Guillermo del Toro: The Shape of Water

WHAT WAS ZELDA doing in the seconds before her front door was kicked in? Before the wood securing the dead bolt disintegrated into daggers and left the chain lock dangling like a mugger-torn necklace? She thinks she was cooking. She often does before heading to work, stocking Brewster with a day’s worth of food. She sniffs bacon, butter, brussels sprouts. There’s music, too, a deep-throated crooner. She must have been listening to it. She wonders if she’d been enjoying herself, if she’d been happy. It seems vital to remember these details, for she’s certain they will be her last.

Until now, the most surreal sight of Zelda’s life was the asset from F-1 staring back at her from Elisa’s laundry cart. It had been so incongruous, that fearsome, brilliant beast situated inside a gray, driveling bed of soiled rags. Even that vision, though, pales against this: Richard Strickland, that horrid man from work, bug-eyed, drenched with rain, spattered with blood, and holding a gun in her living room.

Brewster where he always is when work is scarce, in the Barcalounger at full recline, socked feet propped on the leg rest, a can of beer in one loose fist. Strickland blocks the TV, and Brewster scrutinizes him in mild perturbation, as if the ghoul had appeared behind Walter Cronkite’s news desk instead of inside their duplex. Strickland snorts and spits a flume of spit and rain and blood. He steps over it, smirching the clean carpet with the flat pancakes of mud adhered to the bottom of his shoes.

Zelda doesn’t need to ask why any of this is happening. She lifts her hands before her. She finds she is holding a spatula.

“Nice home you have here.” Strickland’s voice is garbled.

“Mr. Strickland,” she pleads, “we didn’t mean any harm, I swear.”

He frowns at the walls, and for an instant Zelda can see her cheerful decorations through the man’s ferocious red eyes: mendacious trifles, mawkish mementos, idiotic knickknacks commemorating a happy life that could have never been all that happy. Strickland flicks his wrist lazily. The gun barrel smashes the glass of a framed photograph, a lightning-shaped crack splitting the face of her mother.

“Where’d you put it?” He staggers drunkenly. “Basement?”

“We don’t have a basement, Mr. Strickland. I swear.”

He slides the gun along a shelf of porcelain figurines. One at a time they drop, shattering on the floor. Zelda flinches with each one: the little accordion boy, the big-eyed deer, the Happy New Year angel, the Persian cat. Just baubles, she tells herself, without real significance, except it’s a lie, they are significant, they are three decades of evidence that she has, on occasion, saved enough money to purchase herself something frivolous, something that simply looked nice, exceptions to the hard rules of knotty steaks, generic cereal, government cheese.

Strickland swivels, his muddy heel grinding porcelain, and points the pistol at her like an accusing finger.

“ Sir , Mrs. Brewster. You got a real problem with names.”

“Brewster,” says Brewster. Hearing his name stirs him. “That’s me.”

Strickland doesn’t look at him but waggles his head. “Oh. Right. Zelda Fuller. Zelda D. Fuller. Old Delilah.” He lopes from the wall, halving the distance to Zelda so quickly she drops the spatula. “You never let me finish the story.” He swings his gun arm, obliterating a ceramic vase once belonging to Zelda’s grandmother. “Samson, as I remember it, betrayed by Delilah, blinded and tortured by the Philistines, at the very last second is saved. God saves him.” He punches the gun through cabinet glass, pulverizing her mother’s good china. “Why’s he saved? Because he’s a good man, Delilah. A man of principle. A man who, down to his last little fucking ounce of energy, is trying to do the right thing.”

He backhands the stovetop beside Zelda, flipping a pan and shooting bacon grease atop Zelda’s sign language handbook. The grease sizzles and burns holes through the pages. Zelda feels a blast of indignation. She darts her eyes over her spoiled home, the path of crude destruction doing its best to destroy the memories of every struggle she has overcome. Strickland’s a couple of feet away. The gun might swipe her face next. It doesn’t matter: She lifts her chin as high as she can. She will not be frightened. She will not give up her friend.

Strickland leers at her. A white froth that looks like upchucked aspirin has gathered in the corners of his lips. Slowly, he displays his left hand. Despite the stupefying terror, Zelda recoils from the repellent sight. She hasn’t seen these fingers since she and Elisa had found them on the lab floor. Now the bandage is gone and the operation is exposed as a failure. The fingers are the glossy black of rotten bananas, inflated to the point of rupture.

“God gives Samson back all his strength,” Strickland says. “Gives him back all his power. So that Samson can bring ruin raining down on all the Philistines. He takes hold of the columns of the temple. Like so.”

Strickland stashes the gun in his armpit so that he can pinch the two dead fingers.

“And then? He breaks them.”

Strickland tears off the fingers. They detach as if perforated, with a series of light pops—just like snapping beans, Zelda thinks before screaming. She hears a thud, Brewster dropping his beer, and a zing, the Barcalounger springing to starting position. Strickland’s eyebrows lift in surprise at the brown fluid that geysers two inches from the finger holes before dribbling down his hand like slopped gravy. He considers the two black sausages he’s still holding, and drops them on the kitchen floor. From one of the fingers pops a wedding band.

“It’s Elisa,” Brewster blurts. “Elisa what’s-her-name. The mute. She’s the one that has it.”

The only sounds are the rustle of rain coming through the open door, the yammer of the television, and the soft glug of beer emptying onto the carpet. Strickland turns. Zelda reaches for the stove to keep herself upright, then shakes her head at her husband.

“Brewster, don’t—”

“She lives over a movie theater,” he continues. “That’s what Zelda says. The Arcade. Just a few blocks north of the river. Easy trip from here. Five minutes, I bet.”

The weight of the gun appears to double. Zelda watches it hitch downward until it points at the floor.

“Elisa?” Strickland whispers. “Elisa did this?”

He stares at Zelda, face drawn in shocked betrayal, arms shaking slightly as if in search of a hug to keep him aloft. Zelda doesn’t know what to say or do, and so makes no sound or move. Strickland’s face falls. He pouts at the finger smudged across the linoleum, as if longing to have it back. He breathes for a minute, shallow at first, then more deeply, before raising his head and squaring his shoulders. Military bearing, Zelda guesses, is all this wrecked man has left.

He plods across the carpet, shoes dragging through the mud. He lifts the telephone as if it, too, is of cinder block weight, and dials as if through clay. Zelda stares at Brewster. Brewster stares at Strickland. Zelda hears the pip-squeak report of a man picking up on the other end.

“Fleming.” Strickland’s voice is so lifeless that Zelda shudders. “I was… I was wrong. It’s the other one. Elisa Esposito. She’s got the asset above the Arcade. Yes, the movie theater. Reroute the containment unit. I’ll meet it there.”

Strickland gingerly replaces the receiver into its cradle and turns around. He surveys the glass, the porcelain, the ceramic, the china, the paper, the flesh—so much detritus generated so quickly. His comatose manner suggests to Zelda that he’ll never leave this spot, will become a fixture in her home that she’ll have to glue back together along with the rest of the ruin. But Strickland is a wound watch. Cogs inside of him turn and he moves, shuffling between Brewster and the television and out the open door.