She can’t observe him for long. Her arms quake beneath another load of unreturned milk bottles, each cleaned and filled with water. She climbs inside the van. Everything behind the front seats has been cleared to make room for a hodgepodge of boxes and baskets arranged atop a piece of carpet. Elisa lets the bottles roll from her arms and places them, one by one, into a box padded with a blanket. They clank and slosh; her stomach behaves in kind. She sits back against the inner wall, panting.
“Yes, do take a moment’s rest.” Giles flicks his smiling eyes from his stenciling. “You’re working too hard. Worrying too hard as well. In a few hours, my dear, all of it will be over and done with, one way or the other. Focus on that. The only thing I’m certain of is that uncertainty is the hardest thing in life to endure.”
Elisa smiles; she is surprised, but she does. She signs: “Did you finish your ID?”
Giles dabs paint, blows it dry, then sets his brush crosswise atop a tin of paint. He removes his wallet, withdraws a card with flourish, and presents it across his opposite wrist as he might a sword. Elisa takes it, examines it, and then digs her authentic Occam ID out for comparison. The texture and weight are wrong, though if anyone is handling the card that closely, it’s likely the game will already be lost. Otherwise it is as convincing a piece of work as anything Giles has done. That it was a new medium for him, and completed over a single day, makes the effort all the more impressive.
She signs the name on the ID: “Michael Parker?”
“I thought it was a good, hearty, trustworthy name.” Giles shrugs. “Naturally, my friends can call me Mike.”
Elisa scans the details harder, and with a smile, signs: “Fifty-one years old?”
Giles looks crestfallen. “No? Not even with the hair? What about fifty-four? A single dab of paint, and I can add three years, just like that.”
Elisa grimaces. Giles sighs and snaps his fingers for the card. He picks up the paintbrush, twists the bristles so that they taper into a point, and touches it softly to the ID.
“There. Fifty-seven. The absolute best I can do. Now stop being rude to poor old Mike Parker.”
He gets back to work, scowling for show. Elisa is sick with sustained tension, so dizzy she feels as if swimming, and yet bundled in a peculiar warmness, the interior of the van somehow the most comfortable spot in the world. So much of her life she’s felt alone, but at this second there is plentiful proof to the contrary. If they are caught in a few hours, her second-biggest regret is that she won’t be able to thank Zelda for wanting, nearly begging to help. Elisa couldn’t do it to her; if Elisa and Giles get caught, Zelda can’t be involved. It’s a terrible feeling, pushing Zelda away. Still, Elisa thinks, she must have done something right in her life to earn that kind of loyalty.
The sounds of Giles stowing his gear drag her back to harsh reality. A wind too dry to hold a drop of water buffets the inside of the Pug, and she feels from inside the theater the rumble of a sinister music cue. Elisa climbs out of the van, slits her eyes at the dusking sun.
“I’m proud of you.”
Elisa looks down at Giles. He’s on his haunches, rinsing his brush. The sinking sun backlights him, but she can make out the serene lines of fond contemplation.
“Whatever happens,” he says, “I’m old. Even my alter ego, Mike Parker, is old. What does this kind of risk matter to us at the end of the day? But you’re young. Your life sprawls out ahead of you like the Atlantic Ocean. And yet look at you. You’re not afraid.”
Elisa lets herself absorb the compliment, because she needs it, and then, to clear the air, simpers and signs with overblown motions. Giles frowns.
“Oh. You are afraid? Very afraid? Well, don’t tell me that, dear. I’m terrified!”
His exaggeration of fright makes the real thing somehow governable. Elisa smiles, grateful for the buoy, and steps back to gaze at Giles’s stenciled handiwork in the melodrama of an orange-purple sunset. She catches her breath. A doctored ID card slid into a pocket is one thing. A fraudulent sign painted onto a registered motor vehicle is another level of audacity:
MILICENT LAUNDRY
Behind the lettering, the Pug’s cleaned door, luminous in the sun, becomes a pool into which Elisa slips and inside which she drowns until, in a great turnabout, she is graced with the creature’s abilities and begins to swim, even to breathe, not merely bubbled to the top like boiling eggs, but darting through the currents of this impossible scheme. Awareness of the cramped, dirty alley, suffused in the stink of tossed popcorn, doesn’t go away, and yet she believes she can feel an entire ocean’s worth of creatures converging on one spot, looking to her for guidance. The time has come.
26
THE BOTTLE CAP blunders from sweaty fingers, bickers off floor tiles, squirrels behind the toilet. Hoffstetler wants to fall to his knees, scrabble after it like a junkie. One of the janitors will find it, one of the scientists will lift fingerprints from it, and Strickland, cattle prod crackling, will collar Hoffstetler before he can schedule to meet the Bison’s Chrysler. But there’s no time. Monday’s graveyard-to-dayshift change, Occam’s most turbulent thirty minutes, is near. He’s got to steady his hands, his breathing, his mind, and do this. Not for himself. He’ll do it for the children whose lives were ruined by the classified medical studies that he allowed to happen. The Devonian, in its own way, is one more child being abused. Hoffstetler can avert its misery, and in that end, find a snip of redemption.
He pries the stopper and rubber tip from the syringe, tosses both in the toilet, and flushes it; the roar matches the pulse in his ears. Toilet-water flecks his face and hangs on his skin like warts as he pushes the needle into the bottle and draws the plunger. The silver solution eddies gorgeously into the barrel. He knows the law of nature: A substance that beautiful can only be deadly. He places the syringe into the pocket of his lab coat, wipes his face with his sleeve, and exits the toilet stall, trying not to look at the changeling face in the mirror. The poised, aloof college professor has been replaced by a red-faced, curled-lip murderer.
27
ANTONIO TAKES TEN years to find his punch card. It’s the crossed eyes, Zelda figures. Lord knows how he cleans a desk without knocking all contents to the floor. Hostile thoughts, but Zelda decides she deserves them. Elisa had a whole weekend to consider Zelda’s question: Are we friends? The answer, it seems, is no. Here it is, the end of Monday’s shift, and Elisa hasn’t said a word to her. Won’t even look at her. Zelda’s had it. At least that’s what she tells herself: She’s had it. Maybe Brewster’s right. A white friend is only a friend for as long as she needs you. What sticks in her head, though, is how fish-belly pale Elisa’s face had been tonight, how she kept looking over her shoulder, how half the cleaning products she picked up tumbled from the uncontrollable shake of her hands.
Yolanda pokes Zelda in the back. The line has shuffled forward, and so she does the same, except when she reaches for her punch card, the most ordinary thing in the world, it takes longer than Antonio’s ten years—it takes a lifetime. It’s like she’s reaching across a bottomless chasm. Humiliation and anger, it seems, no matter how much she deserves them and wants to own them, are slippery objects to Zelda, as slippery as this punch card. It flutters from her fingers, lazing down like a broken wing.
28
THE PUG JOUNCES up Falls Road. He’s got to arrive per Elisa’s schedule, one hour before the real laundry truck will show up—any earlier will raise suspicion. He barrels through pools of streetlight sodium, along the squiggled vein of the Jones Falls stream, past the black copses of Druid Hill Park, around the purple lawns of the Baltimore Country Club. Parts of the city he’s never explored and never will. Giles goes heavy on the pedal when nervous and takes the left at South Avenue so fast he can feel the passenger-side wheels almost lose contact with the pavement. The Pug slams down on wasted shocks and a box in the back overturns to unleash water-bottle missiles like a Polaris submarine. Giles curses, wrestles the vehicle, slows before a dark
complex called Happy Hills Convalescent Home for Children, the last landmark before Occam Road.
He hasn’t been here since the day he drove eighteen-year-old Elisa to her interview. Nothing has changed. Thick woods on either side of the road still look to hide trolls, and the illuminated clock on Occam’s sign still glows like a second moon. He’s long regretted having had a role in Elisa taking this job. But not today. Today she has a purpose, and it is a beautiful thing to see. He tries to remember that as he follows the LOADING signs, passing through an empty parking lot. Well, not totally empty: He notices a giant green Cadillac Coupe de Ville before the Pug’s headlights strike a checkpoint guard holding up a hand for Giles to stop, while his other hand comes to rest upon the handle of a holstered gun.
29
THE GRAY LIGHT of the security monitors are all the sunrise Strickland needs. He climbs from the floor, his bed on nights he can’t bear to look at Lainie, and into his chair. His guts squelch, the sound of digesting painkillers. Must be hard work, because when he coughs there’s blood. It dots the white envelope on his desk. He wipes it. It smears, but that’s all right. Makes the envelope pulsate with importance. And it is important. It’s the paperwork for today’s dissection of the asset. He removes the document. It’s clean, beautiful—not a word is redacted. He doesn’t bother to read it, signs his name on a few dashes. He does linger over the diagrams. The autopsy looks pretty standard for a beast of such alleged scarcity. Y-shaped incision. Cracking the ribs in half. Scooping out the organs. The serrated-saw scalping. Brain plopped onto a pan. He can’t fucking wait.
Footsteps outside his door. Strickland looks up from the schema. This early, he expects Mr. Clipboard. But it’s not Fleming. It’s Bob Hoffstetler. He looks like shit. Sweaty, pale, skittish. Looks like Raúl Romo Zavala Henríquez, way over his head. Strickland leans back in his chair. Laces his fingers behind the head. It hurts, but the posture is worth it. This should be fun.
30
ZELDA KNEELS TO pick up the punch card. Yolanda’s going wild behind her. But all Zelda hears is Brewster carrying on about how she shouldn’t trust anyone. He doesn’t know Elisa, though, does he? Of course he doesn’t. Despite their long years of friendship, Elisa’s never been to Zelda’s home, not once. But Zelda knows the girl. She knows she knows the girl. And this is not the Elisa she knows.
Elisa’s card waits in its slot, unpunched despite Elisa’s rapid exit from the locker room. A small detail, maybe, until you add it to everything that’s been going on at Occam over the past several days. Equipment under dust covers being wheeled out of F-1. Scientists shaking hands at coffee-and-doughnut farewells. A mixed mood that feels like the last week of senior year: excited, but fearful, and sad, too. Zelda can feel the whole building clenching as if for impact. Something big is happening today, and Elisa, it seems abruptly clear, has gotten herself entwined. And how does Zelda know this? It’d been right there in front of her all night, squeaking across the floors.
Elisa’s shoes. She’d been wearing ugly, gray, rubber-soled sneakers, built for running.
Zelda swipes up her card, punches it, and then, in an act that makes Yolanda spit acid, finds Elisa’s card and punches that, too. Punch cards, after all, are the first evidence to which Fleming will look to find out who is here and who’s not if something goes wrong. Zelda wheels around, bumping past Yolanda without apology, and hustles back in the direction of the labs. Go wrong? Her hunch is that a lot is going to go wrong, a whole lot, and very quickly.
31
HOFFSTETLER TILTS TOWARD Strickland’s desk. He’s holding the syringe inside his pocket. Mihalkov will never find out. He’ll never need to know. Half the solution for Strickland. Half for the Devonian. The first needs to be killed to ensure the second can be killed cleanly. Hoffstetler tells himself that the wicked, hateful mudak deserves it. The glass of the syringe is oily, slipping from his grip. He wipes his fingers on the inside of his pocket, takes a drier hold. He’s nearly to the desk. Don’t stop moving.
“Go back and knock first,” Strickland says.
They are senseless words, and Hoffstetler, his brain hardwired for sense, rejects it like a computer fed defective data, and does the worst thing, he stops moving, right in front of a wall of monitors that blind him with sixteen screens of gray light. He raises a hand to shield his eyes, the hand that, one second ago, had held the syringe. It’s empty now, a soft, flabby, harmless thing.
“Knock…?”
“Protocol, Bob,” Strickland says. “I know how you value protocol.”
“I wanted … to give you one more chance…”
“Me? Give me? Bob, I don’t follow. You’re free to tell me about it, of course. Just go back to the door and knock first.”
32
NOT A SENSITIVE vehicle, the Pug, but the naked tires feel part of Giles’s flesh, and pulling away from the checkpoint, he feels every pebble that passes beneath. Sure, the guard had waved him through without checking ID, duped by the van’s paint job. But the checkpoint was always going to be the easy part, wasn’t it? Giles slows to a creep as he rounds the back of the facility. A figure leans on a wall, smoking between two lights. Giles wipes the fogged windshield. Yes, that has to be it: the loading dock. He tries to swallow his fear, but his throat is sandpaper.
He begins to pull in between painted yellow lines. The guard snaps awake, lifting both palms as one does to question an imbecile. He spins a finger, and Giles flinches at his error. He’s supposed to back in. Of course he is. You don’t load a van through the front. He wipes sweat from his face, shifts to reverse, and pulls back into the first leg of a three-point turn. This is bad. Oh, this is very bad. He’ll go a mile out of his way to avoid the public debasement of parallel parking. Now here, in the predawn dark, he’s got to back into a narrow slot while a wary guard observes? Giles checks the rearview mirror and sees the suspicious red eye of the guard’s lit cigarette. Giles shifts into reverse, grasps the wheel, and prays to the General Motors gods for a vehicular miracle.
33
“WELL, HOWDY, BOB. Come on in. What can I do for you this morning?”
Hoffstetler feels every inch the scolded child Strickland intended him to feel. Ten or twelve times he knocked on the door, while Strickland grinned, far too much time being lost. He lurches back before the strobing security screens. He’s baffled with fear, off-kilter enough that, thrusting his hand into his pocket, his index finger grazes the tip of the needle. Too close—he hisses panic into the bared teeth of his artificial smile.
“I just … wanted to make sure you … wished to go through with this.”
“These here are General Hoyt’s orders.” He lifts the topmost document, a superficial sketch of the asset perforated into butcher’s portions. “And I just initialed them. That means two hours and forty-five minutes from now, you and me act like good Americans and go gut that fish. I know how you feel. But think of it this way. The Japs, the Huns, the Chinese. They’re intelligent creatures, too, aren’t they? But we sure as hell had no problem killing them.”
Hoffstetler visualizes springing across the desk. He knew it might come to this. A graceless act, but so unlikely for a man his age that it might be all the surprise he needs. Strickland will raise an arm to defend himself, or turn his back—it doesn’t matter. The needle will pierce any part. Hoffstetler’s thighs are tensed for the vault when he notices the most minute of motions. Perhaps his eyes have become trained to detect anthropocentric detail of any size, down to the cilia of simple protocells and organelles. Just behind Strickland’s head, in the seventh monitor, the security camera’s perspective tilts upward, from a laundry van backing into a loading dock to the empty black sky above it.
Hoffstetler lets the syringe drop into his pocket. He replies that yes, of course, he’ll see Strickland at the euthanasia, but the polite sounds are muffled by the singing of his heart, “Slav’sya, Otechestvo nashe svobodnoye!” the Soviet state anthem. Mihalkov—he came through. After eighteen years of letting Hoff
stetler struggle alone, the Russians have arrived to help.
34
ELISA SPRINTS INTO the laundry room. It is happening: For a second, she’d glimpsed the Pug backing into the loading dock and making such a serpentine production of it that the guard had rushed forward, a troubling thing, even as it had allowed Elisa space enough to take the broom and nudge the security camera upward before scrambling away. Her waist strikes the industrial sink, and she plugs the drain, cranks both hot and cold knobs. She snatches towels from a bin and hurls them under the water. Elisa and Zelda have spent years ridiculing Fleming’s QCCs, but now she’s got to hand it to the man: The practices rutted into her brain keep her on task when she otherwise might collapse in terror.
She scoops the sopping towels from the sink and drops them, heavy as mud, into the closest empty laundry cart. She keeps going, her uniform getting wetter, until the cart is half-filled, then wrenches off the water and clenches the cart handle. She pushes; the cart doesn’t budge. Her marrow turns to ice. She tries again, teeth bared, muscles tight, bearing down on her sneakers. The first inch is the toughest, but after that the cart slugs forward, one rotation, two. Her stopped heart picks up the beat, only to hiccup again: It’s the squeaky cart, the one that yowls like a tomcat, and there is no time left for switching it out.
The Shape of Water Page 21
