by Lydia Millet
I would have to be careful or the Navy SEAL/old salt would take over where Nancy left off, commandeering Chip’s attention for the rest of our honeymoon.
I WAS NERVOUS about my dive, but when the time came I was even more anxious about being left behind. I made sure I was suited up and ready to go before we dropped anchor; I stuck right by Nancy and Chip, shadowing them as Jamie shadowed me. The videographer was at their other elbow, holding his underwater camera apparatus like it was fashioned of gold filigree.
So we were in the first wave of divers off the boat, scaling a ladder down the side and sinking in backward, tanks first. Once I’d oriented myself in the water my jerk of fear smoothed out, with Jamie on one side of me and Chip on the other, and down we swam toward the sunken, encrusted plane. I felt happy; the water was that bejeweled aquamarine, and nestled in the brilliant coral I spotted skulking eels and other hole-lurkers I hadn’t seen before. Mermaids or not, I thought, this was great. For the first time I felt gratified the honeymoon hadn’t moved along a normal path. We wouldn’t have dived without Nancy, would have settled for snorkeling, probably.
The videographer swam up front with Nancy; then came Chip and I. Behind us swam the second wave, including the Navy SEAL, the high school science teacher and some spearfishermen deprived of spears. A few had tried to bring along their own underwater cameras—cheap deals, not like the videographer’s setup. They were trophy-seekers by nature, they hadn’t wanted to go down there, spot a monster grouper and have nothing to show for it. But Nancy had made them leave those cameras on the boat, and in return she’d promised them free copies of anything the Australian recorded.
I looked up from the corals and the small, flitting fish at one point to find that Jamie and I had fallen behind the other three just a bit. I kicked hard and scooped with my arms to push up alongside Chip; just as I made it to his side, he snapped out an arm and grabbed my wrist. And that was when I realized that despite my claims of solidarity with Chip I’d no more expected to encounter a bevy of mermaids than the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I’d simply been hoping for an explanation—to find, down there, some natural phenomenon that would help explain the mermaid apparition, some anomalous or physically interesting effect, down there below the waves.
But that wasn’t what I got.
What I got was mermaids.
They didn’t see us at first, I guess, because they were engaged in a labor of their own, digging around the base of a large rock. Their hair floated in clouds behind them, long weightless-looking swaths like seaweed, as did their tails, which moved up and down slowly as the tails of dolphins move, not side to side like the tails of fish. Those tails were graceful, beautiful muscles, scales shining silver in rows and rows of small coins.
The Australian, I saw, had his camera on them—I couldn’t read his facial expression because of the mask. No one’s expression was visible under their masks, which is a shame, really, during an event like a mermaid sighting. We hovered there in a kind of frozen surprise, looking down at a cluster of mer-tails, a cloud of mer-hair waving and rippling, their faces hidden from us as they did, industriously, whatever they were doing.
But that tableau lasted only a couple of seconds, and then one of the mer-people turned. She turned her head, looked over her shoulder, and saw us. I saw her face, I saw it full-on—not mythically beautiful, not mythically homely, just a face, its skin sickly white in the water. I saw gills on her neck, their slits opening. I saw a look of surprise.
And I saw her hand: that mermaid was holding some kind of an eel. I had the feeling it was dinner.
Then, like a whip cracking, her tail seemed to buck and all of them were gone, faster than fast, utterly vanished in a turbulence of water.
That was it.
WHAT SHOCKS ME the most, in retrospect, is that within the next few days I would assimilate the mermaids handily. One moment they were impossible, the next they were everyday, in my view of the world. Like moon landings or cell phones. They went from of course not to of course. By the second day I was not only not disbelieving in mermaids but thinking of them as a given. A quirky facet of natural history. Oh the mermaids, I would register casually when they were mentioned.
But before the second day, there was the first.
We swam after the blurred wake, but as underwater swimmers, they were way out of our league. There would be discussions, once we surfaced, of radio-tagging opportunities that had been lost, of the possibility of using the sonar equipment so readily available on all kinds of boats, of enlisting local authorities for future coordinated searches; but in the aftermath of first contact we were just frustrated.
Nancy in particular did not wish to yield. That parrotfish expert swam around as rapidly as possible, peering into nooks and crannies in the coral, finding nothing but the usual minor marine life, until her tank was basically empty. The rest of our tanks were emptying too as we followed her around, our adrenaline rush fading. Personally I never held out much hope of seeing the fishtailed quasi-humans again. There’d been a certain definitive quality to their vanishment, was how it seemed to me. And they knew the territory.
The dive pros urged us back to the boat after about thirty minutes. On the wet decks we milled around stripping off our gear, emitting noises of astonishment and chaotic confusion. Eventually we grabbed up dewy cans of soda and beer—some of us noshed ravenously on bagels or croissants as though we hadn’t had breakfast a mere hour and a half before—and settled down to watch the Australian’s digital video. He replayed it over and over, with passengers and crew crowding around him as he held up his small monitor. No doubt, no doubt at all, the mermaids were there—their pale backs and shining tails, the weaving, waving cloud/streams of their yellow-green hair.
The mermaids could have been CGI, fully. I mean they looked completely real, but so do the movies about aliens with many tentacles, the movies about talking animals, and the movies about beautiful women. It was only our eyewitness status that made the footage so satisfying, like treasure we’d found whose richness would soon be revealed to the world. We knew it was real and there it was, exactly the way we’d seen it, in pixels and HD.
Not, of course, from the selfsame angle—I realized watching it that in real life I’d had the best seat in the house. In the video the mermaid wasn’t looking straight at the camera when she turned, but to the side, so that her features were obscured. But under the water she’d seemed to look right at me; I’d gotten a long gander at her features. What had struck me about them was the details: they were the features of an actual person. They weren’t generic, they were just eyes, a nose, a mouth, all specific and real. The nose had been a little wide and flat, the lips a little thin.
“She wasn’t the same one,” said Chip, as the two of us stood near the dive slide, leaning on the boat’s slippery gunwale and watching the others gaze at the footage for the umpteenth time. Their faces were the faces of fans or admirers. Light struck the planes of those faces differently: these people were different now, I thought, these people would never be the same. (I wouldn’t either, but for me the difference was less a revolution than an adjustment. It’s just the way I am, there are some major aspects of the universe I take in stride daily, other small ones don’t ever cease to amaze me.) The world had changed for all of us, though. For now, for this moment, it shone with a foreign brightness.
“Pardon?”
“I didn’t see the one from before,” Chip explained. “The one on the tape is a different one.”
“She didn’t really have bad teeth,” I agreed. “Or not that I noticed.”
“And the others, did you get a good look at any of them?”
“Not really,” I said. “It was mostly backs and tails. No other faces. She sounded the alarm. The others never even looked at us, did they?”
“All they did was go,” said Chip.
“They really took off,” I said.
“You can’t blame them. I mean, for all they knew, we could have been brin
ging smallpox,” said Chip. “The black plague. Anything. We could have been hunting them. Right?”
“You really think they haven’t met us before?”
“Us?”
“I mean people?”
“They must have! Like Nancy said. That’s why we have a word for them!”
The others were talking about mermaid history too, one putting forward the notion that the mermaids were mutations from nuclear tests in the Pacific, Bikini Atoll and all that, who’d moved east after the bombs went off and mutated them. Another suggested they were descendants of an obscure tribe with webbed feet, which subsequently turned into fused legs. The crew, I noticed, who hadn’t been down there with us, assumed we were bullshitting—either that or we were connected with the movie industry. And so it went, until Nancy stood up on a cooler of roasted-vegetable-with-arugula sandwiches and addressed the collective.
“This is a great day,” she said. “You went out expecting to find grouper—and instead you found mermaids. I’m going to be honest with you, though: the grouper sighting was always a cover. This trip was about mermaids from the start. I discovered them just a day ago, with Mr. Foster over there.”
Chip saluted, nodding briefly.
“Of course we knew no one would credit it. So we said grouper. Enough about the past, though. We need to talk about the future. Now on the one hand, I believe in the free sharing of scientific information. But on the other, we don’t want a feeding frenzy. We don’t want people descending on this island by the thousands and destroying these priceless reefs looking for mythological women with bare breasts.”
“Hear hear!” yelled someone behind me.
“As a biologist, that worries me. So we have to have a well-defined, clear strategy for handling this.”
“Sell the video!” said one of the spearfishers. “Like to Fox News! This guy could make a million bucks!”
“That kind of thinking is exactly what no one needs,” said Nancy sternly.
There were some murmurs then, whose content I couldn’t peg.
“But I admit, it’s going to be tough to do this one by the book. First thing is, to claim a new species you need a specimen. In formaldehyde, typically. And similar species for comparison. We have none of that here—this is more like a cultural encounter. A meeting with an unknown tribe—what anthropologists call first contact. Because let’s face it, these guys seem to be an awful lot like Homo sapiens from the waist up, though of course we don’t have a tissue sample yet. We’ve never seen a human hybrid. Better safe than sorry, when it comes to human rights. I’m going to call in an anthropologist ASAP. By tomorrow, I guarantee, a colleague from Berkeley will be coming. In the meantime, we can’t leak. Is that one hundred percent understood? The find and its location absolutely cannot be leaked. Mr. Foster’s got some confidentiality agreements I’m going to need you all to sign.”
There was a low rumble of dissatisfaction as Chip, who’d pulled out a sheaf of papers, saluted once again.
“Wait. In return—and this is on the forms too—every single one of you gets an equal share in whatever benefits come from this. Should they accrue. My motive is research and conservation, not profit, I’m telling you flat out. Still, in the event that any revenues do accrue, they will be equally shared. Fair’s fair. I’m putting my name on the same contract as you. Finally, we all get joint credit for the find. Keep in mind, though, we don’t own anything except this video. These mer-people—well, they own themselves. All we have is a story. But it’s an important one. Our story will change the world!”
Nods, respectful signs of assent, a few whispers.
“We’re the custodians of a priceless knowledge, a unique piece of history. Not grubby profiteers who’ll go down in Wikipedia as the destroyers of a race. We don’t want to be the conquistadors. We want to be Charles Darwin.”
“Charles Barkley?” muttered the Fox News spearfisher.
“So until we get the anthropologist onboard—which should be tomorrow if all goes well—no tweets. No social networking sites. No nothing. Anyone who leaks anything forfeits their share of any proceeds or benefits, as well as their credit. Am I crystal-clear here? And the video is embargoed. That contract was signed before we went under at all. OK? Please: Do yourselves a favor. Sign the agreement.”
There were grumbles from the Fox spearfisher and maybe the substitute teacher, but it seemed that all the forms got signed, Nancy collecting them and scanning them with brisk efficiency. I had to hand it to that parrotfish expert—she planned ahead. She had the courage of her convictions.
I saw now, despite the purple, owlish rings the mask had made around her eyes, that she didn’t necessarily have a derelict/unstable aspect after all. Her look was more take-charge than that of a disordered, rootless individual tragically amputated from society. She was mannish, yes, but now I considered how that mannishness might be helping her, in this new, albeit temporary, leadership role. Those eyebrows, with their insectoid appearance, reminded me of Stalin eyebrows, come to think of it. So many despot eyebrows, in the past, had been untrammeled, left to sprout free, and maybe hers were a bow to this authoritarian eyebrow styling. And the faint mustache on her upper lip, the furry rim, that too could be a nod in the direction of Stalin … not that she was a despot. I thought her rule was mostly benevolent.
I’m no expert on the discovery of new species, needless to say, but from my amateur perspective—considering we were in completely uncharted mermaid territory—she had a decent grip.
I BARELY RECALL the rest of the day, which turned into a boozefest. Because of the embargo we didn’t want to celebrate in public, so as the afternoon wore on Chip and I found ourselves letting more and more members of the expedition into our cabana—Nancy’s cabana was smaller, since she was on a tighter budget. Before the drinking began, she made calls and confirmed that a first-contact scholar was winging it our way, the Berkeley anthropologist. So there we were, under a gag order, confronted with the existence of beings as improbable as unicorns—hell, more improbable, even.
We waited for the anthropologist.
And while we waited, we blew off some steam. The videographer plugged his camcorder into the cabana’s flat-screen TV and our mermaid footage played across it in a loop, repeatedly; after the first few viewings the guests began to treat the bare-breasted fish/woman as scenery, wandering freely in front of the screen, mingling. As the evening wore on the mermaids seemed to swim among us, or we swum among them: they were there and then gone, with the flick of one tail, the flick of many. They were present, the main one’s face looking at us, and they were gone again, and again, and again. The flat-screen TV was like a massive fish tank in our midst, with various yellow and orange and spotted fish crossing the field of view, passing corals, passing the sunken plane, before the mermaids entered.
Though I knew it was embargoed, and I didn’t plan to share the pic with anyone, I wanted a shot for my records. So I took one, on the sly.
We circulated and talked around the sparse furniture and the dramatic displays of cut flowers, one of us posted as a sentinel at the doorway to make sure the secret video went unseen by others’ eyes. No strangers were allowed. We ordered more and more drinks via room service, through happy hour and into the sadder ones; we ordered individual drinks, then later whole bottles, which arrived on the golf carts with a generous surcharge. The servile young men dismounted from the cart and brought trays to our door.
Once or twice there was a scuffle at the threshold, a member of the party who wanted to smuggle in a loved one or friend. The Heartland man, for instance, was turned away by Nancy for trying to sneak in his wife; I think I hid my pleasure quite smoothly. Later a large man stationed himself outside our door, a large man in a flowery shirt. He was a hotel janitor by day, moonlighting for us in a freelance capacity, Chip told me, as a bouncer. That parrotfish expert had outsourced our security.
I can’t say my fellow party guests were above average, in terms of charisma, intelligence
or conversational ability, but I felt like the mermaid sighting was bringing us together, creating a buzz of enjoyment—until I hit a wall around two in the morning and wanted nothing more than to fall into bed. But that option wasn’t available to me; our guests were still milling, tripping, laughing. The bearded old salt had taken up residence in the room’s puffiest chair, where he regaled his listeners with stories of diving deep into dangerous shipwrecks to “lay charges.” He’d blown up many a vessel in his day, it seemed, ranging from “amphibious assault ships” to “minesweepers.” He told stories of diving in Truk Lagoon, where a ghost fleet of Japanese ships lay filled with human skulls.
At that point I happened to glance at the bathroom door and saw the drunken Fox News spearfisherman rummaging in my tampon box. I watched the spearfisher rummage, I took it in stride, and then I cruised over there, casually interrupting him. You don’t really get to ask why, when you behold a thing like that, but the politeness vs. curiosity dilemma can be tense.
The spearfisher snatched his hand out of the box when he saw me coming; as I led him out of the bathroom he made small talk about mer-people’s gills—claimed he’d once known a guy from Montreal, a regular human who had a vestigial gill himself. Right on his neck, where the mermaids’ gills were. It sometimes leaked a clear substance.
“Actually that would most likely have been a pharyngeal slit,” said Nancy, appearing with her eyebrows. “Or groove. Not a vestigial gill. A layperson might call it a birth defect.”
“I don’t get it,” said Chip, who’d detached himself from old Navy guy. “Why do those mermaids even have gills? I mean wouldn’t they be marine mammals? I mean they have breasts, right? And hair. So aren’t they, like, mammals? Like sea lions and dolphins? Those guys don’t need gills. So why would mermaids?”