Lydia Millet - Mermaids in Paradise - A Novel

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.

Thompson fiddled with some controls. I drew a couple of deep breaths and felt slightly less inclined to empty out my stomach.

“What’s happening, Johnson?” asked Gina.

She’d taken to calling him by the wrong name whenever she addressed him, each time a different one.

“Fishfinder,” he muttered. “Sonar.”

We got up and gathered behind him, looking over the console at a screen with some numbers in the corners, some scraggly fields of color. A radio emitted staticky voices, but the codes and terms meant nothing to me: it was a drone of noise. Through the acutely slanted windshield I could tell the armada rose up ahead of us, its lights the tall geometry of cities, buildings. I couldn’t see the shapes of the ships, only their clusters of brightness.

“The bad guys have these toys too, don’t they?” asked Gina.

“A buttload,” said Thompson.

“With all that gear, those greedy cretins haven’t found the mermaids yet?” said Ellis.

“Maybe the mermaids have burrows,” suggested Chip. “Some fish do, Nancy told me. They camouflage themselves beneath the sand. Those flat ones, kind of ugly. I mean, no offense. The sonar wouldn’t show them there, would it? Maybe the mermaids are hiding.”

Thompson went hmph .

“Hey, can’t the other boats see us?” asked Chip. “Aren’t we too near?”

“Nothing on the channels I checked,” said Thompson. “There was a window, sure. Where someone might have noticed. Don’t think they did. I woulda heard the hail. Believe me. These morons couldn’t find their asses in a shit tornado.”