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

“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.

It’s only been days, I thought, a handful of days after probably tens of thousands of years we must have lived in parallel—we stumbled across them, we filmed them, and now their enemies are legion.

Here come my people, those teeming hordes, here come my people, brandishing their stupidity. Above their heads they raise stupidity like a flaming sword.

I couldn’t help imagining myself below us, the vault of water above me, the dark weight of the armada bearing down, oppressive, the nets sinking, the nets surrounding us.

I really couldn’t breathe.

“You’re white as a sheet! Head between your knees,” said Gina, and she shoved the top of my head and made me sit down right there on the gritty surface of the deck, where instantly my ass got wet and cold. I didn’t care, I just kept trying to draw breath, maybe it wasn’t a panic attack, maybe it was my heart! (So I thought, and then felt sheepish—I was playing Janeane’s role, with my hypochondria/panic attack; I recognized for a second that I’d feared being Janeane as soon as I met her. Janeane embarrassed me like a bad play, a close relation trailing dirty underwear out the bottom of a pant leg: somehow I overidentified. That’s why I brought my Gina side to bear. Then, wearing the muumuu for all the world to see, I’d fully realized my fears.) Still all I could feel was the nets closing above my head, as I swam with the mermaids in their blue fathoms.

I sensed the massive hulls of those greedy ships above us, their shadows blackening the water and closing off the sky.

I’m not sure how long I sat there, enclosed in my private grief/panic cavern—at a certain point it turned out that I was crying and too ashamed to show my tear-streaked, contorted face. I felt like a child again, because I hadn’t cried in front of a group of people, I figured, since then—at least, not so that anyone would notice. Now I’d made a fool of myself, as sadness overtook me; I’d let down the façade of cohesion.

And I was angry at Gina, even, Gina with her irony, even though she meant well, even though her gentle hand sat on my shoulder, lightly patting, while Chip was off with other people, pursuing more important aims. She raised the shield of irony to deflect her opponents. She and her other friends all raised their ironic shields, I thought—her fellow academics, for instance—instead of being willing to fight. Just lifted the shields and held them there.

On the one hand you had the religious hysterics, obesely advancing with their ignorance. On the other hand, to oppose them, all you had was some thin effetes from the city, hiding behind a flimsy row of high-irony deflecting shields.

It wouldn’t save us, I thought. It wouldn’t save anything.

I hit Gina’s hand away, at one point, shaking my head, refusing to raise my face. But then I felt painful remorse, as I always do if I lash out at Gina D., remembering the onset of her irony. It was when her mother died. How Gina had adored her mother, a mother who lived for her and her two brothers, who laughed a lot and was good-natured, actually almost a saint, to be honest. How often her mother hugged them, always looking for opportunities. The love shone out of that woman.

Then withering, pain, a skeletal appearance. No more smiling. And gone.

From that time on Gina painstakingly built the shield, piece by piece. I couldn’t stay angry at Gina D. Never. Beneath her irony, to me, she’d always be that desolate kid.

And anyway who was I to judge?

I was a tourist, I thought. Even at home. I’d always had that aspect, the aspect of a tourist.

“DEBORAH!” I HEARD eventually, once I was ready to absorb current events.

Gina had gone off somewhere, murmuring something about getting me a blanket. I’d been shivering for a good while on my piece of grainy dirty-white deck, my modest, wet square of misery.

The voice filtered down from above; it was Sam. He looked preoccupied. Of course: he was a soldier, not a nursemaid.

I raised my head, wiped my eyes and nose and stood up shakily, one hand braced heavy on the rail.

“Take a look,” he said, and handed me his binoculars. “They’re just standing there. I figure you can read your husband’s expressions better than I can, right? He’s nearest us, there’s a pretty good view of him from the front. So