Mermaids in Paradise by Lydia Millet (debian ebook reader .txt) 📕

about global warming. He said it seemed to be nature—that various Ice Ages, also, had taken place now and then, and the warming was a non-Ice Age.

His logic went: It has been colder before, and now it will be warm. The film-industry Bay Arean, enraged by this, was raining thunder upon him.

Meanwhile the Heartland wife and the other Bay Arean were making small talk off to one side, trying to take the edge off any free-floating climate-change aggression with harmless domesticity. The Bay Arean designer recommended air plants for the Heartland living room, which could be placed in clear-plastic globes that dangled from shelves or light fixtures. They required no soil. You watered them with a spray bottle, he told her; couldn’t be easier. The Heartland wife received this wisdom with earnest nods.

Presently Chip latched onto a couple of words in the Bay Arean filmmaker’s angry tirade—the words carbon dioxide, I picked up—and used them to launch a friendly digression. Chip plays the fool to make peace, often, as well as to make people like him, and in this case he asked if carbon dioxide was the gas from car tailpipes that killed depressed people. If so we should reduce it, Chip suggested with modest buffoonery, absolutely—no one should die in a garage. Least of all a person who’s goddamn depressed. In my garage, went Chip’s transitional patter, there’s a garbage can that smells, some old strips of moldy carpet and an aging Nissan Sentra. Is that a fitting sunset to a life?

This led to a lighthearted discussion of which cars would be the worst to die in, with “minivan” leading, and the conversation was thus steered into the social safe house of irony.

All of this I heard in the background, in pieces, as the parrotfish expert enthused about how coral went in the fishes’ mouths and white, tropical sands came out their ass-ends. We wouldn’t have the tropics as we knew them—with highly visible reef creatures swimming over a pale background in water that looked turquoise—if not for parrotfish and other “bioeroders,” she chin-wagged to me. The tropics would look very different with no white sand, wouldn’t they, and without the reefs and their nibbling fish that sand would disappear, said the biologist. In fact, she elaborated, gesturing at the Bay Arean off to her left, what he was talking about, the warming, the rising acid of seawater, all that would kill the parrotfish, she said, in the event that it continued.

“. . . generate models with fairly narrow margins of error,” she was saying through her final mouthful of crème caramel—because by then I’d realized it wasn’t a flan, strictly speaking. “Of course those models have been completely disregarded. Because, as I’m sure you know, an effective political response to the science, on the time frame needed, was always an impossibility.”

I was thinking of flipping the table switch, because the truth was that most of the wine glasses and beer pitchers were still full at our table and we wouldn’t be leaving that table and hitting dry land anytime soon. Yet once again nausea was rising in me, as we floated past a two-top where a poorly dressed couple seemed to be dipping fried squid rings into a pot of onion-scented sauce. I felt around with my foot for the center post of the table, but all I got was air; I was near the end of the table. So I had to scoot my chair over a few inches, then a few more, to come within range of the central post.

I didn’t want to call attention to my activities, though; I didn’t want to seem like a schemer, so I went on nodding and talking to the biologist while this was going on. Above the table’s edge I was normal, albeit feeling increasingly queasy; below it I was little more than a stuck-out limb with a sneaking, feely foot, making forays.

When my toes finally touched the table’s main post I cast off my shoe and inched the toes up and down the post, looking for the telltale bump of a switch. Listening to the biologist I got distracted, though, so it took several moments for me to notice the post wasn’t as smooth as it should be, the post was in fact furry, and furthermore it was a leg.

The leg extended from the Heartland man. He whipped his head around like it was being spun on its neck-stalk by a Linda Blair Satan.

I was startled by the abruptness of the head spin and snatched my foot back with a speed that rivaled his.

But it was too late. He was smiling at me. The Heartland husband thought I was making a pass at him.

And here’s where I made my second mistake, because instead of coming clean and admitting I’d been looking for the anti-vomit button, I lost my way in confusion. There was a guilty look on my face, I know, as I averted my eyes in embarrassment from his strangely avid gaze. I had to reach out my bare foot a bit in his direction yet again, in order to snag the abandoned mule and tumble said mule back toward me with my toe tips. Then I wriggled the foot back into it.

Making matters worse, I shifted my body neatly away even as I did this, recommitting my attention to the dismal future of parrotfish. For all the world as though I was either ashamed of my footsy overture or, worse, coy.

My eye-contact avoidance convinced the husband, I believe. He knew me for the strumpet that I wasn’t.

AS WE WERE leaving the restaurant, the Heartland guy got next to me while Chip strode ahead listening to the Bay Arean designer orate on the subject of high-end prefab sheds. The Heartland wife had gone to the restroom with the parrotfish expert, so her husband and I were, unfortunately, alone and bringing up the rear.

“So, hey,” he said. “You don’t say much, do you?”

“I say a lot,” I said.