Mermaids in Paradise: A Novel

II. HONEYMOON

I’d never been to the Caribbean before. The closest I’d gotten to a tropical island was the Florida beaches, swarming with the retired and half-naked. But the British Virgin Islands were different. For one thing, seminude humans weren’t littering the sand; the turquoise bays were frequently deserted, the white sands smooth.

I noticed right away that I liked it.

As we motored in on a ferryboat from the airport, which was on a nearby island named Tortola, I pictured pirate ships anchored in the bay. In my mind’s eye I saw the pirates drinking rum in a carefree fashion on the shore, their Jolly Rogers rippling in the breeze, the great sails on their ships billowing. The sleeves of the pirates’ white shirts also billowed, fallen open over muscular chests. This was the kind of thing, I knew, Chip also liked to imagine — how dashing our fellow humans might once have been, in bygone days, even the criminals.

Chip said there was good rum nearby — not far away grew the sugarcane, of whose byproducts that famous rum was made — and we would partake of it. From our resort, a former yacht club with cabins built onto a hillside overlooking the sea, we would visit the Baths, a boulder-strewn shallow-water grotto. We would swim and snorkel. We would receive pampering services. We would be drink swillers and food eaters.

“This is what I was talking about,” I told Chip approvingly, as a servile-acting individual drove us over the resort grounds in a rickety golf-cart rig. Side by side in the back, we jiggled inertly like the human cargo that we were. “This is a honeymoon scenario!”

“Whatever makes you happy,” said Chip, and smiled at me.

It was a shame the whole world didn’t resemble this resort, I thought fleetingly as, still jiggling inertly, we passed the immaculate landscaping and fragrant flowers brimming from Japanese-influenced rock gardens — that would be nice. Was it so much to ask? How hard could it be? Yes, yes, there were some obstacles, but still — thinking of how the whole world didn’t look like this resort, I felt faintly aggrieved.

The golf cart ascended a steep paved path and then halted in front of a scenic dwelling with wraparound covered porches and resplendent greenery.

“Your cabin, sir,” said the servile individual to Chip.

The manservant addressed his master, not me; he respected the hierarchy, the very reason for his job. Was there a difference between truly being servile and just pretending to be? I asked myself. Servility was the pretense of being a servant, wasn’t it, I answered me, but at the same time, you actually were a servant. The damn thing was the pretense of itself.

I’d make a note of that conundrum, I’d bring it up to Chip when he was bored. There was the problem of service and servility, and then the problem of human cargo. Some people were paid to act servile, others paid out to be human cargo, the burden borne by the payee. Chip and I had paid for the privilege of others’ service; therefore, on the back of a golf cart, we sat and jiggled inertly.

I thought of where the fat was, in this world, and particularly in our home country. In fact the fat was mostly settled on the poor people, the poor and the working class. The poor and the working class jiggle inertly, I thought, more than the middle-class people like Chip and me. We jiggle inertly on vacation, though neither Chip nor I is per se fat — still, what fat we do have jiggles, much as inanimate cargo shifts. In short we have some pretty inanimate qualities. In the past, the fat of the human world settled on kings, queens and a few wealthy merchants. But they didn’t have fast food back then. Fast food turned the fat balance upside down, at least in our country. In our country the rich and middle class are thin now and the working poor jiggle inertly — or no. The poor jiggle, but not inertly like the rich. The poor jiggle overtly.

Plus also there’s the fact that, among the tragically, morbidly obese in our nation, especially the white people, many are also religious hysterics. There seems to be a link, statistically, between the obesity epidemic and the religious hysterics, morbid obesity and extreme right-wing politics, and then again between those politics and stupidity, or at least “low educational achievement.” What’s more, many of these aspects are also linked to what Chip liked to call Middle America. What can the meaning of this dark pattern be?

I didn’t pretend to understand it — whether the hysteria was caused by the fatness or vice versa was a mystery to me.

This is your honeymoon, I told myself. Try not to think of the fat tragedy. Try not to think of the thin tragedy either, don’t think of the starving millions or the young middle-class girls with self-loathing. Try not to think of tragedy at all, the vile bookends of the fat/thin tragedy. Don’t let it nestle in your mind there, as it tends to, curled cozy like a squirrel. When you go home, then you can think of tragedy. Plenty of time for that.

No sooner had we settled ourselves in the beautiful rooms — where breezes wafted from huge French doors and there were enormous ceiling fans, on top of the natural seaside air currents, fashioned handily of picturesque woody fronds — than another servile professional entered. This one was female, bearing a tray upon which stood frozen drinks and a spray of gargantuan flowers. She walked sinuously in from the terrace, where the reeds of our palapa rustled in the wind, and Chip and I gazed at her like she was Eve in the Garden of Eden. Not in the sense of being tempted by the snake and bringing about the fall of man — no. More in the sense of embodying a primordial womanly grace, with her darkish, gleaming complexion and earthen-toned sarong. With her high cheekbones, bright eyes and regal bearing, she wore the servility lightly, as though it weighed nothing.

I wouldn’t blame Chip, I thought, I wouldn’t blame him at all.

But Chip had eyes mostly for me, as soon as he hefted his long-stemmed, fruit-adorned cocktail glass, trying not to flinch at its excessive femininity, and thanked the Ur-woman.

It wasn’t that I felt like less of a woman, next to her; more, less of a human. She was the one who bore the burden, I was the one who jiggled inertly, and the burden looked better on her than the jiggle did on me.

“Were we supposed to tip?” Chip asked after she left.

“Yes,” I said, though it hadn’t occurred to me before. “Yes! We have to tip! And the other guy, too. We just insulted them, Chip, by not tipping. It’s like we slapped that beautiful woman right across the face.”

We resolved to tip twice as hard next time we saw her — unless she was replaced by another majestic female being paid to act servile, which we hoped she wouldn’t be. We prided ourselves on loyalty.

I wanted to ask Chip if he thought the fact that the whole world doesn’t look like a beautiful resort was just a question of money — grinding poverty vs. repugnantly excessive wealth. Was it just money, or was money not really the main problem? For instance, I often hear it said that people don’t starve because there’s not enough food in the world, they starve because the food’s not always in the right places. Is it the same way with beauty? Is there, in fact, plenty to go around?

But we got involved in other actions, it was our honeymoon, after all, not some kind of policy debate forum, it was high time for fornication, so we got that out of the way.

Or no, it wasn’t fornication anymore, I realized — we were married. Disappointing.

I HADN’T THOUGHT of people, when I thought of our tropical-resort honeymoon, and the initial pure, scenic expanse of beach sands had encouraged me to continue not thinking of them. But as it turned out there were some other people at the resort. And wherever there are people, Chip will talk to them.

We’re not the same, in that regard. Chip possesses a wealth of interest in his fellow man, harbors a fascination with his own species, whereas I tend to see the prospect of small talk and tedium. It’s not that I don’t like people overall; I just like to personally select the ones I spend time with. I favor screening techniques that don’t involve random proximity.

Chip’s more of an equal opportunity converser.

Even before the first night rolled around — roaming the grounds as I napped and showered — he’d made friends with no fewer than five people including two couples: a same-sex and a homely. He sketched them out for me: they were two well-dressed men from S.F., broadcasting an artsy quality, one in home furnishings and the other in the independent film industry; a spinster biologist specializing in reef fish; and a quiet, nerdly heterosexual duo celebrating some anniversary, whom Chip took under his wing no doubt because they were, as he put it, “from the Heartland.”

“What’s the Heartland, Chip?” I asked him right off, because the moniker has always puzzled me.

“The place in the truck and beer commercials,” said Chip promptly. “Where they like New Country, isn’t it? Those guys that sing about proud to be an American, where at least we know we’re free?”

“It’s the at least part that’s genius,” I said.

“It’s kinda defensive,” agreed Chip.

“But anyway, I don’t think that’s the definition,” I demurred. “I mean some people in New Hampshire like New Country too. They like it a lot, I bet.”

“Yeah, huh,” said Chip. “I bet they do.”

“But New Hampshire’s not the Heartland, is it?”

“That’s true,” said Chip. “Or — I don’t know. Can you have a Heartland that’s kind of spread out, maybe?”

“Maybe the Heartland is spread out,” I mused dreamily.

“Sweetie, you’ll like talking to them. You’ll have fun. They’re really interesting.”

“I doubt that, Chip,” I said. “Look, I know how much you’ve dreamed of making friends with the natives of the Heartland — discovering what makes them tick. I know that about you. But are you sure you’d get an accurate sense of them in this setting? Wouldn’t it be better on their home turf, in a way? Like, their natural habitat?”

“But we never go there,” he objected, beating me on a technicality.

“It’s such an artificial situation,” I persisted. “I mean, think of this resort as kind of a zoo. Consider the animals in zoos that stalk and pace, wishing to sink their teeth into a passing five-year-old’s carotid artery — or the others who, more the truth-in-advertising types, throw their own feces against the glass. I mean can we really know those animals, when we see them in prison like that? No, right? And isn’t all this”—I raised my hands to indicate the splendid hotel—“kind of the same, without the electrocuting fences and the misery? I just wonder if, meeting these people as tourists so far, far away from where they evolved, you’re coming anywhere close to getting the real Heartland experience.”

When Heartland people vacation in the coastal cities, we’re certainly zoo animals to them, I was thinking. Despite the fact that it’s our native habitat, they ogle us as though we’re exhibits. Those Heartland tourists strap on their fanny packs like ammo belts. I’ve seen them trundling along the Walk of Fame, admiring the movie stars’ names on those pink terrazzo stars with their faces wreathed in smiles, then looking up and, on beholding average citizens, shutting those faces like barn doors.

“It’s second-best, I totally see your point. But it’s only dinner, babe,” said Chip, and put a strong, smooth arm around me, nestling me in. He smelled his best smell. I don’t know how he does it — must be a mixture of soap and pheromones.

I have my way of ending arguments, and Chip has his.

So there we were, our first evening in the newlywed utopia, fresh from a dip in the warm, aquamarine ocean, sitting around a table with five strangers. I have to admit, the setting had that odd combination of the picturesque and the asinine you sometimes see in vacationland: the restaurant was built over the water, not jutting over it but actually on top. It had platforms like little islands, allowing groups of diners to float in the bay as they ate. Chip and the Bay Arean designer talked about the engineering that must have been required to build this marvel of tourist novelty.

Meanwhile the “dining islands,” as the restaurant called them, made me feel seasick, bobbing around like that. I tried to believe in the romance of it all, and maybe I would have been able to if I’d been alone with Chip, candlelight shimmering over the gently lapping water of the cove as we drifted beneath the lavender sunset. But with all seven of us sitting there raising our forks to our faces (the Middle Americans, the film industry/decorators and the parrotfish expert) we seemed more like a flotilla of pigs. I noticed plenty of the other islands were tables for two. And here we were with our table for many, long enough for the Last Supper, practically. We were the biggest floater in the pond.

The dining islands were mysterious, seeming to move around freely, yet whenever a waiter wished to serve us, bringing us near the home port to receive heaping platters of seafood, the ocean’s marvelous bounty deep-fried into oblivion. Then away we floated again, to gaze down, whenever we might wish, at a sea slug glistening on the sandy bottom.

It struck me I should take a trip to the restroom, which thankfully had been built on solid ground, to rid myself of queasiness for a bit. So I made my excuses and stepped off the island onto one of the cunning raised pathways of white, broken shells, smoothed into softness by the tide, which ran like tendrils into the small bay where we floated. I struck out for the ladies’ room like I was fleeing a beheading, concentrating on not turning an ankle as I picked my way over the shells on my platform mules.

I’d already drunk some wine and felt the pleasant, half-drunk turmoil of time passing, that rush of buzzed debasement/elevation that’s so perfect and delicate a balance. As I wound my way through the restaurant’s more landlocked tables I felt that swift bittersweet isolation, weightless and delighted — here I am, I thought, like all the others before and after me, my brother and sister drunkards, I salute you up and down the generations, from ancient Rome unto the palace of the future — those decayed palaces, those cities overgrown with the weeds and monuments sunk beneath the waves. I floated through my fellow humans in their multitudes — how sweetly, how thinly the blood ran in my veins!

Inside was where the families with children or elderly members dined — the ones who feared some of their number might topple off the islands if they ventured out there, topple and quickly drown. I envied them their nausea-free location, as my buzz faded slightly. Along the corridor to the restrooms I passed an over-the-hill-looking man wearing bulky suede sandals on his hairy white feet, and my heart went out to him — some people have no sense of anything. That was the thought that came to me.

He stood rocking back onto his heels, his hands linked idly behind his back, gazing at a map on the wall; I saw it was one of those cutesy 3D maps they print for tourists, showing poorly drawn pictures of buildings with banners like SUSIE’S SANDWICH SHOP written on them. Sweat stains were visible beneath his arms on the unfortunate T-shirt he sported, which bore on its wrinkled back the legend Freudian Slip: When You Mean One Thing and Say Your Mother.

It was only a matter of time till Chip made friends with him.

In the bathroom a similar-aged woman stood in front of the mirror, doing something to her eyeballs. Something with contact lenses, judging from the plastic paraphernalia on the sink counter. I could see at once she was a matched set with the Freud T-shirt, her hair a mixture of gray and brown, wearing a frumpy dress from some place Guatemalan or similar, Nicaragua, I don’t know, a place where underpaid women bend over wooden looms, honest and kindly, with their whole bearing giving the impression that they welcome a life of fruitless toil.

A muumuu deal, it had embroidered flowers and a pear-shaped quality. I tried to like the outfit, though, as I beheld it — mainly to counteract Gina. Gina’s opinions rent out a space in my brain, and try as I might I can’t ever completely evict them.

“Isn’t it gorgeous here?” the muumuu wearer half yelled at me, as I tried to sidle past into a toilet stall.

“Mmm, hmm, wmm,” I said, or words to that effect. I don’t want to talk on my way in or out of the stalls. Not to a stranger, possibly not to anyone. It’s a moment for keeping your own counsel.

As I peed I thought of how probably, when Chip made friends with the sweaty Freud T-shirt guy, I’d have to act pally with this woman, his bookend, who now wished to prattle on to me as urine streamed between my legs into the toilet bowl. Well, sure she did. Why not? I was a person; to go with my urethra, I had ears. Urethras were for peeing, ears were for receiving the random chatter of orbiting life forms. Her own life-form equipment included a mouth for talking from — a generous mouth above a muumuu of embroidered flowers, as it happened. Red, green, yellow, purple, and blue. Yes, she was a life form displaying other life forms and reaching out to even more life forms, willy-nilly. Out there, beyond the metal door, she was saying something about Pacifica or maybe spina bifida — I couldn’t hear past the rushing sound of pee. I wished she would stop, though.

I’d known Chip long enough to predict when he would make friends with the strangers I’d spotted; what it came down to was simply whether the person in question would consent to talk to him. Because Chip was going to talk to them, it went without saying, so if the other party was also a scattershot, arbitrary extrovert like Chip, nine out of ten times they’d connect. And here was my answer, right in front of me: the woman, who had never met me before, was talking about spina bifida, or possibly the beer Pacifico, as I peed.

And it was all for naught, I thought, as I loudly, deliberately flushed — on the subject of spina bifida I was a blank slate. No help to give. No expertise at all.

There was a pregnant pause as I came out, as though she’d asked me a question.

“Sorry?” I said.

“Have you been to the Baths yet?” she asked eagerly. “Amazing!”

“I saw them in the ads,” I conceded, turning on a tap and beginning to wash my hands. I was still trying to evict Gina, or rather the goblin Gina, perched cozily on my shoulder and glaring down at the perfectly friendly woman’s shoes. Like her dress, they seemed to partake of a peasant motif, homespun or at least cheaply manufactured. They were fashioned of myriad strings of knotted leather or possibly vegan leather alternative, none too clean, flowers sprouting, tassels hanging, hither, thither and yon, tendrils of shoe twining around her ankles and up her calves like so many creeping vines in a movie where plants come alive. Or wait, plants are alive. But you know what I mean. The shoes were unflattering, with soles flat as pancakes that showcased the woman’s large, pale toes, the female equivalent of her partner’s; they were nosing out of the Jesus-style footwear like rows of eager hippos. Albinos.

The Gina goblin wanted to torch the sandals. Failing that, the goblin wanted to take the sandals, along with the chunky ones worn by the Freud T-shirt man, and nail them up on an offensive sign. HIPPIES GO HOME, something like that. Mean-minded and impeccably dressed, the goblin chittered on my shoulder — chittered unpleasantly.

How many times, I wondered, as the woman said words like mindfulness and fully present, had that Gina homunculus hitched a ride on me? I didn’t always like it, but I couldn’t shake it off, either. Chip and Gina were angel and devil on my shoulders, basically, and there were things I loved about them both. I went Chip’s way when I could — maybe prolonged exposure would encourage me. Gina insisted on judgment, an us-and-them mentality, while Chip, with his earnest friendliness, tried to lead me down the path of brotherly love.

But brotherly love was sometimes wrong.

Take the toe situation, I thought to myself.

When we were kids, Gina and I, and even through college, which we attended together, I’d had some creative ambitions. Young people often do. I wanted to write songs and also sing them for a living, had singer/songwriter fantasies. I took lessons, I wrote songs and forthwith I sang them; excitedly I made demo tapes, performed for myself in mirrors and in showers, concocted videos. Later I put on shows for others, at college bars and grungy yet pretentious cafes.

But finally Gina showed me the error of my ways, pointing out quite rightly that the world was full of singers already — showcasing the foregone conclusion of my artistic and professional failure. Don’t be a wannabe, said Gina impatiently. It was Gina who persuaded me to go the MBA route, whereby at least, she said, I could grow up to be a loser with money instead of a loser without it. And we’d be at the same school then, she said, because she planned to go to Stanford too and get her PhD. She wasn’t born to make money, she said, because to make money, one way or another, directly or indirectly, you had to build people up. She was born to cut people down, she said, and that’s what she was going to do. Criticize. Therefore: a PhD. But about the singing, we can always do karaoke, she said, we’ll go to karaoke bars whenever you want!

We’ll get wall-eyed. We’ll belt us out some Bee Gees shit.

Since then there’s always been a shadow Gina following me, even when the real Gina, in her physical body, is absent, such as during my honeymoon. (Gina, I happened to know from texts received on my cell phone, was enjoying her own honeymoon of sorts with Ellis, whom she’d decided to like for several weeks at least, she texted me, before bringing the hammer down. She also texted me that he was surprisingly good in the sack, you know, for a faggot. She said his Eurofag fashion sense meant he’d given her good advice on buying a new bag. Also, the décor of his apartment was actually half-OK, she reported, if you ignored the fake-punk boy-teen completely faggy Union Jacks. Other than me, all Gina’s closest friends are gay guys; she’s less a homophobe than a victim of Stockholm.)

I acquitted myself with a compliment on my way out of the restroom — you can distract a woman lickety-split with an unexpected piece of flattery about her appearance; it’s the interfemale equivalent of a sucker punch — and booked it past the Freud T-shirt in the hall, who was still rocking back on his callused heels in front of the 3D map like he was contemplating the Mona Lisa. I headed for the restaurant’s shining bar, figuring I could while away another five minutes waiting for a new drink before I had to step onto the nauseating island once again.

“Do you sell Dramamine?” I said, after asking for wine.

Startling me, the bartender whipped out a pill in a paper slip and ripped open the package. He dumped the contents neatly into a glass of seltzer and pushed the glass across.

“We get that all the time,” he said, and leaned over the counter, voice lowered. “I’m going to tell you this because I think you’re a fox. Don’t like to see a beautiful woman puke.”

“Uh—”

“And I don’t like to watch it being cleaned up, either. So here goes: there’s a switch you can flip under the table, on the central post that holds the table up. You find it with your foot. It’s supposed to be for emergencies, but if you want to stop that thing moving, just flip it. You saw how shallow it is out there — there’s a little anchor-type deal on the bottom of the island that drops and locks into the track. The hostess can override, and she will override eventually so you can get served and like that, but meanwhile you guys’ll stop moving.”

“Knight in shining armor,” I said sincerely. “Serious, here. Really.”

So I felt pleased on my return to the table, possessing the secret weapon as I did.

THE MARINE BIOLOGIST sitting next to me was a woman who loved fish. Fish in general, parrotfish in specific. They’re thick-lipped reef fish in bright colors; I saw some later, but at the time I didn’t know a parrotfish from a humphead wrasse. She was a parrotfish promoter, the biologist.

“You see that beautiful, fine white sand all around us?” she asked me, over dessert.

I nodded, though in the dark, to be precise, the beach sand had faded from our sight. Along the dark shore a row of tiki torches flickered orange.

“You’ve got the parrotfish to thank for that,” she said, and nodded emphatically. “Bioerosion. Major contributors.”

“Ah!” I said. “Bioerosion!”

“They eat the reefs! They make the sand! They chew it up and excrete it. A single parrotfish can make two hundred pounds of fine white sand per year.”

“I see!” I said.

“You like the beach? Then thank a parrotfish. That’s what I always say,” she went on.

She was eating a flan with gusto.

Still, I was happy to be talking to her, because the husband from the Heartland seemed to be at loggerheads with one of the Bay Areans, Chip standing by neutrally. The Heartland wife looked embarrassed, but the Heartland husband was sticking to his guns — something about global warming. He said it seemed to be nature — that various Ice Ages, also, had taken place now and then, and the warming was a non-Ice Age.

His logic went: It has been colder before, and now it will be warm. The film-industry Bay Arean, enraged by this, was raining thunder upon him.

Meanwhile the Heartland wife and the other Bay Arean were making small talk off to one side, trying to take the edge off any free-floating climate-change aggression with harmless domesticity. The Bay Arean designer recommended air plants for the Heartland living room, which could be placed in clear-plastic globes that dangled from shelves or light fixtures. They required no soil. You watered them with a spray bottle, he told her; couldn’t be easier. The Heartland wife received this wisdom with earnest nods.

Presently Chip latched onto a couple of words in the Bay Arean filmmaker’s angry tirade — the words carbon dioxide, I picked up — and used them to launch a friendly digression. Chip plays the fool to make peace, often, as well as to make people like him, and in this case he asked if carbon dioxide was the gas from car tailpipes that killed depressed people. If so we should reduce it, Chip suggested with modest buffoonery, absolutely — no one should die in a garage. Least of all a person who’s goddamn depressed. In my garage, went Chip’s transitional patter, there’s a garbage can that smells, some old strips of moldy carpet and an aging Nissan Sentra. Is that a fitting sunset to a life?

This led to a lighthearted discussion of which cars would be the worst to die in, with “minivan” leading, and the conversation was thus steered into the social safe house of irony.

All of this I heard in the background, in pieces, as the parrotfish expert enthused about how coral went in the fishes’ mouths and white, tropical sands came out their ass-ends. We wouldn’t have the tropics as we knew them — with highly visible reef creatures swimming over a pale background in water that looked turquoise — if not for parrotfish and other “bioeroders,” she chin-wagged to me. The tropics would look very different with no white sand, wouldn’t they, and without the reefs and their nibbling fish that sand would disappear, said the biologist. In fact, she elaborated, gesturing at the Bay Arean off to her left, what he was talking about, the warming, the rising acid of seawater, all that would kill the parrotfish, she said, in the event that it continued.

“. . generate models with fairly narrow margins of error,” she was saying through her final mouthful of crème caramel — because by then I’d realized it wasn’t a flan, strictly speaking. “Of course those models have been completely disregarded. Because, as I’m sure you know, an effective political response to the science, on the time frame needed, was always an impossibility.”

I was thinking of flipping the table switch, because the truth was that most of the wine glasses and beer pitchers were still full at our table and we wouldn’t be leaving that table and hitting dry land anytime soon. Yet once again nausea was rising in me, as we floated past a two-top where a poorly dressed couple seemed to be dipping fried squid rings into a pot of onion-scented sauce. I felt around with my foot for the center post of the table, but all I got was air; I was near the end of the table. So I had to scoot my chair over a few inches, then a few more, to come within range of the central post.

I didn’t want to call attention to my activities, though; I didn’t want to seem like a schemer, so I went on nodding and talking to the biologist while this was going on. Above the table’s edge I was normal, albeit feeling increasingly queasy; below it I was little more than a stuck-out limb with a sneaking, feely foot, making forays.

When my toes finally touched the table’s main post I cast off my shoe and inched the toes up and down the post, looking for the telltale bump of a switch. Listening to the biologist I got distracted, though, so it took several moments for me to notice the post wasn’t as smooth as it should be, the post was in fact furry, and furthermore it was a leg.

The leg extended from the Heartland man. He whipped his head around like it was being spun on its neck-stalk by a Linda Blair Satan.

I was startled by the abruptness of the head spin and snatched my foot back with a speed that rivaled his.

But it was too late. He was smiling at me. The Heartland husband thought I was making a pass at him.

And here’s where I made my second mistake, because instead of coming clean and admitting I’d been looking for the anti-vomit button, I lost my way in confusion. There was a guilty look on my face, I know, as I averted my eyes in embarrassment from his strangely avid gaze. I had to reach out my bare foot a bit in his direction yet again, in order to snag the abandoned mule and tumble said mule back toward me with my toe tips. Then I wriggled the foot back into it.

Making matters worse, I shifted my body neatly away even as I did this, recommitting my attention to the dismal future of parrotfish. For all the world as though I was either ashamed of my footsy overture or, worse, coy.

My eye-contact avoidance convinced the husband, I believe. He knew me for the strumpet that I wasn’t.

AS WE WERE leaving the restaurant, the Heartland guy got next to me while Chip strode ahead listening to the Bay Arean designer orate on the subject of high-end prefab sheds. The Heartland wife had gone to the restroom with the parrotfish expert, so her husband and I were, unfortunately, alone and bringing up the rear.

“So, hey,” he said. “You don’t say much, do you?”

“I say a lot,” I said. “Sometimes too much. Believe me. When so moved.”

“But back at the table there, you let your twinkle toes do the talking.”

For a second I thought the barkeep would get to clean my sick up after all.

“Twinkle. .?”

“I like them,” he said, in a fruity voice.

I glanced down at the offending digits as we walked, needing somewhere to rest my eyes. They still sported their wedding pedicure; the nails were salmon-pink. Seen from a Heartland viewpoint, I guessed, they could be deemed trashy.

“I’m a toe man,” he said, dropping the volume. “And yours are top-notch. Grade A. So hot.”

“You’re kidding me,” I said. “Is this something — is there a hidden camera?”

“A lot of people feel it’s not cheating if it’s the toes,” he went on, fruitier and juicier by the second.

“So did Chip mention we just got married?” I rushed. “This is a great place for a honeymoon, I think. Don’t you? Really perfect.”

“Many people say if it’s just the toes, anything goes. There’s an increasingly — call it liberal approach, since you’re from California, ha ha — to when it’s just the toes.”

“Just the toes that what?” I said, and then regretted it.

“That share intimacy,” he said. “Toe-genital intimacy.”

“Oh my God,” I burst out, and practically stampeded over the Bay Areans in my haste to get next to Chip.

As soon as he and I split off from the others to make our way along the lighted footpaths to our cabin, I gave him the lowdown. He seemed not to completely believe me, before I reprimanded him. Chip tries pretty hard to see the best in folks. But he came around when I supplied a few details, and he promised me we’d try to eat alone — at least in the evenings, when darkness was all around.

“I’m not hanging out with that guy again,” I said. “I’m not sharing another meal with him. No meals of any kind. And no day trips either, Chip, because I know how you like to invite strangers along. Not him. He made me feel like my toes were prostitutes. Like my toes, Chip, were dolled up in Frederick’s of Hollywood. That’s not right.”

“Your lips say no, but your toes say yes,” said Chip.

I hit him for deadpanning, but it was weak. Still, the words of the toe man haunted me as I tried to fall asleep. I thought to myself: Are my toes sluts? Were my toes asking for it? It kept me up after Chip had fallen asleep, even, because I worry about these questions. In the broadest sense, of course, no woman should have to worry about whether her toes are asking for it — in the most lofty, the most righteous sense. But on the other hand, in the more narrow, specific context of personal choice, was I responsible for debasing my own toes? Were the toes, in essence, fashion victims, like those newborns with lacy headbands strapped around their craniums, fluffy rosettes affixed, to broadcast femaleness? To function as blaring signs that read: I am a female baby, what so many call a “girl”; moreover, it is absolutely vital to my parents that even perfectly indifferent passersby should know this instantly. For that reason, and that reason alone, I have been tagged with this most hideous adornment.

Had I visited that kind of sad, pimpish outrage on ten innocent dactyls?

It wasn’t till the next morning, when I woke up to the sound of steadily plashing waves, and then the sight of Chip bringing me my morning coffee with his shirt off, that I felt completely nausea-free again. I sat propped up on the pillow, drinking my coffee, watching the fan whir overhead, and I reassured myself. The toenails were pink. That was the whole story.

We set off for the Baths not long after, where we spent the morning walking between gray, wet boulders, on top of boulders, and beneath boulders. There were narrow crevices to walk through, sand beneath our feet; there were ropes to hang onto as we climbed; there were wooden ladders. It was a group of boulders, with the ocean washing in and washing out again. That was the situation there.

We sat on top of a boulder, just the two of us, and looked out to sea one time; after that Chip kissed me on the sand, an inch or two of tide lapping at our legs. I had sand on my calves, sand on my knees, and I thought how much I enjoyed the sight and texture of sand on skin, how satisfying it could be to roll the grains beneath my fingertips, two sleek expanses of my skin with sand between them. One day, I ruminated, that skin would be wrinkly. That skin would be baggy as a pachyderm’s, and possibly gray, too. The sand wouldn’t be as satisfying then.

“You think we’ll still like sex when we’re old, Chip?” I asked romantically, while one more time we boulder-sat.

“I’ll take me some Viagra,” said Chip. “I don’t care. I’ll pop it like vitamins, if need be.”

“I’ll be all wrinkled, like an elephant.”

“Me too.”

“Wrinkles get a bad rap. Don’t they,” I said.

“If you think about it, what’s a wrinkle or two,” agreed Chip.

“I think it’s probably an evolution, reproduction-of-the-fittest type thing. I mean we probably want to mate with wrinkle-free people so they’re still fertile, for one thing.”

“Good point,” said Chip, nodding.

I was contented, sitting there with him. And yet I had a sense that nothing was happening — that nothing, possibly, would ever happen to me again.

Curiously it was then, sitting on our boulder, looking out to sea and thinking of being elderlies together, that we caught sight of a small powerboat churning into the harbor from the direction of the reefs. In that boat was a newly familiar figure: the parrotfish expert. She wore a black wetsuit and stood looking off the bow, a kind of rigid tension in her posture; when the boat passed close enough that we could see each other better she jumped up and down, waving wildly. She was yelling, but I wasn’t able to hear the words. Then the boat veered toward the docks.

“That’s weird,” said Chip. “She didn’t seem the excitable type, so much, when we first met her. Did she, Deb?”

We got down off the rock and strolled along the intertidal zone toward the marina. We weren’t in a hurry — we held hands, we held our shoes in our other hands, we looked for crabs and shells, scooping up water and wet sand onto the top flats of our feet, then letting it trail off. It wasn’t long at all, though, before we saw the parrotfish expert again, and this time she was running toward us. She still had her wetsuit on, which made her run in a held-back, goofy-robotic way that looked like a form of slow torture. But she was doing it anyway. That expert was determined. And it was a sight worth seeing.

By the time she got up to us, though, she was huffing and puffing so hard I thought she might be having an attack. The biologist could hardly breathe, much less speak. But she waved us away and bent over, hands braced on her thighs, catching her breath. She shook her head when we asked if there was anything she needed, just shook her head, struggling to breathe. Finally she wrestled the breathing under control and straightened up, her face beet-red. Her cheeks and forehead still bore the deep, bruising marks of a snorkel mask, which made her look deformed.

“In the reef!” she said breathlessly. “You’ve got to come with me! I have to show you! I saw them!”

“Those colorful fish you like so much?” asked Chip, genuinely interested.

She shook her head rapidly, emphatically.

“Mermaids! There are mermaids! Mermaids are swimming in the reef!”

SHE WAS DISTURBED, of course — we hardly knew the woman. Maybe it was a schizoid deal, we figured, or maybe a drug problem, we didn’t have all the info yet, but the situation had to be handled humanely. If there’s one thing Chip is, it’s game. He’s game for almost anything, and so much the better if, later, it might make good material for an anecdote to tell at a party.

So he humored the delusional scientist, and I went along with it cheerfully — because, of all the people we’d had dinner with, she was the only one I kind of liked. That meant that, after Chip, she was my favorite person for a thousand-mile radius.

She said she’d booked a 7 a.m. seat on a snorkel boat, and it turned out she was the only one booked for that slot, so the boat’s captain took her out to the reef by herself, muttering something about swimming in pairs. But he didn’t want to give her money back; it was just snorkeling after all — child’s play. So he took her by herself, without a second paying customer. And that was how she came to see the mermaids. The boat captain hadn’t seen squat.

We were sitting in the boat ourselves by that time, being ferried back out to the reef. She’d offered the captain more money for the second trip; she talked a blue streak while we were motoring. Also she ran around collecting parts of wetsuits for us to wear, a top and bottom for Chip and a one-piece suit in my size. I obliged her by changing in the boat’s tiny bathroom, enjoying the privacy; I figured we might as well get a free snorkel out of her sad mental incapacity.

The night before, when I’d been assuming she was sane — an absentminded type, but with all the usual marbles — I’d viewed her as a normal, if geeky, woman. Now she took on a kind of homeless aspect to me. I studied her face trying to pick out signs of that unhinged quality. She didn’t tweeze her brows: well, that one was inconclusive. A crazed person might tweeze or might not tweeze — might pick the brows off hair by hair, even get rid of them in one fell swoop like those women you see who shave off their brows on purpose, then pencil them on again, making you wonder: grotesquely ironic? Or ironically grotesque?

If I looked at her brows for too long, they started to seem like centipedes. I was afraid they might start moving their legs. And they had so many!

Nancy, the biologist, wore no traces of makeup, which I’d first thought signaled a feminist: laudable. I like a touch of lipstick and a subtle brown eye shadow myself — I rationalize it as less an attempt to attract males than as a kind of ritualistic tribal decoration/shamanistic warding — but I also enjoy the rare sight of a naked face. Still, now, with the insanity rearing its head, I wondered if the no-makeup thing was less a stance than a sign of neglect. Maybe Nancy was the type who wore her underwear for weeks on end, or stored her cut-off fingernails in jelly jars.

Apparently there was a sunken airplane on the reef, a small plane from long ago, and Nancy said she’d been slowly following a princess parrotfish as it weaved among the corals and then, out of the corner of her eye/mask, had seen something far larger flash through one of the holes where the airplane’s door used to be. Excited to think she might have her first local encounter with a shark or large ray, she abandoned the fish and swam cautiously over to the rusting plane. It was there that she saw it: the tail. Only the tail was visible inside the plane, from her vantage point, she said, until she swam up close and stuck her head around the brown and corroded metal door edge.

And that was when she realized that the tail, covered in silvery scales, was surmounted by a humanoid torso. Atop that sat a neck, and finally a head, out of which long hair grew — modestly, and a little too conveniently, covering the impossible creature’s breasts.

“What color was her hair?” asked Chip, like it mattered.

“Yellow!” said Nancy. I couldn’t tell if she was indignant or just enthusiastic.

“Of course it was yellow, Chip,” I said.

“I don’t know about of course,” retorted Chip. “There are multiplayer games I do where mermaids have blue hair. Green. Even purple.”

“This wasn’t an MOG,” said Nancy, a little prudishly.

“So what did she do?” pressed Chip.

“Put out that cigarette!” said Nancy sharply, turning to the boat captain. “Please! I suffer from asthma!”

“Nancy?” I chimed in as the captain, looking resentful, flicked his cigarette over the side of the boat, thus littering. “So what did the mermaid do?”

“She swam away! She was quick. Really quick,” said Nancy. “I followed, but I was a lot slower. But I saw there were others like her. I saw their shapes in the water before they got away from me. A pod, if you can call it that. It was a pod of mer-people.”

“Well, if they swam away,” said Chip gently, “they may not be there when we get there. I want you to be prepared for that. We won’t judge you, Deb and I, if we can’t find them this time. You know — no judgment.”

“None at all,” I said. “I’m sure they don’t stay for long. Once they’ve been spotted. I mean, they must be secretive types, right? Or people would have known about them long ago.”

“We do know about them,” said Nancy.

“But I mean, know they were real,” I said.

“Colossal squid,” said Nancy.

“Pardon?”

“Well, they were ‘mythic’ too, till recently. Then their bodies were found, dead and floating. Finally one was caught live. Forty feet long. Weighed one thousand pounds. The oceans are very deep, you know. The last frontier. Still largely unexplored. New discoveries happen daily, new species are identified all the time. Maybe this is a similar situation.”

There was no reasoning with a deranged marine biologist. I nodded agreeably.

Before long the captain was throttling down and Nancy was eagerly pulling on her fins, positioning her mask.

“Come on, come on!” she urged, as Chip and I struggled with our own masks and fins. And then we followed her off the side of the boat, which had a slide built into it. Swoop and splash.

I have to say it was gorgeous down there, a place where beauty clichés came true. Light filtering, colorful blobby formations, glamorously decorated fish flitting about — all in all it was exactly what you’d hope it would be. Chip and I followed Nancy, waving our flippers steadily. She turned out to be much better at the free-dive thing than either of us; Chip had to be impressed.

Again and again she dove, fishlike. Or seabird-like, possibly.

Chip tried to copy her after her first few dives, when she turned her goggly, tube-sucking face toward us and made a gesture of impatience. Seemed like she didn’t know what we were up to, snorkeling around on the surface, wimpy. I could tell Chip felt he had to rise, or rather dip, to the challenge. Chip’s fit but he’s no scuba diver; I hoped he wouldn’t get the bends. I didn’t even try to dive deep, myself — I had a mild case of swimmer’s ear. So I floated, waggling my flippers as Chip did his best, coming up to breathe through his tube, then dipping down again and again in the parrotfish expert’s wake.

The airplane was maybe twenty feet under. You couldn’t even see into its decrepit cockpit from up at the surface, where I was. But no yellow-haired mer-people must have been languishing there, because Chip shook his head when he got back up to me. He stuck his head out for air, then came back under and gave me a slow-motion headshake.

But Nancy didn’t give up easily. She kept on going, round and round the reef, to each new nook and cranny, then out past the reef to a cluster of underwater rocks. The variety of fishes thinned out and there were fewer of the bright, darting ones and more of the flattish, dull-colored numbers camouflaged by sand. I was waiting to signal to Chip that I was heading back to the boat — I thought I’d get a drink of water, take off the borrowed wetsuit and put my feet up for a while — when down beneath me, where he and Nancy had most recently dived, came a silvery explosion of bubbles, a confusion of flippers. Streams of froth surged up and made it impossible to see anything but white.

I hoped they hadn’t met with a jellyfish or been barracuda-bit. As I peered down and saw nothing, I ideated blood and teeth, severed digits bobbing and leaking crimson in the surf, like in so many shark movies. I started to feel panicky as the cloud of bubbles in the water beneath me refused to clear, and finally decided to free-dive down — my swimmer’s ear be damned. What if Chip was caught on something and running out of air? What if the crazed biologist had suddenly attacked him? There could be anything happening, below that blinding screen of turbulence.

I gulped air from my tube, held it, and gave what I hoped was a powerful flip of my fins. Down I bucked, feeling pressure inside my head and not liking it a bit. I swished myself around the bubble cloud, instead of through the midst of it, so that I wouldn’t crash into anyone coming up; I tried to force myself down, though my body resisted. Still I could see nothing except a rock with brown and yellow barnacle-type things on it that looked like rotting teeth. I bobbed up again, gasping.

Luckily, a few seconds later Chip surfaced too, and then Nancy, all of us popping our tubes out and sucking in air.

“Jesus!” cried Chip, spluttering.

“You saw them! Didn’t you?” asked Nancy, spluttering too.

“I gotta go down again,” said Chip, and without waiting for me to answer, down he dove.

I followed him, of course, because at this point curiosity was killing me. It was frustrating, though, because I was in Chip’s bubble trail again. There are negatives to being a follower instead of a leader, in a diving situation. I pushed myself down, trying to get alongside him for a better view of whatever it was he thought he’d seen, but all I saw was silver swirls of bubbles — could have been anything — and before long I swooped up again, helpless.

I waited for them to come up, treading water and getting more and more gaspy. When Chip finally surfaced his face was purple-red; he shoved his tube aside and pulled his mask up onto the top of his head, and I could see his eyes were wide, like when he’d been electric-shocked in the mud marathon.

“So? Did you see mermaids?” I asked him, in a joking tone. I assumed he’d report a sea turtle, a dolphin or stingray or what have you.

“Deb! There were some goddamn mermaids down there!”

Feeling a bit fed up, I snorted and turned to swim back toward the boat, shaking my head. Chip’s a fantasist, of course, a fantasy game-player; Chip enjoys the world of make-believe. I think I’ve made that clear.

I climbed back onto the boat, and when I came out of the head with the wetsuit off and my clothes back on, the captain wordlessly handed me a cold can of beer. Didn’t say a word, just handed it over. I was grateful. I sat on one of the white fiberglass benches drinking and taking a breather; before long the other two joined me, climbing the ladder with their faces shining oddly.

“Deb,” said Chip breathlessly, shedding his gear, “you thought I was kidding, but I wasn’t. Maybe it’s a hoax or like that, I’m not saying it isn’t, but down there were people with tails. People fully the size of you or me.”

“If it’s a hoax, how were they breathing underwater?” asked Nancy. “You didn’t see any breathing apparatus, did you?”

“Maybe it was a sleight-of-hand trick,” said Chip. “Or just like phenomenal timing. I mean, the two of us were down there, right Deb? Nancy and I. And we didn’t have oxygen tanks.”

“But have you seen anyone come up since then? There’s nothing but this boat around, as far as the eye can see!” raged Nancy. She turned to me. “Did you see anyone come up?”

“Come on, guys,” I said, and crumpled my beer can, which was already empty. “Enough, already. You got me. Consider me pranked. OK?”

Nancy glared at me with her eyebrows like angry crawlers. Then she turned back to Chip, as though I hadn’t said a thing.

“Maybe they had a submarine to go back to,” said Chip. “A submersible. Like in that movie, The Abyss. Or even Titanic. You know the kind I mean,” he said, appealing to me. “For research. Maybe they saw us, then swam back to their submersible. Technically, free-diving for long periods of time is possible. I mean some free-divers can go down two, three hundred meters on one breath. Competitive apnea! Deb, it’s an extreme sport! There’s one guy who can hold his breath in a pool for eleven minutes. I read it online.”

“Be reasonable,” said Nancy. “Manned submersibles cost a mint. There aren’t any commercial ones operating around here or I’d have found out about them. Plus, who’d strap on a tail and swim around in the middle of the Atlantic just for our benefit? Nobody.”

“You guys,” I said, “I’m sure there’s an explanation, other than you’re both messing with me. Maybe someone rubbed LSD onto your breathing tubes. Or the tubes got toxic mold on it in that box that caused hallucinations. And now I’m ready to go back. Can we please go?”

The boat captain didn’t wait on Nancy’s command; impatient as any man slighted by underpayment, he throttled up and we motored toward dry land.

THE DAY HAD started well, even gaily. First I’d shaken off the tinge of shame laid on me by the Heartland man; then Chip and I had kissed in a shady grotto, water running around our bodies in pleasing rivulets. We’d been living the American Dream, or the American-Caribbean Dream — call it the American-Caribbean Honeymoon Dream. Whatever you call it, I’d felt clothed in its raiment of sun and sex and booze, lassitude, freedom from opinion. I’d felt a pleasing vacuum of responsibility, filled with trade winds and ocean spray. Washing the salt from our ropy hair as sand, too, swirled down the shower drain. Lying spent and happy on cool white sheets, air on the skin, rustle of fronds in the breeze, the whir of time passing, warm wind of the turning world.

But after the boat trip the dream altered. Within the smooth fabric of the dream a thread of doubt had been picked, and suddenly the weave was unraveling.

The problem, at first, seemed to be Chip. I wanted the old Chip back, the Chip for whom there was real life on the one hand, without mythic creatures, and videogames solidly on the other hand, where mythic creatures cavorted quite abundantly. The new Chip was confusing, even frightening to me, because the new Chip was stubbornly insisting that those worlds weren’t separate. That went too far for me. It was a rude jolt. The earth was unstable beneath my feet.

And hadn’t even been Chip’s idea—someone we barely knew had brought the idea to him, and then he’d run with it. There was an arbitrary quality to the mermaid sighting. Yet Chip had signed right up! The honeymoon was supposed to be all about him and me, and instead he’d become a member of a secret society — Chip was affiliated, now, with a disturbed parrotfish expert.

It was as though he’d joined a cult. He was dazed, when we got back to the cabana; there was a look of sheer obliteration on his face. He barely talked to me. And pretty swiftly, there on the island of Virgin Gorda in the British Caribbean, it made me feel terribly lonely, a premonition of the grave. Sitting across the room from Chip as he ignored me — he was scrolling through pages of mermaid lore on the tablet he’d brought with him — I put myself in his shoes. For a second I was Chip, I was Chip, and I couldn’t help believing.

As Chip, I had no choice.

But as myself. .

I made a snap decision. Much as a candidate might flip-flop on abortion when the demographics called for it, I was changing my position. Because the problem, at first, had seemed to be with Chip; but I saw now the problem could equally be seen as mine. And unlike the problem of Chip, that other problem — the problem of me — was one I could solve easily. The plainest solution was the best. Why put up resistance? No need. I bought in. I turned on a dime.

After all, I reasoned, if there were mermaids drifting under the glittering waves, mermaids who rose from the sparkling ceiling of their undersea world from time to time, their father someone like Neptune, bearded, big-chested, trident-holding; if there were mermaids who perched on rocks, sunning, who brushed their golden locks and gazed at their reflections in delicately fashioned mother-of-pearl-framed mirrors; if there were mermaids who rode, when the occasion warranted, in giant clamshells pulled by a team of giant seahorses — so much the better for us all.

And if said mermaids did turn out to be a figment, there too I sensed no threat to me personally.

“Chip, I’m sorry,” I said tenderly, going over to him at our room’s long counter, where he was perched on a barstool scrolling. I put my arms around him and rested my chin on his shoulder. “Because if you saw mermaids, you know what? You saw mermaids. I didn’t mean to be a buzzkill, Chip. I believe you, honey.”

Chip smiled at me, and balance was restored.

That’s another saving grace of Chip: he doesn’t ask why the politician flip-flopped. He doesn’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

ON THE DOMESTIC front, at that point, all was well, but on a practical level there was still the presence of Nancy to contend with — that parrotfish expert had vim and vigor. As far as she was concerned, as far as Chip was concerned, and therefore as far as I had to be concerned, too, her vacation/our honeymoon had turned from a pleasure trip into a cryptozoological mission.

First off, she planned a dive session. She made calls, she sent emails, she hit the streets. She visited every dive shop on the island seeking out scuba adepts, fishing enthusiasts, anyone with even the flimsiest of biology credentials who could go underwater as a part of her expeditionary force.

Unlike Chip I hadn’t gone diving before; you had to be certified to rent gear from any of the shops in town. Yet again, I suspected, I was going to be left out if I didn’t act fast. So while Chip was helping Nancy prepare for the next day’s excursion — she would wait for one day maximum, because she feared losing the mermaids if they proved migratory — I went to the dive shop and hired a pro named Jamie. If I took a beginners’ class, he’d come with me on the expedition, for a fee.

So I practiced with a rental tank in the hotel swimming pool — it was me and some friendly elderlies — and then I met Chip on the sandy drive that led from the resort’s main building to the shop, where he sat waiting in one of the resort golf carts. He drove us back to the cabana while I jiggled inertly.

“We signed on two science teachers,” he reported. “That’s all there are on the whole island. Plus one of them’s just a substitute. But he knows some biology.”

“What did she tell them we’d be looking for?”

“Rare fish. Some kind of huge fish no one has seen for ages. A grouper, I think she said. They weigh four hundred pounds. That’s what she’s telling everyone. She doesn’t want to influence the people who haven’t seen anything yet. Observer bias, or something.”

“That’s smart,” I conceded. “Plus there’s the fact that, if she said you were looking for mermaids, no one would come but lunatics.”

“We signed on one diver who used to be a U.S. Navy SEAL. He bought a house and retired here. We have a bunch of spearfishing dudes — a tourist and a couple of locals. It’s looking pretty good; it’s coming together. There’s a videographer dude, a guy with underwater video equipment, who’s staying at another resort, the other end of the island. He’s coming too. She had to offer to pay him.”

“It’ll be worth it,” I said supportively. “Although — is there a finder’s fee, for something like mermaids?”

Chip had no patience for levity.

The rest of the day rushed past, with Chip functioning as Nancy’s assistant and me functioning as Chip’s. I called dive shops with equipment orders, dive boats for scheduling; I set up an onboard lunch for twenty (on mine and Chip’s credit card, though Nancy claimed she’d cover our expenses. I felt myself doubting that outcome, but hell, it was our honeymoon, we’d said we’d spare no expense). By the time evening was coming on and sun-reddened families were trailing into the resort’s restaurants, Chip was pumped for the next day’s trip and wanted to throw back a beer. Nancy talked on her cell phone nonstop to what were, according to Chip, some of her colleagues. From what I could discern on our end, they were arguing with her but not dismissing her out of hand, as you might assume they would.

She must have credibility capital to spend, I guessed. A less bold woman would have waited till the sighting was confirmed. That parrotfish expert had some cojones on her.

Chip and I let her conduct her business in peace, for the most part, though she didn’t leave our side; it was like a romantic dinner for two where one of the two has a monkey attached to his head. If Chip and I had been a couple of coral outcroppings she would have been the parrotfish, nibbling at our edges and busily expelling grains of sand. She didn’t order food herself but perched on a third chair and picked at what was left on our plates when we finished each course — just reached for it and chewed noisily as she said words like aquatic primate, herbivorous mammals and Sirenomelia into her cheek-parked phone.

“Chip,” I said, to cover the sound of her phone patter over our supposedly relaxing dessert coffee, “what did they look like, the ones that you saw? I know it was fast. But can you tell me some details?”

Chip nodded, swallowed some pie. “The one that was the closest to me was the only one whose face I saw at all. And I have to say, she didn’t look like you might expect. Not exactly.”

“Yellow hair, bare breasts,” I said. “Right?”

“Yeah, no,” said Chip. “That’s true. But she kind of had bad teeth. No dentists in the sea, I guess. No underwater dentistry. The teeth were brownish or yellowish. Like an Englishman.”

“No fluoride,” I guessed.

“And in the background I saw one that seemed to be a guy. He had big shoulders, you know, a general guy shape? Except for the tail. The tail, I have to be honest, on him it looked a bit girly.”

“Maybe it was a butch mermaid.”

“Deb. Are you taking this seriously?”

“I am — really. A butch mermaid isn’t a joke, Chip.”

My husband squinted at me over his fork, sizing me up. Attitudinally. I made my eyes wide. Because I had meant it, about the butch mermaid — it wasn’t a diss. I’ve got nothing against a certain butch quality. Plus if there were really mermaids, I hoped they didn’t look like Ariel. Honestly, if they turned out to be Disney-style mermaids, I wouldn’t like them one little bit. That big-eyed cartoon shit would get on my last nerve.

So I narrowed my own eyes again and lifted the cup containing my decaf, looking past him with what I hoped was a meditative aspect — I was hoping to resemble a person with important, largely abstract concerns. After swallowing my delicate sip, I made my mouth prim. I hoped he got the message.

“Early to bed!” cried the biologist abruptly, snapping her nearly vintage clamshell. She stood up, grabbing a last slice of focaccia from the basket and stuffing it into her mouth, and spoke while chewing. “Got to get up at five to make history! Meet me in the lobby at five-thirty!”

Chip actually whistled as the two of us strode up the Tiki-lit path to the cabin. He held my hand and swung it widely while he whistled a patriotic tune — maybe “La Marseillaise.” Possibly “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Chip, too, believed we might be making history.

I was agnostic where that prospect was concerned, but open to it, certainly; if we made history, then good. A job well done, I guessed.

I WAS DISPLEASED, the next morning, to find the toe man in our party. People milled in the lobby, when we appeared there blearily at that indecent predawn hour, and he was among them. Adding insult to injury, his wife was not among them — I imagined she hadn’t been seduced by the prospect of sighting some goliath groupers. And possibly, unlike him, she was also indifferent to the prospect of ogling other divers as they padded naked-footed around the boat or struggled to pull on fins. A person needed tube socks, I felt, with the man from the Heartland free-roaming.

Or fishermen’s waders.

I wondered if Chip had invited him and prepared to snap at my newly minted husband for the infraction, but before I could open my mouth he assured me Nancy had issued the invite with no input from him.

I didn’t know any of the others, beyond the Bay Areans, though I’d talked to some on the phone; I busied myself carrying a cooler of sandwiches down to the dock, where the dive boat was waiting. I talked to my personal dive pro, Jamie, and then occupied myself with mundane tasks while Chip chatted excitedly with the various divers and fishermen he’d signed on, substituting the word groupers into his enthusiastic narrative of the mermaid sighting.

“Them jewfish are real easy to spear,” I heard a man drawl. At first the phrase startled me. It turned out, Chip told me later, that groupers used to bear that name before some kind of fish-naming council censored it. “Yeah. Easy pickins. Jewfish will swim right up to you. Fish in a barrel, ha ha. As innocent as babies. I use a Stinger.”

“Of course there’s no fishing today,” said Nancy to the spearfisherman, who was sun-wrinkled and had a diamond stud in one ear. “The ban on grouper harvest is respected here.”

We all trooped down to the boat — a motley crew loaded with gear and backpacks, some still sucking at their cups of coffee, others munching on remnants of Danish or muffins from their continental breakfasts. The fisherman ambled beside Chip and me. “The jewfish,” he said to Chip, “now they’re a hermaphrodite, as you may know. Those suckers are born with lady parts.”

I sensed a certain degree of puzzlement, among the recruits, at the suppressed excitement evinced by Chip and Nancy. I got the feeling they thought: Sure, groupers are good, but are groupers as good as all this? At least one of the party was chalking the vibe up to our vacationer status—“Crazy tourists,” I heard him mutter. Someone else nodded sagely.

Nancy focused on the videographer — an Australian, he sounded like — seeking repeated assurances that he would film constantly, without missing a second, as soon as he hit the water. He shrugged, he seemed confused, but at the same time he was willing. Jamie got stuck in a conversation with the toe man before the boat even weighed anchor. I hadn’t asked him to steer clear, of course; I didn’t have the stones for that. I only hoped the two of them wouldn’t still be fraternizing when I had to approach Jamie physically to get ready for my dive.

Meanwhile Chip was deep in a discussion of unusual wildlife with the retired Navy SEAL, a barrel-chested man who sported a full white beard and a blunt yet bombastic attitude. They talked about giant squid at first, moving on to the Loch Ness monster and a creature called the Orang Pendek, some kind of midget Yeti. The Navy SEAL was a specialist in diving into shipwrecks, and tough enough to impress Chip mightily. I could see Chip wishing the old-salt Navy SEAL was his father, for Chip has always longed for a kindly, tough-love type of father — ideally seafaring. He likes the idea of an oceangoing father, a father who, instead of skipping his child support payments to focus on the deep joy of heroin, merely set sail one day to seek his fortune on the high seas. Called by the sirens and followed by an albatross.

I would have to be careful or the Navy SEAL/old salt would take over where Nancy left off, commandeering Chip’s attention for the rest of our honeymoon.

I WAS NERVOUS about my dive, but when the time came I was even more anxious about being left behind. I made sure I was suited up and ready to go before we dropped anchor; I stuck right by Nancy and Chip, shadowing them as Jamie shadowed me. The videographer was at their other elbow, holding his underwater camera apparatus like it was fashioned of gold filigree.

So we were in the first wave of divers off the boat, scaling a ladder down the side and sinking in backward, tanks first. Once I’d oriented myself in the water my jerk of fear smoothed out, with Jamie on one side of me and Chip on the other, and down we swam toward the sunken, encrusted plane. I felt happy; the water was that bejeweled aquamarine, and nestled in the brilliant coral I spotted skulking eels and other hole-lurkers I hadn’t seen before. Mermaids or not, I thought, this was great. For the first time I felt gratified the honeymoon hadn’t moved along a normal path. We wouldn’t have dived without Nancy, would have settled for snorkeling, probably.

The videographer swam up front with Nancy; then came Chip and I. Behind us swam the second wave, including the Navy SEAL, the high school science teacher and some spearfishermen deprived of spears. A few had tried to bring along their own underwater cameras — cheap deals, not like the videographer’s setup. They were trophy-seekers by nature, they hadn’t wanted to go down there, spot a monster grouper and have nothing to show for it. But Nancy had made them leave those cameras on the boat, and in return she’d promised them free copies of anything the Australian recorded.

I looked up from the corals and the small, flitting fish at one point to find that Jamie and I had fallen behind the other three just a bit. I kicked hard and scooped with my arms to push up alongside Chip; just as I made it to his side, he snapped out an arm and grabbed my wrist. And that was when I realized that despite my claims of solidarity with Chip I’d no more expected to encounter a bevy of mermaids than the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I’d simply been hoping for an explanation — to find, down there, some natural phenomenon that would help explain the mermaid apparition, some anomalous or physically interesting effect, down there below the waves.

But that wasn’t what I got.

What I got was mermaids.

They didn’t see us at first, I guess, because they were engaged in a labor of their own, digging around the base of a large rock. Their hair floated in clouds behind them, long weightless-looking swaths like seaweed, as did their tails, which moved up and down slowly as the tails of dolphins move, not side to side like the tails of fish. Those tails were graceful, beautiful muscles, scales shining silver in rows and rows of small coins.

The Australian, I saw, had his camera on them — I couldn’t read his facial expression because of the mask. No one’s expression was visible under their masks, which is a shame, really, during an event like a mermaid sighting. We hovered there in a kind of frozen surprise, looking down at a cluster of mer-tails, a cloud of mer-hair waving and rippling, their faces hidden from us as they did, industriously, whatever they were doing.

But that tableau lasted only a couple of seconds, and then one of the mer-people turned. She turned her head, looked over her shoulder, and saw us. I saw her face, I saw it full-on — not mythically beautiful, not mythically homely, just a face, its skin sickly white in the water. I saw gills on her neck, their slits opening. I saw a look of surprise.

And I saw her hand: that mermaid was holding some kind of an eel. I had the feeling it was dinner.

Then, like a whip cracking, her tail seemed to buck and all of them were gone, faster than fast, utterly vanished in a turbulence of water.

That was it.

WHAT SHOCKS ME the most, in retrospect, is that within the next few days I would assimilate the mermaids handily. One moment they were impossible, the next they were everyday, in my view of the world. Like moon landings or cell phones. They went from of course not to of course. By the second day I was not only not disbelieving in mermaids but thinking of them as a given. A quirky facet of natural history. Oh the mermaids, I would register casually when they were mentioned.

But before the second day, there was the first.

We swam after the blurred wake, but as underwater swimmers, they were way out of our league. There would be discussions, once we surfaced, of radio-tagging opportunities that had been lost, of the possibility of using the sonar equipment so readily available on all kinds of boats, of enlisting local authorities for future coordinated searches; but in the aftermath of first contact we were just frustrated.

Nancy in particular did not wish to yield. That parrotfish expert swam around as rapidly as possible, peering into nooks and crannies in the coral, finding nothing but the usual minor marine life, until her tank was basically empty. The rest of our tanks were emptying too as we followed her around, our adrenaline rush fading. Personally I never held out much hope of seeing the fish-tailed quasi-humans again. There’d been a certain definitive quality to their vanishment, was how it seemed to me. And they knew the territory.

The dive pros urged us back to the boat after about thirty minutes. On the wet decks we milled around stripping off our gear, emitting noises of astonishment and chaotic confusion. Eventually we grabbed up dewy cans of soda and beer — some of us noshed ravenously on bagels or croissants as though we hadn’t had breakfast a mere hour and a half before — and settled down to watch the Australian’s digital video. He replayed it over and over, with passengers and crew crowding around him as he held up his small monitor. No doubt, no doubt at all, the mermaids were there — their pale backs and shining tails, the weaving, waving cloud/streams of their yellow-green hair.

The mermaids could have been CGI, fully. I mean they looked completely real, but so do the movies about aliens with many tentacles, the movies about talking animals, and the movies about beautiful women. It was only our eyewitness status that made the footage so satisfying, like treasure we’d found whose richness would soon be revealed to the world. We knew it was real and there it was, exactly the way we’d seen it, in pixels and HD.

Not, of course, from the selfsame angle — I realized watching it that in real life I’d had the best seat in the house. In the video the mermaid wasn’t looking straight at the camera when she turned, but to the side, so that her features were obscured. But under the water she’d seemed to look right at me; I’d gotten a long gander at her features. What had struck me about them was the details: they were the features of an actual person. They weren’t generic, they were just eyes, a nose, a mouth, all specific and real. The nose had been a little wide and flat, the lips a little thin.

“She wasn’t the same one,” said Chip, as the two of us stood near the dive slide, leaning on the boat’s slippery gunwale and watching the others gaze at the footage for the umpteenth time. Their faces were the faces of fans or admirers. Light struck the planes of those faces differently: these people were different now, I thought, these people would never be the same. (I wouldn’t either, but for me the difference was less a revolution than an adjustment. It’s just the way I am, there are some major aspects of the universe I take in stride daily, other small ones don’t ever cease to amaze me.) The world had changed for all of us, though. For now, for this moment, it shone with a foreign brightness.

“Pardon?”

“I didn’t see the one from before,” Chip explained. “The one on the tape is a different one.”

“She didn’t really have bad teeth,” I agreed. “Or not that I noticed.”

“And the others, did you get a good look at any of them?”

“Not really,” I said. “It was mostly backs and tails. No other faces. She sounded the alarm. The others never even looked at us, did they?”

“All they did was go,” said Chip.

“They really took off,” I said.

“You can’t blame them. I mean, for all they knew, we could have been bringing smallpox,” said Chip. “The black plague. Anything. We could have been hunting them. Right?”

“You really think they haven’t met us before?”

“Us?”

“I mean people?”

“They must have! Like Nancy said. That’s why we have a word for them!”

The others were talking about mermaid history too, one putting forward the notion that the mermaids were mutations from nuclear tests in the Pacific, Bikini Atoll and all that, who’d moved east after the bombs went off and mutated them. Another suggested they were descendants of an obscure tribe with webbed feet, which subsequently turned into fused legs. The crew, I noticed, who hadn’t been down there with us, assumed we were bullshitting — either that or we were connected with the movie industry. And so it went, until Nancy stood up on a cooler of roasted-vegetable-with-arugula sandwiches and addressed the collective.

“This is a great day,” she said. “You went out expecting to find grouper — and instead you found mermaids. I’m going to be honest with you, though: the grouper sighting was always a cover. This trip was about mermaids from the start. I discovered them just a day ago, with Mr. Foster over there.”

Chip saluted, nodding briefly.

“Of course we knew no one would credit it. So we said grouper. Enough about the past, though. We need to talk about the future. Now on the one hand, I believe in the free sharing of scientific information. But on the other, we don’t want a feeding frenzy. We don’t want people descending on this island by the thousands and destroying these priceless reefs looking for mythological women with bare breasts.”

“Hear hear!” yelled someone behind me.

“As a biologist, that worries me. So we have to have a well-defined, clear strategy for handling this.”

“Sell the video!” said one of the spearfishers. “Like to Fox News! This guy could make a million bucks!”

“That kind of thinking is exactly what no one needs,” said Nancy sternly.

There were some murmurs then, whose content I couldn’t peg.

“But I admit, it’s going to be tough to do this one by the book. First thing is, to claim a new species you need a specimen. In formaldehyde, typically. And similar species for comparison. We have none of that here — this is more like a cultural encounter. A meeting with an unknown tribe — what anthropologists call first contact. Because let’s face it, these guys seem to be an awful lot like Homo sapiens from the waist up, though of course we don’t have a tissue sample yet. We’ve never seen a human hybrid. Better safe than sorry, when it comes to human rights. I’m going to call in an anthropologist ASAP. By tomorrow, I guarantee, a colleague from Berkeley will be coming. In the meantime, we can’t leak. Is that one hundred percent understood? The find and its location absolutely cannot be leaked. Mr. Foster’s got some confidentiality agreements I’m going to need you all to sign.”

There was a low rumble of dissatisfaction as Chip, who’d pulled out a sheaf of papers, saluted once again.

“Wait. In return — and this is on the forms too — every single one of you gets an equal share in whatever benefits come from this. Should they accrue. My motive is research and conservation, not profit, I’m telling you flat out. Still, in the event that any revenues do accrue, they will be equally shared. Fair’s fair. I’m putting my name on the same contract as you. Finally, we all get joint credit for the find. Keep in mind, though, we don’t own anything except this video. These mer-people — well, they own themselves. All we have is a story. But it’s an important one. Our story will change the world!”

Nods, respectful signs of assent, a few whispers.

“We’re the custodians of a priceless knowledge, a unique piece of history. Not grubby profiteers who’ll go down in Wikipedia as the destroyers of a race. We don’t want to be the conquistadors. We want to be Charles Darwin.”

“Charles Barkley?” muttered the Fox News spearfisher.

“So until we get the anthropologist onboard — which should be tomorrow if all goes well — no tweets. No social networking sites. No nothing. Anyone who leaks anything forfeits their share of any proceeds or benefits, as well as their credit. Am I crystal-clear here? And the video is embargoed. That contract was signed before we went under at all. OK? Please: Do yourselves a favor. Sign the agreement.”

There were grumbles from the Fox spearfisher and maybe the substitute teacher, but it seemed that all the forms got signed, Nancy collecting them and scanning them with brisk efficiency. I had to hand it to that parrotfish expert — she planned ahead. She had the courage of her convictions.

I saw now, despite the purple, owlish rings the mask had made around her eyes, that she didn’t necessarily have a derelict/unstable aspect after all. Her look was more take-charge than that of a disordered, rootless individual tragically amputated from society. She was mannish, yes, but now I considered how that mannishness might be helping her, in this new, albeit temporary, leadership role. Those eyebrows, with their insectoid appearance, reminded me of Stalin eyebrows, come to think of it. So many despot eyebrows, in the past, had been untrammeled, left to sprout free, and maybe hers were a bow to this authoritarian eyebrow styling. And the faint mustache on her upper lip, the furry rim, that too could be a nod in the direction of Stalin. . not that she was a despot. I thought her rule was mostly benevolent.

I’m no expert on the discovery of new species, needless to say, but from my amateur perspective — considering we were in completely uncharted mermaid territory — she had a decent grip.

I BARELY RECALL the rest of the day, which turned into a boozefest. Because of the embargo we didn’t want to celebrate in public, so as the afternoon wore on Chip and I found ourselves letting more and more members of the expedition into our cabana — Nancy’s cabana was smaller, since she was on a tighter budget. Before the drinking began, she made calls and confirmed that a first-contact scholar was winging it our way, the Berkeley anthropologist. So there we were, under a gag order, confronted with the existence of beings as improbable as unicorns — hell, more improbable, even.

We waited for the anthropologist.

And while we waited, we blew off some steam. The videographer plugged his camcorder into the cabana’s flat-screen TV and our mermaid footage played across it in a loop, repeatedly; after the first few viewings the guests began to treat the bare-breasted fish/woman as scenery, wandering freely in front of the screen, mingling. As the evening wore on the mermaids seemed to swim among us, or we swum among them: they were there and then gone, with the flick of one tail, the flick of many. They were present, the main one’s face looking at us, and they were gone again, and again, and again. The flat-screen TV was like a massive fish tank in our midst, with various yellow and orange and spotted fish crossing the field of view, passing corals, passing the sunken plane, before the mermaids entered.

Though I knew it was embargoed, and I didn’t plan to share the pic with anyone, I wanted a shot for my records. So I took one, on the sly.

We circulated and talked around the sparse furniture and the dramatic displays of cut flowers, one of us posted as a sentinel at the doorway to make sure the secret video went unseen by others’ eyes. No strangers were allowed. We ordered more and more drinks via room service, through happy hour and into the sadder ones; we ordered individual drinks, then later whole bottles, which arrived on the golf carts with a generous surcharge. The servile young men dismounted from the cart and brought trays to our door.

Once or twice there was a scuffle at the threshold, a member of the party who wanted to smuggle in a loved one or friend. The Heartland man, for instance, was turned away by Nancy for trying to sneak in his wife; I think I hid my pleasure quite smoothly. Later a large man stationed himself outside our door, a large man in a flowery shirt. He was a hotel janitor by day, moonlighting for us in a freelance capacity, Chip told me, as a bouncer. That parrotfish expert had outsourced our security.

I can’t say my fellow party guests were above average, in terms of charisma, intelligence or conversational ability, but I felt like the mermaid sighting was bringing us together, creating a buzz of enjoyment — until I hit a wall around two in the morning and wanted nothing more than to fall into bed. But that option wasn’t available to me; our guests were still milling, tripping, laughing. The bearded old salt had taken up residence in the room’s puffiest chair, where he regaled his listeners with stories of diving deep into dangerous shipwrecks to “lay charges.” He’d blown up many a vessel in his day, it seemed, ranging from “amphibious assault ships” to “minesweepers.” He told stories of diving in Truk Lagoon, where a ghost fleet of Japanese ships lay filled with human skulls.

At that point I happened to glance at the bathroom door and saw the drunken Fox News spearfisherman rummaging in my tampon box. I watched the spearfisher rummage, I took it in stride, and then I cruised over there, casually interrupting him. You don’t really get to ask why, when you behold a thing like that, but the politeness vs. curiosity dilemma can be tense.

The spearfisher snatched his hand out of the box when he saw me coming; as I led him out of the bathroom he made small talk about mer-people’s gills — claimed he’d once known a guy from Montreal, a regular human who had a vestigial gill himself. Right on his neck, where the mermaids’ gills were. It sometimes leaked a clear substance.

“Actually that would most likely have been a pharyngeal slit,” said Nancy, appearing with her eyebrows. “Or groove. Not a vestigial gill. A layperson might call it a birth defect.”

“I don’t get it,” said Chip, who’d detached himself from old Navy guy. “Why do those mermaids even have gills? I mean wouldn’t they be marine mammals? I mean they have breasts, right? And hair. So aren’t they, like, mammals? Like sea lions and dolphins? Those guys don’t need gills. So why would mermaids?”

“It’s very exciting!” cried Nancy. “Of course, gills are far more efficient than lungs at extracting oxygen. They have to be. It’s hard to breathe seawater. Less oxygen in water than air. Gills could have been an evolutionary advantage for the mers. Particularly if they have lungs too. They may have both, in fact. It’s not impossible.”

“The ‘mers’?” I asked.

“Mer-people could be read as a colonialist term,” explained the biologist. “Racist and hegemonic. It’d be my own proposal that, until we learn the culture’s own name for itself — assuming the culture has language qua language, which is a major leap — we shorten our label to mer, or mers, plural. It’s relatively value-neutral. Just the French word for sea.”

“Huh?” said the tampon fisherman. “French? Why goddamn French? They should be flattered we’re calling them people! It’s a goddamn compliment!”

“Well, imagine a highly intelligent race of eels. .” said the biologist.

“No, man,” the fisherman interrupted. “I don’t want to.”

“. . and when these intelligent eels discovered our own species,” the biologist went on, “they then referred to us as land eels. Would that seem like a compliment to you?”

“I wouldn’t take it personally,” said Chip.

“Makes no sense. We don’t look like an eel,” said the fisherman.

“My anthro colleague knows this stuff better than I do,” admitted Nancy.

I guess the sensitivity racket was mostly for the humanities.

We heard a crash and turned — it was the man from the Heartland, who must have snuck in, without his wife this time, when I wasn’t paying attention. Like the spearfisher he’d been nosing around in my business, it looked like, because he was squatting in the open closet, where my clothes were, and as I drew closer I saw an iron from the top shelf had fallen. He was prodding the top of his head with two fingers. Our clock radio lay entwined with the iron on the carpet, two black cords spiraling.

“What the hell?” said Chip, and dashed past me.

Sure enough, I saw from somewhere behind Chip’s shoulder, the man was holding one of my shoes. It was a Jimmy Choo. I knew now I wouldn’t wear it on this trip; it had a four-inch heel and there wasn’t enough pavement.

Chip snatched it away from him.

The man’s other hand was bloody from his scalp, which had a bloody dent in it made by the point of the iron. My shoe trembled slightly in midair as Chip looked down at the guy, unsure of his next move.

A thin drip of red trickled its way down the toe man’s forehead, so slow it seemed glacial. I had a sense of losing control, of borders fading loosely into fuzziness.

“Uh. You OK, man?” asked Chip, craning his neck to see the gouge.

The toe man nodded dazedly, then abruptly rose and zigzagged around us, through the living room and out the front door.

“Huh,” said Chip. “Hope he doesn’t have a concussion or something.”

I shrugged inwardly. I had no patience for the guy’s injuries, incurred during his shoe fondling. He hadn’t received them defending our free nation. He didn’t deserve a Congressional Medal of Honor.

I turned to the oglers loitering.

“Sorry, but it’s time for us to turn in,” I announced. The drinking and annoyance had finally emboldened me. “Chip and I are going to hit the sack now. We’ll see you again tomorrow. And thanks for coming, though.”

IT SHOCKED ME to see, when I struggled out of bed the next morning all headachy to answer a vigorous pounding on our door, that the man who stood there — visible through one of the large picture windows as I tottered out of the bedroom in my skivvies, nothing but a camisole and boyshorts — was the guy from outside the restaurant men’s room, two nights ago, who’d been wearing the Freudian slip T-shirt.

He wasn’t wearing the T-shirt now, but still I recognized him.

“What is it?” I asked, opening the door creakily. It felt like five minutes had passed since I collapsed into bed. I couldn’t have cared less that the Freud guy was seeing me half-naked and unkempt; all I cared about was sleep.

“I came to tell you, because I think you’re friends with — that is, I have some news, the news is bad, you might want to sit down, even? Can I come in?”

“Uh—”

“Thanks,” said the guy, whose face was bland, snub-nosed and friendly. It was mournful, too, mournful as an old hound.

He sat right down on our couch himself, quite heavily.

“I’m sorry to tell you this, but I thought you should know they found a body this morning. A — a person died. A woman.”

“What woman?” I said, snapping awake.

“The one you’ve been spending time with. We — I saw you together at the restaurant, with your husband I guess? Her name is Nancy. A Dr. Nancy Simonoff.”

I sat down then myself, all the way to the carpet. My knees somehow gave out on me.

Chip stumbled out of our bedroom in even less underwear, rubbing his chin stubble.

“What did you say?” he asked. “Someone is dead?”

“Sorry. The resort wasn’t sending anyone to let you know — I thought someone should — personally — I was just there, see, I was on the grass near her casita, we’re just a couple casitas down and like every morning I was practicing on my yoga mat—”

“Who? Who?”

“Nancy,” I said robotically.

I wasn’t looking at Chip, but he must have sat down too, on the sofa near the Freud guy, and we were silent there, three rocks. Feeling surreal the way you do. In shock, or whatever.

“I don’t believe it,” mumbled Chip.

“A drowning, is what I heard,” said the Freud guy gently. “It’s not official yet.”

“But she was a great swimmer!” said Chip.

“In her bathtub,” said the Freudian. “Because they didn’t bring her in from the pool or the ocean, they brought her out of her casita. It’s how I even know any of this. I heard an EMT say drowned.”

“Drowned in the bathtub? Like. . suicide?” said Chip.

“No way,” I said.

“Never,” said Chip.

“I only talked to her a couple times,” said the Freudian, “but I’d have to agree it doesn’t seem likely. She was very, um, enthusiastic. She wasn’t a patient, but still — I’d never have pegged her for suicidal depression.”

I realized he might actually be a Freudian. Or something like it, in the therapy arena. Beyond the pun on the T-shirt.

“And she barely drank either,” said Chip. “She ate a lot but didn’t drink. Last night she was stone-cold sober.”

We sat.

“I mean. Murder?” asked the Freudian.

We sat.

BY THE TIME Chip and I were dressed and hygienic, cold water splashed on our faces and teeth brushed with haste and vigor, the press had arrived. It was a strictly small-time crowd compared to the ravening media hordes back home, but it came on the heels of the police so it felt like a minor invasion — a white van with a satellite dish; two pretty women in pancake makeup who must be reporters; cops teeming. That is, there were a couple of cops in uniform, there was hotel security, and there were some official men in jackets and ties, of unknown identity. And then there were the other guests, passing, standing, gawking — the guests, gathering in small groups, craning their necks, whispering nervously and/or with ghoulishly titillated interest.

The police didn’t look like the cops we were used to — these ones had a faintly British, formal look. But the crime scene tape was universal.

We felt ourselves drawn to the Freudian’s cabana, as close to the furor as we could be. He’d invited us to go over there, before he cleared out of our own cabana so we could get dressed. Each of us felt disbelief that Nancy had stopped breathing. We couldn’t imagine it. We didn’t need to use our imaginations, technically — I get that — because apparently it was real, but sometimes you can’t imagine the facts.

First there’d been mermaids and now this. We wanted sanity.

Walking across the grass, between the palms, we caught sight of someone from the diving party, the substitute teacher, face stricken, lost as a child. We had nothing to tell him, no words to clear things up, so we just shook our heads at him, our bodies still heavy; he shook his head at us.

Then Chip knocked on the door of the Freudian cabana, and Steve let us in.

“Statistically it’s low-crime!” said his partner Janeane, the muumuu woman who was now wearing a tie-dyed sundress. I accepted a cup of in-room coffee gratefully, though I’m an espresso person in real life and knew it would taste like backwash. “I mean, there hasn’t been a murder on this island in six years! Before this one. Right, Steve? I know — I have a violent crime phobia. We researched it before we came.”

“I didn’t know that was a phobia,” said Chip, not unkindly. “Old friend of mine has a fear of velocity.”

“Interesting,” said Steve the Freudian. “Even related, possibly.”

“I visualize impacts,” added Janeane. “Bludgeoning. Face punches. I took a pill just now. Well, more than one.”

“But listen,” I said. “Who can we talk to? Who’s gonna talk to us? Is someone going to put out a statement? The police? Because the thing is — I mean, we can’t talk about it, it’s supposed to be embargoed, but Nancy had — she had news. She had information. A major discovery. It was going to break today, maybe.”

“She was murdered!” said Janeane dramatically, clasping her hands.

“Uh, I don’t know about that,” said Chip.

“It’s not impossible,” I ventured.

“She was a fish scientist, wasn’t she?” asked Steve. “Did she discover a new kind of fish?”

“Something like that,” put in Chip hastily.

We took our mugs of bad coffee outside. By that time Chip was constantly checking his phone, texting back and forth with other members of the diving party, fingers twiddling. The news had leaked out to them all at once — even the vast majority who were residents of the island, not guests at the resort — and they were on Chip for information every minute, they turned to Chip as the premier Nancy authority. Chip had nothing to give, obviously, but promised to keep them informed of any new developments. Sit tight, Chip texted them. The embargo was still on, he assured them; we’d put the Berkeley anthropologist in charge of distributing the digital footage as soon as he arrived.

But of course the anthropologist wasn’t here yet. He was due in from Tortola on a late-afternoon ferry.

I watched officials mill around with a growing sense of despair. Chip wasn’t available to me, eyes avidly planted on his bright data-cell, attention utterly committed. This was a time of sad aftermath, and I’ve always hated aftermaths, with their dull, heavy weight of disappointed hope. Nancy’s body was already gone, so in fact there was nothing to watch. It was a matter of waiting for someone to speak to us.

And what about the mermaids? It was increasingly clear to me that we were shut out of everything now — the action was closed to us. Just a few hours earlier, with servers at our beck and call, we’d been members of an inner circle: we’d clustered at the nucleus, cleaved to the core.

Now we were far from the core, excluded, floating like weak electrons. Or something.

I worried, I felt queasy at the thought of Nancy, I still disbelieved the story of her demise — I understood it with my brain, possibly, but not the rest of me. The living Nancy, with her bushy eyebrows, was still realer to me than the dead Nancy.

Chip was busily texting when the videographer from Australia came galumphing toward us over the emerald grass, weaving between the spectators, flushed and sweating.

“It’s gone!” he said, panting, when he pulled up short. “Oh mate — my footage is gone! And my camera!”

“What do you mean?” asked Chip, looking up from the small screen at long last. “Gone where?”

“Stolen!” said the videographer. “They were both stolen!”

“Slow down there, friend,” said Chip. “OK. Let’s. . maybe you left your camera somewhere? Our place, even?”

“I took it back to my hotel room last night,” he puffed. “You know — I’m at the Bitter End, about a half-hour drive, I got back to the room in the wee hours. Well, the camera was too big to fit in the bloody room safe, so I stuck just the video chip in there instead, and put the key under the pillow, just to be extra careful. Didn’t think I really needed to, but. Woke up this morning and the safe door was wide open. Looked under my pillow, the bloody key was still there! The chip is gone, mate! All the footage is lost. Stolen! It’s bloody gone!”

“And there weren’t any copies,” said Chip slowly.

“No copies,” said the Australian. “I hadn’t uploaded it. I promised her.”

Chip and I looked at each other. We had the feeling, I think, people describe as sinking.

“Oh,” said Chip. “Oh no.”

He told the Australian about Nancy. The three of us stood there limply.

We had nothing left. Poor Nancy, I found myself thinking, as though she were still alive. But no. We had no mermaids; we had no Nancy. All we had was a deceased parrotfish expert and a story people would laugh at.

And memories.

“We can go out again,” said Chip weakly. “We’ll find them. We’ll go right out again. Tomorrow! She would want us to. She would insist, you know she would. We owe it to her. It doesn’t have to be a big group. Maybe a backup camera this time. We’ll take the scholar from Berkeley. When we find them again, the scholar will give us credibility.”

But we weren’t comforted. Not even Chip could crack a smile. Our sadness stood there with us like a fourth person.

When we’d arrived on the island, buffeted by trade winds and cradled by the white sands and all for a few weeks’ pay, I’d felt like the American I was. It was a nice feeling, mostly. It had its minuses, sure (passivity, mental blankness), but also its pluses (vague background satisfaction caused by world dominance; non-starvation). When, carried by the white golf cart across the grounds, we’d jiggled inertly, I’d felt American then too — more American than ever, frankly. I’d felt American when we rented a boat and ordered a catered lunch and when we found mermaids. I’d felt American when we had the film of the mermaids in our possession, when we were drinking our fill and eating well and waiting for the anthropologist. I’d felt American when Nancy carried us along in the hubbub of her discovery.

We’d been Americans then, Chip and I; Nancy had too. Now we were spun off to the margins, us and our opinions, our visions, our memories — our singular knowledge. Now we had something to sell that no one would ever buy, we had a secret that cast us out into the wings. . was it possible we’d stopped being American?

It’s like we’re not even Americans, I said to myself.

In fact, I thought as I looked around me at the officials milling in their damp costumes, the female reporters in pancake makeup. . wait, they weren’t female reporters at all — they had no microphones! One looked like a secretary, the other someone’s girlfriend. Now that I looked more closely, their makeup wasn’t heavy enough — they weren’t even that self-important.

So where was the media? Was there no media after all? The van with the satellite dish — did it not have the call number of a local affiliate on it?

No, I saw now, it was the name of some kind of utility, maybe a cable provider. It wasn’t the press at all. There wasn’t any press here.

No one was watching us, as it turned out. We weren’t the focus of anyone’s interest. The death of one of our own seemed, as far as I could tell, to be passing without notice.

I looked around and saw no Americans — no Americans at all.