Mermaids in Paradise: A Novel Read online

  I gulped air from my tube, held it, and gave what I hoped was a powerful flip of my fins. Down I bucked, feeling pressure inside my head and not liking it a bit. I swished myself around the bubble cloud, instead of through the midst of it, so that I wouldn’t crash into anyone coming up; I tried to force myself down, though my body resisted. Still I could see nothing except a rock with brown and yellow barnacle-type things on it that looked like rotting teeth. I bobbed up again, gasping.

  Luckily, a few seconds later Chip surfaced too, and then Nancy, all of us popping our tubes out and sucking in air.

  “Jesus!” cried Chip, spluttering.

  “You saw them! Didn’t you?” asked Nancy, spluttering too.

  “I gotta go down again,” said Chip, and without waiting for me to answer, down he dove.

  I followed him, of course, because at this point curiosity was killing me. It was frustrating, though, because I was in Chip’s bubble trail again. There are negatives to being a follower instead of a leader, in a diving situation. I pushed myself down, trying to get alongside him for a better view of whatever it was he thought he’d seen, but all I saw was silver swirls of bubbles—could have been anything—and before long I swooped up again, helpless.

  I waited for them to come up, treading water and getting more and more gaspy. When Chip finally surfaced his face was purple-red; he shoved his tube aside and pulled his mask up onto the top of his head, and I could see his eyes were wide, like when he’d been electric-shocked in the mud marathon.

  “So? Did you see mermaids?” I asked him, in a joking tone. I assumed he’d report a sea turtle, a dolphin or stingray or what have you.

  “Deb! There were some goddamn mermaids down there!”

  Feeling a bit fed up, I snorted and turned to swim back toward the boat, shaking my head. Chip’s a fantasist, of course, a fantasy game-player; Chip enjoys the world of make-believe. I think I’ve made that clear.

  I climbed back onto the boat, and when I came out of the head with the wetsuit off and my clothes back on, the captain wordlessly handed me a cold can of beer. Didn’t say a word, just handed it over. I was grateful. I sat on one of the white fiberglass benches drinking and taking a breather; before long the other two joined me, climbing the ladder with their faces shining oddly.

  “Deb,” said Chip breathlessly, shedding his gear, “you thought I was kidding, but I wasn’t. Maybe it’s a hoax or like that, I’m not saying it isn’t, but down there were people with tails. People fully the size of you or me.”

  “If it’s a hoax, how were they breathing underwater?” asked Nancy. “You didn’t see any breathing apparatus, did you?”

  “Maybe it was a sleight-of-hand trick,” said Chip. “Or just like phenomenal timing. I mean, the two of us were down there, right Deb? Nancy and I. And we didn’t have oxygen tanks.”

  “But have you seen anyone come up since then? There’s nothing but this boat around, as far as the eye can see!” raged Nancy. She turned to me. “Did you see anyone come up?”

  “Come on, guys,” I said, and crumpled my beer can, which was already empty. “Enough, already. You got me. Consider me pranked. OK?”

  Nancy glared at me with her eyebrows like angry crawlers. Then she turned back to Chip, as though I hadn’t said a thing.

  “Maybe they had a submarine to go back to,” said Chip. “A submersible. Like in that movie, The Abyss. Or even Titanic. You know the kind I mean,” he said, appealing to me. “For research. Maybe they saw us, then swam back to their submersible. Technically, free-diving for long periods of time is possible. I mean some free-divers can go down two, three hundred meters on one breath. Competitive apnea! Deb, it’s an extreme sport! There’s one guy who can hold his breath in a pool for eleven minutes. I read it online.”

  “Be reasonable,” said Nancy. “Manned submersibles cost a mint. There aren’t any commercial ones operating around here or I’d have found out about them. Plus, who’d strap on a tail and swim around in the middle of the Atlantic just for our benefit? Nobody.”

  “You guys,” I said, “I’m sure there’s an explanation, other than you’re both messing with me. Maybe someone rubbed LSD onto your breathing tubes. Or the tubes got toxic mold on it in that box that caused hallucinations. And now I’m ready to go back. Can we please go?”

  The boat captain didn’t wait on Nancy’s command; impatient as any man slighted by underpayment, he throttled up and we motored toward dry land.

  THE DAY HAD started well, even gaily. First I’d shaken off the tinge of shame laid on me by the Heartland man; then Chip and I had kissed in a shady grotto, water running around our bodies in pleasing rivulets. We’d been living the American Dream, or the American-Caribbean Dream—call it the American-Caribbean Honeymoon Dream. Whatever you call it, I’d felt clothed in its raiment of sun and sex and booze, lassitude, freedom from opinion. I’d felt a pleasing vacuum of responsibility, filled with trade winds and ocean spray. Washing the salt from our ropy hair as sand, too, swirled down the shower drain. Lying spent and happy on cool white sheets, air on the skin, rustle of fronds in the breeze, the whir of time passing, warm wind of the turning world.

  But after the boat trip the dream altered. Within the smooth fabric of the dream a thread of doubt had been picked, and suddenly the weave was unraveling.

  The problem, at first, seemed to be Chip. I wanted the old Chip back, the Chip for whom there was real life on the one hand, without mythic creatures, and videogames solidly on the other hand, where mythic creatures cavorted quite abundantly. The new Chip was confusing, even frightening to me, because the new Chip was stubbornly insisting that those worlds weren’t separate. That went too far for me. It was a rude jolt. The earth was unstable beneath my feet.

  And hadn’t even been Chip’s idea—someone we barely knew had brought the idea to him, and then he’d run with it. There was an arbitrary quality to the mermaid sighting. Yet Chip had signed right up! The honeymoon was supposed to be all about him and me, and instead he’d become a member of a secret society—Chip was affiliated, now, with a disturbed parrotfish expert.

  It was as though he’d joined a cult. He was dazed, when we got back to the cabana; there was a look of sheer obliteration on his face. He barely talked to me. And pretty swiftly, there on the island of Virgin Gorda in the British Caribbean, it made me feel terribly lonely, a premonition of the grave. Sitting across the room from Chip as he ignored me—he was scrolling through pages of mermaid lore on the tablet he’d brought with him—I put myself in his shoes. For a second I was Chip, I was Chip, and I couldn’t help believing.

  As Chip, I had no choice.

  But as myself …

  I made a snap decision. Much as a candidate might flip-flop on abortion when the demographics called for it, I was changing my position. Because the problem, at first, had seemed to be with Chip; but I saw now the problem could equally be seen as mine. And unlike the problem of Chip, that other problem—the problem of me—was one I could solve easily. The plainest solution was the best. Why put up resistance? No need. I bought in. I turned on a dime.

  After all, I reasoned, if there were mermaids drifting under the glittering waves, mermaids who rose from the sparkling ceiling of their undersea world from time to time, their father someone like Neptune, bearded, big-chested, trident-holding; if there were mermaids who perched on rocks, sunning, who brushed their golden locks and gazed at their reflections in delicately fashioned mother-of-pearl-framed mirrors; if there were mermaids who rode, when the occasion warranted, in giant clamshells pulled by a team of giant seahorses—so much the better for us all.

  And if said mermaids did turn out to be a figment, there too I sensed no threat to me personally.

  “Chip, I’m sorry,” I said tenderly, going over to him at our room’s long counter, where he was perched on a barstool scrolling. I put my arms around him and rested my chin on his shoulder. “Because if you saw mermaids, you know what? You saw mermaids. I didn’t mean to be a buzzkill, Chip.
I believe you, honey.”

  Chip smiled at me, and balance was restored.

  That’s another saving grace of Chip: he doesn’t ask why the politician flip-flopped. He doesn’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

  ON THE DOMESTIC front, at that point, all was well, but on a practical level there was still the presence of Nancy to contend with—that parrotfish expert had vim and vigor. As far as she was concerned, as far as Chip was concerned, and therefore as far as I had to be concerned, too, her vacation/our honeymoon had turned from a pleasure trip into a cryptozoological mission.

  First off, she planned a dive session. She made calls, she sent emails, she hit the streets. She visited every dive shop on the island seeking out scuba adepts, fishing enthusiasts, anyone with even the flimsiest of biology credentials who could go underwater as a part of her expeditionary force.

  Unlike Chip I hadn’t gone diving before; you had to be certified to rent gear from any of the shops in town. Yet again, I suspected, I was going to be left out if I didn’t act fast. So while Chip was helping Nancy prepare for the next day’s excursion—she would wait for one day maximum, because she feared losing the mermaids if they proved migratory—I went to the dive shop and hired a pro named Jamie. If I took a beginners’ class, he’d come with me on the expedition, for a fee.

  So I practiced with a rental tank in the hotel swimming pool—it was me and some friendly elderlies—and then I met Chip on the sandy drive that led from the resort’s main building to the shop, where he sat waiting in one of the resort golf carts. He drove us back to the cabana while I jiggled inertly.

  “We signed on two science teachers,” he reported. “That’s all there are on the whole island. Plus one of them’s just a substitute. But he knows some biology.”

  “What did she tell them we’d be looking for?”

  “Rare fish. Some kind of huge fish no one has seen for ages. A grouper, I think she said. They weigh four hundred pounds. That’s what she’s telling everyone. She doesn’t want to influence the people who haven’t seen anything yet. Observer bias, or something.”

  “That’s smart,” I conceded. “Plus there’s the fact that, if she said you were looking for mermaids, no one would come but lunatics.”

  “We signed on one diver who used to be a U.S. Navy SEAL. He bought a house and retired here. We have a bunch of spearfishing dudes—a tourist and a couple of locals. It’s looking pretty good; it’s coming together. There’s a videographer dude, a guy with underwater video equipment, who’s staying at another resort, the other end of the island. He’s coming too. She had to offer to pay him.”

  “It’ll be worth it,” I said supportively. “Although—is there a finder’s fee, for something like mermaids?”

  Chip had no patience for levity.

  The rest of the day rushed past, with Chip functioning as Nancy’s assistant and me functioning as Chip’s. I called dive shops with equipment orders, dive boats for scheduling; I set up an onboard lunch for twenty (on mine and Chip’s credit card, though Nancy claimed she’d cover our expenses. I felt myself doubting that outcome, but hell, it was our honeymoon, we’d said we’d spare no expense). By the time evening was coming on and sun-reddened families were trailing into the resort’s restaurants, Chip was pumped for the next day’s trip and wanted to throw back a beer. Nancy talked on her cell phone nonstop to what were, according to Chip, some of her colleagues. From what I could discern on our end, they were arguing with her but not dismissing her out of hand, as you might assume they would.

  She must have credibility capital to spend, I guessed. A less bold woman would have waited till the sighting was confirmed. That parrotfish expert had some cojones on her.

  Chip and I let her conduct her business in peace, for the most part, though she didn’t leave our side; it was like a romantic dinner for two where one of the two has a monkey attached to his head. If Chip and I had been a couple of coral outcroppings she would have been the parrotfish, nibbling at our edges and busily expelling grains of sand. She didn’t order food herself but perched on a third chair and picked at what was left on our plates when we finished each course—just reached for it and chewed noisily as she said words like aquatic primate, herbivorous mammals and Sirenomelia into her cheek-parked phone.

  “Chip,” I said, to cover the sound of her phone patter over our supposedly relaxing dessert coffee, “what did they look like, the ones that you saw? I know it was fast. But can you tell me some details?”

  Chip nodded, swallowed some pie. “The one that was the closest to me was the only one whose face I saw at all. And I have to say, she didn’t look like you might expect. Not exactly.”

  “Yellow hair, bare breasts,” I said. “Right?”

  “Yeah, no,” said Chip. “That’s true. But she kind of had bad teeth. No dentists in the sea, I guess. No underwater dentistry. The teeth were brownish or yellowish. Like an Englishman.”

  “No fluoride,” I guessed.

  “And in the background I saw one that seemed to be a guy. He had big shoulders, you know, a general guy shape? Except for the tail. The tail, I have to be honest, on him it looked a bit girly.”

  “Maybe it was a butch mermaid.”

  “Deb. Are you taking this seriously?”

  “I am—really. A butch mermaid isn’t a joke, Chip.”

  My husband squinted at me over his fork, sizing me up. Attitudinally. I made my eyes wide. Because I had meant it, about the butch mermaid—it wasn’t a diss. I’ve got nothing against a certain butch quality. Plus if there were really mermaids, I hoped they didn’t look like Ariel. Honestly, if they turned out to be Disney-style mermaids, I wouldn’t like them one little bit. That big-eyed cartoon shit would get on my last nerve.

  So I narrowed my own eyes again and lifted the cup containing my decaf, looking past him with what I hoped was a meditative aspect—I was hoping to resemble a person with important, largely abstract concerns. After swallowing my delicate sip, I made my mouth prim. I hoped he got the message.

  “Early to bed!” cried the biologist abruptly, snapping her nearly vintage clamshell. She stood up, grabbing a last slice of focaccia from the basket and stuffing it into her mouth, and spoke while chewing. “Got to get up at five to make history! Meet me in the lobby at five-thirty!”

  Chip actually whistled as the two of us strode up the Tiki-lit path to the cabin. He held my hand and swung it widely while he whistled a patriotic tune—maybe “La Marseillaise.” Possibly “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Chip, too, believed we might be making history.

  I was agnostic where that prospect was concerned, but open to it, certainly; if we made history, then good. A job well done, I guessed.

  I WAS DISPLEASED, the next morning, to find the toe man in our party. People milled in the lobby, when we appeared there blearily at that indecent predawn hour, and he was among them. Adding insult to injury, his wife was not among them—I imagined she hadn’t been seduced by the prospect of sighting some goliath groupers. And possibly, unlike him, she was also indifferent to the prospect of ogling other divers as they padded naked-footed around the boat or struggled to pull on fins. A person needed tube socks, I felt, with the man from the Heartland free-roaming.

  Or fishermen’s waders.

  I wondered if Chip had invited him and prepared to snap at my newly minted husband for the infraction, but before I could open my mouth he assured me Nancy had issued the invite with no input from him.

  I didn’t know any of the others, beyond the Bay Areans, though I’d talked to some on the phone; I busied myself carrying a cooler of sandwiches down to the dock, where the dive boat was waiting. I talked to my personal dive pro, Jamie, and then occupied myself with mundane tasks while Chip chatted excitedly with the various divers and fishermen he’d signed on, substituting the word groupers into his enthusiastic narrative of the mermaid sighting.

  “Them jewfish are real easy to spear,” I heard a man drawl. At first the phrase startled me. It turned out, Chip tol
d me later, that groupers used to bear that name before some kind of fish-naming council censored it. “Yeah. Easy pickins. Jewfish will swim right up to you. Fish in a barrel, ha ha. As innocent as babies. I use a Stinger.”

  “Of course there’s no fishing today,” said Nancy to the spearfisherman, who was sun-wrinkled and had a diamond stud in one ear. “The ban on grouper harvest is respected here.”

  We all trooped down to the boat—a motley crew loaded with gear and backpacks, some still sucking at their cups of coffee, others munching on remnants of Danish or muffins from their continental breakfasts. The fisherman ambled beside Chip and me. “The jewfish,” he said to Chip, “now they’re a hermaphrodite, as you may know. Those suckers are born with lady parts.”

  I sensed a certain degree of puzzlement, among the recruits, at the suppressed excitement evinced by Chip and Nancy. I got the feeling they thought: Sure, groupers are good, but are groupers as good as all this? At least one of the party was chalking the vibe up to our vacationer status—“Crazy tourists,” I heard him mutter. Someone else nodded sagely.

  Nancy focused on the videographer—an Australian, he sounded like—seeking repeated assurances that he would film constantly, without missing a second, as soon as he hit the water. He shrugged, he seemed confused, but at the same time he was willing. Jamie got stuck in a conversation with the toe man before the boat even weighed anchor. I hadn’t asked him to steer clear, of course; I didn’t have the stones for that. I only hoped the two of them wouldn’t still be fraternizing when I had to approach Jamie physically to get ready for my dive.

  Meanwhile Chip was deep in a discussion of unusual wildlife with the retired Navy SEAL, a barrel-chested man who sported a full white beard and a blunt yet bombastic attitude. They talked about giant squid at first, moving on to the Loch Ness monster and a creature called the Orang Pendek, some kind of midget Yeti. The Navy SEAL was a specialist in diving into shipwrecks, and tough enough to impress Chip mightily. I could see Chip wishing the old-salt Navy SEAL was his father, for Chip has always longed for a kindly, tough-love type of father—ideally seafaring. He likes the idea of an oceangoing father, a father who, instead of skipping his child support payments to focus on the deep joy of heroin, merely set sail one day to seek his fortune on the high seas. Called by the sirens and followed by an albatross.