“You need to oil those wheels,” Yolanda says. “I heard you squealing a mile away.”
“Don’t listen to her, Elisa,” Antonio says. “It gives me time to comb my hair nice for you.”
“Is that hair?” Yolanda gibes. “I thought that was the clog you plunged from the bowl.”
“Miss Elisa, Miss Zelda,” Duane calls. “How come you two never smoke with us?”
Elisa shrugs and points to her neck scars. One puff of one cigarette in the work shed behind Home was all the experiment she’d needed; she’d coughed until blood had darkened the dirt. She wheels the squeaky cart down the ramp, waves at the Milicent Laundry driver in the van’s side mirror, and begins chucking material through the open rear doors into waiting baskets. Zelda parks her cart alongside Elisa’s but turns back to the others.
“Oh, hell,” Zelda says. “I do kind of miss the taste. Give me that cigarette.”
The others hurrah as Zelda joins them at the top of the ramp. She accepts a Lucky Strike from Lucille, lights up, takes a drag, and nestles the elbow of her smoking arm into the palm of the opposite hand. It’s a pose that has Elisa fancying a younger, lither version of her friend being slung about a brass-blasted dance hall by a zoot-suited suitor, maybe Brewster. Elisa follows Zelda’s exhaled smoke as it rises, catching the sodium light before drifting in front of a security camera.
“Don’t worry, sugar.”
She’s startled into looking down at Antonio. He winks one of his crossed eyes and swipes an innocuous broom from where it rests against the wall. He lifts it, handle upward, until the end taps the bottom of the camera. An accumulated spot of dirt on the camera’s bottom panel reveals how the janitors tilt the camera upward, the same way every night, before tapping it back down into place.
“Make us a little blind spot for a few minutes. Pretty smart, huh?”
It takes a minute for Elisa to realize that she has ceased loading laundry. The Milicent Laundry driver honks; she doesn’t react. Duane tries to joke her awake, asking her how come she brings so many more boiled eggs for lunch than she can eat; she doesn’t react. Zelda finally stubs her cigarette, gestures for the driver to relax, and hustles down the ramp to do her share of the loading.
“You all right, hon?” she asks.
Elisa hears her neck bones crackle in a nod, yet can’t look away from the smokers as they toss their smoldering butts in capitulation to the clock and leave Antonio to nudge the security camera back into prosecutorial position. She barely hears Zelda shut the van doors and bang them to tell the driver he’s free to go. Blind spot: Elisa nuzzles into the phrase, explores it, finds it familiar, almost cozy. Zelda and Giles aside, she lives her whole life in a blind spot, forgotten by the world, and wouldn’t it be something, she thinks, if this invisibility were the thing that allowed her to shock them all?
7
DAYSHIFTERS FILTER INTO the locker room. Zelda makes eye contact with those she trained over the years. Funny how they got promoted and she didn’t. They pretend to look at watches, busy themselves with purses. Well, Zelda doesn’t forget a face. Some of these fancy-pants dayshifters had been the graveyard shift’s worst rumormongers. Sandra once claimed to have seen, in B-5, flight plans used in gassing the populace with sedatives. Albert declared that the cabinets of A-12 hid human brains simmering in green goo—probably, he theorized, the brains of presidents. Rosemary swore she’d read a discarded file on a young man, code-named “Finch,” who didn’t age.
That’s what rumor mills do: They grind. So Zelda puts little stock in the gossip swirling around F-1. Is there something strange in that tank? You bet there is—it bit off two of Mr. Strickland’s fingers. But strange is Occam’s racket. Anyone who’s been here a spell knows not to get into a lather about it.
That ought to include Elisa. Lately her friend’s behavior has Zelda at sixes and sevens. Oh, she saw how Elisa behaved when they pushed the laundry carts past F-1. That squeaky wheel might as well have been the girl’s whine. Zelda figures it will pass; everyone takes her turn getting gung-ho about government conspiracy. Try as she might, though, she can’t shrug it off. Elisa’s the one person at Occam who sees Zelda for who she is: a good person and a darn hard worker. If Elisa gets herself fired, Zelda doesn’t know if she can take it. Selfish, maybe, but also true. Her knuckles ache, not from gripping mops but because fingers are how Elisa talks, and the idea of losing that daily conversation, that daily affirmation that she, Zelda Fuller, matters—it hurts.
One true thing about F-1: It had top dogs pulling harder at service personnel than anything before. Elisa keeps lingering around that lab, she’ll be playing with real fire. Zelda finishes dressing, sits on the bench, and sighs, enjoying the sharp smell of Lucky Strike. She unfolds a QCC from her pocket, gives it another look. Fleming keeps transposing details, trying to trip them up; if she were Elisa, she might suspect Fleming did this to keep them too busy to concoct theories. Zelda rubs her tired eyes and keeps checking, every row, every column, as the dressed dayshifters bang lockers. The QCC is full of empty, unfillable boxes, the same as her life. Things she’ll never have, places she’ll never go.
The locker room is crowding with women. Zelda looks around, past legs being hoisted, clothes hangers being untangled, bra straps being adjusted. The QCC isn’t the only reason she has lingered here. She’s been waiting for Elisa, so they can wait for the bus together—waiting to wait, the story of her life. Admitting it makes her feel pathetic. The last person Elisa’s thinking about these days is Zelda. The QCC fades before her vision until the night’s biggest unchecked box is revealed to be Elisa. Where is she? She hasn’t changed out of her uniform. Which means she’s still inside Occam. Zelda stands, the QCC gliding to the floor.
Oh, Lord. The girl was up to something.
8
THE MATRON’S VOICE rings through her skull. Stupid little girl. Elisa slows her gait to wait out two gabbing dayshifters ambling toward the end of the hall. You never follow directions, no wonder all the girls hate you. There: She’s alone. She scoots to the F-1 door and slots the key card. One day I’ll catch you lying or stealing and throw you out in the cold. The lock engages, and she throws open the door, an outrageous act at this hour. You’ll have no choice except selling your body, you shameful girl. Elisa slides inside, shuts the door, presses her back against it, and listens for footsteps, her fearful mind conflating nightmare images of the Matron hurling little Mum down the steps only for David Fleming to catch her.
Occam is swelling with morning staff. It’s a treacherous time for Elisa to make this visit, but she can’t help it, she needs to see him, make sure he’s all right. But it’s difficult to see anything at all; F-1 is fully alight, as bright as it was the night the creature’s tank was wheeled inside. Elisa squints and staggers, but also smiles, despite everything. Just a quick visit to let him know she hasn’t forgotten him, to sign to him that she misses him, to radiate with warmth at his sign of E-L-I-S-A, to lift his spirits with an egg. She takes the egg from her pocket and dashes forward, her legs beginning to remember how to dance.
She hears him before she sees him. Like a whale moan, the high-frequency sound bypasses her ears to pull tight like wire around her chest. Elisa stops, completely: her body, her breathing, her heart. The egg slips from her hand, makes a soft landing on her foot, and wobbles through water puddles left behind by a struggle. The creature is neither in pool nor tank, but on his knees in the middle of the lab, his metal bindings chained to a concrete post. A medical lamp on an adjustable arm pounds him with wattage, and she can smell his salty dryness, like a fish left on a pier to fester. His twinkling scales have gone dull and gray. The grace of his water postures has been clobbered by the harsh bends of a forced kneel. His chest rattles like that of a phlegmy old man and his gills labor as if pushing against weights, each opening betraying raw redness.
The creature turns his head, saliva draining from his gasping mouth, and looks at her. His eyes, like his scales, are coated with a dull
patina, and though this makes reading the color of his eyes difficult, there is no mistaking the gesture he makes with his hands, cinched though they are by chains. Two index fingers, pointing urgently toward the door. It’s a sign Elisa knows well: “Go.”
The sign also, by design or chance, draws her eyes to a stool next to the concrete post. She doesn’t know how she missed it before, such a bright color in all this laboratory drabness. Upright on the seat rests an open bag of green hard candy.
9
NEVER, IN ALL of Zelda’s years at Occam, has she passed through its halls in civilian clothing. Her work garb, it turns out, has been a magical cape; without it, she is noticed. Yawning scientists and arriving service staff see her in a way that gives her an unanticipated rush of warmth before it is punctured by an icicle of dread. Her flower-print dress, tasteful elsewhere, is indecent in this domain of white coats and gray uniforms. She covers as much of it as possible with her purse and charges forth. The shift-change chaos will last for a few minutes more, enough time to find Elisa and give her a forceful shaking.
She hustles around a corner to find Richard Strickland stepping from his security-camera office. He teeters as if stepping off of a boat. Zelda knows this kind of unstable weaving. She saw it in Brewster before he stopped drinking. In her father, during dementia’s grip. In her uncle as his house burned down behind him. Strickland rights himself and rubs eyes that look crusted shut. Did he sleep here? He completes his lurch from the office, and Zelda recoils at the clang of metal upon the floor. It is the orange cattle prod. Strickland is dragging it behind him like a caveman’s club.
He doesn’t see her. She doubts he sees much of anything. He lumbers off in the other direction, a blessing except that Zelda knows where he’s headed, and it’s where she’s headed, too. She rotates her mental map of Occam. The underground level is a square, so there is an opposite path to F-1. But it’s twice as long; she’ll never make it before him. Strickland wobbles, puts a hand to the wall to steady himself, and hisses at a pain in his fingers. He’s slow. Maybe she can make it. If only she can cough up the fear clotting her lungs and get her feet to—
She’s moving, arms swinging. She passes a cafeteria astir with smells, not reheated Automat eatables but actual cooked breakfasts. She clips a white woman putting on a hairnet and receives a hard tsk scolding. Secretaries, alerted by the clop of her shoes, poke their heads from the photocopy room. Then, trouble: a bottleneck at Occam’s amphitheater, a room so rarely open at night she’d neglected to figure it into her calculations. Scientists file inside, maybe to view some sort of dissection, though Zelda feels it’s just as likely they’re screening a horror flick, maybe the one she’s currently living, a coven of white-coated monsters leering at her large body and sheen of sweat.
They make things difficult for her. Haven’t they always? She is forced to assert her shoulders against their suddenly inert bodies, pleading I’m sorry and Excuse me until she squeezes out the other side and barrels onward, trying to ignore the laughs aimed at her backside. She is sorry, she thinks, and there is no excuse. Her heart is pounding. She can’t catch her breath. It is thanks only to momentum that she spills around the second corner and sees, at the far end, trudging her way, Strickland.
Zelda is spotted. To turn away now would be to admit wrongdoing. What else can she do? She walks straight toward him. It is the boldest thing she has ever done. Her heart lobs against her rib cage like a handball. Her breathing is a mystery, hijacked by mysterious muscles. He’s eyeing her like an apparition and lifting the cattle prod, a bad sign, though at least it’s no longer chortling along the tile.
Both stop directly in front of F-1. Between gasps, Zelda forces a greeting.
“Oh, hello, Mr. Strickland.”
He’s inspecting her with glazed eyes. No light of recognition, even though he’s met her twice. His face is haggard and wan. A residue of a granulated powder coats his lower lip. He abandons his study of her face with a disdainful grunt.
“Where’s your uniform?”
He’s a man who knows how to cut: do it first, do it deep. With the inspiration of the desperate, Zelda holds up the only item she carries.
“I forgot my purse.”
Strickland squints. “Mrs. Brewster.”
“Yes, sir. Except it’s Mrs. Fuller.”
He nods but looks unconvinced. He looks, in fact, rather lost. Zelda has observed this before in white people new to being alone with black people; he doesn’t know where to look at her, as if he finds her very existence embarrassing. It makes him mumble, a sound too low to be heard from inside F-1. If Zelda wants to warn Elisa, she needs to exploit Strickland’s discomfiture and keep him occupied for as long, and as loudly, as possible.
“Say, Mr. Strickland.” Zelda brightens her voice to hide its tremor. “How are those fingers of yours?”
He frowns, then considers the bandage on his left hand. “I don’t know.”
“Do they have you on any pain relievers? My Brewster broke his wrist once at Bethlehem Steel, and the doctor fixed him up pretty good.”
Strickland grimaces, and for good reason: She’s shouting. Zelda doesn’t care about his reply, though the thirsty pass of his tongue over his lip’s white powder tells her everything about his painkillers. He dry-swallows, and whether by prescription or placebo, his stoop straightens and his glazed, glassy eyes snap into frightening focus.
“Zelda D. Fuller,” he rasps. “D for Delilah.”
Zelda shudders. “How is your…” Suddenly, she can’t think. “Your wife, Mr. Strickland.” She’s got no idea what she’s saying. “How is your wife enjoying—”
“You’re graveyard shift,” he growls, as if this is the worst thing she could be, worse than the other things about her that are so self-evident. “You got your purse. Go home.”
He slides a key card from his back pocket like a stiletto and stabs it into the lock. Zelda goads herself to finish her question, some happy babble about his wife, a courtesy even Richard Strickland will be forced to return, but he’s retreated into his natural state of looking through her, a woman who barely exists, and he’s through F-1’s door, the cattle prod clanking off the knob, a final warning, or at least Zelda hopes, for Elisa, wherever she is.
10
FUCK, IT’S BRIGHT. It’s sewing pins into his eyeballs. He’d like to rush back to his darkened office, shut his eyes beneath the soft gray blanket of the security-camera monitors. It’s a chicken instinct. He’s here for a reason. It’s time to step in, face Deus Brânquia, force Hoffstetler’s experiments to completion. No, not Deus Brânquia. The asset, that’s all it is. Why has he started thinking of it as Deus Brânquia again? He’s got to stop that. The good old Alabama Howdy-do, the heavy-duty Farm-Master 30 cattle prod, is long and straight in his palm, a handrail guiding him from an opiate haze back into the real world.
Only took two MPs to help him fish it from the tank and chain it to the post, not a single finger lost. The MPs won’t say shit. He’s their boss. He’d sent them packing after that, only to discover he’d left the Howdy-do in his office. His office—the desk drawer, the pills. A coincidence. He didn’t leave the cattle prod there on purpose. He didn’t.
He thinks of Lainie’s distraught report of how she’d caught Timmy cutting open a lizard. It hadn’t bothered Strickland at all. Hell, he’d been proud. He ought to take a lesson from his own son. When was the last time Strickland has been alone with this lizard? He’d have to go way back, the Amazon, gripping the harpoon gun in a dim grotto echoing with monkey screams. Deus Brânquia—the asset—speckled with rotenone, reaching out to him with both arms. As if they were equals. The arrogance of it. The insult.
Now look at it. He’s got a nice, clear view of its suffering. Quartered on bloody knees not capped to bear weight for this long. Bleeding from uprooted sutures. Sections of its abhorrent anatomy palpitating and pulsating for air. Strickland holds up the Howdy-do and waggles it. Deus Brânquia bristles its webbed spines.
&nb
sp; “Oh,” Strickland says. “You remember?”
He relishes the finicky click of his heels as he circles the post. The moments preceding torture are always sensuous. The tumescence of fear. The ache of two bodies being kept apart before inevitable impact. Acts more creative than Strickland has patience for flowering in the victim’s imagination. Lainie would never understand this sort of foreplay, but any soldier who’s felt the blood rush would. Lainie’s blood-smeared neck slides into his mind. A fine, invigorating image. He takes a green candy from the bag, sucks it, pretends its sharp tang is that of blood.
When he bites down, the crunch shatters his eardrums. Elisa Esposito must be the only point of silence left in the world. His own is being eaten away by the monkeys, which have returned. Chattering from behind security monitors. Hooting from under his desk. And screaming. Of course, screaming. When he’s trying to think. When he’s trying to sleep. When he’s trying to nod along to his family’s tedious daily chronicles. The monkeys want him to resume the throne of Jungle-god. Until he does, they’ll keep screaming.
So he gives in. Just a little. Just to see if they’ll soften, just a notch. The Howdy-do? Why, it’s not a cattle prod at all. It’s one of the índios bravos’ machetes. The monkeys giggle. They like it. Strickland finds that he likes it, too. He rocks the machete like a pendulum, imagining he’s chopping through the buttress roots of a kapok tree. Deus Brânquia reacts violently, pulling against its chains, the paroxysm of a fish you’d thought was dead. Its gills fluff, widening its head to twice its size. A dumb animal trick. Doesn’t work on humans. Not on gods, either.
Strickland flips a switch. The machete hums in his hand.
11
LIMBS PRETZELED INTO a hard metal box, hair snagged in a hinge, knee abraded and bleeding, and yet Elisa feels no pain. Only fear, that mighty dust storm swirling up from her insides, and anger, thundering her skull into a new shape of thick, broad forehead and long, curling horns. She’ll ram her way out of this box and on her new animal hooves charge this horrible man, even if he kills her in the process—anything to save her beloved creature.
The Shape of Water Page 14