hand. Strickland s
tares at it, dumbfounded. There’s no putting it back. The plastic is broken. He lets it drop to the carpet. It doesn’t make a sound. The kids don’t make a sound, either. Neither does Lainie. They’re mute. Finally mute. Just the way he wants them. The only noise is the crinkle from the static channel on which the dial is stuck. It sounds like rain. He stands up. Yes, rain. The rain forest. It’s where he belongs. He’d been a coward to run here, when his real home is out there.

  He walks to the front door, opens it. The patter becomes a roar. Good, good. If he listens close, he can hear the monkeys, messengers of Hoyt, swinging through the wet trees, hooting their blasted redactions, instructing him what to do. It’s like Strickland’s back in the Yeongdong gold mine under all those bodies. Yes, sir. He’ll rip through flesh and dislocate bone until he finds breathable air. It doesn’t matter anymore who gets torn apart.

  A moment later, he’s outside. In the seconds it takes to get to the Cadillac Coupe de Ville, he’s sopping. Rain slams to the steel surface, the mad drumming of jungle cannibals. He runs his fingers over the hood ornament, some primitive idol. Through the grille teeth, dripping with what feels like blood. Along fins so sharp they cut beads of rain in half. What had the dealer said, that grinning, razor-burned Mephistopheles? Just plain power.

  He runs his hand over the fractured paint. His wet bandages unravel and drop away. Both of his reattached fingers are as black as the night. He frowns. He can’t even see his wedding ring. With his other hand, he presses on one of the noxious fingers. He can’t feel it. He presses harder. Yellow liquid squirts from under the fingernail, hits the back of the car, is erased by rain. Strickland blinks water from his eyes. Did he really see that?

  Lainie is suddenly beside him, hunched under an umbrella.

  “Richard! Get back inside! You’re scaring the—”

  Strickland grabs Lainie’s blouse with both hands. Pain is sucked from his fingers into his arm. He slams her down to the car’s crushed back end. A gust snatches her umbrella, tosses it into the night. The Caddy barely reacts to the impact of Lainie’s body. That’s craftsmanship. Top-notch suspension. Perfectly calibrated shock absorbers. Lainie stares straight into the driving rain. It muddies her makeup into clown blotches. Flattens the teenage haircut she’s so smug about. He adjusts his grip, holds her by her skinny little neck. He has to lean down to be heard over the thunder and rain.

  “You think you’re smarter than me?”

  “No—Richard, please—”

  “You think I don’t know how you go downtown every day? How you go behind our backs?”

  She’s trying to peel his fingers from her neck. Her fingernails dig into his black fingers. More liquid seeps from them, drops of rancid yellow spattering her cheeks and chin, aglow under the streetlight. Her mouth is wide open, filling with rain. If he does nothing else at all, just holds her here, she’ll drown.

  “I didn’t—mean to—it’s just a—”

  “You think people won’t find out? Small shit-hole city like this? They’ll see, Lainie. Just like they see this crashed car. And what will they think? They’ll think I don’t deserve to be here. That I can’t control my own. And I have enough problems already. Do you understand?”

  “Yes—Rich—I can’t—I can’t—”

  “It’s you who’s ruining this family. Not me. Not me!”

  Strickland almost believes his own accusation. He tightens both hands around her neck, tries to solidify the belief. Vessels fatten in her eyeballs like red ink dropped onto paper. She coughs up what looks like a tongue of blood. The whole thing’s revolting. He pitches her body behind him, easy as hiking a football. Hears her body thump against the garage door. A soft sound compared to the monkey screams. The rain has turned his clothes into a second skin. Naked again, just like the Amazon. He can feel his keys in his pocket, sharp as broken bone. He extracts them. Walks the long, satisfying length of the Caddy, the length of a whole life, still salvageable.

  He opens the door, drops behind the wheel. It’s dry inside. Tidy. Still smells new. He fires the ignition. Sure, the car moans when he puts it in gear. But it’ll get him where he needs to go. He pictures the locked drawer of his desk. Inside, his Model 70 Beretta, the same one he used to shoot the pink river dolphin. He’ll miss the Howdy-do. Men grow attached to their tools and it was a good one. But it’s time to advance. He stomps the gas, pictures the spray of mud from the back wheels. All over the garage door, over Lainie’s blouse. The suburbs turned ugly, though that shouldn’t surprise anyone with a brain. Everything’s ugly underneath.

  15

  IT’S MORNING, BUT there is no light. Overflowing drainage ditches are teethed with traffic cones. Side roads are cordoned by sawhorses. The bus she’s riding slices through a foot of standing water that buffets the tires. All of it, the earth’s gush, the sprawling darkness, reflects her anguish. She has checked the river levels twice a day since the downpour began, an act equivalent to carving out her heart ounce by ounce. Tomorrow, Dr. Hoffstetler will get his way. She and Giles will load the creature back into the Pug, drive to the foot of the jetty, lead the creature to the water’s edge. Today, then, is her last day and night with the being who, more than anyone ever, sees her as more than she is. And isn’t that love?

  She looks at her feet. Even in the lightless murk of the bus floor she can see the shoes. The shoes; she still can’t believe it. Yesterday, before managing a few anxious hours of sleep before going to work, she’d lived out a dream. She’d gone inside Julia’s Fine Shoes, and though stunned by the spicy scent of leather, made a quick turn to the window display, nabbed the low-slung, square-toed, silver-encrusted lamé pair from its ivory column, and marched them to the checkout counter.

  As it turned out, the Julia of her long-held imagination, that formidable beauty with a brain for business, didn’t exist. She’d asked about it, and the woman at the register had told her. It was just a nice-sounding name. This had soothed Elisa as she’d gone home and snugged the glittering shoes around the sides of her feet. If Julia didn’t exist, why, she’d be Julia. Providing for the creature had drained her funds, and this extravagant purchase left her flat broke. She didn’t care. She still doesn’t. The shoes are hooves and just this once, over this final day, she wants to be a beautiful creature, too.

  Elisa gets off the bus and expands her umbrella, but it feels wrong, a cumbersome human contrivance. She tosses it into the gutter, turns her face to the sky, and loses herself in water, tries to breathe inside it. She never wants to be dry again, she decides. She’s drenched when she gets home and glad of it; rain patters from her clothes as she heads down the hall, forming puddles she hopes won’t ever evaporate. Before the creature’s trip to the theater, she’d never locked her front door. Now she feels for the key she’s ferreted inside a defunct lamp and fits it into the lock.

  Giles isn’t at his usual spot. He told her before she left for Occam that he’d check in, but that he’d wanted to complete the full painting for which he’d been training with his charcoal sketches. He was on fire, he’d told her. He hadn’t felt so inspired since he was a young man. Elisa didn’t doubt it, but she also wasn’t stupid. Giles, too, knew the end was at hand and he wanted to give her space to say her farewell.

  He’d left the radio on for her, of course. Elisa dawdles by the table to listen. She has come to depend upon the radio: politics, sports scores, dull listings of local events that provide sane counterpoints to the untamed fantasy she is living. She has kept it playing nonstop. Yesterday the creature, wrapped in sodden towels, had sat at her table with her, his first time on a chair—a tricky thing with his spine fins and his short, plated tail. He’d looked like a woman fresh out of the shower and she’d laughed, and though he couldn’t possibly have understood, he’d lit up, his version of a laugh, golden light pulsing about his chest while his gills wiggled.

  She stirs Scrabble tiles with her fingers. She’s been trying to teach him printed words. The day prior, she’d brought home magazines from work
to show him things he’d never otherwise get to see: a 727 airplane, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Sonny Liston punching Floyd Patterson, a spectacular movie still of Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra. He’d learned with such fervor. With the delicate movements of one accustomed to tearing things with his claws, he extended a long index finger and thumb, picked up the still of Elizabeth Taylor, and placed it atop the 727, which he then set atop the New York Philharmonic. Then, like a child playing airplane, he pushed the 727 across the breadth of the table until it landed at another photo of Cleopatra’s Egypt.

  The meaning was clear: For Elizabeth Taylor to get from New York to Egypt, she’d have to take a 727.

  It was information, of course, he didn’t need. He did all of it, she was certain, just to see her smile, hear her laugh.

  None of that means that he is well. A grayness has settled over him like grit from a factory. His brilliant scales have lost luster and turned teal like an old penny on the sidewalk. He seems, in short, to be growing older, and this, she fears, is her most unforgivable crime. For how many decades, if not centuries, had the creature lived without losing a notch of vitality? At least Occam had filters, thermometers, processions of learned biologists. Here there is nothing to sustain him but love. In the end, it isn’t enough. The creature is dying, and she is his murderer.

  “Heavy rains expected to deluge the upper Eastern Seaboard today,” the radio buzzes. “Baltimore will continue to get the worst of it, expecting anywhere between five and seven additional inches by midnight. This storm isn’t going anywhere, folks.”