Mermaids in Paradise
Page 23
Maybe the fish couldn’t be kept down either, the fish and their beautiful reefs.
One time, not long before our wedding, Chip had come home from work with a factoid he’d learned, a piece of new research uncovered in the course of doing business (insurance adjustment). Ashes had been discovered in some cave in South Africa, ashes from cookfires a million years ago, he’d read it in a magazine. Or he had found it on Wikipedia. Something. Anyway, that was us, Chip said—our grandparents, practically.
We’d had short foreheads then, eyebrows that were even bushier than Nancy’s. A million years ago.
“Did we talk?” I asked Chip, propping myself up on an elbow.
I may have sounded fuzzy. My leg was stinging a lot by that time. It really hurt quite a bit.
Chip was chatting with Raleigh in the backseat, and at first they didn’t hear me, so I repeated my question.
“Chip. When we were Homo erectus. Did we know how to talk back then?”
“Relax, honey. Lie back. She may be delirious. Just rest, OK honey?”
“I mean it, Chip, did Homo erectus talk?”
“Uh, hmm. Let me think. I mean no one knows for sure about this stuff. And Homo sapiens were the first real talkers, right? Like maybe fifty thousand years ago. But some people think maybe the later specimens of erectus spoke some kind of pre-language. Like maybe they didn’t just grunt like apes. Still, even if that’s true, it wouldn’t have been anything fancy. They didn’t write or anything. It took us, like, five million years to learn how to do that. Evolution-wise. If you count australopithecines.”
Five million years, I thought, lying back again.
It was warm in the back there, stuffy and warm, and as the sting sharpened and then abated, sharpened and abated, I wondered if I was falling asleep. The Hummer bounced over potholes, leaving behind an invisible stream of global warming . . . it had taken our ancestors four million years to figure out fire. It took them five million to develop writing. And then, in a great acceleration—just a brief, screaming handful of seasons—we got electricity, nukes, commercial air travel, trips to the moon. Overnight the white sands of the parrotfish were running out. Here went the poles, melting, and here, at last, went paradise.
The writing gave us everything all of a sudden, then nothing forever.
I WOKE UP to a mild wind sweeping in from the open doors of the motel bedroom. I lay alone on our bed, my leg wrapped in gauze. It was dusk, I saw from the pink sky. No one was in the room with me, but I could hear their voices outside, where they were milling around the pool.
I must have needed the rest, I thought; maybe it was the shock of the injury. I didn’t have much experience with pain, accident, or trauma—I’ve had an easy life, let’s face it. I’d thought the leg was no big deal. But still I’d slept through the afternoon.
I didn’t want to move yet; I saw my cell phone lay on the bedside table, and I reached out for it. There was a text waiting: Call me when you wake up. <3 C.
So I did, I lay there on my back on the cool linens and I called Chip, and he came in. He sat on the side of the bed, then lay down beside me, careful not to nudge the hurt leg; he asked if I wanted more painkillers.
It wasn’t so bad, I said.
He said that was because they’d given me codeine.
I wanted to know what I’d missed.
“The crowds—the haters?—they’re not accepting that the mermaids are really gone,” he said. “They’re everywhere, looking for them. Trying to hire out boats, dive equipment. It’s a madhouse at the marina. A lot like it was before. The armada’s come back in, mostly to service them. So even without the mermaids, the Venture of Marvels is making a tidy profit. Right now, at least. It’s going to be all the local authorities can do to keep the crowds from destroying the reefs here.”
“Oh,” I said weakly. I closed my eyes again.
The sense of peace I’d had after the whales took the mermaids was dispersing like smoke.
“The good news is, the Coast Guard’s going to be pitching in and Thompson’s reinforcements came through. Wild, right? Can you believe the old guy actually has pull? So there’s a Navy boat on its way. That’s the good news, honey. There’s pretty solid help coming.”
I was tired. It wasn’t just the codeine, the leg ache—I was more tired than that.
“But there’s not so much you and I can do,” he added. “I mean, Nancy’s staying. She’s on sabbatical anyway, so she doesn’t have to go back and teach. And she feels like she has to go to bat for her parrotfish. Plus the locals can use her biology expertise. But I was thinking—since obviously we don’t want to go back to the resort, and this motel’s booked up now, even this crappy place is full, so we’re going to be kicked out in the morning—well, I was thinking we’d get on the ferry and go to the U.S. Virgins, just the two of us plus maybe Ellis and Gina. We can spend the rest of our vacation there. I’m thinking the best would be St. John. I was going to book us there in the first place, you know, before I saw how Gorda had that floating restaurant.”
“Aren’t there crowds on St. John too?” I asked.
I still wasn’t opening my eyes; I lay tucked into Chip like a small child. I’ve always liked that about Chip, his height and broad shoulders, the fact that he can enclose me.
“No, the haters are only in the British Virgins. None of them really went farther west than Tortola, apparently. It’s too far away from where we saw the mermaids, you know, in the U.S. Virgins—people wouldn’t have the access they’re looking for. But listen. On St. John there’s a two-bedroom bungalow on the top of a small mountain that had a last-minute cancellation—we can rent it for a whole week. I checked. It has a private yard, these flowering bougainvillea vines all over the place, even a rose trellis. It has one of those infinity pools, Deb. You always wanted to swim in a pool like that, didn’t you?”
“I’ve always wanted to swim in an infinity,” I murmured.
“And it has a great view of the ocean.”
“Chip? Sweetheart? I wonder if we should just go home,” I suggested. “Home home. Back to the Golden State.”
I thought of those angry crowds teeming onto the coral heads out there, slashing the corals with those long rubber fins, of Nancy’s silly-looking parrotfish with their bulging lips, those innocent fools of fish. Poor things. Just swimming around with no idea what was coming.
I felt like crying again.
“Deb, no, hey—this was a victory. Maybe not ours, exactly, but still, it was a victory for the mermaids. The Venture didn’t get to them, and maybe some small part of that timing was us. Maybe, partly, with our distractions and our interference, we held them off until the whales came. Think of it that way, babe.”
“I’ve always loved your optimism,” I said.
“Deb, look. The reefs are going to weather this invasion. All right? So don’t be discouraged.”
“But if we hadn’t gone public with the mermaids, there wouldn’t be these crowds,” I said listlessly.
“But if we hadn’t gone public with the mermaids, who knows? Maybe the GM wouldn’t have had to take time out to intimidate us on the beach, with his posse. Maybe they would have found the mermaids themselves. Before the blue whales ever got there. And the mermaids would be in a cage right now. And a lot of them might be dead.”
I shook my head. It sounded paper-thin, to me, Chip’s logic. The truth was, I thought, we’d tried our best, we really had. But we’d been bulls in a china shop, and now the reefs were being invaded by hordes of our very own barbarians.
For the first time I had a glimpse of something: I got an inkling of why Chip was obsessed with the Heartland. He knew it was our fault, the ape denial, the fear of science, the epidemic of obesity. He knew we’d done it to ourselves, made our own village into idiots. We’d put our best-looking idiots on thrones, those empty pawns and shiny dolls. And then we had the balls to act surprised—even superior!—when people began to worship them.
Some people worshiped the
false idols and in the face of that some other people turned away. We weren’t this sordid mass, they wanted to think, we were children of God, special and better than the rest. Once you weren’t beautiful, you needed God to love you.
Between the two groups a fault line rumbled, ominous.
“. . . I know your leg hurts,” Chip was saying. “But the doctor says it’s going to be fine, maybe some light scarring. As early as tomorrow, he said—as long as you keep a waterproof bandage over the part without the skin—you can maybe go swimming. I’ll take care of you, honey. Let’s relax, OK? We’ll have that lazy honeymoon you wanted, I promise. We really will. St. John’s is like, rainforest green, one big national park with mountains, and around the edges is a ring road that stops at tons of white-sand beaches. You can snorkel on every one of them, if you want. We won’t do any diving. We’ll take it easy.”
We lay there for a while, with the babble of conversation from the pool, a splashing, every now and then, and the whir of the ceiling fan.
Chip kissed me, and so forth.
“OK,” I said finally.
FOR OUR LAST night with everyone he carried me out to the pool—just for the hell of it, since of course I could have walked, albeit painfully. The leg looked savaged, but it was just lacerations. He laid me down on a chaise and people took turns coming over to see me. I felt like a gimpy queen.
Someone had picked up takeout food, on the pretext of taking the burden of cooking off Janeane, and everyone (except Janeane) was chowing down on pulled pork and fish tacos. A few of the soldiers had come, dressed in their civvies, cargo pants, swim trunks, et cetera, which made them look much younger—like college kids with neat haircuts, I thought, or maybe high school jocks.
Guns age a person, I decided. If you want to look young, you probably shouldn’t carry one.
Miyoko was talking to Sam, who looked enthusiastic about the conversation; Thompson and Gina seemed to be playing darts, with a board stuck up on the trunk of a palm tree. Rick and Ronnie were talking to Janeane, who lay in a hammock knitting, as Ellis (one arm in a sling), Simonoff and Nancy pored over some maps spread out on a table and the doctor floated in the pool ensconced in a pink lifesaving ring. Raleigh leaned over the food table, putting together a plate for me.
Of all of them, I thought, watching people stand around in their drinking-and-talking gaggles, I’d miss Steve and Janeane the most. Their niceness was warming. Even their boringness grew on you after a while, because they meant so well. They really did.
And Raleigh: I liked him too. I liked so many people, when I got to know them, and when I was drinking.
When I was drinking I could almost be Chip, I thought, almost that nice.
But not quite.
I wouldn’t think of the crowds, I told myself, I wouldn’t think of them, the crowds with their swords burning.
That’s right. I would refuse to think of them.
I watched as one of Gina’s darts struck Thompson on the hand. He shrieked. I nursed my smooth bourbon on the rocks, looked up at the darkening sky. There was the planet Venus, and a few stars were out; purple was turning black. The end of our day was ending.
“You should come down and see us, man,” said Chip to Steve.
They were sitting beside me in yellow-and-white deck chairs; Steve was squeezing some kind of resistance ball that’s supposed to make your hands stronger.
“You live in the Bay Area, right?” persisted Chip. “Five-hour shot straight down the 1. We’re literally just a couple minutes off the PCH. Brentwood. Stay overnight! Plenty of space. We’ll move Deb’s Pilates machine out of the guestroom. That thing’s gathering dust anyway, isn’t it, honey?”
“Kind of it is,” I admitted.
“Hey, I really wish we could,” said Steve. “Just not sure there’ll be time.”
He looked up then, tipping his head back pensively, and Chip and I did the same.
In the sky the asteroid was blazing. That earth-crosser was so near, these days. I’d almost forgotten.
“True dat,” said Chip, nodding.
“You read the GAO report?” asked Steve.
“Of course,” said Chip.
We’d all read the report, something from Congress that the papers and blogs picked up. It’d been translated into more than a thousand languages; when Chip saw that figure he said he didn’t even know there were that many. (Gina ridiculed him.) Anyway the study said the asteroid could probably have been stopped, the impact prevented if we’d prepared in time. Well, technically it could have been redirected, not stopped per se, deflected just microscopically along its path so that it wouldn’t hit and wouldn’t bring on the extinction event. Like in a high-concept blockbuster movie, we could have knocked it off its course with a missile, or maybe a few. Apparently, some of that Hollywood shit was true.
But the time for whining had passed.
So in the end we’d failed the whales, much as we’d failed the mermaids. I wondered if they already knew. Did they see to the end, the way we did?
I wished there were some perfect retreat for those whales and those mermaids—the beauty we knew, the beauty we thought we’d made up or maybe only dreamed, we’d never been quite sure. I wished there was a safe haven for them, locked deep in the endless blue.
We smiled at each other, Chip and Steve and I, sadly. I flattered myself that the men were thinking fondly of each other and of me, as I was thinking so fondly of them—of all the milling friends and partygoers—longing for what couldn’t be.
When it came to the future, we all acted as if. Only way to proceed, said Gina firmly, and Chip and I agreed.
So we did the wedding, we did the honeymoon. There’d never be a better time for it.
Still there are instants when it pierces me, it pierces all of us—we all have those instants of remembering—a terrible love that passes in a flash, our terrible love of everything.
It brings us closer than we’ve ever been.
But the closeness is fleeting.
Tears stood on my bottom eyelids again, twice in a single day now, but I wouldn’t let them spill over—not this time. This time I restrained myself, determined to keep my personality intact. From now on, that’s what I’d do. No more slipups. It wasn’t the best personality, I’d been reminded of that recently, but it was mine. You work with what you’ve got.
I’d keep my personality intact, I decided. Give it the old college try.
I raised my cup and toasted; the others raised theirs too. We went on smiling, smiling, and smiling, until the very moment when the whiskey touched our lips.
ALSO BY LYDIA MILLET
Magnificence
Ghost Lights
How the Dead Dream
Love in Infant Monkeys
Oh Pure and Radiant Heart
Everyone’s Pretty
My Happy Life
George Bush, Dark Prince of Love
Omnivores
FOR YOUNGER READERS
Pills and Starships
The Shimmers in the Night
The Fires Beneath the Sea
Copyright © 2015 by Lydia Millet
Illustrations by Sharon McGill
All rights reserved
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