Merfolk

by Jeremy Bates

  “Umm, now I’m not following,” said Jacky. “Rad, you don’t know who Marty is?”

  “Who he is? You’re talking like he’s famous or something… You’re not famous, are you, Marty?”

  “I was on a TV documentary,” he said uncomfortably. “But I don’t think we need to get into that right now—”

  Jacky said, “He’s The Merdoc, for crying out loud!”

  “The Merdoc?” Rad looked like she’d been slapped. “You mean…from that Netflix show?”

  “You know of it?” Marty said, surprised. “I figured since you never recognized me, you never watched the documentary.”

  “I didn’t watch it, but of course I know of it. Who doesn’t? It was huge. Especially after… Oh, Marty.” Sympathy, or perhaps pity, filled her eyes.

  Marty knew what she had been about to say: Especially after it was discovered to be a gigantic hoax.

  Rad now had her phone out, her thumbs tapping rapidly. “Dr. Martin Murdoch. Murdoch. That’s why you never told me your last name. You knew I’d learn who you were.” She stared at Marty. “What the hell? What the hell, Marty? Why didn’t you ever tell me any of this? What was the big secret?”

  “I haven’t told anybody this, Rad. Not since coming to Sri Lanka. The documentary’s not something I’m proud of.”

  Rad said, “You knew, Jacky. You knew Marty was The Merdoc?”

  Jacky nodded. “However, Marty never told me. I recognized him at a science conference. My gig at the Daily Mirror is general news and current affairs. I covered the Netflix documentary’s fallout. I could have picked Marty out of a hundred-person lineup.”

  “Well, this is…a trip, isn’t it? I think I want to slap you, Marty. But…” She stared at him again with that disconcerting who-are-you look. “Whatever. I don’t care. You’re The Merdoc, okay. Jesus Christ, okay. And you think that skull in that video belongs to a mermaid?”

  The mention of the skull got Marty’s blood racing. He felt as though he were a child, and it was six a.m. on Christmas morning. Even so, he did his best to temper this excitement. He wasn’t going to be taken for a sucker again. The skull could be a fake, part of another hoax, or someone’s sick joke. He said, “I’m not going on the record saying anything until—”

  “You’re not on the record, Marty! It’s just us, okay? I’m not going to call up TMZ, okay?”

  “I’m excited, Rad. I won’t deny that.” To Jacky, “You told me you’re flying tomorrow morning. I take it you’re going to see the American oceanographer who discovered the skull?”

  Jacky nodded. “That’s right. She works for an NGO in Mirissa. I’ve already arranged to interview her.”

  “And you came to see me tonight because you want me to join you?”

  “Right again.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” She issued a short laugh. “Because you’re the world’s foremost expert on merfolk!”

  “I mean, what do you want from me? I assume you’re planning on writing an article about the skull?”

  “Yes, of course. Imagine—merfolk exist, and I’m the one to break the story! What do I want from you? That’s quite obvious, isn’t it? I want you to verify the skull’s authenticity.”

  Now Marty laughed. “Don’t give me too much credit, Jacky. I can run genetic and histological analyses and other tests on the skull in the Oannes’ lab. That can rule out it belonging to any known species of ape or human. But it wouldn’t confirm that the skull is merfolk. It would simply confirm it’s from an anthropoidal species unknown in the fossil record.”

  “Right. A species unknown in the fossil record with a humanoid head that lives in the ocean? Come on, Marty! How many candidates fit that description?”

  He held up his hands. “Hey, you don’t have to convince me. I’m just saying, if you write a story claiming that skull is proof that merfolk exist, you’re going to get pilloried in the media. And having my name attached to a sensational claim like that won’t be good for either of us.”

  “This isn’t the damn Netflix documentary, Marty! This isn’t someone in a suit brought to life by a Hollywood special effects team! This skull is the real deal! It was discovered in the belly of a shark that randomly washed up in a beach net. That can’t be faked.”

  Marty knew she was right. If his tests revealed that the skull was indeed unknown in the fossil record, that alone would be groundbreaking. At the very least he would be credited with discovering a new species of primate. At best his aquatic ape theory would once more be the center of serious scientific debate and analysis. He might remain The Merdoc to the pundits in the media, but he would no longer be defined as a quack host of a debunked mockumentary. He would be doing serious science, which would go a long way to repairing his reputation as a credible marine biologist and zoologist.

  In either case he would be in the world spotlight again—for the right reasons this time.

  “Stop keeping me in suspense, Marty,” said Jacky. “What do you say? Are you coming with me tomorrow or what?

  Marty finally allowed a grin to touch his lips. “I say the next round of drinks is on me.”

  Chapter 4

  RAD

  Radhika Fernandez was battling conflicting emotions. Anger and betrayal that Marty had not told her the full truth of who he was. Excitement and wonder that he was a world-famous personality. Embarrassment that she had been so clueless all these months. More wonder that the skull of a mermaid might have just washed up to shore in the belly of a great white—wonder and a great dose of skepticism, that was. Because it seemed…too good to be true, she supposed. Why wash up here? Why Sri Lanka? Why just down the coast from where the foremost mermaid hunter had decided to relocate?

  The world, of course, was full of coincidences that seemed too good to be true, but that didn’t mean they weren’t real. Was this one of them?

  Then again, people made their own realities. Charles Darwin would never have found the Galapagos Islands had he stayed home in England. He found them because he went looking for them—or a place like them.

  Rad eyed Marty, who was organizing travel plans with Jacky. Marty…who lived on a multi-million-dollar state-of-the-art research vessel…who went on week-long sojourns to map the ocean floor and record the sounds of what lurked beneath the waves…who spent nearly every waking hour of every day analyzing that data.

  You’ve been such a fool, she thought. A blind fool.

  She made a short, strident sound that might have been laughter.

  Marty stopped midsentence and glanced at her curiously. His eyes were bright, alive, the bluest she had ever seen them. He seemed ten years younger than he had an hour ago back on the Oannes.

  “What time’s the flight tomorrow morning?” she asked him.

  “Seven o’clock,” Jacky said.

  “I’ll book my ticket now,” said Marty, and began tapping on his phone.

  “You don’t think the skull is real, do you?” Jacky said to Rad.

  “Real? Yes, I think it’s real. I mean, I don’t have any reason to believe it’s not real. I just…I suppose I don’t know…what to make of it.”

  “That’s what I meant. You don’t think it’s a mermaid skull?”

  Rad considered her response. “I believe I have a pretty open mind. I’ve traveled all over Asia for my TV show, often to remote locations. I’ve seen the entire spectrum of primates, mammals, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and fish up close and personal. I know—better than most—how diverse and wonderful and weird life on this planet is. And I’m not naïve enough to believe we’ve seen all that Mother Nature has to offer. I know there’s so much out there yet to be discovered—especially in the unexplored depths of the oceans.”

  Marty looked up from his phone to listen to her.

  Rad continued, “Look, I’m not trying to be profound or anything. I’m just saying that…well, I should be open to the existence of mermaids. I want to be. I want to be as excited as both of you obviously are about the skull. But I’
m just…not. How about I leave it at that?”

  “I think it’s a perfectly reasonable answer,” Jacky said.

  “You’re safely on the side of ninety-five percent of the scientific community,” Marty said.

  “That’s sort of what I mean,” Rad went on. “You would think if mermaids existed, they would be known to science by now.”

  Jacky said, “Like you mentioned, the world’s a big, unexplored place, especially the oceans.”

  Marty said, “Not to mention, we have identified them. They’ve been referenced ever since ancient Mesopotamia and classical Greece, from almost every corner of the world. Once you start keeping track, it’s astounding how ubiquitous merfolk sightings have been throughout the ages. There’ve been dozens of eyewitness accounts of merfolk by local Sri Lankan fishermen in the last twenty years alone. It’s why I began my search here.”

  “I’ve never heard about them.”

  “The mainstream media doesn’t cover them, not here, not anywhere. Ever since P.T. Barnum’s Fiji mermaid in 1842—which was the head and torso of a juvenile monkey sewn onto the back half of a fish—merfolk have fallen back into the realm of myths and legends. Nobody wants anything to do with them.”

  “Was Aquaman a merfolk?” she asked, apropos of nothing.

  “Aquaman had legs, Rad,” Marty told her lightly.

  “How do you know merfolk don’t have legs if you’ve never seen one?”

  “I don’t know that conclusively. It’s what the science suggests. Legs are meant for walking, not swimming.”

  “Turtles have legs.”

  “Well, they walk around on land sometimes, don’t they?”

  “But you believe merfolk have arms?”

  Marty nodded. “Arms—and hands, with opposable thumbs—helped primates develop better defense systems, such as throwing rocks and wielding sticks. They allowed primitive humans to use and to create tools. If merfolk have a powerful piscine tail to propel them through the water, which I believe they do, there would have been no reason to surrender their arms and hands for fins.”

  “I can almost picture a merfolk king sitting on a golden throne with a crown and scepter.”

  Marty smiled at her. He knew her too well, and he wasn’t going to be dragged into a farcical discussion. He went back to booking his plane ticket.

  The silence that followed was protracted and awkward.

  “Well!” Jacky said abruptly, getting to her feet, “it’s late, and Marty and I have an early flight tomorrow. I think I’m going to call it a night.”

  “Likewise,” said Rad, standing. “I’ll walk you to the street.”

  “You’re not coming back to the Oannes?” Marty asked.

  “The Oannes,” she said, saying the word as if for the first time. “Why do I have the feeling your secret identity has been staring me in the face this entire time?”

  “In Babylonian mythology,” he told her, “a water god was depicted as having the upper body of a man and the lower body of a fish—the first recorded reference of a merman. The Greeks called him Oannes.”

  “Of course,” she said dryly. She held her elbow out for Jacky. “Shall we?”

  Chapter 5

  MARTY

  When Marty returned to the Oannes, he found he was too wired to sleep. In the salon he took the bottle of Johnny Walker he’d been drinking earlier from the liquor cabinet, changed his mind, and exchanged it for a bottle of Glenfiddich. He dumped too much whiskey into a tumbler and went to the foredeck, where he lit his pipe and paced beneath the gibbous moon. He was thinking about the video of the skull Jacky had shown him.

  And tomorrow I’ll be holding it in my hands, seeing it with my eyes.

  He dialed Pip’s number.

  “Marty?” she answered sleepily. “Is everything okay?”

  “Yes, and sorry for calling so late. Something extraordinary has come to my attention.”

  He explained.

  “Mon dieu!” Pip exclaimed when he finished. “This is amazing, Marty! Will we sail to Mirissa tomorrow then?”

  “I’m going to fly with the reporter to get there as soon as possible. I don’t want anything to happen to that skull. I was hoping you’d be okay piloting the Oannes on your own?”

  “Why—yes, of course. I pilot her myself on all our research expeditions, mon capitiane. Do you not have confidence in me?”

  “One hundred percent confidence, Pip. I just wanted to make sure you’d be comfortable piloting her on your own.”

  “I am comfortable, do not worry. If I set sail at first light, I should reach Mirissa by midafternoon. We will rendezvous then.”

  ∆∆∆

  Marty returned to the salon, poured himself more whiskey, then sat in the chair in front of his computer. After a cursory glance at his emails (all junk mail), he found himself on YouTube, typing his name into the search bar. The top result was Part 1 of the Netflix documentary, which the streaming giant had uploaded themselves, and which had more than fifty-million clicks. Below it were spinoff documentaries and commentaries from the likes of National Geographic, Harvard University, the BBC, and Discovery Channel. He’d watched all of them, and none were flattering.

  Now, as he often did against his better judgement when he’d had a few too many drinks, he clicked on the first clip of the documentary and sat back with a clenched jaw.

  Yet for the first time since the show’s merfolk was discovered to be a phony, he didn’t experience bitterness and resentment at seeing himself advocating it on camera.

  In fact, he felt wonderfully invigorated, if not vindicated.

  He would show all those assholes in the media and academia that they had laughed at the wrong guy.

  Chapter 6

  Merfolk: From the Deep. The making-of the original Netflix documentary.

  Marty sat on a stool in a soundproofed film studio in Central London. The small room featured a lighting grid attached to the ceiling and a green screen behind him. The air-conditioning was cranked full blast. He wore a worsted wool suit and blue-and-white striped tie. A twenty-something hipster named Gus stood behind a digital television camera on a pneumatic pedestal. A similarly aged girl named Jamie, dressed all in black, was adjusting a large white reflector to his right. The acclaimed Welsh director Fat Mike stood in one corner, talking animatedly on his phone. Fitting his sobriquet, he was an obese man with a moon face and a beard formed from manicured stubble that covered only the first of his two chins. He wore baggy jeans, a sports jersey, and a Dodgers baseball cap, the brim pulled snugly down his brow so it pooled his eyes in shadows.

  Abruptly he hung up the phone and came over to stand next to the camera pedestal. “How’s everything goin’?” he asked in a high-pitched, squeaky voice that belied his size. “We ready to shoot?”

  “Ready,” Gus said.

  “Ready,” Jamie said.

  “All righty then. How you doin’, Double M?”

  “Freezing,” he said.

  Mike belched laughter. “Yeah, well, you don’t want all these lights to melt you, do ya? So this is gonna be pretty straightforward. You tell us everything you know about merfolk. We’ll do the editing and cutting, mix what you have to say with our footage and some filler, and Bob’s your uncle.”

  “Sounds easy enough. What do you want me to start with?”

  “Like I said, it doesn’t really matter when we take it to the cuttin’ floor. But…I don’t know, somethin’ pretty straight forward. How about the legends? Legends come from somewhere, don’t they? So we’re all ready?”

  The girl joined the hipster behind the camera. They both gave a thumbs up.

  “All righty then,” Fat Mike said, sinking his bulk into a foldable wood-framed director’s chair with FAT MAN emblazoned on the canvas back. “In five, four, three, two…roll camera.”

  “Rolling,” the hipster said.

  “Marker.”

  Jamie held the slate in front of the camera which stated the scene and take number. She clapped the sti
cks together.

  “Action!”

  Marty looked into the camera lens. “Merfolk,” he began, “have been around since the beginning of recorded history. The first known reference appeared painted on cave walls in the Stone Age roughly 30,000 years ago.” He thought he sounded professional and authoritative, just as he’d practiced at home in front of the mirror. “The earliest written mention of a merman,” he went on, “dates back over 5,000 years to the ancient Babylonian deity, Oannes, who’s described as having the upper body of a human and the tailed lower body of a fish. The earliest mention of a mermaid dates back at least 3,000 years to Atargadis, an ancient Syrian goddess who is similarly described. In Greek mythology, you have the son of Poseidon and Amphitrite, Triton, the messenger of the sea, often depicted as a merman blowing into a conch shell. Coincidentally, you might also recognize him as the father of Ariel in the Disney movie.”

  Nobody cracked a smile.

  “The Romans and Chinese,” Marty continued, “made numerous references to merfolk in their histories, as did the Arabians and Persians in their famous folklore, Arabian Nights. In Ireland, we find the Merrow; in Scotland, the Ceasg; and in Japan, the Ningyo, all variants of half-human/half-fish creatures. Mainland Europe has the Melusine, a fresh-water mermaid sometimes depicted as having two tails, like the mermaid in the Starbucks logo. Several modern religions such as Hinduism worship merfolk-like deities to this day.”

  “And that’s a cut!” Fat Mike said halfheartedly, shifting his bulk as if uncomfortable in the chair. “This is good stuff, Double M, but maybe tone down the pop culture references, yeah? Now what about actual sightings? Eyewitness accounts and all that? Can you go there?”

  “I thought the Disney and Starbucks references would appeal to—”

  “No, they were shite, Marty. Gotta be brutally honest. Absolute shite. We don’t want to trivialize any of this, yeah?”