His eyebrows wiggled with what I interpreted to mean he was excited.
He was an Englishman, but with hardly any trace of an accent. Pushing fifty, he was surprisingly fit. If one didn’t know him, one might choose tennis instructor as his profession well before medical doctor. At least until the eyebrows started wiggling.
“Of course, but that’s a somewhat non-scientific understanding, isn’t it?” I said.
Bezoars are supposed to offset poisons. The word even means antidote in Persian. Generally speaking, the more disgusting something is, the more things it’s supposed to cure. I don’t understand it either.
“Long assumed to be the case, yes, but! What if the problem is not the bezoar, but the source of the bezoar?”
Doc had been working on a theory regarding a range of debunked medical remedies. His idea was that some of the old, since-disproven solutions to biological conditions were valid, just not for human beings. He got the idea after learning that a painkiller made from local tree bark was highly effective on succubi and incubi, but not on anybody else.
It was a neat idea. I’d rather he worked on answering the kinds of questions that have bothered me for a couple thousand years—like how do pixies reproduce—but he was trying to cure things, which I guess was more important.
“The source of this is a djinn, you say?”
“I was in surgery for a three hours last night extracting that. Their biology makes them highly susceptible to intestinal blockage, as it happens. I washed it off since.”
“Well thank goodness.”
“But you understand my thinking.”
It wasn’t a question, more like a dare. He wanted to see if I could get to where he was. The doctor was incredibly curious as to where my expertise originated, and enjoyed challenging it.
“Djinn emit a toxin through their hands,” I said. “It’s like a poison, and it makes people highly suggestible for short periods.”
“It’s from their sweat glands. I believe biologically it’s a defense mechanism, much like the psychoactive toad.”
“It makes them incredibly dangerous too. You understand that.”
“I wore gloves the whole time, don’t worry. My patient is not that sort of fellow.”
Djinn could make anyone think they’re the most wonderful people in the world. That was the whole problem. I decided not to push that point, though.
“So to take your idea to the next step,” I said, “if the being you took this from has a gland that secretes poison, a bezoar produced inside his body might be an actual remedy for poison.”
“That’s what I’m thinking, yes!”
“I don’t know a lot about medicine, Moreau, but that doesn’t sound anything like a logical progression to me.”
“It’s a possibility, though. I’m going to test it!”
“Let me know how it turns out.”
* * *
I was nearly positive it wouldn’t work, because there was a decent chance the idea that bezoars were a curative for poison was my fault.
I had this scam going. I want to say it was around 500 A.D., but nobody had the same calendars back then so I can’t be sure.
It was a clever scam. First, I’d bring out a rat. (Rats, it should be said, were everywhere, all the time. If I didn’t have one on-hand I would have been able to pick one up pretty fast.) I’d give the rat some poison—real poison, so this was just about the only overhead the business had—and we’d all watch it die. After the rat died, I’d make a big show of drinking the rest of the poison myself, and then pretending to suffer in the same way the rat had.
Then I’d swallow a bezoar and act like I’d been cured.
There were two elements to the trick. First, I actually did drink the poison, but since poison has no effect on me—for the same reason I can’t get sick—it wasn’t going to do any harm regardless of what I swallowed next. Second, I palmed the bezoar instead of swallowing it. This was because I was sort of afraid of choking on one, and also because bezoars are disgusting. Plus, why swallow it when I can sell it?
It was a lucrative gig. I ran out of bezoars several times and had to substitute clay instead, which worked exactly as well. Poison later became scarce enough that I started palming that too rather than actually drinking it. Rats I never ran out of.
I had to stop when someone decided my cure was actually a form of witchcraft. That wasn’t so bad, except then people were asking me for things like love potions and what-not, and I just got tired of making stuff up.
Anyway, I wasn’t going to tell the doctor any of that.
* * *
“Is this bezoar the only thing you’re keeping from the djinn?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I think you know.”
“The toxin? Oh, well, now… that would be something if I could figure out how to get it to work without a live djinn on the other end, wouldn’t it?”
He was grinning, and I felt like I was missing something.
“You’re not about to tell me you’ve already done it, are you?”
“No, nothing like that. I don’t have the skill for such a thing anyway. I imagine what would be needed is a way to test active samples for long enough to ascertain why the chemical doesn’t survive outside of the host, and then perhaps to work out a way to synthesize the components. But all of that would be a great waste of time. The uses are extremely limited.”
I remembered nearly dying at the hands of a clan of djinn after my entire traveling party succumbed to the poison. Limited wasn’t how I would have described what they could do. After that, you could have convinced me the djinn would run the world one day. That hadn’t happened in the thousand-odd years since, so perhaps I was mistaken.
Unless they do run the world and I haven’t figured that out. Never underestimate the appeal of a good conspiracy theory.
“Why is it limited?” I asked.
“The antidote to the poison is another kind of poison, albeit one that doesn’t affect higher species: caffeine. A medium serving of dark roast and one is typically immune from the djinn for a day or two. I suspect one has to travel a long way to find someone with no trace of caffeine in their system nowadays.”
I laughed. “That probably led to a lot of confused djinn.”
“Well yes, I bet it did. It also led to a lot of dead djinn. Caffeine is toxic to them. That’s why there are so few. I’m surprised you’ve even heard of them.”
He side-eyed me, as he did whenever we drifted toward questions regarding my background that I wasn’t going to answer.
I kept promising I would someday. That was probably true, but I needed to trust him a little more, or he needed to catch me a lot drunker than one beer deep.
That reminded me it was probably time I left the bar.
If I’m not careful I will spend an entire day in an establishment that serves alcohol, regardless of how unappetizing said establishment happens to be. After a certain number of beers I tended to forget things, like that I drove to town or that Mirella was waiting for me. After about double that certain number, I could forget where I lived or that I had a girlfriend at all. Double that and I could forget what century I was in and what language I was supposed to be speaking.
The safest recourse was to stop after one or two beers and proceed with my day. So far, over the past two years at least, I’d managed to accomplish this.
I threw some cash on the bar—American dollars to go with the language of choice.
“Time I headed on,” I said to the doc.
“Oh, but I haven’t even told you everything yet!” he said, his hand on my wrist.
“You showed me the bezoar.”
“Yes, yes, but…” he pulled me closer so as to whisper. He was coming off a shift of at least twelve hours from the smell of him and the red in his eyes, so the ability to bring his voice down to a whisper was suspect, but there wasn’t anyone else at the bar in earshot. “I have something I want to show you, in the lab.”
<
br /> “That’s ominous.”
“It was brought in yesterday. Washed ashore. Nobody knows what it is, but I think…”
He stopped talking and looked up at the ceiling. I followed his gaze to the figurehead directly above.
I sighed.
“There’s no such thing, Doctor Moreau. Unless you’re planning to build one. We’ve been through this.”
The esteemed Doctor Cambridge authored research that stood on the line between fact and fantasy. If there were no such thing as goblins and demons and so on, his work would have been pure fantasy and he probably would have gotten locked up a little while ago. But they do exist, and because they do, most of the doc’s research was perfectly valid, if utterly unpublishable.
The problem became in knowing when to stop.
I would have thought there was a minimum empirical bar. That’s how I’ve approached things. If I haven’t encountered a certain mythological being by now, I’m going with the assumption that it doesn’t exist and/or never did exist.
A simple example: centaurs. Satyrs are a real thing, and satyrs are supposedly half man and half goat, so why wouldn’t a creature that’s half man and half horse also exist?
It only sounds like decent reasoning, though. Satyrs aren’t really half goat, so arguing that their existence proves centaurs must also exist is silly. Also, I’m pretty sure the idea of centaurs began in tribes that didn’t quite know what to make of the first men on horseback. And finally, I never saw a centaur, and I would have if they existed.
Admittedly, my argument has some holes in it. A decade or so ago I would have told you nymphs were purely mythological, and three thousand years ago I would have said the same thing about sea serpents, pixies, and faeries. I was wrong on all four.
It’s still a better argument than prove there is no such thing as mermaids, because proving a negative statement is impossible.
“You should come to the lab,” Doctor Cambridge said.
“Are you telling me you have a dead mermaid at the hospital?”
He shrugged. “Not an entire one, no.”
“How much of one?”
“A tail.”
“The tail of a large fish washed ashore.”
“No, no, no. I believe what I have is the remains of a shedding. The creature came ashore and slipped out of its tail so as to walk among us on two legs.”
I laughed. “Come on, doctor. By what biological process do you imagine that even taking place? You’re talking about magic, not science.”
Not incidentally, there’s no such thing as magic. There are a lot of things that look like magic, but those things come with explanations not involving magical processes.
“More ‘magical’ than anything I’ve already seen on this island?” he asked.
“Yes, actually. I’ve never cut open a fish and found legs inside, have you? Even if that were a normal medical thing, you’re telling me they just know how to walk? It takes humans months to learn how to do that for the first time. And how would one return to the ocean? Grow a new tail?”
Doctor Cambridge looked up again at the figurehead looming over our conversation, then at the bar as a whole.
“I’ve heard stories,” he said quietly. “I know it sounds unscientific, but one of the things I’ve learned since I began working here is that stories having little merit on the mainland have a great deal of merit here. Come see what I have, before it deteriorates any further. It’s withering away.”
I clapped him on the shoulder.
“Another time. I’ve already been gone longer than I should have.”
This wasn’t entirely true, but trouble with the missus has been a good excuse to leave the bar since there have been bars.
“Be careful, then,” he said.
“Why? Because the mermaids walk among us?” This was a joke. He wasn’t laughing, though.
“Yes, exactly.”
3
There was a time when I thought mermaids were real.
As I said, I have a standard when it comes to the seemingly impossible things that actually happen to exist. Vampires and werewolves are two other really good examples, because for a long time I assumed they weren’t real, but they are.
Meaning, they aren’t actually impossible, just improbable and perhaps implausible, and the existence of such things as vampires and werewolves therefore made mermaids—in my mind—equally implausible and improbable, but no less impossible.
There’s an important caveat: just because something turns out to have existed at one time or another doesn’t mean it has the same properties as it’s reputed to have. Dragons are my favorite for this, because they didn’t fly or breathe fire. They were just big, dumb animals that died off eventually. Why? I don’t know for sure, but they never adopted a proper pack mentality and were uncommonly bellicose, so maybe they just failed to develop into a creature that deserved to continue existing. The point is, they did exist once, only in a much more mundane iteration than any of the mythological descriptions spoke to.
In that same sense, perhaps it’s not unreasonable to argue that mermaids are entirely real, provided we’re sticking with the argument that men at sea for long periods, staring at vast bodies of water and thinking about things they wished they had, might justifiably mistake a manatee for a full-breasted woman. My only complaint about this reasoning is that a similar thing could be said about sea serpents, and I know for a fact that those are real.
Or were. I haven’t seen one for a long time, but I don’t go across oceans in boats when I can avoid doing so, because again: sea serpents! I’d rather not take any chances.
Anyway. My point is, I used to believe in mermaids, just as at one time I also believed in centaurs and devils. I put all of them in the same mental box as vampires and werewolves and pixies and all the other rare, improbable, but definitely real things.
All that changed between then and now is my standard of proof.
When I talk about things that happened in the distant past I like to pretend I’m a more evolved individual than the people of the time. To a certain degree that’s true, because I have a much larger volume of personal history to inform everything I do. But I can’t apply a perspective that hasn’t been invented yet. I didn’t have the benefit of Cartesian philosophy when arguing with Aristotle, or an awareness of astrophysics when determining whether an eclipse presaged a famine. If someone said a disease was caused by evil spirits I could doubt the existence of said spirits if I wanted—and I did—but I didn’t have the germ theory of disease to counter with.
I was never more than a product of the time, basically. I was only as advanced in my thinking as it was possible to be for the period.
This doesn’t mean I believed all the same things everyone around me did—belief in gods being an excellent example—only that if the people of a time lacked the tools to interrogate what was factually true and differentiate that truth from what was only believed to be true, then I too lacked those tools.
All of which is to say that when I thought there was a mermaid living in the Sea of Galilee, I had a lot of reasons to think it.
* * *
When I tell people I was a fisherman on the Sea of Galilee at around the right time to meet a certain famous person, I get weird looks. And I mean, from people who already know I’m immortal. (I would get entirely different weird looks if I ever shared that piece of information with someone who didn’t already buy into my immortality, which I don’t. I’ve found that immortality is a harder sell than I was around for Jesus.)
The thing is, you’d figure I would have run into the man, and I didn’t.
The Sea of Galilee—we called it Lake Genneseret, but that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue—is huge. Not huge by the standards of certain oceans, or even some of the larger seas, but a whole lot bigger than your average freshwater lake. It was not only possible to make a living fishing in this sea without ever coming across the Nazarean, it was possible to fish there without ever hearing of
him.
Also, his historical impact in the moment wasn’t all that significant. Don’t take that the wrong way, I don’t mean he wasn’t important, only that most of the significance associated with his words and life didn’t get attached to him until after he was dead. At the time, the area had more than a couple of itinerant doomsday prophets, so it’s unlikely that, had our paths crossed, I’d have even noticed.
So I mean, I guess it’s possible I did meet him but I doubt I’d have remembered if I had.
Moving on.
Fishing on Genneseret wasn’t a terrible way to make a living. It was big, and deep, and there was enough for everyone. I knew people who fished off small rowboats and caught enough to feed themselves and their family, and I knew larger vessels that caught fish in nets, cleaned and salted them on board, and brought them directly to market after only a few days on the water. That was the kind of fishing I did.
I was part of a team of twelve, on a boat owned by a man named Barukh. Seven of his sons were on the crew, as was Barukh himself. The other four were old men who had spent their lives on the sea, and me. I had not spent my life on this particular sea, but I’d spent six or seven full lifetimes on the Mediterranean, which meant I had more experience than anybody else there. However, my experience wasn’t in net fishing, it was in things like how to get a lot of slaves to row in unison and how to overpower pirates. My expertise in square-rigged sailing was valuable, however, and I could gut a fish as efficiently as anyone. Plus I worked cheap. I had no family to support and lived in a shed on the small spit of land Barukh’s family owned, fronting the shoreline.
I was going by the name Eleazar.
Barukh and his sons and the rest of us would spend two or three days at sea at a time, then one day at the market and one day of rest. Weather impacted when we left and how long we stayed out, and the Shabbat—honored by most everyone in the area—was almost always a second day of rest. I was Jewish in name but not practice, which added to my value as a crewmember. It meant on a couple of occasions I had to sail the boat alone, such as when weather prevented us from making it to shore before the Shabbat. It was a pain, but it only happened a couple of times.
Immortal and the Island of Impossible Things (The Immortal Series Book 4) Page 4