Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep

by Elizabeth Bear

  It tasted like blood.

  I choked, my body seized, thrashing rapture-violent, and it gushed harder, streaming from my lips, my hair, my fingertips, my eyes, my eyes, my eyes wept a deluge onto the thin little body of Artyom. The windows caught the jets and drops froze there, hard knots of ice. I screamed and all that came from my throat was more water, more and more and more.

  His legs jerked awkwardly and I clutched at him, trying to clear the water and the green stems from his mouth, but already he convulsed under me, spluttering and spitting, reaching out for me from under the growing pool that was our bed, the bubbles of his breath popping in the blue—the bed was a basin and the water steamed and I wet his hair in it, but I did not mean to, I could not close my mouth against it, I could not stop it, I could not move away from him and it came and came and his bones beneath me racked themselves in the mire, the whites of his eyes rolled, and I am sorry, Artyom, I did not know, my mother did not tell me, she told me only to live as best I could, she did not say we drag the lake with us, even into the city, drag it behind us, a drowning shadow shot with green.

  I would like to remember that he called out to me, that he called out in faith that I could deliver him, and if I try, I can almost manage it, his voice in my ear like an echo: “Ksyusha!”

  But I do not think he did, I think he only gurgled and gasped and coughed and died. I think the strangling weeds just passed over his teeth.

  He never tried to push me off of him, he never tried to sit up. His face became still. His lips did not shake. His skin was pale and purpled. The water rippled over his thin little beard as it slowly, slowly as spring thaw, seeped into the mattress and disappeared.

  The snow murmured against the glass.

  IV: Shell Into Snail

  Rybka, you have to wake up.

  She rubs her eyes with little pink fingers and turns away from me, towards the wall.

  Rybka, I’m sorry, you have to wake up.

  She yawns, stretches her legs, and wriggles sleepily towards the edge of the bed. I am waiting, kneeling on the floor with our copper kettle and a glass bowl. I am her mother, I understand the shock of waking, the water is always warm. She stares up through the window-glass at the stars like salt on the skin of a black fish as I pour it over her scalp, clear and clean. I comb it through every strand—her hair is so soft, like leaves. Afterwards, we lie together in the dark, my body curving around hers like a shell onto its snail, our wet hair curling slowly around each other. I sing her back to sleep, and my voice echoes off of the walls and windows, where there is frost and bare branches scraping:

  Bayu, bayushki bayu

  Ne lozhisya na krayu

  Pridet serenkiy volchok

  Y ukusit za bochek

  Her hair is yellowy-brown under the wet, but damp enough to seem always black, like mine. Her eyes are so green it hurts, sometimes, to look at them, like looking at the sun. She swims very well for her age, and asks always to be taken to the mountains for the holidays. She is too little for coffee, but sneaks sips when I am not looking—she says it tastes like wet earth.

  There is money for coffee, and kettles, and birds with browned, sizzling skin. We can see a bright silver scrap of the Neva through our windows, and the gold lights of the Liteyny Bridge. A woman who can set a bone is never hungry. I wash my hands more than anyone on my ward—twelve times a day I thrust my skin under water and breathe relief.

  I taught her before she could read how to braid her hair very tightly. In the morning I will call her Sofiya and put a little red cup full of blueberries floating in cream in front of her, and she will tell me that after the kettle, she dreamed again of the man with the thin little beard and the big nose who sits on the side of a lake and shares his lunch with her. He has larch leaves in his lap, she will say, and he tells her she is pretty, and he calls her rybka, too. His beard prickles her cheek when he holds her. I will pull my coffee away from her creeping fingers and smile as well as I am able. She will eat her blueberries slowly, savoring them, removing the purple skin with her tongue before chewing the greenish fruit. I will draw us a bath.

  But now, under the stars pricking the window-frost like sewing needles, I hold her against me, her wet eyelashes sticking together, her little breath quick and even. I decide I will take her to the mountains. I decide I will not.

  Rybka, poor darling, I’m sorry, go back to sleep.

  I wind her hair around my fingers; little drops like tears squeeze out, roll over my knuckles.

  We are as happy as we may be, as happy as winters with ice on the stairs and coats which seem to always need patching and wet hair that freezes against our shoulders and the memory of still eyelids under water may leave us.

  I am not tired yet.

  Magritte’s Secret Agent

  Tanith Lee

  You asked me about it before, didn’t you, the picture. And I never told you. But tonight, tonight I think I will. Why not? The wine was very nice, and there’s still the other bottle. The autumn dusk is warm, clear and beautiful, and the stars are blazing over the bay. It’s so quiet, when the tide starts to come back, we’ll hear it. You’re absolutely right, I’m obsessive about the sea. And that picture, the Magritte.

  Of course, it’s a print, nothing more, though that was quite difficult to obtain. I saw it first in a book, when I was eighteen or so. I felt a strangeness about it even then. Naturally, most of Magritte is bizarre. If you respond to him, you get special sensations, special inner stirrings over any or all of what he did, regardless even of whether you care for it or not. But this one—this one. . . . He had a sort of game whereby he’d often call a picture by a name that had no connection—or no apparent connection—with its subject matter. The idea, I believe, was to throw our prior conception. I mean, generally you’re told you’re looking at a picture called Basket of Apples, and it’s apples in a basket. But Magritte calls a painting The Pleasure Principle, and it’s a man with a kind of white nova taking place where his head should be. Except that makes a sort of sense, doesn’t it? Think of orgasm, for example, or someone who’s crazy over Prokofiev, listening to the third piano concerto. This picture, though. It’s called The Secret Agent.

  It’s one of the strangest pictures in the world to me, partly because it’s beautiful and it shocks, but the shock doesn’t depend on revulsion or fear. There’s another one, a real stinger—a fish lying on a beach, but it has the loins and legs of a girl: a mermaid, but inverted. That has shock value all right, but it’s different. This one . . . The head, neck, breast of a white horse, which is also a chess piece, which is also a girl. A girl’s eyes, and hair that’s a mane, and yet still hair. And she—it—is lovely. She’s in a room by a window that faces out over heathland under a crescent moon, but she doesn’t look at it. There are a few of the inevitable Magritte tricks—for example, the curtain hanging outside the window-frame, instead of in, that type of thing. But there’s also this other thing. I don’t know how I can quite explain it. I think I sensed it from the first, or maybe I only read it into the picture afterwards. Or it’s just the idea of white horses and the foam that comes in on a breaker: white horses, or mythological kelpies that can take the shape of a horse. Somehow, the window ought to show the sea, and it doesn’t. It shows the land under the horned moon, not a trace of water anywhere. And her face that’s a woman’s, even though it’s the face of a chess-piece horse. And the title. The Secret Agent, which maybe isn’t meant to mean anything. And yet—sometimes I wonder if Magritte—if he ever—

  I was about twenty-three at the time, and it was before I’d got anything settled, my life, my ambitions, anything. I was rooming with a nominative aunt about five miles along the coast from here, at Ship Bay. I’d come out of art school without much hope of a job, and was using up my time working behind a lingerie counter in the local chain store, which, if you’re female, is where any sort of diploma frequently gets you. I sorted packets of bras, stopped little kids putting the frilly knickers on their heads, and av
erted my eyes from gargantuan ladies who were jamming themselves into cubicles, corsets, and complementary heart attack in that order.

  Thursday was cinema day at the Bay, when the movie palace showed its big matinée of the week. I don’t know if there truly is a link between buyers of body linen and the matinée performance, but from two to four-thirty on Thursday afternoons, you could count visitors to our department on two or less fingers.

  A slender girl named Jill, ostentatiously braless, was haughtily pricing B cups for those of us unlucky enough to require them. I was refolding trays of black lace slips; thinking about my own black, but quite laceless, depression, when sounds along the carpet told me one of our one or two non-film-buff customers had arrived. There was something a little odd about the sounds. Since Jill was trapped at the counter by her pricing activities, I felt safe to turn and look.

  I got the guilty, nervous, flinching-away reaction one tends to on sight of a wheelchair. An oh-God-I-mustn’t-let-them-think-I’m-staring feeling. Plus, of course, the unworthy survival trait which manifests in the urge to stay uninvolved with anything that might need help, embarrass, or take time. Actually there was someone with the wheelchair, who had guided it to a stop. An escort normally makes it worse, since it implies total dependence. I was already looking away before I saw. Let’s face it, what you do see is usually fairly bad. Paralysis, imbecility, encroaching death. I do know I’m most filthily in the wrong, and I thank God there are others who can think differently than I do.

  You know how when you’re glancing from one thing to another, a sudden light, or color, or movement snags the eye somewhere in between—you look away then irresistibly back again. The visual center has registered something ahead of the brain, and the message got through so many seconds late. This is what happened as I glanced hurriedly aside from the wheelchair. I didn’t know what had registered to make me look back, but I did. Then I found out.

  In the chair was a young man—a boy—he looked about twenty. He was focusing somewhere ahead, or not focusing, it was a sort of blind look, but somehow there was no doubt he could see, or that he could think. The eyes are frequently the big giveaway when something has gone physically wrong.

  His eyes were clear, large, utterly contained, containing, like two cool cisterns. I didn’t even see the color of them, the construction and the content struck me so forcibly. Rather than an un-seeing look, it was seeing-through—to something, somewhere, else. He had fair hair, a lot of it, and shining. The skin of his face had the sort of marvelous pale texture most men shave off when they rip the first razor blade through their stubble and the second upper dermis goes with it forever. He was slim, and if he had been standing, would have been tall. He had a rug over his knees like a geriatric. But his legs were long. You see I’ve described him as analytically as I can, both his appearance and my reply to it. What it comes to is, he was beautiful. I fell in love with him, not in the carnal sense, but aesthetically, artistically. Dramatically. The fact that a woman was wheeling him about helplessly, into a situation of women’s underwear, made him also pathetic in the terms of pathos. He preserved a remote dignity even through this. Or not really; he was simply far away, not here at all.

  The woman herself was just a woman. Stoutish, fawnish. I couldn’t take her in. She was saying to Jill: “Should have been ready. I don’t know why you don’t deliver any more like you used to.”

  And Jill was saying: “I’m sorry, maa-dum, we don’t deliver things like this.”

  It was the sort of utterly futile conversation, redolent of dull sullen frustration on both sides, so common at shop counters everywhere. I wondered if Jill had noticed the young man, but she didn’t seem to have done. She usually reacted swiftly to anything youngish and male and platitudinously in trousers, but presumably only when trousers included locomotive limbs inside them.

  “Well, I can’t stop,” said the woman. She had a vague indeterminate Ship Bay accent, flat as the sands. “I really thought it would be ready by now.”

  “I’m sorry, maa-dum.”

  “I can’t keep coming in. I haven’t the time.”

  Jill stood and looked at her.

  I felt blood swarm through my heart and head, which meant I was about to enter the arena, cease my purely observational role.

  “Perhaps we could take the lady’s name and phone number,” I said, walking over to the counter. “We could call her when her purchase arrives.”

  Jill glowered at me. This offer was a last resort, generally employed to placate only when a customer produced a carving knife.

  I found a paper bag and a pen and waited. When the woman didn’t speak, I looked up. I was in first gear, unbalanced, and working hard to disguise it. So I still didn’t see her, just a shape where her face was, the shadowy gleam of metal extending away from her hands, the more shattering gleam of his gilded bronze hair. (Did she wash it for him? Maybe he had simply broken his ankle or his knee. Maybe he was no longer there.)

  I strove in vain toward the muddy aura of the woman. And she wouldn’t meet me.

  “If you’d just let me have your name,” I said brightly, trying to enunciate like Olivier, which I do at my most desperate.

  “There’s no phone,” she said. She could have been detailing a universal human condition.

  “Well . . . ” I was offhand “ . . . your address. We could probably drop you a card or something.” Jill made a noise, but couldn’t summon the energy to tell us such a thing was never done. (Yes, he was still there. Perfectly still; perfect, still, a glimpse of long fingers lying on the rug.)

  “Besmouth,” said the woman, grudging me.

  It was a silly name. It sounded like an antacid stomach preparation. What was he called, then: Billy Besmouth? Bonny Billy Besmouth, born broken, bundled babylike, bumped bodily by brassieres—

  “I’m sorry?” She’d told me the address and I’d missed it. No, I hadn’t, I’d written it down.

  “Nineteen, Sea View Terrace, The Rise.”

  “Oh yes. Just checking. Thank you.”

  The woman seemed to guess suddenly it was all a charade. She eased the brake off the chair and wheeled it abruptly away from us.

  “What did you do that for?” said Jill. “We don’t send cards. What do you think we aar?”

  I refrained from telling her. I asked instead what the woman had ordered. Jill showed me the book, it was one of a batlike collection of nylon-fur dressing gowns, in cherry red.

  At four-thirty, ten women and a male frillies-freak came in. By five-forty when I left the store, I should have forgotten about Bonny Billy Besmouth, the wheelchair, the vellum skin, the eyes.

  That evening I walked along the sands. It was autumn, getting chilly, but the afterglow lingered, and the sky above the town was made of green porcelain. The sea came in, scalloped, darkening, and streaked by the neons off the pier, till whooping untrustworthy voices along the shore drove me back to the promenade. When I was a kid: you could have strolled safely all night by the water. Or does it only seem that way? Once, when I was eight, I walked straight into the sea, and had to be dragged out, screaming at the scald of salt in my sinuses. I never managed to swim. It was as if I expected to know how without ever learning, as a fish does, and when I failed, gave up in despair.

  You could see The Rise from the promenade, a humped back flung up from the south side of the bay, with its terraced streets clinging onto it. He was up there somewhere. Not somewhere: 19, Sea View. Banal. I could walk it in half an hour, I went home and ate banal sausages, and watched banal TV.

  On Saturday a box of furry bat-gowns came in, and one of them was cherry red.

  “Look at this,” I said to Jill.

  She looked, as if into an open grave.

  “Yes. Orrful.”

  “Don’t you remember?”

  Jill didn’t remember.

  Angela, who ran the department, was hungover from the night before, and was, besides, waiting for her extramarital relationship to call her. I showed he
r the dressing gown and she winced.

  “If she’s not on the phone, she’s had it.”

  “I could drop it in to her,” I lied ably. “I’m going to meet someone up on The Rise, at the pub. It isn’t any trouble to me, and she has a crippled son.”

  “Poor cow,” said Angela. She was touched by pity. Angela always struck me as a kind of Chaucerian character—fun-loving, warm-hearted, raucously glamorous. She was, besides, making almost as much a mess of her life as I was of mine, with a head start on me of about ten years.

  She organized everything, and the department did me the great favor of allowing me to become its errand-person. I suppose if the goods had been wild-silk erotica, I might not have been allowed to take them from the building at all. But who was going to steal a bat-gown?

  “You aar stew-pid,” said Jill. “You should never volunteer to do anything like that. They’ll have you at it all the time now.”

  At half past six, for Saturday was the store’s late closing, I took the carrier and went out into the night, with my heart beating in slow hard concussions I didn’t know why, or properly what I was doing. The air smelled alcoholically of sea and frost.

  I got on the yellow bus that went through The Rise.

  I left the bus near the pub, whose broad lights followed me away down the slanting street. I imagined varieties of normal people in it, drinking gins and beers and low-calorie cola. Behind the windows of the houses, I imagined dinners, TV arguments. It had started to rain. What was I doing here? What did I anticipate? (He opened the door, leaning on a crutch, last summer’s tennis racket tucked predictably under the other arm. I stood beside his chair, brushing the incense smoke from him, in a long queue at Lourdes.) I thought about his unspeaking farawayness. Maybe he wasn’t crippled, but autistic. I could have been wrong about those strange containing eyes. Anyway, she’d just look at me, grab the bag, shut the door. She had paid for the garment months ago, when she ordered it. I just had to give her the goods, collect her receipt. Afterwards, I’d go home, or at least to the place where I lived. I wouldn’t even see him. And then what? Nothing.