Lydia Millet - Mermaids in Paradise - A Novel

Chip took a lot of care over the cleaning and bandaging, talking to keep my attention off the pain; he said he’d practically had a heart attack when he saw the rubber boat flip. He’d watched the whale’s head rise beside it, the great whale-chin ridged with curving lines, and he’d been thunderstruck. He realized I could swim perfectly well, but who knew, he said — I might have been knocked unconscious by a hard blow to the head, I could have sunk beneath the waves, drowning.

It was the worst minute of his life, he said, waiting for me to come up again, waiting to make sure it was me heaving myself onto that bobbing orange oval.

Negotiations hadn’t been going that well anyway, he added, when the whales came. He looked around then, not wanting to hurt anybody’s feelings. The civil servants had been very polite, said Chip — well, too polite, honestly. They’d been so polite it was hard to tell what they wanted, if anything. Their words, as they spoke to the representatives of the parent company, were so matter-of-fact, so bureaucratic (Chip said these words included stakeholders , as well as win-win and orientated toward the long term ), that even to Chip it wasn’t clear they had a compelling interest in progress. So yes, they’d spoken to the GM, Chip said, the guy from the beach who really was a ten-gallon ass hat.

But on the other hand it was as though they hadn’t spoken, pretty much.

There’d been no forward motion at all until Nancy, out of sheer frustration, had broken in, and just as she was taking the conversational reins away from the civil servants, just at that very moment the blue whales had arrived.

They’d all stopped talking and stood at the rails and watched, and the GM went from disbelief to astonishment to rampaging anger, so that by the time the mermaids were riding into the distant horizon he was in the grips of a temper tantrum, Chip said, you really could call it that — he raced around yelling at underlings, expressing his outrage. He tried to rally crewmembers and volunteers alike, tried to rally them to the cause of chasing down the whales, somehow trapping the whales or possibly attacking them, making them yield up those mermaids; but heads were shaken, for once no one cooperated with him, Chip told me.

It seemed more like a strike than like a mutiny, but either way it was calm and reasonable, and in the face of his crew’s indifference the GM blustered uselessly.

Gina hovered over me, along with Chip and Raleigh; Raleigh had a glass of water, some painkillers he wanted me to take, where Gina mostly wanted to gape.

“That’s gory,” she said, admiringly, and raised her phone. “I’m going to post it to Facebook, when I have bars again. Do they have toxins in them, barnacles? Like sea urchins?”

As we sped shoreward, I turned back and gazed at the armada. On our approach it had soared above us like a citadel. There’d been no doubt in my mind that it was a seat of power, that armada, a bastion of mindless force. It was impervious to our opinions, cold to the good of others. Yet with the mermaids gone — for all of us knew there were none left behind — it struck me as a ghost fleet. Even a ghost city.

Thompson had talked about diving in the sunken warships of Truk Lagoon, full of the skulls of Japanese fighters. . Thompson had told the tale, that night after first contact at our drunk party, of how he had swum through those mossy, rusted hulks, seeing small fish dart through the eye sockets of sailors. Those sailors killed a lifetime ago in a distant war, long forgotten by all who knew them, the forgetters even forgotten.

And here I was looking at a new fleet of ghosts, the remnants of a rapacious army of commerce. Already it was floating around uselessly on top of waves that had been stripped of assets. The whales were gone, and so were the mermaids; the coral reefs were on their way out. I felt like I saw the future of these ships, from the private yachts to the workhorses of the fishing industry, and it seemed to me that future was a sad one, in some respects — a future of decay and dereliction, a future where the ships floated on the vast waters with nowhere to sail to anymore.

For the yachts, no pleasure stops along the sumptuous coasts. For the fishing ships, no schools to catch in their high-tech nets, those endless skeins of white monofilament that would drift for millennia in the oceans, immortal.

I was waxing pretty eloquent, in my mind, about all this, when we got back to the marina. We stepped onto the jetty and said our goodbyes to the civil servants. With Chip’s arm around me I hobbled into the Hummer.

Ellis and I got the places of honor, being the injured ones: he perched in the front passenger seat, gritting his teeth and trying to hold his arm immobilized, while I stretched out in the very back, my scraped-up leg propped up on a pile of dusty blankets. The good doctor said he’d tend to our wounds back at the motel, that he thought Ellis’s wrist was fractured; he’d borrowed some supplies from the ship’s first-aid station.

I lay on my side looking out the rear windows — there were a pair of them, the Hummer had two doors at the back — and seeing the sky, with occasional pieces of tree looming. The rear of the Hummer was sandy, full of diving gear, wetsuits, knives, guns, and ammunition, and the fine white sand got all over me. At first I brushed at it irritably, but then I let it stick. I should appreciate the sand, I thought. The parrotfish expert had said it before she died: the white sands would be leaving us soon.

Maybe they would appear in another time and place, I comforted myself. There were so many stars. These days the scientists said a zillion planets might support carbon-based life, out there. Maybe a planet in a triple-star system would grow these fish with pouty lips, these hills of white sand beneath clear saltwater.

Over the history of the earth, I learned in high school biology, the eyeball has evolved, died out, and then evolved again. The eye can’t be kept down.

Maybe the fish couldn’t be kept down either, the fish and their beautiful reefs.

One time, not long before our wedding, Chip had come home from work with a factoid he’d learned, a piece of new research uncovered in the course of doing business (insurance adjustment). Ashes had been discovered in some cave in South Africa, ashes from cookfires a million years ago, he’d read it in a magazine. Or he had found it on Wikipedia. Something. Anyway, that was us, Chip said — our grandparents, practically.

We’d had short foreheads then, eyebrows that were even bushier than Nancy’s. A million years ago.

“Did we talk?” I asked Chip, propping myself up on an elbow.

I may have sounded fuzzy. My leg was stinging a lot by that time. It really hurt quite a bit.

Chip was chatting with Raleigh in the backseat, and at first they didn’t hear me, so I repeated my question.

“Chip. When we were Homo erectus . Did we know how to talk back then?”

“Relax, honey. Lie back. She may be delirious. Just rest, OK honey?”

“I mean it, Chip, did Homo erectus talk?”

“Uh, hmm. Let me think. I mean no one knows for sure about this stuff. And Homo sapiens were the first real talkers, right? Like maybe fifty thousand years ago. But some people think maybe the later specimens of erectus spoke some kind of pre-language. Like maybe they didn’t just grunt like apes. Still, even if that’s true, it wouldn’t have been anything fancy. They didn’t write or anything. It took us, like, five million years to learn how to do that . Evolution-wise. If you count australopithecines.”

Five million years, I thought, lying back again.