The second ring, though, is terse, severed by the caller, and it gongs off the bare walls, empty cabinets, steel cot frame, and dishes. The last moans, he hopes, of a lonely life. He should be giddy. Instead, he is paralyzed. He can’t swallow. He has to force himself to breathe. Everything is going as planned. Every detail is in place. The loose floorboard, glued shut. His passport and cash, bulging the inside pocket of his jacket. His single suitcase, packed and impatient by the door.
He dials a taxi with memorized numbers and returns to the kitchen chair upon which he’s spent the past fourteen hours. Another fourteen hours after that, he tells himself, and he’ll be in Minsk, where he can get started on his new profession: the business of forgetting. Did the janitor get the Devonian to the river? Or had it died in her possession? In the tall white snowbanks of Minsk, he can bury such questions forever and attempt to get beyond the dismal hunch that, if a being like the Devonian can be allowed to die, then the whole of planet Earth is doomed.
A taxi honks. Hoffstetler takes a deep breath, stands, and waits for his wobbling knees to lock. The moment is heavy; it is also inevitable. Warm tears fill his eyes. I’ve kept myself out of reach of all of you, he thinks, and I’m so sorry. The students for whom he’d felt affection, the friends he’d almost had, the women who might have made him happy. Their ellipses had touched—but nothing had happened. In all of time and space, there is nothing sadder.
Hoffstetler picks up his suitcase and umbrella and steps outside. The cab awaits, a yellow smear beneath a silver scud of pouring rain. An ugly day, by all accounts, yet Hoffstetler is struck by beauty everywhere he looks. This is America: He bids his adieus. Good-bye to the green buds yawning awake from the skeletons of bony trees. Good-bye to the bright plastic children’s toys waiting in front lawns to be renewed with springtime vigor. Good-bye to the cats and dogs blinking from windows, proof of interspecies symbiosis. Good-bye to households of strong brick, cozy television light, comfortable laughter. Hoffstetler lifts his elbow to wipe the tears, but they have mixed with rain.
He’s had this cabbie before, a violation of his own rules of conduct, but it’s his final trip, what could it matter? He tells the man where to go, then peers out the window, wiping fog from the glass, unwilling to miss a single sight. American automobiles, he’ll miss them, too, their preposterous shapes, brash spirits, and gregarious pigments. Good-bye, too, to that big green Cadillac Coupe de Ville idling across the street, a gorgeous machine, even if its back end is smashed.
18
IT IS A good day for disappearing. Lainie can’t help but think it. She parts the pleated mustard drapes of which she was once so proud and gazes into a barrage of rain that bounces like marbles to the street. Baltimore, land of dirt and concrete, is now of water, pouring not only from sky but also from everything else. Rain torrents from roof gutters, dumps from trees, cascades from railings, whirlpools behind passing cars. It falls so hard that it seems to shoot upward from tripped booby traps. In such a downpour, you can’t see far. You could step into it, be lost in seconds, and that is precisely the idea.
Timmy’s backpack is so crammed with toys it takes both of his arms to hold it, leaving his tears unwiped. Tammy’s bag, too, is bursting, but she doesn’t leak a tear. Lainie wonders if it’s because she’s a girl and has learned that the masculine maxim of never running away from trouble is bullshit. (Lainie finds herself cursing in her thoughts lately, another exciting development.) Tammy looks up at her mother, eyes dry and perceptive. The girl has always paid heed to the lessons of picture books. Running is why animals have feet, why birds have wings, why fish have fins.
Lainie became aware of her own feet, their full potential, only this morning. Richard was shambling through the house, eyes swollen, shoulders cracking banisters, tearing free the black tie his dead fingers refused to knot and letting it slop to the floor. She was in her standard position, the patch of carpet permanently dented from the ironing board, skimming the Westinghouse Spray ’N Steam over one of Richard’s dress shirts. He’d gotten home late; she’d felt his half of the bed sink and she’d clung to her side of the mattress so as not to roll into his bottomless hole. This morning, he’d wakened at full boil, slithering his greasy body from bed and dressing without a rinse, his hand constantly dipping into a coat pocket that sagged with the weight of an object as heavy as her iron.
She’d kept beaming into the shifting textures of the TV. The news was no better or worse than any other day. Sportsmen excelling. World leaders orating. Blacks marching. Troops amassing. Women linking arms. Nothing connected one story to the next except forward progress, each spotlighted individual advancing, improving, evolving. At some point, Richard left, the slam of the front door his farewell peck, and the floor had trembled, and that tremble had shaken the ironing board, and her thumb had slipped from the setting dial, and she was just standing there, all at once certain that she was the only one in the world not moving.
The iron was too heavy to set upright. She’d had no choice but to let it settle onto Richard’s shirt. For ten seconds, normalcy was rescuable with a twitch of her wrist. Then smoke began to seep. The Westinghouse sank into the Dacron blend the same way an idea soaks into a mind. Lainie let the smoke coarsen. She let the toxic fumes thistle her sinuses. She’d only pulled the iron from the melted smutch of the board when the children had rushed downstairs, sniffing the smoke, at which point she’d turned, and smiled, and told them, “We’re going on a trip. Pack all of your favorite things.”
Now she has three heavy bags biting down on her shoulders. One of her arms has gone numb; she doesn’t mind. Numbness: It’s how she has survived life with Richard. The woman known as Mrs. Strickland is a corseted, aproned, lipsticked shield from the sting of discarded potential, and to use that shield to advance her own purposes, just this once, is thrilling. She adjusts the straps, her fingertips brushing the furrows in her neck from Richard’s choking. Everyone will see the bruises. Everyone will know. She takes a deep breath. All you have to be, she tells herself, is honest. Truth will begin to pour, and freedom will begin to rise.
A cab pulls up in front of the house, its tires sizzling through standing water. Lainie waves at it through the screen door.
“Come on, kids, let’s hustle.”
“I don’t want to,” Timmy pouts. “I want to wait for Dad.”
“It’s too wet,” Tammy says. “The rain’s high as my dress!”
Lainie has regrets. She regrets that she’ll have to quit her job over the telephone from Florida or Texas or California or wherever they land, and that doesn’t strike her as very professional. But she’ll explain to Bernie the reason she had to leave, and Bernie will forgive her, probably even agree to serve as a reference. There’s another regret: not jotting down Mr. Gunderson’s address, so that at some point in her deliriously undefined future she could write him, let him know that the instant he’d handed over his leather portfolio bag, she’d understood that it was never too late to exchange the things you believed defined you for something better. His bag, in fact, is one of the three strapped over her shoulder right now. Turns out, it can carry quite the load.
Mostly, she regrets that it took her so long to arrive at this front-porch launchpad. Her sloth has had real costs. The children have seen and heard things that have shaped them in unkind ways. Timmy’s dissection of the skink remains a troubling, unresolved thing. Thankfully, both children are young yet; Lainie’s no Occam Aerospace Research Center scientist, but she knows that maturation is no straight line and that her influence upon her kids has a long path still to run. She lifts the bag from her right shoulder so that all three hang from her left, and kneels, wrapping an arm around Tammy while leaning into Timmy.
“Run,” she whispers to him. “Right through the puddles. Make the biggest mess you can make.”
He frowns down at his clean pants and shoes. “Really?”
She nods and grins, and he begins to grin, too, and then he bolts down the steps with a hoot, mara
uding through the yard, dousing himself from both directions. Tammy panics, of course, but that’s why Lainie’s got her arm around her. She lifts her daughter, propping the girl on her hip, opens the door with a foot, and stands beneath the awning that had once represented so much promise but is now laden with enough disappointment that she worries it might collapse and she, trapped beneath it, might crumple.
But Timmy is at the cab, soaking wet and laughing, and hopping in place for her to hurry up, and Lainie laughs, too, and realizes that no, she won’t crumple, she won’t crumple ever again. She runs into the waterworld. She likes how the rain cracks crisply on her short haircut, how it slides off the curled back. The cabbie takes her bags, and she crashes into the backseat, yelping as raindrops run down her back. She brushes water from Timmy’s cap and wrings the ends of Tammy’s hair as both of them howl and giggle. She hears the trunk door slam, and then the cabbie lurches into the front seat, shaking his head like a wet dog.
“We’re all going to float to Timbuktu if this doesn’t let up,” he chuckles. “You going far, ma’am?”
He looks at her in the rearview mirror. His eyes skip downward to her bruised neck. Lainie doesn’t flinch: let truth pour, let freedom rise.
“Somewhere I can rent a car. You know a place?”
“The one by the airport is the biggest.” His voice is softer now. “If you’re aiming to get a car without a reservation, I mean. If you’re aiming to leave quick.”
Lainie consults his identification card: Robert Nathaniel De Castro.
“Yes, Mr. De Castro. Thank you.”
The cab pulls from the depths of the curb and starts down the middle of the road.
“Apologies for the crawl. Little tricky on the roads today. But don’t you worry. I’ll get you where you’re going, safe and sound.”
“It’s all right. I don’t mind.”
“You look happy. The three of you. That’s good. Some people, a little rain falls, they get a little wet, it ruins their whole day. Earlier on, dispatch sent me to pick up this joe, take him to this industrial park over by Bethlehem Steel. Second time I’ve took this joe there. There’s not a thing over there—not a thing. I circled around to check on him. I was kind of worried, you know? And there he was, sitting on a concrete block in the rain. Now there’s a joe who doesn’t look happy. There’s a joe who could use a rental car, you know? Looked like he was waiting for the world to end. From the look on his face, I half believed it would, too.”
Lainie smiles. The cabbie keeps talking, a pleasant distraction. The children have their faces pressed to the windows, and she rests her chin on Tammy’s sweet-smelling scalp. Outside, it’s as if the cab has run off a cliff and is sinking into the sea. To survive under so much water, she thinks, she’ll have to learn to breathe inside it, to adapt into a different kind of creature. Strangely enough, she’s confident that she can. The world is rampant with creeks, streams, rivers, ponds, lakes. She’ll swim through as many as it takes to find the right ocean for them, even if it takes so long she has to grow flippers.
19
RAIN DROPS LIKE wet cement. Hoffstetler’s umbrella carves out a small, dry column eddying with his own breath. It looks like smoke, feels like he’s being burned at the stake. Anything beyond the umbrella is difficult to see: gray breath, gray rain, gray concrete, gray gravel, gray sky. But he knows where to look, and after an anxious eternity, exhaust fumes, one more layer of gray, rise along the path. The black Chrysler sharks through the water.
Hoffstetler wants to dive into the heated leather backseat, but even the fruition of an eighteen-year mission doesn’t mean the riddance of asinine protocol. He picks up his suitcase, stands from the concrete block, and bounces upon the balls of his feet, woozy with excitement. He’s so close now, so close to shaking the trembling hand of Papa, to wrapping both arms around Mamochka, to making amends for the life he’s lived by starting to live a better one.
The driver’s door, as usual, is thrown open with a clack. The Bison, as usual, steps from the running car, his black suit complemented by a black umbrella. Then, something unusual: The passenger door, too, opens, and a second man exits beneath the spreading wings of his own umbrella. He shivers in the cold, shrugs himself more snugly into a scarf that threatens to flatten his boutonniere. Hoffstetler feels a dropping sensation, as if he’d slid off his concrete block to find no ground at all beneath.
“Zdravstvujtye,” Leo Mihalkov says. “Bob.”
The rain against Hoffstetler’s umbrella is deafening; he tells himself sounds cannot be relied upon. Zdravstvujtye is a cold greeting, and Bob, instead of Dmitri? Something has gone wrong.
“Leo? Are you here to—”
“We have questions,” Mihalkov says.
“A debriefing? In the rain?”
“One question, really. It will not take long. When you injected the asset with the solution, how did it react before it died?”
Hoffstetler is still pinwheeling through a vortex. He wants to reach out for his concrete block, the Chrysler’s grille, anything to save himself, but if he lets go of the umbrella, he’ll drown in all the water. He tries to think. The silver solution, what might it have been? He should know; this is his field. Surely one ingredient was arsenic. Was another hydrogen chloride? Could there have been a scintilla of mercury? And what ruin would such a cocktail wreak upon the Devonian’s anatomy? If only the thrum of rain weren’t so disorienting, he might be able to figure it out. Instead, there is no time. All he can do is blurt and pray.
“It was instant. The asset bled. Profusely. Died right away.”
Rain falls. Mihalkov stares. The ground bubbles like lava.
“That is correct.” Mihalkov’s voice is gentler now, pitched for a booth at the back of the Black Sea Restaurant, soft in the storm’s kettledrums. “You have made your country proud. You always have. You will be remembered. Very few can say that. Not even I will be able to say it when my own time comes. In that way, I envy you.”
A KGB man like Mihalkov would have detected the slow-motion closing of this mousetrap a decade earlier, but Hoffstetler only sees it now. Hadn’t he insisted to the Devonian that he didn’t possess true intelligence? He’s spent too much time in America for Moscow to be comfortable with him back on Soviet soil. All that has ever mattered is that his mission reach completion. To believe anything else was reveling in fantasy. His mama and papa are likely alive as promised, but only as collateral. Now, they will be eliminated, shot through the skull, their bodies weighed with rocks to sink into the Moskva River. Hoffstetler says good-bye to them, quickly, and that he’s sorry, frantically, and that he loves them, desperately, all in the second before the Bison lifts from his hip a revolver.
Hoffstetler cries out and, on instinct, hurls his umbrella in the direction of the Bison, and before he hears the shot, the umbrella blacks out the world, a singularity swallowing the man, the gun, the rain, all of it. These are trained killers, though, and he a bungling academic, and what feels like an iron fist whacks his jaw and what feel like hot stones explode from his face. Teeth, he thinks. He’s spinning now, cheeks ballooned with blood, tongue sludgy with splattered flesh.
Now he’s on the ground. Blood gushes from his mouth in a single splash, the upending of a bowl of tomato soup. Cold air lances through his face from left to right, an odd feeling. He’s been shot through the cheek. Mama would be so upset, her little boy disfigured, his nice straight teeth turned to rubble. He tries to raise himself to his knees, thinking that if he shows Mihalkov the damage done, he might leave it at that, but his head weight is all off, and his knees slip in the mud, and he is on his back, the rain coming at his eyes like silver spears.
The Bison’s black form, still holding his umbrella, occludes all light. He looks down with the same void of personality as ever, and aims the revolver at Hoffstetler’s head. The bang, Hoffstetler thinks, is oddly muffled for being the shot that kills him. Stranger yet is how it’s the Bison who recoils. There is a second bang, and the umbre
lla falls from the Bison’s hand, on top of Hoffstetler, like soil being pitched into an open grave, and it takes a moment for Hoffstetler to dig his way out and prop himself on his elbows, the rain sluicing a hot mix of blood and saliva down his chest.
What he sees is the Bison’s still, fallen body, the red puddle about him being thrashed into pink by the clobbering rain. Hoffstetler’s eyes won’t focus, but he can see shapes, Mihalkov’s slender ovoid shuffling with a haste incongruous with his usual demeanor. He’s pulling his own gun, that’s clear even in abstract, but perhaps spoiled on lobster and caviar, he holds on to vanity too long, choosing not to drop his umbrella, and in those crucial few seconds, Hoffstetler’s savior, whoever he is, rushes forward, his own weapon still smoking from the Bison’s murder, and he’s no amateur, either. The pistol is held with two hands, steady in the storm, and a single shot is all it takes.
Mihalkov is thrown against the car. Now he drops his umbrella. His gun, too. A circle of red blooms on his shirt, a second boutonniere. He dies instantly and is instantly forgotten, just as he predicted he would be. Hoffstetler squints through the cloudburst to watch the gunman kneel beside the body to make sure it’s dead, then bolt upright and move, with spiderlike speed, toward Hoffstetler. It is the rain that obscures the man’s identity until he looms over Hoffstetler. It is also, Hoffstetler supposes, disbelief.
The Shape of Water Page 29
