Had she drained the cocktail without realizing it? Her vision swam. To steady it, she looked past the bastion of ketchup, mustard, and steak sauce, and out the window, and saw a mother struggle with a grocery bag while pushing a wobbly baby carriage. Lainie looked in the opposite direction, into the restaurant’s murk, and saw sharp-suited sharks flashing teeth at heartsick mistresses, who prayed the men’s hungry looks meant something beyond their being devoured.
Lainie could guarantee them that the looks meant nothing. Just last night, Richard was saying that the asset he’d been hired to guard was nearing the end of its utility, and when it was gone, maybe the Stricklands would pull up stakes from Baltimore. He doesn’t like it here; she’s seen him with encyclopedia volumes on his lap, looking up Kansas City, Denver, Seattle. But Lainie does like it here. She thinks it’s the greatest city in the world. To be uprooted from the one place where she feels useful capsulizes the danger of attaching yourself to a man in the first place. You’re a parasite, and when your host begins to die—say, from an infection in his fingers—your bloodstream is poisoned, too.
She wanted to say yes to Bernie. She thought about it every day, every minute.
But would that be saying no to Richard?
“Tell you what, you think about it,” Bernie said. “Offer’s good for, let’s say, a month. Then I guess I’ll hire a second girl. Hey, let’s eat. I could eat a horse. Two horses. And the chariot behind them.”
16
FEAR DROPS ONTO Giles’s back like a pterodactyl shot from the sky. Occam is Baltimore’s own Bermuda Triangle, and he’s heard the wild rumors, most of which end with the suspicious death or disappearance of a courageous investigator. He feels a nausea. What Elisa is suggesting is far beyond the abilities of two broke deadbeats living above a crumbling movie theater. The fish-man of Elisa’s delusion must be a poor fellow born with physical deformities—and she wants to break him out?
Elisa is a good person, but her life experience is terrifically limited; she’s incapable of appreciating how deep run the fault lines of America’s Red Scare. Undesirables of all sorts risk their lives and livelihoods on a daily basis, and a homosexual painter? Why, that’s as undesirable as they come! No, he doesn’t have time for this rubbish. He has a meeting with Bernie, an advertisement over which he has slaved.
Giles turns away, knowing the gesture will hurt Elisa. It hurts him, too, to the point that he has trouble sliding his revised canvas into the portfolio case. He faces the wall before speaking, a cowardly tactic that prohibits a mute person’s interruption.
“When I was a boy,” he says, “a carnival pitched its tents out at Herring Run. They had a special exhibit, a whole tent full of natural oddities. One of them was a mermaid. I know because I paid five cents to see it. A sizable fortune for a boy in those days, I assure you. And do you know what this mermaid was? It was dead, first of all. All the paintings of some bare-breasted beauty didn’t square with the old mummified thing in the glass case. What it was was a monkey’s chest and head sewed to a fish tail. I knew that. Anyone could see that. But for years I told myself it’d been a mermaid, because I’d paid my money, hadn’t I? I wanted to believe. People like you and me, we need belief more than others, don’t we? Yet in the cold light of day, what was the mermaid? What was it really? Creative taxidermy. That’s so much of life, Elisa. Things patched together, without meaning, from which we, in our needful minds, create myths to suit us. Does that make sense?”
He buckles the case, the smart clicks the very sound of wisdom. He’s got to get going, after all; perhaps this will be the first of many small jiltings he delivers to Elisa like inoculations. He dons a placating grin and turns back around. His grin freezes solid. Elisa’s cold stare brings the outdoor chill gusting back into the apartment, and he shields himself from the spitting frost. She’s signing, bludgeon-hard and whip-fast, a tone he’s never seen her take, certain repeated symbols engraving themselves onto the air like Fourth of July sparklers. He attempts to look away, but she lunges into his line of sight, her signs like punches, like shaking him by the lapels.
“No,” he says. “We’re not doing it.”
Signs, signs.
“Because it’s breaking the law, that’s why! We’re probably breaking the law even talking about it!”
Signs, signs.
“So what if it’s alone? We’re all alone!”
It’s a truth too cruel to be spoken. Giles darts to the left. Elisa moves to block him. Their shoulders collide. He feels the impact in his teeth and stumbles; he has to slap a hand to the door to steady himself. It is, without question, the worst moment the two of them have ever shared, commensurate to a slap. His heart is pounding. His face is flushed. There’s something wrong with his toupee. He pats his scalp to make sure it’s in place; this only makes him blush more. Abruptly, he is near tears. How did things go so wrong so fast? He hears her panting and realizes he’s panting, too. He doesn’t want to look at her, but he does.
Elisa is crying, and still, the signs, the signs Giles can’t help but read.
“‘It’s the loneliest thing I’ve ever seen.’” He groans. “You see? You said it yourself. It’s a thing. A freak.”
Her signs slash and punch. He bleeds and bruises.
“‘What am I, then? Am I a freak, too?’ Oh, please, Elisa! No one is saying that! I’m sorry, dear, but I really have to go!”
There is more signing (“He doesn’t care what I lack”), but Giles refuses to repeat it aloud. His shaking hand finds the knob and pulls open the door. Cold wind crystallizes the single unfallen tear at the corner of each eye. He steps into the drafty hall, catching another sentence (“I either save him or let him die”), but he reminds himself that somewhere in the city is a building, and inside that building is an appointment book, and in that book is his name. That isn’t fantasy; those are facts. He takes a single step away before pausing and must raise his voice from a squeak.
“It’s not even human,” he insists.
They are the words of a quailing old man pleading to live out his days in peace. Before he can angle the portfolio case out of his own way and escape via the fire escape, just as he’s turning away, he catches her signed reply and it feels as if those signs brand themselves into his back, right through his jacket, his sweater, his shirt, his muscle, his bone, deep enough that the words ache like a fresh wound all the way to Klein & Saunders, where they begin their itchy conversion into scars that he’ll be forced to read for the rest of his life: “NEITHER ARE WE.”
17
WORD FROM WASHINGTON is that the asset is to be put to sleep, chopped like a steak, shipped off in samples to labs around the country. Hoffstetler has one week to wrap up his research. Strickland leans back in his office chair and tries to smile. Mission’s nearly finished. A better life waits on the other side. He should use this week to relax. Find a hobby. Get back to where he was before the Amazon. Maybe even visit the doctor like Lainie keeps nagging, get his fingers checked out. He strikes that idea. Looking at the fingers reminds him of jungle rot. Better keep them hid under bandages, just a while longer.
So he comes home early. He’ll surprise Timmy and Tammy by being there when they get back. Strange thing is, Lainie’s not there. He sits in front of the TV and waits. It’s the opposite of what he planned. He waits and crunches painkillers. What’s the point? He might as well be at work. Late afternoon, she finally returns. By that point, he doesn’t know what’s what. The pills smudge details until they are as unintelligible as General Hoyt’s shrieked orders: **** ** *****, ***. Strickland doesn’t see groceries in Lainie’s arms. The dress she’s got on, it doesn’t look familiar. She’s clearly startled to see him, then laughs and says she’ll have to go back to the store tomorrow, she’d forgotten her pocketbook.
Observation is what Strickland does. He can tell you which scientists are left-handed, what color socks Fleming wore last Wednesday. Lainie is talking too much, and Strickland knows that’s the truest tell of any liar
. He thinks of Elisa Esposito, her soothing silence. She’d never lie to him. She hasn’t the power, or inclination. Lainie is hiding something. Is it an affair? He hopes not. For her sake, and also his, because of what might happen to him, legally speaking, after he dealt with the adulterers.
He compresses his emotions for the night. Next morning, after the kids catch the bus, he kisses Lainie good-bye over the hot ironing board and drives the Thunderbird to the next block. He parks under a giant beech tree. Not the cover he’d prefer. The limbs are skeletal from lack of rain. But it’ll do. He’s had his four breakfast pills, but that’s it. Needs to keep his observational ability sharp. He kills the engine. He silently prays that Lainie doesn’t appear on the road in front of him. This is their marriage. This is their life. Please, just stay home, clean the kitchen, unpack the boxes, anything.
Fifteen minutes later, she appears on the cross street, suddenly done ironing. He feels a needle of shame. He’d once promised her that no wife of his would have to take public transportation. He forces the needle from his mind with a mental flex. They’d both made promises, hadn’t they? He’s the one who forced his wedding ring back on only for his finger to bloat around it. He fights the Thunderbird for a good minute to get it started, then rolls out, creeping a block behind his wife. He idles as she waits for the bus, and when it pulls out, he follows.
The bus lets people off in front of a grocery store. Lainie isn’t among them. Strickland reminds himself that good surveillance requires an open mind. Maybe she doesn’t like the prices at that store. When the bus leaves an entire downtown shopping center without expunging Lainie, Strickland’s mind snaps shut. If his wife had some special errand today, she’d had all morning to tell him about it. Whatever she’s doing, she’s doing it behind his back. He grips the steering wheel so hard he feels a snap in one of his injured fingers. One of the big black stitches, perhaps, ripping from rotting flesh.
Then the car dies. No dramatic deathbed scene. It coughs weakly, one last time, and then Strickland is coasting. He throws it into neutral and tries to reignite it, but there isn’t a wisp of life. The bus swerves back into traffic with a noise like the asset’s squeal of pain, and there’s not a thing he can do about it. Through engine smoke far thicker than Lainie’s ironing steam, he muscles the Thunderbird to the curb. The only spot is in front of a fire hydrant. Just fucking perfect. He slams the gear into park. Shoves his way out of the car. Stares down the road. Vehicles swarming like wasps. People scurrying like roaches. The whole city a venomous nest.
He kicks the car door. It leaves a dent. His toes sing in pain and he hops in a circle, running every cuss word invented into a single, vulgar masterwork. He finds himself turned around, looking across the street. What he finds is a white-hot fireball. Beneath it are giant plates of liquid fire and smooth runners of lava. His head throbs from the overkill of light. He has to shield his eyes to make sense of it. Sunshine sizzles from the rotating-earth sign, floor-to-ceiling windows, and endless chrome trims of a Cadillac dealership.
Strickland doesn’t recall crossing the street. But he’s wandering the car lot. Under garlands of snapping flags. Beside an actual palm tree. Staring into headlight eyes turned angry by the V-shaped emblem between them. Trailing his fingers across the Cheshire grins of front grilles, those hundreds of slippery fangs. He pauses before one of the cars. Seals his hands to the scalding hood. Feels strong and smooth and sharp. Even his damaged fingers feel reinforced. He leans over the hood and inhales. He likes the hot-metal smell, like a gun after being fired.
“Cadillac Coupe de Ville. Most perfect machine mankind’s ever made.”
A salesman has joined Strickland. Strickland registers thin hair, razor burn, a flabby neck. Further details melt in the too-bright sun. The man is perfectly automatized, as metallic as the vehicles he sells. He sidles alongside the Caddy as if he, too, moves on hubcapped wheels, the creases of his suit and pants as sharp as tail fins. He strokes the hood, his watch and cuff links as bright as the chrome.
“Four-stroke spark-ignition V-8. Four-speed gearbox. Zero to sixty in ten-point-seven. Clocked at one-hundred-and-nineteen on the straightaway. Runs as crisp as a fresh dollar bill. AM/FM stereo sound. Have the whole London Philharmonic in your backseat. All deluxe interior. White leather. It’s a presidential suite in there. Those aren’t seats. Those are sofas. Davenports. Divans. Settees. Air-conditioning good enough to keep your drink cold, heater good enough to keep your little lady warm.”
His little lady? She’s trundled on down the road to who knows where. Leaving him behind with an Occam job that’s nearly complete. Whether he chases Lainie or drives himself, all alone, out of this execrable burg, he’ll need wheels to replace that heap illegally parked across the street. This man of metal is stronger than him. Is it any use fighting? He protests because that’s what you do in car lots, but it’s pitiful. “I’m just looking.”
“Then look at this, my friend. Tip to tail, here to there: eighteen-and-a-half feet long. That’s two basketball hoops, the second balanced atop the first. You think you could sink a basket that high? Look at the width. That’ll fill a car lane, won’t it? Look how low it sits, like a lion. Two-point-three tons, it weighs. You drive this darling out of here, you rule the road, simple as that. Power windows. Power brakes. Power steering. Power seats. Power everything. Just plain power.”
That sounds good. It’s what any American man deserves. Power means respect. From your wife, your kids, flunkies who don’t know anything harsher in life than a car breaking down on the road. He’s better than that. All he needs is a way to tell everyone to steer the hell out of his way. He’s starting to feel better. Not just better, but good, for the first time in a while. He manages one more demurral, though any good salesman can hear his capitulation, and this is the best salesman of all time.
“I’m not sure about the green,” Strickland says.
The lot confirms that Cadillacs come in as many shades as Elisa Esposito’s shoes. Stardust gray. Cotton-candy pink. Raspberry red. Oil black. This one is green, but not the solacing glass-green of his hard candy. It’s silkier, like a creature that ought to have died centuries ago glimpsed through still waters as it trawls a riverbed.
“Green?” The salesman is offended. “Oh no. No, siree. I wouldn’t sell you a green car. This, my friend, is teal.”
Something shifts inside Strickland. The salesman has shown him the way. Power: He had it as the Jungle-god. He still has it now. He thinks back to one of Lainie’s jabbering pastors. What was one of God’s first displays of power? To name things. The Jungle-god can name things, too. They become what he wants them to become. Green becomes teal. Deus Brânquia becomes the asset. Lainie Strickland becomes nothing at all.
He leans down to peer inside. He’ll be sitting inside it in a moment. But it feels good to tease himself. The dashboard has a hundred dials and knobs. It’s F-1, packed into a single front seat. The steering wheel is whip-thin, the strap of a nightie. He imagines wrapping his fingers around it, how easily the red blood from his torn fingers will wipe from the white leather. The salesman has moved behind him. He whispers like a lover. The limited-edition color. Twelve coats of hand-polished paint. Four out of five successful men in America drive a Caddy. Forget the rockets everyone’s shooting into the sky. Sputnik’s got nothing on the de Ville.
“That’s the business I’m in.” Even with the deed all but signed, Strickland feels the need to impress the man.
“That right? Now, how about you slide in there.”
“National defense. New initiatives. Space applications.”
“You don’t say. You can adjust the seat—there you go.”
“Space stuff. Rocket stuff. Stuff of the future.”
“The future. That’s good. You look like a man who’s headed there.”
Strickland draws a long inhale through his nose. He’s not only headed into the future. He is the future. Or will be, once his job as Jungle-god is complete, the asset is gone, his fami
ly matters are resolved, and the pills are no longer required. He and this car will be joined together, a man of metal, same as the salesman. Fused on a factory assembly line of the future. A future where the world’s jungles, and all of the creatures therein, are modernized by concrete and steel. A place void of nature’s madness. A place of dotted lines, streetlights, turn signals. A place where Cadillacs just like this, just like him, can roam free, forever.
18
EVERYONE AT KLEIN & Saunders dresses to project style; it’s part of their job to anticipate trends. This old fellow isn’t wearing a suit of modern cut. He isn’t even wearing a suit. His blazer and trousers are mismatched. Maybe his eyesight is to blame; he wears crooked glasses, thick-lensed and paint-flecked. There’s paint on his mustache, too. His bow tie, at least, is clean, though she’s never seen a bow tie in this office before. It has its charm, though, just as the toupee does, though she doubts it’s the kind of charm he intended. Lainie wants to protect him, this grandfather figure, from the pack of wolves kept beyond the frosted glass door.
She recognizes him as Giles Gunderson right away.
“You must be Miss Strickland.” He beams and strides forward.
On his phone calls, of which there have been many, it has always been “Miss Strickland”—not “honey,” not “toots.” For his polite, dogged pursuit of a single meeting with Bernie, Mr. Gunderson has become Lainie’s favorite freelancer—and least favorite as well. Favorite because talking with him is like talking with the gentle grandfather she never knew. Least favorite because it is her job to pass along Bernie’s hogwash excuses and hold back apologies when she hears, popping through the telephone, the cracks of Mr. Gunderson’s pride.
The Shape of Water Page 17
