32
LAINIE SEES WILDNESS in him and welcomes it. For too long now, his best energy has belonged to the jungle. But there’s more at stake here in Baltimore than a military mission. She needs to remind him of that as often as she can. Timmy’s time-capsule question had knocked Richard off his rails, and he’d responded excellently, doling advice like a father should. Lainie knows she just needs to give him time. Soon he’ll be ready to talk to their son about what he did to the skink and how to be a good man. Because Richard is, despite his job, despite his fealty to General Hoyt, despite everything, good. She’s almost sure of it.
Progressive women’s magazines have instructed her not to offer her body as a reward, but what do they know? Have any of those writers and editors had a husband tossed into two different kinds of hell and come back alive? This is how it could be, is what she hopes their sex will tell him. We could be happy, normal. While she’s at it, maybe she can convince herself of the same. Maybe her job at Klein & Saunders won’t have to be a secret much longer. Maybe, if this goes well and he holds her tight afterward, drained and fuzzy-headed, she’ll tell him right then. Maybe he’ll even be proud of her.
His wildness, however, doesn’t last. Richard is easily embarrassed when his own body feels ungainly, and between the lumpish shucking of his clothes and his awkward positioning atop her, he retreats into the brow-furrowed ogre he’s been since the Amazon. She is purposely messy, her nightie half-open, one hand sunk into her tangled hair, the other gripping the coverlet, but he is flesh upon pistons, a tool for a task, and he enters her with syringe straightness. He thrusts without build, beginning at medium speed, not varying.
It is something, though, definitely something, and she crosses her ankles behind his back and digs her fingers into his biceps, and threshes her torso, not because it feels particularly good but to keep all of their parts in motion, for as long as she doesn’t lie still there’s a chance to see from fresh perspectives each moment, to believe that this act, as well as the larger act of their marriage, has yet to be resolved.
This takes energy and dedication, and it distracts her until she feels the warmth of Richard’s hand on her neck. She takes care to open her eyes slowly so as not to startle him. His face is wet and red, and his eyes, also wet and red, are fixed upon her neck, where his thumb is tracing a diagonal line down each side of her throat. She can’t interpret this but wants to encourage it.
“That’s good,” she whispers. “Rub me all over.”
His hand slides upward, over her chin, and covers her mouth with a smooth ease she doesn’t understand until she feels wetness roll down her neck. Against her lip, knuckle-hard, she can feel the wedding ring under a bandage. She tells herself to stay calm. He’s not trying to hurt her. He’s not trying to choke her. More wetness pools between her lips. She recognizes the taste. She refuses to believe it. She tastes it again and pushes her head sideways to break from his palm.
“Honey,” she gasps. “Your hand’s bleeding—”
But his wet hand slides over her mouth again. That’s what he wants—he wants her mute. He’s going faster now, the bedsprings shrilling and the headboard thunking in unexpected rhythms, and she presses her lips together to keep out the blood and breathes through her nose, and tells herself she can hold out until he’s done, because here is that wildness she wanted, and at heightened levels. Some women like this. She’s seen countless adventure magazine covers of helpless women in tattered dresses thrown about by Tarzanlike men. Maybe she can learn to like it, too.
His grip starts to slip as his body begins to hitch, and Lainie’s able to force her head upright. Richard is no longer looking at the two lines he’s been tracing in blood across her throat. His head is wrenched over his shoulder, neck muscles taut as he strains to see inside the closet. She feels his thighs shudder against hers and she lets her head drop back onto the pillow, feeling blood creep down both sides of her neck. It’s too confusing to think about. There’s nothing in the closet worth looking at, nothing at all. Just some crummy old high-heel shoes.
33
IT’S NOT EVERY night that Elisa makes it into the lab, and on nights when she does, eggs in hand, and finds the creature inside the tank instead of the pool, her heart breaks. This rouses her from selfish exuberance, reminds her that there is no joy inside F-1, not really. Yes, the pool is preferable to the tank, but what would be preferable to the pool? Anything, everything. The world is full of ponds and lakes, streams and rivers, seas and oceans. She stands before the tank on these nights wondering if she is any better than the soldiers who captured the creature or the scientists who keep him contained.
What she knows for certain is that the creature can sense her state of mind, even through metal and glass. His body-lights fill the tank with colors so intense it looks as though he swims in lava or melted steel or yellow fire. Elisa worries about the severity of these emotions. Has she only made his life harder to live? Before peering into a porthole window, she swallows down thick tears and masks her trembling lips with the most serene smile she can manage.
He’s waiting, circling just behind the portholes. He twists and rolls when he sees her, bubbles rising from his hands as they sign the words he likes best: “hello,” “E-L-I-S-A,” “record.” She doubts he can hear anything from inside the locked tank, and this takes her broken heart and grinds it to dust. He wants her to put on a record he can’t hear because it will make her happy, and that will make him happy.
So she goes to the audio table, relieved to be out of the creature’s line of sight so he won’t see the shudder of her sob or how she wipes tears with the crook of her arm. She puts on a record and takes bracing breaths before returning to the tank window, where he blinks perceptively, scanning her for authenticity before pushing off from one side of the tank to the other, back and forth, spinning and twirling, as if to impress her with a display of prowess.
Elisa laughs and gives him the show he wants, positioning one hand shoulder-high, the other waist-low, and waltzing to the music with the dance-partner substitute of an egg, sidestepping concrete pillars bolted with steel shackles and tables of sharp instruments as if neither are worse than bumbling fellow dancers. His pleasure is evident by the lavender that radiates from the tank, and after a time, she knows her dance floor well enough to close her eyes and imagine that it is his cool, clawed hand and strong, scaled waist that she holds.
34
THERE ARE PLENTY of reasons Elisa doesn’t notice the man enter the lab. “Star Dust” is a song of bewitching rhythm, and during her earlier upset, she’d turned the volume dial further than usual. Mostly, though, it is that her ears have become attuned to specific kinds of late-night threats: The oafish rattle of a scientist turning out his pockets for his key card or the exacting snap of Empties marching down a hallway. This sound is one for which she isn’t prepared, that of a man cognizant of the creature’s heightened senses of vision and hearing. Elisa box steps and dips and waltzes, while the creature’s luminescence dims to a worried matte black, a warning that Elisa, with her eyes so blissfully shut, has no chance to heed.
CREATIVE TAXIDERMY
1
ONLY THE HEAT of the man’s tears makes him aware of the pervading coldness: F-1’s closed door against his back; the hall’s catacomb draft; the corpse chill of his fingers clamped over his mouth. He’d laugh if he wasn’t crying—of course the conduit of this epiphany is an egg. So much of his life has been dedicated to investigating what some call evolution, but he prefers to call emergence: the asexual replications of worm and jellyfish; the embryonic morphogeneses of fertilized ovum; the infinite other theoretical paths of life’s progression that didn’t end with mankind obliterating everything pure and good.
It’s the same thing he used to tell his students. The universe folds itself along dull axial lines generation after generation, but what truly reshapes life are the foibled folds, the outright tears. Changes kick-started by emergences can last for millennia and affect us all.
He’d flatter their young minds by telling them that, though he might be the only first-generation immigrant in the classroom, each one of them is quite exotic, a child of fantastic mutants.
Oh, he’s awfully bold when on terra firma, snug behind a lectern, high on chalk dust. Now he’s in the field, the real world. Why, then, does it feel more like fantasy every day? His mother used to call his daydream spells leniviy mozg. Translated: “lazy brain.” They are, of course, the opposite; his hyperactive mind is what has driven him to be a scientist of repute. What those diplomas, ribbons, and honors are worth here in the real world, he’s no longer certain. He could have pulled the janitor away from the tank, away from danger, and yet he, the ivory-tower coward, had simply raced from the room.
Frequently he returns to Occam late at night, unable to sleep until he’s checked, a fourth or fifth time, the gauges of pool and tank. The asset, he has become certain, won’t last much longer under such artificial conditions. One morning, they’ll find it belly-up, dead as a goldfish, and Mr. Strickland will go around cheering and slapping backs, while he, on the other hand, will try to hold back a tide of tears. Only here, tonight, at last, does he understand the answer to the riddle of the asset’s continued survival. This woman—this janitor—is keeping it alive, not through serums or solutions but through force of spirit. To drag her from the lab right now might be the same as dragging a dagger through the creature’s travailing heart.
Other daggers are slicing into his soft, pink, pitiful human palm. It is a stiff manila folder, an object of outrageous import moments ago, now wadded to sharp-edged crumples. He relaxes his fist and smooths it out. He hadn’t come to F-1 tonight to check gauges. He certainly hadn’t come to have his bedrock beliefs fractured by a dancing janitor. Tonight’s visit was to verify previously collected data. Inside the manila folder is an intel report he has compiled at great personal risk, a report that must be finished before tomorrow’s rendezvous.
Faint strains of “Star Dust” rumble into his skull, still pressed against the lab door. He pushes off and staggers down the hall. He grips the folder tighter, no matter how it cuts into his flesh, to remind himself who he is, why he’s here. He is Dr. Bob Hoffstetler, born Dmitri Hoffstetler in Minsk, Russia, and though one would be excused for inferring from his curriculum vitae that he is a scientist to his bones, his true occupation, the only real one he’s ever had, goes by terms far more sincere than “the asset.” He is a mole, an operative, an agent, an informer, a saboteur, a spy.
2
TO SEE INSIDE Hoffstetler’s rented house on Lexington Street would be to peg him as the sort of fanatic who arranges toenail clippings by length. The home is beyond spare. It’s sparse. Cabinets and closets are kept empty and open. Nonperishable groceries remain in shopping bags on a folding table in the center of the kitchen. Perishable goods, too, remain in bags inside the refrigerator. There are no dressers in the bedroom; his spartan wardrobe is folded atop another table. He sleeps on a camping cot of steel frame and canvas. His medicine cabinet is bare, his pharmaceuticals holding military lines atop the toilet tank. The single trash can he keeps is emptied outside each night and scrubbed clean each week. All lights are bare bulbs; he has moved the fixtures to a box in the basement. The light, therefore, is harsh, and months after arrival, he still jumps at his own thrown shadows—some KGB operative, he always thinks, slinking close to cut short Hoffstetler’s overlong mission.
Keeping a shipshape residence complicates the placing of wiretaps, bugs, other black-bag jobs. He has no reason to think the CIA is onto him, yet every Saturday, when other men crack open beers and watch sports, he runs a putty knife around drawers, windows, heat vents, doorjambs, and soffits, then makes a special event, like other men do of family cookouts, of disassembling and reassembling the telephone. Televisions and radios are burdens he doesn’t need; he guts the phone in silence, pausing to read from library books that he returns, finished or not, every Sunday. It took the jarring sight of a janitor—identified by punch-card records as “Elisa Esposito”—dancing in front of an asset gone absolutely radiant for Hoffstetler to feel the full sadness of his lonely customs.
Today, though, his routine dislodging one of the hallway floorboards feels worse than dangerous. It feels wrong. It’s a detestable feeling. Wrong is the bailiwick of parents, schoolmarms, men of the cloth. Scientists have no need of it. Yet caught in his throat like a fish bone is the certainty that what he saw last night changes everything. If the asset can feel that kind of joy, affection, and concern—he espied all three in its chromatic flux—no nation, for any reason, should toy with it like a specimen in a Bunsen burner. In hindsight, even his own experiments, done with doctorly care, feel wrong. Of the many emotions the asset has stirred in Washington, at Occam, and in his own heart, how is it, Hoffstetler wonders, that not a single one of those emotions has been shame?
The hollow beneath the floor holds a passport, an envelope of cash, and the crinkled manila folder. Hoffstetler picks up the folder, hears the toot of a taxi, and forces the plank back into place. It always happens the same. He receives a brusque phone call with a specific time and a code phrase; he drops all that he is doing; he formulates a lateness excuse for David Fleming. Then he stews in anxious acids until the time arrives, calls a cab, gets inside, and records the cabbie’s name in a notebook to ensure no cabbie drives him to the meeting location more than once. Today’s driver is named Robert Nathaniel De Castro. Hoffstetler wagers that his friends call him “Bob.” What American name is more inoffensive or forgettable?
Past the airport, across Bear Creek Bridge, contiguous to the shipyards in the shadow of Bethlehem Steel, the industrial park is not a place men in suits are often dropped. Hoffstetler’s wardrobe is limited to suits; blandness is his only disguise. He stows away his professorial peacock feathers and bores Robert Nathaniel De Castro with flavorless chatter and an unmemorable tip. He walks toward a warehouse until the cab is gone, then veers between container ships, past a transit shed, and over the tracks, doubling back around thirty-foot sand piles to make sure no one has followed.
He likes to sit atop a particular concrete block while waiting. He drums his heels on it like he’s a bored little boy back in Minsk. Soon a Chinese dragon of dirt floats across the sky while tires crunch gravel like gnashed bones. A titanic Chrysler swings into view, black as a crevasse with chrome like liquid mercury, its tail fins slicing loaves of risen dust. Hoffstetler slides off the concrete block and stands before the purring beast in the swirling grit—his papa would call it gryaz. The driver’s door opens and the same man as ever emerges, stretching a tailored suit across his bison breadth.
“The sparrow nests on the windowsill,” Hoffstetler says.
“And the eagle—” The Russian accent is thick. “The eagle…”
Hoffstetler reaches for the silver door handle. “And the eagle takes the prey,” he snaps. “What’s the point of using a code phrase if you can’t ever remember it?”
3
THE STYGIAN CHRYSLER wends him all the way back across the city. The Bison, as Hoffstetler has come to think of the driver, never takes the shortest path. Today, he scoops up west of Camp Holabird, circles the Baltimore City hospitals, and effects a stair-step pattern to the North Street cemeteries before dropping like an anvil into East Baltimore. Hoffstetler’s leniviy mozg finds in Baltimore’s grimy, gray street grid proof of the cosmological organization present in all matter, from the smallest corpuscles to most unfathomable galactic clusters. Thus he is but an insignificant pinprick playing a nugatory role in history. This, at least, is his prayer.
They park directly in front of the Black Sea Russian Restaurant. It never makes sense to him. Why the cryptic telephone calls, coded phrases, and loop-de-loop course if it ends every time at the highly conspicuous, mirror-plated, gold-inflected, red-sashed restaurant bedecked with filigreed nesting dolls atop malachite tabletops? The Bison holds the car door open and follows him inside.
It’s still early. The Bl
ack Sea isn’t open yet. There is clatter from the kitchen, but not much talk. Waitstaff sit smoking at a table, memorizing specials. Three violinists tune their strings to “Ochi Chernye.” The sharp smell of red-wine vinegar mixes with the sweetness of fresh-baked gingerbread. Hoffstetler passes the restrooms, where hangs a poster issued by J. Edgar Hoover to inveigle immigrants to report Espionage, Sabotage, and Subversive Activities. It’s an inside joke: There, in the last booth of the restaurant’s farthest dogleg, backlit by the lunar glow of a giant tank crawling with lobsters, waits Leo Mihalkov.
“Bob,” he greets.
Mihalkov prefers speaking to Hoffstetler in English to practice his conversation skills, but hearing his Americanized name from the agent’s lips makes Hoffstetler feel strip-searched. It is no small thing that Mihalkov pronounces the name as boob. Hoffstetler wonders if this, like the FBI poster, is a backhand slap. On cue, musicians rush the booth like hatchet men, nod out a rhythm, and strike up. One point in the Black Sea’s favor is its insusceptibility to wiretap, and the deafening strings further moot the point. Hoffstetler has to raise his voice.
“I ask once again, Leo: Please call me Dmitri.”
Call it cowardice, but it is easier for Hoffstetler to keep his two personas separate. Mihalkov places a blini topped with smoked salmon, crème fraîche, and caviar onto his extended tongue, draws it in, and savors it. Hoffstetler finds himself smoothing the manila folder in his hands. How quickly this Russian brute, with a single belittling syllable, has muscled him into the position of timid supplicant.
Leo Mihalkov is the fourth intelligence contact he has had. Hoffstetler’s reluctant embroilment in espionage began the day after his commencement at Lomonosov in Moscow, when agents of Stalin’s NKVD came into view like shipwrecks from a draining lake. They fed him—a young, hungry scholar—a dinner of pickled tomatoes, zakuski, beef stroganoff, and vodka, followed by a dessert of government secrets: teams working to put satellites into space, advanced chemical warfare tests, Soviet infiltrators inside the US atomic program. It was as good as being fed poison. Hoffstetler was a dead man unless he obtained the antidote, and the antidote was, and always would be, strict allegiance to the Premier.
The Shape of Water Page 12