Steven Millhauser - Voices in the Night - Stories

Partly in order to verify reports of mermaid sightings, and partly in order to record evidence more accurately, an association of concerned citizens was formed, which became known as Watchers in the Night. Members, who ranged from waitresses and yard workers to doctors and financial advisers, divided their time between visiting locations where mermaids had been sighted and patrolling the beach at all hours of the night. Wearing binoculars around their necks, and carrying notebooks and ballpoint pens, they walked along the shore, sat far out on the jetty, climbed onto tall lifeguard chairs and watched the waters of the Sound. From the public beach and the adjacent private beach they gathered long hairs, fish scales, broken mirrors, barrettes, fragments of comb, bits of bone, and turned them over to the Historical Society, which sent them off to a laboratory for testing. The specimens were invariably identified as familiar seashore debris, except for two of the bones, which came from a dead cat. One branch of the Watchers made it their business to set nets a few hundred yards out in the water, in order to catch mermaids who might stray toward shore.

Along with the sightings, which produced belief and skepticism in equal measure, came reports of a more elusive kind. These accounts were little more than rumors or stories, which drifted through the air like odors of exotic flowers. It was said that staring into the eyes of our mermaid could make you see things that weren’t there. It was said that Richie Gorham, a college junior who had spent many hours before the glass display case, left his house one night to wander down to the beach. At the end of the jetty he saw a mermaid, who lured him onto the rocks and then into the middle of the Sound, where she pulled him down to an underwater grotto. Gorham was found the next day lying facedown in the north woods, where he was suffering from a raging migraine and unable to remember anything about the last day and night. One woman, swimming alone in the last light of dusk, said that a mermaid had swum up against her and tried to drag her off; she fought violently and escaped to the beach with a bloody scratch along the length of her forearm. People who lived near the beach reported that they could hear mermaids singing at night — it was a high, haunting, deeply sad melody, like nothing on this earth. The singing filled the listener with restlessness, yearning, and a kind of heavy, weary ecstasy. One young man, glimpsing a mermaid at night, was so filled with longing that he went to bed and would not eat for days; his joints ached, his heart was heavy, he kept hearing sighs and whispers. Now and then a girl or grown woman would be struck: the victim would hear a mermaid call to her in the middle of the night, and she would rise from her bed and walk down to the water, where she stood looking for a long time as small waves broke at her feet.

One of the stranger episodes of that summer was the case of Melanie Lautenbach, whose story we partly had to reconstruct. Melanie was sixteen years old; in the fall she would be a senior at William Warren High. She was quiet, dark-haired, a bit on the short side, a little shy, with a vaguely sullen look that changed to an appreciative openness whenever anyone spoke to her. She seemed tense and a little wary, as if anticipating a rejection that never came. She wore jeans and tight stretch-tops that gave shadowy glimpses of her bras, with their smooth white cups that seemed designed to press down and conceal her low breasts. From the very first day, Melanie had gone to look at the mermaid in the display case at the Historical Society. There she stared for a long time at the girl with the green eyes and the perfect hair, the perfect body, who gazed at her and through her and beyond her from her perch on the rock. Each day after school Melanie walked the two miles to the Historical Society, where she gazed at the girl in the glass case, the girl who never had to worry about walking down the hall past shrewd-eyed boys and tall, high-breasted girls who swung their hips and laughed and showed their white teeth that gleamed like little clean dishes. She could feel the mermaid looking into her, knowing her; she knew the mermaid back. A great calm came over her at these meetings, a peacefulness tinged with quiet excitement. At home she would sit on her bed for a long time, thinking of the mermaid, feeling the water against her own skin. In front of the mirror she stood in a long skirt and no top, pulling her hair over the front of her shoulders, staring at her too-white breasts with their nipples like purple wounds.

Her plan grew slowly. One day she bought a cheveux top in a mermaid shop; a week later she returned and bought the bottom half of the suit. One night at two in the morning she left her house and walked the mile and a half to the beach. By the side of an overturned rowboat not far from a lifeguard chair she changed into her cheveux top and fishtail. The heavy hair fell over the skin of her breasts like hands. Down at the water, low waves broke and washed up onto the wet sand. She stood for a moment before walking straight in up to her rib cage. She paused again, did not look back, and began to swim. She swam straight out into the deep, rocking water, now on her side, now on her stomach. In the note she left for her parents, she said she had gone to be with her sisters. For she was one of them, and they were calling to her, far out over the water; she was going out to join them, in that peaceful place where every gaze was clear. Melanie was reported missing the next day. That night, she washed up on the beach of a neighboring town, where at first there was a great deal of excitement about the new mermaid, before the truth came out.

The case of Melanie Lautenbach brought home to us the danger of visiting our mermaid, but hadn’t we always known that? The naked girl on her rock in the glass fortress, the visitor from another world who stared off at something just over our shoulders — what else was she if not dangerous? In fact the death of Melanie, far from giving us pause, seemed to spur us to deeper reckonings. Of course there were those who deplored our passion, who wagged their fingers and warned of trouble, but on the whole we ignored them, for we knew that we needed to feel our way toward wherever it was our mermaid was taking us.

We now began to hear of more extreme instances of mermaid infatuation. In a new tattoo parlor on a side street off Main, girls laid themselves down on a bright white table, removed their pants and underwear, and under the fierce eyes and sharp needle of a little old man who was said to be a master artist from Tokyo, received, slowly and painfully, over every inch of their lower bodies, beginning just beneath the navel and moving down along the thighs, the buttocks, the knees, the calves, the ankles, and the full length of the soles, a series of perfectly replicated overlapping fish scales. We began to hear rumors of sexual practices so bizarre that they must have been real. We heard of frenzied, unconsummated couplings, initiated by husbands and lovers who said they were no longer stimulated by female legs, which struck them as gangly and spidery, and who required their women to wrap up their lower bodies tightly before lovemaking. One recently married woman, recovering from minor surgery, begged her surgeon to stitch her legs together so that she would be beautiful.

In truth, legs were disappearing from the women of our town. At the beach there were fishtails as far as you could see; on our streets and in our yards, women of all ages wore long tapered skirts that concealed the legs and feet. In the bedrooms of every neighborhood, mermaid lingerie was all the rage. It so happened that a number of women, angered by male demands that they resemble mermaids, but at the same time stirred by feelings of kinship with the visitor they obsessively imagined, took a stand of their own: the male lower body was declared to be inferior to the lower fishbody, smooth and powerful and lithe. Men resisted, then began to embrace the new fashion; and all along our beach, and on the rocks of our jetty, we saw the new mermen, shimmering in the summer light.