Mermaids in Paradise: A Novel (27 page)

He took his glasses off and wiped the lenses on his tie. Scrubbed them, more like, scrubbed furiously.

We looked around at each other, mystified. There was a feeling of being dumb, a feeling of stupidity.

“But here’s the kicker,” said the doctor. “They didn’t know about any death certificate.”

“It’s a small place,” said Raleigh, nodding. He had a hearty quality to him, Raleigh, an admirable meat-and-potatoes attitude a person might find almost attractive, if they were unmarried. “Usually they know right away, pretty much, when to expect business. The news gets out. But this time, nothing leaked. None of the local doctors signed a certificate. No one in an official capacity.”

Simonoff put his glasses back on, poked them up onto the bridge of his nose with the tip of a finger. He did a quick tic of a half-smile, nervous, almost imperceptible.

I saw where he was going: our emeritus was getting his hopes up. I didn’t want it to happen; it was like a slow-motion roadkill, and I couldn’t stand to watch.

“Well,” I said, in a measured tone I meant to sound matter-of-fact, “she could still be at the resort. They may not have ever released her. Although that’d make them look pretty guilty.”

“I wouldn’t put it past them,” said Chip, shaking his head. “Keeping her.”

“Did you call?” Rick asked Simonoff. “I mean, they’d have to know where the—where she got moved to, wouldn’t they?”

“I put in the calls myself,” said Raleigh. “Just to make sure management didn’t get its hooks in the professor, I went ahead and handled the inquiries.”

“And?” asked Chip.

“And nothing,” said Raleigh. “I got passed down along the admin chain, and in the end they sent me to the cops. And the cops passed the buck back to the funeral home.”

“But I saw them!” protested Steve. “The cops were the ones who rolled out the gurney.”

“You know,” said Thompson, cleaning a folding knife with a handle made of bone, maybe antler—sort of a dirty, white-brown color, narrowly ridged like corduroy. “The place has big restaurants. Restaurants that serve hundreds of people at a time. Big restaurants have big freezers.”

Gina put her hand on Simonoff’s arm, like Thompson’s bluntness might injure him. Normally G. doesn’t give a shit about bluntness/offending, if anything she aims straight for it,
but after the homophobic name-calling episode she’d appointed herself a general anti-Thompson deputy, an anti-Thompson missile defense shield with broad jurisdiction.

Thompson flicked his antler knife open and closed, open and closed. With the pinkie of the other hand he rooted around in his ear.

“Looks like we need to send a contingent over there,” said Raleigh to Sam. “Doesn’t it.”

With Gina guiding him, Simonoff turned away, followed by the doctor; they needed refreshment, maybe some rest. The doctor opened the door of the mini-fridge and bent over, rummaging.

“But like, undercover,” said Rick. “We need access to the kitchens. To the . . . to all the storage facilities connected to the kitchen areas.”

“Whoa,” said a soldier standing behind me, and yelled over his shoulder. “Jerry! You hear that? They need someone with restaurant access at the Big House.” Then, turning back to us: “Jerry can get you a backstage pass for sure. His girlfriend waits tables up there.”

Raleigh signed on the girlfriend, Annette, with lightning speed. Her ringing, strident voice on the other end of the speakerphone reminded me uncannily of Chip’s mother, that same combo of raw power and fingernails on a blackboard. Jerry had to promise to pay some bills if Annette lost her job as a result of the spying—her own mother had racked up a sizable debt to a psychic hotline. He got a bit sheepish when she brought that up, with all of us listening. But Annette couldn’t have
cared less about Jerry’s embarrassment: that much was abundantly clear. She was slaving to pay off her mother’s credit cards, she reminded him. “This is serious shit, Jer,” she shrilled. “Serious shit.”

We had no doubt of it.

Simonoff was restless, as the late afternoon wore on, impatient for Annette to begin her shift. He had a flicker of hope now, he wasn’t as defeated as before; he stood up slightly taller, though it kept threatening to break my heart—there’s nothing more piercing than seeing hope lighten the face of a devastated person, that futile, doomed, and lovely bird of hope with its bright wings and round, dark eyes. First rising over a warm nest, wings softly spread, sheltering tiny chicks—then struck and flattened.

But there was no denying it, he and the doctor both looked better than they had an hour or two earlier. They’d been invigorated by the missing corpse. In my view, a missing corpse isn’t something to rejoice about. The absence of a corpse, well, it doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as one.

I tried to ignore their hopefulness, the easiest way to deal with it. Meanwhile Steve, I noticed, trotted out references to Nancy’s body at regular intervals, speaking about it with an attitude of clinical firmness. Our Freudian was on the case.

All of us had turned off our phones by then, save Miyoko and Chip who were doing interviews, because we couldn’t handle the call volume. Rick and Ronnie were obsessing over the mermaid haters, who had their own social media pages now—even their own funding. Their cause had been embraced by
undisclosed sponsors. These sponsors, Chip opined between phone calls, seemed to be paying for rapid dissemination of the anti-mermaid message on screens across the world.
Hunt them,
they said,
and put them down
.
This is a test of faith!

That lust for blood worried me; it even seemed to worry Gina, though her ironic distance prevents her from showing too much concern, typically. As she and I stood there, shoulder to shoulder at the counter of the kitchenette, and studied the chatter on the screen, I had a feeling of compression. I felt those lines and lines of speech pressing me down and overpowering me—the weight of all the haters out there, a juggernaut of loathing. What was their problem? Our problem, as a race? (I was woozy on beer and lack of sleep.) We started out soft and warm, trusting. I’d seen babies—held a couple, even.

It seemed to me the virtual world was even worse than the real one, when it came to humanity. To look at screens like these, you’d think there was nothing left of us but a pile of pixilated ash. We were a roiling mass of opinion, most of it mean. Here we sat at civilization’s technological peak, and what we chose to do on that shining pinnacle was hate each other’s guts.

First I’d been excited about the social networking; now it seemed, like nuclear weapons, to be one of the worst ideas ever.

“Where are the nice people?” I asked Gina. “Seriously?”

She patted my hand.

“The meek shall inherit the earth,” she said.

“Uh huh. The meek with six legs,” said Thompson.

Gina hadn’t been heavily ironic, it occurred to me, since
she got to the island—but this was evidence, wasn’t it, that her approach had merit. This mass of humanity that hated the mermaids demonstrated how right Gina had been, our whole lives, to divide and separate, to detach herself from any earnest passion, to preemptively give up on the ideas of goodness and of meaning. People would disappoint you every time.

Rick, on another computer, was fixated on some ugly animations that were proliferating on the web—crude images of mermaids with tridents that morphed into Satans with pitchforks. There was a clean version and an X-rated one, with oversize sexual characteristics.

He had to be pulled away, finally, for spending his time and energy on fruitless anger—much as he’d tired himself, over our first dinner, unleashing a torrent of anti-climate-denier rage on the hapless toe fetishist. I couldn’t help recalling the toe man as he’d been that evening, first claiming with a smirk that the Arctic would be a nice vacation spot once all the ice and polar bears were gone; then feeling the accidental, stroking touch of
my own foot
upon his hairy calf; then saying in his juicy voice
toe-genital intimacy
.

Yep, Rick was rising to the bait, joining the fray, and we couldn’t let him go there, so in the end Ronnie shut him down with some kind of appetizer tray Janeane brought out involving caramelized onions.

Tired of the hater opinions, Gina and I turned away too. We turned our faces away.

WE’D FORMED THREE
teams by then, adding to our media and stealth divisions a Simonoff department—devoted, obviously, to the question of justice for Nancy. I wanted to switch off the media team, I wanted someone to change places with me, and to that end I persuaded Ronnie. He’d be with Rick, once they were both media, and he’d enjoy that; meanwhile, I’d be with Chip.

So Ronnie officially took over my tweeting duties and I joined Chip, Thompson, Gina, and Ellis on stealth detail. While the Simonoff team waited for bulletins from Annette, we’d spy on the parent company’s mermaid search. That would be our gig, as soon as the sun finished setting and darkness took over: we’d be investigators.

Thompson had borrowed a friend’s powerboat, which was waiting for us at a slipway down the beach road. We walked out of the motel smelling the sweetness of jasmine, hearing the faint splashes of kids in the motel pool (which I idly hoped had been divested of toad corpses). It was a balmy evening. Thompson had his own rig for fishing, he said, as we drove over in the Hummer, but it was an old rustbucket. This one, I saw when he parked the Hummer, was sleek and high-end. We got out and approached: the vessel was black with red detailing and looked like it went fast. A monster pickup was towing it, and backed down the ramp as we walked over; someone ran down and set up a stepladder deal.

“Not too shabby. I feel like 007,” said Ellis, busting out a gleeful, preteen grin at Chip as we clambered aboard.

Gina was sour-faced.

Inside it looked swank, with modern leather appointments and polished surfaces. We arranged ourselves near the front—bow?—and hovered behind Thompson as, above a futuristic-looking display, he flicked toggles and turned on headlights.

“Hold on,” he said, after a minute or two, and I grabbed the back of a seat as he prodded a couple more buttons. Chip and the others did the same—just in time as the engine roared to life. We reared, bucked, and set off bumping across the incoming waves.

“How are we supposed to sneak up on anyone in this small-dick cockboat?” said Gina.

Thompson pretended to be deafened by the din.

From the beach I’d briefly made out the lights of the armada, a scattering of yellow pinpricks on the horizon where dark met dark, but now those far-off twinkles were lost in the bright foreground of the boat’s headlights. It was surprisingly hard to see, at night, with the glares and shadows, confused by speed. I’d let Thompson be in charge of our fate, I determined, at least while it depended on this flashing dart of fiberglass. If I closed my eyes I felt queasy, so I kept them open and stared out through the speedboat’s moonroof—a thick, tinted Plexiglas sheath. Once my eyes adjusted I thought I could see a raft of stars, the blurry Milky Way, though my neck ached from craning. Being inside an enclosed cabin was a negative; I would have enjoyed fresh air, salt spray.

Neither Chip nor I wanted to sit, we wanted to stand with our feet planted firmly, holding on to something, feeling the bumps and the insane freedom of fastness. Still, after a while
our necks hurt from standing/craning and we were forced to sit down. Our posture went from triumphant to vanquished then as we slumped into each other on the seats, his arm around me, my head in the crook of his neck. Across from us, on the opposite bench, Gina and Ellis took up a similar position, with Ellis doing his best to execute a familiar, possessive arm-over-shoulder maneuver and Gina ignoring the draped appendage, trying to yell across to me over the engine roar.

Chip and I were reminded, in our physical proximity, of how our tropical honeymoon concept had been derailed—of how, despite not choosing the Tibetan monastery trip, we’d ended up monklike and sexless after all.

FINALLY THOMPSON CUT
the engines; our boat slowed down and bobbed a bit, quietly. Then he cut the lights too. I was queasier, with the slow rocking motion, than I had been when we were going fast. (Would I vomit? When that’s the question you’re asking, you don’t have time for others.) I fixed my eyes on a small, thin door at the back where the toilet must be.