Mermaids in Paradise: A Novel

by Lydia Millet

  “It’s very exciting!” cried Nancy. “Of course, gills are far more efficient than lungs at extracting oxygen. They have to be. It’s hard to breathe seawater. Less oxygen in water than air. Gills could have been an evolutionary advantage for the mers. Particularly if they have lungs too. They may have both, in fact. It’s not impossible.”

  “The ‘mers’?” I asked.

  “Mer-people could be read as a colonialist term,” explained the biologist. “Racist and hegemonic. It’d be my own proposal that, until we learn the culture’s own name for itself—assuming the culture has language qua language, which is a major leap—we shorten our label to mer, or mers, plural. It’s relatively value-neutral. Just the French word for sea.”

  “Huh?” said the tampon fisherman. “French? Why goddamn French? They should be flattered we’re calling them people! It’s a goddamn compliment!”

  “Well, imagine a highly intelligent race of eels …” said the biologist.

  “No, man,” the fisherman interrupted. “I don’t want to.”

  “… and when these intelligent eels discovered our own species,” the biologist went on, “they then referred to us as land eels. Would that seem like a compliment to you?”

  “I wouldn’t take it personally,” said Chip.

  “Makes no sense. We don’t look like an eel,” said the fisherman.

  “My anthro colleague knows this stuff better than I do,” admitted Nancy.

  I guess the sensitivity racket was mostly for the humanities.

  We heard a crash and turned—it was the man from the Heartland, who must have snuck in, without his wife this time, when I wasn’t paying attention. Like the spearfisher he’d been nosing around in my business, it looked like, because he was squatting in the open closet, where my clothes were, and as I drew closer I saw an iron from the top shelf had fallen. He was prodding the top of his head with two fingers. Our clock radio lay entwined with the iron on the carpet, two black cords spiraling.

  “What the hell?” said Chip, and dashed past me.

  Sure enough, I saw from somewhere behind Chip’s shoulder, the man was holding one of my shoes. It was a Jimmy Choo. I knew now I wouldn’t wear it on this trip; it had a four-inch heel and there wasn’t enough pavement.

  Chip snatched it away from him.

  The man’s other hand was bloody from his scalp, which had a bloody dent in it made by the point of the iron. My shoe trembled slightly in midair as Chip looked down at the guy, unsure of his next move.

  A thin drip of red trickled its way down the toe man’s forehead, so slow it seemed glacial. I had a sense of losing control, of borders fading loosely into fuzziness.

  “Uh. You OK, man?” asked Chip, craning his neck to see the gouge.

  The toe man nodded dazedly, then abruptly rose and zigzagged around us, through the living room and out the front door.

  “Huh,” said Chip. “Hope he doesn’t have a concussion or something.”

  I shrugged inwardly. I had no patience for the guy’s injuries, incurred during his shoe fondling. He hadn’t received them defending our free nation. He didn’t deserve a Congressional Medal of Honor.

  I turned to the oglers loitering.

  “Sorry, but it’s time for us to turn in,” I announced. The drinking and annoyance had finally emboldened me. “Chip and I are going to hit the sack now. We’ll see you again tomorrow. And thanks for coming, though.”

  IT SHOCKED ME to see, when I struggled out of bed the next morning all headachy to answer a vigorous pounding on our door, that the man who stood there—visible through one of the large picture windows as I tottered out of the bedroom in my skivvies, nothing but a camisole and boyshorts—was the guy from outside the restaurant men’s room, two nights ago, who’d been wearing the Freudian slip T-shirt.

  He wasn’t wearing the T-shirt now, but still I recognized him.

  “What is it?” I asked, opening the door creakily. It felt like five minutes had passed since I collapsed into bed. I couldn’t have cared less that the Freud guy was seeing me half-naked and unkempt; all I cared about was sleep.

  “I came to tell you, because I think you’re friends with—that is, I have some news, the news is bad, you might want to sit down, even? Can I come in?”

  “Uh—”

  “Thanks,” said the guy, whose face was bland, snub-nosed and friendly. It was mournful, too, mournful as an old hound.

  He sat right down on our couch himself, quite heavily.

  “I’m sorry to tell you this, but I thought you should know they found a body this morning. A—a person died. A woman.”

  “What woman?” I said, snapping awake.

  “The one you’ve been spending time with. We—I saw you together at the restaurant, with your husband I guess? Her name is Nancy. A Dr. Nancy Simonoff.”

  I sat down then myself, all the way to the carpet. My knees somehow gave out on me.

  Chip stumbled out of our bedroom in even less underwear, rubbing his chin stubble.

  “What did you say?” he asked. “Someone is dead?”

  “Sorry. The resort wasn’t sending anyone to let you know—I thought someone should—personally—I was just there, see, I was on the grass near her casita, we’re just a couple casitas down and like every morning I was practicing on my yoga mat—”

  “Who? Who?”

  “Nancy,” I said robotically.

  I wasn’t looking at Chip, but he must have sat down too, on the sofa near the Freud guy, and we were silent there, three rocks. Feeling surreal the way you do. In shock, or whatever.

  “I don’t believe it,” mumbled Chip.

  “A drowning, is what I heard,” said the Freud guy gently. “It’s not official yet.”

  “But she was a great swimmer!” said Chip.

  “In her bathtub,” said the Freudian. “Because they didn’t bring her in from the pool or the ocean, they brought her out of her casita. It’s how I even know any of this. I heard an EMT say drowned.”

  “Drowned in the bathtub? Like … suicide?” said Chip.

  “No way,” I said.

  “Never,” said Chip.

  “I only talked to her a couple times,” said the Freudian, “but I’d have to agree it doesn’t seem likely. She was very, um, enthusiastic. She wasn’t a patient, but still—I’d never have pegged her for suicidal depression.”

  I realized he might actually be a Freudian. Or something like it, in the therapy arena. Beyond the pun on the T-shirt.

  “And she barely drank either,” said Chip. “She ate a lot but didn’t drink. Last night she was stone-cold sober.”

  We sat.

  “I mean. Murder?” asked the Freudian.

  We sat.

  BY THE TIME Chip and I were dressed and hygienic, cold water splashed on our faces and teeth brushed with haste and vigor, the press had arrived. It was a strictly small-time crowd compared to the ravening media hordes back home, but it came on the heels of the police so it felt like a minor invasion—a white van with a satellite dish; two pretty women in pancake makeup who must be reporters; cops teeming. That is, there were a couple of cops in uniform, there was hotel security, and there were some official men in jackets and ties, of unknown identity. And then there were the other guests, passing, standing, gawking—the guests, gathering in small groups, craning their necks, whispering nervously and/or with ghoulishly titillated interest.

  The police didn’t look like the cops we were used to—these ones had a faintly British, formal look. But the crime scene tape was universal.

  We felt ourselves drawn to the Freudian’s cabana, as close to the furor as we could be. He’d invited us to go over there, before he cleared out of our own cabana so we could get dressed. Each of us felt disbelief that Nancy had stopped breathing. We couldn’t imagine it. We didn’t need to use our imaginations, technically—I get that—because apparently it was real, but sometimes you can’t imagine the facts.

  First there’d been mermaids and now this. We w
anted sanity.

  Walking across the grass, between the palms, we caught sight of someone from the diving party, the substitute teacher, face stricken, lost as a child. We had nothing to tell him, no words to clear things up, so we just shook our heads at him, our bodies still heavy; he shook his head at us.

  Then Chip knocked on the door of the Freudian cabana, and Steve let us in.

  “Statistically it’s low-crime!” said his partner Janeane, the muumuu woman who was now wearing a tie-dyed sundress. I accepted a cup of in-room coffee gratefully, though I’m an espresso person in real life and knew it would taste like backwash. “I mean, there hasn’t been a murder on this island in six years! Before this one. Right, Steve? I know—I have a violent crime phobia. We researched it before we came.”

  “I didn’t know that was a phobia,” said Chip, not unkindly. “Old friend of mine has a fear of velocity.”

  “Interesting,” said Steve the Freudian. “Even related, possibly.”

  “I visualize impacts,” added Janeane. “Bludgeoning. Face punches. I took a pill just now. Well, more than one.”

  “But listen,” I said. “Who can we talk to? Who’s gonna talk to us? Is someone going to put out a statement? The police? Because the thing is—I mean, we can’t talk about it, it’s supposed to be embargoed, but Nancy had—she had news. She had information. A major discovery. It was going to break today, maybe.”

  “She was murdered!” said Janeane dramatically, clasping her hands.

  “Uh, I don’t know about that,” said Chip.

  “It’s not impossible,” I ventured.

  “She was a fish scientist, wasn’t she?” asked Steve. “Did she discover a new kind of fish?”

  “Something like that,” put in Chip hastily.

  We took our mugs of bad coffee outside. By that time Chip was constantly checking his phone, texting back and forth with other members of the diving party, fingers twiddling. The news had leaked out to them all at once—even the vast majority who were residents of the island, not guests at the resort—and they were on Chip for information every minute, they turned to Chip as the premier Nancy authority. Chip had nothing to give, obviously, but promised to keep them informed of any new developments. Sit tight, Chip texted them. The embargo was still on, he assured them; we’d put the Berkeley anthropologist in charge of distributing the digital footage as soon as he arrived.

  But of course the anthropologist wasn’t here yet. He was due in from Tortola on a late-afternoon ferry.

  I watched officials mill around with a growing sense of despair. Chip wasn’t available to me, eyes avidly planted on his bright data-cell, attention utterly committed. This was a time of sad aftermath, and I’ve always hated aftermaths, with their dull, heavy weight of disappointed hope. Nancy’s body was already gone, so in fact there was nothing to watch. It was a matter of waiting for someone to speak to us.

  And what about the mermaids? It was increasingly clear to me that we were shut out of everything now—the action was closed to us. Just a few hours earlier, with servers at our beck and call, we’d been members of an inner circle: we’d clustered at the nucleus, cleaved to the core.

  Now we were far from the core, excluded, floating like weak electrons. Or something.

  I worried, I felt queasy at the thought of Nancy, I still disbelieved the story of her demise—I understood it with my brain, possibly, but not the rest of me. The living Nancy, with her bushy eyebrows, was still realer to me than the dead Nancy.

  Chip was busily texting when the videographer from Australia came galumphing toward us over the emerald grass, weaving between the spectators, flushed and sweating.

  “It’s gone!” he said, panting, when he pulled up short. “Oh mate—my footage is gone! And my camera!”

  “What do you mean?” asked Chip, looking up from the small screen at long last. “Gone where?”

  “Stolen!” said the videographer. “They were both stolen!”

  “Slow down there, friend,” said Chip. “OK. Let’s … maybe you left your camera somewhere? Our place, even?”

  “I took it back to my hotel room last night,” he puffed. “You know—I’m at the Bitter End, about a half-hour drive, I got back to the room in the wee hours. Well, the camera was too big to fit in the bloody room safe, so I stuck just the video chip in there instead, and put the key under the pillow, just to be extra careful. Didn’t think I really needed to, but. Woke up this morning and the safe door was wide open. Looked under my pillow, the bloody key was still there! The chip is gone, mate! All the footage is lost. Stolen! It’s bloody gone!”

  “And there weren’t any copies,” said Chip slowly.

  “No copies,” said the Australian. “I hadn’t uploaded it. I promised her.”

  Chip and I looked at each other. We had the feeling, I think, people describe as sinking.

  “Oh,” said Chip. “Oh no.”

  He told the Australian about Nancy. The three of us stood there limply.

  We had nothing left. Poor Nancy, I found myself thinking, as though she were still alive. But no. We had no mermaids; we had no Nancy. All we had was a deceased parrotfish expert and a story people would laugh at.

  And memories.

  “We can go out again,” said Chip weakly. “We’ll find them. We’ll go right out again. Tomorrow! She would want us to. She would insist, you know she would. We owe it to her. It doesn’t have to be a big group. Maybe a backup camera this time. We’ll take the scholar from Berkeley. When we find them again, the scholar will give us credibility.”

  But we weren’t comforted. Not even Chip could crack a smile. Our sadness stood there with us like a fourth person.

  When we’d arrived on the island, buffeted by trade winds and cradled by the white sands and all for a few weeks’ pay, I’d felt like the American I was. It was a nice feeling, mostly. It had its minuses, sure (passivity, mental blankness), but also its pluses (vague background satisfaction caused by world dominance; non-starvation). When, carried by the white golf cart across the grounds, we’d jiggled inertly, I’d felt American then too—more American than ever, frankly. I’d felt American when we rented a boat and ordered a catered lunch and when we found mermaids. I’d felt American when we had the film of the mermaids in our possession, when we were drinking our fill and eating well and waiting for the anthropologist. I’d felt American when Nancy carried us along in the hubbub of her discovery.

  We’d been Americans then, Chip and I; Nancy had too. Now we were spun off to the margins, us and our opinions, our visions, our memories—our singular knowledge. Now we had something to sell that no one would ever buy, we had a secret that cast us out into the wings … was it possible we’d stopped being American?

  It’s like we’re not even Americans, I said to myself.

  In fact, I thought as I looked around me at the officials milling in their damp costumes, the female reporters in pancake makeup … wait, they weren’t female reporters at all—they had no microphones! One looked like a secretary, the other someone’s girlfriend. Now that I looked more closely, their makeup wasn’t heavy enough—they weren’t even that self-important.

  So where was the media? Was there no media after all? The van with the satellite dish—did it not have the call number of a local affiliate on it?

  No, I saw now, it was the name of some kind of utility, maybe a cable provider. It wasn’t the press at all. There wasn’t any press here.

  No one was watching us, as it turned out. We weren’t the focus of anyone’s interest. The death of one of our own seemed, as far as I could tell, to be passing without notice.

  I looked around and saw no Americans—no Americans at all.

  III.

  THE MURDER MYSTERY

  We stood on the dock a little while before sunset, Chip and I, with waves lapping quietly onto the sand behind us. I squinted into the distance, trying to make out the faint white dot of the island ferry.

  Steve was there too, Steve the Freudian. By then we
’d told him about the sighting. With Nancy and the mermaid footage both gone, we’d decided (over a lunch we had no interest in) that our embargo was beside the point. Obviously there couldn’t be an embargo without a commodity—in this case the mermaid video. So with me sitting upright next to him on their sofa, Chip had told Steve—Steve and his wife Janeane, who preferred to be called his life partner—about the mermaid sighting.

  To my surprise the Freudian didn’t mock us. I’d assumed a therapist type would instantly dismiss our claims, but Steve just cocked his head to one side, contemplative.

  “Something happened to me, not long ago, that I could never explain either,” he offered, nodding.

  “What?” asked Chip.

  “Enh, I’ll tell you the story sometime. But in a nutshell, I had a strange experience. It made me question things. Question a lot.”

  “It was how we met,” said Janeane. “I mean, after his experience. We both went to this PTSD encounter group.”

  “For post-traumatic stress?” asked Chip. “Hey. So sorry. I know they say they don’t let women in combat, but once you’re out in a war zone that line blurs. Doesn’t it.”

  “Oh, she wasn’t in the army,” said Steve. “Janeane?”

  “My practice is around peace,” said Janeane. “Sending out empathy for all beings.”

  “What happened was, a therapist told her the phobia had features in common with PTSD, so she started going to the group. I was helping to moderate that day.”

  “It was a new horizon,” said Janeane, smiling. “Plus I met Steve!”

  Now, in the tropical dusk, Janeane was back in their cabana, resting and making all of us a late dinner; she didn’t like to eat out much. In the resort’s restaurant, she’d said, and the various restaurants off-campus too, there was always the chance of a bludgeoning. Especially now, after this, she was reluctant to emerge. She’d be picking at an overpriced entrée, she’d said, fingering the stem of a goblet, and then suddenly see, in her mind’s eye, a machete intruder.