The Shape of Water

by Guillermo Del Toro

  When the war was kaput, the agents said, America would sift Eurasia’s rubble for gold, and who would they find? Dmitri Hoffstetler, that’s who. His task was to willingly defect, become a good American. It wouldn’t be so bad, they promised. His wouldn’t be a life of pistol silencers and bitable suicide pills. He’d be free to follow his professional predilections, provided they were in fields ripe for top-secret harvesting whenever he was contacted by agents. Hoffstetler didn’t bother asking what would happen if he refused. The men took care to mention his papa and dear mamochka with specificity enough that there was no doubting how easily the NKVD could tighten their fists around them.

  Mihalkov shrugs at Hoffstetler’s request. He’s not a physically imposing man; in fact, he seems to enjoy making himself smaller by sitting in front of the lobster tank’s blue vista. In this way, Mihalkov is a switchblade, compact and benign in snug suits, rose boutonnieres, and short-cut gray hair, until he’s provoked and the sharp parts are sprung. He swallows the caviar and holds out a receiving hand while the crustaceans behind him appear to crawl out of his ears. Hoffstetler hands over the folder, fretting over the wrinkles like a mother over a child’s unironed church clothes.

  Mihalkov unravels the string tie, taps out the documents, shuffles through them.

  “And this is what, Dmitri?”

  “Blueprints. It’s all there. Every door, window, and ventilation duct at Occam.”

  “Otlichno. Ah, English, English: good job. This will interest the directorate.”

  He pinches another blini before noticing Hoffstetler’s tense expression.

  “Drink this vodka, Dmitri. Four times it is distilled. Arrives in diplomatic valise from Minsk. Your homeland, da?”

  This is the latest in a decade’s worth of references to the knives held against his parents’ jugulars. Unless Hoffstetler has become adrift in paranoiac seas. Unless he’s fallen so deep undercover he can no longer see the outlines of the surface. He flaps a cloth napkin from its pinwheel fold and mops his sweat. The violinists can’t hear anything beyond the vibrations passing directly into their chins, but still Hoffstetler leans forward and keeps his voice low.

  “I stole those blueprints for a reason. I need you to authorize an extraction. We have to get the creature out of there.”

  4

  MEMORIES OF HIS years teaching in Wisconsin are like the state’s winter terrain: The bright sincerity of Midwestern living splotched by the ugly black slush of the reports he handed over to Leo Mihalkov, who would materialize behind snow whirlwinds in a sable overcoat and ushanka hat like Ded Moroz—Old Man Frost—of Mama’s Christmas fables. Hoffstetler tried to sate Mihalkov with material thefts: electroscopes, ionization chambers, Geiger-Müller counters. It was never enough. Mihalkov squeezed and Hoffstetler, like a sponge, seeped litanies of top-secret atrocity. An American program involving abrading the scalps of retarded children with ringworm to study the effects. Mosquitoes bred with dengue, cholera, and yellow fever and loosed upon pacifist prisoners as part of an entomological weapons program. Most recently, a proposal to expose US servicemen to a new herbicidal dioxin called Agent Orange. Each test result Hoffstetler ferreted to the Soviet agent was itself a virus that putrefied the guts of his otherwise pleasant life.

  He realized, with a heavying grief, that anyone too close to him might become future fodder for Soviet blackmail. He had no choice that he could see. He broke it off with the lovely woman he’d been seeing and quit hosting the university cocktail parties that had intoxicated him with amiable intellectualism. He christened the house the university gave him by removing most of the furniture and all of the light fixtures, emptying the drawers and closets, and sitting, that first night, alone in the center of the cleared floor, repeating “Ya Russkiy,” I am a Russian, until wet snow covered the windows and he began, in darkness, to believe it.

  Suicide was the only exit. He knew too much about sedatives to rely upon them to do the job. Madison lacked a tall building from which to leap. Purchasing a gun with a Russian accent might draw undue attention. So he’d purchased a box of Gillette Blue Blades and placed them on the tub’s rim, but no matter how hot he drew the bathwater, he couldn’t dissolve Mama’s warnings about Nečistaja sila—the Unclean Force—the demon legion into which all suicides were inducted. Hoffstetler cried in the tub, naked, middle-aged, balding, pasty-skinned, flabby, shuddering like a baby. How far he’d sunk. How very, very far.

  The invite to be a part of an Occam Aerospace Research Center team analyzing a “newly discovered life-form” saved his life. This is no hyperbole. One day, the razor blades waited on the side of the tub; the next day, they were out with the trash. The news got better. Mihalkov got word to him that this would be the final mission required of him. Do his job at Occam and he’d be taken home, back to Minsk, back into the arms of parents he hadn’t seen in eighteen years.

  Hoffstetler could not begin quickly enough. He signed every release form he saw and started reading the partially redacted but plenty astonishing dispatches from DC. He quit his position at the college using the old chestnut of “personal issues” and arranged lodging in Baltimore. Newly discovered life: The term pumped his cold, withering body with warm jets of youthful hope. Inside himself, too, was newly discovered life, and for once he would use it not to ruin another being but to understand it.

  Then he saw it. That’s the wrong word. He met it. The creature looked at Hoffstetler through a tank window and acknowledged him in that distinctive way of humans and primates. In seconds, Hoffstetler was stripped of the scientific armor he’d constructed over twenty years; this was not some mutant fish upon which acts should be performed, but rather a being with whom thoughts, feelings, and impressions should be shared. The realization was freeing in the exact way that Hoffstetler, recently resigned to death, needed. Everything had prepared him for this. Nothing had prepared him for this.

  The creature, too, was a contradiction, its own biology aligning with historical evidence from the Devonian Period. Hoffstetler began calling it “the Devonian,” and of foremost interest was its profound relationship to water. Hoffstetler first theorized that the Devonian coerced the water around it, but that was too despotic. To the contrary, water seemed to work with the Devonian, reflecting the creature’s disposition by kicking and frothing, or going as still as sand. Typically, insects were attracted to standing water, but those that made it inside F-1 were in thrall to the Devonian itself, zipping about in spectacular overhead patterns and pelting Hoffstetler whenever he made an aggressive-looking move.

  His mind stormed with incredible hypotheses, but he hoarded them selfishly, limiting his first Occam report to digestible facts. The Devonian, he wrote, was a bilaterally symmetrical, amphibious biped showing clear vertebral evidence of a notochord, a hollow neural tube, and a closed blood system powered by a heart—four-chambered like humans or three-chambered like amphibians Hoffstetler did not yet know. Gill slits were evident, but so were the dilations of a rib cage atop vascularized lungs. This suggested that the Devonian could exist, to some extent, in two geospheres. What the scientific community might learn about subaquatic respiration, he typed frantically, was limitless.

  The drawback to Hoffstetler’s newly discovered life was a new naïveté. Occam had no interest in solving primordial mysteries. They wanted what Leo Mihalkov wanted: military and aerospace applications. Overnight, Hoffstetler found himself in the business of hindrance, fiddling knobs and adjusting valves, declaring equipment unsafe and data compromised, anything to buy more time to study the Devonian. This took creativity and audacity, as well as a third personal attribute he’d let atrophy under Mihalkov: empathy. Hence the special bulbs he’d installed to approximate natural light, hence the Amazonian field recordings.

  Such efforts took time, and Richard Strickland had turned time into a species as endangered as the Devonian. Academia was rife with rivalry; Hoffstetler knew how to see the blade hidden behind a grinning glad-hander. Strickland was a different kind
of rival. He didn’t hide his antipathy toward scientists, cussing right to their faces in a way that made them flush and stammer. Strickland called out Hoffstetler’s delays for the bullshit they were. You want to learn about the asset, Strickland said in so many ways, you don’t tickle its chin. You cut it and watch how it bleeds.

  Hoffstetler’s instinct, too, was to shrink in fear. He couldn’t, though, not this time. The stakes were too high, not only for the Devonian, but also for his own soul. F-1, he told himself, was the singularity of an untamed new universe, and to survive inside it, he’d need to create a third person. Not Dmitri. Not Bob. A hero. A hero who might redeem himself for saying nothing while innocents fell prey to the experiments of two heartless countries. To succeed, he’d need to live out the same basic lesson he’d taught his students: Universes form through collisions of escalating violence, and when a new habitat erupts, members of the local taxon will fight over the resources, often to the death.

  5

  “EXTRACTION,” MIHALKOV MUSES. “This is the word Americans use for teeth. A messy procedure. Bone and blood all over your bib. No, extraction is not part of the plan.”

  Hoffstetler is unconvinced at the rationality of his own idea. Who is to say the USSR won’t inflict baser tortures upon the Devonian than the US? But incertitude has matured into the better of two bad choices. Hoffstetler opens his mouth to speak, but the violinists hit a gap between songs and he snags hold of his breath. Their elbows swoop, and they’re off again, the horse hair of their bows swaying like broken cobwebs. Shostakovich: lavish enough to blanket a conversation of any degree of danger.

  “With these plans,” Hoffstetler insists, “we can get it out of Occam in ten minutes. Two trained operatives is all I ask.”

  “This is your last mission, Dmitri. Why do you wish to complicate it? The happiest of homecomings awaits you. Listen, comrade, to the advice I give. You are no man of adventure. Do what you are good at doing. Sweep up after the Americans like a good maid and hand over to us your dustpan of dirt.”

  Hoffstetler knows he’s being insulted, but the jab lands without muscle. Lately he’s come to think that maids, specifically janitors, are more attuned to secrets than anyone on earth.

  “It can communicate,” he says. “I’ve seen it.”

  “So, too, can dogs. Did that stop us from shooting little Laika into space?”

  “It doesn’t only feel pain, it understands pain, the same as you or I.”

  “I am not surprised Americans are slow to acknowledge this. How long did they espouse that blacks do not feel the same pain as do whites?”

  “It understands hand signals. It understands music.”

  Mihalkov takes a shot of vodka and sighs.

  “Life should be like carving up red stag, Dmitri. You peel the skin, you strip the meat. Simple and clean. How I long for the 1930s. Meetings on trains. Microfilm hidden inside ladies’ cosmetics. We transported objects we could touch and feel and know we were bringing home to the benefit of nashi lyudi. Vitamin D concentrates. Industrial solvents. Today our work is more like pulling bowels from a hole in the belly. We deal in untouchable things. Ideas, philosophies. No wonder you confuse them with emotion.”

  Emotion: Hoffstetler pictures Elisa’s orchestration of the Devonian’s lights.

  “But what is wrong with emotion?” he asks. “Have you read Aldous Huxley?”

  “First music, now literature? You are a Renaissance man, Dmitri. Da, I have read Mr. Huxley, but only because Stravinsky speaks so highly of his work. Did you know his newest composition is a tribute to Mr. Huxley?” He nods at the violinists. “If only these novices could learn it.”

  “Then you’ve read Brave New World. Huxley’s warning of sterile baby hatcheries, mass conditioning. Is this not where we are headed if we are not guided by what we know is the innate goodness of human nature?”

  “The path from Occam’s fish to this future dystopia is a long and tiring one. You must not be so softhearted. If popular fiction is your hobby, may I suggest H. G. Wells? Let me tell you what Wells’s Dr. Moreau said. ‘The study of nature makes a man at last as remorseless as nature.’”

  “Surely you are not defending Dr. Moreau.”

  “Civilized men like to pretend that Moreau is a monster. But this is the Black Sea, Dmitri. We are alone. We can be honest with each other. Moreau knew that you cannot have it two ways. If you believe the natural world is good, then you must also accept its brutality. This creature you hold in such high regard? It feels nothing for you. It is remorseless. And so should you be.”

  “Man should be better than monsters.”

  “Ah, but who are the monsters? The Nazis? Imperial Japan? Us? Do we not all do monstrous things to prevent the ultimate monstrous act? I like to visualize the world as a china plate held aloft by two sticks, one the US, the other the USSR. If one stick rises, so must the other, or else the plate goes smash. Once I knew a man by the name of Vandenberg. Embedded in America, like you. Cockeyed with ideals, like you. He did not make it, Dmitri. He sank into a body of water that I am not at liberty to specify.”

  Bubbles burp up from the lobster tank as if water, all water, had participated in swallowing Vandenberg. A subtle shift in the music’s signature: the violinists moving aside to allow the arrival of a waiter who, with a diffident bow, slides a plate of lobster and steak before Mihalkov. The agent grins, tucks his napkin into his collar, and arms himself with cutlery. Hoffstetler is glad for the distraction; he is rattled, but given what happened to this Vandenberg fellow, doesn’t believe it is wise to let Mihalkov know it.

  “I serve at the pleasure of the Premier,” Hoffstetler says. “I pursue the asset only so we alone will know its secrets.”

  Mihalkov cracks the lobster, dips white flesh in butter, chews in large, slow revolutions.

  “For you, so loyal for so long,” he says from behind the food, “I will do this favor. I will ask about extraction. I will see what is possible.” He swallows, points his knife at Hoffstetler’s empty place setting. “Do you have time to join me? Americans have an amusing name for this dish. They call it ‘surf and turf.’ Look behind me. Choose the lobster that suits you. If you would like, we can take it to the kitchen, and you can watch it boil. They squeak a little, it is true, but they are so soft, so sweet.”

  6

  SPRING COMES. THE gray scrim lifts from the sky. Lumps of old snow, bundled in shadows like shivering rabbits, vanish. Where there was silence, solitary birds cheep and impatient boys crack baseballs across sandlots. The swells of dock water lose their sickle edges. Menus change—you can smell it through windows open for the first time in months. But all is not well. Still the rain abstains. The grass is as rumpled as morning hair and yellow as urine. Garden hoses unravel for an unslakable task. Tree limbs hold buds like fists. Drainage grates face their thirsty, stained teeth to the sun.

  Elisa feels the same way. A torrent inside her is being held at bay. She hasn’t been inside F-1 for three days—five days if you count the weekend, which she does, every minute of it, keeping a running sum in her head. The lab has been occupied. There are more Empties than before and their patrol is more vigorous; before a single mopped floor can dry, it is blotted by boot prints. When Elisa arrives at work, it isn’t only Fleming lording over the shift change. It’s Strickland. She looks away from him, hoping she didn’t just see him smile at her.

  The laundry room still smarts the eyes five years after the washing machines were removed. This happened after Elisa came upon Lucille passed out from bleach fumes. In a valorous feat Zelda likes to recount over Automat lunches, Elisa lifted Lucille into a four-wheeled laundry cart and rolled her into the cleaner air of the cafeteria before calling the hospital. Occam doesn’t like attention; all laundry work was outsourced to Milicent Laundry, and Elisa and Lucille were lucky to keep their jobs.

  Only sorting duties remain. Zelda and Elisa separate dirty towels, smocks, and lab coats onto large tables as Zelda runs through a fresh Brewster story.
Zelda had wanted to watch Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color last night, but Brewster had insisted upon The Jetsons, escalating a row until Zelda had shaken her husband off the Barcalounger like trash from a wastebasket, to which he’d retaliated by belting the theme to The Jetsons at top volume over her program’s entire hour.

  Elisa knows that Zelda tells the tale to lift Elisa from the doldrums she is unable to hide and declines to specify. She is grateful, and between pitching items into carts, she signs interjections with as much vigor as she can muster. They finish and push their carts into the hall. Elisa has the squeaky one; it caterwauls enough that an Empty pokes his helmeted head into the far end of the hall to evaluate the threat. Their route takes them right past F-1. Elisa strains to listen for telltale sounds while trying not to look like she’s listening.

  They turn left and head down a windowless corridor black but for the orange parking-lot lights eking through double doors being held open by a block of wood. Zelda pushes open a door, pulls her cart after her, and holds the door for Elisa to follow. They are met, as they often are, by the other graveyarders, standing like birds on a wire, puffing on cigarettes. Scientists dare flaunt Occam’s smoking ban, but not janitors; several times per night they gather at the loading dock, their quarrels suspended for the duration of a smoke. It’s a risk: Breaks are allowed in the main lobby, but not here, not this close to sterile labs.