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

business casual, both dark-skinned like most islanders, slight of build and faultlessly polite, a woman and a man. Their accents were a kind of soft quasi-Brit Creole; they had a genteel quality. (Ellis told me later they weren’t elected officials but appointed by the Queen.) Gina tried to offer them coffee but gave up when she couldn’t find any. They were very concerned, they said, that required commercial-fishing permits had not been even applied for by the parent company. There’d also been a number of related “irregularities,” they realized, concerning the actions of the “constabulary.” They’d be going out to investigate shortly, heading out to meet the armada in an unannounced visit aboard the U.S. Coast Guard’s cutter.

The woman, who turned out to be the deputy governor, said we could hitch a ride, if we wished to. Could our party be ready by 6 a.m.?

It was then that Raleigh and Sam appeared at the open door; Raleigh winked at me. I grabbed Chip’s arm and inclined my head in the soldiers’ direction, impressing on him via sharp finger-squeeze that we probably shouldn’t shout out a joyful greeting. These were the “higher-ups” Raleigh had been avoiding, I figured; orders had finally come down.

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