“Strickland! It got free! I went inside to ready it, and it dragged me into the pool!”
“You expect me to believe—”
Hoffstetler grabs Strickland’s coat. Strickland recoils, wants to jam him with the Howdy-do, but it’s so sudden, so bewildering.
“It’s not me, Richard! Somebody broke in! Got it out!”
“You’re the dirty Red who came into my—”
“If it was me, would I be telling you this? We need to shut down the whole facility!”
Hoffstetler’s face is so close their noses touch. Strickland glares, trying to make out the scientist’s eyes. Truth is in the eyes. He’s seen it in every man he’s threatened. Every man he’s killed. If only he could see it.
Then, a little favor: All the lights in the universe blast back to life.
47
GOING DARK HAD been a soft thing, a closing of one’s eyes for sleep. When Occam’s lights return, it’s at stadium wattage, tungsten exploding from windows like backdraft fire, parking-lot lights pounding down like lava. The guard shields his eyes and spins, the building itself having become the ambusher. Giles has one leg out of the driver’s door and hesitates, blinded, too, but somehow, between his pressed eyelids, he looks in the right direction and sees the double doors open and Elisa emerge with a cart, just as planned, except with a large black woman helping her push.
Giles knows he is not a man of action. It has hurt him, again and again. It has taken the life he should have had. Not today. The guard is still staring at the building when Giles has an idea, one he doesn’t allow to reach the scale upon which notions so consequential are weighed. He grabs the door with both hands and slams it into the guard with all of his strength. The van sits high and the sound of the metal door against the man’s skull is awful, and so is the bag-of-bones rattle of the body hitting the pavement, but it is done, the first violent act of his life, and though it does not make him feel good, he knows there is plenty of violence to share, especially here.
48
THE CART DESCENDS the ramp by itself, crashing into the back of the van. Elisa sprints after it while Zelda shuts the ramp doors to camouflage their exit. Elisa pulls open one of the van doors and starts pitching wet towels inside, just enough to uncover the creature. He is curled like a fetus, one of his great hands shielding his darting eyes from the brilliant overhead floods. She reaches in, takes him under the arm, tries to lift. He comes with her, but only a little. His gills are ballooning, his posture is wracked, he can barely stand.
Zelda is there—again, her friend is there. She takes the creature’s other arm, her face scrunching in revulsion until she feels the cool, chain-mail texture of his body. She touches him for no more than ten seconds as they roll him into the back of the van, but in that time, Elisa glimpses the stunned comprehension on Zelda’s face. This is no mere creature, no overgrown lizard. This is more like a man, but greater in every aspect, a higher grade of creature than they are, stranded in a cold, arid desert he was never meant to enter.
“Go,” Zelda breathes. “Go!”
There is no time for grateful farewells. Elisa points at the security camera, signs “They can’t see you,” and scoots Zelda toward the doors, for they haven’t seen her yet, she can still get back inside and plead ignorance. But Zelda is still standing there, slack and astonished, when Elisa slams the van’s doors and the vehicle lurches from the dock, tires squealing louder than the laundry cart’s bad wheel.
49
STRICKLAND RUNS. HE loathes it. Running in an office is the ultimate proof he’s lost control. But there’s no choice. He hurtles through the lobby, thumping people to the floor, and scrambles up the utility stairs and through the lobby, exploding out the front door and stopping to get his bearings. Two MPs are right behind Strickland, and Fleming behind them. Outside, morning has fully arrived. Scientists are treading up the walk for work, yawning. Secretaries pause to adjust their lipstick in compact mirrors. Everything is normal.
That sound, though. A vehicle, too close to be going that fast. Strickland springs to the right, across the lawn, rounding the corner of the building. There it is, like a giant snowball plowing down Everest, a white laundry van careening toward him.
“Shoot it!” Strickland cries, but the MPs are still catching up, and there’s nothing a man with a cattle prod can do to a speeding behemoth. The checkpoint guard scrambles out of the way. Still the van swerves, an unexpected clue to the driver’s unwillingness to cause casualties. There is only one vehicle in that part of the lot, and the van swipes it. The car’s rear end crumples. It is a long, gorgeous teal Cadillac Coupe de Ville.
“No.” Strickland’s chest hurts like he’s the object being struck. He hears his voice spiral upward, girl-pitched. “No, no, no!”
50
THE VAN JOLTS, the tires spin. Giles feels the punch of Elisa’s body hitting the back of his seat. Burnt rubber wafts up. They’re stopped. Feet from freedom, they’re stuck. He looks over the Pug’s hood and sees the van’s front bumper locked with the bright green Caddy’s. He hears a broken scream—he thinks it’s a woman—but it’s a hulk of a man barreling toward the van in a silverback lope, holding some sort of bat.
Giles curses, cranks the van into reverse, pounds the gas. The van slugs backward a yard. Metal screeches. Broken glass pops like fireworks. The running man is fast; he’s halved the distance. Giles switches the gear to forward and stomps the pedal. Chrome crunches and the pinched bumpers whine. He looks up and sees armed men with raised guns calling for the running man to get out of the way so they can fire. The man, though, is crazed. He jumps a hedge, shouting nonsense. Giles rolls up his window, a pitiful defense.
And it’s good he does. The man’s bat strikes the window. A crack halves the glass. Giles cries out, twists the steering wheel right and guns the engine, then twists it left and guns it again. The man strikes the window again, creating a spiderweb. Then again and it shatters, hard little pellets raining against Giles’s face. It is then that the van’s bumper tears off and the man has to leap back to avoid being sideswiped. There are sparks as the Pug shears through the back of the Caddy, spitting green paint, a lot of it, multiple coats, it seems to Giles.
51
HIS GILLS OPEN wide, revealing dizzying layers of red lace, and hold there, the filaments fluttering like centipede legs in search of solid ground. His gasps are short, growing further apart. His arm rises from the wet laundry, draped in it like a child playing ghost, and his hand curls and continues upward, like the first part of him going to heaven.
Elisa grabs his wrist, brings it back to earth. It struggles back outward, and suddenly she sees it: the sign for water. She’s been packing him in towels, deaf to bottles clanging all over the floor. They bank and spin with Giles’s turns, but she snatches one, screws off the lid, and douses the creature’s face, eyes, gills. He arches his back, leans into it. It seeps into his body through grooves that have gone a miserable brown, the liquid vanishing seconds after it hits, and still he’s dry, still he’s gasping.
“Is it all right? Is it alive?” Giles hollers.
Elisa kicks the wall with both feet, the closest she can get to signing “faster.”
“It’s morning! It’s traffic! I’m doing my best!”
She kicks again. Hoffstetler had said thirty minutes was all the creature could take and fifteen must have passed by now, maybe twenty; time is lost. Her attention knifes back to the creature. He’s making a choking noise, and Elisa, who knows only human consoling techniques—a pathetic limitation, she now realizes—slides an arm beneath him and hitches him up to a sitting position, while her other hand corrals another bottle and starts pouring it over his body.
He absorbs, he gulps; his freshly watered eyes, now at window level, go from gold to dandelion yellow; even nearly suffocated, he appears amazed at the world unfolding outside the van. Elisa looks, too, wondering if the city possesses a shred of a jungle’s magic. Gray scaffolding of unlit neon lights daubed with
orange sunlight. The surging yellow whale of a trolley. A Coca-Cola billboard of a man and woman, nestled as closely as Elisa and the creature, the woman holding a soda bottle as Elisa holds the next bottle of water. She thinks, just for a moment, that Baltimore isn’t the futile anthill she’s forced herself to accept, but its own tangle of tales, morass of myths, forest of fairies.
The Pug, swooping behind the Arcade, loses control, and though Giles brakes, the left front of the van, no longer protected by a bumper, smashes into the trash bins. No one has time to care. When Giles throws open the back doors, Elisa is ready, the creature draped in a wet lab coat and hooded in a wet sheet. The climb up the fire escape is a blundering, gawky, graceless slapstick, the sickening opposite of Shirley Temple and Bojangles.
Somehow they make it to the top, and also down the hall, and also through Elisa’s door, and Giles lets go at the bathroom threshold because of the narrow clearance, and it’s Elisa alone who has to guide the creature down, but they’re both weak now and it’s more like a fall, his useless legs buckling against the tub and dropping back-first into the waiting water. The splash hits Elisa’s face like the van’s bottled water had hit the creature’s face: ablution, baptism. He dwarfs the apartment’s tub, but so would most men, Elisa tells herself, and she cranks the hot-water knob because a full night has cooled what’s there. The pipes squeal and shudder, then water unloads right next to the creature’s head. The surface rises fast, covers his face. Elisa waits for bubbles of breath. There is nothing. She stirs the water with her hand to match the heat of F-1’s pool.
“Who was that woman helping you?” Giles pants from behind. “Do you employ a whole nest of saboteurs?”
Yes, the pool: She thinks of how she slipped beneath the water, how her mouth flooded with salt. She reaches into her pocket, withdraws Hoffstetler’s bottle of saline pills. Another object comes out, clatters to the floor.
“Good Lord,” Giles says. “Is that a syringe?”
One pill every three days, is that what Hoffstetler had said? Or three pills every one? The creature is a sunken rock; there is no time to ponder. She shakes three pills directly into the water. They fizz, and she stirs again with her hand, slopping the salt toward the creature’s face and neck. Then, terribly, there is nothing more to do. She takes the creature’s hand. That massive, webbed thing, resplendent with rainbowed scales, striated with delicate spirals. She adds her other hand, folding his clawed fingers until she can squeeze their joint fist as a surgeon might squeeze a heart.
Giles’s shadow falls over them.
“You were right,” he breathes. “He’s beautiful.”
The creature’s hand tightens around hers, swallowing it whole as a snake does a rodent. A death spasm, Elisa thinks with a jagging sob, until the bathwater begins to glow, a flicker of cobalt at first, a trick of the eye, then blossoming, then burning sapphire blue, transforming the cramped, dank, windowless chamber into an endless aquarium inside which they swim, too, effervescent, ethereal, and alive.
TROUBLE YOUR HEART NO MORE
1
ON A TRAY, on his desk, are the blistered remains of a gadget. Strickland’s been staring at it for hours. A section of metal pipe peeled open by some kind of explosion. A red blotch that looks like deep-fried plastic. Black, crusted veins that probably used to be wiring. Truth is, he doesn’t have the first fucking clue. He’s not even really trying. He’s just staring.
Whatever sort of bomb it was, it melted everything. That’s his life now, isn’t it? Melted. His efforts to be a dad. The cardboard notions he’d had of domestic tranquility. Even his body. He glances at the bandages. He hasn’t changed them for days. They’re gray, damp. This is what happens to corpses in caskets. They melt to black sludge. And it won’t stop at his fingers. He feels the decay worming up the arteries of his arm. Tendrils of it already gluing to his heart. The Amazon was replete with such rank fecundity. There might be no stopping it.
A knock on his door. He’s been staring at the tray so long that it aches to roll his eyeballs. It’s Fleming. Strickland dimly recalls requesting this visit. Fleming had gone home to sleep. To sleep. After this level of disaster? Strickland never considered leaving Occam. He convinced himself it had nothing to do with how, if he wanted to go home, he’d first have to assess the damage to the Caddy. The thought is disrupted by Fleming clearing his throat. The gray light of the security monitors is like an X-ray. Strickland can see Fleming’s flabby organs. His twiggy bones. The pulsing electrodes of his fear.
“You making any progress with that?” Fleming asks.
Strickland doesn’t glare. To glare requires an ounce of respect. Over the top of the clipboard behind which Fleming hides, Strickland can see a neck bruise from where he throttled Fleming during the blackout. The fucker’s as tender as a fruit.
Fleming clears his throat again, consults his clipboard. “We have a lot of paint chips to work with. That should tell us a lot. Make, model. Best of all, we’ve got the whole front bumper. We can put out search parties right away to look for a white van without a bumper. It’d be easier if we could involve local police, but I understand why you don’t want to do that. Right now we’ve got the whole lot roped off so we can measure tire treads.”
“Tire treads,” Strickland repeats. “Paint chips.”
Fleming swallows. “We’ve also got surveillance tapes.”
“Except from the camera that matters. Do I have that right?”
“We’re still combing the footage.”
“And not a single eyewitness who can tell us anything useful.”
“We’ve really only just begun interviews.”
Strickland drops his gaze back to the tray. Food belongs on a tray. He imagines eating the gadget. His teeth cleaving against the metal bits. The swallowed pieces sitting heavy and strong in his stomach. He could become the bomb. The question would be where he chose to place himself when he exploded.
“If you don’t mind me saying so,” Fleming continues, “I believe we’re dealing with highly trained elites here. Well financed and well equipped. Infiltration took less than ten minutes. My opinion, Mr. Strickland, is that this is the work of Red Army Special Forces.”
Strickland doesn’t respond. Russian penetration? Could be. First satellite, first animal, and first man in space. Next to those feats, the theft of the century is nothing. Plus, there’s Hoffstetler. Except Strickland can’t find a feather of proof Hoffstetler did anything wrong last night. The whole attack, it doesn’t feel Russian. It’s too sloppy. The van he assaulted with the Howdy-do was a piece of junk. The driver some hysterical old man. Strickland needs time to think. That’s why he called Fleming here. Now he remembers. He sits up straight. Grabs his painkillers. Tosses a few into his mouth and chews.
“What I wanted to say,” he declares, “what I want to make absolutely clear, is that we confine knowledge of this situation to Occam until I give the say-so. Give me a chance to contain it. No one needs to know about this, not yet, you understand?”
“Except General Hoyt?” Fleming asks.
The rot threaded up Strickland’s arm freezes like sap in winter.
“Except…” Strickland can’t finish.
“I…” Fleming, needing a shield, brings the clipboard to his chest. “I called the general’s office. Right away. I thought—”
The last of his melt is rapid. Strickland’s ears seal off with his own liquefied flesh. The job he’d nearly completed at Occam, everything he’d achieved in the Amazon. All of it had been plenty enough to bargain away the binds roping him to Hoyt. What is it all worth now? Hoyt knows he’s failed him. The career tower Strickland has climbed at Hoyt’s goading is revealed to be a guillotine. Strickland falls from it in two halves and lands in something soft. It’s the slime of a rice paddy. He’s choked by the stench of excrement fertilizer. Deafened by the idiot chortle of passing oxcarts. Oh, God, God, God. He’s back in Korea, where it all began.
Korea, where Hoyt’s job was to guide the southwa
rd evacuation of tens of thousands of Koreans, with Strickland as his personal deputy. It was in Yeongdong, where General MacArthur ordered their group to make a stand, that Hoyt collared Strickland, pointed at a truck, and told him to drive. Drive he did, through steaming, silver rain, keeping pace with herons on their lazy, flapping hops from one paddy to the next.
They arrived at a former gold mine halfway filled with squalid clothes. Strickland figured he was to burn them, same as they’d burned so many villages so that the People’s Army of the North couldn’t nab the spoils. Only when Strickland got closer did he see they weren’t clothes. They were bodies. Fifty of them, maybe a hundred. The inside of the mine was pocked with bullet holes. It was the worst of army rumors come true, a massacre of Korean innocents. Hoyt smiled, took gentle hold of Strickland’s rain-slicked neck, and caressed it with his thumb.
“* **** ** * *****,” he said.
When Strickland thinks back on it, Hoyt’s words are but more shrieked redactions. The gist, though, he recalls well enough. A scout had brought word to Hoyt that not all of those dispatched inside of this mine were dead. That was bad for Hoyt. Bad for America. If survivors crawled out and told their story, the US would have a real mess on its hands, wouldn’t it?
Never, ever would Strickland let himself blubber in front of Hoyt. He unslung his rifle. It felt like he was tearing off his own arm. But Hoyt held a finger to his lips, then waved it around in the rain. It was just the two of them out here. Not too wise to draw attention. Hoyt drew from his belt a black-bladed Ka-Bar knife. He held it out to Strickland and winked.
The leather handle squished like putrefied meat in the muggy rain. The bodies were muggy, too, piled five or six deep, the limbs bent and raveled. He rolled a woman out of the way. Brains spilled from a hole in her head. He dug a man from the heap. Intestines spooled out, bright blue. Ten bodies, twenty, thirty. He burrowed into the cold carnage, like tunneling into a corpse’s womb. He was lost, slippery and stinking. Most were dead. But some were, in fact, alive, whispering, maybe begging, probably praying. He cut every throat he found, just to be safe. No one was alive here, he told himself, not even Richard Strickland.
The Shape of Water Page 23