Guillermo del Toro: The Shape of Water

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.

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.