Probably Monsters

by Ray Cluley

  “Shall we drink these outside?”

  He nods, and scrapes two chairs out to the porch. We can watch the sea ease in . . . and leave. Ease in . . . and leave. The lights of the boats, the bigger boats, are still distant watery stars.

  “There is a reef out there. It used to be packed full with lobsters. Those spiny little treasures people die for here. There were so many, you could pluck them up with your eyes closed. Like this.”

  For some reason he feels compelled to close his eyes and mime picking them up, grabbing imaginary lobsters from around our chairs. When he opens his eyes again he laughs. “You only needed a snorkel in those days. Then came big boats and scuba diving and the reef was picked clean. No more red gold.”

  My watch beeps an hour I don’t want to know.

  “Tomorrow I will take you to someone who remembers this. Gabriela, she remembers this.” He points absently at the room behind us and I know one of the pictures somewhere there comes from her. She will have a sadder story than disappearing lobsters, though the two will be inextricably linked.

  “Today is what I mean. I will take you today.”

  “Why me, Eliot?” I haven’t written anything for nearly two years. I’ve barely existed, one day at a time.

  Eliot meets my eyes in the way he always used to. I feel strangely scared and safe at the same time. He holds my gaze as if looking for the answer there, not because he doesn’t have one but because he believes I already do.

  “People listen to you,” he says.

  I’m surprised and appalled at his certainty. I think of my mother, her gurgling-drain cough. The way she rolled her cigarettes even as she struggled to breathe, and rolled her eyes when I said anything about it. I will let him down again.

  I finish my breakfast deciding to make it my supper. Eliot has a spare cot for me and I will lie on it, staring at the ceiling, trying to sleep.

  Eliot wishes me, “Pleasant dreams.” He is looking to sea when he says it and I wonder if he’s thinking of when the lobster roamed closer to the shore. He has a faraway nostalgic look.

  Then again, maybe he thinks of the same woman I do.

  S

  I have seen them riding seaward on the waves, combing the white hair of the waves blown back when the wind blows the water white and black.

  I am staring at the cayucas on the beach, thinking of earlier when I’d seen them dragged and paddled out to sea, and I’m thinking of these lines from T.S. Eliot while I wait for a different Eliot to wake and take me to the clinic. I have more people to meet today than the Gabriela he has already mentioned. Each of them is tied somehow to the sea before me. It does not look like the place for mermaids.

  I am separated from my home by a distance I cannot visualize, miles upon miles of ocean between me and my tiny flat above the newsagents. Sharif, the man who owns it, likes having a journalist live above his shop, though my work rarely appears in his stock. His wares are strictly daily papers and women’s magazines and a top shelf of plastic-wrapped publications boasting star-nippled tits and mock-sultry mouths. No National Geographic, no Focus, no New Scientist. His is a shop where beer is sold by the individual can, a place to buy cigarettes and scratch cards. I imagine the people buying them dream of coming here, to the Caribbean, but this is not the Caribbean they’d imagine.

  I take a breath of fresh ocean air, listening to the susurrus of waves and sand, and then I take a breath of cigarette smoke, filling myself alternately with salt and nicotine. I shouldn’t smoke. My mother smoked. I think that’s maybe why I do.

  I do not get a “good morning” from Eliot when he wakes. Instead, he joins me on the porch with, “The lobsters have retreated to where the water is deeper, trying to escape the grabbing hands. It is like you, yes?”

  I wonder if he’s been thinking of something like that to say all morning.

  “I’m here because you asked me.”

  He waves that away. It’s not what he meant, and he knows I know. But he says nothing more about it.

  “Today, you will see the clinic. And I will take you to see friends of mine. They will tell you about the mermaids.”

  He is wearing the same clothes he met me in at the airport. So am I. But then I haven’t slept yet, so it feels like the same day anyway.

  “Will I see the decompression chamber?”

  He nods.

  “And the boats?”

  “Tomorrow. We will need an authority different to mine for that.” He looks skyward as if apologizing to his authority, but I’m sure God knows we’ll need an official to visit the boats. He’ll forgive him. It’s what He does.

  “Do you want to freshen up first?”

  I’ve never heard “freshen up” used in real life and it makes me smile.

  “It is the right expression?”

  I clasp Eliot by the shoulder and tell him yes, it is, but I’m as fresh as I get these days. He clasps me back, and it’s the embrace we didn’t have at the airport. My mother was still between us then, at least for me.

  “Let us go then, you and I.”

  Eliot is curious at my grammatical arrangement and I tell him a different Eliot wrote those lines at the beginning of a poem. He shakes his head in a gesture that is dismissive and amused.

  “Poems,” he says. He quotes me something in Spanish as he leads me to his truck but doesn’t tell me what it’s from. “It’s beautiful,” is all he says.

  I think of those Spanish lines as he drives us from his place on the beach to various small communities up and down the coast; I don’t understand this place, not yet, but there is a beauty to it. The buildings aren’t as primitive as I’d imagined, not quite huts, but they’re close. However small the settlement, there are people everywhere. They wear bright colours and baseball caps and they smile more than I thought they would. They know about the dangers that lie beneath the surface of the sea, and still they smile. Mermaids be damned.

  S

  After my mother’s stroke they gave her an MRI scan and I expect the same sort of apparatus for a decompression chamber. The decompression chamber is actually quite large, though. At least, the one Eliot shows me is. The one I’m looking at in the clinic is only one of three in the entire region, despite the widespread problem. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy in a decompression chamber is the only way to treat the bends.

  Eliot makes introductions as he and the doctor share a warm embrace and an exchange in Spanish. Dr. Kervin Mendoza and I simply shake hands. He holds my hand in his grip for a moment then he brings in the other and holds my one between his two. His hands are as warm as his smile. I hope Eliot hasn’t built his hopes up about me.

  “Do you know about decompression sickness?”

  I do. I read about it on the plane coming over. Central Nervous System Decompression Disease, also decompression sickness, also the bends. But I want to hear it from this man, so I only say, “A little.”

  “When you go deep in the water for a long time, the pressure of the air you breathe increases and your body dissolves more nitrogen.”

  His English is excellent. I shouldn’t be surprised—it’s as widely spoken here as Spanish—but I am.

  “The deeper or longer the dive, the more gas is absorbed into the tissue in higher concentrations than normal, and the faster the ascent, the less time between dives, the less time there is for this nitrogen to be offloaded safely, normally, through the lungs. When you come up quickly,” he makes a quick upward motion with one hand, “the pressure drops rapidly and the dissolved nitrogen comes out of solution as bubbles. They expand and they clot the blood, which stops oxygen reaching the brain and spinal cord. The nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord.”

  “Like beer.”

  I think for a moment Eliot is making a poor joke, but Dr. Mendoza immediately agrees. “Yes, like a beer.” He mimes opening on
e and makes a sharp “pssht” sound. “Fizzy blood. The bubbles stop oxygen reaching the cells that need it and they die. It damages the nervous system, like having a stroke.”

  Eliot exchanges a quick glance with me that is apologetic, but I had already made the comparison myself during my research. It’s not a surprise.

  “This chamber raises the pressure, the surrounding air pressure, so that the nitrogen bubbles dissolve back into solution. Then we lower the pressure, slowwwwwly,” he flashes his teeth in a smile, “and the nitrogen returns to its normal state as if the diver has made a controlled and gradual ascent.”

  “So it saves lives,” is my summary.

  “Yes.”

  “And you only have three.”

  “Yes.” That smile again, but sharper. “They are expensive.”

  Dr. Mendoza gestures for me to move into the next room. It’s a small room, with a single small sofa. People can be in the chamber for hours and hours and relatives can wait here. The thread of the sofa has been pulled away by nervous fingers and stuffing presses to spit out but doesn’t yet. None of us sit because it won’t fit all three of us but the doctor says, “Please,” so we do. Eliot and I lean forward, elbows on knees, feeling awkward sitting while Dr. Mendoza stands. It’s a position that makes him seem enormous, probably a mighty reassuring force to those waiting to hear about loved ones, but with us he feels as awkward as we do so he scatters magazines and papers from a tiny table and sits on it like a stool.

  “The people we see here have gone through a tremendous amount of pain,” he says. Eliot nods beside me and I see he has put his hands together as if for prayer. I don’t think he realizes he’s done it. “They are often choking for air and can experience blindness, crippling back pain, as well as severe abdominal agony, all before they reach us. They lose the feeling in their legs and for many it will be permanent. They are paralyzed.” He allows a second to pass and says that again. “Many are paralyzed. Many die. If they don’t get here quickly. Even if they show no immediate symptoms, rapid pressure change can cause permanent bone injury; something called dysbaric osteonecrosis can develop from just a single exposure to rapid decompression.

  “The only way to treat them, the only way, is in one of these chambers.”

  “They need more than their St. Andrews and St. Peters,” says Eliot.

  My job is to write about what’s happening, raise awareness, maybe claw in some money for a new decompression chamber. If Geographic picks it up, maybe that will happen, but otherwise it’s unlikely. I think both of them know this, they’re just hoping the piece will move someone rich with as much heart as money. Maybe they even hope for another doctor or two. Hope, and pray.

  “Is it true you have only three doctors here?” Too late I realize the question sounds like I doubt Eliot’s email, but he doesn’t seem offended.

  “Oh, we have lots of doctors. Lots. We have herbalists and we have doctors.”

  “Witch doctors,” Eliot explains.

  I laugh, but he only smiles. “Are you joking?”

  Dr. Mendoza looks to the floor.

  Maybe I misheard and Eliot was asking, “which doctors?” but . . .

  “We have four people with actual medical training and qualifications, including your friend.” Dr. Kervin Mendoza points with both hands at Eliot. “The rest are local ‘traditional’ doctors.”

  Eliot continues. “To awaken the legs of a paralyzed diver they burn the spine. When it doesn’t work it’s because the water demon has already eaten the backbone, sucked out the spinal fluid like juice from a mango.”

  Dr. Mendoza spreads his hands and nods. “They have songs about it.”

  “What happens to these people?”

  Eliot gets up, smoothes the wrinkles in his trouser legs. “Come. I will show you.”

  S

  Gabriela is an African-Nicaraguan. Her skin is the same colour as the coffee she serves me, and her smile as bright as the sugar she adds to it. She smiles a lot, though I can only wonder what she has to smile about.

  Eliot has driven us north to a sparsely populated area off the coast. Most of the people here descend from shipwrecked or escaped slaves and conditions haven’t improved a great deal for them since. Houses are made of boards, three rooms held three feet off the ground on sturdy stilts. Many of the houses have swapped their front steps for ramps. I stopped counting the people in wheelchairs or on crutches when I got to thirty. Most of the wheelchairs were homemade affairs, little more than boards with wheels.

  Gabriela is not in a wheelchair; she never dived, but her son does. He dives even though “the mermaids took his father.” He risks a wheelchair, or worse, every time. Risks hearing the mermaids singing.

  “I am better here, yes? On the land, my life is better.”

  After her husband’s death, Gabriela, like so many women here, became the breadwinner of the family. For most women there is only one sure means of employment. That she considers prostitution better than diving for lobsters tells me how seriously the people here take the threat of water demons.

  “Can you tell us about the fishing when you were young?” Eliot asks.

  “I am still young,” she says, and they laugh in such a way that I know it is a shared joke.

  “When I was young,” again she shares a smile with Eliot, “Americans came. They brought . . . mouth hoses—”

  “Snorkels.”

  “Yes. Snorkels. And air you wear on your back. Like turtle. They wanted us to find spinys. There were lots of them then. You could see them at night.” She holds her hands to her head and waggles the fingers like antennae.

  “They glow,” explains Eliot. “Phosphorescence.”

  “Spirit light,” says Gabriela, and she chuckles. It’s a thick deep sound in her throat, like the noise my mother made in her last days instead of coughing. I can’t tell if Gabriela laughs because Eliot is foolish enough to think it natural, or because she mocks her own comment about spirit light.

  “Now, no more lobster. The lobster were called deeper, so people go deeper.”

  She drinks all of her coffee down at once and I realize mine is cool enough to do the same. It feels strange, drinking it from a tin cup, but it tastes good.

  “My husband, he dive. His boat the Azul Celeste. He make a lot of money.”

  She is clearly proud of her home. In my country we keep our bicycles and lawnmowers in better places. There is a photograph she shows me of her husband. It has been cut from a newspaper, a group of men standing around the biggest lobster I have ever seen. It’s the size of a small dog. Its claws have been bound with what looks to be an entire roll of tape. Everyone is smiling and pointing. Behind them, rows of cayucas line the beach, waiting to go out again. Whatever story went with the picture has been cut away or folded behind the photograph.

  “Richard Gere,” she says, giving us that ambiguous throaty chuckle again, tapping one of the faces behind the glass. I doubt she knows who Richard Gere is, but I understand the sentiment and nod politely, either at her opinion or her joke.

  “He look good to mermaid. One day . . .” Her eyes are wet, but she shrugs instead of crying.

  “I’m sorry.”

  I remember how hollow those words had sounded when people said them to me, but we say them anyway, don’t we? With my mother I wasn’t even sure if the words were true, unless it was short for “I’m sorry it didn’t happen sooner.” For their own sakes as much as hers.

  “He saw the mermaid,” Gabriela says. “He tried to tell them, but she filled his mouth with water.”

  S

  Eliot introduces me to dozens of people like Gabriela and all of them have similar stories. Some know the medical terms and conditions, but they offer them like alternatives to an already established fact: the mermaids came. I meet many widows and many men who have lost the u
se of limbs to paralysis. Some seem able-bodied and will not talk to me, but Eliot confides what he knows. “They say the demon came and took their seed. They are impotent.” I see many men in wheelchairs, their homes still ridiculously perched on stilts, children dragging them backwards up the steps. Those not in chairs are on crutches. Eliot has made it his duty to visit daily, cleaning the ulcerous bedsores of one man in an attempt to stop the wounds festering in the tropical heat and turning sceptic. “There is no home care but me. A local doctor will spit in the sores and chant a backwards song, maybe throw fish bones.”

  As the day goes on, Eliot becomes angrier. I think before I came he stored it all, bottled his rage until, like nitrogen in the blood, it diffused back into calm. With me here it comes out too quick. I’m his chance to rant and he gives me words he wants rephrased for the article. He reels off statistics, high percentages living in poverty, the numbers of malnourished. Nicaragua is the second poorest country in the Americas. He takes hope from a growing improvement in people’s literacy, but despairs at their tendency to cling to folklore and tradition. “We are nearly in a new century, the millennium, and still—” He gives up with an angry gesture.

  Driving back to his own wooden hut, he takes us along coastal roads. His anger and the helplessness fall away with our speed, like he’s racing away from it all, and he points out various places. When he parks on one of the elevated coastal roads he’s something like the man I remember my mother meeting in Spain. He’s the happy priest who taught me about the good in the world before he’d ever seen so much of the bad. “Look,” he says, getting out of the truck.

  The journey has shaken my bones, and the broken air conditioning has done little to cool the sweat on my skin, but up here there’s a breeze to enjoy and even a tangy smell that is almost taste. I admire the view. Much of the Miskito coastline is a winding broken mass of lagoons and deltas. The ocean is a bright wild blue. It’s beautiful. Here we look down on a magnificent curve of it.