Mermaids in Paradise: A Novel

by Lydia Millet

  I did a glance-around to cover my feeling of embarrassment. Janeane and Steve were talking intently to the soldier who liked soy taquitos; Miyoko was doing another phone interview, pacing and talking as the bed filled with soldiers, piled up there practically on top of each other, watching themselves on her laptop. It was like a clown car, only the car was a bed and the clowns were wearing camo. Thompson and the doctor were examining Thompson’s array of what he called “folders,” a.k.a. folding knives, in a corner.

  I had to turn back to Simonoff eventually, who stood there, humble in his demeanor but with a resolve I can only call steely.

  “You understand,” said Raleigh after the silence, “this would be temporary. We could spread a rumor, in effect, just among the divers working for the company.”

  “Rumors have more life than fact, in our economy,” said Simonoff. “I’m sorry, but I can’t risk it. Even afterward, once you set the facts straight—if you were able to—some of her colleagues would think of her as a purveyor of hoaxes, if it got out. And it would. Everything gets out, nowadays. You know I’m right on this. To some people, she’d always be the person who committed fraud. No, the risk is too great. I’m very sorry.”

  “What if she were the victim?” offered Chip. “I mean she was. She is. We could make me the villain of the piece, say the scam was my doing, that I roped her in—”

  “No,” said Simonoff. “That makes her look foolish. My Nancy was not a gullible woman.”

  We’d thought, for a moment, that we had an idea with maybe some traction, but now we had nowhere to go.

  “So the disinformation campaign is off the table,” said Raleigh, with difficulty.

  “We have to see my daughter’s … remains,” said Simonoff. “If this wasn’t a drowning, or if it was and there are any signs of a struggle, well, that’d be a game-changer. Wouldn’t it.”

  “Then you’ll need to go straight to the …” began Chip.

  “Mortuary,” said Simonoff solemnly.

  That guy was really keeping it together.

  “The trick will be the local police,” said Raleigh. “These guys aren’t serious. They do what the corporates tell them. So we need to get Mr. Simonoff here—”

  “Professor Simonoff,” corrected Chip, deferential.

  “—I’m sorry, yes of course, Professor Simonoff—to where his daughter’s remains are located, and make sure we get him and the doctor out again after that examination without the parent company interrupting us.”

  “They’ve got no business interfering,” said Simonoff. “I have a right to privacy. Anyway, the mortuary’s just a private institution. We couldn’t get a hold of anyone at the police station or the resort, but they must have moved her—they don’t have the right facilities at the police station. There’s no … er … refrigeration.”

  He could barely say it.

  “Still, we’d be more comfortable if these gentlemen had a couple of your guys with them,” Rick told Raleigh. “An escort, as it were. Possible? Or is that too obvious?”

  “Sam and I will supply the escort,” said Raleigh to Simonoff. “As long as it’s not all of us, we may not raise any red flags. We’ll keep a lookout, is all, when you go in.”

  So they went off, Simonoff and the doctor, Raleigh and Sam.

  “MAN,” SAID CHIP, after they’d left. (The rest of the soldiers were still with us. They loved Miyoko; they clustered around her wherever she went. Which wasn’t far, in our connected rooms.) “I really liked that hoax idea. Too bad.”

  “I see his point, though,” said Ronnie.

  “Yeah,” said Rick. “Still. Nancy would have wanted to do whatever it took, for her mermaid sanctuary.”

  We sat around the small table, meditative. Nancy would have done whatever it took. She wouldn’t have worried about posterity. We knew that. But then, she’d been alive back then. Like all of us.

  We felt the ridiculous sadness of her being dead—worse, then, than it had ever been.

  To take our minds off the waiting, we busied ourselves with tasks. I did some more tweeting, responding to other tweets, updating our status on Facebook. It was tedium, all the social networking, it was Boring Central, plus I got agitated thinking about Simonoff and the doctor looking at Nancy’s body—I thought of how Simonoff must be feeling, the punched-in-the-gut devastation. My eyes glazed over as rows and rows of comments rolled in, each one less interesting than the last. I drank an extra beer, lamented its weak impact to Gina, and thought fondly of the days, back in college, when I used to put anything I felt like in my body. Kids think they’re immortal, I mused, giddy. Then, before they know it, they’re no longer good-looking.

  Chip, using Miyoko’s laptop while she talked on the phone, immersed himself in aggregators and quickly discovered an anti-mermaid backlash. It seemed the mermaid tapes had enraged a highly vocal contingent.

  “I think it’s some folks in the Heartland,” worried Chip.

  He peered in close at the screen, scrolling through comment lists. The defection of the toe fetishist had been nagging at him—he’d wanted for so long to craft new friendships among the fellow citizens he doesn’t understand, the ones from the vast unknown. With the Heartland couple he’d made a special effort at outreach, an effort dating from that very first dinner, but he had failed; the Heartland couple had turned on him.

  “It is! Deb! It’s Middle Americans!”

  Chip knows his Internet research, he knows how to trace trends and memes and what have you, and so I didn’t doubt his opinion.

  The Heartland had spoken. The mermaids were against God, the people of the Heartland said: the mermaids were unholy.

  Some said the mermaids were descendants of Lucifer: when he’d fallen from grace he’d grown a tail and been condemned to swim the deep. Couldn’t the ocean’s depths be hell? Others said mermaids were the hybrid spawn of ancient hippie-pagans. The long-ago hippies had loved animals more than humans, much like their current-day equivalents, the mermaid haters said. And it had driven them crazy. Therefore they mated with some fish.

  There was confusion there, I guess, because, though most of the threads Chip found were staunchly creationist, there was some chatter about mutations that looked a little science-y to me. We tried to imagine olden-time people mating with fish, Chip and I did, as we hovered over the screen, but we couldn’t muster it, not a single obscene mental picture could we call up on the blank walls of our brains.

  Some of the haters claimed God had just stuck those fish tails on people suddenly—a penalty for a heinous crime against the Bible’s teachings. One day the mermaid ancestors had been walking around free and clear, on two fine, dandy legs; the next, flop, swish, legs gone and hello tails. Then, probably embarrassed, they had to slide all snakelike to the nearest body of water. “Wriggle on their bellies like unto the Serpent that tempted Eve!” posted a Churchgoer from Tuscaloosa in a newspaper’s op-ed comments.

  These people had convictions, no one could argue against that. They didn’t agree on how the tails and gills had happened, on that point they were all over the map, but as to why the tails/gills had happened—on that front they were perfectly united. It was the bestiality aspect. The crime was loving animals, whichever way you sliced it, they said. For it was clear as day, to all these hundreds, then thousands of commenters—as the movement gathered steam across the web and reportedly on right-wing radio—that the punishment had been tailored, by none other than God, to fit the crime.

  “If a woman approaches any animal and lies with it, you shall kill the woman and the animal!” posted an irate blogger called No Monkeys Here. “Leviticus!” He thought God had been too lenient, electing not to obliterate the first mermaids. God had been too liberal. If he weren’t so deeply respectful of God, so deeply pious, personally, the blogger wrote, he’d almost be tempted to voice a suspicion that God had been, in a word, weak. He wanted to say right out that God had been a fuckin’ pussy, said Chip, but he didn’t have the stones.

  “
One man’s weakness is another man’s mercy,” said Ronnie.

  By that time the others had joined us; every screen was tuned to the groundswell of mermaid hatred.

  “What did the mermaids ever do to them?” asked Janeane. “It’s unloving.”

  WE WERE STILL huddled like that, scrolling and scrolling, peering and peering, when a knock came on the door: Simonoff, the doctor, Raleigh, and Sam.

  “She wasn’t there!” said Simonoff.

  You’d think he’d be distressed by this fact, his inability to locate the physical evidence of his only daughter, but his face was glowing with energy, a fine sheen of sweat. I saw a glint in his eyes.

  “What do you mean?” said Chip. “It’s the only facility on the island. With, um, the necessary—cold storage.”

  “Exactly,” said Simonoff. “The attendant said they never saw a body. Not only that, they never heard of a body. No one ever called to make any arrangements. No one got notified. We talked to everyone there. Literally every single person on staff.”

  He took his glasses off and wiped the lenses on his tie. Scrubbed them, more like, scrubbed furiously.

  We looked around at each other, mystified. There was a feeling of being dumb, a feeling of stupidity.

  “But here’s the kicker,” said the doctor. “They didn’t know about any death certificate.”

  “It’s a small place,” said Raleigh, nodding. He had a hearty quality to him, Raleigh, an admirable meat-and-potatoes attitude a person might find almost attractive, if they were unmarried. “Usually they know right away, pretty much, when to expect business. The news gets out. But this time, nothing leaked. None of the local doctors signed a certificate. No one in an official capacity.”

  Simonoff put his glasses back on, poked them up onto the bridge of his nose with the tip of a finger. He did a quick tic of a half-smile, nervous, almost imperceptible.

  I saw where he was going: our emeritus was getting his hopes up. I didn’t want it to happen; it was like a slow-motion roadkill, and I couldn’t stand to watch.

  “Well,” I said, in a measured tone I meant to sound matter-of-fact, “she could still be at the resort. They may not have ever released her. Although that’d make them look pretty guilty.”

  “I wouldn’t put it past them,” said Chip, shaking his head. “Keeping her.”

  “Did you call?” Rick asked Simonoff. “I mean, they’d have to know where the—where she got moved to, wouldn’t they?”

  “I put in the calls myself,” said Raleigh. “Just to make sure management didn’t get its hooks in the professor, I went ahead and handled the inquiries.”

  “And?” asked Chip.

  “And nothing,” said Raleigh. “I got passed down along the admin chain, and in the end they sent me to the cops. And the cops passed the buck back to the funeral home.”

  “But I saw them!” protested Steve. “The cops were the ones who rolled out the gurney.”

  “You know,” said Thompson, cleaning a folding knife with a handle made of bone, maybe antler—sort of a dirty, white-brown color, narrowly ridged like corduroy. “The place has big restaurants. Restaurants that serve hundreds of people at a time. Big restaurants have big freezers.”

  Gina put her hand on Simonoff’s arm, like Thompson’s bluntness might injure him. Normally G. doesn’t give a shit about bluntness/offending, if anything she aims straight for it, but after the homophobic name-calling episode she’d appointed herself a general anti-Thompson deputy, an anti-Thompson missile defense shield with broad jurisdiction.

  Thompson flicked his antler knife open and closed, open and closed. With the pinkie of the other hand he rooted around in his ear.

  “Looks like we need to send a contingent over there,” said Raleigh to Sam. “Doesn’t it.”

  With Gina guiding him, Simonoff turned away, followed by the doctor; they needed refreshment, maybe some rest. The doctor opened the door of the mini-fridge and bent over, rummaging.

  “But like, undercover,” said Rick. “We need access to the kitchens. To the … to all the storage facilities connected to the kitchen areas.”

  “Whoa,” said a soldier standing behind me, and yelled over his shoulder. “Jerry! You hear that? They need someone with restaurant access at the Big House.” Then, turning back to us: “Jerry can get you a backstage pass for sure. His girlfriend waits tables up there.”

  Raleigh signed on the girlfriend, Annette, with lightning speed. Her ringing, strident voice on the other end of the speakerphone reminded me uncannily of Chip’s mother, that same combo of raw power and fingernails on a blackboard. Jerry had to promise to pay some bills if Annette lost her job as a result of the spying—her own mother had racked up a sizable debt to a psychic hotline. He got a bit sheepish when she brought that up, with all of us listening. But Annette couldn’t have cared less about Jerry’s embarrassment: that much was abundantly clear. She was slaving to pay off her mother’s credit cards, she reminded him. “This is serious shit, Jer,” she shrilled. “Serious shit.”

  We had no doubt of it.

  Simonoff was restless, as the late afternoon wore on, impatient for Annette to begin her shift. He had a flicker of hope now, he wasn’t as defeated as before; he stood up slightly taller, though it kept threatening to break my heart—there’s nothing more piercing than seeing hope lighten the face of a devastated person, that futile, doomed, and lovely bird of hope with its bright wings and round, dark eyes. First rising over a warm nest, wings softly spread, sheltering tiny chicks—then struck and flattened.

  But there was no denying it, he and the doctor both looked better than they had an hour or two earlier. They’d been invigorated by the missing corpse. In my view, a missing corpse isn’t something to rejoice about. The absence of a corpse, well, it doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as one.

  I tried to ignore their hopefulness, the easiest way to deal with it. Meanwhile Steve, I noticed, trotted out references to Nancy’s body at regular intervals, speaking about it with an attitude of clinical firmness. Our Freudian was on the case.

  All of us had turned off our phones by then, save Miyoko and Chip who were doing interviews, because we couldn’t handle the call volume. Rick and Ronnie were obsessing over the mermaid haters, who had their own social media pages now—even their own funding. Their cause had been embraced by undisclosed sponsors. These sponsors, Chip opined between phone calls, seemed to be paying for rapid dissemination of the anti-mermaid message on screens across the world. Hunt them, they said, and put them down. This is a test of faith!

  That lust for blood worried me; it even seemed to worry Gina, though her ironic distance prevents her from showing too much concern, typically. As she and I stood there, shoulder to shoulder at the counter of the kitchenette, and studied the chatter on the screen, I had a feeling of compression. I felt those lines and lines of speech pressing me down and overpowering me—the weight of all the haters out there, a juggernaut of loathing. What was their problem? Our problem, as a race? (I was woozy on beer and lack of sleep.) We started out soft and warm, trusting. I’d seen babies—held a couple, even.

  It seemed to me the virtual world was even worse than the real one, when it came to humanity. To look at screens like these, you’d think there was nothing left of us but a pile of pixilated ash. We were a roiling mass of opinion, most of it mean. Here we sat at civilization’s technological peak, and what we chose to do on that shining pinnacle was hate each other’s guts.

  First I’d been excited about the social networking; now it seemed, like nuclear weapons, to be one of the worst ideas ever.

  “Where are the nice people?” I asked Gina. “Seriously?”

  She patted my hand.

  “The meek shall inherit the earth,” she said.

  “Uh huh. The meek with six legs,” said Thompson.

  Gina hadn’t been heavily ironic, it occurred to me, since she got to the island—but this was evidence, wasn’t it, that her approach had merit. This mass of humanity th
at hated the mermaids demonstrated how right Gina had been, our whole lives, to divide and separate, to detach herself from any earnest passion, to preemptively give up on the ideas of goodness and of meaning. People would disappoint you every time.

  Rick, on another computer, was fixated on some ugly animations that were proliferating on the web—crude images of mermaids with tridents that morphed into Satans with pitchforks. There was a clean version and an X-rated one, with oversize sexual characteristics.

  He had to be pulled away, finally, for spending his time and energy on fruitless anger—much as he’d tired himself, over our first dinner, unleashing a torrent of anti-climate-denier rage on the hapless toe fetishist. I couldn’t help recalling the toe man as he’d been that evening, first claiming with a smirk that the Arctic would be a nice vacation spot once all the ice and polar bears were gone; then feeling the accidental, stroking touch of my own foot upon his hairy calf; then saying in his juicy voice toe-genital intimacy.

  Yep, Rick was rising to the bait, joining the fray, and we couldn’t let him go there, so in the end Ronnie shut him down with some kind of appetizer tray Janeane brought out involving caramelized onions.

  Tired of the hater opinions, Gina and I turned away too. We turned our faces away.

  WE’D FORMED THREE teams by then, adding to our media and stealth divisions a Simonoff department—devoted, obviously, to the question of justice for Nancy. I wanted to switch off the media team, I wanted someone to change places with me, and to that end I persuaded Ronnie. He’d be with Rick, once they were both media, and he’d enjoy that; meanwhile, I’d be with Chip.

  So Ronnie officially took over my tweeting duties and I joined Chip, Thompson, Gina, and Ellis on stealth detail. While the Simonoff team waited for bulletins from Annette, we’d spy on the parent company’s mermaid search. That would be our gig, as soon as the sun finished setting and darkness took over: we’d be investigators.

  Thompson had borrowed a friend’s powerboat, which was waiting for us at a slipway down the beach road. We walked out of the motel smelling the sweetness of jasmine, hearing the faint splashes of kids in the motel pool (which I idly hoped had been divested of toad corpses). It was a balmy evening. Thompson had his own rig for fishing, he said, as we drove over in the Hummer, but it was an old rustbucket. This one, I saw when he parked the Hummer, was sleek and high-end. We got out and approached: the vessel was black with red detailing and looked like it went fast. A monster pickup was towing it, and backed down the ramp as we walked over; someone ran down and set up a stepladder deal.