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

“Well bugger me,” said Ellis, “it’s the bird from the beach,” and at first I thought he meant a waterfowl—a seagull, possibly a tern.

“The woman from the parent company,” crowed Chip. “Look, Deb. And the guy with the spray-on tan!”

I got a good, solid five-second glimpse, between the heads of my companions. They were walking across the gangplank: the previous Mormon and her coworker, Mike Chantz, Janz or Djanz. They wore polo shirts and shorts, dressed for leisure, I guess, but there were plastic twist-ties around their wrists, and their wrists were behind their backs, and they were walking a little awkwardly.

“What’s the game now,” growled Thompson.

But Chip nodded. “I think I know, I think I know,” he said. “Thompson, you have to get us back!”

I stayed frustrated with Chip as the boat sped toward the shoreline, Thompson talking sometimes on the radio, other times hunkered down over the controls. I was frustrated because Chip wouldn’t tell me what the good news was: Chip was flat out convinced his information-withholding was in my own best interest, a point on which I flat out disagreed. He was like a small child on Christmas morning, during that trip back—the nearer we got to terra firma, the more excited he.

I tried some tactics: I tried to freeze him out, completely stonewalling him, my face shut tight and bitchy, my eyes dead like a shark’s. I wished, by signaling my coldness, to force him into confession. But it did no good.

Long story short, we achieved the shore without anything surprising happening. Next we scrambled out of the boat and trudged/hastened up the beach, each according to his mood. Thompson exchanged a series of grunts with the boat’s owner, who sat in the small parking lot idling his truck. Finally, when Chip had almost expired of pent-up energy and boiling impatience, Thompson hauled himself into the driver’s seat and drove us back to the motel.

There, in our room, surrounded by a raucous crowd, was Nancy.

Not dead at all. Au contrary.

I DON’T KNOW if you’ve ever been sure someone was dead, then found out you were wrong. It’s not really a standard experience—there’s no card section for it.

Prof. Simonoff, for obvious reasons, was the hub of startlement/amazement; we were bowled over and stupefied, but the professor was in a different category. That guy’s whole self was completely transformed, his bearing, his voice, even his face looked new to me. Although, in any of these arenas, I couldn’t have told you exactly why. The instant change taught me a lesson about mood or affect or what have you—not quite sure what the lesson was, per se, but it was in there somewhere. Something about the spirit animating the body. Or not animating it.

My point is, there was Nancy, a smidgeon paler but alive and well, not decomposing in the least—except insofar as we all are, dying as we live, or living as we die, taking that opportunity. Depends if you’re a glass half-full type or a glass half-empty, I guess.

Nancy was full color, animated, and life-size.

We charged up to embrace her, plowing through the cluster of others, Chip just ahead of me—though Nancy was never much of a hugger, if I’m being honest. Even at that moment, appearing among us like Lazarus from the tomb, the risen Christ, etc., she wasn’t big on hugging. She’s more the kind of person who stands there stiffly, passively enfolded. When she gets hugged her cardboard form sends out a signal of awkward unresponsiveness, with her plainly wondering when the “display” of “affection” will be completed. In that realm she has a maybe autistic quality.

Imagine my shiver of recognition, then indignation when she told us she’d been kidnapped. My kidnapping was extremely small potatoes, next to hers; mine was a casual, throwaway kidnapping where hers was serious (though also highly incompetent). I felt embarrassed by the inadequacy of my personal kidnapping. I was in the bush leagues, as a kidnapping victim.

Unlike me, Nancy had been stuck with a syringe, covered in a sheet, and rolled out of her cabana and across the grounds on a gurney, dressed up as a corpse. Then they’d stowed that expert in a windowless room, a room off the hallways behind the main restaurant, where she’d been found an hour before, while we were on the boat. Annette had been passing the door on her way to a walk-in freezer and heard Nancy’s thin wail of help, help through the wall; she used a key off the ring she’d snatched from the staff pegboard and voilà, set her free.

Not one of the refrigerators, no—the place had simply been a disused storeroom, standard room temp, but they kept Nancy on a cot, shot up with drugs to make her sleep. (“Benzodiazepine, I’d guess,” she said.)

Periodically a man would come in and hustle her to a small bathroom down the hall or give her a tray of restaurant vittles; he wouldn’t talk much at those times, she said, no one had deigned to tell her what she was doing there until she got it out of a second guy, who subbed in with the food one time. The Venture of Marvels needed a certain number of days, he said, to put its claim in place, to establish its rights. Until then, she was stuck.

“No one told me they faked my death,” she said, as her father stood close beside her and gazed fondly at her living face, with its many-legged eyebrows (Homely virtue! I thought. How good to have her back). He kept a hand posed quasi-formally on her shoulder, as though to indicate to himself that his daughter was there, actual, real and independently breathing—without, however, showing excessive affection: like daughter, like father.

“They never mentioned that,” went on Nancy.

“Why would they,” said Thompson. “No advantage in it. A female; possible hysterics.”

“I don’t get this,” said Simonoff. “Why do that? Why tell everyone she—she had drowned? Good