The Shape of Water Read online

  There’s no need to incite a coup. Attrition does the job. A candirú spine fish, agitated by driving rain, darts up the first mate’s urethra while he’s pissing into the river. Three men take him to the nearest town and are never seen again. The next day, the Peruvian engineer wakes up spotted with purple punctures. A vampire bat. He and a friend are superstitious. They’re gone. Weeks later, a torn mosquito net leads to one of the índios bravos being bitten to death, blanketed in tracuá ants. Finally, the Mexican bosun, best pal to Henríquez, is struck in the throat by a bright green papagaio viper. Seconds later, blood spurts from every pore of his body. There’s no hope for him. General Hoyt taught Strickland just where to put the Beretta, right at the base of the bosun’s skull, so that death comes quick.

  Then they are five. With guides, seven. Henríquez hides belowdecks, filling his logbook with daymare transcripts. His straw hat, once so crisp, has collapsed into its new role as bedpan. Strickland visits and chuckles at the captain’s erratic mumbling.

  “Are you motivated?” Strickland asks him. “Are you motivated?”

  No one asks Richard Strickland about his motivation. Until now, he didn’t have an answer. Never gave a shit about Deus Brânquia, that’s for sure. Now there’s nothing in the world he wants more. Deus Brânquia has done something to him, changed him in ways he suspects can’t be reversed. He’ll capture it with what’s left of the Josefina crew—aren’t they vestigios now, too? Then it’s home, finally home, for whatever it’s still worth. He masturbates under a torrid rain, above a nest of baby snakes, picturing silent, tidy sex with Lainie. Two dry bodies shifting like blocks of wood on a boundless veldt of tight, white sheets. He’ll make it back there. He will. He’ll do what the monkeys say, and then it will all be over.

  10

  ELISA USED TO exchange her fancy shoes for sneakers in the locker room. But it’d felt like a chopping, her hand the hatchet. You can’t clean in heels—that was among Fleming’s maxims the day she’d been hired. We can’t have any slipping and falling. No black heels, either, because there are scientific markings on some of the laboratory floors, and we can’t have them marred. Fleming had a thousand such bromides. These days, though, his attention is mostly elsewhere, and the discomfort of Elisa’s heels has become comfort; it keeps her awake, alive to sensation, if barely.

  A long-defunct shower room serves as the janitorial closet. Zelda takes her traditional cart, and Elisa hers, which they stock from shelves they’re expected to keep in three-month supply. Then their eight cart wheels, plus eight more for the mop buckets, reverberate down Occam’s long white hallways like a slow-moving train to nowhere.

  They have to be professional at all times; some white-coated men linger about the labs until two or three in the morning. Occam scientists are a strange subspecies of male whose jobs drive them to absolute distraction. Fleming teaches his janitors to promptly exit any lab they find occupied, and it happens periodically. When two scientists finally leave together, they squint in disbelief at each other’s watches, chuckling about the hell they’re going to catch from their wives, sighing at how they’d rather crash-land at their girlfriends’ pads.

  They don’t censor these comments when they pass Elisa and Zelda. Just as the janitors are trained only to see Occam’s dirt and trash, the scientists are trained only to see the manifestations of their brilliance. Long ago, Elisa had indulged fantasies of workplace romance, of meeting that man who danced through the darks of her dreams. It was the notion of a silly young girl. That’s the thing about being a janitor, or maid, any type of custodian. You glide unseen, like a fish underwater.

  11

  THE VULTURE CIRCLES no more. Strickland had one of the remaining two índios bravos catch it. No idea how the man did it. He doesn’t really care. He leashes the bird to a spike he drives into Josefina’s stern and eats his dinner of dried piranha in front of the bird. Lots of bones in piranha. He spits them, none close enough for the vulture to peck. Its face is purple, its beak red, its neck bassooned. It displays its wingspan but can do nothing but shuffle.

  “Watch you starve now,” he says. “See how you like it.”

  Back into the jungle with Henríquez left behind to occupy the boat. Strickland’s terms now. No gifts. Lots of guns. Strickland pursues the natives as if General Hoyt himself is standing there giving the order. He teaches the men military hand signals. They learn fast. Their circle contracts around a village, beautiful synchronicity. Strickland shoots the first villager he sees to make a point. The vestigios flop to the mud, blubber secrets. Their last sighting of Deus Brânquia, its exact trajectory.

  The translator tells Strickland that the villagers believe him to be the embodiment of a gringo myth—a corta cabeza, a head cutter. This appeals to Strickland. Not some foreign despoiler like Pizarro or Soto, but something born of the jungle itself. His white skin is piranha. His hair is greasy paca. His teeth are fer-de-lance fangs. His limbs are anacondas. He’s as much a Jungle-god as Deus Brânquia is a Gill-god, and he doesn’t even hear the final order when he gives it, can’t hear shit past the screaming monkeys. But the crew hears it. They sever every head in the village.

  He can smell Deus Brânquia. Smells like milky silt from the river bottom. Maracuya fruit. Crusted brine. If only he didn’t have to sleep. Why don’t the índios bravos ever get tired? By moonlight he stalks them and witnesses a ritual. Bark shavings pulverized into a globby pale paste atop a frond. One of them kneels, holds his eyelids open. The other rolls the frond and coaxes from it a single drop of liquid onto each eyeball. The kneeling one pummels the mud with his fists. Strickland is drawn by the suffering. He steps into the open, kneels before the standing man, and holds open his own eyelids. The man hesitates. He calls it buchité, makes gestures of caution. Strickland does not budge. Finally, the man squeezes the frond. A bulb of white buchité fills the world.

  The pain is indescribable. Strickland writhes, kicks, howls. But he survives. The burning subsides. He sits up. Wipes the tears. Squints up into the guides’ blank faces. He sees them. More than that, he sees into them. Along the crooked canals of their wrinkles. Deep inside the forest of their hair. The sun rises, and Strickland discovers an Amazon of infinite depth and color. His body sings with vitality. His legs are cashapona trees, sinewed with roots like fifty extra feet. He peels off his clothes. He doesn’t need them. Rain bounces off his naked skin as if from rock.

  The Gill-god knows it can’t hold back the Jungle-god, not as the latter guns Josefina so hard hunks of its hull fall into the river. Deus Brânquia backs itself into a boggy bayou. There the boat breaks down. The bilge pump is clotted and the captain’s cabin is filling with water and still Henríquez refuses to move. The Bolivian gets out the tools. The Brazilian hauls forth the harpoon gun, Aqua Lung, and net. The Ecuadorian rolls out a barrel of rotenone, fish pesticide from the jicama vine he claims will force Deus Brânquia to the surface. “Fine,” Strickland says. He stands at the bow, naked, arms outstretched, electric with rain, and calls to it. There is no telling for how long. Days, maybe. Maybe weeks.

  Deus Brânquia, at last, rises from the shoal, the blood sun carving the Serengeti, the ancient eye of eclipse, the ocean scalping open the new world, the insatiable glacier, the sea-spray spew, the bacterial bite, the single-cell seethe, the species spit, the rivers the vessels to a heart, the mountain’s hard erection, the sunflower’s swaying thighs, the gray-fur mortification, the pink-flesh fester, the umbilical vine cording us back to the origin. It is all this and more.

  The índios bravos drop to their knees, beg forgiveness, cut their own throats with their machetes. The savage, uncontrolled beauty of the creature—Strickland shatters, too. He loses bladder, bowels, stomach. Bible verses from Lainie’s pastor drone from a forgotten, squeaky-clean purgatory. The thing that hath been is that which shall be. There is no new thing under the sun. This century is a blink. Everyone is dead. Only the Gill-god and the Jungle-god live.

  Strickland’s crash is brief and h
appens but once. He will try to forget it ever happened. When he reaches the city of Belém a week later in a Josefina listing forty degrees and half-sunk, he is wearing the translator’s clothes. Knowing too much, the man had to be killed. By now, Henríquez is recovered, clinging to the king post and blinking at the vaporous spring, throat bobbing as he works to swallow the fantasy Strickland has fed him. Henríquez was a good captain. Henríquez caught the creature. Everything went as expected. Henríquez looks to his logbook for corroboration, but he can’t find it. Strickland fed it to the vulture, watched it choke, watched it seizure and die.

  He confirms all of this on a phone call to General Hoyt. Strickland survives the call only with the distraction of green hard candies. Generic label, synthetic taste, but the flavor is achingly concentrated, almost voltaic. He cleaned out every market in Belém, harvesting nearly a hundred bags before making the call. The crunch of the candy is loud. Despite thousands of miles of wire, Hoyt’s voice is even louder. As if he’d always been there in the jungle, observing Strickland from behind sticky fronds or veils of mosquitoes.

  Strickland can think of nothing that worries him more than lying to General Hoyt, but the actual details of Deus Brânquia’s capture, when he tries to recall them, make no sense. He believes the rotenone was, at some point, poured into the water. He recalls the sizzling effervescence. He remembers the M63, the stock a block of ice against his feverish shoulder. Everything else is a dream. The creature’s balletic gliding through the depths. Its hidden cave. How it waited there for Strickland. How it did not fight. How monkey screams resounded off the rock. How before Strickland aimed the harpoon, the creature reached out to him. Gill-god, Jungle-god. They could be the same. They could be free.

  He squeezes his eyes shut, kills the memory. Hoyt either buys his version of the capture or doesn’t care. Hope trembles through Strickland’s hands, rattling the receiver. Send me home, he prays. Even though home is a place he can no longer picture. But General Hoyt isn’t a man who answers prayers. He requests that Strickland see the mission through to the end. Escort the asset to Occam Aerospace Research Center. Keep it safe and secret while the scientists there do their thing. Strickland swallows shards of candy, tastes blood, hears himself comply. One last leg of the journey. That’s all it is. He’ll have to relocate to Baltimore. Maybe it won’t be so bad. Move the family up north, sit behind a tidy desk in a clean, quiet office. It’s a chance, Strickland knows, to start over, if only he can find his way back.

  UNEDUCATED WOMEN

  1

  “I’M GOING TO strangle him. Last week he swears to me he’ll get the toilet to stop gurgling so I can get a single decent day’s sleep, but when I get home it’s like there’s someone in there taking an eight-hour tinkle. He says I’m the janitor, why don’t I fix it? That’s not the point. That is not the point. You think I want to come home, dead on my feet, toes swollen up like gum balls, and just for fun stick my hand into the ice-cold water of the toilet tank? I’ll stick his head in the tank.”

  Zelda is carrying on about Brewster. Brewster is Zelda’s husband. Brewster is no good. Elisa has lost track of the odd jobs Brewster has held, the multitude of colorful ways he’s been fired, the depressive dives he takes into his Barcalounger for weeks at a time. The details don’t matter. Elisa is grateful for them however they come and signs appropriate interjections. Zelda began learning sign language the day Elisa arrived, an effort Elisa doesn’t believe she can ever repay.

  “And like I told you, the kitchen sink’s been running, too. Brewster says it’s the coupling nut. Whatever you say, Albert Einstein. If you’re finished with your theory of relativity, how about you go to a hardware store? And you know what he says? He says I should just sneak a coupling nut from work. Does he even know where I work? All the security cameras here? I’m going to be honest with you, hon, about my future plans. I am going to strangle that man and chop him into little pieces and flush those pieces down the toilet so at least when the toilet’s keeping me awake I can think about all those Brewster bits zooming off to the sewer where they belong.”

  Elisa smiles through a yawn, signing back that this is one of Zelda’s better murder plots.

  “So tonight I get up for work, because somebody in this family needs to afford luxury items like coupling nuts, and the kitchen is the Chesapeake Bay. I march right back to the bedroom, and because I haven’t bought my strangling rope yet, I wake up Brewster and say we’ve got us a Noah’s ark situation developing. And he says good. Baltimore hasn’t had rain in forever. The man thinks I’m talking about rain.”

  Elisa studies her copy of the Quality Control Checklist. Fleming doesn’t warn them when he changes it; it’s how he keeps his workers on their toes. The three-sheet carbon form enumerates the labs, lobbies, restrooms, vestibules, corridors, and stairwells assigned to each janitor, each location tied to a numbered list of correlated tasks. Fixtures, water fountains, baseboards. Elisa yawns again. Landings, partitions, railings. Her eyes keep slipping.

  “So I drag him into the kitchen where his socks get all soggy, and you know what he says? He starts talking about Australia. How he heard on the news Australia’s drifting two inches a year, and maybe that’s the reason everyone’s pipes keep coming loose. All the continents, he tells me, used to be shoved together. He says if the whole world is drifting like that, then all the pipes are going to bust one day and there’s no sense getting upset about it.”

  Elisa hears the wobble in Zelda’s voice and knows where this is headed.

  “Now, look, hon. I could have taken that man’s head, drowned him in two inches of water, and still made it here by midnight. But you ever known a man who could wake up from a deep sleep and talk like that? He mixes me up so bad. Some weeks we can’t put food on the table. Then this man of mine says ‘Australia’ and suddenly I get emotional? Brewster Fuller will be the death of me, but I’m telling you, the man sees things. Then, for a second, I see them, too. Past Occam, that’s for sure. Way past Old West Baltimore. The Chesapeake Bay in my kitchen? This too shall pass.”

  From the lab to the left, a ruckus. They halt their carts; toilet scrubbers swing from pegs. For weeks, they’ve heard rumbles of construction behind this door, but that’s unexceptional. A room isn’t on your list, you ignore it. But tonight the door, previously unadorned, has been given a plate: F-1. Elisa and Zelda have never encountered an F. They always clean together the first half of every night, and together they frown and consult their matching QCCs. There it is, F-1, planted on their lists like a bomb.

  The women angle their ears at the door. Voices, footsteps, a crackling noise. Zelda looks worriedly at Elisa; it pains Elisa to see her friend’s yakkity mood so easily snuffed. It’s her turn, Elisa tells herself, to be the bold one. She falsifies a confident smile and makes the sign for “go ahead.” Zelda exhales, gathers her key card, and inserts it into the lock. The gears bite down and Zelda pulls open the door, and in the outrush of chilly air, Elisa has a swift intuition, from out of nowhere, that she has just made a disastrous mistake.

  2

  LAINIE STRICKLAND SMILES at her brand-new Westinghouse Spray ’N Steam iron. Westinghouse built the atomic engine that fueled the first Polaris submarine. That says something, doesn’t it? Not just about a product, mind you, but a company. She’d been sitting at the back of Freddie’s, her beehive inserted into the pink plastic of the flip-top dryer hood, when she paused, right in the middle of an interesting and, she thought, important story about a place called the Mekong Delta, where a group called the Viet Cong had shot down five US helicopters, killing thirty Americans, soldiers just like her Richard, so that she could instead linger upon the full-page advertisement. It depicted a submarine unzipping the white ocean on its dive down. All those brave boys. The intrinsic danger of water. Would they die, too? Their lives depended on Westinghouse.

  The image had resonated enough that she’d resolved to ask Richard what sort of brand of submarine a “Polaris” was. An army man since age n
ineteen, Richard’s reflex to any question about his job is to clam up, so she’d waited until he was well fed and pacified by the popcorn gunfire of The Rifleman before asking. Without breaking his appraising gaze of Chuck Connors’s ambidextrous gunmanship, he’d shrugged.

  “Polaris isn’t a brand. It’s not like one of your breakfast cereals.”

  The word cereal snapped Timmy from his television stupor. Electricity crackled between the shag carpet and his corduroyed knees as he turned to resume a two-day-old conversation. “Mom, could we please get some Sugar Pops?”

  “Froot Loops!” Tammy added. “Oh, Mommy, please?”

  Richard has always been gruff. It’s just his way. Before the Amazon, though, Richard didn’t let her dangle from the cliff of her own ignorance like this, watching her flail without offering a hand. Lainie had yet to figure out the right reaction and chose to laugh at herself. Then Chuck Connors had been replaced by a Hoover Dial-a-Matic with variable Suction Control, operated by an actress who looked a bit like Lainie. Richard chewed his lip and looked down at his lap in what might have been remorse.

  “Polaris is a missile,” he said. “Nuclear-armed ballistic missile.”

  “Oh!” She’d wanted to soothe him. “That sounds dangerous.”

  “Better range, I guess. More accurate, too, is what they say.”

  “I saw it in a magazine and I thought, ‘I bet Richard knows all about this,’ and I was right.”

  “Not really. It’s Navy shit. I avoid those bastards the best I can.”

  “That’s true. You do. You’ve told me many times.”