Mermaids in Paradise: A Novel (30 page)

Luckily, the natives seemed friendly.

“Look here!” said Ellis to the bureaucrats. “I really am
dashed
grateful you took my phone call seriously. I’m chuffed to bits.”

Usually when he went old-school Gina accused him of “getting lordy.” But this time she let it sail right past.

Soon the others were up and bustling, Nancy “over the moon,” as Ellis said, about the presence of the two civil servants (the man was the head of some government ministry). There was a shortage of vessels, she’d found out the night before, so if Ellis hadn’t reached out to the colonial authorities a lot of us would probably have been stranded on land. Thompson’s borrowed speedboat could have been called back into service, possibly, but its capacity was limited.

Before long we were driving straight to the main marina, no fear this time, no need to hide. We had the government with us; we had the troops. Steve and Janeane watched us motor away from the dock, as—Chip with one arm slung over my shoulders, the two of us floating in a crowd of soldiers—we stood at the bow in the leaping spume.

Janeane waved a yellow scarf in the air. It looked so old-fashioned, lifted by the breeze.

THE DEPUTY GOVERNOR
invited us to call her by her first name, which was Lorna, but we both felt awkward so we avoided calling her anything. The minister guy didn’t chat with us much, he mostly hunkered down talking to the Simonoffs, but the
deputy governor talked to Ellis, and because we were near Ellis, she also talked to us.

This was on the deck of the Coast Guard cutter, you understand—there was a kind of excitement, a festive atmosphere, a bonded, band-of-brothers situation, though detail-wise, on a technical level, we weren’t brothers or even all men and some of us didn’t like each other.

But we dismissed the issue of not liking each other, then. Liking each other, not liking each other, who cared, was our thinking aboard that charging white vessel of law enforcement. It was beside the point. Gina’s disgust with Thompson, Thompson’s pathological fear/hatred of “the gays”—it was meaningless, on the deck of the Coast Guard cutter.

I thought of when I’d first met Janeane, harshly indicting her sandals, observing the plantlike tendrils as they wound up her fishbelly calves—my frustration as she talked to me during peeing. How small it seemed to me now. I felt a real pang of affection for her, the way I’d seen her just minutes before, standing on the shore and waving her yellow handkerchief. She’d looked nostalgic then, as though we’d boarded the
Titanic
and away we steamed.

I’d first deployed my devil/Gina half, judging Janeane, but then my angel/Chip half had taken over. Yet seeing Gina and Janeane together, I’d noticed there wasn’t any conflict between them. Sure, they were opposites—Janeane deploring polymers while Gina ironically loved them, Janeane getting choked up over industrial meat production while Gina ironically ordered full plates of bacon at the all-American diners she frequented.

But still there was a kind of understanding between them, right? I thought of Gina raising a sly eyebrow at what Janeane was saying; of Janeane, sometimes, gazing at Gina in startled confusion.

We didn’t know what was going to happen, but at last something would—we had a trajectory. We had new strength with the government on our side: from what Nancy said to me, passing us on the deck, it seemed the civil servants might be interested in her idea for a mermaid sanctuary. They already had some plan in mind, she said, for “marine protected areas.”

We were aloft, moving forward at last, and not a single one of us was currently dead.

As we neared the armada, though—the first time I’d approached it in daylight—my mood changed rapidly. Damn! It was a floating citadel. It was a whole city on the ocean, with nets and cranelike structures, complicated metal architectures of utility. Small boats were moving among the larger ships, serving them, ferrying. My stomach flipped when I saw the armada/citadel. Who were we, really? And what was the law, even? We were a handful of men wearing berets, we were two very polite civil servants, one of whom was named Lorna; we were a small group of tourists, vacationing from our lives.

As the yachts and the trawlers towered over us, some soaring up gracefully in their white fiberglass slickness, some stolid as factories in their black rust and barnacles, what I saw was mass—I saw solidity. The law was ancient runes on a parchment, a parchment you might see in one of Chip’s gameworlds. Law was a tale and government was more a wish than a reality.
A smart dresser, maybe, but simply not effective. For the first time I understood its quaintness.

Government! Once we’d believed in it.

Those ships were really big.

We did have guns, at least (I reassured myself, looking sidelong at Raleigh’s face). He stood straight-backed at the prow, hands clasped behind him, jawline firm. The guns were a factor in our favor, I could see the logic there, but where there are guns there are always more guns. Seemed like another can of worms. The guns didn’t comfort me, for that reason.

There’d been some radio communiqués back and forth, I guessed, because we had a destination in the vast armada: the flagship yacht, where management resided. Now we circled the periphery, engine rumbling and wake churning as we cut a swath. I looked down at the white curls, at my flip-flop-clad feet on the deck, damp from the spray. I thought of the defectors, those former dive companions and partygoers. Where were they now, the blond-headed profiteer Riley, the toe fetishist from the Heartland, the substitute teacher? Where was the Fox News spearfisherman who’d rummaged around in my tampons?

I looked up at the rails, the gunwales, idly hoping to catch a glimpse of a familiar face. But if there were any people there, they were hidden from my sight.

Then the bureaucrats were climbing into an orange rubber motorboat—a Zodiac, Raleigh called it. Then he was boarding, then Nancy, then a couple more soldiers. I thought we’d all be left behind, till Nancy waved impatiently at Chip and he gave me a quick kiss and hurried to board too.

My husband was among the chosen people, but I wasn’t, apparently.

I raised an eyebrow at Gina and tried not to resent it, the fact that I hadn’t made the cut. I did resent it, though. I wondered whether I had offended Nancy somehow (bad breath? Or had she read my mind about her caterpillar eyebrows?). I felt only a bit better when, as the boat sputtered away toward the flagship yacht, Raleigh turned, smiled, and saluted me mockingly/flirtingly.

“Man. You could totally date him,” said Gina.

SO THERE I
was, cooling my heels with the rest of the rabble. It was me, Gina, Ellis, Sam, Thompson, Simonoff, the good doctor, and some leftover soldiers, still standing at strict attention on the deck, waiting on Sam’s orders. Thompson was talking to a crewman and Rick, with Ronnie’s help, was busy filming Miyoko. That Japanese VJ never stopped working; right then she was broadcasting an update from the stern of the cutter, where the mics wouldn’t pick up the interference of our background noise.

We watched quietly as the orange boat ferried our diplomatic dinghy over to the yacht with soaring lines, a pearly white vessel whose name, emblazoned in ornate gold curlicues, seemed to be
Narcissus
. I wasn’t sure why you’d name your luxury yacht that. Was it self-aware/ironic, or more straight-up toolishness?

I opened my mouth to ask Gina, but she was already talking.

“What are they going for, an injunction?” asked Gina.

“They’re going to ask them to simply pull up the nets,” said Ellis. “The minister says they don’t have the legally required permits.”

“And they think the parent company will just say, Oh, OK?” said Gina. “And, like, go gently into that good night?”

“Not really, no,” said Ellis. “They’re also filing for a PI. Not sure where that’s at, though, judicially.”

The arc of my confidence fell. Gone was the rush I’d felt as the Coast Guard cutter crested the waves, when speed was ours and we’d seemed to be duty-bound.

We’d had a higher calling, then.

“Hey,” said Sam, squinting into his binoculars, “I can see them talking, there on the upper deck. I can make out Nancy . . . that’d be the deputy governor, yeah. There’s the GM.”

“GM?” asked Gina.

“The resort’s general manager,” I said.

“Sam!” called one of the cutter’s crewmen, sticking his head out the door of the wheelhouse. “Get in here!”

Gina and I followed Sam over, looking sidelong at each other—we were hoping to get in on the action, whatever that might be. No one stopped us.

Inside, near the control panel with the steering wheel, a TV jutting out from the wall was playing CNN. We hung behind Sam and the crewmen and craned our necks.

It was live footage of the airport in Tortola, according to the news ticker. Very crowded: people hurried along pulling their roller bags, hefting their suitcases, pink-faced from the strain of
hefting their duffel bags. Disorder seemed to reign, and the reporter’s voice was barely audible. Then the scene changed: the ferry dock, also Tortola. I recognized it, since I’d been there less than a week before. Two ferries were docked at once, full of people; crowds were still pressing to get on them, crew pushing them away.

Then there was a reporter talking, a woman who stood on the quay with strands from her mound of polished yellow hair blowing across her face. She had a British accent, not unlike Ellis’s—and for all I knew, equally fake.

“. . . tourists descending on the island in numbers that have simply never been seen before,” I caught. “Every single hotel room on Virgin Gorda is full to capacity, according to the reports we’re getting, and frankly no one knows where the rest of the arriving crowds will be accommodated. Some are based here on Tortola, of course, where hotels rooms are also overbooked . . . .”

“Feculent shite,” said Ellis.

“It’s happening,” I said, and my throat closed gaggingly.

“Shhh,”
Gina hissed.

“. . . these are not all your friendly neighborhood scuba enthusiasts and beachgoers, which these tiny islands in the British Caribbean have depended on for decades,” said the reporter. “No, many of them apparently have a very
different
reason for visiting this tropical getaway.”

A man was talking, a microphone held up in front of his angry, slightly sweaty face; his backpack bobbed behind his head.

“. . . gotta get in there and take care of these things. Get rid of
them. Our mission is
annihilation
. What if they interbreed with humans? What then?”

The camera panned to the woman beside him, who smiled and nodded.

“What our
pastor
is saying,” she offered eagerly, “is this could be the Fifth Trumpet. Like it says in Revelation 9, you know, a man’s face with lion’s teeth, the wings of locusts and the tail of a scorpion—”

“Point being
is
,” interrupted the man, “these things are not the work of the Lord. These things are filth and abomination.”

I felt cold, and my scalp tingled. I backed out of the wheelhouse, hitting the deck rail with the small of my back. There was dizziness: the sky was too white. The sky attacked my eyeballs. Light was everywhere, when all I wanted was shade. I thought I might faint, although I’ve never fainted my whole life. I’m not sure why it hit me so hard, but basically, when I heard the man say that, my personality collapsed.

“Hey, hey,” said Gina, her hands firm on my shoulders. “Honey. You need to get a
grip
.”

“They’re coming,” I said.

“Well, that’s right,” said Gina. “What of it?”

She put her face close to mine and gazed into my eyes in what was, for Gina, a pretty strong bid for sincerity. I looked into her brown irises, her warm, almond-shaped eyes, so familiar and comforting, with their impossibly thick eyelashes courtesy of Latisse.

“Listen.
Deb
. It’s not your fault, sweetie. This was always going to happen. The mermaids were living on borrowed time. You see that, right?
It’s amazing they weren’t gone centuries ago. Like the giant sloths. The mammoths. The saber-tooth cats.”

It didn’t comfort me.