Mermaids in Paradise: A Novel (26 page)

“Let’s put our heads together,” said Rick. “Right, Chip? See what we can come up with.”

“My troops’ll have to keep a low profile,” said Raleigh. “Far as the suits know, we’re out on a drill. We can’t get in their faces. Other than that, though, we’re here for you.”

The six of us stood around the small table in the room, though we really didn’t fit. Raleigh said he had some information, first off, which was that the armada still hadn’t spotted any mermaids, even with their dozens of divers.

They were painstakingly crossing quadrants off their grid and moving the nets in, but there was low morale, out there, with a growing majority of skeptics. The parent company had shown the mermaid footage to the searchers, but many still didn’t believe it was genuine, said they’d seen better CGI mermaids in kids’ movies. With each fruitless search there were more divers who thought the video was simply a hoax.

Raleigh thought the best move would be to “take ownership,” as he put it, and come out and admit it was a hoax—our hoax, that
we
were the hoaxers. We’d buy ourselves some time that way, he claimed, although the parent company wouldn’t be swayed; they claimed to have had the footage “authenticated” by
“experts” before they took action in the first place. If we pulled back, he said, in essence pulled a hoax now, claiming to have hoaxed before, they’d lose a lot of manpower. They’d lose logistical support, and it would set back their project, at least temporarily.

Miyoko wouldn’t like that at all, said Chip, she’d staked her reputation on this being real, she’d gone the whole nine yards for us.

Rick nodded. We didn’t even want to bring it up with her.

“We don’t need to go public with it,” said Raleigh. “Losing face
here
, with the teams they’re depending on to find the mermaids for them, that could do it. Without their divers, see, they’re screwed, and the divers are already pissed and impatient, chomping at the bit.”

“How would we do that, though?” said Chip. “We don’t have access to their divers. Do we?”

We knew a few of them, of course; Chip had emails for the ones who’d been in our group before they defected.

“They won’t believe the hoax angle,” said Chip. “I mean, some of these people were with us. They
saw
the mermaids. Personally.”

“You’d say it was all a setup,” suggested Sam. “Some kind of elaborate publicity stunt. Say you
put
the mermaids there.”

“Like, they were free divers,” said Chip. He’d always liked that angle. “Wearing fake tails.”

“Maybe it was a gambit to protect the reefs all along,” said Rick. “Nancy’s gambit! To save her parrotfish!”

“Hold it,” came a voice from behind us. “What’s this?”

Prof. Simonoff was hovering.

“You’d make my daughter out a liar?” he went on. “Is that what I’m hearing?”

“We’re just tossing out ideas,” said Chip, apologetic.

“It wouldn’t be public,” I added. “We’re just trying to think how we could undermine the parent company.”

“I can’t support any scheme that would tarnish my daughter’s reputation,” said Simonoff. “I’m sorry, but I couldn’t allow it.”

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.”