She became a quiet wraith, gliding past stacks between shifts. She awaited her turn crouched among the few monographs she could find. Almost everything was on computer now. Hearing the library staff call her name attained the weight of communion, even for fruitless searches.
The library's central air labored on a sultry evening as Hurricane Dennis left casualties in the Caribbean and spun toward Apalachee Bay. Mercedes glanced over as a teenager with chopped purple hair dropped into the chair to her left and logged on.
Mercedes smiled at the girl's Live 8 tee that promised to change the world and was about to turn back when the image on the neighboring screen began to load. Despite the weak A/C, her teeth chattered.
The girl turned toward her, pierced eyebrows in a squint. “You okay?"
The photo tags read “Monkey Island” and “Port Antonio.” At first glance the shot showed only broken branches and spiny sea urchins and not the battered doll in the mid-ground. Below its waist stretched an unruly mass of blackened plastic. Its legs had been partially melted, fused together, and stretched out like taffy.
Mercedes shook her head. “Is nothing."
A silver stud ticced up. “Bullshit.” She peered closer. “The storm hit Jamaica. I wonder if it blew that in.” She clicked the zoom.
Mercedes said, “It must have been in a fire."
"No, I've seen others like that. There's one made out of wood in Indonesia. One made out of bread dough in some Ecuadorean village. I saw one made out of mud on a riverbank in a jungle somewhere. No, wait, that was the Mississippi. Like they were trying to make mermaids but nobody could give them a decent tail. It's weird."
Mercedes glanced at the user clock on her own computer. Eleven minutes remained before she had to yield the machine again. That left less than an hour for the forty-minute bus ride to her night shift. “What do I search on? What keywords?"
The girl shrugged. “I don't know. The keywords are all over the place, too. Just don't type ‘mermaid'—you'll get a thousand bikini shots before you get one of those."
"Who makes them? Who takes the pictures?” Relief workers? Tourists? How many people in the world didn't have access to a camera, let alone a computer? How many were creating representations in the only way they could?
"Hey.” Black-painted fingernails touched her arm. “What's with you and them?"
Mercedes fought to keep her voice steady. “They remind me of something, that's all."
"Suit yourself.” The nails returned to their keyboard. “I found them by clicking on Random, but it took forever."
The doll vanished, replaced by a wedding photo from half a world away. Blurs on a dance floor.
* * * *
Random.
She hadn't carried a child for nine months, she had carried it for thirty-two years. Mercedes couldn't say whether the sea baby had invaded her dreams because she didn't remember her dreams. Instead, memory hovered about her shoulders as she navigated daily fogs smelling of cleanser and fry oils. She caught snatches of sleep on a time-shared mattress and awoke with wrinkled cuticles, as though her hands had spent the night submerged in tap water. Her body ached.
Sometimes Mercedes almost hopped the bus to the beach. Maybe if she stood with her bare feet in the surf, she could touch what was underneath again. But it was not her beach any more. All that remained was the ever-present need that swept her to the library, to live her life in one, maybe two half-hour increments before she had to leave it again.
She found a new flyer tacked to the bulletin board between the rest rooms and blinked at its promise of “grassroots environmentalism.” On the other end of a pay phone line, a pleasant-voiced man agreed to see her after closing.
Mercedes watched the parade of street lamps as her bus carried her past a line of piers and left her between puddles of iridescent rainbows. She followed memorized instructions, careful of which streets to avoid and which to trust, however furtively, until Duvall Hix called her name out of the shadows and escorted her between the warehouses.
She thanked him for seeing her at such an irregular hour.
He waved it off. “You're giving up a lot to come here."
* * * *
"You're talking about birth defects."
Shirttails vanished around a corner, leaving Mercedes surrounded by posters and old wooden filing cabinets. She circled a large meeting table and listened to the uneven rhythm of steam pipes, then to bearings sliding on well-oiled runners as Hix checked his archives.
A pistachio-colored ceiling with stamped metal moldings shifted time out of the twenty-first century and back more than fifty years. Mousetraps dotted the corners on aged linoleum tile. Mercedes half-expected to find a black rotary phone beside the pamphlet display, the computer seemed so out of place.
They had traveled to the sixth floor in a freight elevator and walked down industrial-painted hallways. The director of the 58th Street Coalition had unlocked a metal door bearing a hand-lettered sign.
Hix returned with a black-and-white eight-by-ten and laid it on the table. “What you've described is not unheard-of. It's called sirenomelus. Mermaid syndrome."
A shriveled corpse stared up from the photograph. The typed line on its yellowed tag dated it to 1983.
Mercedes held the sheet in both hands. Agreeing with him would be so easy. It would make the most sense. She could point to an actual creature, to an actual cause, and tell the churning in her brain and her heart to stop.
Except it wouldn't.
She said, “It's not a birth defect, Mr. Hix."
"Duvall.” He sat opposite her and laid out a series of fact sheets on PCBs and dioxins, followed by water and soil reports. “These will tell you what we're up against. We've got kids playing in brownfields that were supposed to be remediated more than a decade ago. It's no wonder you saw something like this."
"Did they do an autopsy?"
"No, not to my knowledge. The effects were already obvious."
She laid the sheet back down. “This was not a human child."
She forced herself to watch the emotions playing across his face. His quiet distress made her throat close up. They could agree that the child in the picture was more than twenty years dead, and that it had once been alive and real, so why not leave it at that?
Did villagers in remote corners of the world fashion sculptures of birth defects?
Hix reached into his pants pocket, flipped open a battered wallet, and laid a smaller, color photo on the table. Mercedes looked down at a pair of buck-toothed smiles, sprays of dark freckles across brown cheeks, and eyes that looked just like Duvall's. She guessed the boy's age to be about nine, the girl's about seven. “They're beautiful."
His words were measured weights. “I will do everything I can to keep them healthy, Mercedes. From what you've told me, I wish I could have done the same for your family.” His fingers caressed the image. “I wasn't with you when you found whatever you found. I didn't see what you saw, so I can't speak about it. But when I go home every night, the faces here tell me what I have to do, with what little resources we have. Do you understand what I'm saying?"
Less than a hand's breadth of wood grain separated the shots. On one side were living, breathing children whose joy gave no indication of danger. On the other side lay a long-dead baby with collapsed gills and ruptured skin. Limp flesh tapered to a flat appendage.
Every case in Hix's files had been washed ashore. If these were birth defects, then why were they all found near water bodies? Wouldn't that assume they'd been deliberately drowned and then surfaced again with the tide? What were the chances of that happening?
Mercedes raised her face to Duvall's. She did not withhold her arguments for fear of insanity this time. She knew he wouldn't openly dispute what she told him, regardless of what he did or didn't believe.
Funding evaporated faster than water. Even if he believed her, what could he do?
* * * *
He found her a cheap room in a patched-up, century-ol
d Victorian subdivided into a dozen odd-shaped apartments with shared kitchen and baths. Sprouts grew in tall jars set in south-facing windows. Mushrooms swelled from flats spread across a musty attic floor. In the fall sunflowers bent beneath their own weight in a tiny, fenced-in yard, their heads tied up in plastic shopping bags to catch the seeds.
More food came from the community garden a mile walk away. Mercedes helped her housemates grow peas and tomatoes beneath a narrow strip of sun between slabs of triple-decker shade. She steered toddlers away from the crops and traded for lettuce and carrots from adjoining plots, then washed and peeled away as much lead uptake as she could.
Everybody spoke about the bad air at a public hearing on the reassessment of discharge ponds and drainage creeks. Reassurances rolled back to them as quickly as the tires discarded off the overpass four blocks away, piling up in the pond closest to the road. Mercedes counted nine tires when the drought hit the pond, cracking its muddy bottom.
The tires didn't stop the ducks from returning with the rains, unmindful of the smell of rotten eggs. A muskrat commuted to points unknown. Life continued as before.
New tethers snaked around Mercedes, tying her to the people aboveground. Children clustered about her as she bent over the garden, sifting out sand thrown in from the nearby tot lot. They waited for the two-inch-tall GIs that surfaced out of the earth and for the other plastic-molded toys that spring brought. Marbles and jacks rose up like scattered seeds. Half an action figure raced broken crockery toward the open air.
Tiny fingers tugged on Mercedes's dirt-stained pants. No one looked away from her, this time. No one cringed at her occasional outbursts. Eventually the small, pudgy faces all but eclipsed her memory of bright green eyes above sallow cheeks wavering under the water, lips pursed in hunger.
Hector and Elian returned in suddenly remembered dreams and Mercedes awoke clutching the sides of her narrow bed. For a few minutes she forgot where she was, and it was her turn to stumble down to the breakfast table, stunned by old grief. On those mornings her food lost its taste and she couldn't recall riding the bus to work, but she remembered how many arms had held her, and whose.
Her trauma joined others and became one of the many grooves into which the household settled, so deep they were often buried in laughter. Music floated down the block from open windows after sundown in a confusion of reggae, Ca Hue, salsa, hip-hop, kpop. Smoke from tobacco and weed danced pirouettes in alleyways. Mothers yelled at pimped-up sedans to slow down. The city sank new Neighborhood Watch signs into fresh concrete, in place of twisted metal. Children painted a rainbow mural in a restored corner park barely larger than a parking spot. Shopkeepers swept up broken glass. Unsubsidized tenants dug deeper as rents increased.
In April the fireworks started up as usual, littering the streets with spent casings of Coloured Shots and Gulf War Rockets and lighting up police party lines throughout the night. In May an early heat wave overloaded the old power grid again, filling the stoops with gossip and sweat.
* * * *
In June, Tuan and Letitia dug a hole in the garden to bury a shoebox and changed everything.
Side by side they walked, counting the number of steps they each held the box and keeping their steps equal, because something this important had to be fair. Far behind them the muskrat continued its rounds, a black lozenge cutting through slick.
They walked past purple loosestrife waving from the corner lot. Past the hair salon and the Chinese take-out and the bail bonds. Over the train tracks and under the highway. Letitia scratched around her dress strap, where too much sun had darkened her skin to the color of burnt toast. Tuan stopped to pick wild mulberries from a tree crouched beside the on-ramp.
Their mouths and tongues were stained by the time they reached the tot lot. They continued on toward the vegetables and began scooping out the dirt from between two tomato cages while Tuan softly sang.
Their neighbor Mai turned from her weeding. “What died?"
Letitia mumbled, “We're just playing."
"That's a funeral song, Letitia. You're not supposed to touch dead animals! They're full of germs."
Tuan stopped singing. “This is different."
Mai raised white brows at his uncharacteristic insolence. She rocked to her feet and shouted across the yard, calling for reinforcements in the neighborhood's first-line defense against fallen birds, car-struck cats, and diseased rodents.
In the kitchen a mile away, Mercedes laid her cleaver down as her vision blurred. When it cleared she set her half-chopped carrots in the fridge, dropped the cleaver into soapy water, and fled the house. Halfway to the garden she was still unaware she was being followed, or that doors cracked open and curtains shushed to the side. The people calling her name faded into murkiness.
Eleven children entered the garden behind her, crowding in as she fought her way toward the boy and girl who'd thrown their bodies over the box and dug their fingers and toes into the dirt. She didn't know what strength let her pry the yelling adults away.
"Water!” She screamed over the heads of her entourage. “Somebody fill a tub with water and bring it here! Now!"
Tuan's voice was muffled against the ground.
"No, sweetie. It's still alive.” They had so much to do. Mercedes touched a steely little arm. “Letitia ... let me see..."
A geyser exploded above the hubbub as a teen opened a hydrant. Re-directed splatter rang against metal.
Letitia raised a tear-streaked face to Mercedes.
"I know it's a baby.” Her voice dropped. “You found it near the pond?"
Letitia nodded. Mercedes cradled the girl's head.
The same cry as before lodged in her breast but much thinner this time, much softer.
Tuan said, “It's a boy."
"With a tail and no legs. Like a mermaid. Yes?"
High-pitched voices behind her broke into a torrent.
"Fish food! Get him fish food!"
"Where's a pet store?"
"I dunno, I never saw a pet store!"
"Get seaweed then!"
Mercedes said, “He's still too young for seaweed."
She blinked back tears as the silent cry rang through every child. They all clung together like tentacles stemming from a single body. Her neighbors made way as two pairs of flame-tattooed forearms dropped a steel tub beside her, sloshing water onto the mulched walkway.
Mercedes took and opened the shoebox from Letitia and groaned. The sea baby looked as dead as the one in Duvall's photograph. No wonder the children almost buried it.
Voices rose as she lowered the infant into the tub. Kinked gray hair fell over her eyes as she growled back, “I'm not drowning him. It's not a birth defect. Ask the bebes, they'll tell you."
The sun beat sweat from her brow. Mercedes held onto the lip of the tub and blinked at people and tomatoes through waves of heat. Below her, the gills began to flutter more strongly.
Behind her, a man asked, “So, what do we do now?"
A tiny fist gripped her finger. Green eyes opened.
"He'll eat earthworms.” This was a garden. They couldn't be in a better place. Her voice rasped. “Look for earthworms. Mash them up."
The children fanned out immediately, digging in the dirt.
The man said, “That's not what I meant."
Mercedes whispered, “I know."
She listened to the buzz of speculation around the plots. Yes, there are more, she wanted to say. Yes, they've been here all along, just like us, she wanted to say.
No, they are not our competitors.
Wouldn't they be? If Mercedes wrote her fantasized letters, if she sent them off to Woods Hole and EPA and NOAA and UNESCO with pictures and documentation, what then?
Which would the authorities relocate? Who would sooner be placed on an endangered species list?
You can't fund everything.
No. The children understood. Tuan, grasping nightcrawlers in his hand. Letitia, holding another one at arm's length away from
her dirt-smeared dress. Even Ho, the biker sitting hunched against the garden fence and chopping up a plate of worms with his Bowie. They all knew this was a child like any other child.
Except it wasn't.
The sea baby was a discovery.
Someone said, “Fire department,” amidst growing sirens.
Mercedes looked down at the bruised body and tapered tail, across at the filthy hands offering wrigglers to Ho, up at the tightly controlled fear in her neighbors’ eyes. Once the hydrant was closed, the fire official would take one glance at the crowd and summon a police cruiser. This was no block party.
What if all those years ago, while she dreamt she walked on the bottom of the sea, the super had lifted that other baby in its plastic bag and returned it to its polluted waters instead of dumping it in the trash? Separate peoples, living apart in their own poisoned worlds?
Tiny lips zoomed in on her pinky and began to suckle. Mercedes took the first batch of formula in her free hand, a slurry of worms and water in a bottle with a nipple hacked off at the tip. Letitia squatted by her side as she lifted the baby just high enough to get the nursing started.
The girl snuggled against her. “What's going to happen to him?"
"I don't know,” Mercedes said. “But pray for him, okay? And tell the uniforms to come see me."
"What are you going to say to them?"
"Just do as I ask."
She smiled a little at Letitia's struggle to tear herself away. A housemate came forward, and then a second, marveling. Now that the sea baby was alert, now that it was feeding, it didn't seem quite so unreal.
But if it were real, would that make it a threat?
Help me, Maria. Help me, Jesucristo.
Mercedes closed her eyes against the sounds of suckling, and opened them again as the water shut off.
Asimov's SF, October-November 2009 Page 19