Lydia Millet: Mermaids in Paradise: A Novel

It was warm in the back there, stuffy and warm, and as the sting sharpened and then abated, sharpened and abated, I wondered if I was falling asleep. The Hummer bounced over potholes, leaving behind an invisible stream of global warming. . it had taken our ancestors four million years to figure out fire. It took them five million to develop writing. And then, in a great acceleration — just a brief, screaming handful of seasons — we got electricity, nukes, commercial air travel, trips to the moon. Overnight the white sands of the parrotfish were running out. Here went the poles, melting, and here, at last, went paradise.

The writing gave us everything all of a sudden, then nothing forever.

I WOKE UP to a mild wind sweeping in from the open doors of the motel bedroom. I lay alone on our bed, my leg wrapped in gauze. It was dusk, I saw from the pink sky. No one was in the room with me, but I could hear their voices outside, where they were milling around the pool.

I must have needed the rest, I thought; maybe it was the shock of the injury. I didn’t have much experience with pain, accident, or trauma — I’ve had an easy life, let’s face it. I’d thought the leg was no big deal. But still I’d slept through the afternoon.

I didn’t want to move yet; I saw my cell phone lay on the bedside table, and I reached out for it. There was a text waiting: Call me when you wake up. <3 C .

So I did, I lay there on my back on the cool linens and I called Chip, and he came in. He sat on the side of the bed, then lay down beside me, careful not to nudge the hurt leg; he asked if I wanted more painkillers.

It wasn’t so bad, I said.

He said that was because they’d given me codeine.

I wanted to know what I’d missed.

“The crowds — the haters? — they’re not accepting that the mermaids are really gone,” he said. “They’re everywhere, looking for them. Trying to hire out boats, dive equipment. It’s a madhouse at the marina. A lot like it was before. The armada’s come back in, mostly to service them. So even without the mermaids, the Venture of Marvels is making a tidy profit. Right now, at least. It’s going to be all the local authorities can do to keep the crowds from destroying the reefs here.”

“Oh,” I said weakly. I closed my eyes again.

The sense of peace I’d had after the whales took the mermaids was dispersing like smoke.

“The good news is, the Coast Guard’s going to be pitching in and Thompson’s reinforcements came through. Wild, right? Can you believe the old guy actually has pull? So there’s a Navy boat on its way. That’s the good news, honey. There’s pretty solid help coming.”

I was tired. It wasn’t just the codeine, the leg ache — I was more tired than that.

“But there’s not so much you and I can do,” he added. “I mean, Nancy’s staying. She’s on sabbatical anyway, so she doesn’t have to go back and teach. And she feels like she has to go to bat for her parrotfish. Plus the locals can use her biology expertise. But I was thinking — since obviously we don’t want to go back to the resort, and this motel’s booked up now, even this crappy place is full, so we’re going to be kicked out in the morning — well, I was thinking we’d get on the ferry and go to the U.S. Virgins, just the two of us plus maybe Ellis and Gina. We can spend the rest of our vacation there. I’m thinking the best would be St. John. I was going to book us there in the first place, you know, before I saw how Gorda had that floating restaurant.”

“Aren’t there crowds on St. John too?” I asked.

I still wasn’t opening my eyes; I lay tucked into Chip like a small child. I’ve always liked that about Chip, his height and broad shoulders, the fact that he can enclose me.

“No, the haters are only in the British Virgins. None of them really went farther west than Tortola, apparently. It’s too far away from where we saw the mermaids, you know, in the U.S. Virgins — people wouldn’t have the access they’re looking for. But listen. On St. John there’s a two-bedroom bungalow on the top of a small mountain that had a last-minute cancellation — we can rent it for a whole week. I checked. It has a private yard, these flowering bougainvillea vines all over the place, even a rose trellis. It has one of those infinity pools, Deb. You always wanted to swim in a pool like that, didn’t you?”

“I’ve always wanted to swim in an infinity,” I murmured.

“And it has a great view of the ocean.”

“Chip? Sweetheart? I wonder if we should just go home,” I suggested. “ Home home. Back to the Golden State.”

I thought of those angry crowds teeming onto the coral heads out there, slashing the corals with those long rubber fins, of Nancy’s silly-looking parrotfish with their bulging lips, those innocent fools of fish. Poor things. Just swimming around with no idea what was coming.

I felt like crying again.

“Deb, no, hey — this was a victory. Maybe not ours, exactly, but still, it was a victory for the mermaids. The Venture didn’t get to them, and maybe some small part of that timing was us. Maybe, partly, with our distractions and our interference, we held them off until the whales came. Think of it that way, babe.”

“I’ve always loved your optimism,” I said.

“Deb, look. The reefs are going to weather this invasion. All right? So don’t be discouraged.”

“But if we hadn’t gone public with the mermaids, there wouldn’t be these crowds,” I said listlessly.

“But if we hadn’t gone public with the mermaids, who knows? Maybe the GM wouldn’t have had to take time out to intimidate us on the beach, with his posse. Maybe they would have found the mermaids themselves. Before the blue whales ever got there. And the mermaids would be in a cage right now. And a lot of them might be dead.”

I shook my head. It sounded paper-thin, to me, Chip’s logic. The truth was, I thought, we’d tried our best, we really had. But we’d been bulls in a china shop, and now the reefs were being invaded by hordes of our very own barbarians.

For the first time I had a glimpse of something: I got an inkling of why Chip was obsessed with the Heartland. He knew it was our fault, the ape denial, the fear of science, the epidemic of obesity. He knew we’d done it to ourselves, made our own village into idiots. We’d put our best-looking idiots on thrones, those empty pawns and shiny dolls. And then we had the balls to act surprised — even superior! — when people began to worship them.

Some people worshiped the false idols and in the face of that some other people turned away. We weren’t this sordid mass, they wanted to think, we were children of God, special and better than the rest. Once you weren’t beautiful, you needed God to love you.

Between the two groups a fault line rumbled, ominous.

“. . I know your leg hurts,” Chip was saying. “But the doctor says it’s going to be fine, maybe some light scarring. As early as tomorrow, he said — as long as you keep a waterproof bandage over the part without the skin — you can maybe go swimming. I’ll take care of you, honey. Let’s relax, OK? We’ll have that lazy honeymoon you wanted, I promise. We really will. St. John’s is like, rainforest green, one big national park with mountains, and around the edges is a ring road that stops at tons of white-sand beaches. You can snorkel on every one of them, if you want. We won’t do any diving. We’ll take it easy.”

We lay there for a while, with the babble of conversation from the pool, a splashing, every now and then, and the whir of the ceiling fan.