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

He wanted to draw me out of my personality breakdown by distracting me. I saw that, and I appreciated it. I decided to play along. I took the binoculars from him.

I can never quite get the hang of binoculars, don’t like them, basically, and as I was futzing around trying to normalize my face and emotions and at the same time master the focus ring, I must have turned my body. Because as I fiddled I noticed the specs were pointed in the wrong direction now, the wrong direction completely. And when my view sharpened I was looking out over a network of nets across the open ocean. I swiveled, trying to find the Narcissus again, but then I swiveled back, hesitating. There was a large, flattish gray bump out there in the water. Actually a couple of them.

“I didn’t know there were atolls out here,” I said.

“There aren’t,” said Sam.

I blinked; my eyes were watering, but this time from wind or staring, not emotion. The flat gray things were moving; now they were curved, not flat, I saw.

I took the binoculars off my eyes and handed them back to him. The gray bumps, in fact, were visible with the naked eye.

“Then what are those?” I asked.

“Shit,” said Sam, raising the binoculars.

“What?”

“No, that can’t be,” he said. “Wait. Wait a second.” He was playing with the focus ring, or maybe zooming.

“Look!” said Gina. “What’s going on? Water came out of it!”

“Whales.”

“Huge whales,” I said.

“We never see whales this big,” said Sam, but he still sounded distracted, as though it was hard to muster the time/energy to talk to us. Then, under his breath: “What the hell?”

“What species?” burst out Ronnie, running up from the stern. “Rick’s filming them. What are they?”

“It can’t be,” said Sam, shaking his head. He was still staring through the field glasses, all tense and pressed against the rails. “They’re not—no way, not this far south this time of year, I never heard of that. It’s not a finback, see, it’s even bigger—that baby’s ninety feet long at least. Maybe a hundred. Blues!”

“Blue whales?” asked Ellis, dubious. He shook his head. “In the Caribbean in summertime? Go on, mate. Pull the other one.”

“I worked one summer on a whalewatch boat,” said Sam. “I know my cetaceans. But you’re right. I’ve never seen this before. They usually travel in pairs or by themselves—not pods like that. Not blues. And they don’t stay up for so long, they’re not typically so visible. What the hell.”

“Five,” said Ronnie. “Six. Seven . . .”

I couldn’t get a sense of their size, personally. Out there on the waves they were a fleet of dark bumps—that was all.

“They’re goddamn blues, all right,” said Thompson, appearing out of the wheelhouse. He was holding a can of beer. (When it came to beer being handed out, why him? Where was the beer for me?)

“Oh shit, are they going to get caught? Caught in the fishing nets?” asked Gina. “Jesus. Really? Enough already.”

“I never saw so many in one place,” said Thompson. He had a brief coughing fit, then stuck his beer in one of his large cargo pockets and fished in his tobacco pouch. “And we’re talking, I’ve seen ’em in the Antarctic. They make ’em even bigger down there. Course, we don’t know much about blue whales. Goddamn mystery. Used to think they migrated, turns out not all of them do. Bunch off the coast of Sri Lanka never leave home at all. Pygmy blues, just sixty feet long. Regular ones have hearts the size of cars. Baby could crawl through one of their arteries. No sweat.”

“Doesn’t make sense,” said Sam. “A large pod of blues? I’ve never seen that. They’re coming toward us, too, toward the nets—they’re headed straight for the nets across the open water. See? Is your man Rick still filming?”

“He’s getting it,” nodded Ronnie.

“Blue whale calls are louder than jet planes, you know that?” said Thompson to me. I briefly eyed his beer. If I moved suddenly, I could grab it. “Songs carry thousands of miles. Freakish. Slow swimmers. Still, used to be faster than we were, before the steam engine. Before the explosive harpoons.”

I glanced up at the yacht, where I could make out Chip—suddenly I was sure it was him—leaning over the side and gazing toward the whales, just as we were. There was Nancy, too. Behind them, other heads and shoulders.

“Can’t we get closer?” I asked Sam. “Out by the nets? To see them better?”

“We could take the inflatable, maybe,” he said.

He sounded dubious at first; then (seeing Miyoko’s hopeful face as she came toward us) he seemed to get a rush of energy, sounding more enthused. “You know what? Let’s do it. This is a once-in-a-lifetime sighting. Let’s take the Zodiac.”

He stepped away and talked into his radio; in no time the orange inflatable that had been bobbing alongside the Narcissus, nobody in it but one sailor at the helm, was jumping over the waves back to us.

Miyoko wanted to come, of course, and Ronnie, and Rick lugged the videocamera along—in no time we were all scrambling down the ramp into the smaller boat. As we poured in Sam tossed us lifejackets from a bin under a bench, and we sat down and clicked their plastic buckles. Then there was engine noise and bouncing and a wall of spray that drenched me—it’d been bone dry on the high-up deck of the cutter, by comparison, despite my ass that was now soaked and freezing.

We sped off along the edge of the nearest net.

I wished Chip was with us—I wished our phones worked out here on the waves, at least I’d have been able to text him then—but failing that I turned and waved at the crowd on the Narcissus’ deck, as we left the yacht behind. I couldn’t be completely sure—the heads and shoulders up there were blurry and interchangeable to me once again—but I thought he raised