The Shape of Water

  The conversation shouldn’t go like this; it isn’t fair. Zelda knows the same Bible stories, but her body betrays her, turns her into the stooge Strickland expects—she can feel her eyes widen and her lips tremble. Strickland scans the file, and Zelda can hear his silent tsk, tsk. Zelda is ashamed to feel relief when Strickland shifts his gaze to Elisa. Zelda can still hear his thoughts, though. Laziness isn’t strictly a Negro problem, no sir. The lower class is the lower class because they can’t find their bootstraps. Take this white woman. All right face, nice enough figure. If she had an ounce of gumption, she’d be puttering about a tidy house taking care of kids, not working the graveyard shift like some sort of nocturnal beast.

  Strickland crunches candy, picks up the second file.

  “Elisa Esposito,” Strickland says. “Es-po-si-to. You part Mexican or something?”

  Zelda glances at Elisa. Her friend’s face is taut with the particular anxiety she suffers when someone doesn’t yet know she’s mute. Zelda clears her throat and intercedes.

  “It’s Italian, sir. It’s a name they give to orphans. She was found on the riverbank when she was a baby, and they gave her the name.”

  Strickland frowns at Zelda. She knows the look. He’s getting sick of hearing her talk. Creating self-aggrandizing myths, he must believe, is yet another flaw of the common class. This girl here was found by the river. This boy here was birthed with a caul. Pathetic origin stories chanted as if proof of divinity.

  “How long you two known each other?” he grunts.

  “Whole time Elisa’s been here, sir. Fourteen years?”

  “That’s good. Means both of you know how things run here. How things need to stay. I guess you’re the two who found my fingers?” He rubs his head. He’s sweating. He looks like he’s in agony. “That’s a question. You can reply.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m going to go ahead and thank you for that,” he says. “We thought they ended up—it doesn’t matter what we thought. Now I’m not real thrilled about the paper bag. Seems like there should have been something better than a bag. The doc says a wet rag would have been just as good as ice. He said they wasted a lot of time sterilizing the fingers before they could label the nerves and whatnot. I’m not trying to blame you here. But still. Right now, we don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s like what Delilah here said about having children. The fingers will take or they won’t. Well, there you have it. That’s what I have to say about that.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Zelda says. “We did our best.”

  An earnest apology delivered quick before you can feel bad about it—that’s Zelda’s method. Strickland nods, but then there’s trouble. He looks to Elisa, expecting the same, and impatience darkens his tired, pained face. Elisa’s silence comes off as rudeness. There’s no hope in dodging this. Zelda sends a prayer up and steps into the lion cage once more.

  “Elisa doesn’t talk, sir.”

  22

  MILITARY WORK INGRAINS certain assumptions into a fellow. A person who won’t talk is suspect. They’re choosing belligerence. They’re hiding something. These two women don’t seem sharp enough for subterfuge, but you never know. The lower classes, after all, are where you find your Communists, unionists, folks with nothing to lose.

  “She can’t talk?” Strickland asks. “Or chooses not to?”

  “Can’t, sir,” Zelda says.

  The throb in his arm fades to the background. This is interesting. It explains why this Elisa Esposito has kept this shit-hole job. Not obstinacy but limitation. Probably all explained on page two. He closes the folder, though, and gives her a long look. She can hear just fine, that’s for sure. There’s a raptness to her that is startling. Her eyes are locked onto his lips in a way most females would consider indelicate. He looks harder, wishing for buchité vision, and sees raised scar tissue in the shadow of her shirt collars.

  “Some kind of operation?”

  “They don’t know,” Zelda replies. “Either her parents did it to her, or someone at the orphanage.”

  “Now why would someone do that to a baby?”

  “Babies cry,” Zelda says. “Maybe that was enough.”

  Strickland thinks back to Timmy’s and Tammy’s infancies. How each time he’d returned from DC to Florida, he’d been stunned by the Lainie he found. Exhausted, floppy-limbed, fingers puckered from baths and diapers. Now suppose you worked at an orphanage. Suppose there wasn’t one baby, or two, but dozens. He’s read military studies on sleep deprivation. He knows the kind of dangerous ideas that begin to seem sane.

  He wants to tell Elisa to stretch out her neck so he can watch the gray light of the monitors slide across the satiny extrusion of scars. The ferocity of Elisa’s eyes make her wild; the wounds indicate that she’s tamed. It’s an appealing combination. She fidgets under his stare and crosses her legs. Well, there you go. Just a regular girl after all. Except here’s something else he wasn’t expecting. She isn’t sporting the rubber-soled shoes of every other janitor he’s seen. These are coral pink. He saw shoes like this all the time in Japan. Painted on the sides of Air Force bombers. Worn by pinup models. In real life, though, hardly ever.

  Elisa Esposito stares at her clasped hands, just like they all do, then appears to recall something. She digs into the pocket of her smock, withdraws a tiny, bright object, and holds it out. She looks somber, which makes the monkey motion of her other hand so strange. She’s rotating a thumbs-up fist over her tits. She’s a certifiable fruitcake, he thinks, until the Negro pipes up to remind him of sign language.

  “That means she’s sorry,” Zelda says.

  Elisa is holding his wedding ring. This, too, he’d assumed had tumbled down the asset’s gullet. Lainie will be glad to see it. He, however, feels no emotion about it. He searches Elisa’s face but can’t find anything dishonest about the offer. She didn’t steal the ring, nothing like that. Her expression is sincere. The circular pattern of her hand over her breast seems less simian, more sensual. He has a sudden, strange realization. His new aversion to light and loud noises—here’s a woman built as if to those specifications. A woman who works in the dark of night. A woman who can’t make a peep.

  He makes a cup of his left hand and allows her to place the ring into it. It feels ceremonial, an inverted wedding.

  “Can’t put it on just yet,” he says. “But thanks.”

  The girl shrugs and nods. Her eyes don’t leave his. Damn, it’s almost unnerving. He hates it. He kind of likes it. He looks away—that’s unusual—to her pink shoes, bouncing in midair. Pain blurts up his arm for no reason at all. He grinds his teeth and reaches for the bag of candy and instead opens the desk drawer. The bottle of painkillers is right there, glowing white amid Eagle Black Warrior pencils. Sweat pops from his forehead pores, and he tries not to wipe it. Wiping sweat isn’t a dominant gesture.

  “That’s the first thing,” he says. “Second thing is, F-1.”

  The Negro opens her mouth. Strickland slashes his hand to shut her up.

  “I know. You signed the papers. I know all that bullshit. I don’t care. My job’s to make sure you comprehend the gravity of that signature. You’ve been here fourteen years? That’s nice. Maybe next year you get a cake. I hear fourteen years, you know what I think? Fourteen years is plenty of time to get lazy. Now, Mr. Fleming told you you don’t clean F-1 unless he says. Here’s what you don’t know. You disobey, you don’t deal with Mr. Fleming. You deal with me. And I represent who? The US government. We wouldn’t have us a local problem. We’d have us a federal problem. Is that understood?”

  Elisa’s top leg slides off her lower. A positive, submissive sign, though he mourns losing sight of the shoe. Right then, one of the telephones begins to ring. The balloon of acid under his temple bursts from the noise and courses down his left arm, pooling under the wedding ring in his palm. A call this late? He flexes his bad hand, hoping to fight off the ache.

  “Let me finish. You may have seen some things. So be it.”


  He’s seeing things, too, streaks of red, tainted blood pumping directly into his eyeballs. Red—it’s the red phone ringing. Washington. Maybe General Hoyt. He’s got to get these girls the hell out of his office. Undaunted, his rivalry with Deus Brânquia rises from the swamp, the quicksand, the black depths of misery. The red phone, the red blood, the red Amazonian moon.

  “Final words, now, listen, just listen. It doesn’t take a genius to know we’re dealing with a living specimen here. That doesn’t matter. That doesn’t matter at all. All you need to know is this. That thing in F-1? It might stand on two legs, but we’re the ones made in God’s image. We’re the ones. Isn’t that right, Delilah?”

  The worthless woman can’t muster but a whisper.

  “I don’t know what God looks like, sir.”

  The pain is absolute now. He is aware of individual nerve endings. It’s as if the lights inside his body have been switched on. Fine, he’ll take the painkillers. He’s already gripping the bottle. He’ll answer the red phone with cheeks full of half-chewed pills. Manufactured drugs, after all, are what civilized men ingest. And he is civilized. Or will be. Very soon. This phone call might even be the proving ground. Decisions are being made about the asset. And to advise about that he will need control. He thumbs off the lid of the painkillers.

  “God looks human, Delilah. He looks like me. Like you.” He nods the women toward the door. “Though let’s be honest. He looks a little bit more like me.”

  23

  ELISA’S DREAMS HAVE begun to unmuddy. She’s reclined at the bottom of a river. Everything is emerald. She springs her toes from mossy stones, glides through caressing grasses, pushes off from the velveted branches of sunken trees. Objects she recognizes appear gradually. Her egg timer in slow somersault. The eggs themselves, little moons in rotation. Shoes tumble past like a school of clumsy fish, and album covers descend like stingrays.

  Two human fingers float into view, and Elisa wakes up.

  A lot about Richard Strickland distresses Elisa, but his fingers are what haunt her. It takes several of these dreams before, one night, she bolts awake in understanding. She uses her own fingers to interact with the world. It’s not ridiculous, she thinks, to be frightened by a man at risk of losing his own fingers. She imagines the equivalent in a speaking person and it’s horrific: Strickland’s teeth tumbling across riven lips, a man no longer capable, or inclined, to discuss what he does before he does it.

  She, too, has things she won’t discuss. It’s the latter half of the night, when she and Zelda work separately. Elisa presses her ear to the ice-cold door of F-1. She holds her breath and listens. Voices tend to carry through lab walls, but tonight none do. She glances back at her cart, which she has parked in front of a different lab halfway down the hall, hopefully enough to hoodwink Zelda should she rejoin Elisa earlier than expected. Elisa feels exposed while carrying so little—just a brown-paper lunch bag and her key card. She slots the card and wishes the lock’s bite was softer.

  Occam’s constant is its uncompromising brightness. Lights do not turn off. Elisa has never been privy to so much as a single switch. F-1’s dimness, then, is as outrageous as a fire. Once inside, Elisa presses her back to the closed door and panics that something has gone wrong. But this is clearly by plan: A perimeter of lights, installed along the walls for this purpose, radiate a honey glow off the ceiling.

  Plenty enough light to see by, but there are noises, too, keeping Elisa sealed to the door. Reek-reek, chuk-a-kuk, zuh-zuh-zuh, thoonk, hee-hee-hee-hee-hee, thrub-thrub, curu-curu, zeee-eee-eee, hik-rik-hik-rik, lug-a-lug-a-lug, fyeeeeeew. Elisa has spent every day of her life in the city, yet recognizes these as natural sounds, none of which have any place in this concrete bunker. They overwhelm F-1’s after-hours inertia, impregnating every table, chair, and cabinet with predator menace. There are monsters loose in the lab.

  Elisa’s reason wrests control from the fear. The bird arias and frog dirges come from a single source, off to the right. They are recordings, and this isn’t so different than a movie at the Arcade—the lowered lights, the speaker sound track. Some Occam scientist has designed what Giles might call a mise-en-scène, an atmosphere inside which unfolds the currently screening fantasy. Her guess is Bob Hoffstetler. If anyone at this facility has the empathy required for this artistic endeavor, it’s him.

  She crosses over the spot where she plucked Strickland’s fingers from the floor. Her footsteps are loud, and she curses her forgetfulness. She’d meant to wear rubber-soled sneakers. Or had she kept on her purple heels as subconscious inspiration? There’s a hissing to her right. An anaconda attracted by the jungle’s incantations? No—it’s the roll of a reel-to-reel player. The stainless steel surface shimmers like a moonlit river; Elisa approaches until she is close enough to see the jumping VU meters. Canisters are piled about. MARAÑON FIELD #5. TOCANTINS FIELD #3. XINGU/UNKNOWN FIELD #1. Gathered also is a hill of other audio gear, none of which she can identify except for a standard record player.

  Elisa steps away, circles the tank. One more foreboding sign: The top hatch is open. She expects the hair on her neck and arms to razor in dread, but it doesn’t. She continues toward the pool. It is the pool, after all, that has monopolized her mind. Every bath she takes, she takes in this pool, or so she pretends. This make-believe persists throughout her whole routine: Eggs bobbing into water, the creak of the timer, the hope of shoes, the disappointment of LPs, Giles pausing his paintbrush to bid her good night, having no idea of the strange thoughts in her head.

  A red line is painted on the floor a foot from the pool. It is unsafe to go any farther. So why is she considering it? Because she can’t get it out of her head, this thing that Mr. Strickland has dragged here, that Empties guard with guns, that Dr. Hoffstetler endeavors to study. She knows that she’s been the thing in the water before. She’s been the voiceless one from whom men have taken without ever asking what she wanted. She can be kinder than that. She can balance the scales of life. She can do what no man ever tries to do with her: communicate.

  She proceeds until the two-foot ledge pinches her thighs. The surface of the water is still. But not perfectly still. You only need to look, really look, to see the water breathe. Elisa inhales, exhales, and sets her lunch bag on the ledge. It crunches, as loud as driving a shovel into dirt. She watches the water’s surface for reaction. Nothing. She reaches into the bag and winces at the rustling. Nothing. She finds what she wants, withdraws it; it glows in the soft light. A single boiled egg.

  For days, she’s dared herself to add this egg to the three she makes each night for Giles. Now she peels it. Her fingers are shaking. It’s the ugliest egg peeling of her life. White fragments drop to the ledge. The egg, at last, is revealed, and what is more coherent and elemental than an egg? Elisa holds it in the palm of her hand like the magical object it is.

  And the water responds.

  24

  THERE IS A dark, underwater twitch, like the leg-jerk of a dozing dog, and a plip of water leaps a foot from the center of the pool. It lands and echoes outward in delicate concentric circles—and then the lab’s soft babbles are overwhelmed by a ripsaw of ratcheting metal. The water is torn into an X-shape as four fifteen-foot chains, each bolted to a corner of the pool, pull tight and shark-fin to the surface, sizzling foam and slobbering water, all of them attached to a single rising shape.

  The knifing water, the rainbow refractions, the bat-wing shadows: Elisa can’t understand what she’s seeing. There: the gold-coin eye reflections she first saw in the tank, sun and moon. The angle alters and the eyeshine winks out. She sees its real eyes. They are blue. No—green, brown. No—gray, red, yellow, so many implausible shades. It is moving closer. The water does the thing’s bidding, barely rippling. Its nose is slight, reptilian. Its lower jaw is multijointed but rests in a noble straight line. It is moving closer. Upright, as if no longer swimming, but walking. It is the God-image Strickland referenced: It moves like a man. Why, then, does Elisa fee
l that it is every animal that ever existed? It is moving closer. Gills on either side of the neck tremble like butterflies. Its neck is brutalized by a metal collar that binds the four chains. It is moving closer. It has a swimmer’s physique, with shoulders like clenched fists, but the torso of a ballerino. Tiny scales cover it, scintillating like diamonds, lucent as silk. Grooves run over its whole body in elaborate, swirling, symmetrical patterns. It is no longer moving. It is five feet away. Even the water streaming from its body makes no sound.

  It looks from the egg to her. Its eyes flash.

  Elisa crashes back to earth, her heart thwacking. She sets the peeled egg on the ledge, grabs the lunch bag, and hops behind the red line. Her stance is defensive and the creature responds, lowering itself until only the smooth crown of its head is visible. Its eyes bore into hers for an unsettling moment before shifting back to the egg; the eyes, at this angle, go blue. It skims leftward as if expecting the egg to match the move.

  He trusts nothing, Elisa thinks, and then verifies to herself, with surprise, that the creature is male. She’s somehow certain. It’s in the bluntness of his bearing, the forthrightness of his stare. Elisa has a queasy thought: If she knows he’s male, he must know she’s female. She orders herself to hold steady. This creature might be the first man-thing she’s known who is more powerless than herself. She nods for him to go ahead, take the egg.

  He advances as far as the chains allow, two feet from the ledge. Elisa is postulating that the red line was painted at too cautious of a distance when the creature’s lower jaw drops and a secondary mandible punches out like a bone fist. A fraction of a second later, the egg is vanished, the pharyngeal jaw is retracted, and the water is as still as if none of it had happened. Elisa hasn’t the time to even gasp; she pictures Strickland’s fingers toppling to the floor.