Mermaids in Paradise: A Novel (33 page)

Gone were her hopes of a sanctuary, I assumed, and yet—and yet I could tell she was pleased.

We’d been far closer to the spectacle than they had, but aboard that yacht, with its lofty decks, the diplomatic party had had the boon of height, a panoramic view. Chip had made a phone video; on the small screen the whales weren’t anything, you couldn’t see the mermaids at all, but it was HD, he said, it would look better on his laptop screen.

As the cutter headed back to shore, he knelt down beside me and tended my hurt leg, smearing on some antibiotic ointment and then wrapping my calf lightly in bandages from the cutter’s well-stocked first-aid cabinet. The thigh would be harder to bandage, he thought; we’d get the doctor to handle that.

Chip took a lot of care over the cleaning and bandaging, talking to keep my attention off the pain; he said he’d practically had a heart attack when he saw the rubber boat flip. He’d watched the whale’s head rise beside it, the great whale-chin ridged with curving lines, and he’d been thunderstruck. He realized I could swim perfectly well, but who knew, he said—I might have been knocked unconscious by a hard blow to the head, I could have sunk beneath the waves, drowning.

It was the worst minute of his life, he said, waiting for me to come up again, waiting to make sure it was me heaving myself onto that bobbing orange oval.

Negotiations hadn’t been going that well anyway, he added, when the
whales came. He looked around then, not wanting to hurt anybody’s feelings. The civil servants had been very polite, said Chip—well, too polite, honestly. They’d been so polite it was hard to tell what they wanted, if anything. Their words, as they spoke to the representatives of the parent company, were so matter-of-fact, so bureaucratic (Chip said these words included
stakeholders
, as well as
win-win
and
orientated toward the long term
), that even to Chip it wasn’t clear they had a compelling interest in progress. So yes, they’d
spoken
to the GM, Chip said, the guy from the beach who really
was
a ten-gallon ass hat.

But on the other hand it was as though they hadn’t spoken, pretty much.

There’d been no forward motion at all until Nancy, out of sheer frustration, had broken in, and just as she was taking the conversational reins away from the civil servants, just at that very moment the blue whales had arrived.

They’d all stopped talking and stood at the rails and watched, and the GM went from disbelief to astonishment to rampaging anger, so that by the time the mermaids were riding into the distant horizon he was in the grips of a temper tantrum, Chip said, you really could call it that—he raced around yelling at underlings, expressing his outrage. He tried to rally crewmembers and volunteers alike, tried to rally them to the cause of chasing down the whales, somehow trapping the whales or possibly attacking them, making them yield up those mermaids; but heads were shaken, for once no one cooperated with him, Chip told me.

It seemed more like a strike than like a mutiny, but either way it was calm and reasonable, and in the face of his crew’s indifference the GM blustered uselessly.

Gina hovered over me, along with Chip and Raleigh; Raleigh had a glass of water, some painkillers he wanted me to take, where Gina mostly wanted to gape.

“That’s gory,” she said, admiringly, and raised her phone. “I’m going to post it to Facebook, when I have bars again. Do they have toxins in them, barnacles? Like sea urchins?”

As we sped shoreward, I turned back and gazed at the armada. On our approach it had soared above us like a citadel. There’d been no doubt in my mind that it was a seat of power, that armada, a bastion of mindless force. It was impervious to our opinions, cold to the good of others. Yet with the mermaids gone—for all of us knew there were none left behind—it struck me as a ghost fleet. Even a ghost city.

Thompson had talked about diving in the sunken warships of Truk Lagoon, full of the skulls of Japanese fighters . . . Thompson had told the tale, that night after first contact at our drunk party, of how he had swum through those mossy, rusted hulks, seeing small fish dart through the eye sockets of sailors. Those sailors killed a lifetime ago in a distant war, long forgotten by all who knew them, the forgetters even forgotten.

And here I was looking at a new fleet of ghosts, the remnants of a rapacious army of commerce. Already it was floating around uselessly on top of waves that had been stripped of assets. The whales were gone, and so were the mermaids; the coral reefs were on their way out. I felt like I saw the future of
these ships, from the private yachts to the workhorses of the fishing industry, and it seemed to me that future was a sad one, in some respects—a future of decay and dereliction, a future where the ships floated on the vast waters with nowhere to sail to anymore.

For the yachts, no pleasure stops along the sumptuous coasts. For the fishing ships, no schools to catch in their high-tech nets, those endless skeins of white monofilament that would drift for millennia in the oceans, immortal.

I was waxing pretty eloquent, in my mind, about all this, when we got back to the marina. We stepped onto the jetty and said our goodbyes to the civil servants. With Chip’s arm around me I hobbled into the Hummer.

Ellis and I got the places of honor, being the injured ones: he perched in the front passenger seat, gritting his teeth and trying to hold his arm immobilized, while I stretched out in the very back, my scraped-up leg propped up on a pile of dusty blankets. The good doctor said he’d tend to our wounds back at the motel, that he thought Ellis’s wrist was fractured; he’d borrowed some supplies from the ship’s first-aid station.

I lay on my side looking out the rear windows—there were a pair of them, the Hummer had two doors at the back—and seeing the sky, with occasional pieces of tree looming. The rear of the Hummer was sandy, full of diving gear, wetsuits, knives, guns, and ammunition, and the fine white sand got all over me. At first I brushed at it irritably, but then I let it stick. I should appreciate the sand, I thought. The parrotfish expert had said it before she died: the white sands would be leaving us soon.

Maybe they would appear in another time and place, I comforted myself. There were so many stars. These days the scientists said a zillion planets might support carbon-based life, out there. Maybe a planet in a triple-star system would grow these fish with pouty lips, these hills of white sand beneath clear saltwater.

Over the history of the earth, I learned in high school biology, the eyeball has evolved, died out, and then evolved again. The eye can’t be kept down.

Maybe the fish couldn’t be kept down either, the fish and their beautiful reefs.

One time, not long before our wedding, Chip had come home from work with a factoid he’d learned, a piece of new research uncovered in the course of doing business (insurance adjustment). Ashes had been discovered in some cave in South Africa, ashes from cookfires a million years ago, he’d read it in a magazine. Or he had found it on Wikipedia. Something. Anyway, that was us, Chip said—our grandparents, practically.

We’d had short foreheads then, eyebrows that were even bushier than Nancy’s. A million years ago.

“Did we talk?” I asked Chip, propping myself up on an elbow.

I may have sounded fuzzy. My leg was stinging a lot by that time. It really hurt quite a bit.

Chip was chatting with Raleigh in the backseat, and at first they didn’t hear me, so I repeated my question.

“Chip. When we were
Homo erectus
. Did we know how to talk back then?”

“Relax, honey. Lie back. She may be delirious. Just rest, OK honey?”

“I mean it, Chip, did
Homo erectus
talk?”

“Uh, hmm. Let me think. I mean no one knows for sure about this stuff. And
Homo sapiens
were the first real talkers, right? Like maybe fifty thousand years ago. But some people think maybe the later specimens of
erectus
spoke some kind of pre-language. Like
maybe
they didn’t just grunt like apes. Still, even if that’s true, it wouldn’t have been anything fancy. They didn’t
write
or anything. It took us, like, five million years to learn how to do
that
. Evolution-wise. If you count australopithecines.”

Five million years, I thought, lying back again.

It was warm in the back there, stuffy and warm, and as the sting sharpened and then abated, sharpened and abated, I wondered if I was falling asleep. The Hummer bounced over potholes, leaving behind an invisible stream of global warming . . . it had taken our ancestors four million years to figure out fire. It took them five million to develop writing. And then, in a great acceleration—just a brief, screaming handful of seasons—we got electricity, nukes, commercial air travel, trips to the moon. Overnight the white sands of the parrotfish were running out. Here went the poles, melting, and here, at last, went paradise.

The writing gave us everything all of a sudden, then nothing forever.

I WOKE UP
to a mild wind sweeping in from the open doors of the motel bedroom. I lay alone on our bed, my leg wrapped in gauze. It was dusk, I saw from the pink sky. No one was in the room with me, but I could hear their voices outside, where they were milling around the pool.

I must have needed the rest, I thought; maybe it was the shock of the injury. I didn’t have much experience with pain, accident, or trauma—I’ve had an easy life, let’s face it. I’d thought the leg was no big deal. But still I’d slept through the afternoon.

I didn’t want to move yet; I saw my cell phone lay on the bedside table, and I reached out for it. There was a text waiting:
Call me when you wake up. <3 C
.

So I did, I lay there on my back on the cool linens and I called Chip, and he came in. He sat on the side of the bed, then lay down beside me, careful not to nudge the hurt leg; he asked if I wanted more painkillers.

It wasn’t so bad, I said.

He said that was because they’d given me codeine.

I wanted to know what I’d missed.

“The crowds—the haters?—they’re not accepting that the mermaids are really gone,” he said. “They’re everywhere, looking for them. Trying to hire out boats, dive equipment. It’s a madhouse at the marina. A lot like it was before. The armada’s come back in, mostly to service them. So even without the mermaids, the Venture of Marvels is making a tidy profit. Right now, at least. It’s going to be all the local authorities can do to keep the crowds from destroying the reefs here.”

“Oh,” I said weakly. I closed my eyes again.

The sense of peace I’d had after the whales took the mermaids was dispersing like smoke.

“The good news is, the Coast Guard’s going to be pitching in and Thompson’s reinforcements came through. Wild, right? Can you believe the old guy actually has pull? So there’s a Navy boat on its way. That’s the good news, honey. There’s pretty solid help coming.”

I was tired. It wasn’t just the codeine, the leg ache—I was more tired than that.

“But there’s not so much you and
I
can do,” he added. “I mean, Nancy’s staying. She’s on sabbatical anyway, so she doesn’t have to go back and teach. And she feels like she has to go to bat for her parrotfish. Plus the locals can use her biology expertise. But I was thinking—since obviously we don’t want to go back to the resort, and this motel’s booked up now, even
this
crappy place is full, so we’re going to be kicked out in the morning—well, I was thinking we’d get on the ferry and go to the U.S. Virgins, just the two of us plus maybe Ellis and Gina. We can spend the rest of our vacation there. I’m thinking the best would be St. John. I was going to book us there in the first place, you know, before I saw how Gorda had that floating restaurant.”

“Aren’t there crowds on St. John too?” I asked.

I still wasn’t opening my eyes; I lay tucked into Chip like a small child. I’ve always liked that about Chip, his height and broad shoulders, the fact that he can enclose me.

“No, the haters are only in the British Virgins. None of them really went farther west than Tortola, apparently. It’s too far
away from where we saw the mermaids, you know, in the U.S. Virgins—people wouldn’t have the access they’re looking for. But listen. On St. John there’s a two-bedroom bungalow on the top of a small mountain that had a last-minute cancellation—we can rent it for a whole week. I checked. It has a private yard, these flowering bougainvillea vines all over the place, even a rose trellis. It has one of those infinity pools, Deb. You always wanted to swim in a pool like that, didn’t you?”

“I’ve always wanted to swim in an infinity,” I murmured.

“And it has a great view of the ocean.”

“Chip? Sweetheart? I wonder if we should just go home,” I suggested. “
Home
home. Back to the Golden State.”

I thought of those angry crowds teeming onto the coral heads out there, slashing the corals with those long rubber fins, of Nancy’s silly-looking parrotfish with their bulging lips, those innocent fools of fish. Poor things. Just swimming around with no idea what was coming.