The Shape of Water

1

RICHARD STRICKLAND READS the brief from General Hoyt. He’s at eleven thousand feet. The twin-prop taking hits as hard as a boxer’s fists. The last leg of Orlando to Caracas to Bogotá to Pijuayal, the knuckles of the Peru-Colombia-Brazil fist. The brief is indeed brief and punctuated with black redactions. It explains, in staccato army poetry, the legend of a jungle god. The Brazilians call it Deus Brânquia. Hoyt wants Strickland to escort the hired hunters. Help them capture the thing, whatever it is, and haul it to America.

Strickland’s eager to get it done. It’ll be his last mission for General Hoyt. He’s certain of it. The things he did in Korea under Hoyt have shackled him to the general for twelve years. It’s a form of blackmail, their relationship, and Strickland wants washed clean of it. He pulls off this job, the biggest yet, and he’ll have the capital to recuse himself from Hoyt’s service. Then he can travel home to Orlando, to Lainie, to the kids, Timmy and Tammy. He can be the husband and father Hoyt’s dirty work has never permitted him to be. He can be a whole new man. He can be free.

He turns his attention back to the brief. Adopts the callous military mind-set. Those sorry fucks down in South America. It’s not subnormal farming practices to blame for their poverty. Of course not. It’s a Gill-god displeased with their stewardship of the jungle. The brief is smudged because the twin-prop is leaking. He blots it on his pants. US military, it reads, believes Deus Brânquia has properties of significant military application. His job will be to look out for “US interests” and keep the crew, as Hoyt puts it, “motivated.” Strickland knows firsthand Hoyt’s theories on motivation.

Think of Lainie. Better yet, given what he might have to do, don’t think of her.

The pilot’s Portuguese profanities are justified. Landing is a terror. The runway is hacked from pure jungle. Strickland staggers from the plane to find the heat is visible, a floating bruise. A Colombian in a Brooklyn Dodgers T-shirt and Hawaiian shorts waves him toward a pickup. A little girl in the truck bed throws a banana at Strickland’s head, and he’s too nauseated from the flight to react. The Colombian drives him to town, three square blocks of clacking, wood-wheeled fruit carts and shoeless, potbellied children. Strickland wanders the shops and purchases on instinct: a cigarette lighter, bug juice, sealable plastic bags, foot talc. The countertops across which he pushes pesos seep tears from the humidity.

He studied a phrase book on the plane. “Você viu Deus Brânquia?”

Merchants chuckle and flutter their hands over their necks. Strickland hasn’t the faintest fucking clue. These people smell sharp and steely, like freshly slaughtered livestock. He walks away on a blacktop road that is melting beneath his shoes and sees a spiny rat threshing in the black muck. It is dying, and slowly. Its bones will blanch, sink into the tar. It is the nicest road Strickland will see for a year and a half.

2

THE ALARM SHAKES the bedside table. Without opening her eyes, Elisa feels for the clock’s ice-cold stopper. She’d been in a deep, soft, warm dream and wants it back, one more tantalizing minute. But the dream eludes wakeful pursuit; it always does. There was water, dark water—that much she remembers. Tons of it, pressing at her, only she didn’t drown. She breathed inside it better, in fact, than she does here, in waking life, in drafty rooms, in cheap food, in sputtering electricity.

Tubas blare from downstairs and a woman screams. Elisa sighs into her pillow. It’s Friday, and a new movie has opened at the Arcade Cinema Marquee, the around-the-clock theater directly below, and that means new dialogue, sound effects, and music cues she’ll need to integrate into her wake-up rituals if she wishes to ward off continual, heart-stopping frights. Now it’s trumpets; now it’s masses of men hollering. She opens her eyes, first to the 10:30 p.m. of the clock and then to the blades of film-projector light finning through the floorboards, imbuing dust bunnies with Technicolor hues.

She sits up and arches her shoulders against the cold. Why does the air smell like cocoa? The strange scent is joined by an unpleasant noise: a fire engine northeast of Patterson Park. Elisa lowers her feet to the chilled floor and watches the projector light shift and flicker. This new film, at least, is brighter than the last one, a black-and-white picture called Carnival of Souls, and the rich colors pouring across her feet allow her to slide back into dreamy make-believe: She’s got money, plenty of it, and groveling salesmen are slipping onto her feet an array of colorful shoes. You look ravishing, miss. In a pair of shoes like this, why, you’ll conquer the world.

Instead, the world has conquered her. No amount of gewgaws picked up for pennies at garage sales and pinned to the walls can hide the termite-gnawed wood or distract from the bugs that scatter the second she turns on the light. She chooses not to notice; it’s her only hope to get through the night, the following day, the subsequent life. She crosses to the kitchenette, sets the egg timer, drops three eggs into a pot of water, and continues to the bathroom.

Elisa takes baths exclusively. She peels off her flannel as the water pours. Women at work leave behind ladies’ magazines on the cafeteria tables, and countless articles have informed Elisa of the precise inches of her body she should fixate on. But hips and breasts can’t compare to the puffy pink keloid scars on either side of her neck. She leans in until her naked shoulder bumps the glass. Each scar is three inches long and drawn from jugular to larynx. In the distance, the siren advances; she’s lived her whole life in Baltimore, thirty-three years, and can track the fire engine down Broadway. Her neck scars are a road map, too, aren’t they? Places she’s been best not to remember.

Dipping her ears under bathwater amplifies the cinema’s sounds. To die for Chemosh, cries a girl in the movie, is to live forever! Elisa has no idea if she’s heard this right. She slides a sliver of soap between her hands, enjoying the feeling of being wetter than water, so slippery she can cut through liquid like a fish. Impressions of her pleasant dream press against her, heavy as a man’s body. It is abruptly, overwhelmingly erotic; she skates her soapy fingers between her thighs. She’s gone on dates, had sex, all that. But it’s been years. Men meet a woman who’s mute, they take advantage of her. Never once on a date did a man ever try to communicate, not really. They just grabbed, and took, as if she, voiceless as an animal, was an animal. This is better. The man from the dream, hazy as he is, is better.

But the timer, that infernal pip-squeak, ding-a-ling-a-ling-a-lings. Elisa splutters, embarrassed even though she’s alone, and stands, her limbs shiny and draining. She wraps in a bathrobe and pads shivering back to the kitchen, where she kills the stovetop and accepts the clock’s bad news: 11:07 p.m. Where did she lose so much time? She shrugs into a random bra, buttons a random blouse, smooths a random skirt. She’d felt ragingly alive in the dream, but now she’s as inert as the eggs cooling on a plate. There’s a mirror here in the bedroom, too, but she chooses not to look at it, just in case her hunch is true and she’s invisible.

3

ONCE STRICKLAND FINDS the fifty-foot riverboat in its appointed place, he uses his new lighter to burn Hoyt’s brief, SOP. Now the whole thing is black, he thinks, the whole thing is redacted. Like everything down here, the boat offends his military standards. It’s garbage nailed to garbage. The smokestack is patched with hammered tin. The tires atop the gunwales look deflated. A sheet stretched between four poles offers the only shade on the vessel. It’ll be hot. That’s good. Burn away torturous thoughts of Lainie; their cool, clean home; the whisper of the Florida palms. Boil his brain into the kind of fury a mission like this requires.

Dirty brown water squirts between dock slats. Some of the crew are white, some tan, some red-brown. Some are painted and pierced. All lug wet crates across a plank that dramatically dips with the weight. Strickland follows and reaches a hull stenciled Josefina. Small portholes suggest the most perfunctory of lower decks, just big enough for a captain. The very word captain rankles him. Hoyt’s the only captain here, and Strickland is Hoyt’s proxy. He’s in no mood for fatuous ship-steerers who think they’re in charge.

He finds the captain, a bespectacled Mexican with a white beard, white shirt, white pants, and white straw hat signing manifests with excessive flourishes. He shouts “Mr. Strickland!” and Strickland feels like he’s been transported inside one of his son’s Looney Tunes: Meester Streekland! He’d committed the captain’s name to memory somewhere above Haiti: Raúl Romo Zavala Henríquez. It fits, starting off well enough before ballooning into pomposity.

“Look! Escoces and puros cubanos, my friend, all for you.” Henríquez hands over a cigar, fires up one of his own, and pours two glasses. Strickland was trained not to drink on the job but permits Henríquez his toast. “¡To la aventura magnífico!” They drink, and Strickland admits to himself that it feels good. Anything to ignore, just for a while, the looming shadow of General Hoyt, what it might mean for Strickland’s future if he fails to properly “motivate” Henríquez. For the duration of the scotch, the heat of his innards equalizes with that of the jungle.

Henríquez is a man who has spent too much time blowing smoke rings: They are perfect.

“Smoke, drink, enjoy! It is all you will know of luxury for much time. It is good you came no later, Mr. Strickland. Josefina is impatient to depart. Like Amazonia, it waits for no man.” Strickland doesn’t like the implication. He sets down his glass and stares. Henríquez laughs, claps his hands. “Quite right. Men like us, pioneers of the Sertão, it is not necessary we express excitement. Los brasileños honor us with a word: sertanista. It has a fine sound, sí? It stirs the blood?”

Henríquez recounts in dull detail his trip to an outpost of the Instituto de Biologia Maritima. He claims that he has handled—with his own dos manos!—limestone fossils said to resemble descriptions of Deus Brânquia. Scientists date the fossils to the Devonian Period, which, did you know, Meester Streekland, is part of the Paleozoic Era? This, Henríquez intones, is what attracts men like them to Amazonia. Where primitive life yet thrives. Where man might page back the calendar and touch the untouchable.

Strickland holds his question for an hour. “Did you get the charter?”

Henríquez stubs his cigar and frowns out the porthole. There he finds something to grin about and gestures imperiously.

“You see the face tattoos? The nose dowels? These are not Indians like your Tonto. These are índios bravos. Every kilometer of the Amazon, from Negro-Branco to Xingu, they know in their blood. From four different tribes they come. And I have secured them as guides! It is impossible, Mr. Strickland, for our expedition to become lost.”

Strickland repeats: “Did you get the charter?”

Henríquez fans himself with his hat. “Your Americans mailed me mimeographs. Very well. Our expedição científica will follow their wiggly lines for as long as we can. Then, Mr. Strickland, we move on foot! We locate the vestigios, the remains of original tribes. These people have suffered from industry more than you can imagine. The jungle swallows their screams. We, however, will come in peace. We will offer gifts. If Deus Brânquia exists, they will be the ones to tell us where to find it.”

In General Hoyt’s parlance, the captain is motivated. Strickland gives him that. But there are warning signs, too. If Strickland knows anything about untamed territory, it is that it stains you, inside and out. You do not wear white clothing unless you do not know what the hell you are doing.

4

ELISA AVOIDS THE western wall of her bedroom until the last moment, so that the sight might strike with inspiration. It isn’t a big room, so it is not a big wall: eight feet by eight feet, and every inch covered in shoes bought over the years in budget or secondhand stores. Featherlite spectator pumps in cherry and spice. Two-tone Customcraft with toes like garden spades. Champagne satin peep-toe heels, like a pile of fallen wedding chiffon. Three-inch Town & Countrys, brilliant red: wearing them looks like your feet are softly layered with rose petals. Relegated to the margins are the dirtied strapless mules, sling-back sandals, plastic penny loafers, and ugly nubucks of nostalgic value only.

Each shoe hangs upon a tiny nail that she, common renter, had no right to insert. Time is against her, but she takes some of it anyway, carefully selecting Daisy-brand pumps with a blue leather flower on a clear plastic throat, as if the choice is of utmost importance. And it is. The Daisys will be the only insurgency she brings off tonight, and every night. Feet are what connect you to the ground, and when you are poor, none of that ground belongs to you.

She sits on the bed to put them on. It is like a knight shoving his hands into a pair of steel gauntlets. As she wiggles the toe for fit, she lets her eyes stray across the slag heap of old LPs. Most of them were bought used years ago, and nearly all carry memories of joy pressed, right along with the music, into the polymer plastic.

The Voice of Frank Sinatra: the morning she helped a school crossing guard free downy brown chicks from under a sewage grate. Count Basie’s One O’Clock Jump: the day she saw a clobbered baseball, rare as a red-footed falcon, pop out of Memorial Stadium and ricochet off a fire hydrant. Bing Crosby’s Stardust: the afternoon she and Giles saw Stanwyck and MacMurray in Remember the Night at the theater below, and Elisa lay on her bed the rest of the day, dropping the needle on Bing and wondering if she, like Stanwyck’s good-hearted thief, was serving a sentence in this harsh life, and if anyone, like MacMurray, would be waiting for her the day she was freed.

Enough: It’s pointless. No one’s waiting for her and no one ever has, least of all the punch clock at work. She puts on her coat, grabs the plate of eggs. The curious smell of cocoa is undeniable as she exits into a short hallway cluttered with dusty film cans holding who knows what celluloid treasures. To the right, the sole other apartment. She knuckles it twice before entering.

5

WITHIN THE HOUR, they depart. Delight, say the guides, is the dry season; it is called verão. Tragedy is the wet season; no one will even tell Strickland what it’s called. The legacy of the previous wet season are furos, flooded shortcuts across the river’s bends, and Josefina takes them while she can. These oxbow switchbacks transform the Amazon into an animal. It dashes. It hides. It pounces. Henríquez hoots with joy and throttles the engine, and the green, peaty jungle fills with toxic black smoke. Strickland grips the rail, gazes into the water. It is milk-chocolate brown with marshmallow froth. Fifteen-foot elephant grass bristles along the banks like the back of a colossal, wakening bear.

Henríquez likes to hand the controls to the first mate so he can take notes in his logbook. He boasts that he writes for publication and fame. Everyone will know the name of the great explorer Raúl Romo Zavala Henríquez. He caresses the logbook’s leather, likely dreaming of an author photo of appropriate smugness. Strickland smothers his hate, disgust, and fear. All three get in the way. All three give you away. Hoyt taught him that in Korea. Just do your job. The most advantageous feeling is to feel nothing at all.

Monotony, though, might be the jungle’s stealthiest killer. Day after day, Josefina traces an endless ribbon of water beneath expanding spirals of mist. One day Strickland glances upward to find a large black bird like a greasy smear across the blue sky. A vulture. Now that he’s noticed it, he finds it every day, making lazy loops, anticipating his demise. Strickland is well armed, a Stoner M63 assault rifle in the hold and a Model 70 Beretta in his holster, and he itches to shoot the bird down. The bird is Hoyt, watching. The bird is Lainie, saying good-bye. He doesn’t know which.

Sailing is treacherous at night, so the boat anchors. Usually Strickland chooses to stand alone at the bow. Let the crew whisper. Let the índios bravos stare like he’s some kind of American monster. The moon this particular evening is a great hole carved through nightflesh to reveal pale, luminescent bone, and he does not notice Henríquez creep up on him.

“Do you see? The frolicking pink?”

Strickland is furious, not at the captain, but himself. What sort of soldier leaves his back exposed? Plus, he’s caught gazing at the moon. It’s feminine, something Lainie would do while asking him to hold her hand. He shrugs, hoping Henríquez will go away. Instead, the captain gestures with his logbook. Strickland looks into the distance and sees a sinuous leap and silver spray.

“Boto,” Henríquez says. “River dolphin. What do you think? Two meters? Two and a half? Only the males are so pink. We are lucky to see one. Very solitary, the male boto. Keeps to himself.”

Strickland wonders if Henríquez is playing games, mocking his offish proclivities. The captain takes off his straw hat, and his white hair glows in the moonlight.

“Do you know the legend of the boto? I suppose not. They teach you more about guns and bullets, eh? Many of the indigenous believe the pink river dolphin is an encantado, a shape-shifter. On nights like this, he transforms himself into a man of irresistible good looks and walks to the nearest village. You can tell him by the hat he wears to hide his blowhole. In this disguise, he seduces the village’s most beautiful women and leads them back to his home beneath the river. Wait and see. We will find very few women along the river at night, so afraid are they of encantado kidnap. But I think it is a hopeful story. Is not some underwater paradise preferable to a life of poverty and incest and violence?”

“It’s coming closer.” Strickland didn’t mean to say it aloud.

“Ah! Then we should definitely rejoin the others. They say looking into the eyes of an encantado curses you with nightmares until you are driven insane.”

Henríquez pats Strickland on the back like the friend he isn’t and ambles away, whistling. Strickland kneels beside the rail. The dolphin dives like a knitting needle. It probably knows what boats are. It probably wants fish scraps. Strickland unholsters the Beretta and takes aim where he estimates the dolphin will emerge. Fanciful fables don’t deserve to live. Harsh reality, that’s what Hoyt seeks and what Strickland must find if he hopes to get out of here alive. The dolphin’s shape becomes visible beneath the water. Strickland waits. He wants to look it in the eyes. He’ll be the one to deliver nightmares. He’ll be the one to drive the jungle insane.

6

INSIDE THE SECOND apartment, a happy horde greets her: beaming housewives, smirking husbands, ecstatic children, cocksure teenagers. But they’re no realer than the roles being played at the Arcade Cinema. They’re characters in advertisements, and though these original paintings are executed with terrific skill, not a single one is mounted. Easy-to-Remove Waterproof Lashes is being used to block a cold-air crack. Soft-Glo Face Powder props open a drafty door. The Hosiery Woes of 9 Out of 10 Women has been repurposed as a table to hold paint tins for works in progress. This lack of pride depresses Elisa, though all five cats disagree. The strewn canvases make fabulous plateaus atop which they scout for mice.

One cat preens her whiskers against a toupee, spinning it upon a human skull named, for reasons Elisa can’t recall, Andrzej. The artist, Giles Gunderson, hisses and the cat bounds away, mewling of litter-box revenge. Giles leans into his easel and squints through tortoiseshell glasses dappled in paint. A second pair of glasses is propped above his overgrown eyebrows, and a third is perched on the bald peak of his head.

Elisa rises to the toes of her Daisys to look over his shoulder at the painting: a family of disembodied heads hovering over a cupola of red gelatin, the two children jawing like hungry apelings, the father pinching his chin in admiration, and the mother looking satisfied about her rhapsodic brood. Giles is struggling with the father’s lips; Elisa knows that men’s expressions bedevil him. She leans farther and sees him shape his own lips into the smile he’s trying to paint and it’s so adorable that Elisa can’t resist: She swoops down and gives the old man a kiss on the cheek.

He looks up in surprise, and chuckles.

“I didn’t hear you come in! What time is it? Did the sirens wake you? Gird yourself, dearest, for new heights in pathos. The radio says the chocolate factory is on fire. Could anything be more dreadful? I wager children everywhere are tossing in their sleep.”

Giles smiles beneath a fastidious pencil mustache and holds up, in each hand, a paintbrush, one red, one green.

“Tragedy and delight,” he says, “hand in hand.”

Behind Giles, a shoe-box-sized black-and-white television on a wheeled cart pulses static through the guts of a late-night movie. It’s Bojangles tap-dancing backward up a staircase. Elisa knows it will cheer up her friend. Quick, before Bojangles has to slow down for Shirley Temple, Elisa makes the two-fingered sign for “look.”

Giles does, and he claps his hands together, mashing red paint with green. It is beyond belief what Bojangles does, which is why Elisa is ashamed to feel a burst of ego: She could have kept pace with him better than Shirley Temple, if only the world into which she’d been born had been wholly different. She’s always wanted to dance. That’s why all the shoes: They are potential energy, just waiting for use. She squints at the television and counts off the beats, ignoring the competing music from the cinema below, and launches into a tap dance in time with Bojangles. It’s not bad—whenever Bojangles kicks the face of a step, Elisa kicks the nearest thing, Giles’s stool, which makes him laugh.

“You know who else could hotfoot down a staircase? James Cagney! Did we watch Yankee Doodle Dandy? Oh, we should. Cagney’s coming down a staircase. He feels like a million bucks. And he starts flinging his legs around like his ass is on fire. Complete improvisation, and talk about dangerous! But that’s true art, my dear—dangerous.”

Elisa holds out the plate of eggs and signs, “Eat, please.” He grins sadly and takes the plate.

“I believe without you, I would be a starving artist in the least figurative of senses. Wake me when you get home, won’t you? I’ll do the buying: breakfast for me, supper for you.”

Elisa nods but points sternly at the Murphy bed locked in its upright position.

“When viscous fruit molds call to Giles Gunderson, he answers! Then, I promise: dreamland for me.”

He cracks an eggshell against The Hosiery Woes of 9 Out of 10 Women and slides one pair of glasses past two others. His face resumes mimicking the smile he’s trying to paint: that smile is a little bigger now, and Elisa is glad. Only the crashing fanfare of the downstairs movie’s final frame jars her back into action. She knows what happens next: The words The End materialize on the screen, the list of featured players rolls, the houselights rise, and there is no more hiding who you really are.

7

THE NATIVES ARE mutants, unslowed by the swelter. They hike, they climb, they hack. Strickland has never seen so many machetes. They call them falcóns. Call them whatever you want. He’ll take his M63, thank you. The inland trek begins on a penetration road some forgotten hero plowed straight into the rain forest. By 1100 hours, they find the plow strangled by creepers, the seat sprouting philodendron. Fine—he won’t shoot his way through the jungle after all. He takes a machete.

Strickland considers himself strong, but his muscles are liquid by afternoon. The jungle, like the vulture, detects weakness. Vines rip hats from heads. Spiked bamboos stab outstretched limbs. Wasps with finger-length stingers seethe atop papery nests, waiting for a reason to swarm, and everyone who tiptoes past shudders in relief. One man leans against a tree. The bark squishes. It is not bark. The tree is layered with termites, and now they’re thronging up his sleeve, looking to burrow. The guides have no maps but keep pointing, keep pointing, keep pointing.

Weeks pass. Maybe months. Nights are worse than days. They strip off trousers rock-heavy with dried mud, pour liters of sweat from their boots, and lay in mosquito-net hammocks, helpless as babies, listening to the frog croaks and the malarial moan of mosquitoes. How can so much space feel so claustrophobic? He sees Hoyt’s face everywhere, in the burls of tree fungus, the patterns of tracaja turtle shells, the flight formations of blue macaws. Lainie he doesn’t see anywhere. He can barely feel her, like a dying pulse. It alarms him, but there is so much that alarms him, second by second.

Days into the hike, they reach a village of vestigios. A small clearing. Thatched malocas. Animal hides stretched between trees. Henríquez darts about, telling the crew to stow their machetes. Strickland complies, but only to better grip his rifle. Being armed, isn’t that his job? Minutes later, three faces surface from the maloca dark. Strickland shivers, a queasy sensation in such heat. Soon bodies follow the faces, picking their way across the clearing like spiders.

Strickland feels diseased on sight. His rifle twitches. Wipe them out. He’s shocked at the thought. It’s a Hoyt thought. But it’s attractive, isn’t it? Get this mission done, fast. Go home, see if he’s the same man who left Orlando. While Henríquez carefully unveils his gifts of cooking pots and one of the guides tries to establish a shared pidgin, a dozen more vestigios bleed from the shadows to stare at his guns, his machete, his ghostly white skin. He feels flayed and finds no pleasure in the following festivities. Sour wildfowl eggs cooked over a fire. Some half-ass ritual involving the daubing of paint upon the crew’s necks and faces. Strickland waits it out. Henríquez will get around to asking them about Deus Brânquia. He better do it soon. There are only so many insect bites Strickland will accept before he starts doing things his way.

When Henríquez leaves the fire to hang his hammock, Strickland puts himself in the way.

“You gave up.”

“There are other vestigios. We will find them.”

“Months down the river and you’re just going to walk away.”

“They think speaking about Deus Brânquia robs it of its power.”

“That could be a sign it’s close. That they’re protecting it.”

“Oh, you have come to believe?”

“It doesn’t matter what I believe. I’m here to get it and go home.”

“It is not so simple as one protecting the other. The jungle is more, how do you say it? Back and forth? Existing together? These people believe all natural things are connected. To introduce invaders such as we, it is setting a fire. Everything burns.” Henríquez’s eyes trail down to the M63. “You are holding your gun very tightly, Mr. Strickland.”

“I’ve got a family. You want to be out here a whole year? Two years? You think your crew will stick around that long?”

Strickland lets his glare do its work. Henríquez is no longer strong enough to resist such a look. Beneath his filthy white suit, he’s a skeleton. A rash of tick bites on his neck suppurates and bleeds from scratching. Strickland has seen him wander off the trail to throw up out of sight of his men. He grips his logbook to stop his hands from trembling. Strickland wants to hurl the worthless pile of papers to the ground and fill it with lead. Maybe that would keep the captain motivated.

“The young tribesmen,” Henríquez sighs. “Gather them after the elders are asleep. We have ax heads and whetstones to trade. They might still talk.”

Talk they do. The adolescents are greedy for loot and describe Deus Brânquia in such detail that Strickland finds himself convinced. This is no legend like the pink river dolphin. This is a living organism, some sort of fish-man that swims and eats and breathes. The boys, beguiled by Henríquez’s map, tap the Tapajós tributary region in recognition. Deus Brânquias’s seasonal migrations stretch back generations, the guide translates. Strickland says that doesn’t make sense. Are there more than one of them? The guide asks. Long ago, the boys say. Now there is but one. Some of the boys begin to cry. Strickland’s interpretation is that they are worried their greed has put their Gill-god in danger. It has.

8

TWO STORES STAND opposite Elisa’s bus stop. Thousands of times Elisa has stared at them; zero times has she visited either during business hours, sensing that to do so would be akin to shattering a dream. The first is Kosciuszko Electronics. Today’s deal is BIG SCREEN RECTANGULAR COLOR TVS WITH WALNUT GRAINED FINISH, and several models, each with legs like Sputnik’s antenna, are broadcasting the night’s final images. An American flag cedes to a “Seal of Good Practice” screen before signing off, a sight that confirms Elisa’s lateness. She prays for the bus to come. Who did the girl in the movie pray to tonight? Chemosh? Maybe Chemosh works faster than God.

She shifts her eyes to the second store, Julia’s Fine Shoes. She does not know who this Julia is, but tonight she envies her so much she is pinpricked by tears, this bold, independent woman with a business all her own, inevitably beautiful with bouncy hair and a bounce in her step, so confident in her store’s value to the Fells Point neighborhood that instead of turning the lights off at night, she leaves a spotlight upon a single pair of shoes placed upon an ivory column.

The gambit works. My, how it works. On nights when she isn’t running behind, Elisa crosses the road and rests her forehead against the glass to get a better look. These shoes don’t belong in Baltimore; she’s not sure they belong outside of Parisian runways. They are her size, square-toed, and so low slung they’d slip off the foot if not for the snug, inward-leaning heel. They look like hooves in the best way: of unicorns, of nymphs, of sylphs. Every inch of lamé is encrusted with glittering silver, and the inserts are as shiny as mirrors—she can literally see herself in them. The shoes stir in Elisa feelings she thought that the orphanage had beaten out of her as a youth. That she could go places. That she could be something. That all was within the realm of the possible.

Chemosh answers her call: The bus hisses down the hill. The driver, per usual, is too old, too tired, too spiritless to drive safely. The bus makes its hard right on Eastern, hard right on Broadway, and barrels north past the heartbeat of fire-engine lights and the blood spill of the melting chocolate factory. The leaping, licking destruction is, at least, a kind of life, and Elisa contorts herself to watch it, feeling for a minute that she isn’t rumbling through civilization’s scabwork, but rather darting through some vicious, vital jungle.

All of it shrinks from the long, sulfur-lit driveway of Occam Aerospace Research Center. Elisa presses her cold face to the colder window to make out the illuminated clock on the sign: 11:55. Her shoes touch a single stair on her bound from the bus. The changeover from the busy swing shift to the tiny graveyard shift is chaotic, and it allows Elisa to move quickly, gazelling from the bus and deering up the service sidewalk. Beneath the merciless outdoor floodlights—every light at Occam is merciless—her shoes are blue blurs.

It’s a single-floor elevator ride down, but some of the labs are more like hangars and the trip takes half a minute. The car opens into a two-story staging area, where stanchions direct staff along a narrowing path. Ten feet above the floor, in a Plexiglased observation chamber, stands David Fleming. Born with a clipboard instead of a left hand, he lowers it to review his subjects. It was Fleming who interviewed her for her job over a decade ago, and he’s still here, his hyena scrutiny pushing him up the throat of command year after year. Now he runs the whole building yet still can’t help meddling with bottom-rung employees. Over the equal period of time, Elisa has gone where janitors go: nowhere.

Elisa curses her Daisys. They stand out, which is the point, but there’s a double edge. Her fellow graveyarders are up ahead: Antonio, Duane, Lucille, Yolanda, and Zelda, the first three disappearing down the hall while Zelda searches for her punch card as if choosing from a menu. The cards go into the same slots every day; Zelda is stalling for Elisa’s sake, because Yolanda is behind Zelda and if Yolanda gets a shot, she’ll dawdle at the punch clock to make Elisa one crucial minute late.

It shouldn’t be this cutthroat. Zelda is black and fat. Yolanda is Mexican and homely. Antonio is a cross-eyed Dominican. Duane is of mixed race and has no teeth. Lucille is albino. Elisa is mute. To Fleming, they are all the same: unfit for other work and therefore easy to trust. It humiliates Elisa that he might be right. She wishes she could talk so she might stand on the locker-room bench and stir her coworkers with a speech about how they need to look out for one another. But that’s not how Occam is set up. As far as she can tell, it’s not how America is set up, either.

Except Zelda, who has always been protective of Elisa. Zelda is digging through her purse for glasses everyone knows she doesn’t wear, waving off Yolanda’s gripes about the ticking clock. Elisa decides that Zelda’s boldness must be matched by her own. She thinks of Bojangles and darts off, mamboing through yawners, fox-trotting past coat-buttoners. Fleming will spot her speeding blue shoes, and her behavior will be noted upon a checklist; at Occam, anything beyond a tired slump earns suspicion. Yet in the seconds it takes Elisa to reach Zelda, her dancing frees her from all of it. She rises above the underground and floats as if she’d never left that lovely, warm bath.

9

FOOD RUNS OUT southwest of Santarém. The crew is weak, starving, light-headed. Happy, chattering monkeys are everywhere, mocking them. So Strickland starts firing. Monkeys fall like aguaje fruit, and men gasp in horror. This annoys Strickland. He advances against a gut-shot monkey, machete raised. The soft-furred animal curls into a woeful ball, its hands pressed over its sobbing face. It is like a child. Like Timmy or Tammy. This is like slaughtering children. He flashes back to Korea. The children, the women. Is this what he’s become? The surviving monkeys scream in sorrow, and the sound pins into his skull. He turns away and attacks a tree with the machete until it spits white wood.

Other men gather the bodies and drop them in boiling water. Don’t they hear the monkeys screaming? Strickland scoops up moss, plugs his ears with it. It doesn’t help. The screaming, the screaming. Dinner is rubbery gray balls of monkey gristle. He doesn’t deserve to eat but does anyway. The screaming, the screaming.

The wet season, whatever the fuck they call it, sniffs them out. The cloudburst is hot, like offal splatter. Henríquez quits trying to wipe steam from his glasses. He walks blind. He is blind, thinks Strickland. Blind to believe he could head up this expedition. Henríquez, who’s never fought a war. Henríquez, who can’t hear the monkeys’ screams. The screams, Strickland realizes, are just like those of the villagers in Korea. As terrible as these sounds are, they tell Strickland what to do.

There’s no need to incite a coup. Attrition does the job. A candirú spine fish, agitated by driving rain, darts up the first mate’s urethra while he’s pissing into the river. Three men take him to the nearest town and are never seen again. The next day, the Peruvian engineer wakes up spotted with purple punctures. A vampire bat. He and a friend are superstitious. They’re gone. Weeks later, a torn mosquito net leads to one of the índios bravos being bitten to death, blanketed in tracuá ants. Finally, the Mexican bosun, best pal to Henríquez, is struck in the throat by a bright green papagaio viper. Seconds later, blood spurts from every pore of his body. There’s no hope for him. General Hoyt taught Strickland just where to put the Beretta, right at the base of the bosun’s skull, so that death comes quick.

Then they are five. With guides, seven. Henríquez hides belowdecks, filling his logbook with daymare transcripts. His straw hat, once so crisp, has collapsed into its new role as bedpan. Strickland visits and chuckles at the captain’s erratic mumbling.

“Are you motivated?” Strickland asks him. “Are you motivated?”

No one asks Richard Strickland about his motivation. Until now, he didn’t have an answer. Never gave a shit about Deus Brânquia, that’s for sure. Now there’s nothing in the world he wants more. Deus Brânquia has done something to him, changed him in ways he suspects can’t be reversed. He’ll capture it with what’s left of the Josefina crew—aren’t they vestigios now, too? Then it’s home, finally home, for whatever it’s still worth. He masturbates under a torrid rain, above a nest of baby snakes, picturing silent, tidy sex with Lainie. Two dry bodies shifting like blocks of wood on a boundless veldt of tight, white sheets. He’ll make it back there. He will. He’ll do what the monkeys say, and then it will all be over.

10

ELISA USED TO exchange her fancy shoes for sneakers in the locker room. But it’d felt like a chopping, her hand the hatchet. You can’t clean in heels—that was among Fleming’s maxims the day she’d been hired. We can’t have any slipping and falling. No black heels, either, because there are scientific markings on some of the laboratory floors, and we can’t have them marred. Fleming had a thousand such bromides. These days, though, his attention is mostly elsewhere, and the discomfort of Elisa’s heels has become comfort; it keeps her awake, alive to sensation, if barely.

A long-defunct shower room serves as the janitorial closet. Zelda takes her traditional cart, and Elisa hers, which they stock from shelves they’re expected to keep in three-month supply. Then their eight cart wheels, plus eight more for the mop buckets, reverberate down Occam’s long white hallways like a slow-moving train to nowhere.

They have to be professional at all times; some white-coated men linger about the labs until two or three in the morning. Occam scientists are a strange subspecies of male whose jobs drive them to absolute distraction. Fleming teaches his janitors to promptly exit any lab they find occupied, and it happens periodically. When two scientists finally leave together, they squint in disbelief at each other’s watches, chuckling about the hell they’re going to catch from their wives, sighing at how they’d rather crash-land at their girlfriends’ pads.

They don’t censor these comments when they pass Elisa and Zelda. Just as the janitors are trained only to see Occam’s dirt and trash, the scientists are trained only to see the manifestations of their brilliance. Long ago, Elisa had indulged fantasies of workplace romance, of meeting that man who danced through the darks of her dreams. It was the notion of a silly young girl. That’s the thing about being a janitor, or maid, any type of custodian. You glide unseen, like a fish underwater.

11

THE VULTURE CIRCLES no more. Strickland had one of the remaining two índios bravos catch it. No idea how the man did it. He doesn’t really care. He leashes the bird to a spike he drives into Josefina’s stern and eats his dinner of dried piranha in front of the bird. Lots of bones in piranha. He spits them, none close enough for the vulture to peck. Its face is purple, its beak red, its neck bassooned. It displays its wingspan but can do nothing but shuffle.

“Watch you starve now,” he says. “See how you like it.”

Back into the jungle with Henríquez left behind to occupy the boat. Strickland’s terms now. No gifts. Lots of guns. Strickland pursues the natives as if General Hoyt himself is standing there giving the order. He teaches the men military hand signals. They learn fast. Their circle contracts around a village, beautiful synchronicity. Strickland shoots the first villager he sees to make a point. The vestigios flop to the mud, blubber secrets. Their last sighting of Deus Brânquia, its exact trajectory.

The translator tells Strickland that the villagers believe him to be the embodiment of a gringo myth—a corta cabeza, a head cutter. This appeals to Strickland. Not some foreign despoiler like Pizarro or Soto, but something born of the jungle itself. His white skin is piranha. His hair is greasy paca. His teeth are fer-de-lance fangs. His limbs are anacondas. He’s as much a Jungle-god as Deus Brânquia is a Gill-god, and he doesn’t even hear the final order when he gives it, can’t hear shit past the screaming monkeys. But the crew hears it. They sever every head in the village.

He can smell Deus Brânquia. Smells like milky silt from the river bottom. Maracuya fruit. Crusted brine. If only he didn’t have to sleep. Why don’t the índios bravos ever get tired? By moonlight he stalks them and witnesses a ritual. Bark shavings pulverized into a globby pale paste atop a frond. One of them kneels, holds his eyelids open. The other rolls the frond and coaxes from it a single drop of liquid onto each eyeball. The kneeling one pummels the mud with his fists. Strickland is drawn by the suffering. He steps into the open, kneels before the standing man, and holds open his own eyelids. The man hesitates. He calls it buchité, makes gestures of caution. Strickland does not budge. Finally, the man squeezes the frond. A bulb of white buchité fills the world.

The pain is indescribable. Strickland writhes, kicks, howls. But he survives. The burning subsides. He sits up. Wipes the tears. Squints up into the guides’ blank faces. He sees them. More than that, he sees into them. Along the crooked canals of their wrinkles. Deep inside the forest of their hair. The sun rises, and Strickland discovers an Amazon of infinite depth and color. His body sings with vitality. His legs are cashapona trees, sinewed with roots like fifty extra feet. He peels off his clothes. He doesn’t need them. Rain bounces off his naked skin as if from rock.

The Gill-god knows it can’t hold back the Jungle-god, not as the latter guns Josefina so hard hunks of its hull fall into the river. Deus Brânquia backs itself into a boggy bayou. There the boat breaks down. The bilge pump is clotted and the captain’s cabin is filling with water and still Henríquez refuses to move. The Bolivian gets out the tools. The Brazilian hauls forth the harpoon gun, Aqua Lung, and net. The Ecuadorian rolls out a barrel of rotenone, fish pesticide from the jicama vine he claims will force Deus Brânquia to the surface. “Fine,” Strickland says. He stands at the bow, naked, arms outstretched, electric with rain, and calls to it. There is no telling for how long. Days, maybe. Maybe weeks.

Deus Brânquia, at last, rises from the shoal, the blood sun carving the Serengeti, the ancient eye of eclipse, the ocean scalping open the new world, the insatiable glacier, the sea-spray spew, the bacterial bite, the single-cell seethe, the species spit, the rivers the vessels to a heart, the mountain’s hard erection, the sunflower’s swaying thighs, the gray-fur mortification, the pink-flesh fester, the umbilical vine cording us back to the origin. It is all this and more.

The índios bravos drop to their knees, beg forgiveness, cut their own throats with their machetes. The savage, uncontrolled beauty of the creature—Strickland shatters, too. He loses bladder, bowels, stomach. Bible verses from Lainie’s pastor drone from a forgotten, squeaky-clean purgatory. The thing that hath been is that which shall be. There is no new thing under the sun. This century is a blink. Everyone is dead. Only the Gill-god and the Jungle-god live.

Strickland’s crash is brief and happens but once. He will try to forget it ever happened. When he reaches the city of Belém a week later in a Josefina listing forty degrees and half-sunk, he is wearing the translator’s clothes. Knowing too much, the man had to be killed. By now, Henríquez is recovered, clinging to the king post and blinking at the vaporous spring, throat bobbing as he works to swallow the fantasy Strickland has fed him. Henríquez was a good captain. Henríquez caught the creature. Everything went as expected. Henríquez looks to his logbook for corroboration, but he can’t find it. Strickland fed it to the vulture, watched it choke, watched it seizure and die.

He confirms all of this on a phone call to General Hoyt. Strickland survives the call only with the distraction of green hard candies. Generic label, synthetic taste, but the flavor is achingly concentrated, almost voltaic. He cleaned out every market in Belém, harvesting nearly a hundred bags before making the call. The crunch of the candy is loud. Despite thousands of miles of wire, Hoyt’s voice is even louder. As if he’d always been there in the jungle, observing Strickland from behind sticky fronds or veils of mosquitoes.

Strickland can think of nothing that worries him more than lying to General Hoyt, but the actual details of Deus Brânquia’s capture, when he tries to recall them, make no sense. He believes the rotenone was, at some point, poured into the water. He recalls the sizzling effervescence. He remembers the M63, the stock a block of ice against his feverish shoulder. Everything else is a dream. The creature’s balletic gliding through the depths. Its hidden cave. How it waited there for Strickland. How it did not fight. How monkey screams resounded off the rock. How before Strickland aimed the harpoon, the creature reached out to him. Gill-god, Jungle-god. They could be the same. They could be free.

He squeezes his eyes shut, kills the memory. Hoyt either buys his version of the capture or doesn’t care. Hope trembles through Strickland’s hands, rattling the receiver. Send me home, he prays. Even though home is a place he can no longer picture. But General Hoyt isn’t a man who answers prayers. He requests that Strickland see the mission through to the end. Escort the asset to Occam Aerospace Research Center. Keep it safe and secret while the scientists there do their thing. Strickland swallows shards of candy, tastes blood, hears himself comply. One last leg of the journey. That’s all it is. He’ll have to relocate to Baltimore. Maybe it won’t be so bad. Move the family up north, sit behind a tidy desk in a clean, quiet office. It’s a chance, Strickland knows, to start over, if only he can find his way back.