Lydia Millet - Mermaids in Paradise - A Novel

And I was angry at Gina, even, Gina with her irony, even though she meant well, even though her gentle hand sat on my shoulder, lightly patting, while Chip was off with other people, pursuing more important aims. She raised the shield of irony to deflect her opponents. She and her other friends all raised their ironic shields, I thought — her fellow academics, for instance — instead of being willing to fight. Just lifted the shields and held them there.

On the one hand you had the religious hysterics, obesely advancing with their ignorance. On the other hand, to oppose them, all you had was some thin effetes from the city, hiding behind a flimsy row of high-irony deflecting shields.

It wouldn’t save us, I thought. It wouldn’t save anything.

I hit Gina’s hand away, at one point, shaking my head, refusing to raise my face. But then I felt painful remorse, as I always do if I lash out at Gina D., remembering the onset of her irony. It was when her mother died. How Gina had adored her mother, a mother who lived for her and her two brothers, who laughed a lot and was good-natured, actually almost a saint, to be honest. How often her mother hugged them, always looking for opportunities. The love shone out of that woman.

Then withering, pain, a skeletal appearance. No more smiling. And gone.

From that time on Gina painstakingly built the shield, piece by piece. I couldn’t stay angry at Gina D. Never. Beneath her irony, to me, she’d always be that desolate kid.

And anyway who was I to judge?

I was a tourist, I thought. Even at home. I’d always had that aspect, the aspect of a tourist.

“DEBORAH!” I HEARD eventually, once I was ready to absorb current events.

Gina had gone off somewhere, murmuring something about getting me a blanket. I’d been shivering for a good while on my piece of grainy dirty-white deck, my modest, wet square of misery.

The voice filtered down from above; it was Sam. He looked preoccupied. Of course: he was a soldier, not a nursemaid.

I raised my head, wiped my eyes and nose and stood up shakily, one hand braced heavy on the rail.

“Take a look,” he said, and handed me his binoculars. “They’re just standing there. I figure you can read your husband’s expressions better than I can, right? He’s nearest us, there’s a pretty good view of him from the front. So take a look. You think those talks are going well?”

He wanted to draw me out of my personality breakdown by distracting me. I saw that, and I appreciated it. I decided to play along. I took the binoculars from him.

I can never quite get the hang of binoculars, don’t like them, basically, and as I was futzing around trying to normalize my face and emotions and at the same time master the focus ring, I must have turned my body. Because as I fiddled I noticed the specs were pointed in the wrong direction now, the wrong direction completely. And when my view sharpened I was looking out over a network of nets across the open ocean. I swiveled, trying to find the Narcissus again, but then I swiveled back, hesitating. There was a large, flattish gray bump out there in the water. Actually a couple of them.

“I didn’t know there were atolls out here,” I said.

“There aren’t,” said Sam.

I blinked; my eyes were watering, but this time from wind or staring, not emotion. The flat gray things were moving; now they were curved, not flat, I saw.

I took the binoculars off my eyes and handed them back to him. The gray bumps, in fact, were visible with the naked eye.

“Then what are those?” I asked.

“Shit,” said Sam, raising the binoculars.

“What?”

“No, that can’t be,” he said. “Wait. Wait a second.” He was playing with the focus ring, or maybe zooming.

“Look!” said Gina. “What’s going on? Water came out of it!”

“Whales.”

“ Huge whales,” I said.

“We never see whales this big,” said Sam, but he still sounded distracted, as though it was hard to muster the time/energy to talk to us. Then, under his breath: “What the hell ?”

“What species?” burst out Ronnie, running up from the stern. “Rick’s filming them. What are they?”

“It can’t be,” said Sam, shaking his head. He was still staring through the field glasses, all tense and pressed against the rails. “They’re not — no way, not this far south this time of year, I never heard of that. It’s not a finback, see, it’s even bigger — that baby’s ninety feet long at least. Maybe a hundred. Blues!”

“ Blue whales?” asked Ellis, dubious. He shook his head. “In the Caribbean in summertime? Go on, mate. Pull the other one.”

“I worked one summer on a whalewatch boat,” said Sam. “I know my cetaceans. But you’re right. I’ve never seen this before. They usually travel in pairs or by themselves — not pods like that. Not blues. And they don’t stay up for so long, they’re not typically so visible . What the hell .”

“Five,” said Ronnie. “Six. Seven. .”

I couldn’t get a sense of their size, personally. Out there on the waves they were a fleet of dark bumps — that was all.

“They’re goddamn blues, all right,” said Thompson, appearing out of the wheelhouse. He was holding a can of beer. (When it came to beer being handed out, why him ? Where was the beer for me?)

“Oh shit, are they going to get caught? Caught in the fishing nets?” asked Gina. “Jesus. Really? Enough already.”

“I never saw so many in one place,” said Thompson. He had a brief coughing fit, then stuck his beer in one of his large cargo pockets and fished in his tobacco pouch. “And we’re talking, I’ve seen ’em in the Antarctic. They make ’em even bigger down there. Course, we don’t know much about blue whales. Goddamn mystery. Used to think they migrated, turns out not all of them do. Bunch off the coast of Sri Lanka never leave home at all. Pygmy blues, just sixty feet long. Regular ones have hearts the size of cars. Baby could crawl through one of their arteries. No sweat.”

“Doesn’t make sense ,” said Sam. “A large pod of blues? I’ve never seen that. They’re coming toward us, too, toward the nets — they’re headed straight for the nets across the open water. See? Is your man Rick still filming?”

“He’s getting it,” nodded Ronnie.

“Blue whale calls are louder than jet planes, you know that?” said Thompson to me. I briefly eyed his beer. If I moved suddenly, I could grab it. “Songs carry thousands of miles. Freakish. Slow swimmers. Still, used to be faster than we were, before the steam engine. Before the explosive harpoons.”

I glanced up at the yacht, where I could make out Chip — suddenly I was sure it was him — leaning over the side and gazing toward the whales, just as we were. There was Nancy, too. Behind them, other heads and shoulders.

“Can’t we get closer?” I asked Sam. “Out by the nets? To see them better?”

“We could take the inflatable, maybe,” he said.

He sounded dubious at first; then (seeing Miyoko’s hopeful face as she came toward us) he seemed to get a rush of energy, sounding more enthused. “You know what? Let’s do it. This is a once-in-a-lifetime sighting. Let’s take the Zodiac.”

He stepped away and talked into his radio; in no time the orange inflatable that had been bobbing alongside the Narcissus , nobody in it but one sailor at the helm, was jumping over the waves back to us.

Miyoko wanted to come, of course, and Ronnie, and Rick lugged the videocamera along — in no time we were all scrambling down the ramp into the smaller boat. As we poured in Sam tossed us lifejackets from a bin under a bench, and we sat down and clicked their plastic buckles. Then there was engine noise and bouncing and a wall of spray that drenched me — it’d been bone dry on the high-up deck of the cutter, by comparison, despite my ass that was now soaked and freezing.