Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep

by Elizabeth Bear

  Seal-men I found to be very like our dads on land, all possessiveness and anxiety, patrolling the borders of the clan. When we went up on a beach, they must always be seeing other seal-men off, coming back blown and bloodied. It seemed a savage way of work to me, this knocking of heads together. Sometimes me and my fellows had a play at it, but it were two rubber heads bouncing off each other, no teeth and no purpose, and the mams laughed lounging around us.

  And then there were those sister-seals, our size but not fighters, but only slipping alongside us through the sun shafts, blinking beside us through the roof of the world, into the windy air and the rasp of breath in both of ours’ opening nostrils. Those whiskery sea-maids, the ones with the spell on them to keep them seals, to keep them safe from human men. Like animate seeds or stones, they moved, like bullets leaping through the water, like weed undulating away along the tide or teasing your face with a leaf-end.

  I don’t know how to tell you. Seal feelings are different from human ones, seal-affections, seal-ties with other seals. The best I can do is overlay a skin of man-words on the grunt and urge and song and flight and slump of seal-being.

  Our mams belonged better here than they ever had belonged above. Our mams found their wings, is how you might put it. Our mams did not glory or revel or make any particular celebration, but only slipped back to rightness, went back about their business. The bulk of our mams was not beautiful as a man sees beautiful, but to seal-eyes their beautiful black teardrops of being fell fast, flew fast, twisted through the home depths.

  The sea was at our ears and against our sensitive faces, all its cavities and their echoes like a giants’ city, this castle, that market and that cluster of tiny homes. Braided through, it was, with tidal temperatures, underlain with colder harder depths, with darkness-fish and the skeletons that fell out of everyone’s feeding. Here above we were a multitude, in ranks of size and ferocity; I cannot explain to you, if you are a fisherman, the beauty and panic of a shining mass of herded fish, the whole school flashing back and forth looking for the no-way-out among my darting fellows, the topmost swimming out into the air in their terror.

  The days were long and unformed; the seasons beckoned us, then pushed us away behind them; stars rode over us, and moons in their boatishness and bulbousness; towns were a crust at the edge of our world’s eye and people were mites that crawled there. If I saw my father in that time, I don’t recall it, or recognizing any man of Potshead—or woman, because Messkeletha was still there for a long while, and Trudle stayed all that time, and is still here now.

  I don’t recall particularly the landscape of our island, not above its rocks or above the beach-sand that as men we called Crescent Corner. As the sea to men, beyond the point that they can see bottom, becomes only the plumblined depths full of loves and livelihoods, so to seals the heights become only wastes of dry blaring light from which weather and occasional dangers descend.

  I felt no pull to the land; I barely knew that I knew the land; I barely thought; I didn’t feel the way a person feels. I only was, following flurries of instinct, flurries of friends and of fish.

  “It happened by accident,” says my dad. “Shorten Thomas found it out, enraging ’cross an ice floe one winter—all those cold nights without light nor woman will set a man to clubbing. Only he was using a hacker-pick that sealers have, cutting them, you see. Well, he was in a fine way—up to his ears in hotpunch too, no doubt. And he says it like this, that he turned at the end of the crowd of them, and weeping and looking back down the path of his butchery he saw a boy—all long and lanky, he says, much like you were extracted as, Dan’l. Writhing on the ice, he said, just like a seal does, only not managing to move as they do, for he was not built the same. And when the boy realizes, up onto hands and knees he goes, and quick as he can but clumsy—because he has forgot, in all that time, how to progress such a body—he crawls for the edge of the ice.

  “Shorten went after him, calling: ‘Boy, boy! What is your name?’ But not fast enough, and the boy gets to the rim and looks back once, and falls in, all messy like an accident, not like seals do, like a brine-drop back into the ocean. And of course there drowns, doesn’t come up even the once, for all Shorten’s pleading. The cold catches him, and his first breath of the North Sea, and all that is left to Shorten is a few bubbles among the bobbing ice.”

  “He looked around, you say, the boy?”

  Dad shakes his head. “You press Shorten on that, he will break and blub at you like you charged him with holding the boy’s head under. He says he was all emotional, and you all look the same, you boys. He says he couldn’t tell, that he might even have been looking his own Vernar in the eye and not known, the boy would have grown so much. But it might have been any of you, any of the ones we’ve not recovered yet: Snow, or Toll Hardy, Harold Roman, or the Gormlin twins who knows?” In the windowlight my dad is worn and clean; even the smoke from his brier-pipe is clean and white as his hair. Evening is coming; that light is cool, gray-blue. I am glad of the fire against its lack of cheer.

  “So, then,” he begins into the crackling silence with the sea behind it.

  “Yes.” The light fades on his face even as I watch, all crags of frail flesh.

  “Well, he is struck horrorful with the thought he may have butchered other sons, he says, but mainly he’s wondering, How did I cut that seal, to free the boy inside? And he goes back and finds the skin—and this is not hard among six-seven slaughtered beasts, because it has all shrunk and thinned, don’t you know. It’s one of those wee coats, you see, that your mams made to spirit you away in. Wi’ the hoods, you remember? All of rabbit or lambskin.”

  I nod. “They stank to be inside, and were so tight. We had to put them on there in the shallows, else we were trapped tight in them, unable to walk, and too big for them to carry as well as their own coat.”

  “And Shorten sees that with this pick he’s managed to cut, neat as a tailor, all the front stitches down the middle, so as to open the thing just like the coat that it is, and out has come the boy. And he brings the skin home and tells the tale, and we’re all there handling this wee coat and weeping, like it were a holy relic, a roomful of grown men brought to nothing by this garment, all of us trying to recognize our wife’s hand in the stitching, all of us desperate to see it, yet not to see it, so as not to lose hope of our son.”

  There is a slight crack in his voice on that last word, and I look up in time to see him surprised, and embarrassed, and straightaway recovered. “So then the hunt was on, every man for his boy,” he says almost jovial, lifting pipe and paws and letting them drop to his blanketed lap, a fleck of ash stirred out of the bowl by the movement and falling beside.

  I was born again and I came out crying—a lot of us did, they say. There never was such a race as the seals for mawking and mowing. I came out crying into a driving rain, and all sounds hurt my ears, rain-hiss on the decks and hatches and the sealers’ celebrations: “Daniel Mallett! Welcome back to the world, boy!” They lifted me into the confusion and there with my big bony shoulders pulling my ragged coat apart up the back I stood and choked and took their embraces, that each was like an assault on me but which I did not rebuff. I had not the strength; I had forgot how to use arms.

  They laid me down on the deck; it was not comfortable. Some man had put a rope-coil under my head for pillowing and it pressed in hard enough to hurt. I was accustoming myself—and it was difficult—to the frontwaysed eyes seeing two things for every one and putting them together. My bony body was less massy than before; how could it be so much heavier? Everything was heavier around me, glued to the deck; the men as they moved must cling to it; anything that fell must roll or slide to any lower point.

  Around me was airy noise, every movement light and startling, every contact a concussion, throwing out more noise. Unpredictable, to no rhythm, they moved and swore and fumbled, the men of my town, of my land-world, and the sea-birds stuttered in the sky. And I was glued here myself, to these coat-r
emnants beneath me, pressed to the damp wood by this blanket, its heavy knots of sea-grass. All the wind could do was push the damp hair back and forth on my brow; it could not lift and return me to the water; it could not lift even this knotted knitted thing, that held the little left of my warmth around me in the absence of my seal-flesh.

  It was an ill-making dream, and the men came by, smiling and patting me, to console me for it, all the way home. They asked me nothing; they did not expect me to speak, out of this strange-packed mouth, out of this flat face with its new framework of jaw. They muttered and crooned, and as the sky went on and the illness, their noises slipped together, interlocked into items of sense. Welcoming me, they were, welcoming me back; their words were all about their gladness and our preciousness, their sons’. They were changed men from the ones I was beginning to remember.

  “You’ll be heavy to yourself awhile,” said one, over the grinding of the boatside into the jetty, over the hard explosions of sound in my back, in the back of my head. He lifted the weed-blanket off me, and I waited to fly up into the air. But I did not. I lay helpless.

  They hooked my arms over two men’s necks and taught me walking, across the deck all cluttered with box and bolt and reel; across the frail plank that was all that kept me from a dirty corner of water, a corner of my home below. And to the land, locked unmoving, the jetty standing firm against the water that slapped and fought it below. My feet dragged and my legs attempted rescuing them—how was I to support myself and balance, on these two stalkish things? The men had put a shirt on me and trousers but still the foreign knees swung and braced below my poor-focusing eyes, my heavy head. I knew that they belonged to me, but I could not see how ever I was to control them.

  My father was brought down the street to me, but I did not see him, only heard clomping boots and men saying, “See, Dominic? There he is!” And then a voice out of years ago, out of my bones, saying, “Is that him? Is that my Daniel? Are you sure?”

  Then space opened before me and I heaved up my head. Some boots swam there and his familiar belt-buckle, and then the rest of him was there, sharp-edged and astounding, his big hands out wide at me and in between them his awakening face.

  “Dan’l,” he said, and “Dad,” I said, and even words were heavy here, all burdened with the years, and my head sagged again and there was nothing but wet greeny-black-blue cobbles ringed by boot-toes and marveling men.

  “Here, let me take him,” said my father to the man at my right, and they un-hooked and re-hooked me and I seemed to walk worse than ever, leaning onto him with my head swung fast into his shoulder.

  “You will be fine, my boy,” he said. “Fine and good.” And he held me up and walked me. A splash appeared a brighter blue on his shirt and I had not known it was raining, or he was crying, and I tried to say, I did not know what, that I knew him, that I was surprised, that I was sorry, that I had found my way somehow into this strange, long, wrong-grown body—but all I could manage for the moment was seal-cries, that said nothing, that had to say everything for me.

  “We found out various as they came back,” my dad says, “a little by little. But that first boy, Willem Canker, no. He came in, shocked and shivering, eyes all over the place, and as they brought him on the boat all the men were at him, question-and-poking, weeping on him and embracing, each asking after his own sons.

  “Some thought Willem had gone simple, there under the waters all that time, or perhaps half-drowned on the way up and it had affected his brain, because he did not utter a proper word all the way, only moaned somewhat and seemed to suffer to be with us.

  “We put him away in his house. Joel Canker laid him in his bed, and milk-and-breaded him back to life, and every now again he would come out and say, Oh he is coming good, every day a wee bit more our lad. He was sitting by the boy, talking and talking whenever he was awake to usen him to the sound of words again, to bring him back his memory. And today he answered me, he might say. Today he said yes, when I asked him did he want for milk.

  “Which the rest of us found little consolation of, one word here or there when such bright little buttons you’d been all of you, never stopped rattling and singing morning to night, ever one of you, questions questions. And the last five years along at Wholeman’s every word you had spoke we had turned over and wet with our tears and polished with our examinations and nostalgias. Besides which, Canker might be imagining, from the strength of his own wishing, and Willem truly damaged and never to think a clear thought nor speak a clear word again.

  “But then the boy came out. I remember the day. ’Twas a whole new weather and season, bright and blowy, and suddenly there was color in the sky and flowers on the hills around town.

  “And the boy come out, good as new, Willem Canker, good as gold; I opened my curtains and there he was walking up the town long and limber with his easy man-stride—just like yours, Dan’l, only of course I’d not seen yours then. Had no surety of ever seeing it, always I reminded myself. I remember he looked up—not at me nor no one but just up, at the town, at walls, and maybe at hill and sky above, and the look of him—of all our boys and our wives and our selves rolled into the one—the sight of him near split me down the middle. And Canker out ahead—he did not need to sing, just his face was singing, the joy of it. They say it is a sin, envy. You must not covet, they say. Well, your old man, Dan’l, he’s a sinner I hope you don’t mind, cloven by envy, hating Joel Canker for having what I had not.”

  He beams around his pipe; takes the thing from between his teeth with one rheumaticky hand, reaches out the other and bats my face with it, softly, and takes it purple-gray away, trailing soap-scent.

  Then a thought scoops his smile away and he’s a codger again, all belligerent, his eyes a-swim with window-light. “’Course, there’s some that only got that ever, only ever got that envy and no more. Corris Snow, bless his soul, and the Greens, none o’ theirs came back.” His gaze is like a pressure on my face, feasting on me and guilting about it.

  Sometimes it can be simple pleasure seeing each other, but not often; net after net of past event and slippery feelings drops between us, until sometimes I can barely make him out through the masses.

  When that happens I will up and sigh, and fetch us teas, maybe, that the two of us can sip staring out over the roofs and water, while it all dissipates. You cannot have that stuff drawn in on yourself too close and constant. It will drive you mad; it will drive you off Chisel Top like Corris Snow, into the arms of your wife as you think, into the rocks, crushed cold there forever. Sometimes you must just stand, upright on the earth as you are or cupped in an armchair like Dad or propped on a barstool; sometimes you must just breathe and be, with your small land-lungs and your stuck body. You must cease your wishing for things you cannot have, and just proceed towards the grave, kind as you can be to your fellow travelers, not raising any great hopes or moaning any great miseries.

  This is the truest way for us boys, and the hardest, bred as we are from two great tribes-ful of yearning. Not all of us can steady ourselves so, and none of us are balanced aright all of the time.

  We were all put to fishing, of course. Gratefully the older men passed us their places on the boats, while the ones with still a little fire in them leaped to ordering and instructing us with almost glee.

  It was good for us. It was better than sitting at home net-mending with the sadder dads. The sea was the best place for us, halfway between our two homes and with a job to do. And it tired us properly, all that hauling and winding. And you never knew what curious-familiar thing would come up squirming in the net and make you wonder.

  This was going to be our lives then, these the components, unless Grinny enacted his scheme of starting Trudle knitting again, unless Raditch and Cawdron took up theirs, of rowing to the mainland for a look at the women there.

  I am not much for venturing. I had no such schemes. I tend to stop where I am brought or put, and endure whatever yearning is my lot there. It has been before me all
my life in my mam, and now it is in me, and in my dad, and that is only natural, the whole town with its head full of sea and seals, enraged or grief-ridden or both. Us boys—well, I did not know about the others, it was not as if we named things to each other. For myself I felt too freshly arrived, too newly born yet to do more than walk and work from day to day. I thought if I waited, equanimity might come, my father’s slow eating of himself, after all these years, notwithstanding.

  I came home early from helping at Fisher’s store. The smell was all through the house: wild salt sweat of mams, caverns of ocean, turning the air blue-green. I walked through it with my arms out; it all but swirled about them.

  In the kitchen, at the heart of the smell, at the heart of the home, Dad sat at the slab table with his white plate and a spoon and a caught-red-handed look disguised as normal every-dayness up at me.

  “What brings you so early?” he accused me.

  “Done all I had to do.” His chin was tilted up, his eyes craven, and then there was the thing on the plate—hairy, with a rubbery inner lining with a blob of orange curd on the lip. The spoon hovered.

  “Here,” he says. “There’s another.” Points with his thumb to the pot on the stove. As if this were an ordinary dinner.

  I tried for both our sakes to pretend it was. Crossed and spooned it from the pot, clanked out a plate and rattled a spoon from the drawer. Cut the cap off, with my big capable hands—last time I et one of these, my mam had to open it for me, that tough skin.

  The steam flooded up and the smell: bodies, wet hair, boiled shellfish, sour seawater, the coziest of winter nights, her clear pale skin with a hint of green; her hair like black water made thread, made silk.