Mermaids in Paradise: A Novel

by Lydia Millet

  Where had the soldiers come from? They looked like UN peacekeeping forces, with those berets—the guys that got sent out to deal with Somalia, the Sudan, war-torn, distant countries where their job was to resemble soldiers but not do anything. Here we’d thought it was only a few policemen, only the resort’s pathetic rent-a-cops, as Thompson had put it, but now we had soldiers on our hands. To go with the armada, there was now an army.

  By this time, luckily, Miyoko was wrapping up her speech. The next part of our broadcast was to be the mermaid footage, safe in the computers in Tokyo. I was so grateful, in that moment, for those Tokyo computers, so grateful for the TV producers Miyoko implicitly trusted. I was so grateful for technology, for social networking even, and also for our Thompson, that Navy SEAL Santa, with his distracting incendiary devices and surprising skills of stealth.

  We looked to Thompson now, all of us did. Chip did, I did, and even Gina did. We expected great things of him.

  “Outmanned and outgunned,” was what he said, shrugging.

  Miyoko was the one who told us what to do.

  “Don’t stop filming,” she said. “Rick. Turn the camera. Film the soldiers. Keep it rolling. No matter what. We’re still live. We’re still broadcasting.”

  And then she said something, I guess to her viewers, in Japanese, and Rick swung the camera around and pointed it right at the soldiers.

  On they came till they were right beside us. Maybe twenty soldiers on foot, and more in the jeeps. Some soldiers jumped out of the jeeps. Among them were a couple of civilians—a man in a suit and the woman who’d pretended to be Mormonish, then fully reneged on it.

  “I’m sorry,” said the non-Mormon, but her tone wasn’t apologetic. Not one bit. “Do you have a permit for whatever it is that you’re doing?”

  “We’re hotel guests,” said Gina. “We have a perfect right to be here. Or do you tell all your guests they can’t set foot on your beach? Is that your policy?”

  “You should know we’re broadcasting live,” added Chip. “Millions of Japanese viewers are watching this.”

  The soldiers unhooked their guns from their shoulders and, in an unhurried way, lifted and more or less pointed them. At us.

  I’d never had a gun pointed at me, other than a paint gun at a corporate retreat, and I have to say it felt more personal than you might think. It seemed it’d be far too easy for one of those guys to pull the trigger. Glocks, I’d heard, had hair triggers on them, cops shot themselves in the foot with those things, just taking them out of the holsters. These weren’t Glocks, though, I told myself—Glocks were mostly handguns. Weren’t they?

  Words were what we had, I told myself. Words were the only weapons that we had, since the numchucks hadn’t come in handy, and this was the time to deploy them.

  “You should also know,” I said, maybe a little shakily, “that we’ve sent them the video footage. A major TV station in Japan. They have it and they’re showing it. The Japanese are seeing the mermaids, too. The Japanese know.”

  “You’ll have to stop what you’re doing and come along with us,” said the man in the suit.

  He did look paler, didn’t he? Now that we’d told him about the people of Japan?

  “This is how you want to be introduced to the world?” said Gina. “Really, Mr. Corporate Asshole? Does the term Facebook mean anything to you? The term Twitter? To say nothing of the lawsuits your company will be facing. We have a litigator lined up already, in D.C. Meyers & Finkelstein. Kidnapping of a U.S. citizen, just for starters. And trust me, that’s only the very tip of that iceberg.”

  Miyoko spoke in Japanese. She was talking about the soldiers and the suits and who paid their bills, she told me later, and though what she said was pretty damning she smiled brightly throughout.

  “You think people will come to see your mermaid zoo once they know how you started it? Like this?” asked Chip. “Kidnappings? Guns? They’ll boycott it. You’ll be notorious. And how about Nancy? She was the one who found them. And she wanted the mermaids to be like Darwin’s finches. Not—not Barnum & Bailey’s poor old elephants. These mermaids were her discovery.”

  I felt proud of Chip, then, for his eloquence.

  Miyoko translated for her audience, keeping up a rapid patter while the suit leaned close to the woman, whispering something.

  “Stand down,” said Thompson loudly, in the direction of the soldiers. He had his balls back, suddenly. “You’re on the wrong side here. I am an officer of the United States Navy.”

  One or two of the soldiers looked at each other insecurely.

  “Then you’ve got exactly no jurisdiction here,” said the man in the suit.

  “He’s just a retiree,” sneered the woman.

  “You think I don’t have strings to pull, lady?” said Thompson. “I’ve got some strings. Don’t force me to pull them.”

  “You don’t have strings,” she said. “You’ve got no strings at all. Now who’s the bullshitter.”

  “That far out isn’t territorial waters,” said Thompson. “It’s still in the Exclusive Economic Zone, sure, but it’s contiguous zone, where those coral heads are. I measured it.”

  I turned and stared at him, then back at the corporates. I wasn’t sure what Thompson was talking about. But the suit looked like maybe he knew.

  “Last night,” he went on. “I measured it last night. It’s only inside the territorial zone, see, that they have a crystal-clear right to tell everyone else what to do. Assuming they’re in cahoots with the cops, a.k.a. what passes for government in the BVI. In the contiguous zone the law’s not so clear. So they’re trying to cordon the mermaids off with those nets, bring them closer in. So then they can claim the rights to them absolutely. No wiggle room, they figure, if they can just bring them closer in.”

  That would have been good information to have earlier. The suit/non-Mormon looked shifty.

  “The mermaids don’t belong to you,” said Chip. “They’re not a fish stock. They’re half-human! They don’t belong to anyone!”

  “Look, people,” said the man, after a long pause. “What we have here is essentially a misunderstanding.”

  “Then tell your toy soldiers to lower their guns,” said Thompson. “Remember you’re on live TV. Come on, Mr. Money. Give the order.”

  The suit conferred with the non-Mormon again. After a while she nodded, and he gestured at the soldiers. Guns were lowered.

  We all stood there, silent except for the sound of Miyoko, still talking in her native tongue.

  “And how about Nancy?” asked Chip. “Dr. Nancy Simonoff? We want justice for her. You’re still claiming she drowned in her bathtub? A first-rate swimmer and diver?”

  “The woman was an asthmatic,” said the woman. “Her accidental passing is regrettable.”

  “Deeply regrettable. Yes, very sad. And also, no comment,” added the suit.

  “I demand an autopsy,” said Chip. “By someone other than the locals. Say, for instance, the FBI.”

  “We’re not prepared to discuss any of that, other than with her family,” said the suit. He whispered to the woman and gestured to the army again.

  “Have they even been notified?” yelled Chip, as the soldiers executed a snappy about-face and began marching away. The suits, then the jeep soldiers hopped into the jeeps. “Release her cell phone! You have no right to it!”

  “Neither do we,” pointed out Rick from behind his camera. “Technically.”

  “We can talk to her family,” said Gina. “She was an academic, right? Look, there are avenues. I’ll do research. Just lead me to a laptop. Forget these ass clowns. We’ve got them on the run.”

  As quickly as it had appeared, the convoy made a wide turn and drove off, foot soldiers bringing up the rear. Marching away, they looked almost foolish.

  Miyoko finished her broadcast and signed off; now, she told us, the mermaid footage was running. We’d have to spread the word to other countries, send out our press release to as many places as we coul
d—basically make sure that the mermaid footage went viral. That’d be no problem, Miyoko assured us. It took a lot less than the world’s first mermaid video to generate a viral scenario.

  “I’m thinking we should stay somewhere else,” said Chip, as we walked up the beach toward the cabanas. “Another hotel. Another part of the island.”

  “No kidding,” said Gina. “Let’s get the hell outta Dodge.”

  WE THREW OUR clothes and toiletries into bags and drove down the road, some of us in Rick and Ronnie’s rental car, the rest in Thompson’s “jeep,” which turned out to be a Hummer, a car Gina admired with particularly hard-edged irony. She congratulated Thompson when she saw it, told him owning a Hummer was the most antisocial act a person could commit without breaking the law.

  The sticking point was Janeane, who had a little trouble leaving her safe space despite the fact that it really wasn’t safe anymore. In the end Steve gave her a couple of horse tranquilizers and called it good. We practically carried her out.

  A lot of the places were booked up, so we landed at a cheap motel in the end—probably just as well, we figured, since it wouldn’t have corporate ties. It wasn’t a chain and it wasn’t directly on the beach, either, though it was within walking distance. We had thin-walled rooms but there were enough for all of us; we needed to maintain our safety-in-numbers policy. (We’d thought of Thompson’s house, but we’d be too easy to find there if the company decided to come after us.) The pool had leaves floating in it, even a toad, and the clerk had to be enticed out of his back room with impatient shouts to check us in. He wasn’t a go-getter.

  On the upside, it had WiFi and cable and it wasn’t too far from our previous location. Chip and I crossed the road and walked down to the ocean just after we checked in: we could still make out the dots of the armada.

  Someone got the apathetic clerk to unlock the door between the two biggest rooms and we set up shop with our modest tech array and Janeane’s surprisingly large supply of groceries, sadly lacking in meat, dairy and refined sugar. We convened what Chip called a “leadership conference” to decide on our next steps. We’d broadcasted, we’d faced them down for now, evaded capture; but what was our next goal? There’d be a horde, Miyoko’d warned, descending on the island soon; that was the other big risk we’d run. Now that the mermaids were public knowledge, first in Japan, soon virally, there were new challenges.

  We’d done what we had to do, but we’d also opened up a world-size can of worms.

  “Not everyone who comes will be on our side, either,” piped up Ronnie. “We can depend on that. Half of them will probably just want to pay the price of admission to the Venture of Marvels.”

  “More than half,” grumped Thompson.

  “We need to call in some people who’ll be on our side, then,” said Chip.

  “Like, who?” said Rick. “Animal rights people? Environmentalists?”

  “No, people with power,” said Gina. “Shit. First off, we need some celebrity spokespeople. Like Miyoko. But more so. And American.”

  “And scientists,” said Rick. “We have to get some of them. You need at least one famous scientist, in a situation like this.”

  “At least one major politician,” put in Steve. “And a rich guy, someone famous for being extremely rich. Say a Bill Gates, a Warren Buffett.”

  We brainstormed like that, as Miyoko slaved away on social media and did some phone interviews. Gina took a break to watch the footage, which was posted on YouTube; it already had six figures’ worth of hits, mostly from people in Japan, Miyoko said, but people in other countries were starting to catch on. Before long the hits would be in the millions, she told us confidently. Plenty of people thought it was a hoax, pure Hollywood—good, said Miyoko, that was just fine with her, maybe it’d keep some of the riffraff out.

  “More likely it’s the riffraff that’ll come,” said Thompson. “Your alien abductees, your Bigfoot believers, your New Age freaks that go to Sedona to find the vortexes.”

  Janeane looked startled at that last one, like maybe she’d made some trips to Sedona herself, but said nothing.

  The rest of us thought he had a point.

  “Jesus,” said Rick. “Maybe we’re the bad guys here. Maybe we shouldn’t have done this.”

  We all felt the panic of that possibility, for a long moment. We saw the hordes, in our mind’s eyes, overrunning the island and the mermaids, and we didn’t like it.

  “It was our only play,” said Chip finally. “This was our only play. We have to make it work.”

  “I’m going to find a number for Nancy’s family,” said Gina. “We need to get them on board, then reach out to the scientists she worked with. Science will give us our legitimacy. Who’s got a spare laptop? Or iPad?”

  Chip’s was still in the possession of the parent company, but Rick had one and he set Gina up. Ellis claimed he’d get in touch with a British embassy or consulate—there had to be one nearby, and maybe, since he was a citizen, they could be of some help.

  “Ellis,” I said, in a private aside, “really, man. Listen. I’m always on your side, with the English thing. You’re free to be you. Completely. But you might have to, like, prove you’re a citizen, dealing with a consulate.”

  Ellis gave me a hurt look. “Well-w, Deb-rah,” he said, “wot d’ya fink dis is?” (He goes cockney when he’s feeling confronted.)

  And damned if he didn’t reach into a zip compartment on his roller bag and pull out a UK passport. The thing was red, with a gold crown on it and a couple of royal-looking animals standing up on hind legs. Seemed like the real deal. I’ve known Ellis a long time, and I still have no idea how he got his hands on it.

  Anyway, we figured there was no harm letting him waste his time with embassies or whatnot. There were none on the island, that was for sure.

  The group had decided no one should use words like murder or homicide, when one of us talked to Nancy’s family. Those words were not comforting words, and the truth was, without any cops to talk to, without having even seen the body (except for Steve, who’d seen it covered in a sheet) we didn’t actually know shit. Once Gina had a number for Nancy’s parents, which she accomplished with a speed that impressed me (“Failed academics run in families. Turns out her old man’s a professor too”), we decided Chip would make the call. He’d been the closest to Nancy by far, and Chip, when he wants to, can be tactful.

  He needed privacy for the call, he said, so we let him out onto the balcony, where he fortified himself with a few swigs from a dewy beer before connecting.

  Meanwhile Miyoko had started getting Tokyo celebrities on board; she also had ties to some American actors and rock stars, she told us, a lot of them did lucrative commercials in Japan, for perfume and jewelry and clothing, and she’d interviewed some of our A-listers now and then. Still, they weren’t her best buds so getting through their handlers would take some time, she said. But she was up for it. She didn’t have many ins with scientists or government officials, but pop-culture famous people were her stock in trade.

  Gina and Chip would handle the scientist angle, Gina being in the academy herself and Chip having had Nancy’s ear. Rick would try to schmooze the wealthy, since, as an independent filmmaker, he knew quite a few of them. Plus his money contacts had friends among the nationally prominent Democrats, since many made sizable contributions to political campaigns. He’d handle that angle, and Ronnie would help him. Thompson insisted he could pull strings, that he’d call on some old friends still on active duty; he’d try to put together some military might for us, he said, though what he meant we weren’t entirely sure.

  There they were, all on cell phones, all frantically dialing and talking. And then there were the rest of us, with no contacts at all. The best Steve could do were some astronomers in Palo Alto, who wouldn’t be much help. They were preoccupied, he said, didn’t have an interest in marine biology: their eyes were fixed on the heavens.

  Janeane and I also had nothing.

 
So Steve, as a therapist (though apparently he didn’t practice anymore) and therefore a de facto interpersonal specialist, would try to do some coalition-building, visit some places of business and government locally, trying to reach out to the year-round community. He’d be armed only with a tablet and our footage, and he’d try to garner local support for a mermaid sanctuary.

  We didn’t have high hopes for that part of the outreach, but it was a nice time-killer for Steve, who, like Chip, enjoyed meeting people, whoever they might be. He didn’t feel great about going out alone, but Thompson said he could drive the Hummer and I think the novelty may have encouraged Steve a bit.

  Janeane and I were relegated to the menial jobs: Janeane was in charge of keeping us fed and watered, and I—well, I had the lowest task of all. I had to tweet.

  Miyoko had several million followers, but they followed her in Japanese. So we established a mermaid-group handle linked to the Facebook page she’d set up, plus the footage of us on the beach, and I tweeted from that. I’d never tweeted before, but it’s not rocket science and I’m a quick study. At first the tweeting was slow-going, but soon enough, with Miyoko’s input, I gained a following for us. Re-tweets were everywhere.

  We saw the TV tape on YouTube, our confrontation with the suits and the soldiers, the Japanese TV broadcast. I didn’t like the feeling of watching myself on TV—the shapeless garment I sported was a blot on the landscape. A lifetime of good dressing went out the window; now I was immortalized wearing Janeane’s floral quasi-muumuu.

  Gina took my hand, the first time we saw that footage, and squeezed it in terrible sympathy. I would have cried, if I’d had the time and energy. But there was no pause to allow for tears, and the milk was already spilt. The world now knew me as a muumuu woman. I looked like Janeane.

  Before long the personal calls and texts started rolling in to my cell phone. I ignored them all—people from work, friends, even B-school people I hadn’t heard from in years. There were three calls from Chip’s mother alone.

  Chip ignored his calls too; the long conversation with the Simonoff family—Nancy’s mother, to be specific—was draining. As it turned out, the family had known something was terribly wrong, because someone unfamiliar had answered Nancy’s cell phone when her mother called to check in. That person had said Nancy wasn’t available and not to call again, then promptly hung up. When the father called back (by then the mother was too distraught), no one picked up, so they called the resort and were put through to Guest Services, where they were given the run-around. As a result, the father was already en route to us. Worried sick about Nancy, he’d simply gotten on a plane.