Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep Read online

  There’s a certain sort of Brazilian you find along the shore in the fishing villages, old yet ageless. See one of their men and you think he could be fifty, he could be sixty—will probably look the same when he’s eighty-five. Such was Juao. We once figured it out. He’s seven hours older than I am.

  We became friends sometime before the accident when I got tangled in his nets working high lines in the Vorea Current. A lot of guys would have taken their knife and hacked their way out of the situation, ruining fifty-five, sixty dollars’ worth of nets. That’s an average fisherman’s monthly income down here. But I surfaced and sat around in his boat while we untied me. Then, like typical coastal kids, we came in and got plastered. Since I cost him a day’s fishing, I’ve been giving him hints on where to fish ever since. He buys me drinks when I come up with something.

  This has been going on for fifteen years. During that time my life has been smashed up and land-bound. In the same time Juao has married off his five sisters, got married himself and had two children.

  (Oh, those bolitos and teneros asados that Amalia—her braids swung out, her brown breasts shook so when she turned to laugh—would make for Sunday dinner/supper/Monday breakfast.) I rode with them in the ambulance ’copter all the way into Brasilia. In the hospital hall Juao and I stood together, both still barefoot, he tattered with fish scales in his hair, me just tattered, and I held him while he cried and I tried to explain how a world that could take a pubescent child and with a week of operations make an amphibious creature that can exist for a month on either side of the sea’s foam-fraught surface could still be helpless before certain rampant endocrine cancers coupled with massive renal deterioration. Juao and I returned to the village alone, by bus, three days before our birthday—back when I was twenty-three and Juao was twenty-three and seven hours old.

  “This morning,” Juao said. (The shuttle danced in the web at the end of the orange line.) “I got a letter for you to read me. It’s about the children. Come on, we go up and drink.” The shuttle paused, backtracked twice, and he yanked the knot tight. We walked along the port toward the square. “Do you think the letter says that the children are accepted?”

  “If it’s from the Aquatic Corp. They just send postcards when they reject someone. The question is, how do you feel about it?”

  “You are a good man. If they grow up like you, then it will be fine.”

  “But you’re still worried.” I’d been prodding Juao to get the kids into the International Aquatic Corp nigh on since I became their godfather. It would mean much time away from the village during their training period—and they might eventually be stationed in any ocean in the world. But two motherless children had not been easy on Juao or his sisters. The Corp would mean education, travel, interesting work, the things that make up one kind of good life. They wouldn’t look twice their age when they were thirty; and not too many amphimen look like me.

  “Worry is part of life. But the work is dangerous. Did you know there is an amphiman going to try and lay cable down in the Slash?”

  I frowned. “Again?”

  “Yes. And that is what you tried to do when the sea broke you to pieces and burned the parts, eh?”

  “Must you be so damned picturesque?” I asked. “Who’s going to beard the lion this time?”

  “A young amphiman named Tork. They speak of him down at the docks as a brave man.”

  “Why the hell are they still trying to lay the cable there? They’ve gotten by this long without a line through the Slash.”

  “Because of the fish,” Juao said. “You told me why fifteen years ago.”

  “Sixteen,” I said, “actually. We had a birthday three months back, you and me.”

  Juao went on as if it made no difference. “The fish are still there, and we fishermen who cannot live below are still here. If the children go for the operations, then there will be less fishermen. But today . . . ” He shrugged. “They must either lay the line across the fish paths or down in the Slash.” Juao shook his head.

  Funny things, the great power cables the Aquatic Corp has been strewing across the ocean floor to bring power to their undersea mines and farms, to run their oil wells—and how many flaming wells have I capped down there—for their herds of whale, and chemical distillation plants. They carry two-hundred-sixty-cycle current. Over certain sections of the ocean floor, or in sections of the water with certain mineral contents, this sets up inductance in the water itself which sometimes—and you will probably get a Nobel prize if you can detail exactly why it isn’t always—drives the fish away over areas up to twenty-five and thirty miles, unless the lines are laid in the bottom of those canyons that delve into the ocean floor.

  “This Tork thinks of the fishermen. He is a good man too.” I raised my eyebrows—the one that’s left, anyway—and tried to remember what my little Undine had said about him that morning.

  And remembered not much.

  “I wish him luck,” I said.

  “What do you feel about this young man going down into the Coral-rimmed jaws to the Slash?”

  I thought for a moment. “I think I hate him.”

  Juao looked up.

  “He is an image in a mirror where I look and am forced to regard what I once was,” I went on. “I envy him the chance to succeed where I failed, and I can come on just as quaint as you can. I hope he makes it.”

  Juao twisted his shoulders in a complicated shrug (once I could do that) which is coastal Brazilian for, “I didn’t know things had progressed to that point, but seeing that they have, there is little to be done.”

  “The sea is that sort of mirror,” I said.

  “Yes.” Juao nodded.

  Behind us I heard the slapping of sandals on concrete. I turned in time to catch my goddaughter in my good arm. My godson had grabbed hold of the bad one and was swinging on it.

  “Tio Cal—?”

  “Hey, Tio Cal, what did you bring us?”

  “Clara, you will pull him over,” Juao reprimanded. “Let go, Fernando!”

  And, bless them, they ignored their father.

  “What did you bring us?”

  “What did you bring us, Tio Cal?”

  “If you let me, I’ll show you.” So they stepped back, dark-eyed and quivering. I watched Juao watching: brown pupils on ivory balls, and in the left eye a vein had broken in a jagged smear. He was loving his children, who would soon be as alien to him as the fish he netted. He was also looking at the terrible thing that was me and wondering what would come to his own spawn. And he was watching the world turn and grow older, clocked by the waves, reflected in that mirror.

  It’s impossible for me to see what the population explosion and the budding colonies on Luna and Mars and the flowering beneath the ocean really look like from the disrupted cultural mélange of a coastal fishing town. But I come closer than many others, and I know what I don’t understand.

  I pushed around in my pocket and fetched out the milky fragment I had brought from the beach. “Here. Do you like this one?” And they bent above my webbed and alien fingers.

  In the supermarket, which is the biggest building in the village, Juao bought a lot of cake mixes. “That moist, delicate texture,” whispered the box when you lifted it from the shelf, “with that deep flavor, deeper than chocolate!”

  I’d just read an article about the new vocal packaging in a U.S. magazine that had gotten down last week so I was prepared and stayed in the fresh vegetable section to avoid temptation. Then we went up to Juao’s house. The letter proved to be what I’d expected.

  The kids had to take the bus to Brasilia tomorrow. My godchildren were on their way to becoming fish.

  We sat on the front steps and drank and watched the donkeys and the motorbikes and the men in baggy trousers, the women in yellow scarves and bright skirts with wreaths of garlic and sacks of onions. As well, a few people glittered by in the green scales of amphimen uniforms.

  Finally Juao got tired and went in to take a nap. M
ost of my life has been spent on the coast of countries accustomed to siestas, but those first formative ten were passed on a Danish collective farm and the idea never really took. So I stepped over my goddaughter, who had fallen asleep on her fists on the bottom step, and walked back through the town toward the beach.

  III

  At midnight Ariel came out of the sea, climbed the rocks, and clicked her nails against my glass wall so that droplets ran, pearled by the gibbous moon.

  Earlier I had stretched in front of the fireplace on the sheepskin throw to read, then dozed off. The conscientious timer had asked me if there was anything I wanted, and getting no answer had turned off the Dvořák Cello Concerto, which was on its second time around, extinguished the reading lamp, and stopped dropping logs onto the flame so that now, as I woke, the grate was carpeted with coals.

  She clicked again, and I raised my head from the cushion. The green uniform, her amber hair—all color was lost under the silver light outside. I lurched across the rug, touched the button, and the glass slid into the floor. The breeze came to my face as the barrier fell.

  “What do you want?” I asked. “What time is it, anyway?”

  “Tork is on the beach, waiting for you.”

  The night was warm but windy. Below the rocks silver flakes chased each other in to shore. The tide lay full.

  I rubbed my face. “The new boss man? Why didn’t you bring him up to the house? What does he want to see me about?”

  She touched my arm. “Come. They are all down on the beach.”

  “Who all ?”

  “Tork and the others.”

  She led me across the patio and to the path that wound to the sand. The sea roared in the moonlight. Down the beach people stood around a driftwood fire that whipped the night. Ariel walked beside me.

  Two of the fishermen from town were crowding each other on the bottom of an overturned washtub, playing guitars. The singing, raucous and rhythmic, jarred across the paled sand. Shark’s teeth shook on the necklace of an old woman dancing. Others were sitting on an overturned dinghy, eating.

  Over one part of the fire on a skillet two feet across, oil frothed through pink islands of shrimp. One woman ladled them in; another ladled them out.

  “Tio Cal!”

  “Look, Tio Cal is here!”

  “Hey, what are you two doing up?” I asked. “Shouldn’t you be home in bed?”

  “Poppa Juao said we could come. He’ll be here, too, soon.”

  I turned to Ariel. “Why are they all gathering?”

  “Because of the laying of the cable tomorrow at dawn.” Someone was running up the beach, waving a bottle in each hand.

  “They didn’t want to tell you about the party. They thought that it might hurt your pride.”

  “My what . . . ?”

  “If you knew they were making so big a thing of the job you had failed at—”

  “But—”

  “—and that had hurt you so in failure. They did not want you to be sad. But Tork wants to see you. I said you would not be sad. So I went to bring you down from the rocks.”

  “Thanks, I guess.”

  “Tio Cal?”

  But the voice was bigger and deeper than a child’s.

  He sat on a log back from the fire, eating a sweet potato. The flame flickered on his dark cheekbones, in his hair, wet and black. He stood, came to me, held up his hand. I held up mine and we slapped palms. “Good.” He was smiling. “Ariel told me you would come. I will lay the power line down through the Slash tomorrow.” His uniform scales glittered down his arms. He was very strong. But standing still, he still moved. The light on the cloth told me that. “I . . . ” He paused. I thought of a nervous, happy dancer. “I wanted to talk to you about the cable.” I thought of an eagle; I thought of a shark. “And about the . . . accident. If you would.”

  “Sure,” I said. “If there’s anything I could tell you that would help.”

  “See, Tork,” Ariel said. “I told you he would talk to you about it.” I could hear his breathing change.

  “It really doesn’t bother you to talk about the accident?”

  I shook my head and realized something about that voice. It was a boy’s voice that could imitate a man’s. Tork was not over nineteen.

  “We’re going fishing soon,” Tork told me. “Will you come?”

  “If I’m not in the way.”

  A bottle went from the woman at the shrimp crate to one of the guitarists, down to Ariel, to me, then to Tork. (The liquor, made in a cave seven miles inland, was almost rum. The too-tight skin across the left side of my mouth makes the manful swig a little difficult to bring off. I got “rum” down my chin.) He drank, wiped his mouth, passed the bottle on and put his hand on my shoulder. “Come down to the water.”

  We walked away from the fire. Some of the fishermen stared after us. A few of the amphimen glanced, and glanced away.

  “Do all the young people of the village call you Tio Cal?”

  “No. Only my godchildren. Their father and I have been friends since I was . . . well, younger than you.”

  “Oh, I thought perhaps it was a nickname. That’s why I called you that.”

  We reached wet sand where orange light cavorted at our feet. The broken shell of a lifeboat rocked in moonlight. Tork sat down on the shell’s rim. I sat beside him. The water splashed to our knees.

  “There’s no other place to lay the power cable?” I asked. “There is no other way to take it except through the Slash?”

  “I was going to ask you what you thought of the whole business. But I guess I don’t really have to.” Tork shrugged and clapped his hands together a few times. “All the projects this side of the bay have grown huge and cry for power. The new operations tax the old lines unmercifully. There was a power failure last July in Cayine down the shelf below the twilight level. The whole underwater village was without light for two days; three amphimen died of overexposure to the cold currents coming up from the depths. If we laid the cables farther up, we chance disrupting our own fishing operations as well as those of the fishermen on shore.”

  I nodded.

  “Cal, what happened to you in the Slash?”

  Eager, scared Tork. I was remembering now, not the accident, but the midnight before, pacing the beach, guts clamped with fists of fear and anticipation. Some of the Indians back where they make the liquor still send messages by tying knots in palm fibers. One could have spread my entrails then, or Tork’s tonight, to read our respective horospecs.

  Juao’s mother knew the knot language, but he and his sisters never bothered to learn because they wanted to be modern, and, as children, still confused with modernity the new ignorances, lacking modern knowledge.

  “When I was a boy,” Tork said, “we would dare each other to walk the boards along the edge of the ferry slip. The sun would be hot and the boards would rock in the water, and if the boats were in and you fell down between the boats and the piling, you could get killed.” He shook his head. “The crazy things kids will do. That was back when I was eight or nine, before I became a waterbaby.”

  “Where was it?”

  Tork looked up. “Oh. Manila. I’m Filipino.”

  The sea licked our knees, and the gunwale sagged under us.

  “What happened in the Slash?”

  “There’s a volcanic flaw near the Slash’s base.”

  “I know.”

  “And the sea is hypersensitive down there. You don’t insult her fashion or her figure. We had an avalanche. The cable broke. The sparks were so hot and bright they made gouts of foam fifty feet high on the surface, so they tell me.”

  “What caused the avalanche?”

  I shrugged. “It could have been just a goddamned coincidence. There are rock falls down there all the time. It could have been the noise from the machines though we masked them pretty well. It could have been something to do with the inductance from the smaller power cables. Or maybe somebody just kicked out the wrong stone that wa
s holding everything up.”

  One webbed hand became a fist, sank into the other, and hung.

  Calling, “Cal!”

  I looked up. Juao, pants rolled to his knees, shirt sailing in the sea wind, stood in the weave of white water. Tork looked up too. The wind lifted his hair from his neck; and the fire roared on the beach.

  “They’re getting ready to catch a big fish!” Juao called.

  Men were already pushing their boats out. Tork clapped my shoulder. “Come, Cal. We fish now.” We waded back to the shore.

  Juao caught me as I reached dry sand. “You ride in my boat, Cal!”

  Someone came by with the acrid flares that hissed. The water slapped around the bottom of the boats as we wobbled into the swell.

  Juao vaulted in and took up the oars. Around us green amphimen walked into the sea, struck forward, and were gone.

  Juao pulled, leaned, pulled. The moonlight slid down his arms. The fire diminished on the beach.

  Then among the boats, there was a splash, an explosion, and the red flare bloomed in the sky: the amphimen had sighted a big fish.

  The flare hovered, pulsed once, twice, three times, four times (twenty, forty, sixty, eighty stone they estimated its weight to be), then fell.

  Suddenly I shrugged out of my shirt, pulled at my belt buckle.

  “I’m going over the side, Juao.”

  He leaned, he pulled, he leaned. “Take the rope.”

  “Yeah. Sure.” It was tied to the back of the boat. I made a loop in the other end, slipped it around my shoulder. I swung my bad leg over the side, flung myself on the black water—

  —mother-of-pearl shattered over me. That was the moon, blocked by the shadow of Juao’s boat ten feet overhead. I turned below the rippling wounds Juao’s oars made stroking the sea.

  One hand and one foot with torn webs, I rolled over and looked down. The rope snaked to its end, and I felt Juao’s strokes pulling me through the water.

  They fanned below with submarine flares. Light undulated on their backs and heels. They circled, they closed, like those deep-sea fish who carry their own illumination. I saw the prey, glistening as it neared a submarine flare.

  You chase a fish with one spear among you. And that spear would be Tork’s tonight. The rest have ropes to bind him that go up to the fishermen’s boats.