by Lydia Millet
No. Breaking the peace was the loud, abrasive noise of a ratcheting, a winching, scraping cacophony—mechanical, groaning. I understood after a second that a thick cable was creaking, the net slung beside us in the water was being moved. I wondered why; had the parent company found something? Or was this just part of the process of reduction, the process by which it was shrinking its search area and supposedly also forcing the mermaids nearer the shore, bringing them closer in?
With the hawser, or whatever it was, grinding away I had the urge to cover my ears with my hands, and at the same time I was struck with the conviction that either the whales or the mermaids were getting caught down there, convinced that the hauling of the nets was intended for them, that we were about to witness their willful death, what you might call their murder.
I was terrified, and for a while—I can’t say how long—that feeling of dread, plus the whine of the moving cable, was all I was really aware of.
Rick was filming, though there was little to see, he had the camera pointed at the patch of ocean where the whales had been. The rest of us did nothing, just watched and waited and endured the groan of steel.
With no warning except a single, slight back-and-forth rock, the Zodiac was pushed up onto one side, and we spilled out of it before we could register what was happening. It flipped on top of us, as we splashed, gurgled, and squawked. Blinded, choking on salt water and flailing around, I panicked—maybe I wouldn’t be able to get out from under the boat again, the surprisingly bulky inflatable boat that hung above me, upside-down, as I struggled to find its edge, get up around it and into the air to breathe. I felt my flip-flops slipping off my feet, and saw belongings floating near me, debris I bumped into, someone’s foot landed a heavy kick on my thigh, and then a hard, smooth surface scraped along me—not quite smooth, no, actually very rough at times, later I’d find I was bleeding all down the outside of one leg where barnacles had scraped the skin open.
There would be scars, I’d understand later. Gone, in a single instant and for the rest of my life, were the days of perfect legs. Those barnacles are sharp as hell. They’re vicious, truthfully. But at the time I wasn’t conscious of pain, only desperation as I tried to scrabble my way to the surface to breathe.
And when I got there—because I made it, obviously, since here I am, not dead, not telling my story as a sad ghost full of wisdom and longing from the grave—the water was still turbulent around me, and I was hearing shouts, faintly, and I was deeply relieved I’d put on the bulky, foolish-seeming lifejacket (Thompson, by contrast, had refused to wear one) because I couldn’t grab onto the side of the boat at first, it was too far up there and too slick/slippery and I was weak and out of breath, though I must have had some adrenaline on my side. There seemed to be chaos, and I couldn’t see right away, it took me a minute to blink the salt water out of my eyes and clarify the bobbing boat alongside and the floating objects that, I guess, had been dumped out when we were overturned (my eyes fixed, while I was getting my breath back, on a two-liter soda bottle, its brown syrupy liquid sloshing inside; a white first-aid kit with the telltale red cross on it; and a large running shoe). There was still the overwhelming racket of the cable grinding, too.
Was Gina OK? Miyoko? The others? I looked around, called out, sputtering. But I was too low in the water, all I could see was the churning froth itself, right around me—I had to have a better vantage point. With more scraping of elbows and knees I hoisted myself up onto the upside-down boat, I found a rope to hold on to and hauled myself onto its bottom, which had ridges, almost shelves along it that made it easy to get a grip on, once I was up there. For whatever reason I was the first of all of us to clamber back on.
The whales were surfacing again. It was a blue whale, of course, that had come up right beneath us—I realized it only when I saw them, it took me that long to get a clue why we’d capsized. The whales were rising from the depths, and there were a fair number of them—too many for me to count, given their size. The only thing that made them seem less than frighteningly huge was the fact that you didn’t see their whole bodies at once, only sections as they arched out of the water and then under it again, sliding along like sea serpents in movies. They had risen. They rose still.
And the mermaids were with them.
They’d dived down by themselves and come up with mermaids.
The first two I saw were clinging to a dorsal fin, really far back on the whale—those dorsal fins were pretty small, considering how massive the whales’ bodies were. That whale dove briefly and the mermaids went under; then he/she rose and they were visible again. And so it went. Whales surfaced, then dipped under, with a few mermaids holding fast to those lone fins but most of them grabbing onto the great white armatures of barnacles across the whales’ massive backs. For a mermaid, I guess, those crusted, razor-sharp crustaceans weren’t too lethal to grab onto. There were whole rows of mermaids arrayed along the whales’ backs and sides, like so many kids in a full school bus.
I’d left my cell phone in my bag, on the Coast Guard ship, but Rick had brought his, and bizarrely enough it hadn’t gotten completely waterlogged/ruined.
Later, turning the sight over in my mind, I’d figure the mermaids had to hold on somewhere; they weren’t big on sitting, being half-fish and all. You don’t see a fish in a chair often. Maybe they could sometimes manage on a stable base, say a pile of rocks or a coral outcropping, to brush their hair and sing seductive ditties to sailors, but not on a moving whale. They didn’t have asses. It was that simple.
I barely noticed as the others joined me on the capsized boat, scrambling atop it one by one—there was Gina, there was Miyoko, then Ellis, with one limp arm that seemed to be bothering him—and we stared as the whales came up, one after another. After a bit we understood that they were heading out into the open ocean. The whales were moving away from the armada and the nets, and with them went the mermaids.
I watched a pair near me, one particular whale and one mermaid—my whale and my mermaid, as I thought of them afterward, though the mermaid wasn’t the same one I’d seen before. She was a different mermaid, younger and prettier. I saw her shining tail hanging along the side of the whale’s great, flattened head, the whale curves I didn’t understand anatomically (nostrils? ears? blowholes?). Sun glanced off the scales on her tail and the mermaid’s long, light hair was plastered down her back and sides. There were others like her on that whale, but she was the one near me.
There were far more mermaids than we’d seen before and far more whales than we’d seen before, too. I couldn’t count them, it was too fast and too multiple for that—it was like a storm or a battle, a frenzy of movement, a confusion of images and sliding, foaming water. Struggling to stay on the overturned boat as the last stragglers climbed on, rocking it as they clambered, and at the same time watching the whales in a daze, I had no time to draw conclusions, right then. I vaguely registered some discord about organizing—whether we should jump off the boat again and work together to turn it right side up—but I ignored the shouts, tuned out the argument, I wanted it to stop. I was laser-focused.
In the sound and the noise, grasping at the hard plastic ridges as I slipped back and forth on the bottom of the Zodiac, I watched the whales recede, watched them dip and surface, dip and surface again in a graceful motion (Sam said later it wasn’t the usual way whales swam but more the way dolphins did—possibly for the benefit of the mermaids). They quickly put a good distance between us, eventually a great distance, and I was just beginning to shiver and feel the sting of the cuts and scrapes on my leg and elbows when they grew indistinct. Soon they were nothing but ripples in the plain of ocean beneath the horizon line.
And finally they disappeared from my field of view and I knew I’d never see those whales or mermaids again. I’d never see another blue whale, the vastest creature ever to live on earth, and I’d never see a mermaid again, either.
They’d taken our mythological creatures, the blue whales had. They�
�d come to the rescue as the nets were closing in and the hordes were descending with their burning swords. They’d come to claim their own and taken the mermaids far from the armada—far from the Venture of Marvels. They saw what we were, those whales, and wanted nothing to do with it. They simply swam away, those ancient goliaths of the sea.
They took the marvels with them.
I’M A PERSON who doesn’t like aftermaths, as I may have mentioned earlier—in general they’re depressing. But this one wasn’t like that, at least not for me. I could tell some of us were let down, some people felt kind of robbed—Ellis, for instance, who’d been nursing a possibly broken arm and hadn’t seen much of anything—but I didn’t feel that way at all. From the time we headed back to the cutter (we’d finally righted the rubber boat, but its motor wouldn’t start so Sam, Thompson, Miyoko, and Gina paddled us in) I felt euphoric.
I was shivering in my wet clothes, even under the tropical sun, but a curious sense of peace kept me sitting quietly, contented. Blood ran down my leg from the barnacle scrapes: it welled up in thousands of microscopic pinpoints from one place where the outer layers of skin had been sheered off, plus there were thin, deep lines scored into my thigh and calf that drooled blood all the way down to my ankle and heel.
I barely noticed it. I mean, I did notice—sitting on the wet bench-seat of the Zodiac I stretched out the leg and peered down at the red lines and ribbons of blood—but it was less out of urgent concern than with a sense of friendly interest.
I knew I shouldn’t feel peaceful, necessarily, because those mermaids wouldn’t be safe now anyway, no matter where they went. Still, for today they were safe, and somehow the knowledge that the blue whales had taken them far away comforted me.
What if the whales, I thought dreamily (happily resting my dripping leg on the side of the boat and letting the others handle the paddling), what if the whales were in charge of the whole shebang? Those behemoths had obscure ways of knowledge, obviously. Somehow they’d heard a mermaid distress call: that alone was astonishing.
I let myself daydream that the whales had great, all-encompassing wisdom, far greater than any commanded by the race of men. The whales weren’t going to fall prey to our mischief this time (although they often had, in centuries past and even more recently). Their songs carried hundreds of miles; we hadn’t even known about those songs until the 1960s. Sam and Thompson had both trotted that out.
So we knew little of them, and for eons they’d wandered the quiet deep, masters of that dark and liquid kingdom.
They might be anyone. They might know anything.
WE MADE IT back to the cutter just as Gina was becoming annoyed by having to paddle; we toweled off and sat in the sunlight with towels wrapped around us, tamping the moisture from our soaking clothes.
In due time the rest of our party returned from the Narcissus. Though our Zodiac was out of service now, the yacht had her own inflatables; so over they chugged, finally, aboard one of those (larger, newer, and cleaner than the one we’d capsized in). When Chip came back aboard the Coast Guard boat again I saw he was elated too, just like me. Behind him was Nancy, satisfaction shining from her like a beacon. She went up to her father right away, for he and the doctor had stayed on the cutter this whole time, and they shared a heartfelt, emotional greeting: each grasped the upper arms of the other, briefly yet firmly.
Gone were her hopes of a sanctuary, I assumed, and yet—and yet I could tell she was pleased.
We’d been far closer to the spectacle than they had, but aboard that yacht, with its lofty decks, the diplomatic party had had the boon of height, a panoramic view. Chip had made a phone video; on the small screen the whales weren’t anything, you couldn’t see the mermaids at all, but it was HD, he said, it would look better on his laptop screen.
As the cutter headed back to shore, he knelt down beside me and tended my hurt leg, smearing on some antibiotic ointment and then wrapping my calf lightly in bandages from the cutter’s well-stocked first-aid cabinet. The thigh would be harder to bandage, he thought; we’d get the doctor to handle that.
Chip took a lot of care over the cleaning and bandaging, talking to keep my attention off the pain; he said he’d practically had a heart attack when he saw the rubber boat flip. He’d watched the whale’s head rise beside it, the great whale-chin ridged with curving lines, and he’d been thunderstruck. He realized I could swim perfectly well, but who knew, he said—I might have been knocked unconscious by a hard blow to the head, I could have sunk beneath the waves, drowning.
It was the worst minute of his life, he said, waiting for me to come up again, waiting to make sure it was me heaving myself onto that bobbing orange oval.
Negotiations hadn’t been going that well anyway, he added, when the whales came. He looked around then, not wanting to hurt anybody’s feelings. The civil servants had been very polite, said Chip—well, too polite, honestly. They’d been so polite it was hard to tell what they wanted, if anything. Their words, as they spoke to the representatives of the parent company, were so matter-of-fact, so bureaucratic (Chip said these words included stakeholders, as well as win-win and orientated toward the long term), that even to Chip it wasn’t clear they had a compelling interest in progress. So yes, they’d spoken to the GM, Chip said, the guy from the beach who really was a ten-gallon ass hat.
But on the other hand it was as though they hadn’t spoken, pretty much.
There’d been no forward motion at all until Nancy, out of sheer frustration, had broken in, and just as she was taking the conversational reins away from the civil servants, just at that very moment the blue whales had arrived.
They’d all stopped talking and stood at the rails and watched, and the GM went from disbelief to astonishment to rampaging anger, so that by the time the mermaids were riding into the distant horizon he was in the grips of a temper tantrum, Chip said, you really could call it that—he raced around yelling at underlings, expressing his outrage. He tried to rally crewmembers and volunteers alike, tried to rally them to the cause of chasing down the whales, somehow trapping the whales or possibly attacking them, making them yield up those mermaids; but heads were shaken, for once no one cooperated with him, Chip told me.
It seemed more like a strike than like a mutiny, but either way it was calm and reasonable, and in the face of his crew’s indifference the GM blustered uselessly.
Gina hovered over me, along with Chip and Raleigh; Raleigh had a glass of water, some painkillers he wanted me to take, where Gina mostly wanted to gape.
“That’s gory,” she said, admiringly, and raised her phone. “I’m going to post it to Facebook, when I have bars again. Do they have toxins in them, barnacles? Like sea urchins?”
As we sped shoreward, I turned back and gazed at the armada. On our approach it had soared above us like a citadel. There’d been no doubt in my mind that it was a seat of power, that armada, a bastion of mindless force. It was impervious to our opinions, cold to the good of others. Yet with the mermaids gone—for all of us knew there were none left behind—it struck me as a ghost fleet. Even a ghost city.
Thompson had talked about diving in the sunken warships of Truk Lagoon, full of the skulls of Japanese fighters . . . Thompson had told the tale, that night after first contact at our drunk party, of how he had swum through those mossy, rusted hulks, seeing small fish dart through the eye sockets of sailors. Those sailors killed a lifetime ago in a distant war, long forgotten by all who knew them, the forgetters even forgotten.
And here I was looking at a new fleet of ghosts, the remnants of a rapacious army of commerce. Already it was floating around uselessly on top of waves that had been stripped of assets. The whales were gone, and so were the mermaids; the coral reefs were on their way out. I felt like I saw the future of these ships, from the private yachts to the workhorses of the fishing industry, and it seemed to me that future was a sad one, in some respects—a future of decay and dereliction, a future where the ships floated on the vast waters w
ith nowhere to sail to anymore.
For the yachts, no pleasure stops along the sumptuous coasts. For the fishing ships, no schools to catch in their high-tech nets, those endless skeins of white monofilament that would drift for millennia in the oceans, immortal.
I was waxing pretty eloquent, in my mind, about all this, when we got back to the marina. We stepped onto the jetty and said our goodbyes to the civil servants. With Chip’s arm around me I hobbled into the Hummer.
Ellis and I got the places of honor, being the injured ones: he perched in the front passenger seat, gritting his teeth and trying to hold his arm immobilized, while I stretched out in the very back, my scraped-up leg propped up on a pile of dusty blankets. The good doctor said he’d tend to our wounds back at the motel, that he thought Ellis’s wrist was fractured; he’d borrowed some supplies from the ship’s first-aid station.
I lay on my side looking out the rear windows—there were a pair of them, the Hummer had two doors at the back—and seeing the sky, with occasional pieces of tree looming. The rear of the Hummer was sandy, full of diving gear, wetsuits, knives, guns, and ammunition, and the fine white sand got all over me. At first I brushed at it irritably, but then I let it stick. I should appreciate the sand, I thought. The parrotfish expert had said it before she died: the white sands would be leaving us soon.
Maybe they would appear in another time and place, I comforted myself. There were so many stars. These days the scientists said a zillion planets might support carbon-based life, out there. Maybe a planet in a triple-star system would grow these fish with pouty lips, these hills of white sand beneath clear saltwater.
Over the history of the earth, I learned in high school biology, the eyeball has evolved, died out, and then evolved again. The eye can’t be kept down.