Voices in the Night

by Steven Millhauser

  The case of Melanie Lautenbach brought home to us the danger of visiting our mermaid, but hadn’t we always known that? The naked girl on her rock in the glass fortress, the visitor from another world who stared off at something just over our shoulders—what else was she if not dangerous? In fact the death of Melanie, far from giving us pause, seemed to spur us to deeper reckonings. Of course there were those who deplored our passion, who wagged their fingers and warned of trouble, but on the whole we ignored them, for we knew that we needed to feel our way toward wherever it was our mermaid was taking us.

  We now began to hear of more extreme instances of mermaid infatuation. In a new tattoo parlor on a side street off Main, girls laid themselves down on a bright white table, removed their pants and underwear, and under the fierce eyes and sharp needle of a little old man who was said to be a master artist from Tokyo, received, slowly and painfully, over every inch of their lower bodies, beginning just beneath the navel and moving down along the thighs, the buttocks, the knees, the calves, the ankles, and the full length of the soles, a series of perfectly replicated overlapping fish scales. We began to hear rumors of sexual practices so bizarre that they must have been real. We heard of frenzied, unconsummated couplings, initiated by husbands and lovers who said they were no longer stimulated by female legs, which struck them as gangly and spidery, and who required their women to wrap up their lower bodies tightly before lovemaking. One recently married woman, recovering from minor surgery, begged her surgeon to stitch her legs together so that she would be beautiful.

  In truth, legs were disappearing from the women of our town. At the beach there were fishtails as far as you could see; on our streets and in our yards, women of all ages wore long tapered skirts that concealed the legs and feet. In the bedrooms of every neighborhood, mermaid lingerie was all the rage. It so happened that a number of women, angered by male demands that they resemble mermaids, but at the same time stirred by feelings of kinship with the visitor they obsessively imagined, took a stand of their own: the male lower body was declared to be inferior to the lower fishbody, smooth and powerful and lithe. Men resisted, then began to embrace the new fashion; and all along our beach, and on the rocks of our jetty, we saw the new mermen, shimmering in the summer light.

  It was at this period that the second mermaid washed up on our shore. The Listener reported the full story: the excited phone call, the arrival of the police at four in the morning, the body half buried in sand and seaweed, the thick yellow hair, the long-lashed blue eyes, the graceful neck, the discovery of the hoax. Three college students confessed it. They had ordered a blow-up doll from an online company, covered the lower half of the body in a mermaid tail, and left her partially buried on the beach at half-past three in the morning.

  The deception enraged us, but fevered us too—it was as if the hoax revealed to us the deeper truth of our unappeased yearning. Over the next few days a rash of new sightings was reported. It was said that a school of mermaids had taken up residence in our waters, just beyond the jetty. They were seen swimming below the waves within ten feet of the beach. As rumors blossomed, and children woke in the night from green ocean dreams, we felt that something more was waiting for us, something that would fill us with the thing we lacked.

  Meanwhile, in her display case, our mermaid was changing. Her skin had become mottled, her fish-scales dull; the whiteness of her fishbelly looked faintly yellow. Even her hair seemed somewhat different, a little lanker and less vibrant. One of her eyelids had begun to droop; her gaze had grown vacant. We wondered whether we had looked at her so often that she was being worn away by the intensity of our stares. The very liquid in which she was immersed seemed hazier than before. We knew her days were numbered.

  Perhaps it was the sense that she was leaving us, perhaps it was the knowledge that we had failed her in some way, but as the summer moved toward its end we surrendered extravagantly to our mermaid dreams, as if we knew it was already too late. We were tired of human things, we wanted more. You could feel a kind of violence in the air. At a dance party on Linden Lane, a group of high-school girls stripped the clothes off fourteen-year-old Mindy Nelson, painted her naked hips and buttocks and legs bright green, bound her ankles with duct tape, and carried her writhing and screaming out of the house into the back woods, where they tossed her into a shallow stream; her hysterical shouts attracted the attention of a neighbor. At an adult mermaid party in a ranch-house neighborhood, a costume variation resulted in complaints to the police: through uncurtained windows, in darkened rooms lit only by candles, people in neighboring houses saw men and women dressed in scaly fish-tops that covered their faces and descended to the waist; from the hips down they were entirely naked. In the blue nights of August, groups of boys, wearing no shirts, roamed the backyards of quiet neighborhoods, looking up at second-story bedroom windows, where now and then a mermaid would appear, sitting with her tail over the sill as she combed her hair slowly in the dim red light of her room.

  Even the children of our town could not escape the general unease. At Norman Sugarman’s seventh birthday party, Mrs. Sugarman went upstairs to fetch a comb in her bedroom. There she found two six-year-olds, a girl and a boy, sitting naked on the bed. They had each thrust their legs into a black nylon stocking; the stocking-ends snaked out beyond their feet. Their eyelids were green, their cheeks were rouged, and on their chests they had drawn brilliant crimson circles for breasts, with bright green nipples.

  Such distortions and corruptions, unsavory though they were, struck many of us as representing a desperate striving, for we knew in our bones that the season of mermaids was running out. What was it we were looking for? Sometimes we felt a little impatient with our mermaid for just sitting there, for not doing anything. What did she want from us? Couldn’t she see we were pushing ourselves to the limit? It was a time of exaggerated rumors, of impossible stories, which we ourselves invented in order to see how much we could bear. We said that if you touched the scales of a mermaid, you would be struck blind. We said that certain women of our town were mermaids, who disguised themselves as human beings in order to lure men away from safe middle-class lives into under-sea realms of danger and madness. We spoke of the secret births of mermaids to the wives and daughters of our town. We whispered that if a mermaid chose you, and took you out into the ocean, you would become as a god. We created in ourselves new visions, new gullibilities—we wanted to become children or seers. We could feel ourselves straining at the confines of the possible. We wanted to believe that the time of mermaids was at hand, that our lives were about to change forever. It was as if we were waiting for something from our mermaid, who had come to us from out there, but we did not know what it was.

  In the warm summer nights, when the sea-smell hung in the air, you could see us at our open windows, staring out in the direction of the water.

  In this tense atmosphere of impossible expectation, our mermaid did something at last, something that made us look at her in a new way: she disappeared. One morning the glass case was gone. A sign on a stand told us that the Historical Society was no longer able to preserve her properly. We learned that she had been sent to a marine laboratory in New Haven and from there to Washington, D.C., where she was to be examined by a team of scientists before being turned over to the Smithsonian for further study. Even as the facts were reported to us, even as we agreed that it was probably all for the best, a skepticism penetrated our belief, as if words were being used to deflect us from the thing we wanted to know. Before our eyes we had only the sign where the glass case had been. Soon there was not even that.

  In the midst of our disappointment we detected the presence of another feeling, one that surprised us, though not entirely. It was a lightening of spirit, almost a gaiety. We understood that our mermaid’s departure was somehow pleasing to us. Had we secretly resented her? Her absence gave rise to our exuberant farewells. Some said that she had been spirited away in the night by others of her kind, who had vowed to return her to
the ocean. Others claimed they had noticed small movements in her eyelids and lips; after a long sleep, our mermaid had gradually awakened. Whether she had smashed the glass and escaped alone to the water, or been aided by unknown forces in the night, who could say? The important thing was that she was out of human hands, she was back in her true element. Disappearance improved her. As the old parties ended, and the costumes were tossed into drawers and boxes, never to be looked at again, as legs reappeared and breasts retreated, as we returned to the normal course of things, our lost mermaid underwent a sea-change: her mottled skin grew fresh and lovely, her scales glistened, her gold hair caught the light, and like an exiled queen restored to her throne, she assumed again her rightful place in her own land, far in the distance, forever out of reach, out there beyond where we can clearly see.

  THE WIFE AND THE THIEF

  She is the wife whose husband sleeps. She is the wife who lies awake, listening to the footsteps below. The thief is making his way steadily through the living room, stopping now and then, perhaps to bend close to objects, to hold them up and feel their weight, before he drops them into his sack. Do thieves have sacks? She knows she ought to wake her husband up, there isn’t a second to lose, but she needs to be sure, very sure, before she destroys his sleep. Her husband can never fall back to sleep if you wake him up at night, next day at the office he’s a wreck of a man, his day ruined, his life a living hell, and though he never complains, in a direct sort of way, that he’d rather be dead, he manages to let her see, at breakfast early in the morning, and again at dinner, the tiredness in his eyes, the sadness of a body that has been unfairly deprived of sleep, none of which would matter a damn if only she could be sure. She’s sure, but is she sure she’s sure? It’s possible that the footsteps are not footsteps at all, but only the sounds a house makes, in the middle of the night, a creak of floorboards, a faint snap of wood in a door. But she’s sure the sounds she hears are not those sounds, at least so far as she can tell. The sounds she hears are far more regular than that, they are the sounds, she swears she’s sure, that footsteps make, when someone is moving through your house, threatening your very existence. But even if she’s sure she’s sure, or as sure she’s sure as she can be, that the sounds she hears are not the sounds a house makes, but the sounds that footsteps make, when a thief has broken into your house and is creeping around, dropping things into his sack, if thieves have sacks, how can she wake her husband up? What on earth’s he supposed to do? He’s a good man, a decent man, kind, intelligent, a bit of a temper, true, best to keep out of his way then, but no man of action, no fighter of thieves. He would simply lie there, as she is lying there, wondering what in god’s name to do, now that a thief has entered the house, in the middle of the night, and is robbing them blind, or worse, he’d think it his duty to go downstairs and confront the thief, who would crack him in the head, tie him up, throw him into the trunk of a car, she needs to get a grip on herself. Best to do nothing, just lie there and wait it out. Let the thief take whatever he likes, the flat-screen TV, the silver dove on the mantel, be my guest, the Chinese lamp from her mother on their fifth anniversary, the cut-glass bowl in the dining room, he can have it all, every last bit of it, take it, break it, feel it, steal it, just clear out, mister, and leave us alone. Better to be alive in an empty house than dead on the floor next to tasteful furniture. It’s true he’s taking a long time down there. He must think they’re fast asleep, safely tucked in for the night, nothing to worry about on his end, hey, take your time, steal everything, and what if he starts climbing the stairs in search of money, her jewelry box on the lace runner on top of the dresser, what about that? She listens for a step on the stairs, a sound in the hall, but the footsteps remain below, moving now, she’s sure of it, from the living room to the dining room, or from the dining room to the living room, it’s hard to tell. She should call the police, is what she ought to do, her cell phone is sitting on the night table, six inches away, but what if the thief hears her and heads upstairs, what if he’s holding a knife in his hand, what if the knife is a gun, what if the police arrive and find an empty house, nobody home but a sleeping husband and a neurotic wife who’s got nothing better to do than make crazy calls in the wee hours, ruining everything for everyone? Best to lie still and breathe slowly, try counting to a thousand, one Mississippi, two Mississippi, who is she kidding, she can’t just lie there doing nothing like a bump on a log when a thief is moving around downstairs, in the middle of the night, stopping to put things in his sack, if thieves have sacks, before he makes off with the whole living room. And what of her own sleep, what about that? It’s 3:10 by the bedside clock. She’ll never get to sleep with a thief in the house, snooping around and stealing everything, tomorrow she’ll have a raging headache, she’ll want to die from exhaustion, from screaming shame. For she ought to’ve done something, while she still had the chance, ought to do something right now, this second, before it’s too late, since she’s the one who’s lying awake, listening to the thief as he prowls through their house, in the middle of the night, in his hoodie or his ski mask.

  She tells herself not to move a muscle, just lie there like a nice corpse, even as she throws the covers off and feels her bare soles on the rug. She only wants to listen, to make sure sure, before she wakes her husband up. A house makes many sounds, in the middle of the night, and though she’s completely sure the sounds she hears are the sounds of footsteps, she will be surer when she opens the bedroom door. Over her short nightgown she slips her silk robe, pulls the belt tight as she walks with immense caution to the door. What if the thief hears the turn of the knob, the click of the latch? In the hall she stops. She listens, hears nothing, hears something, hears nothing. At the top of the stairs she hears the sounds of footsteps, she’s sure now, absolutely sure, though to be perfectly honest it’s hard to hear anything over the thudding in her chest.

  With her hand on the banister she begins to descend, placing first her left foot and then the right on each stair. The last thing she wants is for the thief to hear her as she comes slowly down the stairs, first her left foot and then the right. At the same time the one thing she wants more than anything in the world is for the thief to hear her, as she comes slowly down the stairs, first her left foot and then the right, so that he’ll flee with his sack of stolen goods, if thieves have sacks, what else would they have, and leave everybody in peace, if you can call it peace to be awake in a house where a thief’s been prowling around at three in the morning, stealing your things and driving you insane. It occurs to her that he might all of a sudden stop, if he hears her footsteps on the stairs. He’ll stop and wait for her, the foolish wife in the slinky robe, coming half naked down the stairs, that’s what he’ll do, and then she, and not her husband, will be the one lying on the floor with scratchy rope tied around her wrists and ankles, in the middle of the night, duct tape over her mouth, or maybe a cord around her neck, her nightgown up around her waist, policemen standing over her, studying her thighs, examining the pubic ridge with its coils of hair, before covering her with a sheet. Go back, go back, before it’s too late, go back, go back, let it all wait, but already she’s at the bottom of the stairs, facing the front hall, on her left the living room, dining room on the right. The windows of her house have tie-back curtains on both sides, covering the blinds and the window frames, but a faintness of light comes through, an easing of the dark, probably from the streetlamp next to the sugar maple. She can make out the shapes of parts of things, an arm of the couch, a corner of the hutch. The footsteps have stopped. The thief is waiting. Maybe he’s waiting for her to return upstairs, so that he can make his escape without having to throw a cord around her neck, if thieves have cords, and drag her behind the couch, if that’s what he’s planning to do, if she enters the room.

  She eases her way into the living room, with its shapes of parts of things, its unblack dark. She’s a cat in the night, her fur alive, whiskers twitching. All at once she stops, with a hand raised to her open
mouth, like that poster in the lobby of the movie theater, the woman’s body stiff with fear, the long robe half open, but it’s only a sound from outside the house, a car door slamming, the Kelly kid back from a date, or some other sound, a squirrel on a garbage pail. What if the thief is waiting for her? What if he’s sitting on the couch? There’s someone on the couch, she can see him there, a dark thief, waiting, or is it a throw pillow, she needs to calm down. Three o’clock in the stupid morning and she’s creeping around in the dark like a madwoman with her arm outstretched and her hair plunging along her cheeks. She should’ve pinned her hair up, or put a clip in it, as if anybody could see her, in the practically black dark. He has to be in here somewhere, she heard the footsteps, if they were footsteps, what else could they have been. She moves from couch to armchair, from armchair to lamp table, from lamp table to six-disc CD player, peering, touching, one hand clutching the thin robe closed at her throat. The new flat-screen is still on its stand, the silver dove on the mantel, nothing missing, everything in its place. Is he still in the house? She moves quickly now, into the dark dining room, where the cut-glass bowl still sits on the table, into the kitchen, where the cabinets remain shut. The thief must have heard her on the stairs. He’s fled, vamoosed, she’s saved the house. She’s won.

  Back in the living room she checks the front door, locked tight, and turns around. She listens. He might have come in through a window. Might have come in here, there, who knows where. She moves through the downstairs rooms, checking the windows, all closed, checking the door in the kitchen, locked tight, that opens onto the porch. In the living room she throws herself down on the couch, head flung back against the top of a cushion. She has to be sure, surer than sure, before she can return to bed. What if he’s hiding in a corner? What if he finds her? Finds her, binds her, whacks her, sacks her, shhh. What if he’s outside, waiting? Better if she’d found a window smashed, drawers open, coasters and folded maps scattered across the floor, TV gone, cut-glass bowl gone. The muscles in her arms are clenched, as though she’s struggling to lift a heavy box. Her whole body is a fist.