by Lydia Millet
“Man. You could totally date him,” said Gina.
SO THERE I was, cooling my heels with the rest of the rabble. It was me, Gina, Ellis, Sam, Thompson, Simonoff, the good doctor, and some leftover soldiers, still standing at strict attention on the deck, waiting on Sam’s orders. Thompson was talking to a crewman and Rick, with Ronnie’s help, was busy filming Miyoko. That Japanese VJ never stopped working; right then she was broadcasting an update from the stern of the cutter, where the mics wouldn’t pick up the interference of our background noise.
We watched quietly as the orange boat ferried our diplomatic dinghy over to the yacht with soaring lines, a pearly white vessel whose name, emblazoned in ornate gold curlicues, seemed to be Narcissus. I wasn’t sure why you’d name your luxury yacht that. Was it self-aware/ironic, or more straight-up toolishness?
I opened my mouth to ask Gina, but she was already talking.
“What are they going for, an injunction?” asked Gina.
“They’re going to ask them to simply pull up the nets,” said Ellis. “The minister says they don’t have the legally required permits.”
“And they think the parent company will just say, Oh, OK?” said Gina. “And, like, go gently into that good night?”
“Not really, no,” said Ellis. “They’re also filing for a PI. Not sure where that’s at, though, judicially.”
The arc of my confidence fell. Gone was the rush I’d felt as the Coast Guard cutter crested the waves, when speed was ours and we’d seemed to be duty-bound.
We’d had a higher calling, then.
“Hey,” said Sam, squinting into his binoculars, “I can see them talking, there on the upper deck. I can make out Nancy . . . that’d be the deputy governor, yeah. There’s the GM.”
“GM?” asked Gina.
“The resort’s general manager,” I said.
“Sam!” called one of the cutter’s crewmen, sticking his head out the door of the wheelhouse. “Get in here!”
Gina and I followed Sam over, looking sidelong at each other—we were hoping to get in on the action, whatever that might be. No one stopped us.
Inside, near the control panel with the steering wheel, a TV jutting out from the wall was playing CNN. We hung behind Sam and the crewmen and craned our necks.
It was live footage of the airport in Tortola, according to the news ticker. Very crowded: people hurried along pulling their roller bags, hefting their suitcases, pink-faced from the strain of hefting their duffel bags. Disorder seemed to reign, and the reporter’s voice was barely audible. Then the scene changed: the ferry dock, also Tortola. I recognized it, since I’d been there less than a week before. Two ferries were docked at once, full of people; crowds were still pressing to get on them, crew pushing them away.
Then there was a reporter talking, a woman who stood on the quay with strands from her mound of polished yellow hair blowing across her face. She had a British accent, not unlike Ellis’s—and for all I knew, equally fake.
“. . . tourists descending on the island in numbers that have simply never been seen before,” I caught. “Every single hotel room on Virgin Gorda is full to capacity, according to the reports we’re getting, and frankly no one knows where the rest of the arriving crowds will be accommodated. Some are based here on Tortola, of course, where hotels rooms are also overbooked . . . .”
“Feculent shite,” said Ellis.
“It’s happening,” I said, and my throat closed gaggingly.
“Shhh,” Gina hissed.
“. . . these are not all your friendly neighborhood scuba enthusiasts and beachgoers, which these tiny islands in the British Caribbean have depended on for decades,” said the reporter. “No, many of them apparently have a very different reason for visiting this tropical getaway.”
A man was talking, a microphone held up in front of his angry, slightly sweaty face; his backpack bobbed behind his head.
“. . . gotta get in there and take care of these things. Get rid of them. Our mission is annihilation. What if they interbreed with humans? What then?”
The camera panned to the woman beside him, who smiled and nodded.
“What our pastor is saying,” she offered eagerly, “is this could be the Fifth Trumpet. Like it says in Revelation 9, you know, a man’s face with lion’s teeth, the wings of locusts and the tail of a scorpion—”
“Point being is,” interrupted the man, “these things are not the work of the Lord. These things are filth and abomination.”
I felt cold, and my scalp tingled. I backed out of the wheelhouse, hitting the deck rail with the small of my back. There was dizziness: the sky was too white. The sky attacked my eyeballs. Light was everywhere, when all I wanted was shade. I thought I might faint, although I’ve never fainted my whole life. I’m not sure why it hit me so hard, but basically, when I heard the man say that, my personality collapsed.
“Hey, hey,” said Gina, her hands firm on my shoulders. “Honey. You need to get a grip.”
“They’re coming,” I said.
“Well, that’s right,” said Gina. “What of it?”
She put her face close to mine and gazed into my eyes in what was, for Gina, a pretty strong bid for sincerity. I looked into her brown irises, her warm, almond-shaped eyes, so familiar and comforting, with their impossibly thick eyelashes courtesy of Latisse.
“Listen. Deb. It’s not your fault, sweetie. This was always going to happen. The mermaids were living on borrowed time. You see that, right? It’s amazing they weren’t gone centuries ago. Like the giant sloths. The mammoths. The saber-tooth cats.”
It didn’t comfort me.
It’s only been days, I thought, a handful of days after probably tens of thousands of years we must have lived in parallel—we stumbled across them, we filmed them, and now their enemies are legion.
Here come my people, those teeming hordes, here come my people, brandishing their stupidity. Above their heads they raise stupidity like a flaming sword.
I couldn’t help imagining myself below us, the vault of water above me, the dark weight of the armada bearing down, oppressive, the nets sinking, the nets surrounding us.
I really couldn’t breathe.
“You’re white as a sheet! Head between your knees,” said Gina, and she shoved the top of my head and made me sit down right there on the gritty surface of the deck, where instantly my ass got wet and cold. I didn’t care, I just kept trying to draw breath, maybe it wasn’t a panic attack, maybe it was my heart! (So I thought, and then felt sheepish—I was playing Janeane’s role, with my hypochondria/panic attack; I recognized for a second that I’d feared being Janeane as soon as I met her. Janeane embarrassed me like a bad play, a close relation trailing dirty underwear out the bottom of a pant leg: somehow I overidentified. That’s why I brought my Gina side to bear. Then, wearing the muumuu for all the world to see, I’d fully realized my fears.) Still all I could feel was the nets closing above my head, as I swam with the mermaids in their blue fathoms.
I sensed the massive hulls of those greedy ships above us, their shadows blackening the water and closing off the sky.
I’m not sure how long I sat there, enclosed in my private grief/panic cavern—at a certain point it turned out that I was crying and too ashamed to show my tear-streaked, contorted face. I felt like a child again, because I hadn’t cried in front of a group of people, I figured, since then—at least, not so that anyone would notice. Now I’d made a fool of myself, as sadness overtook me; I’d let down the façade of cohesion.
And I was angry at Gina, even, Gina with her irony, even though she meant well, even though her gentle hand sat on my shoulder, lightly patting, while Chip was off with other people, pursuing more important aims. She raised the shield of irony to deflect her opponents. She and her other friends all raised their ironic shields, I thought—her fellow academics, for instance—instead of being willing to fight. Just lifted the shields and held them there.
On the one hand you had the religious
hysterics, obesely advancing with their ignorance. On the other hand, to oppose them, all you had was some thin effetes from the city, hiding behind a flimsy row of high-irony deflecting shields.
It wouldn’t save us, I thought. It wouldn’t save anything.
I hit Gina’s hand away, at one point, shaking my head, refusing to raise my face. But then I felt painful remorse, as I always do if I lash out at Gina D., remembering the onset of her irony. It was when her mother died. How Gina had adored her mother, a mother who lived for her and her two brothers, who laughed a lot and was good-natured, actually almost a saint, to be honest. How often her mother hugged them, always looking for opportunities. The love shone out of that woman.
Then withering, pain, a skeletal appearance. No more smiling. And gone.
From that time on Gina painstakingly built the shield, piece by piece. I couldn’t stay angry at Gina D. Never. Beneath her irony, to me, she’d always be that desolate kid.
And anyway who was I to judge?
I was a tourist, I thought. Even at home. I’d always had that aspect, the aspect of a tourist.
“DEBORAH!” I HEARD eventually, once I was ready to absorb current events.
Gina had gone off somewhere, murmuring something about getting me a blanket. I’d been shivering for a good while on my piece of grainy dirty-white deck, my modest, wet square of misery.
The voice filtered down from above; it was Sam. He looked preoccupied. Of course: he was a soldier, not a nursemaid.
I raised my head, wiped my eyes and nose and stood up shakily, one hand braced heavy on the rail.
“Take a look,” he said, and handed me his binoculars. “They’re just standing there. I figure you can read your husband’s expressions better than I can, right? He’s nearest us, there’s a pretty good view of him from the front. So take a look. You think those talks are going well?”
He wanted to draw me out of my personality breakdown by distracting me. I saw that, and I appreciated it. I decided to play along. I took the binoculars from him.
I can never quite get the hang of binoculars, don’t like them, basically, and as I was futzing around trying to normalize my face and emotions and at the same time master the focus ring, I must have turned my body. Because as I fiddled I noticed the specs were pointed in the wrong direction now, the wrong direction completely. And when my view sharpened I was looking out over a network of nets across the open ocean. I swiveled, trying to find the Narcissus again, but then I swiveled back, hesitating. There was a large, flattish gray bump out there in the water. Actually a couple of them.
“I didn’t know there were atolls out here,” I said.
“There aren’t,” said Sam.
I blinked; my eyes were watering, but this time from wind or staring, not emotion. The flat gray things were moving; now they were curved, not flat, I saw.
I took the binoculars off my eyes and handed them back to him. The gray bumps, in fact, were visible with the naked eye.
“Then what are those?” I asked.
“Shit,” said Sam, raising the binoculars.
“What?”
“No, that can’t be,” he said. “Wait. Wait a second.” He was playing with the focus ring, or maybe zooming.
“Look!” said Gina. “What’s going on? Water came out of it!”
“Whales.”
“Huge whales,” I said.
“We never see whales this big,” said Sam, but he still sounded distracted, as though it was hard to muster the time/energy to talk to us. Then, under his breath: “What the hell?”
“What species?” burst out Ronnie, running up from the stern. “Rick’s filming them. What are they?”
“It can’t be,” said Sam, shaking his head. He was still staring through the field glasses, all tense and pressed against the rails. “They’re not—no way, not this far south this time of year, I never heard of that. It’s not a finback, see, it’s even bigger—that baby’s ninety feet long at least. Maybe a hundred. Blues!”
“Blue whales?” asked Ellis, dubious. He shook his head. “In the Caribbean in summertime? Go on, mate. Pull the other one.”
“I worked one summer on a whalewatch boat,” said Sam. “I know my cetaceans. But you’re right. I’ve never seen this before. They usually travel in pairs or by themselves—not pods like that. Not blues. And they don’t stay up for so long, they’re not typically so visible. What the hell.”
“Five,” said Ronnie. “Six. Seven . . .”
I couldn’t get a sense of their size, personally. Out there on the waves they were a fleet of dark bumps—that was all.
“They’re goddamn blues, all right,” said Thompson, appearing out of the wheelhouse. He was holding a can of beer. (When it came to beer being handed out, why him? Where was the beer for me?)
“Oh shit, are they going to get caught? Caught in the fishing nets?” asked Gina. “Jesus. Really? Enough already.”
“I never saw so many in one place,” said Thompson. He had a brief coughing fit, then stuck his beer in one of his large cargo pockets and fished in his tobacco pouch. “And we’re talking, I’ve seen ’em in the Antarctic. They make ’em even bigger down there. Course, we don’t know much about blue whales. Goddamn mystery. Used to think they migrated, turns out not all of them do. Bunch off the coast of Sri Lanka never leave home at all. Pygmy blues, just sixty feet long. Regular ones have hearts the size of cars. Baby could crawl through one of their arteries. No sweat.”
“Doesn’t make sense,” said Sam. “A large pod of blues? I’ve never seen that. They’re coming toward us, too, toward the nets—they’re headed straight for the nets across the open water. See? Is your man Rick still filming?”
“He’s getting it,” nodded Ronnie.
“Blue whale calls are louder than jet planes, you know that?” said Thompson to me. I briefly eyed his beer. If I moved suddenly, I could grab it. “Songs carry thousands of miles. Freakish. Slow swimmers. Still, used to be faster than we were, before the steam engine. Before the explosive harpoons.”
I glanced up at the yacht, where I could make out Chip—suddenly I was sure it was him—leaning over the side and gazing toward the whales, just as we were. There was Nancy, too. Behind them, other heads and shoulders.
“Can’t we get closer?” I asked Sam. “Out by the nets? To see them better?”
“We could take the inflatable, maybe,” he said.
He sounded dubious at first; then (seeing Miyoko’s hopeful face as she came toward us) he seemed to get a rush of energy, sounding more enthused. “You know what? Let’s do it. This is a once-in-a-lifetime sighting. Let’s take the Zodiac.”
He stepped away and talked into his radio; in no time the orange inflatable that had been bobbing alongside the Narcissus, nobody in it but one sailor at the helm, was jumping over the waves back to us.
Miyoko wanted to come, of course, and Ronnie, and Rick lugged the videocamera along—in no time we were all scrambling down the ramp into the smaller boat. As we poured in Sam tossed us lifejackets from a bin under a bench, and we sat down and clicked their plastic buckles. Then there was engine noise and bouncing and a wall of spray that drenched me—it’d been bone dry on the high-up deck of the cutter, by comparison, despite my ass that was now soaked and freezing.
We sped off along the edge of the nearest net.
I wished Chip was with us—I wished our phones worked out here on the waves, at least I’d have been able to text him then—but failing that I turned and waved at the crowd on the Narcissus’ deck, as we left the yacht behind. I couldn’t be completely sure—the heads and shoulders up there were blurry and interchangeable to me once again—but I thought he raised a hand and held it up to me.
We drew closer to those gray masses, and they, I guess, were moving closer to the nets and to us as we approached them, and I couldn’t see much because Sam and Thompson were the only ones looking through binoculars as we motored. Just as we were getting in close enough for me to begin to study the w
eird curves of the tops of their bodies—because frankly I had no idea what I was looking at—one by one they dove, the edges of their massive tails leaving a waterfall of white as they sank beneath the waves. They were great smooth-moving crescents of gray-blue, and just like that those crescents slid under and disappeared from view, leaving only a faint, lacy wash of intercrossing waters on the surface. In fact there was hardly any turbulence at all. Those giants’ movements were seamless.
The guy at the steering wheel slowed us down; now we were chugging along a line of green oval buoys that marked the edge of a net. Beyond them was nothing but water.
“Damn it,” said Gina.
“Patience. We’re not done yet,” said Sam.
The sailor cut the engine and we sat there in the boat, the boat that was suspended on the water, dancing a bit, up and down, side to side in the lazy rhythm.
For a short time it seemed to me—and I remember this moment better than anything else from my honeymoon trip—as though the light over the ocean was a different light from any I’d seen before. It was morning, I know that rationally, but I have a strong recollection of a golden light, a gilded, amber light you might associate with retirement, peace and tranquillity. The light that seems to tremble in the air before the dusk descends, before a darkness falls upon the earth.
I’ve always liked to talk, as long as they’re someone worth talking to. I’ve always been bored by silent people. But right then I was so glad that no one was talking, that no one in that lifeboat was saying anything at all . . . I wondered: What if we’d never spoken in the first place? Where would we be, our race? Would we have machines, even?
Or on the other hand, maybe we’d already be long gone. Fallen to stronger animals, the ones with smaller brains and bigger muscles, longer claws and teeth.
Still: right then I wanted nothing more than for the wordless quiet to persist. I wished we’d never speak again, at that particular second—that the pure silence of waiting for the appearance of the blue whales, that wide-open, neutrally buoyant hope, that expectation would stretch on forever and a day.