The surface of the pool shivers, a billion pinpricks Elisa interprets as pleasure. The creature looks at her with eyes so bright they’re white. She takes a stabilizing breath through her puny, single-jawed mouth and directs herself to keep going, keep going, keep going. She reaches her shaking hand into the bag again. Chain links clang as he lifts a shoulder to shield himself from what might be a weapon. This, she sees, is what he has come to expect from Occam.
But it is simply another egg, the last one. She holds it up so that he can see, then cracks it against her opposite knuckle and peels off a bit of the shell. Carefully, now, carefully—she extends her arm, the egg upright in her palm, her proffering posture like that of a mythical goddess. The creature doesn’t trust it. He dolphins his upper body from the water and hisses. His gills fluff, flashing a blood-red warning. Elisa lowers her face to show meekness; it is no mere show. She waits. His jaws gnash but his gills subside. Elisa seals her lips and resumes extending her arm. She shifts the egg so that she holds it atop her fingers, a ball on a tee.
Elisa is out of range of his jaw and, she hopes, his arm. She lifts her other hand until it mirrors the egg. She can’t sign “egg” without letting the egg drop from sight so instead she uses the letters: E-G-G. He does not react. She signs again, the dog paw of the E, the finger-point of the G, and wonders what the signs might remind him off. Wolf? Arrow? Cattle prod? She asserts the egg, then the signs. She is desperate that he understand. Unless he does, this creature who seems to have materialized straight from her dreams can’t fully exist inside her reality. The egg, the signs. Egg, signs, egg, signs.
Her hand is beginning to cramp when the creature at last reacts. Once resolved upon action, he shows no hesitation, gliding as near to the ledge as the chains allow and raising his arm from water without splash or sound. Spines sprout from the arm like dorsal fins, and his fingers are bound by translucent webbing and tipped with curled claws. This makes the hand look huge, and when the fingers flex, it’s difficult to imagine them doing so for any reason other than crushing prey.
His fingers bend at the second knuckles. His thumb curls across pale palm scales. The webbing folds like diaphanous leather. It’s an E, a clumsy one, but Elisa believes this creature is accustomed to much larger gestures: full-body tumbles within seething seas; darting attacks; unfolding to full height beneath a tropical sun. Elisa feels as if she’s the one underwater. The creature dips its gills into the pool as if to remind her to breathe.
His palm releases the E and his fingers open into a hesitant fan. Elisa nods support and signs G, pointing off to her left. This is considered good signing, but the creature is a novice. His three smallest fingers pinwheel to touch the heel of his hand and he points his index finger directly at Elisa. Her vision spins. Her chest throbs joyfully, almost painfully. He sees her. He doesn’t look through her like Occam’s men or past her like Baltimore’s women. This beautiful being, however he might have hurt those who hurt him first, is pointing at her and only her.
She drops her signing hand and moves forward, her purple heels fearlessly disobeying the red line. The creature paddles in wait, his eyes, blue now, watching her body so closely that she feels naked. She holds the egg over the ledge, into the zone of hazard, no longer afraid of what happened to Strickland. The creature rises, all portents of caution gone, gills ruffling, chest expanding, water slipping from the splendor of his gemlike scales. He is what the jungle field recordings only hinted at: a pure thing.
She grieves the bulky steel locked to his neck and chest before noticing a second perversion down his left side. Four metal sutures clamp shut a gash spanning lower ribs to external oblique. Blood corkscrews into the water like drowned carnations. It’s while she frowns at the grisly wound that the creature strikes with viper speed. The egg is swiped—Elisa feels only a breeze from his webbed fingers and a coolness of scales—and then he is submerged, swimming upside down back to the pool’s center. She closes her empty hand. It’s shaking. The creature resurfaces, a hundred lonely miles away, trailing his nose across the egg’s shell. He picks at it with a claw, as if wondering how the human had managed to husk it.
Finally, he attacks the egg with claw and tooth. Scraps of shell catch the low light like shards of broken mirror. Elisa can’t help it: A silent laugh jets from her lungs. If there’s any chewing at all, it’s brief, and then the creature turns toward her, coin eyes twirling with the recognition that she is capable of wonders. Elisa has never been the recipient of such a look. She is light-headed with it, even as her purple heels feel nailed to the floor.
The jungle clangor is beheaded. A deafening pop slaps the lab like a sonic boom, and the creature dives, gone without a ripple. Elisa seizes, thinking she’s been discovered, until a soft flapping sound tells her that the reel-to-reel tape has run out and the take-up spool is spinning. It can’t be good for the machine; someone will be along to shut it off or restart it; she needs to get out of F-1 and be happy with what she’s achieved, which she is, so much so that her chest will surely be bruised tomorrow from the ferocious hammer of her heart.
25
EGGS ARE BAD enough. An omelet is worse. Omelets require fork and knife. Lainie should have thought of that. What kind of wife doesn’t think of that? Strickland takes the fork in his right hand. The knife, though, is not so simple, not with these fingers. He glances up at her. She’s unmindful of him. There’s no other way to put it. A year and a half spent fighting in the Amazon while she did what? Wipe up juice spills? A wife is supposed to anticipate her husband’s needs. Keep things spic-and-span, in all realms of his life.
Look at this place. Weeks have passed since their Baltimore arrival and still the house is backcountry, something from the Tapajós region. Wet bras and stockings loop from the shower rod like rattan vines. The heat’s cranked to verão levels. The television makes insect roars while Timmy and Tammy charge like tusked peccaries. And those fucking unpacked boxes. When he does manage to relax, the boxes surge upward like the Andes, and he’s back there again, his feet caught in the sucking mud (shag carpet), breathless in the fever mist (air freshener), paralyzed before the stalking jaguar (vacuum cleaner).
A man doesn’t like to feel like prey in his own home. More often he stays late at Occam, despite having nothing to do. How can a home television set compare with sixteen security monitors? “You’re never home,” Lainie sulks. He has shrinking sympathy. She finds the upheaval of the move invigorating, and he has begun to hate her for it. Because he can’t share in it, not until the asset is finished and his ass doesn’t belong to Hoyt. Maybe if she’d clean the place his heart would stop pounding and he could stand being here.
Family breakfast, the whole reason he’s awake after only four hours of sleep. How come he’s the only one at the table? Lainie’s calling the kids, but they don’t listen. She’s laughing, like their behavior is permissible. She’s chasing them. She’s barefoot again. Is this some kind of bohemian fad? Poor people go barefoot. They’re not poor. He pictures Elisa Esposito’s coral-pink shoes, her exposed toes, even pinker. That’s how all women should be. In fact, Elisa strikes him as the natural evolution of the female species: clean, colorful, silent. Strickland looks away from his wife’s feet in disgust, back to his plate, the uneatable omelet.
The last time he changed his bandages, he pushed his wedding ring back onto his swollen, discolored ring finger. He figured Lainie would appreciate it. But it’d been a mistake. Now he can’t get the ring off. He tries to get the fingers to grip the knife. The pain is like twine being dragged through his arteries. His face is pouring sweat. The house, it’s so goddamn hot. He looks for something cold. The bottle of milk. He picks it up, slurps from it, and gasps when finished. He spots Lainie in the kitchen, frowning at him. Because he drank from the bottle? Last year he ate raw puma butchered on the jungle floor. Still he feels guilt. He sets down the bottle and feels lost, a stranger. He’s a decaying finger, and Baltimore is the body rejecting his reattachment.
H
e picks up the fork, manages to squeeze the knife in his left palm.
The knife catches on cheese, the handle clanking against the wedding ring. Pain flares. He mutters bad words only to find Tammy sitting across from him, staring. The girl is getting used to seeing her father struggle. It makes him feel weak, and he can’t afford that, not with General Hoyt getting daily updates from Occam. He’ll need to betray no sign of frailty if he hopes to convince Hoyt that his quick, brutal path, not Hoffstetler’s lenient, winding one, is the right route to take in regard to the asset. Before Hoyt rang his red office telephone in the dead of night, Belém had been the last time he’d heard the general’s voice. And it had rattled him. He’d preferred pretending that Hoyt had been left behind with the broken-down Josefina.
Tammy’s cereal is untouched and bloating.
“Eat,” he says, and she does.
Hoyt’s voice did what it always did to Strickland. It’s like he’s one of those old metal soldiers, and Hoyt wound him. He’ll snap his heels. He’ll redouble efforts to enforce army doctrine upon Occam. Distantly he feels a melancholy. What little progress he’s made at home will continue to move slowly. The lumbering inroads he’s made with the children. The interest he’s made himself take in Lainie’s chronicles of shopping and childcare. It occurs to him that Hoyt isn’t altogether different than the asset. Both are unknowable, somehow larger than their physical forms. Strickland is merely the secondary jaw that lashes from Hoyt’s skull, and he’ll have to keep biting, just a few weeks longer.
The knife catches and falls, its handle thudding past his bandaged fingers. It feels like they’ve been twisted in their sockets. Strickland slams the table with his right fist. Silverware jumps. Tammy drops her spoon into her bowl. He feels tears, that unacceptable expression of vulnerability, rush to his eyes. No, not in front of his daughter. He fumbles from his pocket the bottle of painkillers. He bites off the lid, taps the bottle too hard. White pellets dance across the tabletop until stickiness grabs them. Why is the table sticky? What kind of household is this? He nabs two, then three, then what the hell, four, and pushes them into his mouth. Grabs the milk bottle and swigs—fuck germs. The pills and milk form a paste. He slurps it down. Bitter, bitter. This house, this neighborhood, this city, this life.
26
LAINIE KNOWS THE kind of man she married. Once, after slashing himself building Tammy’s crib, he’d wrapped his palm in duct tape and kept going. Another time he’d returned from a military exercise in Virginia sporting a forehead gash sealed shut with superglue. Finger reattachment is a different scale of injury, she understands that, yet still a dread rumbles her stomach each time she sees him gobble those painkillers.
Even before the Amazon, Richard had scared her a little. She figured that wasn’t so rare; she’d noticed an arm bruise now and then on her Orlando friends. Now it’s a different kind of fear. It’s unpredictability, the scariest thing of all. There’s nothing to panic about. It’s only that the idea of drugs dulling Richard’s investment in normal, everyday reality—well, it concerns her. A few pills down his hatch, and he starts looking like a stone-hearted hunter willing to destroy anything. Tammy’s Thirstee Cry-Baby doll: Its mewl is suspicious. The Kem-Tone wall-finish samples she’d brought home from the hardware store: Stratford Green is too much like jungle, Cameo Rose too much like blood.
Lainie trots up the stairs. It’s not to escape Richard’s opaque glower. It’s to find Timmy, the one person around who doesn’t show proper fear—respect, she corrects herself—to the head of the family. This is troubling, though not as troubling as Richard’s indulgence of it. Some days it seems like Richard is encouraging his son to denigrate his sister and challenge his mother, as if Timmy, at eight years old, is already superior to the household’s females.
“Timmy,” she sings. “It’s breakfast time, young man.”
A good wife doesn’t think such thoughts, not about her son and not about her husband. She understands the use of pharmaceuticals. Six weeks after Richard disappeared into the Amazon, she’d been a disaster, face puffy from lack of sleep, throat raw from weeping. At the urging of a Washington secretary forced to listen to her sob over the phone, she’d gone to the family practitioner and, staring at her lap, asked him if it was true there was a drug that could make lonely wives stop crying. The doctor, made fidgety by her sniffling, dropped his just-lit cigarette in his rush to prescribe her Miltown—“mother’s little helper,” he called it, penicillin for your thoughts. He’d patted her hand and reassured her. All feminine minds were fragile.
The Miltown had worked. Oh, how it had worked! The snowballing panic of her every dire day smoothed into a drowsy disquiet, nudged even closer to calmness by an afternoon cocktail or two. She had an inkling she might be overdoing it, but when she saw fellow army wives at the mailboxes or grocery store, they too were slurring and butterfingered. But then Lainie had pulled herself together and tossed the tranquilizers into the toilet. On her way to Timmy’s room, she catches carnivalesque reflections of herself in doorknobs, vases, picture frames. Is the independent Orlando Lainie entirely gone?
Lainie’s relieved to find Timmy sitting with his back to the door at his table, a darling replica, she likes to imagine, of his father’s workplace desk. She lingers at the door frame, chiding herself for having any misgivings about this cherub. He’s his father’s son, but he’s also his mother’s baby, a bright child with a voracious thirst for life, and she is lucky to have him.
“Knock-knock,” she says.
He doesn’t hear and she can’t help but smile. Timmy is as focused as his father. Lainie comes forward, her bare feet silent on the carpet, feeling like an angel floating down to check on one of the world’s saints, until she’s directly above him and can see the lizard pinned through its four legs to the tabletop, still twitching, its abdomen an open slit that Timmy explores with a knife.
27
THE GASH IN the creature’s side is healing. Each time Elisa visits, in the deadest of hours, she sees a lesser moil of blood following his glide across the pool. Only his eyes are visible, lighthouse beacons casting searchlights across a black sea. He swims right in front of her, and this is progress; no more hiding underwater. Her pulse rabbits. She needed this. She needed him to remember her, trust her. She shifts the heavy garbage bag she carries to the opposite hand. Not a surprising thing for a janitor to carry, though this bag carries anything but garbage.
To die for Chemosh is to live forever! The movie’s muffled cry has become a second wakeup alarm she doesn’t need. She’s awake long before needed, thinking of him, the magnificence no thickness of chain can diminish. Julia’s silver shoes are the only thing to distract her. She’s never late for the bus these days and has plenty of time to cross the street and put her palms to the window glass. She used to feel glass on all other sides of her, too, invisible walls of the maze in which she was trapped. No more: She believes she sees a path out of that maze, and it leads through F-1.
The jungle field recordings aren’t rolling tonight, and she’s done enough tabulating of the lab’s activity, in tiny hash marks at the bottom of her QCCs, to know this means no scientists have stayed late to reset the tapes. Occam is empty, Zelda is busy across the facility, and Elisa toes the red line and holds up the evening’s first egg.
The creature sharpens his arc to drift closer, and Elisa has to resist smiling—that’s giving him what he wants before he earns it. She stands firm, holding the egg upright. The creature floats in place by magic; if he’s kicking to tread water, she can’t see it. Slowly his large hand rises from the pool, water fluming between his forearm spines and through his chest’s etched patterns. The small flexings of his five fingers are like five arms wrapping her in a tight embrace: E-G-G.
She’s breathless behind her grin. She places the egg on the ledge and watches him take it, not with last week’s savage swat, but with a grocer’s discernment. She’d like to watch him peel it, see if he’s improved at that task, but the weight of
the garbage bag makes her impatient. Holding as much eye contact as possible, she walks backward until her hip knocks the table of audio equipment. She slides the reel-to-reel player back, moves aside the radio, and opens the lid of the record player.
Elisa is certain the player’s presence is incidental. The gear likely came from a single scientist’s closet, all of it knotted together by tangled wires. She withdraws from the bag the dusty relics of a forgotten young life that she’s kept stashed inside her locker for days: record albums, the ones she quit playing around the time she quit believing she had any reasons left to hear them. She’s brought too many, ten or fifteen, but how was she supposed to know in advance what kind of music this moment would demand?
Ella Fitzgerald’s Songs in a Mellow Mood—would he find the low rumble distressing? Chet Baker Sings—is the beat too sharklike? The Chordettes Sing Your Requests—might he think the room had suddenly filled with other women? Lyrics suddenly seem like a bad idea. She selects the first instrumental album she finds, Glenn Miller’s Lover’s Serenade, and slides it from its sleeve onto the player. She looks back at the creature and makes the sign for “record.” Then she turns on the player, drops the needle, and only then realizes it’s unplugged. She finds both cord and outlet, brings them together—
—and the band swings to life in blasting brass syncopation, knocking Elisa to her heels. Piano, drums, strings, and horns dive down and soar up, catching the rhythm before a trumpet is let loose above it all like a tossed dove. She looks at the pool, certain that the creature will think she’s betrayed him with an ambush. Instead, he is as still as if the water itself has frozen. The shells of his half-peeled egg float outward, a physical expression of his widening awe.
Elisa lurches to the table, takes the needle from the spinning circle. The trumpet dissevers with a squelch. She musters a smile to convince the creature that everything is fine. But everything is fine. It’s beyond fine: The grooves in his scaled skin are glowing. She recalls a fragment of a news article regarding bioluminescence, a chemical light emitted by certain fish, but she’d imagined it like lightning bugs, soft bulbs in a distant night, not this dulcet simmer that seems to boil from the creature’s center and steep the entire pool from ink black to a radiant summer-sky blue. He is hearing the music, yes, but he’s also feeling it, reflecting it, and from that reflection Elisa can hear and feel the music as she never has before. Glenn Miller has colors, shapes, textures—how has she never noticed?
The Shape of Water Page 10
