Mr. Eternity (12 page)

Azar lay down to nap in the sand. I tried to breathe deeply. A sweating smoking tattooed walrus of a man went by with his kid. He was giving the boy a lecture.

“Sea water not only cures you,” he said, “it gives you all the nutrients you need to survive.”

Another idiot, I thought, but when I saw them coming back a few minutes later, the man was holding the boy’s hand. There was a lesson to be learned here about affection and kindness, prejudice and ignorance, whatever, and I tried hard to learn it.

“False memories?” said Azar, snapping awake and giving voice to some internal dialogue about the ancient mariner. “Or else, let’s think about this, selective memories?”

“You remember what you need to remember.”

“Or even better,” he said, “elective memories. You remember what you want to remember.”

There were more frigate birds hanging around up there in the sky. I’d read somewhere that frigate birds were able to sleep in flight by shutting down one half of their brain at a time.

“When I think of one particular fall a few years ago,” Azar said, “I think of reggae and muscadine grapes. Is that a true memory? Did I listen to a lot of reggae and eat a lot of muscadine grapes? Or did I eat muscadine grapes and listen to reggae one time, and then it came to stand for that whole period in my life?”

He didn’t last long at the beach. He was excited about the movie and he wanted to do something. He went to the bookstore to read about Columbus, Magellan, Captain Cook.

When he was gone, I sat crunched like a broken umbrella in the shade of my coconut palm. It was very hot and I wanted badly to go for a swim, but I’d gotten stuck to my ego somehow and I couldn’t bear to walk across the sand and make myself into an object of scrutiny for the people around me. I kept promising myself I’d move as soon as this couple went by, or this couple, or as soon as those people over there were distracted. It took me twenty minutes to get down to the water, and then I squatted
there like an alligator, just my eyes above water, and told myself I wasn’t feeling so bad after all. I was not a starving pauper in Nairobi. I was not a garment worker in Central America.

Two girls settled in near my palm tree while I was in the water. I reflected on this word, “girls.” They were my age, and in a different era they would have been called young women, or even just women. In a yet more remote era I suppose they’d have been getting on toward spinsterhood. Today they were still girls. One of them was dark, Hispanic maybe, and the other was a small redhead with skin like a snowfield. She looked like she was getting burned even underneath her enormous straw hat.

I could not stay in the water forever, and eventually I went back to my towel and introduced myself. I forced myself to do it, even though my natural mode was shyness disguised as aloof self-absorption.

“People call me Bee,” said the Hispanic girl.

“What’s your real name?”

She looked troubled. “Are you making fun of me?”

“Am I making fun of you?”

“My name’s Bee.”

“Sorry.”

“Lena,” said the other girl. “Elena, but people
call
me Lena.”

They had a bottle of vodka and four cans of sugar-free Red Bull, which they’d carried here in a pink Victoria’s Secret bag. They were mixing the Red Bull and vodka in jelly jars.

“You want some?” said Bee.

“I’m trying to sort of live more cleanly these days.”

Bee could appreciate the benefits of clean living. With the dispassionate air of a woman discussing the features of her new cell phone, she explained that her father was a drug addict. Lena’s brother was too, she said, though Lena herself did not look happy to have this fact disclosed. She did not look happy about anything. She drew her legs up underneath her and pulled her dress down over her knees. She was trying to fold her whole body into the disk of shade under her hat. I suggested that she
move to the shade of my palm tree, but she pointed to the coconuts. Yet another danger. She was afraid they would fall on her.

“What are you reading?” I said.

She held the book out so I could see. It was a battered Signet Classic.

“
Tristram Shandy
on the beach!” I said.

She looked embarrassed. “I always thought I should read it.”

“It’s great. It’s all of modernism two hundred years beforehand. The black page.”

Bee squinted slightly and looked away. Lena nodded and blushed. I knew I was misreading the situation somehow.

“Are you just on vacation?” said Bee.

“My friend and I are here making a documentary.”

“A movie?”

An egret floated out of the sky like a plastic bag. I was conscious of Lena watching me from beneath her vast shady hat. I did not want to seem like a pretentious jerk, but isn’t that what I was?

“We don’t know anything about filmmaking,” I said. “I don’t know how we got the idea we could do it. It’s about an old man who lives in a boat over on Mango Lane.”

“Old Dan,” said Bee. “Daniel Defoe.”

“You know him?”

“Of course we know him.”

They knew him because they lived on Key West. They had grown up here, which seemed extraordinary to me, like growing up in Las Vegas or Disney World.

“What’s the idea with this guy?” I said. “He told us he was five hundred years old. Six hundred maybe.”

“Yeah,” said Bee. “He’s pretty old.”

“There’s a photo of him at John Baxter’s maritime museum,” said Lena. “You should go look at it. It’s from just after the Civil War, I think. So says John Baxter. Obviously it’s a fake.”

“John Baxter’s maritime museum?”

“He runs it out of his house. The John Baxter Maritime Museum.”

They went for a swim. Lena was skinny and pale and beautiful. They were both beautiful. Girls in their bathing suits! Girls or women or spinsters. No matter. It was a reason to go on living. It was a vision of life itself.

But then they had to go. Bee had to get to work. She was a housekeeper at Tradewinds Cottage. Lena had to get to work too, though she wouldn’t say where. They had this little break each afternoon and that was all. I didn’t know what to do. Bee said maybe they’d see me tomorrow, if I was still around. Lena smiled and made a show of getting her stuff together. I waited until they’d disappeared around the corner and then I left as well.

I met Azar at the bookstore. We had coffee and then walked back to the ancient mariner’s house, or his boat, or whatever it was proper to call it. Tom Rath was loitering outside the gate once again, peering in. Later we learned that he was staying across the street at Pelican Court.

I said, “We’re not in the mood, Tom. We’re serious people and we’re having a serious conversation about the environment.”

“My toupee is made from recycled water bottles. It’s hot as the dickens.”

“Hold on,” said Azar. “How do you know Tom Rath?”

“How do you?”

Tom Rath said, “Everyone knows everyone.”

“He bet me he could stand on his head for ten seconds,” said Azar.

“Once I was standing on my head so good,” said Tom Rath, “so still, like a statue, that a dog peed on me.”

“Not this morning, though.”

“Hey, Tom,” I said, “we’ve got some things to do. We’ll check back with you later.”

“You think I’m a scumbag, is it? You think I’m out here and I like lying to my wife? She’s not even my wife! She’s my husband. His name is William. I love him but sometimes a person needs to flap free in the wind a little bit.”

It took a while to rouse the ancient mariner, but when we’d gotten him
upright again he was very cheerful. He told us to set up our camera. He was going to tell us a story about mermaids, to take our minds off garbage.

“The first time I saw one was in 1575,” he said, “off the coast of Ceylon. We caught her in a net while we were fishing for our supper. She had a small flat nose and round gray eyes and hair like seaweed. Actually she was very ugly, but I was haunted for weeks by her perfect breasts. This mermaid also had gray skin and a powerful fluke, like a porpoise. That’s why we didn’t eat her. It wasn’t because she looked so much like a young girl. Monkeys look very much like human children, after all, and in port we ate monkeys often enough. It was just that we thought her flesh was likely to be too oily, because of this additional or secondary resemblance to a porpoise, or a grampus.”

“A grampus?” said Azar.

“Or a porpoise. But today’s story takes place on a fishing boat off the Faroe Islands. It must have been around 1770. That’s where I had an almost fatal encounter with a mermaid. We caught her when we were fishing for cod, which was an important commodity in those days.”

“Hang on,” said Azar. “Are you saying that you did not eat that Ceylonese mermaid, or that you never ate mermaids at all?”

“And anyway,” I said, “how did they go extinct if they weren’t fished out? It was probably climate change.”

“Mermaids and snowmen,” said Azar. “Endangered species in a warming world.”

“I never ate one. And I should also explain that ‘mermaid’ is only a very general term. There were as many kinds of mermaids in the sea as there are monkeys and apes and humans on earth. Some of them had soft gray skin, like the one I’d seen off Ceylon, but others had rough skin, like sharks, and others had fine rainbow scales. Some had a fin running from between the eyes, up over the head, down the neck, and all the way to the lower back. Some had webbed fingers, and others had very short necks and a funny kind of feet at the extremity of the tail. The main thing is that all of them had breasts like a Dutch wet nurse
or a sixteen-year-old dairy maid. That’s what I’m driving at. And the mermaid we caught that day in 1770 was sleeker and prettier than the other mermaids I’d seen. She had thick black hair and a strong fluke and caramel-colored skin, and she had breasts like you could only hope to see in the moments before death, when you’re caught in the anchor chain and going over. She was a knockout. We put her in a rain barrel and she sat there watching us.”

“Do you think it was like dogs,” I said, interrupting again, “where they’re all the same species, but they look so different?”

“This is part of what I’m getting at. Why were some so humanlike, and others more fishlike? What accounts for the diversity of mermaids?”

“What about mermen?” said Azar.

“We hardly ever caught mermen. They must have had different habits.”

“You did catch them sometimes, though?”

“Stop interrupting. I’m telling a story. I had the second watch that night, and I was in a fever of anxiety over that mermaid. I remember thinking that I was in the prime of life, just three hundred years old, and it was a scandal to live like I did. Like a monk. Did I need to keep myself perfectly spotlessly chaste, for Anna Gloria’s sake? And I didn’t think I could resolve this trouble by ignoring it and waiting for the dawn, so I went below and stole some canary wine from the mate. What you have to understand is how beautiful this mermaid was. You yourselves have probably only seen monstrous embalmed mermaids, if you’ve seen one at all, or maybe you’ve seen fake mermaids. In England I once saw a mermaid said to have been taken from the Gulf of Stanchio, but it was only a salmon’s tail sewn on the torso of a shaved monkey. Awful sight! Another time, in Boston, they were exhibiting a mermaid’s skeleton, but I knew it was the dugong of Sumatra, a type of sea cow, because I’d subsisted on dugong milk for a few months when I was shipwrecked in the archipelago. I’d swim up underneath the cows and suckle with the calves. I just want to emphasize that the word ‘mermaid’ comprehended the most repulsive creatures in the sea, but also the most beautiful, the sirens of the ancients, and if you’ve never seen one of
the beautiful ones then you can’t know what it was to be there, drinking canary wine in the haunting twilight of the North Sea, while she beckons you with her mischievous adolescent eyes.”

“We can imagine,” said Azar.

“I couldn’t keep away. I was just pivoting around the rain barrel and gawking, and anyway I was roaring drunk. You know how there’s a sweet desire that comes from beauty in the garden at dusk, but there’s also the feeling you get in a Calicut brothel, when your lungs are burning and the air is thick with sailors’ curses? The mermaid smiled at me! Her breasts were full and round! They bobbed to the surface like buoys! Then she grabbed me with her webbed fingers and kissed me. It was a warm shocking kiss, and I didn’t need to be told twice. I climbed in there with her. I took my clothes off beforehand so I’d have something dry to put on afterwards, but anyway there it is. I remember the shock of cold, the white northern sky, the warmth of the mermaid herself, her dexterous hands, her teeth. I was very timid at first, but she knew what she wanted. I suppose she was accustomed to powerful mermen. She bit me hard, out of love I think, and laughed a human laugh, and licked the blood where it ran down my neck. It was like a holiday in a distant port. You come ashore and everyone’s celebrating, you don’t know whose God is whose, you don’t care, you just put on the feathers and drink the sweet-potato wine.

“The next thing I knew, some of the other crewmen were pouring rum down my throat and slapping me all over to get my blood moving. I’d fallen asleep in the water and they’d found me hung over the edge of the barrel. I was naked and chilled to the bone, and the mermaid was just sitting there as before, bored as anything. I didn’t hold it against her. Later we threw her back and she swam away like nothing had happened. I think about her sometimes. I think how sad that they’ve all gone away. But anyway, I think this explains why there were so many types of mermaids. It was because of incidents like this one. The sea was crowded with the progeny of sailors and mermaids, and maybe some were only one-sixteenth human, but others had human and fish characteristics in different proportions, in as many grades and combinations as
you please. The first mermaids must have derived from an amorous connection between a sailor and a porpoise.”

“Of course,” said Azar, looking through the viewfinder. “That explains it.”

I said, “You were three hundred years old at the time, and still vigorous enough to get in that barrel with a monster?”