The Shape of Water

by Guillermo Del Toro

  Elisa hadn’t been able to identify the voices at first, but inside F-1, all human timbres mean trouble, and she’d tensed like a varmint and looked for a hole inside which to burrow. It wasn’t Strickland she first saw through the opening door, but Zelda, her casual dress as gobsmacking as a bright red wedding gown. Zelda had been trying to warn Elisa, and Elisa had to honor that risk. She dove into a medical cabinet, cracking her knees hard enough to draw tears to her eyes. Like everything in F-1, the cabinet was wheeled and began to roll. She stuck out a hand and pressed her palm to the floor as a brake.

  Now there’s Strickland, pacing ten feet away, too close for her to close the creaky cabinet door. She constricts herself, hidden only by shadow, and self-strangles her panting. Her chest and left ear are flattened to the cabinet floor and she can feel through the flimsy tin the thump of her heart. Don’t move, she tells herself. Run, attack, she tells herself.

  Strickland swings the prod with a ballplayer’s ease. It makes a sidearm swoop and sticks the creature’s armpit. Two gold lights flash and the creature’s body clenches, scales rippling over seizing muscles, torso twisting as far from Strickland as he can get—mere inches. It’s only because Elisa can’t cry out that she doesn’t. She covers her mouth anyway, fingertips digging into her cheeks. Everybody has felt electric shocks of some sort, but she can’t imagine the creature ever has. He’d believe it black magic, a bolt shot from a vengeful god.

  Strickland looks damaged and desperate. He lumbers behind the post. There, out of the creature’s sight, he removes his blazer, folds it like a man who’s never had to fold his own laundry, sets it beside the candy bag. It is a snakelike shedding of a skin that chokes Elisa with dread. The white shirt beneath is stained with what looks like old food. It doesn’t look to have been ironed in some time.

  “I got some shit to say to you,” he mutters.

  He slides the prod across his injured left hand like a pool player so that it aims at the nape of the creature’s neck. Elisa can feel her hands signing into the darkness: “Stop, stop.” Strickland takes his shot; sparks fly and the creature’s head rockets into the concrete post. His head lolls back, his forehead scales crushed and shining with blood. To Elisa, they are still beautiful, silver coins dipped in red ink. His gills sinuate, confused from the shock, and he lets loose a dolphin whimper. Strickland shakes his head in disgust.

  “Why’d you have to be so much trouble? Leading us to hell and back. You knew we were there. You could smell us, sure as we could smell you. Seventeen months. Hoffstetler says you’re real old. Maybe to you, seventeen months is a drop in the bucket. Well, I’ll tell you what. Those seventeen months—they ruined me. My own wife looks me in my face like she doesn’t know me. I come home, my little girl runs the other way. I’m trying, I’m fucking trying but—”

  He kicks a cabinet just like the one in which Elisa hides, denting the door right where her face would be. He flips the table to its side. Medical instruments catapult across the lab. Elisa draws more tightly into a ball. Strickland rubs his free hand over his face and the bandage unfurls, and in the underlayers Elisa sees concentric brown rings of blood as well as a splotch of yellow. There’s a dark ring, too. The wedding band she returned to him. He’s forced it back on, right over his reattached finger. Elisa, already sick, feels sicker.

  “I dug you out of the jungle like I’d dig a stinger out of my arm. Now you get hot tubs and pools. And what do I get? A house no better than a jungle? A family no friendlier than all those native fucks in all their fucking villages? It’s your fault. It’s all your fucking fault.”

  Strickland thrusts the prod like a fencing blade, triggering fire against the creature’s sutures, then back-swinging to strike them again. Elisa sees one of the sutures tear, scaled flesh peeling away from raw muscle. A stench of smoke and singed blood fills the lab, and Elisa buries her mouth into her elbow while her stomach convulses. She doesn’t, then, see the second cabinet being kicked over, only hears its clatter like a full drum kit being tossed down a staircase. Her own cabinet, she realizes, is the next in Strickland’s destructive path.

  She peeks from the cabinet and finds, close enough to smell the insomniac stink, the back of Strickland’s legs, the trousers wrinkled from being slept in and spattered with old coffee and fresh blood. If she had a knife, she thinks wildly, she could slice his Achilles tendon or go stabbing for a calf artery, terrifically vicious acts she’s never before considered. What has happened to her? She thinks she knows, despite the dark irony: What has happened to her is love.

  “You’re going to pay for it,” Strickland snarls. “All of it.”

  There is the hum of the Howdy-do and the malodor of hot metal, and he bucks away, the prod striking Elisa’s cabinet with an incidental but deafening crash. She grinds her teeth, rigid with horror, and watches Strickland lift the prod like a jouster’s lance and gallop straight for the creature’s eyes, those former beacons of flashing gold turned flat, milky plashets. Though the cabinet vibrates, she envisions it clearly: The prod will pierce an eye, pump the creature’s brain full of electricity, and end the miracle of his life while she, every bit as slow as the Matron accused, does nothing.

  Strickland’s foot glances against a small object. It twirls away in a mocking arc. He stutter-steps, nearly trips, and then halts to watch the object putter to a stop. He mutters, bends down, and picks it up. It is the boiled egg Elisa dropped upon seeing the chained creature, a fragile little thing of atomic potential.

  12

  IT WAS FLEMING who’d suggested they check F-1 for the truant Strickland. Hoffstetler had scoffed, opining that Strickland had no business in there, but seconds after he trails Fleming into the lab and sees Strickland’s anthropoid shape pacing about in the center of the room, he feels as naive as he has since arriving in Baltimore, the epitome of the cloistered professor duped by a real world that discarded rules as it saw fit. The Devonian—it’s on the floor. Hoffstetler hadn’t been notified the creature was being removed from the tank; thus, a rule follower to his stupid core, he’d believed it an impossibility.

  Even Fleming, still crossing the lab, is sharp enough to suspect misconduct.

  “Good morning, Richard,” he says. “I don’t recall this procedure on the schedule…?”

  Strickland lets an object slip from his hand to the floor. Does Fleming not also see this? It’s the cattle prod, this ruffian’s armament of choice, and Hoffstetler’s heartbeat quickens. He goes on tiptoes like a child, trying to ascertain that the creature is all right. Strickland has something in his injured hand, too, but it’s small enough to palm. Hoffstetler was disturbed before; now he’s frightened. He’s never known a man like Strickland, so unpredictable in his acts of concentrated id.

  “Standard,” Strickland says. “Disciplinary matters.”

  Hoffstetler speeds up, passing Fleming, his cheeks flushing in the hot beam of Strickland’s sneer. Disciplinary matters, perhaps—the man did lose two fingers—but standard? There is nothing standard about this. The Devonian’s condition is appalling. The sutures over its original harpoon wound have ripped, and it’s bleeding everywhere, from its armpit, the back of its neck, its forehead. From grayed lips hang gooey strands of saliva long enough to touch the slurry of blood, salt water, and scales in which it kneels. Hoffstetler drops to his knees beside the Devonian without fear; it is bound with chains and, furthermore, barely has strength enough for breathing, much less unleashing its secondary jaw. Hoffstetler palms its wounds. Blood flows thick and dark through his fingers. He needs gauze, he needs tape, he needs help—so much help.

  Fleming clears his throat, and Hoffstetler thinks, Yes, please, step in, stop this, he won’t listen to me. But what comes out of Fleming’s mouth is as far from a rebuke as Hoffstetler could imagine.

  “We didn’t mean to interrupt breakfast.”

  Only an utterance this preposterous could get Hoffstetler to look away from the mutilated Devonian. Strickland looks down like a boy called out for ste
aling candy and opens his left hand to reveal a single white egg. He seems to consider it for a moment, its possible meaning, but in Hoffstetler’s opinion, an egg is too fragile a thing for a beast like Strickland to understand, too gravid with purpose, too symbolic of the delicate perpetuation of life. Strickland shrugs, drops the egg into a wastebasket. The egg, to him, is of no consequence.

  To Hoffstetler, it is the opposite. He hasn’t forgotten, and will never forget, how the quiet janitor had held just such an egg in her hand when waltzing in front of the Devonian’s tank. Slowly, Hoffstetler turns his head, as if he’s making a casual inventory of F-1. His neck bones squeak, trying to reveal him. He shoots his eyes into every potential hiding place. Under desks. Behind the tank. Even inside the pool. It takes ten seconds to find Elisa Esposito, big-eyed and clench-jawed, clearly visible through a cabinet door her own body prevents from being shut.

  Hoffstetler’s throat feels choked by cords of rushing blood. He holds the eye contact with her, then closes his eyes once, the universal sign, or so he hopes, for keep calm, though he knows full well that panic is the pertinent emotion. There is no telling what might happen to this woman if caught. This isn’t stealing company toilet paper. A graveyard-shift woman like her? Apprehended by a man like Richard Strickland? She might simply vanish into the mist.

  Elisa has become critical to keeping the Devonian alive. Perhaps even more so following these injuries. Hoffstetler has to distract Strickland. He turns back to the Devonian. The damage to the janitor is theoretical; the damage to this singular organism is real, and gruesome, and might yet kill it if Hoffstetler can’t get it back into the healing waters of tank or pool right away.

  “You can’t do this!” Hoffstetler shouts.

  Both Strickland and Fleming had begun to speak, but now both cut off, leaving the lab silent but for the Devonian’s gasping. Hoffstetler glares up at Strickland, who appears to relish the whippersnapper insurgence.

  “It’s an animal, isn’t it?” Strickland mutters. “Just keeping it tame is all.”

  Hoffstetler knows true fear: each time he’s accessed classified papers for Soviet agents. Never anger, though, not like this. Everything he’s ever done, said, or felt about the Devonian feels superficial, even flippant. His haggling with Mihalkov over whether the creature was smarter than a dog, their debate over Wells and Huxley. In some ways, he suddenly feels, this creature in F-1 is an angel that, having deigned to grace our world, had been promptly shot down, pinned to corkboard, and mislabeled as a devil. And he was a part of it. His soul might never recover.

  Hoffstetler bolts upright and stands face-to-face with Strickland, his glasses sliding down a face suddenly slicked with sweat, unable to stop from pooching his lip like a surly mal’čik defying his papa. He won’t get anywhere with Strickland, he never has, but Fleming has come with news, and Hoffstetler has a hunch that it might be the tool he needs to keep Strickland at bay. He prays that Elisa can hold on, just for a few more minutes.

  “Tell him, Mr. Fleming,” Hoffstetler says. “Tell him about General Hoyt.”

  The mere word does it. It’s a small satisfaction for Hoffstetler to see what he’s never before seen, a crease of disorientation fold through the center of Strickland’s face: forehead wrinkle, brow furrow, lip rumple. Strickland takes a step away from Hoffstetler. His heel lands upon a fallen object, and he looks down, seeming to notice the overturned tables and spilled implements for the first time—a mess he has, in fact, made and can’t hide. Strickland clears his throat, gestures vaguely at the spill, and when he speaks, his voice makes a pubescent break.

  “The … janitors. They need … to clean up better.”

  Fleming, too, clears his throat. “I don’t want to be awkward about this, Mr. Strickland. But Dr. Hoffstetler is right. General Hoyt called me this morning. Direct from Washington. He asked me to prepare a document for him. Clarifying, you know, the two different philosophies you and Dr. Hoffstetler have regarding the asset.”

  “He…” Strickland’s face has gone slack. “… called you?”

  There is unease in Fleming’s small, tight smile, but there is pride, too.

  “An unbiased recorder,” he says. “That’s all he was looking for. I’m just to collect the information and present it to General Hoyt so he can make an educated decision about which course to take.”

  Strickland looks sick. His face is pale, his lips an ill violet, and his head tilts slowly downward, as if by rusty crank, until he is staring at Fleming’s clipboard like it’s a saw blade about to start spinning. Hoffstetler doesn’t understand what kind of hold Hoyt has over Strickland, and he doesn’t care. It is an advantage, for him, for the Devonian, for Elisa, and he leaps at it.

  “For starters, David, you can tell the general, that I, as a scientist, as a humanist, beg him to explicitly forbid behavior like this, unilateral decisions to harm the asset without reason. Our study has not yet left its crib! We’ve so much to learn from this creature, and here it is, beaten half to death, suffocating while we stand and watch. Let us move the creature back into the tank.”

  Fleming lifts his clipboard. His pen zags across a piece of paper, and just like that, Hoffstetler’s objection is logged, down in permanent ink. His chest warms with victory, so much so that he finds Elisa again and flashes his eyes to say that it’s all going to be okay, before looking back at Strickland. The soldier is staring at Fleming’s ink squiggle, his jaw quivering, his eyes blinking in addled horror.

  “Nn,” Strickland blurts, an ejection of nonverbal upset.

  Hoffstetler is energized, powered by the same rich fuel he used to burn during big university lectures. Quickly, before Strickland can achieve anything more intelligible, Hoffstetler kneels beside the creature and indicates the shivering gills and shuddering chest.

  “David, if you will, take note of this. See how the creature alternates—perfectly, flawlessly—between two entirely separate breathing mechanisms? It is too much to hope that we can replicate, in the laboratory setting, all of its amphibious functions—lipid secretion, cutaneous drinking. But respiratory emulsions? Tell General Hoyt that I am confident that, given enough time, we can formulate oxygenated substitutes, fabricate some semblance of osmoregulation.”

  “A crock—” Strickland begins, but Fleming’s doing what he does best, taking notes, giving Hoffstetler his full attention. “All this is a crock of—”

  “Imagine, David, if we, too, could breathe as this creature breathes, within atmospheres of incredible pressure and density. Space travel—it becomes so much simpler, does it not? Forget the single orbits toward which the Soviets work. Imagine weeks in orbit. Months. Years! And that’s only the beginning. Radiocarbon dating indicates that this creature could be centuries old. It dazzles the mind.”

  Hoffstetler’s chest, ballooned with confidence, is pinpricked by shame. He’s telling the truth, but it’s arsenic on his tongue. For two billion years, the world knew peace. Only with the invention of gender—specifically males, those tail-fanners, horn-lockers, chest-pounders—did Earth begin its slide toward self-extinction. Perhaps this explains Edwin Hubble’s discovery that all known galaxies are moving away from Earth, as if we are a whole planet of arsenic. Hoffstetler comforts himself that, on this morning, all such self-contempt is worth it. Until Mihalkov can authorize the extraction, Occam’s dogs need bones on which to chew.

  “… of shit.” Strickland manages to complete his sentence. “Crock of shit. You can tell General Hoyt that Dr. Hoffstetler—Bob—sides with the Amazon savages. Treats this thing like some god. Maybe it’s a Russian thing. Write that down, Fleming. Maybe in Russia they got different gods than we do.”

  Hoffstetler’s throat clogs with alarm; he swallows it down, a hard bolus. Richard Strickland wouldn’t be the first colleague to undermine him for his ancestry, but he might be the first with the means to uncover the full truth. Although Hoffstetler has never met General Hoyt, not even seen a photo, he feels he can see the man take shape against F-1�
��s ceiling, a giant puppeteer who enjoys butting two marionettes against each other to see which one deserves sponsorship. Hoffstetler conceals his unease by looking back down at the wheezing creature. Hoffstetler’s career path is marked by spikes of ego, it’s true, but this is one kind of attention he’d never wanted.

  It is also, however, a fight from which he can’t withdraw, not if he wishes the Devonian to live, if he wishes Elisa Esposito to live, if he wishes to live with himself. Beneath the medical lamp, squatting in the dying creature’s coagulating blood, Hoffstetler has the abrupt notion that the Devonian’s melding with the natural world only begins with the Amazon, and that its death might mean the death of emergence, the cessation of progress, the end of everything and all of us.

  “The keys.” Boldly, he holds out a palm to Strickland. “We must return it to the water at once.”

  13

  LATELY HE CAN’T sleep. Until he can, and then it’s into the pitch. Three in the morning, he’s gasping and choking, and Lainie’s rubbing his back like he’s a boy, but he’s not a boy and those can’t be tears on his cheeks, and he repels her hands, and still she goes on shushing, asking if it’s his fingers and won’t he let the doctor examine them again, but it’s not his fingers, and she starts in about how it must be the war, then, she’s read about it in magazines, how war can haunt a man, but what would this woman know about war, how it eats you, but also how you eat it, and what would she know about memory, for it doesn’t seem possible that she, in her life of ironing boards and dirty dishes, has forged a single memory like those scorched onto Strickland’s brain.

  In the dreams, he’s back on the Josefina, skating beneath cutlasses of fog, the blood of the crew drooling from the deck, the only sound the slavering suck of toothless mud. He steers the ship into a grotto as tightly curled as a conch, and a curtain of insects parts, and the being rises, except it’s not Deus Brânquia, it’s General Hoyt, naked and pink and shining like rubber, holding out the same Ka-Bar knife he’d held out to him in Korea and making the same grim bargain.