The Shape of Water Read online

  “Boto,” Henríquez says. “River dolphin. What do you think? Two meters? Two and a half? Only the males are so pink. We are lucky to see one. Very solitary, the male boto. Keeps to himself.”

  Strickland wonders if Henríquez is playing games, mocking his offish proclivities. The captain takes off his straw hat, and his white hair glows in the moonlight.

  “Do you know the legend of the boto? I suppose not. They teach you more about guns and bullets, eh? Many of the indigenous believe the pink river dolphin is an encantado, a shape-shifter. On nights like this, he transforms himself into a man of irresistible good looks and walks to the nearest village. You can tell him by the hat he wears to hide his blowhole. In this disguise, he seduces the village’s most beautiful women and leads them back to his home beneath the river. Wait and see. We will find very few women along the river at night, so afraid are they of encantado kidnap. But I think it is a hopeful story. Is not some underwater paradise preferable to a life of poverty and incest and violence?”

  “It’s coming closer.” Strickland didn’t mean to say it aloud.

  “Ah! Then we should definitely rejoin the others. They say looking into the eyes of an encantado curses you with nightmares until you are driven insane.”

  Henríquez pats Strickland on the back like the friend he isn’t and ambles away, whistling. Strickland kneels beside the rail. The dolphin dives like a knitting needle. It probably knows what boats are. It probably wants fish scraps. Strickland unholsters the Beretta and takes aim where he estimates the dolphin will emerge. Fanciful fables don’t deserve to live. Harsh reality, that’s what Hoyt seeks and what Strickland must find if he hopes to get out of here alive. The dolphin’s shape becomes visible beneath the water. Strickland waits. He wants to look it in the eyes. He’ll be the one to deliver nightmares. He’ll be the one to drive the jungle insane.

  6

  INSIDE THE SECOND apartment, a happy horde greets her: beaming housewives, smirking husbands, ecstatic children, cocksure teenagers. But they’re no realer than the roles being played at the Arcade Cinema. They’re characters in advertisements, and though these original paintings are executed with terrific skill, not a single one is mounted. Easy-to-Remove Waterproof Lashes is being used to block a cold-air crack. Soft-Glo Face Powder props open a drafty door. The Hosiery Woes of 9 Out of 10 Women has been repurposed as a table to hold paint tins for works in progress. This lack of pride depresses Elisa, though all five cats disagree. The strewn canvases make fabulous plateaus atop which they scout for mice.

  One cat preens her whiskers against a toupee, spinning it upon a human skull named, for reasons Elisa can’t recall, Andrzej. The artist, Giles Gunderson, hisses and the cat bounds away, mewling of litter-box revenge. Giles leans into his easel and squints through tortoiseshell glasses dappled in paint. A second pair of glasses is propped above his overgrown eyebrows, and a third is perched on the bald peak of his head.

  Elisa rises to the toes of her Daisys to look over his shoulder at the painting: a family of disembodied heads hovering over a cupola of red gelatin, the two children jawing like hungry apelings, the father pinching his chin in admiration, and the mother looking satisfied about her rhapsodic brood. Giles is struggling with the father’s lips; Elisa knows that men’s expressions bedevil him. She leans farther and sees him shape his own lips into the smile he’s trying to paint and it’s so adorable that Elisa can’t resist: She swoops down and gives the old man a kiss on the cheek.

  He looks up in surprise, and chuckles.

  “I didn’t hear you come in! What time is it? Did the sirens wake you? Gird yourself, dearest, for new heights in pathos. The radio says the chocolate factory is on fire. Could anything be more dreadful? I wager children everywhere are tossing in their sleep.”

  Giles smiles beneath a fastidious pencil mustache and holds up, in each hand, a paintbrush, one red, one green.

  “Tragedy and delight,” he says, “hand in hand.”

  Behind Giles, a shoe-box-sized black-and-white television on a wheeled cart pulses static through the guts of a late-night movie. It’s Bojangles tap-dancing backward up a staircase. Elisa knows it will cheer up her friend. Quick, before Bojangles has to slow down for Shirley Temple, Elisa makes the two-fingered sign for “look.”

  Giles does, and he claps his hands together, mashing red paint with green. It is beyond belief what Bojangles does, which is why Elisa is ashamed to feel a burst of ego: She could have kept pace with him better than Shirley Temple, if only the world into which she’d been born had been wholly different. She’s always wanted to dance. That’s why all the shoes: They are potential energy, just waiting for use. She squints at the television and counts off the beats, ignoring the competing music from the cinema below, and launches into a tap dance in time with Bojangles. It’s not bad—whenever Bojangles kicks the face of a step, Elisa kicks the nearest thing, Giles’s stool, which makes him laugh.

  “You know who else could hotfoot down a staircase? James Cagney! Did we watch Yankee Doodle Dandy? Oh, we should. Cagney’s coming down a staircase. He feels like a million bucks. And he starts flinging his legs around like his ass is on fire. Complete improvisation, and talk about dangerous! But that’s true art, my dear—dangerous.”

  Elisa holds out the plate of eggs and signs, “Eat, please.” He grins sadly and takes the plate.

  “I believe without you, I would be a starving artist in the least figurative of senses. Wake me when you get home, won’t you? I’ll do the buying: breakfast for me, supper for you.”

  Elisa nods but points sternly at the Murphy bed locked in its upright position.

  “When viscous fruit molds call to Giles Gunderson, he answers! Then, I promise: dreamland for me.”

  He cracks an eggshell against The Hosiery Woes of 9 Out of 10 Women and slides one pair of glasses past two others. His face resumes mimicking the smile he’s trying to paint: that smile is a little bigger now, and Elisa is glad. Only the crashing fanfare of the downstairs movie’s final frame jars her back into action. She knows what happens next: The words The End materialize on the screen, the list of featured players rolls, the houselights rise, and there is no more hiding who you really are.

  7

  THE NATIVES ARE mutants, unslowed by the swelter. They hike, they climb, they hack. Strickland has never seen so many machetes. They call them falcóns. Call them whatever you want. He’ll take his M63, thank you. The inland trek begins on a penetration road some forgotten hero plowed straight into the rain forest. By 1100 hours, they find the plow strangled by creepers, the seat sprouting philodendron. Fine—he won’t shoot his way through the jungle after all. He takes a machete.

  Strickland considers himself strong, but his muscles are liquid by afternoon. The jungle, like the vulture, detects weakness. Vines rip hats from heads. Spiked bamboos stab outstretched limbs. Wasps with finger-length stingers seethe atop papery nests, waiting for a reason to swarm, and everyone who tiptoes past shudders in relief. One man leans against a tree. The bark squishes. It is not bark. The tree is layered with termites, and now they’re thronging up his sleeve, looking to burrow. The guides have no maps but keep pointing, keep pointing, keep pointing.

  Weeks pass. Maybe months. Nights are worse than days. They strip off trousers rock-heavy with dried mud, pour liters of sweat from their boots, and lay in mosquito-net hammocks, helpless as babies, listening to the frog croaks and the malarial moan of mosquitoes. How can so much space feel so claustrophobic? He sees Hoyt’s face everywhere, in the burls of tree fungus, the patterns of tracaja turtle shells, the flight formations of blue macaws. Lainie he doesn’t see anywhere. He can barely feel her, like a dying pulse. It alarms him, but there is so much that alarms him, second by second.

  Days into the hike, they reach a village of vestigios. A small clearing. Thatched malocas. Animal hides stretched between trees. Henríquez darts about, telling the crew to stow their machetes. Strickland complies, but only to better grip his rifle. Being armed, isn�
��t that his job? Minutes later, three faces surface from the maloca dark. Strickland shivers, a queasy sensation in such heat. Soon bodies follow the faces, picking their way across the clearing like spiders.

  Strickland feels diseased on sight. His rifle twitches. Wipe them out. He’s shocked at the thought. It’s a Hoyt thought. But it’s attractive, isn’t it? Get this mission done, fast. Go home, see if he’s the same man who left Orlando. While Henríquez carefully unveils his gifts of cooking pots and one of the guides tries to establish a shared pidgin, a dozen more vestigios bleed from the shadows to stare at his guns, his machete, his ghostly white skin. He feels flayed and finds no pleasure in the following festivities. Sour wildfowl eggs cooked over a fire. Some half-ass ritual involving the daubing of paint upon the crew’s necks and faces. Strickland waits it out. Henríquez will get around to asking them about Deus Brânquia. He better do it soon. There are only so many insect bites Strickland will accept before he starts doing things his way.

  When Henríquez leaves the fire to hang his hammock, Strickland puts himself in the way.

  “You gave up.”

  “There are other vestigios. We will find them.”

  “Months down the river and you’re just going to walk away.”

  “They think speaking about Deus Brânquia robs it of its power.”

  “That could be a sign it’s close. That they’re protecting it.”

  “Oh, you have come to believe?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I believe. I’m here to get it and go home.”

  “It is not so simple as one protecting the other. The jungle is more, how do you say it? Back and forth? Existing together? These people believe all natural things are connected. To introduce invaders such as we, it is setting a fire. Everything burns.” Henríquez’s eyes trail down to the M63. “You are holding your gun very tightly, Mr. Strickland.”

  “I’ve got a family. You want to be out here a whole year? Two years? You think your crew will stick around that long?”

  Strickland lets his glare do its work. Henríquez is no longer strong enough to resist such a look. Beneath his filthy white suit, he’s a skeleton. A rash of tick bites on his neck suppurates and bleeds from scratching. Strickland has seen him wander off the trail to throw up out of sight of his men. He grips his logbook to stop his hands from trembling. Strickland wants to hurl the worthless pile of papers to the ground and fill it with lead. Maybe that would keep the captain motivated.

  “The young tribesmen,” Henríquez sighs. “Gather them after the elders are asleep. We have ax heads and whetstones to trade. They might still talk.”

  Talk they do. The adolescents are greedy for loot and describe Deus Brânquia in such detail that Strickland finds himself convinced. This is no legend like the pink river dolphin. This is a living organism, some sort of fish-man that swims and eats and breathes. The boys, beguiled by Henríquez’s map, tap the Tapajós tributary region in recognition. Deus Brânquias’s seasonal migrations stretch back generations, the guide translates. Strickland says that doesn’t make sense. Are there more than one of them? The guide asks. Long ago, the boys say. Now there is but one. Some of the boys begin to cry. Strickland’s interpretation is that they are worried their greed has put their Gill-god in danger. It has.

  8

  TWO STORES STAND opposite Elisa’s bus stop. Thousands of times Elisa has stared at them; zero times has she visited either during business hours, sensing that to do so would be akin to shattering a dream. The first is Kosciuszko Electronics. Today’s deal is BIG SCREEN RECTANGULAR COLOR TVS WITH WALNUT GRAINED FINISH, and several models, each with legs like Sputnik’s antenna, are broadcasting the night’s final images. An American flag cedes to a “Seal of Good Practice” screen before signing off, a sight that confirms Elisa’s lateness. She prays for the bus to come. Who did the girl in the movie pray to tonight? Chemosh? Maybe Chemosh works faster than God.

  She shifts her eyes to the second store, Julia’s Fine Shoes. She does not know who this Julia is, but tonight she envies her so much she is pinpricked by tears, this bold, independent woman with a business all her own, inevitably beautiful with bouncy hair and a bounce in her step, so confident in her store’s value to the Fells Point neighborhood that instead of turning the lights off at night, she leaves a spotlight upon a single pair of shoes placed upon an ivory column.

  The gambit works. My, how it works. On nights when she isn’t running behind, Elisa crosses the road and rests her forehead against the glass to get a better look. These shoes don’t belong in Baltimore; she’s not sure they belong outside of Parisian runways. They are her size, square-toed, and so low slung they’d slip off the foot if not for the snug, inward-leaning heel. They look like hooves in the best way: of unicorns, of nymphs, of sylphs. Every inch of lamé is encrusted with glittering silver, and the inserts are as shiny as mirrors—she can literally see herself in them. The shoes stir in Elisa feelings she thought that the orphanage had beaten out of her as a youth. That she could go places. That she could be something. That all was within the realm of the possible.

  Chemosh answers her call: The bus hisses down the hill. The driver, per usual, is too old, too tired, too spiritless to drive safely. The bus makes its hard right on Eastern, hard right on Broadway, and barrels north past the heartbeat of fire-engine lights and the blood spill of the melting chocolate factory. The leaping, licking destruction is, at least, a kind of life, and Elisa contorts herself to watch it, feeling for a minute that she isn’t rumbling through civilization’s scabwork, but rather darting through some vicious, vital jungle.

  All of it shrinks from the long, sulfur-lit driveway of Occam Aerospace Research Center. Elisa presses her cold face to the colder window to make out the illuminated clock on the sign: 11:55. Her shoes touch a single stair on her bound from the bus. The changeover from the busy swing shift to the tiny graveyard shift is chaotic, and it allows Elisa to move quickly, gazelling from the bus and deering up the service sidewalk. Beneath the merciless outdoor floodlights—every light at Occam is merciless—her shoes are blue blurs.

  It’s a single-floor elevator ride down, but some of the labs are more like hangars and the trip takes half a minute. The car opens into a two-story staging area, where stanchions direct staff along a narrowing path. Ten feet above the floor, in a Plexiglased observation chamber, stands David Fleming. Born with a clipboard instead of a left hand, he lowers it to review his subjects. It was Fleming who interviewed her for her job over a decade ago, and he’s still here, his hyena scrutiny pushing him up the throat of command year after year. Now he runs the whole building yet still can’t help meddling with bottom-rung employees. Over the equal period of time, Elisa has gone where janitors go: nowhere.

  Elisa curses her Daisys. They stand out, which is the point, but there’s a double edge. Her fellow graveyarders are up ahead: Antonio, Duane, Lucille, Yolanda, and Zelda, the first three disappearing down the hall while Zelda searches for her punch card as if choosing from a menu. The cards go into the same slots every day; Zelda is stalling for Elisa’s sake, because Yolanda is behind Zelda and if Yolanda gets a shot, she’ll dawdle at the punch clock to make Elisa one crucial minute late.

  It shouldn’t be this cutthroat. Zelda is black and fat. Yolanda is Mexican and homely. Antonio is a cross-eyed Dominican. Duane is of mixed race and has no teeth. Lucille is albino. Elisa is mute. To Fleming, they are all the same: unfit for other work and therefore easy to trust. It humiliates Elisa that he might be right. She wishes she could talk so she might stand on the locker-room bench and stir her coworkers with a speech about how they need to look out for one another. But that’s not how Occam is set up. As far as she can tell, it’s not how America is set up, either.

  Except Zelda, who has always been protective of Elisa. Zelda is digging through her purse for glasses everyone knows she doesn’t wear, waving off Yolanda’s gripes about the ticking clock. Elisa decides that Zelda’s boldness must be matched by her own. She thinks of Bojangles
and darts off, mamboing through yawners, fox-trotting past coat-buttoners. Fleming will spot her speeding blue shoes, and her behavior will be noted upon a checklist; at Occam, anything beyond a tired slump earns suspicion. Yet in the seconds it takes Elisa to reach Zelda, her dancing frees her from all of it. She rises above the underground and floats as if she’d never left that lovely, warm bath.

  9

  FOOD RUNS OUT southwest of Santarém. The crew is weak, starving, light-headed. Happy, chattering monkeys are everywhere, mocking them. So Strickland starts firing. Monkeys fall like aguaje fruit, and men gasp in horror. This annoys Strickland. He advances against a gut-shot monkey, machete raised. The soft-furred animal curls into a woeful ball, its hands pressed over its sobbing face. It is like a child. Like Timmy or Tammy. This is like slaughtering children. He flashes back to Korea. The children, the women. Is this what he’s become? The surviving monkeys scream in sorrow, and the sound pins into his skull. He turns away and attacks a tree with the machete until it spits white wood.

  Other men gather the bodies and drop them in boiling water. Don’t they hear the monkeys screaming? Strickland scoops up moss, plugs his ears with it. It doesn’t help. The screaming, the screaming. Dinner is rubbery gray balls of monkey gristle. He doesn’t deserve to eat but does anyway. The screaming, the screaming.

  The wet season, whatever the fuck they call it, sniffs them out. The cloudburst is hot, like offal splatter. Henríquez quits trying to wipe steam from his glasses. He walks blind. He is blind, thinks Strickland. Blind to believe he could head up this expedition. Henríquez, who’s never fought a war. Henríquez, who can’t hear the monkeys’ screams. The screams, Strickland realizes, are just like those of the villagers in Korea. As terrible as these sounds are, they tell Strickland what to do.