Lydia Millet - Mermaids in Paradise - A Novel

Then we were there, on the sand, vigilant and purposeful, on the lookout for minions. At first the only people nearby were some early-morning beachgoers, who ogled us curiously, their eyes asking: Is that pretty young Asian woman a celebrity? Yes, I answered those curious oglers in my mind, quite a celebrity, well known to millions but not to you. Or me. Then we were setting up; then Miyoko was smiling and smiling and speaking in Japanese, while Rick filmed her and Steve held the small-but-heavy satellite dish. Her small black mic was on her small black collar and behind her stretched the blue-turquoise expanse of ocean, upon which, in the distance, the white dots of the armada could be seen.

But sure enough, before long we had company.

THEY MARCHED TOWARD us across the sand, parallel to the water, from the direction of the marina — men in formation, dressed as soldiers. Yes: soldiers , said their camouflage uniforms, and soldiers , said the long guns they were carrying. They wore berets, I saw as they got closer, which gave them an effeminate quality, or French at least. But then they chose the long guns for accessories, which lent a tone of seriousness to the outfits. They made you hesitate to laugh at the berets — the laugh impulse was certainly silenced. And the soldiers had tucked their pants into their boots; I wondered what Gina was thinking of that, the pants tucked into chunky combat boots. I couldn’t ask, while Miyoko was recording, but I did wonder.

It wasn’t only foot soldiers, either. From behind their ranks appeared some vehicles, and the vehicles soon overtook them. The vehicles were jeeps, and those jeeps, as far as I could see, were chock-full of soldiers, those jeeps without tops on them, those open-air jeeps bouncing over the creamy white sand.

Where had the soldiers come from? They looked like UN peacekeeping forces, with those berets — the guys that got sent out to deal with Somalia, the Sudan, war-torn, distant countries where their job was to resemble soldiers but not do anything. Here we’d thought it was only a few policemen, only the resort’s pathetic rent-a-cops, as Thompson had put it, but now we had soldiers on our hands. To go with the armada, there was now an army.

By this time, luckily, Miyoko was wrapping up her speech. The next part of our broadcast was to be the mermaid footage, safe in the computers in Tokyo. I was so grateful, in that moment, for those Tokyo computers, so grateful for the TV producers Miyoko implicitly trusted. I was so grateful for technology, for social networking even, and also for our Thompson, that Navy SEAL Santa, with his distracting incendiary devices and surprising skills of stealth.

We looked to Thompson now, all of us did. Chip did, I did, and even Gina did. We expected great things of him.

“Outmanned and outgunned,” was what he said, shrugging.

Miyoko was the one who told us what to do.

“Don’t stop filming,” she said. “Rick. Turn the camera. Film the soldiers. Keep it rolling. No matter what. We’re still live . We’re still broadcasting .”

And then she said something, I guess to her viewers, in Japanese, and Rick swung the camera around and pointed it right at the soldiers.

On they came till they were right beside us. Maybe twenty soldiers on foot, and more in the jeeps. Some soldiers jumped out of the jeeps. Among them were a couple of civilians — a man in a suit and the woman who’d pretended to be Mormonish, then fully reneged on it.

“I’m sorry,” said the non-Mormon, but her tone wasn’t apologetic. Not one bit. “Do you have a permit for whatever it is that you’re doing?”

“We’re hotel guests,” said Gina. “We have a perfect right to be here. Or do you tell all your guests they can’t set foot on your beach? Is that your policy?”

“You should know we’re broadcasting live,” added Chip. “Millions of Japanese viewers are watching this.”

The soldiers unhooked their guns from their shoulders and, in an unhurried way, lifted and more or less pointed them. At us.

I’d never had a gun pointed at me, other than a paint gun at a corporate retreat, and I have to say it felt more personal than you might think. It seemed it’d be far too easy for one of those guys to pull the trigger. Glocks, I’d heard, had hair triggers on them, cops shot themselves in the foot with those things, just taking them out of the holsters. These weren’t Glocks, though, I told myself — Glocks were mostly handguns. Weren’t they?

Words were what we had, I told myself. Words were the only weapons that we had, since the numchucks hadn’t come in handy, and this was the time to deploy them.

“You should also know,” I said, maybe a little shakily, “that we’ve sent them the video footage. A major TV station in Japan. They have it and they’re showing it. The Japanese are seeing the mermaids, too. The Japanese know .”

“You’ll have to stop what you’re doing and come along with us,” said the man in the suit.

He did look paler, didn’t he? Now that we’d told him about the people of Japan?

“This is how you want to be introduced to the world?” said Gina. “Really, Mr. Corporate Asshole? Does the term Facebook mean anything to you? The term Twitter ? To say nothing of the lawsuits your company will be facing. We have a litigator lined up already, in D.C. Meyers & Finkelstein. Kidnapping of a U.S. citizen, just for starters. And trust me, that’s only the very tip of that iceberg.”

Miyoko spoke in Japanese. She was talking about the soldiers and the suits and who paid their bills, she told me later, and though what she said was pretty damning she smiled brightly throughout.

“You think people will come to see your mermaid zoo once they know how you started it? Like this?” asked Chip. “Kidnappings? Guns? They’ll boycott it. You’ll be notorious. And how about Nancy? She was the one who found them. And she wanted the mermaids to be like Darwin’s finches. Not — not Barnum & Bailey’s poor old elephants. These mermaids were her discovery.”

I felt proud of Chip, then, for his eloquence.

Miyoko translated for her audience, keeping up a rapid patter while the suit leaned close to the woman, whispering something.

“Stand down,” said Thompson loudly, in the direction of the soldiers. He had his balls back, suddenly. “You’re on the wrong side here. I am an officer of the United States Navy.”

One or two of the soldiers looked at each other insecurely.

“Then you’ve got exactly no jurisdiction here,” said the man in the suit.

“He’s just a retiree,” sneered the woman.

“You think I don’t have strings to pull, lady?” said Thompson. “I’ve got some strings. Don’t force me to pull them.”

“You don’t have strings,” she said. “You’ve got no strings at all. Now who’s the bullshitter.”

“That far out isn’t territorial waters,” said Thompson. “It’s still in the Exclusive Economic Zone, sure, but it’s contiguous zone, where those coral heads are. I measured it.”

I turned and stared at him, then back at the corporates. I wasn’t sure what Thompson was talking about. But the suit looked like maybe he knew.

“Last night,” he went on. “I measured it last night. It’s only inside the territorial zone, see, that they have a crystal-clear right to tell everyone else what to do. Assuming they’re in cahoots with the cops, a.k.a. what passes for government in the BVI. In the contiguous zone the law’s not so clear. So they’re trying to cordon the mermaids off with those nets, bring them closer in. So then they can claim the rights to them absolutely. No wiggle room, they figure, if they can just bring them closer in.”