Guillermo del Toro: The Shape of Water

Now he’s on the ground. Blood gushes from his mouth in a single splash, the upending of a bowl of tomato soup. Cold air lances through his face from left to right, an odd feeling. He’s been shot through the cheek. Mama would be so upset, her little boy disfigured, his nice straight teeth turned to rubble. He tries to raise himself to his knees, thinking that if he shows Mihalkov the damage done, he might leave it at that, but his head weight is all off, and his knees slip in the mud, and he is on his back, the rain coming at his eyes like silver spears.

The Bison’s black form, still holding his umbrella, occludes all light. He looks down with the same void of personality as ever, and aims the revolver at Hoffstetler’s head. The bang, Hoffstetler thinks, is oddly muffled for being the shot that kills him. Stranger yet is how it’s the Bison who recoils. There is a second bang, and the umbrella falls from the Bison’s hand, on top of Hoffstetler, like soil being pitched into an open grave, and it takes a moment for Hoffstetler to dig his way out and prop himself on his elbows, the rain sluicing a hot mix of blood and saliva down his chest.

What he sees is the Bison’s still, fallen body, the red puddle about him being thrashed into pink by the clobbering rain. Hoffstetler’s eyes won’t focus, but he can see shapes, Mihalkov’s slender ovoid shuffling with a haste incongruous with his usual demeanor. He’s pulling his own gun, that’s clear even in abstract, but perhaps spoiled on lobster and caviar, he holds on to vanity too long, choosing not to drop his umbrella, and in those crucial few seconds, Hoffstetler’s savior, whoever he is, rushes forward, his own weapon still smoking from the Bison’s murder, and he’s no amateur, either. The pistol is held with two hands, steady in the storm, and a single shot is all it takes.

Mihalkov is thrown against the car. Now he drops his umbrella. His gun, too. A circle of red blooms on his shirt, a second boutonniere. He dies instantly and is instantly forgotten, just as he predicted he would be. Hoffstetler squints through the cloudburst to watch the gunman kneel beside the body to make sure it’s dead, then bolt upright and move, with spiderlike speed, toward Hoffstetler. It is the rain that obscures the man’s identity until he looms over Hoffstetler. It is also, Hoffstetler supposes, disbelief.

“Strickland?” His voice is mushy, lispy. “Oh, thank you, thank you.”

Richard Strickland reaches down, loops the thumb of his free hand into the hole in Hoffstetler’s cheek, and pulls. Pulls so hard Hoffstetler’s whole body is dragged through the mud. Pain arrives belatedly, full-fleshed and muscular from under a blanket of shock, and Hoffstetler screams, feeling the jagged rip of his cheek, and screams again, and keeps screaming, until the mud being plowed by his shoulder fills his eyes and his mouth and he is blind, and mute, and then nothing at all.

RECLAIMING WAKEFULNESS IS leaping into a nightmare. A thunderous roar subsumes everything. Hoffstetler’s eyes whirl upward, expecting needles of rain, but there is a tin roof, hence the roar. He’s on a concrete porch, some sort of outbuilding. He sees thick plaits of rain pound crumbled brick and oxidized steel. He’s still in the industrial park. A shadow lurches across his vision. He blinks liquid from his eyes—rain, blood? It’s Strickland, pacing the length of concrete. He’s gripping something small, a medicine bottle. He upends it over an open mouth, but it’s empty. He curses, whips the bottle into the rain, stares down at Hoffstetler.

“You’re awake,” Strickland grunts. “Good. I’ve got things to do.”

He squats down. Instead of that orange cattle prod Strickland brings everywhere, he’s got a gun, and he pulls the slide and noses it into Hoffstetler’s right palm. The barrel is cold and wet, a puppy’s nose, Hoffstetler thinks.

“Strickland.” As soon as Hoffstetler says it, his mangled cheek, all those severed nerves, scream to life. “ Richard . It hurts. The hospital, please—”

“What’s your name?”

He’s been lying for two decades, it’s instinct: “Bob Hoffstetler. You know me.”

The gun discharges. A bullet into cement sounds surprisingly rubbery, a resounding thwap . Hoffstetler’s hand feels swatted. He lifts it. There is a tidy, singed hole through the center of the palm. His instinct is to contract the fingers to see if they still work, for there are thousands of book pages still to flip, scores of analyses yet to write, but instead he revolves it. The exit wound is a ragged starburst serrated by flaps of skin. Blood vessels drape from the hole. He knows it is about to bleed; he presses it against his chest.

Strickland pins Hoffstetler’s other palm with the gun.

“Your real name, Bob.”

“Dmitri. Dmitri Hoffstetler. Please, Richard, please.”

“All right, Dmitri. Now give me the name and ranks of the strike team.”

“The strike team? I don’t know what—”

The gun blasts again, and Hoffstetler screams. He brings his left hand into his chest without looking at it, though he can’t ignore the puff of smoke exhaling from the burnt flesh. His hands, what are left of them, clasp on to each other, while actions Hoffstetler might never again make race through his head: feed himself, bathe himself, clean himself after using the toilet. He’s sobbing now, his tears funneling into the hole in his cheek and gathering salty on his tongue.

“Now look, Dmitri,” Strickland says. “Those guys who came to pick you up, someone’s going to notice they’re gone. Things are moving fast now. There’s nothing I can do about that. So I’m going to ask again.”

Hoffstetler feels the hard barrel of the gun screw into his kneecap.

“No, no, please, no, Richard, please, please.”

“Names and ranks. Of the strike team that took the asset.”

Through the red eruptions of pain, Hoffstetler understands. Strickland believes the Soviets stole the Devonian. Not a single infiltrator like Dr. Hoffstetler, either, but some penetration unit toting high-tech tools as they wriggled through air ducts to collar their quarry. A strange sound escapes Hoffstetler’s throat. It must be a bleat of pain, he thinks, but then another one escapes and he recognizes it as a laugh. It’s funny what Strickland thinks. And here, as the wick of his life burns toward bottom, he can’t think of any more surprising, and welcome, sound on which to end. He drops his jaw and lets the laughter peal, bubbling out blood, slushing out pebbles of tooth.

Strickland’s face goes red. He shoots, and Hoffstetler screams, and he can see from the bottom of his vision the bottom half of his leg sliding across concrete, but his scream mutates right back into laughter, and he’s so proud, and Strickland’s lips peel back and more gunshots follow, his other knee, both elbows, his shoulders, pain detonating until it is not pain at all, just a pure, raw state of being that amplifies the fermata he’s chosen as his final one: laughter. The jolly sound rings from his mouth, the hole in his cheek, the new holes all over his body. Strickland has stood up, is unloading his clip into Hoffstetler’s stomach.

“Names! Ranks! Names! Ranks!”

“Ranks?” Hoffstetler laughs. “Janitors.”

Hoffstetler feels a shot of regret like one more bullet—perhaps he shouldn’t have said that—but he’s too light-headed to think. The stew of his guts runs down the sides of his torso, steam rising from his entrails to curl before Strickland, little fists of protest. He is twirling backward and downward, moving rapidly after a lifetime rooted behind lecterns and desks, and still, stubbornly, he’s a scholar till the end, the words of his favorite philosopher, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin—who but a career academic has a favorite philosopher?—bleeding through the haze. We are one, after all, you and I. Together we suffer, together exist, and forever will recreate each other. Yes, that’s it! A lifetime spent alone doesn’t matter, for he’s not alone here at the end. He is with you, and you, and you, and he wouldn’t have noticed any of it if not for the Devonian. Here is the ultimate emergence, quickened by sacrifice: finding God, that mischievous imp, hiding where we least expected, not in a church, not on a slab, but inside us, right there next to our hearts.