Mermaids in Paradise: A Novel (11 page)

Apparently there was a sunken airplane on the reef, a small plane from long ago, and Nancy said she’d been slowly following a princess parrotfish as it weaved among the corals and then, out of the corner of her eye/mask, had seen something far larger flash through one of the holes where the airplane’s door used to be. Excited to think she might have her first local encounter with a shark or large ray, she abandoned the fish and swam cautiously over to the rusting plane. It was there that she saw it: the tail. Only the tail was visible inside the plane, from her vantage point, she said, until she swam up close and stuck her head around the brown and corroded metal door edge.

And that was when she realized that the tail, covered in silvery scales, was surmounted by a humanoid torso. Atop that sat a neck, and finally a head, out of which long hair grew—modestly, and a little too conveniently, covering the impossible creature’s breasts.

“What color was her hair?” asked Chip, like it mattered.

“Yellow!” said Nancy. I couldn’t tell if she was indignant or just enthusiastic.

“Of course it was yellow, Chip,” I said.

“I don’t know about
of course
,” retorted Chip. “There are
multiplayer games I do where mermaids have blue hair. Green. Even purple.”

“This wasn’t an MOG,” said Nancy, a little prudishly.

“So what did she do?” pressed Chip.

“Put out that cigarette!” said Nancy sharply, turning to the boat captain. “Please! I suffer from asthma!”

“Nancy?” I chimed in as the captain, looking resentful, flicked his cigarette over the side of the boat, thus littering. “So what did the mermaid do?”

“She swam away! She was quick. Really quick,” said Nancy. “I followed, but I was a lot slower. But I saw there were others like her. I saw their shapes in the water before they got away from me. A pod, if you can call it that. It was a pod of mer-people.”

“Well, if they swam away,” said Chip gently, “they may not be there when we get there. I want you to be prepared for that. We won’t judge you, Deb and I, if we can’t find them this time. You know—no judgment.”

“None at all,” I said. “I’m sure they don’t stay for long. Once they’ve been spotted. I mean, they must be secretive types, right? Or people would have known about them long ago.”

“We do know about them,” said Nancy.

“But I mean, know they were
real
,” I said.

“Colossal squid,” said Nancy.

“Pardon?”

“Well, they were ‘mythic’ too, till recently. Then their bodies were found, dead and floating. Finally one was caught live. Forty feet long. Weighed one thousand pounds. The oceans are very deep, you know. The last frontier. Still largely unexplored.
New discoveries happen daily, new species are identified all the time. Maybe this is a similar situation.”

There was no reasoning with a deranged marine biologist. I nodded agreeably.

Before long the captain was throttling down and Nancy was eagerly pulling on her fins, positioning her mask.

“Come on, come on!” she urged, as Chip and I struggled with our own masks and fins. And then we followed her off the side of the boat, which had a slide built into it. Swoop and splash.

I have to say it was gorgeous down there, a place where beauty clichés came true. Light filtering, colorful blobby formations, glamorously decorated fish flitting about—all in all it was exactly what you’d hope it would be. Chip and I followed Nancy, waving our flippers steadily. She turned out to be much better at the free-dive thing than either of us; Chip had to be impressed.

Again and again she dove, fishlike. Or seabird-like, possibly.

Chip tried to copy her after her first few dives, when she turned her goggly, tube-sucking face toward us and made a gesture of impatience. Seemed like she didn’t know what we were up to, snorkeling around on the surface, wimpy. I could tell Chip felt he had to rise, or rather dip, to the challenge. Chip’s fit but he’s no scuba diver; I hoped he wouldn’t get the bends. I didn’t even try to dive deep, myself—I had a mild case of swimmer’s ear. So I floated, waggling my flippers as Chip did his best, coming up to breathe through his tube, then dipping down again and again in the parrotfish expert’s wake.

The airplane was maybe twenty feet under. You couldn’t
even see into its decrepit cockpit from up at the surface, where I was. But no yellow-haired mer-people must have been languishing there, because Chip shook his head when he got back up to me. He stuck his head out for air, then came back under and gave me a slow-motion headshake.

But Nancy didn’t give up easily. She kept on going, round and round the reef, to each new nook and cranny, then out past the reef to a cluster of underwater rocks. The variety of fishes thinned out and there were fewer of the bright, darting ones and more of the flattish, dull-colored numbers camouflaged by sand. I was waiting to signal to Chip that I was heading back to the boat—I thought I’d get a drink of water, take off the borrowed wetsuit and put my feet up for a while—when down beneath me, where he and Nancy had most recently dived, came a silvery explosion of bubbles, a confusion of flippers. Streams of froth surged up and made it impossible to see anything but white.

I hoped they hadn’t met with a jellyfish or been barracuda-bit. As I peered down and saw nothing, I ideated blood and teeth, severed digits bobbing and leaking crimson in the surf, like in so many shark movies. I started to feel panicky as the cloud of bubbles in the water beneath me refused to clear, and finally decided to free-dive down—my swimmer’s ear be damned. What if Chip was caught on something and running out of air? What if the crazed biologist had suddenly attacked him? There could be anything happening, below that blinding screen of turbulence.

I gulped air from my tube, held it, and gave what I hoped
was a powerful flip of my fins. Down I bucked, feeling pressure inside my head and not liking it a bit. I swished myself around the bubble cloud, instead of through the midst of it, so that I wouldn’t crash into anyone coming up; I tried to force myself down, though my body resisted. Still I could see nothing except a rock with brown and yellow barnacle-type things on it that looked like rotting teeth. I bobbed up again, gasping.

Luckily, a few seconds later Chip surfaced too, and then Nancy, all of us popping our tubes out and sucking in air.

“Jesus!” cried Chip, spluttering.

“You saw them! Didn’t you?” asked Nancy, spluttering too.

“I gotta go down again,” said Chip, and without waiting for me to answer, down he dove.

I followed him, of course, because at this point curiosity was killing me. It was frustrating, though, because I was in Chip’s bubble trail again. There are negatives to being a follower instead of a leader, in a diving situation. I pushed myself down, trying to get alongside him for a better view of whatever it was he thought he’d seen, but all I saw was silver swirls of bubbles—could have been anything—and before long I swooped up again, helpless.

I waited for them to come up, treading water and getting more and more gaspy. When Chip finally surfaced his face was purple-red; he shoved his tube aside and pulled his mask up onto the top of his head, and I could see his eyes were wide, like when he’d been electric-shocked in the mud marathon.

“So? Did you see mermaids?” I asked him, in a joking tone. I assumed he’d report a sea turtle, a dolphin or stingray or what have you.

“Deb! There were some goddamn
mermaids
down there!”

Feeling a bit fed up, I snorted and turned to swim back toward the boat, shaking my head. Chip’s a fantasist, of course, a fantasy game-player; Chip enjoys the world of make-believe. I think I’ve made that clear.

I climbed back onto the boat, and when I came out of the head with the wetsuit off and my clothes back on, the captain wordlessly handed me a cold can of beer. Didn’t say a word, just handed it over. I was grateful. I sat on one of the white fiberglass benches drinking and taking a breather; before long the other two joined me, climbing the ladder with their faces shining oddly.

“Deb,” said Chip breathlessly, shedding his gear, “you thought I was kidding, but I wasn’t. Maybe it’s a hoax or like that, I’m not saying it isn’t, but down there were people with tails. People fully the size of you or me.”

“If it’s a hoax, how were they breathing underwater?” asked Nancy. “You didn’t see any breathing apparatus, did you?”

“Maybe it was a sleight-of-hand trick,” said Chip. “Or just like phenomenal timing. I mean, the two of us were down there, right Deb? Nancy and I. And
we
didn’t have oxygen tanks.”

“But have you seen anyone come up since then? There’s nothing but this boat around, as far as the eye can see!” raged Nancy. She turned to me. “Did
you
see anyone come up?”

“Come on, guys,” I said, and crumpled my beer can, which
was already empty. “Enough, already. You got me. Consider me pranked. OK?”

Nancy glared at me with her eyebrows like angry crawlers. Then she turned back to Chip, as though I hadn’t said a thing.

“Maybe they had a submarine to go back to,” said Chip. “A submersible. Like in that movie,
The Abyss
. Or even
Titanic
. You know the kind I mean,” he said, appealing to me. “For research. Maybe they saw us, then swam back to their submersible. Technically, free-diving for long periods of time is possible. I mean some free-divers can go down two, three hundred meters on one breath. Competitive apnea! Deb, it’s an extreme sport! There’s one guy who can hold his breath in a pool for eleven minutes. I read it online.”

“Be reasonable,” said Nancy. “Manned submersibles cost a
mint
. There aren’t any commercial ones operating around here or I’d have found out about them. Plus, who’d strap on a tail and swim around in the middle of the Atlantic just for
our
benefit? Nobody.”

“You guys,” I said, “I’m sure there’s an explanation, other than you’re both messing with me. Maybe someone rubbed LSD onto your breathing tubes. Or the tubes got toxic mold on it in that box that caused hallucinations. And now I’m ready to go back. Can we please go?”

The boat captain didn’t wait on Nancy’s command; impatient as any man slighted by underpayment, he throttled up and we motored toward dry land.

THE DAY HAD
started well, even gaily. First I’d shaken off the tinge of shame laid on me by the Heartland man; then Chip and I had kissed in a shady grotto, water running around our bodies in pleasing rivulets. We’d been living the American Dream, or the American-Caribbean Dream—call it the American-Caribbean Honeymoon Dream. Whatever you call it, I’d felt clothed in its raiment of sun and sex and booze, lassitude, freedom from opinion. I’d felt a pleasing vacuum of responsibility, filled with trade winds and ocean spray. Washing the salt from our ropy hair as sand, too, swirled down the shower drain. Lying spent and happy on cool white sheets, air on the skin, rustle of fronds in the breeze, the whir of time passing, warm wind of the turning world.

But after the boat trip the dream altered. Within the smooth fabric of the dream a thread of doubt had been picked, and suddenly the weave was unraveling.

The problem, at first, seemed to be Chip. I wanted the old Chip back, the Chip for whom there was real life on the one hand, without mythic creatures, and videogames solidly on the other hand, where mythic creatures cavorted quite abundantly. The new Chip was confusing, even frightening to me, because the new Chip was stubbornly insisting that those worlds weren’t separate. That went too far for me. It was a rude jolt. The earth was unstable beneath my feet.

And hadn’t even been Chip’s
idea
—someone we barely knew had brought the idea to him, and then he’d run with it. There was an arbitrary quality to the mermaid sighting. Yet Chip had signed right up! The honeymoon was supposed to be all about
him and me, and instead he’d become a member of a secret society—Chip was affiliated, now, with a disturbed parrotfish expert.

It was as though he’d joined a cult. He was dazed, when we got back to the cabana; there was a look of sheer obliteration on his face. He barely talked to me. And pretty swiftly, there on the island of Virgin Gorda in the British Caribbean, it made me feel terribly lonely, a premonition of the grave. Sitting across the room from Chip as he ignored me—he was scrolling through pages of mermaid lore on the tablet he’d brought with him—I put myself in his shoes. For a second I
was
Chip,
I was Chip,
and
I couldn’t help believing
.

As Chip, I had no choice.

But as myself . . .

I made a snap decision. Much as a candidate might flip-flop on abortion when the demographics called for it, I was changing my position. Because the problem, at first, had seemed to be with Chip; but I saw now the problem could equally be seen as mine. And unlike the problem of Chip, that other problem—the problem of me—was one I could solve easily. The plainest solution was the best. Why put up resistance? No need. I bought in. I turned on a dime.

After all, I reasoned, if there
were
mermaids drifting under the glittering waves, mermaids who rose from the sparkling ceiling of their undersea world from time to time, their father someone like Neptune, bearded, big-chested, trident-holding; if there were mermaids who perched on rocks, sunning, who brushed their golden locks and gazed at their reflections in
delicately fashioned mother-of-pearl-framed mirrors; if there were mermaids who rode, when the occasion warranted, in giant clamshells pulled by a team of giant seahorses—so much the better for us all.