Near + Far

by Cat Rambo

  Behind me, Niko gasped and sputtered. There was another sound beside the hiss and slap of the waves. Mary Magdalena, whispering, whispering. What was she saying to him? What was going on in his head, what had he seen in his time underwater? Had the mermaids come and stared in his face, their eyes as blank as winter, his father there, driven mad by solipsism and sea song, looking at his son with no thoughts in his head at all?

  I stood, Jorge Felipe looking at me. If I locked myself in the cabin, how long would it take him to break in? But he gestured me away as I stepped towards the door.

  "Not now," he said, and the regret in his tone was, I thought, for the time he'd have to spend at the wheel, awake, more than anything else.

  She was whispering, still whispering, to Niko. Why hadn't she warned me? She must have known what was brewing like a storm beneath the horizon. I couldn't have been the first.

  I started to turn to Jorge Felipe, Mary Magdalena's voice buzzing under my nerves like a bad light bulb. Then weight shifting on the deck, Niko's footsteps squelching forward as he grabbed at Jorge Felipe, backpedaling until they fell together over the side in a boil of netting and mermaids.

  In a fairytale, the mermaids would have brought Niko back to the surface while they held Jorge Felipe down below, gnawing at him with their sharp parrot beaks. In some stories, dolphins rescued drowning sailors, back when dolphins were still alive. And whales spoke to the fishing boats they swam beside, underneath clear-skied stars, in waters where no mermaids sang.

  But instead no one surfaced. I turned the boat in great circles, spinning the cargo net over and over again. Finally I told the Mary Magdalena to take us home. It had started to rain, the sullen sodden rain that means winter is at elbow's length.

  I took the yellow ducks out of my pocket and put them on the console. What did Jorge Felipe think I'd found? I stared at the display and the slow shift and fuzz of the earth's bones, far below the cold water.

  "What did you tell Niko?" I asked.

  "I told him that his father would be killed if he didn't defend him from Jorge Felipe. And I activated my ultrasonics. They acted on his nervous system."

  I shuddered. "That's what I felt as well?"

  "There should be no lasting effects."

  "Thanks," I said. I stirred three sugar packets and powdered cream into my coffee. It was almost too hot to drink when it came out of the microwave, but I cupped it in my fingers, grateful for its heat.

  I could have slept. But every time I laid down in the hammock, I smelled Jorge Felipe, and thought I heard him climbing out of the water.

  Finally I went out and watched the water behind us. The Mary Magdalena played the radio for me, a soft salsa beat with no words I could understand. It began to rain, and I heard the sound of raindrops on the decking beside me, pattering on the plastic sheeting I drew over my head.

  By the time I arrived back in port, the mermaids had plucked away all but a few tangles of seaweed from the netting. I'd be lucky to net the cost of a cup of coffee, let alone cover the fuel I'd used. Never mind. A few more seasons and I'd have the money I needed, if I was careful. If there were no disasters.

  Neither body was there in the net. Perhaps Niko's father had reclaimed him.

  The wind and rain almost knocked me off the deck as I stared into the water. The green netting writhed like barely visible guilt in the darkness.

  The Mary Magdalena called after me, as she had not dared in years. "Sleep well, Lolo. My regards to Grandma Fig."

  I stopped and half turned. I could barely see her lines through the driving rain.

  Sometimes I used to imagine setting her on fire. Sometimes I used to imagine taking her out to a rift and drilling holes in the hull. Sometimes I used to imagine her smashed by waves, or an earthquake, or a great red bull stamping through the streets.

  But the winter was long, and it would be lonely sitting at home with my grandmother. Lonelier than time at sea with her, haunted by the mermaids' music.

  "Good night, Mary Magdalena," I said.

  Afternotes

  The title of the story, which most fellow English majors and poets will recognize, is taken from T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, a poem I love enough to have completely committed to memory at a stage in my life when my memory was less prone to lapses. The inspiration for the story itself, though, was a book I've always greatly admired, Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. When I sat down to write the story, I had in my head that I'd do an updated version of someone who finds something with the potential to lift them out of their troubles, only to see it vanish, bit by bit.

  Katherine Sparrow, both a terrific writer and fellow Clarion West student, had recently posted online a news story about giant floating garbage masses. I'd also been thinking about feral mermaids when someone mentioned to me what a glut of mermaid stories they'd been getting lately. When I threw all that together, this story emerged.

  The core of the story shifted in the writing of it to center on the relationship between Lolo and Mary Magdalena, becoming a story of coming to terms with and forgiving betrayal. The setting is an unidentified island with a Hispanic culture, whose main source of income is tourists.

  Lolo's decision to become ungendered is one some reviewers have criticized. But the fact that bodies will become more malleable, more self-defined in the future, is a theme that fascinates me, and one that will be increasingly resonant with our day to day lives as we move into an age of electromagnetically-configured tattoos, of changeable hair color and lips and eyes and limbs.

  I was happy with how this story turned out, and it sold to the first person that looked at it, Sean Wallace, who bought it for Clarkesworld, which is always pleasant. I count it a success because when I ran into one of my writing heroes, she specifically mentioned reading and enjoying this story. That's awfully nice when it happens, and other people liked it enough for it to get some nice mentions here and there.

  PEACHES OF IMMORTALITY

  Decades later the music was what really tipped Glen off. He heard a song on the radio, a brand new release, and remembered the day he'd first heard it, twenty years earlier.

  Everything began to fall together then. Or maybe that was when it really started to shatter.

  There were four of them in high school. Glen wasn't one of the quartet. Instead, it was Fred Lipton and his gang.

  But you could have said that of any of them. Derek Cho and his gang. Penelope Nantes and her gang. Casey Lucas and her gang. Casey Lucas, Barbie-blond, eyebrows as fine and wispy as fledgling feathers. Graceful Casey, but smart, too, planning on becoming a journalist, colleges salivating at the prospect.

  Shiny happy careers lined up before all four. Glen's post-high school future was murkier. He was a D&D player and artist, trying not to be thought the only queer in a Catholic school while not above exploiting his sensitive side to get girls, a pursuit that beguiled him more than studying.

  Casey hadn't yielded to his best brooding looks. He suspected she thought herself above him, but the heat in the way she looked at him egged him on.

  Once she'd laid her hand on his arm to steady herself, a delicious trusting pressure, and ever since then he'd always stood as close to her as possible.

  So—it was perhaps not entirely a surprise when she invited him to the loft.

  "What for?"

  "We like to play music," she said. "We're pretty good, even. Come and listen to us." She laid her hand on his, this time not to catch herself, but to snare him. He turned into his locker to hide his sudden erection.

  "All right," he said, half over his shoulder.

  He'd found a magazine a few weeks ago while in the library that advised boys to play it cool at first. He didn't want to play it cool, though. He wanted to turn and look into her blue eyes and lean close enough to smell the perfume she wore, a lemon and musk scent unlike any other girl's perfume.

  The Lipton's house was within walking distance, but Casey gave him a ride over, along with Danny and
Penelope. They knew who he was—their entire class was a few hundred kids, and only the most aloof didn't know the names of the rest. They creaked up the stairs and into the loft, a high-ceilinged, drafty space smelling in equal measures of marijuana and incense.

  Fred was there, along with Jenny, a girl from the Social Studies class Fred and Glen shared, and another boy, Alf Reidle, who looked up as Casey entered and tried to catch her eye. Unsuccessful, he settled back like the others. The pellets in his grimy beanbag chair scrunched and rescrunched as he passed around an enormous bong with layers of skull-shaped bubblers in the stem.

  Casey swung open the door of an old-fashioned refrigerator and gestured. Glen stared in. It was stocked with soda and beer, an emphasis on the latter. Casey took one. He hesitated. Beer made him sleepy and stupid. It might make him say or do something dumb around Casey.

  "What's the matter, worried the folks will smell it when you get home?" Fred sneered.

  The door banged open and Derek barged in, grabbing the bong, discarding his jacket, a bustle that allowed Glen to grab a soda and settle in his own beanbag.

  "We're all here," Fred said. He slapped Jenny's thigh jocularly and stood up. "Let's play."

  The four of them sang. It was November, 1980, and they began with some of the most popular songs of the day: "Another One Bites the Dust," "It's Still Rock & Roll to Me," Dan Fogelberg's "Longer"—songs overplayed on the radio, almost perfect renditions, note for note. They all played instruments, and sometimes between songs they'd trade off according to some system Glen didn't understand, some combination of challenge and self-declaration. The boys strutted and pranced like TV tough guys. Derek's snarl like dark, bitter honey; Fred's voice husky and sincere. The girls' voices seemed interchangeable at first, but Glen began to pick out nuances. Casey's was lower, more syrupy; Penelope's edged with crystal.

  Like Glen, Jenny and Alf were onlookers, sitting on the beanbags, watching the enchanted four play.

  Then they switched to other things, music that seemed all new. Often they resorted to the synthesizer in the corner for beats and effects: ethereal glass flutes or tiger yodels or a rhythmic sandpaper rasp, magnified a thousand times, almost painful underneath the screamed defiance of the song.

  As they changed instruments after something that somehow seemed more disco than disco could ever be, Glen leaned over and touched Casey's elbow.

  "Who wrote these?" he said.

  She paused. She was rising from the drums, still breathing hard from playing the last song.

  The moment stretched longer than it should have. He found her looking at him with an inability to answer the question, a lack of preparation that surprised him.

  "We all do," Fred said. "Someone comes up with an idea and we all contribute. We like to improvise." He began a bouncy beat, staring at Glen. "Here's one I like from U2, 'Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For.'"

  They joined in. The words flowed along, strangely ominous. Fred's speculative black eyes watched Glen as though assessing his reaction to each chord.

  "I haven't heard of them," Jenny said. "Did they just release an album?"

  Casey broke off playing. "Our friend Ana's visiting," she said, warning in her tone. Derek nodded as though in confirmation. Glen didn't know what they were talking about.

  "It doesn't matter," Fred said. He waved a lazy hand at the bong and shrugged. "We can play anything we like. We're all just a bunch of stoned zombies."

  Penelope picked out the first few bars of a Beatles song, "Yesterday," and Derek half-laughed. He picked up the bass and they launched into a version that was somehow campy and mocking one moment, and heartbreakingly sincere the next. Tears welled in Glen's eyes as Casey sang, and he swallowed hard. Looking up, he saw Alf watching him with a frown on his face.

  He could have listened all afternoon, all evening, long into the morning hours. But they could not play that long. All too soon, they were putting down their instruments, exchanging wry smiles as Alf and Jenny and Glen applauded.

  "What do you call your band?" Jenny asked.

  Derek shrugged. "We don't really have a name," he said. He was a skinny Asian boy who kept a proprietary hand on Penelope at all times. "I call it the Peaches of Immortality, but you can call it anything you like."

  "That's a pretty name," Jenny said. "Where's it from?"

  "In Chinese legend, the gods eat them and become immortal," Derek said. "My grandfather believed in them. He was an alchemist back in China. I remember him telling me stories about them when I was just a little kid."

  Alf departed after a whispered, angry conversation with Casey in the corner. She shrugged off questions and settled into the beanbag next to Glen.

  They smoked more pot and drank more beer and watched a movie on the dilapidated VCR in the corner.

  "My folks like to get the latest thing, so they let me have this," Fred explained. Glen thought that Fred had one of the luckiest existences possible: permissive parents, beer and technology, cool friends, the brains to get through classes while seeming to coast, bored and above it all. He sighed.

  "What's wrong?" Casey breathed in his ear. She leaned over from her beanbag, half settling on his. He wondered if he could slide an arm around her. How would she react? Maybe best not to.

  But the article had said be bold.

  His arm raised and curled around her shoulders as though by itself. She rested against him, and he could feel her warmth like a burning coal along his side. He could smell her perfume.

  It made it hard to focus on the film, even more than the pot. He couldn't make out the plot, but gathered that it was a love story, lovers separated by fate and meeting each other by chance at intervals through the years, never at the right time.

  Casey nudged him. "This is my favorite part."

  The lovers in a garden.

  Him to her: We only meet when we're tangled with others, it seems.

  Her to him: Someday we'll meet at the right time.

  He takes her hand, moonlight silhouetting them, a cut paper portrait.

  His voice lowers. Till then, a kiss to dream about, he says.

  The inevitable clinch. It seemed cliché and sappy to Glen. The sort of thing girls liked, he supposed.

  Casey's perfume filled his senses, and he was focused on the soft, round breast pressed against his side. He held still, as though afraid of frightening her, breathing in a mix of smoke and happiness.

  But the next day at school, Casey was distant again. He saw her in the corridors, but she didn't look at him.

  Fred clued him in when he caught Glen waiting near her locker.

  "Don't let Brad Effer catch you," he said.

  Brad was captain of the football team, a hearty, handsome hunk with a touch of the bully about him.

  "What?" Glen stammered.

  "She's dating him now. You'll have to wait for your chance."

  Disappointment engulfed Glen, shading the hall a few colors darker. But he tried to keep it off his face, conscious of the odd avidity with which Fred watched him. He muttered something and turned away.

  High school passed like high school. He never got that close to Casey again. She flitted from boyfriend to boyfriend, but by the time he was aware she'd left one, she'd already be with someone else. Once, for three days, it was Alf. Then they broke up, leaving him red-eyed and ragged.

  Most of the kids watched the four of them, knew what they were doing (which instantly became cool, whether it was bowling or wearing baseball hats), but didn't socialize with them. It was as though the rest of the school provided a backdrop, scenery against which their stories played out.

  He wasn't sure what most of the teachers thought of them, but Mr. Laskowski warned him at one point when he caught Glen trying a cigarette—some girls liked the taste, and it never hurt to have a touch of bad boy about you—in the school parking lot.

  "Don't become like Lipton or Cho," he said. "They're just treading water, waiting to get through high school. Missing out on some of thei
r best years. You can do better than that. You're a decent artist when you work at it."

  Glen thought later, years later, that perhaps every high school had them. The boys and girls who ruled the school, whose favor or lack thereof could shape a lesser kid's personal existence. He thought, though, that usually everything after high school was uphill for them, that they would never achieve their glory days again.

  But it wasn't so for the Peaches. Fred started a software company halfway through his time at Harvard that made him a millionaire by the day he graduated. Penelope's novel made the bestseller list, somehow expressing the zeitgeist in a way that had every young adult in America clutching a copy. Derek was rumored to have gone to work for a government think-tank.

  Casey went to journalism school. Her lively, informal prose led her to television journalism, where her looks and personable delivery netted her an early morning show.

  It surprised him that they hadn't kept up with the music. They'd been so good. But nothing of it, as though, ascending to college, they'd abandoned their adolescent passion.

  Life overtook Glen. He forgot about them for the most part. He met a woman, Eloise, in grad school and married her. They had no children, but had successful careers.

  He still drew sometimes, although only for himself; he never showed the pictures to anyone. Complex landscapes with machinery buried underneath, showing through like a skeleton, gears gleaming in the rent of a tree's bark, screws bolting a clump of grass to the sidewalk.

  Periodically he remembered that music. He'd hear something on the radio, some new release, and he'd think that it reminded him of a song played in the echoing loft. They had moved effortlessly from one style to another, sometimes a hard driving metal beat that had acquired a gritty edge, an undertone of concrete and late night steel, then bubblegum as vacuous and sweet as cotton candy, singing it, half-laughing all the while.

  When he ran into Casey, he knew her immediately, despite the decade and a half since he'd last seen her. He could tell she knew him from the way her eyes widened, even though she tried to play it off as though she didn't. He bought her a Frappuccino and they caught up.