The Shape of Water by Guillermo Del Toro

Author:Guillermo Del Toro
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends

16

FEAR DROPS ONTO Giles’s back like a pterodactyl shot from the sky. Occam is Baltimore’s own Bermuda Triangle, and he’s heard the wild rumors, most of which end with the suspicious death or disappearance of a courageous investigator. He feels a nausea. What Elisa is suggesting is far beyond the abilities of two broke deadbeats living above a crumbling movie theater. The fish-man of Elisa’s delusion must be a poor fellow born with physical deformities—and she wants to break him out?

Elisa is a good person, but her life experience is terrifically limited; she’s incapable of appreciating how deep run the fault lines of America’s Red Scare. Undesirables of all sorts risk their lives and livelihoods on a daily basis, and a homosexual painter? Why, that’s as undesirable as they come! No, he doesn’t have time for this rubbish. He has a meeting with Bernie, an advertisement over which he has slaved.

Giles turns away, knowing the gesture will hurt Elisa. It hurts him, too, to the point that he has trouble sliding his revised canvas into the portfolio case. He faces the wall before speaking, a cowardly tactic that prohibits a mute person’s interruption.

“When I was a boy,” he says, “a carnival pitched its tents out at Herring Run. They had a special exhibit, a whole tent full of natural oddities. One of them was a mermaid. I know because I paid five cents to see it. A sizable fortune for a boy in those days, I assure you. And do you know what this mermaid was? It was dead, first of all. All the paintings of some bare-breasted beauty didn’t square with the old mummified thing in the glass case. What it was was a monkey’s chest and head sewed to a fish tail. I knew that. Anyone could see that. But for years I told myself it’d been a mermaid, because I’d paid my money, hadn’t I? I wanted to believe. People like you and me, we need belief more than others, don’t we? Yet in the cold light of day, what was the mermaid? What was it really? Creative taxidermy. That’s so much of life, Elisa. Things patched together, without meaning, from which we, in our needful minds, create myths to suit us. Does that make sense?”

He buckles the case, the smart clicks the very sound of wisdom. He’s got to get going, after all; perhaps this will be the first of many small jiltings he delivers to Elisa like inoculations. He dons a placating grin and turns back around. His grin freezes solid. Elisa’s cold stare brings the outdoor chill gusting back into the apartment, and he shields himself from the spitting frost. She’s signing, bludgeon-hard and whip-fast, a tone he’s never seen her take, certain repeated symbols engraving themselves onto the air like Fourth of July sparklers. He attempts to look away, but she lunges into his line of sight, her signs like punches, like shaking him by the lapels.

“No,” he says. “We’re not doing it.”

Signs, signs.

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