Mermaid in Chelsea Creek

by Michelle Tea

  In her vision, Sophie pulled her twin jewel out from her shirt, the seashell buried in the frosted, ancient glass, and showed it to the mermaid. And the mermaid opened her mouth and spoke inside the water.

  “Yah, I know,” she said, sounding annoyed. Her words were heavy, each one sounded carved from rock. It was an old voice—not the shaky timbre of an elderly woman but old like bedrock, a hard voice, solid. “Why do you think I am doing here, anyway? I come for you.”

  The current of the waters pushed the mermaid’s hair in front of her face, obscuring her. She pulled a six-pack of plastic rings from the creek bed, tore a circle free and pulled her hair through it at the top of her head, subduing a bit of the wild mane. Sophie could see more six-pack rings and other bits of garbage stuck in the mermaid’s hair, trying to control it.

  “You came for me?” Sophie asked. The mermaid’s heavy accent, her struggle with English, made Sophie unsure she was hearing right. They spoke in the glow of their jewels, their faces lit but the water dim around them. Sophie was glad about that. She had come to understand that they were submerged in the creek, and what floated around them was the terrible flotsam and jetsam of Chelsea. She would be completely grossed out if not for the absolute wonder of a mermaid, or the bizarre ability to speak and breathe underwater. How was that possible? Sophie thought it was better not to question it. Of course I can breathe underwater, she thought. That’s what happens when you hang out with a mermaid.

  “You have the amulet, yes?” the mermaid gestured to the jewel. “I know you are the one. Now, put it away. Do not flaunt.”

  Sheepishly, Sophie dropped her amulet into her shirt, which ballooned around her in the water.

  “I come all the way from Poland to be here,” the mermaid said, her voice thick with her country. “I watch over my city, and now, come to get you, who watches over my river? No one. Is unprotected. Will turn into a mess, like this place. I try and try not to come. I try to get out from it. I try to come later. No, no, no, everyone say, time is now, the girl, you do what you call—pass out?”

  Sophie nodded.

  “Very great way to come to you, in this special place, half-real, half-dream. Is own space. Girls find it when they come into power, at certain age.” The mermaid sighed with deep resignation. “So, was time to come for you. And here we are in this—what you call this? Not a river—”

  “A creek,” Sophie offered.

  “Yes. Is terrible! So skinny, like a girl that doesn’t eat. I am used to my big river, water all around me.” The mermaid spread her hands grandly, to indicate space. One hand banged up against a rusted, submerged shopping cart, the other slapped against the earthen wall of the narrow channel. Sophie noticed shining rings on the creature’s pale fingers, iridescent shards of seashells. “My back is very sore from having hunch to be in this small water,” she continued her complaint. “And the water, so dirty! But all the waters everywhere, very, very bad. I see in my journey here. One place in the ocean is so evil, a machine pours darkness into the water, pure darkness, and if it touches you, you become the darkness, you get caught in it like this—” She caught a floating tangle of hair and thrust it at Sophie. Sophie saw a hermit crab, its tiny shell imprisoned in the snarl. “You cannot move, the darkness ensnares you, you sink down down down until you die.” She shook her head. “I would think that machine is where the night comes from, except night comes from the sky and is gentle. This is something wrong.”

  “It’s oil,” Sophie offered. “There was a big spill or something.” She had seen it on the news, flickering across her mother’s sleeping face.

  “Well, it fucking sucks. Excuse my language, but I try to speak words you know. You know ‘fucking sucks,’ yes?”

  Sophie nodded.

  “To leave my beautiful river—I keep it very nice, I promise you. I have lived there for many, many hundreds of years and the people, they are very good to me, they put my picture on the seal of the city, even. I am—what you call—a celebrity. Parents scare your children with me. They tell them, ‘You throw trash in the river; Syrena will come and get you.’ And I do! I come in their dreams, like I am in your dream right now.” Syrena took a moment to consider herself. “I am not like the mermaids in your books and pictures, no? They are very—they are like dolls. They are pretty, but they are not real. I am real mermaid. Rusalka, river mermaid.” She bunched her hair and twisted it in a long bundle, like a baguette, pulled it over one bare shoulder. An eel poked its confused head from the garland, and the mermaid plucked it free, sent it zooming into the dark of the creek.

  “That is probably bad,” she said. “Eel in your creek. Not right to have eels in this creek. But it’s so filthy, he will die before doing any harm.” The mermaid took a deep, sad breath, and coughed in a heavy sputter of bubbles. She pulled her hair in front of her mouth and hacked into the tangle. “This is like, humans smoke cigarettes? Being in this creek is like being in the smoke of eighty million cigarettes smoked all at once.”

  Sophie wrinkled her face. “That sounds horrible.”

  “Is fucking disgusting. That what humans say? Fucking disgusting?”

  Sophie half-nodded, half-shrugged. “Certain kinds of humans,” she said.

  “I was told here, this creek, where I find you—Chelsea?”

  Sophie nodded.

  “I was instructed—much ‘fucking sucks,’ ‘fucking disgusting.’ What else? I don’t know, put ‘fucking’ in front of much words, no? Then you understand?”

  “I would understand without it,” Sophie said. “It’s sort of a—bad word.”

  “This is bad place, no?”

  Sophie nodded. “I guess it is.”

  “I come to you to help you fix it,” Syrena said heavily. She didn’t seem happy about it, but she didn’t seem sad either. “I have show for you. Something to feel. Will be hard. I would ask, Are you ready? But I don’t think you are, and is time for you regardless. Everything has own time, and time much bigger than us all.” The creature sighed and with her long, bony hands pushed her hair strongly from her face. The amulet lit up her sharp cheekbones; they were almost finlike, lifting from the contours of her blueish-white skin. Her clear eyes shone at Sophie and in them Sophie felt something to be trusted. But she didn’t like the sound of any of this, and began to shake herself around beneath the water.

  “I’m going to wake up now,” she told the mermaid. “This has been cool, seeing a mermaid, but I’ve got to wake up before I kill my brain cells. Okay?” She tried to twist herself awake but felt the weight of the water upon her like a straight jacket, constricting her.

  “Brain is fine, brain is fine,” the mermaid said dismissively. “You wake up when allowed. First, you must understand. Here.” The creature’s hands, cupped together, opened like the shell of an oyster, revealing something small and gleaming, round and pale but not an oyster.

  “What is that?” Sophie asked.

  “Is salt.” The mermaid smiled, a real smile now, her mouth, thin and wide, cracking into her face. The mermaid was terribly old, old as the rocks in the furrows of the deepest valley at the ocean’s bottom, but in her smile she was just a girl, a girl like Sophie, or Ella. “At start of journey, this salt as big as house! I wrap in seaweed for one day. From everywhere everyone help me—my sisters help, and fish help us, and seals, you know, everyone pitch in. And together we wait for whale shark to come, and into its mouth it goes. So big! The whale shark not like, not at all. Too salty! All along it spits and spits.” Syrena laughed, again becoming young, just for a flicker. “Slowly, the salt melt. From sea to sea we travel, it melts. The salt is not regular salt. This the salt that make the ocean.” The mermaid’s fisted hand loosened, and Sophie caught a silvery flash of the crystal in the dark.

  “Two giant women, they make it far from here, at the bottom of the ocean. Women so big, if they here now, water would dribble at their feet! They are ogress. You know them? Big, big women! An ocean king take them many years ago, when they were just gi
rls. King thought they were women already, they were so big, but no, they are just baby ogresses. Strong little babies! The king make them slaves, tell them to mine gold from the earth beneath the ocean. And they do for a little bit, because they were just babies and the digging was fun, but they grow older and become wise and they try to escape but they cannot. And so they begin to dredge salt instead of gold. So much salt! The ocean becomes full of it! The king cannot take it, he flee to some fresh water somewhere, he there still, what you call—refugee? In little bitty spring. And the ogresses keep bringing the salt to the ocean. They don’t mind, many creatures like the salt, and so they do it and do it, even now.” The mermaid smiled with the thought. “I hear story of ogresses since baby mermaid. Was something to see! Their big toe as big as your whole body. You could sleep on their toenail!” The mermaid laughed, shimmering globes of air bubbling up around her. Sophie tried to imagine a woman so big. “Ogress would let you sleep on her toe,” the mermaid continued. “They—sisters—they know all about you. You famous for them like they famous for me. Say you will need their salt, they dig out big piece for you, they say will dig you more. They say you will—make them feel better.”

  Sophie liked the thought of being famous with friendly ogresses, but her concern was growing into a higher pitch of panic. This wasn’t a normal pass-out vision. It had been too long, she was too conscious, too participatory. “I don’t mean to be rude,” she said to the mermaid. “But I really think I ought to stop. To wake up or whatever.”

  The mermaid ignored Sophie and moved closer. “We must begin,” she said sternly, her joy at having met the ogresses gone, her ancient face set back to steel and determination. She brought her face to Sophie’s so that her hair hung about them like a tent. Her eyes sparked brighter. It seemed that the darker the water, the more the creature’s eyes glowed, like lightning bugs were trapped in her skull, illuminating the murk. Was the mermaid good or bad? Sophie felt she was both—her badness a hardness like a rock inside her, and her goodness the light in her eyes. “I will give you feeling,” the mermaid spoke. “You ready to feel?”

  Sophie laughed, a skittish hiccup that bubbled to the surface like a lone jellyfish. “I guess,” she shrugged. The mermaid placed her forehead to Sophie’s brow. How smooth it felt, like a dolphin Sophie had once touched at the aquarium. The mermaid’s fingers, long and gnarled as coral branches, cupped her cheeks, slick as seal skin. Sophie felt something like love flare inside her, and wondered if that was the feeling the mermaid was giving her, this leaping feeling of love, of excitement.

  “You guess,” the mermaid said, hearing her thoughts.

  “This is it?” Sophie asked with a smile.

  “Not yet,” the mermaid said, moving the glowing talisman around her neck so that it clanked gently against Sophie’s. “This your feeling.”

  “Oh,” Sophie giggled. The giggle was like a school of tiny silver fish bursting in the water around her face. “I’m starting to feel silly.”

  “Okay, now I give you feeling,” the mermaid said. She closed her eyes like snuffing a candle, and the water grew dark around them. Her face pressed closer and the fingers on the girl’s face grew tight.

  “Sophia,” the mermaid whispered. “I very sorry.”

  Chapter 9

  Sophie felt, feelings like a black wave risen from the middle of the ocean and then crashing down on her, crushing her, pounding the air from her lungs until all that she breathed, all that filled her was an infinity of pain. Each pain as exquisite, as singular, as a snowflake, or a human being. The pain of a mother, her child torn apart before her. The pain of the torn child, helpless, conscious of their brief horror. The pain of a village in flames, as seen by the one villager who ran, who turned back to see the orange and the black gusts of smoke, to smell the terrible smell of people burning. The pain of soldiers torturing a man, their hearts a manic sickness inside them, the pain of the tortured as he tries again and again to leave his body, to die, but only remains here, in the body he once adored, now its own chamber of punishment. The pain of the old and the pain of the young, the pain of the hurt and the pain of the violent, it blew through Sophie like a rough wind through a corridor, and Sophie felt such a wind would never die, that it had blown forever and forever now would batter her, wearing holes in her heart for it to whistle through.

  Sophie was frozen still, paralyzed. The sensation in her body, if she still had a body, was like tumbling and being stuck at once. She thought of a carnival ride that spun and spun until you stuck to the wall and the floor fell down. She was falling with the feelings, the anguish of a creature as its beloved is slain, the devastation of the pulse of love in the midst of terror and war, so that the love turned upon itself and became a misery, a pinching crab where a heart once was. A child immobilized, a child pushed into the sea, a woman screaming in a dark place, all the women screaming in all the dark places. Sophie could not bear it. She could not bear even a single strand of the pain, but how they looped and wove together, how the pain tangled with other pain into tangled snarls, tumors, pulsing and snaring yet more cords of horror. Sophie could not bear any of it, and slowly she felt herself cease to be Sophie. Sophie was easing away. There were only the feelings, thick and cold and endless and alone, bleaker than death. Death, flickered the last wisp of Sophie’s intelligence, death was a pleasure, a welcome, a gateway. Death was kind, a flare in eternity. This, Sophie realized, this was eternity. And then there was nothing but pure and terrible sensation forever.

  Feeling her lost now, the mermaid took the salt in her fingers and pressed it into the girl’s slackened mouth. She pinched Sophie’s lips with her twisted, elegant fingers, and on her tongue the crystal continued its slow dissolve. From a rock the size of a house to the bead the mermaid had clutched in her fist, now melting to nothing.

  The ogresses had thundered across the ocean floor, to a bed of coral they’d never touched. With a twist of their wrists they’d snapped the coral from the sea like popping a top from a bottle of soda, sending a spray of tiny creatures scuttling. A special stash, one ogress had grunted as Syrena circled their heads in the water, pushing through their forests of hair, looping before their faces. Gorgeous as a woman carved into a marble cliff, golden eyes and the soft curve of their mouths. Special for Sophia. And they began to dig. To have seen the magnificent crystal, gestating so deep within the earth for so long; to watch it become small enough to slip through a crack in your fist—a pebble, a pearl, but still so powerful.

  When the mermaid felt Sophie become lost, she experienced it as a flicker of peace. The pressure of hundreds upon hundreds of years—her age—lifted away in a single throb. For a pulse, she was ageless. Before her gills could complete a breath the peace was gone, and her time on this earth crashed back down upon her. Syrena was old. It was time to give the girl her pearl.

  Chapter 10

  Water tunneled backward through Sophie’s nose until it ran bitter down the back of her throat. Her mouth tasted like drowning. She took a breath; there were boats where her lungs were. The mermaid was gone and everything was as ink-black as the hole bleeding oil at the bottom of the ocean. Sophie rolled onto her side. Her opening eyes cracked the darkness and brought her a vision of her best friend dumping creek water from a scummy beer bottle onto her face. She brought up her hands to block the filth of it. Sophie opened her mouth to shout, and a rogue wave of water spilled out from her lips. Her body contracted, and more water rolled out. Grimy, oily creek water. A single hardy fish surfed from Sophie’s mouth and flopped onto the dirt to suffocate. Sophie lifted him by his tiny tail and flicked him back into the creek. Who knew that anything lived in that creek? Ella stood over her, clutching the old beer bottle and crying. She flung it at the ground where it did not shatter but bounced precariously close to Sophie’s soggy head.

  “You were out,” Ella said, “for so long.” She was not even going to try to convey the panic and grief she’d spent the last hour gripped in. The terror at Sophie being
gone, the sorrow at Sophie being gone. The dread of having helped her pass out, the guilt at the sight of her, her breathing gone weird, slowed down, stop and go, had Ella helped her best friend into a coma, had she killed her, even? Would she go to jail, was she an accessory to something horrible? In her frenzied panic she’d grabbed a bottle from the weeds and plunged it into the creek, filling it with rancid water. She dumped it onto her friend’s soft face, loving her, hating her, weird dopey Sophie, sweet funny Sophie, Sophie who didn’t understand anything, Sophie who understood her. Again and again Ella poured the water over Sophie’s face, crying, until her actions ceased to make sense. Crying, Sophie, Sophie, Sophie, smacking her friend, first because she’d seen it on television, a fainted woman getting smacked—that’s what you were supposed to do, wasn’t it?— and when Sophie refused to stir, when nothing in her face responded to the blow, Ella smacked her again, this time in anger, this time in fear, and she smacked her friend three times like that before her sense came back to her and she pulled her ringing hand away and clutched at her own face, not even caring that the muck of the creek was upon her, though later she would. She returned to the water, because she had seen this on television, too—someone throwing water in the face of a fainted woman. And the water was gentler, and didn’t bring Ella face to face with the violence of her own fear. The water splashed off Sophie’s face in every direction. And finally, Sophie came to, spurting an ocean of water, fish and everything, from her mouth, and Ella felt like maybe she was losing her mind. She grabbed her purse from where it lay in the weeds and pulled out her cigarettes, her wet fingers shaking like the branches of a tree in the wind of a storm.

  Sophie sat up. She was soaked from the water that had poured from her mouth. Her mouth tasted terrible. Though Sophie had never smoked, she imagined it tasted like she’d thrown up cigarettes. “What happened?” she asked. Her face felt sore. She remembered the mermaid, the blue glow of her in the dark water, then a cyclone descending on her heart. Her chest ached. “Did I fall in the creek?”