When he was awake, the world was drab. The buzz of insomnia in the back of his head had relented, but Carol’s voice took its place, so that she always seemed to be speaking to him from far away. He found that if he concentrated, everything she said made sense, that her voice was the same pleasant, soothing voice she had always had. But it was an effort to perceive her this way, and when he didn’t bother she seemed strange—her movements awkward, her features too sharp, her eyes small and dim.
All he could think about was getting back to sea, but Carol did her best to divert him. She began planning trips for them on her days off, to the movies, to new restaurants they had to drive three towns over to get to. She invited friends he hadn’t seen in years over for dinner, and when he dragged himself out of bed at noon, the house was already filled with the scent of sautéed onions or chopped herbs, smells he found cloying.
One Sunday morning Robert woke to find Carol shaking him gently as pale sunlight poured over her shoulders, leaving her face in shadow and making him squint.
“Get up, we’re going shopping,” she said.
“Go without me.”
“I need your opinion.”
“We don’t need anything anyway.”
“You’ve brought home more money than we know what to do with,” she said. “What’s the point in making all this money if we can’t spend it? Get up.”
He dressed, drank a glass of water for breakfast, and slumped against the window in the car as Carol drove. He wanted nothing more than to go back to sleep, but there was such a crispness about Carol’s actions, the way she wrapped her fingers around the steering wheel and held her head, that they didn’t seem to brook any disagreement. It reminded him of how she had acted when he was her patient—firm and capable, radiating assurance.
When they reached the mall, Carol walked up and down between rows of overstuffed leather sofas that reminded Robert of great overfed cows, not the kind of thing Carol would buy at all, and he wondered why she was even looking at them. She led him through a department store, examining pots and pans, rubbing bath towels against her face to check their softness. Eventually she found the sporting goods section, where she picked up a cheap rod-and-reel set and examined it minutely, as though it held secrets in its plastic casing.
“We should go fishing together,” she said. “We could go out to that lake by Wamset.”
“Lake fishing is just waiting with a pole in your hand,” said Robert.
“Well I guess I’ve gotten pretty good at waiting,” she said. “And I think it would be fun.”
She tucked the rod under her arm and began looking at bait, fingering through tubs of sparkling green rubber worms that only a thirty-pounder could swallow, peering into jars of cinnamon-red salmon eggs as though selecting expensive produce. She chose a jar and shook it, then held it up along with the handful of worm lures and said, “Which one?”
Robert envied her for a moment, her ability to focus so intensely on trivial things as though they were important. He knew that, once, cleaning gutters, hauling fish, and admiring the fine curve of Carol’s neck had been substantial material to fill the days of his life, and that it had all dissolved now into sea-foam, a puff of nothing. Carol would go along happily forever, he thought, and just then she put the jar back on the shelf and said, “Are you sorry you married me?”
“What?”
“I don’t like you being gone all the time, but I could stand it if you were different when you came home. You don’t even talk to me anymore.”
“I’m talking to you right now.”
“Don’t play dumb, Robert,” she said, her voice rising.
“We’re in a store. Don’t yell.”
“Who cares? Do we know these people? I’m worried about you.”
“I’m fine,” he said, but he knew it wasn’t true. Many things had been wrong lately. He had trouble concentrating, and his bedsheets seemed to scratch his skin when he pulled them up at night. The people he passed in the street all looked as though they had contracted a disease; they were slow, squint-eyed, their skin the color of dishwater.
“Then why are you acting this way?” she said.
“Maybe I haven’t been feeling quite well.”
“Well, why don’t you say so?” she said, crying now and wiping her face with the back of her hand. “You can’t just walk around sick all the time, and you’re scaring me. I want you to talk to one of the doctors at the hospital.”
A doctor would not be able to do anything, he thought. A doctor would not even begin to understand. “All right,” he said.
He looked down at the bucket of sparkling rubber worms, thought of the creatures of his dreams, the glimmers of phosphorescent life that were teeming through deep waters somewhere every minute of the day, unseen, even now. He thought of the glimmer of a silver tail, skin like mother-of-pearl.
“Promise?” said Carol.
He squeezed his eyes shut. What had he promised? When he opened them again, Carol was staring at him, her eyes rimmed pink, lips taut with unhappiness.
“Yes, yes, I do,” he said, and she sniffed and pressed her warm, wet face against his chest.
* * *
—
The doctor she sent him to prescribed an antidepressant, and told Carol to keep Robert off the boats for a while. So the Ushuaia sailed without him, and he sat at the end of the dock and watched it go.
The antidepressants gave the world a different sort of unreality where everything was excessively bright, where he found he could not stop talking even though he was not a talkative man. For the next three weeks, he spent most of his waking hours at the Lock and Dock and returned home every night exhausted. Carol pulled him into bed, made love to him desperately, and, as soon as they were finished, he was asleep. His dreams were more vivid than ever, and their images spilled over into his waking hours. When the Ushuaia came back into port with another full hold, he told Carol he was going on the next trip no matter what.
She argued with him and finally refused to drive him to the dock when the departure day arrived. Robert was so close to being back at sea that he was nearly twitching with anticipation, but he forced himself to stay in bed with her until the last possible moment; to hold her; to wipe the tears off her face and tell her that he loved her, that he would be back soon. He called for a taxi, boarded the ship with his duffel bag, and began helping with the final preparations for castoff. As the Ushuaia was pulling away from the dock, he caught sight of Carol on the pier, half-hidden behind one of the pilings, trying not to let him see her, and he waved.
* * *
—
There was heavy rain when they got to the fishing ground off Newfoundland, and the possibility of a storm, so they didn’t let the nets out right away. The crew members spent their time huddled in the cabins smoking, but their spirits were high. They were certain another hold full of fish awaited them as soon as the weather abated. Robert sat on his bunk in the midst of the chatter and curling smoke and tried not to fidget. Eventually he put on his rain slicker and went out on deck, instantly feeling much calmer. A moment later, Mark Leslie was standing beside him, holding tight to the rail and looking as though he might vomit.
“Get back below,” Robert said. “You’ll get soaked.”
“I saw her,” said Mark.
Robert tried his best not to let his expression change, to tell himself that he was jumping to conclusions. He said nothing.
“All those nights you came in late, I knew you were up to something,” Mark said. “Smuggling, I thought. I even followed you once, but you were just standing, looking at the water. So on the last trip I went up there every night and stood in your place, trying to see what you saw. There was nothing and I thought, maybe it’s just the ocean. He wants to look at the ocean. But then I saw her. She was swimming with that thing.”
“What thi
ng?” asked Robert.
Mark’s eyes became sly, veiled in possessiveness. “I wondered whether you knew, but no? No.”
Such a stab of bitter loathing passed through Robert that he turned away. The clouded sky had made the sea truly dark, as no place on land could ever be. He could hear the patter of raindrops against the waves forming a sweet, clear slick of fresh water on the ocean’s surface. Mark was still talking, but Robert shut his ears against it, until Mark said, “It was the biggest shark I’ve ever seen. Twenty feet long and swimming past the side of the ship, and she was right behind it.”
Robert tried to picture this, to cast the image onto the black waves below them, the pure white-and-silver body of the mermaid pursuing the grim bulk of the shark. “Hunting it?” said Robert.
“No. She couldn’t. If it wanted to, it could destroy her in one bite, it’s that monstrous. I don’t think it even knew she was there.” Mark was sopping now, his fair hair dark with water and sleek against his skull, rain dripping from his chin and nose. “You weren’t going to tell anyone, were you? I mean, of course you weren’t. Who would even believe us?”
Robert shook his head. He didn’t care for Mark’s moist-eyed reverence, and yet he saw that Mark took naturally to the mermaid, to the intrusion of such implausibility into his life. That he had, in fact, been waiting for just such a thing to happen to him, and so its coming to pass could not harm him. Robert turned to leave, but Mark grabbed his arm.
“Tell me something about her,” Mark said. “You must know something, you’ve known about her for months. Does she talk to you?” Robert stared at him, tight-lipped, wordless, wondering what would happen if he simply punched Mark in the mouth, but Mark held tight. “I want to touch her,” he said.
* * *
—
Robert avoided Mark after that, as much as it was possible to avoid someone within the confines of a ship. The thought of the shark troubled Robert, but it bothered him at least as much to think that Mark might know something about the mermaid that he, Robert, did not. Robert spent every night pacing the deck. Mercifully, Mark did not have Robert’s capacity for sleep deprivation, and after working a sixteen-hour day was often too tired to last the night, whatever his intentions might have been. When Robert finally saw the mermaid and the shark, he was alone.
The shark was cutting through the very top of the water, its dorsal fin exposed. The mermaid held on to the fin, and pressed her body against the shark’s. Robert watched. And then he began to yell at her, to scream like a madman, waving his arms to get her attention. She did not respond; he had decided she couldn’t hear sounds that were airborne, but that didn’t stop him from screaming. Finally, she glanced up, by chance, and saw him, but as quickly as her eyes registered him, she looked away again. He watched her and the shark trace the edge of the ship, and her expression was one of pure delight. It made her face beautiful, and it was nothing like the look of searching curiosity he saw when she stroked his legs. He stood at the rail, watching them, until the shark dove underwater and the mermaid followed.
* * *
—
In the morning, the crew of the Ushuaia hauled up the nets, and the net drums creaked in a way they had all become familiar with. The men stood around, grinning, shifting on their feet with anticipation, thinking that by the end of the day they would have moved several thousand dollars’ worth of fish into the hold. But when the nets were up and the fish spilled onto the deck, the crew stood still and quiet. There were no cod, or mackerel, or swordfish. The fish they had caught were lemon yellow, magenta, electric blue. They were striped and spotted, fish the crew had never seen before outside of photographs, fish that had no business being in the northern Atlantic. They covered the deck like a brightly colored quilt, and the sound of their bodies slapping against the deck filled the men’s silence. Too many fish was something they could rejoice in. They could ignore the fact that it made no sense, could believe that God had created a special fountain of fish off the coast of Newfoundland just for them. But this was unnatural. The rainbow fish were unsettling and aberrant beneath the gray sky. Jim Barner nudged one with his toe, a two-foot-long yellow fish that had a blue crest and a blue ring around its eye and little puckered lips that made it look like it wanted a kiss. The fish’s gills flared halfheartedly, and Jim bent down and grabbed it and flung it over the rail.
“What did we do?” said Tomás.
“Help me,” said Jim, and he picked up another fish and threw it back.
They worked at it all day. Most of the fish were dead by the time they got back in the water; they littered the sea around the Ushuaia like confetti. Robert worked along with the rest of the crew, although less frantically. He kept thinking about the mermaid and the shark, wondering if he would see her again. He thought at first that he would not dare go back into the water with her, knowing that the shark might be close behind, but he realized he would go anyway, that he would brave the shark the same way he had braved the cold, and all for a creature who found him nothing more than a curious diversion. Because she was still as entrancing as she had been all these months, even if he meant nothing to her.
Every night the fishermen sent the nets out, and every morning they brought in another net full of strange fish. They did not bring them on board anymore, but simply lowered the net again, dumping them back into the ocean. The men began to tell Tomás that the place had become cursed, that they should turn back, but the captain could not settle with the idea of returning to Portsmouth empty-handed. So they kept at it, and two weeks passed without a single fish being put into the hold.
Robert watched for the mermaid by night, but did not see her. He knew she had brought the tropical fish, although he couldn’t say how. He wondered where she was, what she was doing. After seven days and six nights of watching, he finally slept through the night.
When he woke, the bunkroom was empty. He dressed quickly and headed for the deck. The sky at the top of the hold was a block of bright cloudless blue that grew as he approached it. He heard the other men laughing and talking, and realized this was a sound he had not heard for days; grim silence had become the usual state of the ship.
On deck the men were gathered around Mark Leslie, slapping him on the back, all of them drinking beers while Mark grinned idiotically. Robert stepped farther out onto the deck and saw the shark. It was hanging by its tail, jaws open, two-inch teeth displayed in rows. They had measured it; it was not twenty feet, it was twenty-three. Even out of the water it was slick black, even dead it was terrifying. Robert walked up to it, past Mark and the men, and Mark sobered as soon as he saw Robert and turned to watch him. Robert reached into the shark’s mouth, thinking that his entire torso would fit into that maw, and touched one of the teeth, pressing downward until the tip of it punctured his fingertip. A drop of bright blood appeared, and it glowed with color that the rest of the world lacked. Mark was standing behind him now, nervous and wheedling, all his drunken bravado gone.
“It would have killed her,” Mark said. “I had to get rid of it. I threw some bait in the water and I got it with the harpoon gun. You should have seen it fight. I shot it right through the skull and it still kept going. I thought it was never going to die. I was scared stiff, even from up here.”
Robert nodded. He turned to the rail and looked down at the water. There was no sign of the mermaid, but he knew she was there. Waves smacked against the side of the boat, and Robert thought he could feel their vibration in his hands, and with them another sound. He leaned closer to listen, and leaned farther, and then he was pitching over the rail, into the water below.
He was surrounded by the green of the seawater, and the water was full of a sound that made him feel as though he could start crying and never stop, as though his blood were turning to brine, as though the world were nothing but shades of gray. The mermaid was singing, and he knew from the song that she had seen the shark’s body, and t
hat she would not come back. She was going, but for the moment, the ocean, the salt that filled his mouth, the rush and swell of the waves, all of it was real, all of it was as vibrant and as painful as anything he had ever known. The song twisted through him, and the last tenuous line that moored him to what had been his life gave way. He was laid open, filled to overflowing. Then there was a splash beside him, and a thick arm around his waist, and he was pulled, struggling, from the water.
Every time Michael told Gina about how he had become her father’s debtor—the old man’s slave, he always said—the story changed a bit. He might linger over his description of the bar where he and the old man met, The Blue Mustang, painting for her the horseshoes nailed along the edge of the bar, the locked door leading to the back room with the illegal poker games, the fat beads of air jiggling up the tubes of the Wurlitzer during the twelve hours they played cards. Or he might, as he traced a finger along Gina’s hairline, her lips, the edge of her collarbone, describe her father: the way the old man laughed even when he was losing, the way his eyes narrowed to slits when he looked at his cards, only once per hand, no double-checking no matter how high the stakes. Sometimes Michael skimmed over the whole night at The Blue Mustang and focused on better days, three straight weeks of a winning streak that had started on his twenty-sixth birthday and had taken him from Reno to Denver, leaving him feeling like he could turn any card to an ace just by brushing his fingers across it. But the story always ended the same way, back at the bar with him losing hand after hand, losing his temper and his money and digging himself deeper until he dug himself right down into Gina’s father’s coal mine, working ten-hour days to pay the old man back for all the bets made with money Michael didn’t have. His hands, while he spoke, were always gentle, but his voice tightened like a guitar string.
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