There is a crash. Down on the street. It’s close, against the building itself. And loud. Metal, glass, plastic, steam. Elisa feels the brunt in her body, a concussion in her lungs, and she knows, she knows she has lingered too long. Giles knows it, too: He reaches across worlds and snatches her wrist. Even the creature knows it: His claws protrude, scratching like a lover’s fingernails across her naked back. They move in concert. Water sloshes over the tub rim. Plants topple from the sink. Cardboard trees swing from the walls. They have been found.
23
IT’S THE RAIN’S fault. Must be two inches deep, suctioning him toward the gutter. Lashing the windshield with dizzying ecliptics that make him misjudge the turn. The movie theater springs into view, its thousands of lights smudged like drizzled yellow paint. He cranks the wheel at the adjacent alley, relying on the ballyhooed power steering, but too late. The bashed-in back end muffs the simplest maneuvers, and his Caddy—his beloved teal Cadillac Coupe de Ville, two-point-three tons and eighteen and a half feet of palatial leisure, zero to sixty in ten-point-seven seconds, AM/FM stereo sound, crisp as a fresh dollar bill—rams into the side of the theater.
Strickland shoves his way out. He tries to shut the door, force of habit, but he’s not used to missing two fingers. He misses the door entirely, his hand slicing through rain. He takes stock of the disaster. Front end smashed, back end smashed. The American dream demolished from both ends. It doesn’t matter. He’s the Jungle-god now, the monkeys ripping apart his stupid human skull. He stomps through ankle-deep puddles. A man with a name tag rushes at him from the box office, gesturing in dismay at the broken bricks strewn across the sidewalk.
In the jungle, this man is just a buzzing carapanã. Strickland lashes out with the Beretta, strikes him in the nose. A pennant of blood flaps before the rain splatters it to the sidewalk. Strickland stalks past the writhing body, hunts beneath the waterlogged glitz of the marquee bulbs. Finally, back in the alley, he spots it. An alcove, a door to the overhead apartments. Elisa, his voiceless vision, his hope of the future, his betrayer, his prey. The Caddy blocks the whole alley. He has to climb over the indented hood. The bifurcated engine spews steam, and Strickland pauses inside it. The heat of the Amazon, the leprous thrill, the warm viper squirm, the sweltering swirl of piranha, all of it picking him down to the hard, clean, sharp, efficient bone.
What’s that he sees at the other end of the alley beneath a moth-flickered light? A white van missing its front bumper, painted with the words MILICENT LAUNDRY. Strickland pushes from the scorching steam and grins, feeling a million hard darts of rain bouncing off his skull.
24
THEY SWAY AT the top of the fire escape, overweight with the creature between them. Elisa wears the quickest of coverings, her ratty pink bathrobe and the first shoes she saw, Julia’s silver-encrusted specials, which she grabbed like talismans, and sure enough she slips, her top half pitching over the guardrail. The creature, draped in a blanket that barely hides him, pulls her from the brink. Below, Elisa sees the Pug. Also below, a car wreck, a goliath green machine wedged between alley walls, blocking the Pug’s only exit path. Directly beneath them, out of view, she hears the knob of the Arcade Apartments being throttled, then the loud whacks of a shoe kicking the door, then a blast so loud all the raindrops freeze in place for one second, red light from the gunpowder flash transforming each drop into the blood of an expiring world.
The man’s footsteps race upstairs. Giles, in turn, pulls Elisa down the fire-escape stairs. Their descent is the opposite of their inchworm climb with the creature a week ago, a madcap scramble, feet slipping and bodies colliding. Elisa can only tuck her head into the creature’s neck and hold on to Giles’s sopping sweater. He leads them onward, fast, undaunted. His new hair is slicked to his head and the paintbrush in his breast pocket bleeds green through his shirt. Her heart, if punctured, would bleed green, too, she thinks.
They reach the alley with broken hearts, but not one broken bone.
“We’ll have to go on foot!” Giles cries over the downpour. “Just a few blocks! We can make it! No discussion! Go, go!”
The alley is its usual minefield of potholes. Elisa has never cared until now, when every other step plunges one of them shin-deep into oily water. There’s no time to unbuckle the silver heels. They progress like damaged pistons, one up, one down. It’s taking them far too long. Finally, they are at the crashed car, blinded by its headlights. Elisa crawls over the scrunched hood, then helps Giles hoist the creature. Giles is last, gathering the fallen blanket, wrapping it back around the creature, and shoving them onward. Elisa throws a look back at Mr. Arzounian, who gawks from the sidewalk, a hand pressed to his broken nose, perhaps believing that the strangest film he ever screened has come to life.
25
STRICKLAND SMELLS DEUS Brânquia. The memory floods back from the Amazon. The Gill-god’s scent of brine and fruit and silt. In Occam’s labs, antiseptic cleaners had blotted it out, and that had been a mistake. How stupid are humans to rob themselves of their most critical defensive sense? He knows who’s to blame. The janitors. Their soap, bleach, and ammonia weren’t wiping away the crud of this world. It was hiding a second world, an ascendant one, unless Strickland moves fast and puts an end to it.
Two apartment doors. He picks the first one. Doesn’t bother with hands or feet. He points the Beretta, fires at the knob. The door is of lousier quality than Delilah Brewster’s. The middle third of it disintegrates into sawdust. Strickland boots away the sharp-edged clingers and shoulders inside, gun raised, as prepared as he was at the bottom of the pile in Yeongdong to murder anything that breathes.
Deus Brânquia, colossal, beatific, resplendent, lords from the center of the cramped, dusty apartment. Strickland was wrong that he was ready. He isn’t. He screams, and falls to his knees, and fires, and screams, and fires, and screams. Bullets pass right through Deus Brânquia. The Gill-god doesn’t react. The gun goes hot in Strickland’s hands. His arms tremble from the discharges. He throws himself back against the wall and covers his face. Deus Brânquia gazes down at him, patient and unchanged.
Strickland wipes rain from his eyes, begins to understand. This Deus Brânquia isn’t real. Not in the sense of a thing that he can kill. It’s a painting. Bigger than life, disorienting in detail. It is Deus Brânquia, somehow, as if painted with Deus Brânquia’s blood and scales upon a rock dredged from Deus Brânquia’s grotto. Strickland angles his head and the picture of the Gill-god seems to lift its arms, offering embrace. Some kind of visual trick. Strickland rejects the memory. It barges in anyway. His chasing of Deus Brânquia to the fateful bayou. His cornering of it in a cave. How it had reached out to Strickland, accepting his violence, anger, and confusion, understanding the obligation Strickland felt to the god he called General Hoyt. Strickland, in reply, had harpooned Deus Brânquia. Until now, he’d never noticed that he’d impaled himself on the harpoon’s other end, binding the two of them forever, wound to wound.
26
ELISA CAN’T DENY that it is a form of miracle. The night she has no choice but to walk in public with the creature at her side is a night so brutally beset by sheeting rain that the streets are empty. Rogue automobiles idle in parking lots, drivers hoping to wait out a storm that they must suspect won’t ever end. Woeful loners huddle under bus-station carapaces or store awnings watching the water rise ever higher over their shoes. The sidewalks are impassable, so Elisa and Giles walk along the highest available ground, the center of the road, the creature supported between them, his gills opened to the rain.
She can barely walk under the soaked housecoat. Giles, though revived in spirit, is still old. They are not going quickly enough. The man in the Arcade Apartments will catch them. Elisa throws a look behind her, waiting to hear the crunch of the ruined Cadillac rolling after them like a tank or see Richard Strickland part curtains of rain, grinning lazily, saying to her, once again: I bet I could make you squawk. Just a little?
If not Strickland
, some good citizen will approach to help, and all will be lost just the same. Elisa looks about frantically, hair spitting rain. One more miracle is all they need. An abandoned car with the keys in the ignition, a maniac bus driver still running his route. Elisa starts signing to Giles: “Too slow.” He isn’t looking. She reaches past the creature, drags the sign across Giles’s arm. He pats her hand, but it’s not a response. He’s trying to get her attention. He pulls to a sudden halt. The creature pitches, and Elisa nearly topples in her silver heels. Stopping is a terrible idea; she glares at Giles. But he is staring at the curb, eyes wide open against the downpour.
To their right, a dark mass gathers in the gutter. Mud, Elisa thinks, coughed up by inundated sewers. But the mass is moving. Swimming through cascades of rain. Scrabbling over wet pavement. Elisa identifies the creatures with a dull shock. Rats, pouring out of the flooded sewers. Far off, a horrified observer screams. The rats tussle past one another, pink tails twitching, spreading across the road like tar, wet pelts winking in the streetlights. Elisa looks left and it’s the same, a black ripple of rodents. She feels Giles clutch at her hand and she holds her breath as the rats encircle them. The madness intensifies: The rats stop en masse, holding a five-foot distance, black eyes staring, noses twitching. Hundreds now, waiting for a signal.
“I confess, my dear,” Giles says, “I do not know what to do.”
Elisa feels the creature stir from beneath the soaked blanket. A single huge, taloned hand emerges, and though his body heaves in a struggle for breath, the hand is steady. It makes a smooth, curling gesture, a benediction, the rain gathering in his scaled palm. The field of soaked rats undulate in a collective shiver, one small body to the next, and a strange scritching noise rises to compete with the beat of rain. It is the scrape, Elisa realizes, of a thousand minuscule legs backpedaling across pavement. She wipes rain from her eyes, but there is no mistaking it.
The rats are parting, creating a path to let them pass.
The creature drops his hand and slumps so heavily that Elisa and Giles have to snap together to keep him from collapsing.
“‘It ain’t a fit night out for man or beast,’” Giles quotes, his voice trembling. “W. C. Fields.” He swallows, nods at the road ahead. “Together, then, we go. Into the fray.”
27
MOLTEN TEARS BLAZE down Strickland’s face, already burned from the Caddy’s steam. He will not become a human again. Changing would be crawling back into the womb, voiding his whole history, confessing to a purposeless life. Impossible, no matter how badly he might want it. The monkeys shriek and he does what they say, forcing himself to look at Deus Brânquia. Mere paint, mere canvas. He stands, finds equilibrium. Yes, that’s right. If he has to, he’ll yank off another two fingers, a whole arm, his own head, anything to see the blood flow and prove which one of them is real.
Strickland passes through the splintered door into a hallway uproarious with rain, and faces the second apartment. Best to save bullets. Six or seven kicks and he’s inside. It’s worse than Lainie’s unpacked boxes. It’s a slovenly hole fit for vermin. That’s all Elisa Esposito is. The second the Negro told him how Elisa had been raised in an orphanage, he should have known. No one has ever, will ever, or should ever want her.
He follows her smell into a cluttered bedroom. The wall over the bed is covered with shoes, many of which, to his shame, he recognizes. His cock responds, and he wants to rip it off the same as he did his fingers. Maybe later, when he comes back to watch the whole building burn. Deus Brânquia’s smell is thick here, too. He hurries to the bathroom, finds a tub varnished in luminous scales. Little air-freshener trees cover every inch of wall. What in the holy hell happened here? The idea he’s beginning to form disgusts him.
Strickland teeters into the main room. His vision spirals. They’re not here. Somehow the asset got away. The Beretta grows heavy in his hand. It pulls him to the right, to the right, in one circle, then another. He’s spinning. The detritus of Elisa’s world, the world he once wanted, swirls into an ugly brown. He glimpses something, has just enough sense left to notice it. He has to jam the gun against a rattletrap table to halt the nauseating rotations.
A day-by-day calendar. Inked across today’s date are the words MIDNIGHT—THE DOCKS. Strickland checks the clock above the table. Not quite twelve. There’s still time. Still time if he can stop spinning, if he can run in a straight line. He snatches a phone from its cradle on the table, dials with a finger that looks long and insectile next to its missing brethren. Fleming picks up. Strickland tries to tell him to divert the containment crew, coming all the way from Occam, to the docks just down the street. He can’t tell if his instruction succeeds. His voice no longer sounds like his own.
“****** ******** ** *** *****! ******* **** *** ******! ***, ***, ***!”
28
THE RATS WERE all she noted at first because they so outnumbered the rest. By the time she sets her foot on the jetty, her dazed eyes have accepted other subterrestrial dwellers among the palpitating legion, predators and prey alongside one another in a cross-species peace that imitates that of Elisa and the creature. Matted squirrels, red-eyed rabbits, ponderous raccoons, sewage-stained foxes, bounding frogs, scampering lizards, glissading snakes, and, squirming beneath them all, a layer of worms, centipedes, and slugs. Insects churn above the rolling rodentia, a black stripe that persists even through the driving rain. On the periphery, overland animals have begun to arrive, too. Dogs, cats, ducks, a single mysterious pig, drawn forth as if to bow before a god that they, in their beastly hearts, had always awaited.
The animals peel from the jetty to let the trio pass. The pier is as short as Elisa remembers, maybe forty feet, though that is plenty. The thirty-foot depth mark has been far surpassed; only the top of the stanchion is visible. The river level is mere inches below the jetty and it bucks in the storm, spilling across the planks. Here it is, then. All elements are aligned. Yet Elisa stands still, rain drilling into her flesh. Her breaths come in scraping jags; she realizes that they resemble the creature’s labored pull of air through his flapping gills. She feels a hand on her wet back.
“Hurry,” Giles whispers.
She cries, but so does the sky; the whole universe sobs, the people and animals and land and water, all weeping for a unity nearly sealed between two divergent worlds, but that could not, in the end, be sustained. Elisa’s arms dangle at her sides and she feels the cool, damp scales of the creature’s hand slide against hers. They are holding hands. For one final time, they are joined. Elisa looks at his beautiful face through the prison bars of rain. Great onyx eyes gaze back, betraying no inclination to take to water, despite how the absence will kill him. He will stand here forever if that’s what she wants.
So she walks. To save his life, she walks. One step, two steps, wading through the sloshing water. Over the storm’s blast, she can make out the chattering retreat of the beasts, as well as the splashing footsteps of Giles, her sole follower. Forty feet doesn’t take long. Elisa finds herself at the end, the very end. The square toes of her silver shoes align to the edge of the jetty. The creature’s feet line up as well, his toe claws jutting over the perimeter. Inches below, black water spumes. Elisa takes a deep, salty breath and turns to him. Gusts of apocalyptic wind catch her pink bathrobe and rip free the belt, and the coat flutters about her naked body like butterfly wings.
He glows green. His light lanterns through the rain, pulsing like a lighthouse. Even now, Elisa’s breath is stolen away. She tries to smile. She nods at the water. The creature surveys the depths; his green glows brighter and she sees his gills yawn in yearning. He looks back at her, liquid coursing from his face. Can he cry? She believes he can, though his sobs do not come from his chest. Thunder rumbles from above: That is his cry. He releases her hand, slowly, gingerly. He signs her name, his favorite word, E-L-I-S-A, then folds his own webbed hand so that he can gesture the index finger from his chest to the water. He then turns the finger in a counterclockwise circle.
The signs, though clumsy, read: “Go alone?”
The broken parts of Elisa’s heart break further. For how long has the creature been the last of his kind? How long has he swum alone? She can’t let herself be deterred. She nods, points at the water. He signs again, a pinching gesture: “No.” She flings her arms downward in frustration. He keeps signing, faster now, he’s learned so much: “I need”—but she doesn’t let him finish, she can’t bear it, she needs, too, but their needs can’t matter, and she pushes him, and his body twists toward the water, nearly falling. His blue eyeshine swirls with green. His shoulders curl inward. He stares down at the water. He turns to face it. She is glad, for she doesn’t want him to see her fingers, which, though kept at her side, act on their own, signing, “Stay, stay, stay, stay, stay.”
“Elisa,” Giles cries. “Elisa!”
29
THE VERÃO, THE dry season, is over. The wet season, with its secret name, its secret purpose, has returned. There is no mistaking it. Rats, lizards, snakes, flies, a world made wholly of living, breathing things. They glint evil eyes, open fanged mouths. They come at him. The monkeys in his head shriek their orders, each of them just as secret. He’s a loyal solider. He is the asset, their asset. He roars and runs, kicking and thrashing against rabid squirrels clinging to his pants, manic rats biting into his calves. They can’t stop him. He, Jungle-god, delivers punishment, cracking brittle skulls beneath his heels, throttling tiny, squealing necks with his hands.
Then he’s on the jetty, tearing off a last rat along with a chunk of his thigh. Waves smash into the walkway, walls of water rising on either side, a military saber arch. The black tunnel focuses him upon its end. There stands Elisa Esposito and Deus Brânquia, their backs to him, gazing down at the river’s vortex. Strickland covers the distance in seconds, his feet sure despite the river’s spray. There’s an old man, too, off to the side. Strickland recognizes him. It’s the driver of the laundry van. It’s all coming together now. Oh, what a pleasure this will be.
The Shape of Water Page 31