Lydia Millet - Mermaids in Paradise - A Novel

“Man. You could totally date him,” said Gina.

SO THERE I was, cooling my heels with the rest of the rabble. It was me, Gina, Ellis, Sam, Thompson, Simonoff, the good doctor, and some leftover soldiers, still standing at strict attention on the deck, waiting on Sam’s orders. Thompson was talking to a crewman and Rick, with Ronnie’s help, was busy filming Miyoko. That Japanese VJ never stopped working; right then she was broadcasting an update from the stern of the cutter, where the mics wouldn’t pick up the interference of our background noise.

We watched quietly as the orange boat ferried our diplomatic dinghy over to the yacht with soaring lines, a pearly white vessel whose name, emblazoned in ornate gold curlicues, seemed to be Narcissus . I wasn’t sure why you’d name your luxury yacht that. Was it self-aware/ironic, or more straight-up toolishness?

I opened my mouth to ask Gina, but she was already talking.

“What are they going for, an injunction?” asked Gina.

“They’re going to ask them to simply pull up the nets,” said Ellis. “The minister says they don’t have the legally required permits.”

“And they think the parent company will just say, Oh, OK?” said Gina. “And, like, go gently into that good night?”

“Not really, no,” said Ellis. “They’re also filing for a PI. Not sure where that’s at, though, judicially.”

The arc of my confidence fell. Gone was the rush I’d felt as the Coast Guard cutter crested the waves, when speed was ours and we’d seemed to be duty-bound.

We’d had a higher calling, then.

“Hey,” said Sam, squinting into his binoculars, “I can see them talking, there on the upper deck. I can make out Nancy. . that’d be the deputy governor, yeah. There’s the GM.”

“GM?” asked Gina.

“The resort’s general manager,” I said.

“Sam!” called one of the cutter’s crewmen, sticking his head out the door of the wheelhouse. “Get in here!”

Gina and I followed Sam over, looking sidelong at each other — we were hoping to get in on the action, whatever that might be. No one stopped us.

Inside, near the control panel with the steering wheel, a TV jutting out from the wall was playing CNN. We hung behind Sam and the crewmen and craned our necks.

It was live footage of the airport in Tortola, according to the news ticker. Very crowded: people hurried along pulling their roller bags, hefting their suitcases, pink-faced from the strain of hefting their duffel bags. Disorder seemed to reign, and the reporter’s voice was barely audible. Then the scene changed: the ferry dock, also Tortola. I recognized it, since I’d been there less than a week before. Two ferries were docked at once, full of people; crowds were still pressing to get on them, crew pushing them away.

Then there was a reporter talking, a woman who stood on the quay with strands from her mound of polished yellow hair blowing across her face. She had a British accent, not unlike Ellis’s — and for all I knew, equally fake.

“. . tourists descending on the island in numbers that have simply never been seen before,” I caught. “Every single hotel room on Virgin Gorda is full to capacity, according to the reports we’re getting, and frankly no one knows where the rest of the arriving crowds will be accommodated. Some are based here on Tortola, of course, where hotels rooms are also overbooked. . ”

“Feculent shite,” said Ellis.

“It’s happening,” I said, and my throat closed gaggingly.

“Shhh,” Gina hissed.

“. . these are not all your friendly neighborhood scuba enthusiasts and beachgoers, which these tiny islands in the British Caribbean have depended on for decades,” said the reporter. “No, many of them apparently have a very different reason for visiting this tropical getaway.”

A man was talking, a microphone held up in front of his angry, slightly sweaty face; his backpack bobbed behind his head.

“. . gotta get in there and take care of these things. Get rid of them. Our mission is annihilation . What if they interbreed with humans? What then?”

The camera panned to the woman beside him, who smiled and nodded.

“What our pastor is saying,” she offered eagerly, “is this could be the Fifth Trumpet. Like it says in Revelation 9, you know, a man’s face with lion’s teeth, the wings of locusts and the tail of a scorpion—”

“Point being is ,” interrupted the man, “these things are not the work of the Lord. These things are filth and abomination.”

I felt cold, and my scalp tingled. I backed out of the wheelhouse, hitting the deck rail with the small of my back. There was dizziness: the sky was too white. The sky attacked my eyeballs. Light was everywhere, when all I wanted was shade. I thought I might faint, although I’ve never fainted my whole life. I’m not sure why it hit me so hard, but basically, when I heard the man say that, my personality collapsed.

“Hey, hey,” said Gina, her hands firm on my shoulders. “Honey. You need to get a grip .”

“They’re coming,” I said.

“Well, that’s right,” said Gina. “What of it?”

She put her face close to mine and gazed into my eyes in what was, for Gina, a pretty strong bid for sincerity. I looked into her brown irises, her warm, almond-shaped eyes, so familiar and comforting, with their impossibly thick eyelashes courtesy of Latisse.

“Listen. Deb . It’s not your fault, sweetie. This was always going to happen. The mermaids were living on borrowed time. You see that, right? It’s amazing they weren’t gone centuries ago. Like the giant sloths. The mammoths. The saber-tooth cats.”

It didn’t comfort me.

It’s only been days, I thought, a handful of days after probably tens of thousands of years we must have lived in parallel — we stumbled across them, we filmed them, and now their enemies are legion.

Here come my people, those teeming hordes, here come my people, brandishing their stupidity. Above their heads they raise stupidity like a flaming sword.

I couldn’t help imagining myself below us, the vault of water above me, the dark weight of the armada bearing down, oppressive, the nets sinking, the nets surrounding us.

I really couldn’t breathe.

“You’re white as a sheet! Head between your knees,” said Gina, and she shoved the top of my head and made me sit down right there on the gritty surface of the deck, where instantly my ass got wet and cold. I didn’t care, I just kept trying to draw breath, maybe it wasn’t a panic attack, maybe it was my heart! (So I thought, and then felt sheepish — I was playing Janeane’s role, with my hypochondria/panic attack; I recognized for a second that I’d feared being Janeane as soon as I met her. Janeane embarrassed me like a bad play, a close relation trailing dirty underwear out the bottom of a pant leg: somehow I overidentified. That’s why I brought my Gina side to bear. Then, wearing the muumuu for all the world to see, I’d fully realized my fears.) Still all I could feel was the nets closing above my head, as I swam with the mermaids in their blue fathoms.

I sensed the massive hulls of those greedy ships above us, their shadows blackening the water and closing off the sky.

I’m not sure how long I sat there, enclosed in my private grief/panic cavern — at a certain point it turned out that I was crying and too ashamed to show my tear-streaked, contorted face. I felt like a child again, because I hadn’t cried in front of a group of people, I figured, since then — at least, not so that anyone would notice. Now I’d made a fool of myself, as sadness overtook me; I’d let down the façade of cohesion.