Merfolk

by Jeremy Bates

  “I am glad you were not my professor, Marty, because he liked my thesis. He gave me an A.” She flicked a wave as she started down the gangway to the pier. “See you tomorrow.”

  “See you, Pip.”

  Clamping the stem of his pipe back between his teeth, Marty entered the ship’s salon through a set of bi-folding doors. When he’d decided to call the Oannes his permanent home, he’d wanted a living area that felt homey, so he’d decorated the previously spartan salon—the main social cabin of a boat—with teak joinery and luxury textiles, plum velvet, button-tufted leather, Art Deco mahogany furniture, and objets d’art from around the world. He liked to believe the finished product was a Neo Baroque masterpiece reminiscent of gentlemen’s yachts from the 1930s (though Pip always complained it felt like a room lifted from The Addams Family home).

  The renovations had cost a small fortune, but money had never been an issue for him. His grandfather had been a successful treasure hunter known for discovering several famous shipwrecks. Old Alfred Murdoch hit the motherlode in 1981 when he located the wreckage of the RSS Republic, a steam-powered ocean liner that was lost off Nantucket in 1909. He successfully salvaged US gold Double Eagles and other valuables from the ship’s rotting holds—appraised to be worth close to half a billion dollars at the time.

  When Alfred died in 1983, the fortune was divided amongst his widow and three children, one of whom was Marty’s father. As a child Marty was cosseted in luxury, splitting his time between a Georgian mansion in the heart of London and an even grander riverside estate in Oxfordshire. He attended one of the most prestigious private schools in the country, and the University of Cambridge after that, where he earned an undergraduate degree in marine biology and a doctorate in zoology. Thanks to a thirty-million trust fund he’d received on his twenty-fifth birthday, he was able to privately fund field research expeditions around the world, gaining a reputation as a foremost expert on ecology and conservation.

  By his mid-thirties he became fascinated by a little-known hypothesis called the aquatic ape theory. First proposed by a marine biologist named Alister Hardy in 1960, the theory posited that about ten million years ago a branch of primitive ape-stock was forced by competition from the forests to the shallow waters off the coast of Africa to hunt for food, and these semi-aquatic apes became the ancestors of Homo sapiens. The idea stemmed from the fact that modern humans had several aquatic adaptations not found in other great apes. A lack of body hair. A layer of subcutaneous fat. The location of the trachea in the throat rather than the nasal cavity, as well as the overall regression of the olfactory organ. The propensity for front-facing copulation. Tears and eccrine sweating. Webbed fingers. The theory went so far as to argue that bipedalism evolved as an aid to wading through water, and that the use of tools evolved from using rocks to crack open shellfish and sea urchins.

  Despite the aquatic ape theory being ignored or deprecated as a pseudoscience by academics and scientists, Marty took it seriously. He published a paper in a special issue of the Journal of Human Evolution in which he argued that the aquatic ape ancestors of modern humans were, in fact, not extinct but had evolved into fully aquatic mammals.

  The scientific community’s response was swift and harsh. Biologists, anthropologists, evolutionary theorists, paleoanthropologists, and other experts pounced on the hypothesis, many calling it “crank anthropology” akin to alien-human interbreeding and Bigfoot.

  Nevertheless, all publicity is good publicity, as they say, and Marty began packing lecture halls in the UK and US as a guest lecturer, while also conducting interviews on radio stations and podcasts and major television stations.

  Within a year, he had become an international name and the face of a newly coined scientific discipline, sirentology—the study of mermaids and mermen, collectively known as merfolk.

  In 2017, at the height of Marty’s popularity, a well-respected filmmaker contacted him, claiming to possess video evidence that supported his merfolk theory. Marty was initially skeptical. Despite the filmmaker’s credentials and reputation, the timing of the video evidence (surfacing just as the idea of merfolk was capturing the public’s imagination) seemed too coincidental. Even so, Marty agreed to meet the filmmaker, and when he saw the footage with his own eyes, his skepticism vanished.

  The video had been taken just after dawn by an American man walking his dog along a remote stretch of beach in southern California. It began with the man spotting three beached whales (the US Navy had been testing sonar blasts two kilometers off the coast at the time, which were believed to have killed the whales). The man filming the footage was speaking to someone on his phone. His voice rose in excitement as he spotted something farther down the beach. He hurried toward it before slowing to a walk and steadying the camera on a beached bottlenose dolphin.

  Partly obscured by its smooth, gray body was some sort of large fish.

  The man was about ten meters away from the dolphin and the fish…only the second animal was now clearly no fish, as it had two very distinct arms protruding from its sides. As the man drew closer, the camera revealed more of the bizarre creature. It lay on its chest, facedown. Its head was covered with scraggly black hair. Its tightly muscled upper body resembled a human’s (especially the arms, ending in huge, webbed hands). The skin was a light shade of blue. From the waist down the legs fused into a powerful tail that terminated in a forked fin. This was covered in horny skinfolds like those found on armadillos.

  The man closed the final few feet to the creature very slowly. He nudged its shoulder with a toe. It didn’t move. He crouched, panning the camera up and down the thing’s body. He reached a hand under its shoulder. Grunting, he rolled it over onto its back. The face was humanoid…yet horribly different too. There were no eyebrows or facial hair, and the forehead seemed broader than a human’s, the jaw slimmer. The ears and nose were almost non-existent, and the mouth was a lipless slit. The large, wide-spaced eyes, black and pupilless, stared blankly at the camera.

  Then it hissed.

  The man fell backward. Gasping, he scrambled away, gained his footing, and ran a short distance before swinging around. He focused the camera on the creature. It was twenty or so meters away, flopping across the sand toward the ocean in the awkward, clumsy way of a seal on land. It reached the foaming surf and splashed through the shallow water. A wave crest crashed over it. When the water flattened in the subsequent trough, the creature was gone.

  A thousand thoughts had run through Marty’s mind while he’d watched the astounding footage, and for the next hour he bombarded the filmmaker with questions. When the man pitched Marty a Netflix documentary based on the footage, and asked if Marty would be interested in narrating it, he agreed without hesitation.

  That decision turned out to be the biggest mistake of his life.

  “Dumb bastard,” he muttered to himself, catching his reflection in an ornate mirror. The middle-aged man looking back had skin the color of copper, craggy yet cultured features inherited more from his grandfather than either of his parents, and dark stubble. There was a tiredness in his blue eyes these days, a weariness borne from a dwindling lack of purpose and the recognition that his best days were behind him. He still believed wholeheartedly that merfolk existed in the planet’s oceans and seas; he simply no longer believed he would be the one to ultimately uncover the evidence. Years of fruitless searching could erode even the most determined man’s optimism, and despite being only forty-five, he felt as though time were running out. The world was turning without him, moving inevitably forward, while he remained trapped in a bubble, longing for the past and a life that no longer existed.

  Setting aside his pipe to burn out, Marty withdrew a bottle of Scotch from the liquor cabinet below the mirror and allowed himself a generous pour. He went to the baby grand piano in the corner of the salon, sat on the padded bench, and stared at the sheet music propped on the rack before him without seeing the notes.

  He set the glass on the piano’s glossy t
op board and tapped a white key. The solitary, mournful note carried eerily in the darkening twilight.

  ∆∆∆

  An hour and four drinks later Marty’s spirit was buoyed, and his fingers danced over the piano keys as he played Dire Strait’s “Walk of Life,” singing along in a nobody-is-listening, gruff baritone.

  He didn’t realize his phone was ringing until it had gone silent. He looked around the salon, waiting for it to begin ringing again. It didn’t.

  He got to his feet—and almost fell flat on his face as he lost his balance while lifting a leg over the piano bench. He found his phone atop a stack of National Geographic magazines piled haphazardly on an Edwardian writing desk. He was surprised to see the missed call was from Jacqueline DeSilva, a reporter for the Daily Mirror.

  Marty had met Jacky at a scientific ichthyology conference not long after he’d arrived in Sri Lanka. After the final panel of the afternoon concluded, he was making a quiet exit from the hotel’s packed conference room when she approached him. He was surprised and alarmed when she called him by his name. He hadn’t told anyone from his old life that he had moved to Sri Lanka. Even so, he kept his cool, making polite chitchat. When she excused herself to use the restroom, he ducked outside and had been in the process of flagging down a taxi in the helter-skelter traffic when she found him again and convinced him to join her for a drink at a nearby bar. They ended up having a good time, and he invited her back to the Oannes, where they had an even better time. Marty was looking forward to their next date—until Jacky sent him a link to a feature article she’d written about him in the Daily Mirror. It was generous and well-researched…and made him tremble with rage. To be fair, he’d never told her not to write anything about him, yet he thought he’d made it clear he’d come to the country seeking anonymity.

  As he expected and feared, the story was picked up by major newspapers around the world, including London’s The Telegraph and The Guardian, with one headline blaring “THE MERDOC FOUND WASHED UP IN SRI LANKA” and the other “DISGRACED MERDOC LOOKING FOR MERMAIDS IN INDIAN OCEAN.” (“Merdoc” was a pejorative play on his name that the media had gleefully applied to him after the Netflix documentary was exposed as a fraud…and one they had apparently not tired of.)

  Marty cut off all communication with Jacky, ignoring her calls and texts until she stopped trying to get in touch with him altogether.

  And that had been that.

  Nothing for nearly three years.

  He’d all but forgotten about her.

  So why is she calling me now?

  ∆∆∆

  Marty was considering ringing Jacky back when his phone rang first. It wasn’t Jacky though; it was Radhika Fernandez, the woman Marty was currently pseudo seeing. He’d met her about a year after the Jacky fiasco. He’d been at his preferred local pub, an unpretentious place popular with all rungs of society, including a good number of expats. He’d been minding his own business in a corner booth when Radhika slid into it across from him and began complimenting him on one thing or another. She was clearly drunk. He was too, which was probably why he couldn’t remember what they talked about. But it must have been interesting because they remained at the pub until closing. After that night, they began getting together every week or two. She didn’t recognize him as The Merdoc, and he didn’t tell her anything about himself that might give away his identity. However, the more time they spent together, the more aggressive her inquiries became, until he bluntly explained that his past was off limits. She wasn’t happy with this declaration, but she accepted it.

  Marty held the phone to his ear. “Hello, Rad,” he said.

  “Feeling lonely, mister?” she said playfully.

  In fact, he was. With the piano muted, the salon seemed suddenly lifeless and uninviting. “Want to come by for dinner?”

  “I’ve been playing tennis at the club. You don’t mind if I’m in my whites?”

  “No dress code here. You’ve seen my assistant.”

  “I’ll be there shortly.”

  Marty hung up and went to the dinette off the starboard side of the salon. It was appointed with stainless-steel appliances, a stone bench, and a butler’s pantry. The fridge was stocked with freshly caught seafood, and he went about prepping deviled crabs, hot butter cuttlefish, and jasmine rice. Everything was almost ready when Rad arrived. He mixed her a vodka soda with a slice of lemon and joined her out on the foredeck, sitting in a steamer chair facing the sea. It was dark now, a wash of stars glittering overhead as far as the eye could see. Vintage brass lanterns lit the deck in warm hues.

  “You got here quickly,” he said, handing her the vodka. Her white top clung tightly to her breasts and thin waist, while the matching miniskirt showed off her toned legs. She had a pale, aristocratic face. Her hair, parted Cher-like in the middle of her head, fell straight down over each shoulder like black water. Designer sunglasses were pushed up on her forehead, and fancy silver earrings dangled from her earlobes.

  “The nice thing about having a driver,” she said, her brown eyes twinkling, “is that they’re always waiting at the curb, waiting to take you somewhere.”

  Marty frowned at Rad. Her voice was raspy, like she had woken up with a hangover. He hadn’t detected it on the phone, though it hadn’t been the best connection. “You okay?” he asked her.

  “What do you mean?” she said, staring out at the sea.

  “Let me see.”

  “See what?”

  “Your throat.”

  Sighing dramatically, she tugged loose the scarf she had wrapped around her neck. Ugly purple and brown bruises marred her throat.

  “Jesus, Rad,” he said, shaking his head.

  Marty knew what the bruises were from, of course. Rad was into erotic asphyxiation. He’d learned this on their fourth date, when she’d asked him to choke her during a session of spirited lovemaking. He couldn’t bring himself to do it, and they continued on as if she’d never asked. Only she had asked. And the request had made him uncomfortable. He spent much of the following days thinking about it. He couldn’t get his head around why anybody in their right mind would want to be choked during sex. Everybody had their quirks, and he wasn’t afraid of trying new things, but choking pushed the bounds of acceptability in his mind.

  Despite his apprehension at Rad channeling Fifty Shades of Grey, he continued to see her. She didn’t bring up the choking stuff during their next few dates, and he was thinking it had been a one-off request, when during another spirited session of lovemaking she’d blurted in a throaty, frantic voice, “Hurt me!” He asked her to clarify what she meant, which killed the mood. When she told him to choke her, he once again refused, which really killed the mood. She began calling him out, saying, “Don’t be a wimp, Marty!” and “Be a man, Marty!” Finally out of frustration and anger and a sense of emasculation, he wrapped his hands around her neck and squeezed. Immediately her taunts stopped. Her eyes rolled back in her head with pleasure. Her body language—her sensuality and her passion—shot to a new level. It was easily the best sex they’d ever had. Probably the best sex he’d ever had.

  The next day, after some research on the internet, Marty decided Rad was getting turned on by the thrill of looking over the edge, and of forcing him to look over the edge alongside her. Indeed, she was an adrenaline junkie by nature. She had more adventure-filled stories than anyone else he knew, and in each one she was always pushing the limits of what was safe and responsible and sane, from cage-diving with saltwater crocodiles to walking along the wing of an airborne plane.

  Understanding what drove Rad’s desire for erotic asphyxiation, and understanding that the deviant sexual activity was a lot more common than he’d previously believed, Marty felt a little better about his complicit participation. Yet choking was not his “thing” and never would be. Sex should be sensual and romantic, he thought, not violent. What they were doing could not be called lovemaking. They were fucking, plain and simple.

  Which, for the time be
ing, was fine with Marty—and fine, apparently, with Rad too.

  “Who did that to you?” he asked her, surprised to find it bothered him that she had been with another man, despite the two of them acknowledging their open relationship.

  “What does it matter, Marty?” she said. “You don’t know him.”

  “Your tennis partner?”

  “You’re cute when you’re jealous.”

  “I’m worried for you, Rad.”

  “You do the same thing to me!”

  “I’ve never left bruises.”

  “Would you prefer if I had him pull a plastic bag over my head?”

  “I’d prefer if you gave up the damn fetish altogether.” He saw that his words had surprised and stung her, and he added, “Sorry. I guess I should check on the food.”

  He went to the dinette, turned off the stove burners, and slid the food into the oven to keep warm. When he returned to the foredeck, Rad was plucking a small silver case from her clutch. She lit up a cigarette, blowing the smoke over her shoulder. “How was whatever you do here all day?” she asked him.

  What little he’d told Rad about himself was this: he was a university professor on an indeterminate leave from teaching while he searched the seas for new species of marine life. This wasn’t far from the truth—he was simply leaving out the fact that the new species of marine life was merfolk. “Pip discovered a pod of whales that came by this way last year, only now they were two members short.”

  “A regular Einstein, that girl.”

  “She’s an excellent sonar technician.”

  “Do you like her?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You work together all day, just the two of you. Isolated out here…”

  “Enough, Rad.”

  “Why don’t you want to talk about her?”