All the Names They Used for God

by Anjali Sachdeva

  The mermaid began to search for fish, finding the biggest ones in the surrounding ocean, corralling them toward him. She experimented first with a snapper, slashing a piece of sharpened shell against its side. The fish jerked away from her with a powerful flip of its tail, but a stream of blood trailed behind it. She kept the snapper in sight, and waited.

  The shark could smell blood miles away, could feel the telltale vibrations in the water that a wounded fish made. He charged up from below in an explosion of turbulence, bit the snapper in half and swallowed it in two bites. When he had finished eating, the mermaid swam cautiously toward him. His flat, black eyes followed her, but he did not seem disturbed, and she edged closer and pressed her hands against his side. His skin was rough, covered with serrations too small to see, and his blood beneath it was not the cold blood of a fish; it was as warm as her own. Touching that skin thrilled the mermaid, propagated broods of memories that skittered through the depths of her mind. The shark was a solid whip of muscle, carelessly lethal, and his presence transformed the drab green of the northern sea into a place she longed for even though she could not properly recall it. He dove deeper, the water changed from green to gray to nearly black, and eventually the mermaid left him and spiraled away on her own.

  She swam to a spot she especially liked, a large chunk of volcanic rock that rested on the seafloor, worn smooth by years of tides and sand. The mermaid sank down into a hollow of it and began to sing. Her voice had a deep, liquid sound like a separate current within the water. The shark could hear it but it meant nothing to him, and he paid no attention to it. The fish heard it, too, though, and they were entranced by it. The song was the sound of joy without depth, of clear waters and warm blood and the sunlight that pierced the tops of the waves. Fish were drawn from miles away. They orbited the mermaid in a slow swirl of fins and scales, and she could think only that the shark would be well fed, that she could be close to him more often.

  * * *

  —

  When Robert arrived back at port, twenty-nine days after setting out, Carol was standing at the end of the dock waiting, as though she had not moved during that entire month. In the parking lot, she hugged him tightly. He kissed the top of her head and tried to find the scent of her hair beneath the smell of disinfectant and the sickly sweet air freshener they used at the hospital.

  “Was it a good trip?” she asked, as they got into their car.

  Robert thought about the mermaid, and knew he wouldn’t tell Carol about her.

  “Not a bad catch. Nothing spectacular, though. It won’t be much money,” he said.

  “Did you miss me?”

  “Of course,” he said, but realized he hadn’t.

  * * *

  —

  Usually, like all the fishermen, Robert enjoyed being back on land after a long trip, but now he felt restless. Sometimes he found himself, in the middle of one of Carol’s stories about the hospital, ignoring her words and thinking that her voice had a shrill edge to it. He wondered why he had not noticed it before. He began looking for projects to keep himself busy, cleaning out the attic and the basement, repainting the toolshed. He did not know how to doubt himself, which would have been the easiest thing to do, and so he was forced to try to live his life as though steady work and a watertight roof and a loving wife were still as important as they had been before he had seen the mermaid.

  Robert started spending time at the Lock and Dock, the local fishermen’s bar. It was a place he usually avoided, telling Carol he’d seen more than enough of his friends during their time at sea. Now he went frequently and the talk was always about the same thing. No one was catching. Men on land-leave drank all night, running up tabs they couldn’t pay, and fights were frequent. Some of these men had been to sea on and off for a year without ever being home for more than a few weeks at a time, trying to find the catch that would give them money for their car payments, their mortgages, for the debts they had accumulated back when fish were plentiful. Robert realized that the crew of the Ushuaia hadn’t fared too badly with their mediocre catch; most trips weren’t even making back their expenses.

  He often saw Mark Leslie at the bar, sitting alone in a corner booth. One night, against his better judgment, Robert joined him. Mark was reading a book, which he politely put down when Robert approached. They made small talk for a few minutes, until Mark said, “So, will you be going on the next trip?”

  “Will you?” said Robert, surprised. They’d hit a train of small storms on the way back to Portsmouth, and Mark had spent most of the return trip throwing up over the side of the boat.

  Mark nodded. “Tomás said he’d take me on as an apprentice if I was willing to work without pay for a few trips. He and my grandfather were friends, back when Tomás was just starting out. And I’ve always loved the sea.”

  Robert looked down at his beer to avoid frowning directly at Mark. Taking on a man with no experience, whether he was free labor or not, was irresponsible. Mark had a romantic’s vision of the sea, which was nothing like the understanding of men who earned their living by it. During the last journey he had made a fool of himself, and of the other men, by asking ridiculous questions: What was the best time of year to watch the sunset? What did native legends say about this part of the sea? Were there any endangered species in the area? They did not know the answers, although they had been fishing Great Bay since they were teenagers. These things did not matter to them. Robert gulped the rest of his beer and said his goodbyes.

  * * *

  —

  The next afternoon, when Robert came back from the hardware store, Carol said that Tomás had called, that he was planning to head for Newfoundland again in two weeks, and had asked if Robert would ship out with him. Robert nodded, and let out a slow sigh that belied the nervous quivering in his stomach. Carol, still wearing her scrubs, sat down beside him on the couch.

  “You just got here,” she said.

  “I’ll be back soon. Maybe with some real money this time.”

  “I could just work an extra shift or two. We’re doing all right.”

  Robert put one hand against the back of her neck. He wanted to see the mermaid again, and he did not. He rubbed the ends of Carol’s hair between his fingers.

  “It won’t be too long,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  There were high winds the day the Ushuaia left Portsmouth, but when it reached the spot that had provided its meager bounty the last time, the ocean was calm.

  For a week, Robert spent his evenings watching for the mermaid while the other men drank and played cards, but he did not see her. Finally, one night when everyone else was asleep, he stole up onto deck and unlashed the lifeboat that was tied to the edge of the ship. Climbing inside, he lowered it into the water with the ropes and pulleys. He took the oars from the side of the lifeboat and began to row until he was about five hundred feet from the ship. With every pull of the oars, he felt increasingly uneasy. The waves were larger than they had looked from the deck of the Ushuaia, and the sound and smell of them was inescapable. For all his years at sea, he had spent precious little time this close to the water, and there was good reason for it. The ocean here was a mile or more deep; if they were to move a few miles farther eastward they would be over the edge of the continental shelf, and the water would reach down forever into bottomless trenches of blackness. He tried to put those depths out of his mind as he brought the oars in and looked over the edge of the boat. He thought about calling out, but realized it would be useless. If the mermaid were on the surface and near enough to hear him, he would see her—with that luminous skin—and if she wasn’t, she wouldn’t hear him through the waves. He dragged his fingers slowly through the water, imagining for a moment that he could feel the plankton in it, all the thousands of invisible creatures that float on the surface of the sea. Then he saw a faint white glow beneath the waves sev
eral feet away, coming closer, and he pulled his hand back quickly as though it had been burned, holding it against his chest.

  The mermaid rose to the surface and hooked her long, pale fingers over the edge of the boat. Now that she was close enough to touch, Robert still could not say if she was beautiful. She had large, wide-set eyes, dark green in color. Her lashless eyelids were translucent. He would have said her hair was tangled except that it did not look as though it should be otherwise; he felt that combing it out would be like trying to comb a person’s limbs. Each indigo strand was as thick as a twig, and had the moist look of an anemone. All her veins were clearly visible beneath her skin. Her breasts were small, and he realized this would be necessary, that her whole body must be streamlined for moving through the ocean. She had a wide mouth, with lips the color of seawater. He could not see, through the tangle of hair, whether she had ears. Her nose was thin and her fingers were webbed with the same tissue that made up her eyelids, flesh that looked delicate but that must be incredibly strong.

  He reached out slowly and touched her arm. She flinched but did not move away. Her skin was cool and moist. Robert felt as though the tips of his fingers where he touched her were dissolving.

  He stripped off his clothes and lowered himself into the water. The chill cut through his skin instantly. He hadn’t actually been in the ocean in years, although he was used to being drenched in spray or rain while he was on the ship. He was a strong swimmer, but the cold was debilitating. Forcing himself to let go of the edge of the lifeboat, he reached for the mermaid. She stayed afloat easily, flicking her tail back and forth beneath the surface of the ocean, and did not move away when he placed his hands on her shoulders. He ran his fingertips tentatively over her collarbone, her face, through her hair, and below the water her tail fins stroked his legs, caressing his feet and toes as nimbly as fingers would, and sending a crackle like static shock through his skin. The feeling the mermaid inspired in Robert was not lust, or love, or curiosity; it was a feeling he did not recall having before, a sense of wonder that traveled with his blood and invaded every part of his body. While he was touching her, the rest of the world faded from his notice, and it was only when she ducked beneath the water that he saw that the lifeboat had drifted a hundred feet away. If his muscles cramped, which seemed increasingly likely in the frigid water, he would never make it back. He could see the mermaid below him in the water and lunged for her, but she dodged him. When he surfaced, he turned reluctantly away and swam to the lifeboat.

  As he pulled himself over the side, his leg muscles began to spasm, and he fell into the bottom of the boat. He grabbed his T-shirt and used it to dry himself as well as he could, then struggled into his sweater. He pulled on his pants and rowed back to the Ushuaia, pulling hard, his arm muscles threatening to seize up. By the time he managed to climb on board and haul the lifeboat up, he was shivering uncontrollably, and the sky was beginning to lighten.

  * * *

  —

  When everyone had had their breakfast and assembled on deck with the hooks they used to move the fish, Jim Barner began to draw in the catch. The net rose, foot by foot, and Jim closed his eyes and listened to the sound of the motors. A moment later, the first fish came into view.

  There were more fish than Robert had seen in years. The net was heavy with them, the monofilament lines straining to hold them. The men all stood blinking for a moment, then grinned at one another. Jim whooped like a cowboy and moved swiftly to the controls that would bring the fish on board.

  The crew spent the rest of the day putting fish into the hold and cleaning the deck. In addition to cod, they had caught a few tuna, some snapper. Those that were still alive thrashed around the deck, trying to make their way back to the water, their slick scales turning dull in the sun. There was a dolphin, too, and Mark Leslie was distraught when he saw it, dropping his hook, running over to it and throwing his arms around the animal as though it were his sister.

  “Just look at it,” Mark said. “It’s practically human. Look at the eyes.” He struggled with the dolphin until Robert came to help him and they heaved the animal back over the rail into the water. Mark stood and watched it swim away with a look somewhere between awe and grief, and Robert had the feeling that Mark would have called a goodbye to it, if he hadn’t known the other men would ridicule him for it.

  That night, Jim Barner cooked a feast in the galley. Robert sat among the crew trying to look pleased with himself, but he could feel the emptiness of his smile. He was light-headed with exhaustion and yet, when the other men finally finished drinking and went to bed, he found that, again, he could not sleep. The world shifted around him in patches of gray fluorescence, every sound in the bunkroom was magnified, and a dull buzz began building at the back of his skull. Eventually he went to the deck. He watched until sunup, but did not see the mermaid.

  * * *

  —

  The mermaid was ecstatic. Her shark had more food than he needed; he glutted himself, and after every feeding the mermaid circled around him and sang. As weeks passed, her melody gained a deeper resonance, reverberated along the great ridge that marks the spine of the Atlantic and spread farther. She called fish from the deep sea, swordfish and bass, whole schools of mackerel. And others, fish that had never before ventured north: angelfish, clown fish, spotted eels. A school of orange-and-pink parrot fish followed the sound of her voice from the balmy waters off Florida up toward the north seas, their body temperatures plummeting as they went, until they died suddenly, as a group, and rose to the surface of the ocean in a multicolored cloud. The fish that followed the mermaid’s song ignored migratory patterns, potential prey, and the baited lines of the trawling boats; they thought of nothing but moving north toward her.

  * * *

  —

  On the Ushuaia the catches were good every day, so good that the fishermen began to feel uncomfortable about it. This kind of abundance hadn’t been seen since most of them were children, if ever. One day, Robert walked to the bow and found the captain staring down into the water.

  “I can see them,” Tomás said. “I swear I can.”

  Robert looked and, through the glow of the sun on the waves, he thought he, too, saw shifting layers of movement just below the surface, as though the ocean were so full of fish it was preparing to overflow.

  It took them two weeks to fill the hold, and in that time Robert slept no more than a few hours each night. For the most part, everyone else was too busy hauling fish and getting drunk to notice, but he thought Mark Leslie looked at him strangely sometimes as they passed in the hall between the galley and bunks. Robert saw the mermaid every night. He had found an old wet suit in the storage room and now lowered himself with a rope that he dropped from the prow of the ship, straight into the water. The suit gave him an extra layer of protection, but his arms and his legs below the knees were still exposed, and going into the ocean inevitably left him drained, weak, shivering. Still, he wanted to be as close to the mermaid as he could. The chill of the water faded into obscurity when her moist, searching fingers were trailing along his calves. She was fascinated by his legs, spent long minutes wrapping her arms around them, every touch sending painful pulses of electricity through his body. He stayed beside her until he could feel hypothermia edging in and, against the pull of his desire, forced himself to leave the water.

  Robert could not say that he enjoyed being with the mermaid, just that she was the only thing that seemed to be real. The phosphorescence of her skin, the silver reflections of her tail were more tangible than the ocean or the ship or the food he ate every day. The sparks of energy that went through his hands or face when she touched them were the only sensations that fully pierced the veil of exhaustion and lethargy that had settled over the rest of his life. He got so little sleep, he sometimes thought it would kill him.

  When the hold was full, they went home. They were days ahead of sche
dule, but Carol had somehow heard and was there waiting for him on the dock. She took his face in her hands and kissed him. Her body seemed to have very little weight or scent, and she looked paler than usual.

  “Are you feeling all right?” he asked.

  “The house gets lonely without you,” she said. “There’s nobody to get dock grease all over my hand towels and keep me up at night with his snoring.”

  Robert leaned against the car, looking toward the docks although he couldn’t see the ocean from the parking lot, listening for the sound of the water.

  “I’m joking,” Carol said.

  “What?”

  “I’m glad you’re back.”

  He nodded, and let her hug him again, opening the door for her so she could get in the car and take him home.

  That night the crew of the Ushuaia, all of them but Robert, made their way to the Lock and Dock to celebrate their success. They were bursting with money and good will when they entered the bar, but their exuberance quickly faded under the jealous stares of the other fishermen. While the Ushuaia had been hauling in thousands of dollars a day, no one else’s luck had changed. The faces around the bar were still grim. The crew gathered at a corner table and quietly toasted their luck until they had drunk enough that they forgot to be quiet. Then they started singing, endless choruses of misremembered lyrics. When Tomás heard about it the next day, he called every one of them and told them that if they wanted to have another good haul and another payout in a few weeks, they had better stay quiet and keep their money low.

  Robert Greenman found himself finally ready to sleep. Over the course of the next week he slept twelve, fourteen, eighteen hours a day. He dreamed of monsters from the deep, jagged teeth and wide-open jaws, suction cups as big as tires adhering to his chest and back. He moved through ranges of underwater mountains covered in waving seaweed, a place both terrifying and alluring, while the shadows of massive fish passed over him.