Mermaids in Paradise: A Novel

IV. GLORIOUS REVOLUTION

“Jesus,” said Gina disgustedly, before she said anything else. “What the hell are you wearing, Deb? You look like a hangover from Woodstock. I mean, you look really bad.”

We ushered them to us hastily, decamping to a small clump of trees behind a stucco half-wall where we weren’t in full view.

“We’re in a hurry, G.,” I said. I was suddenly seeing myself the way Gina saw me, clad in Janeane’s hippie hand-me-downs, my hair like a cheap fright wig from Walmart. I tried to shake it off. “We’ve got to keep moving. My God. I can’t believe you’re here!”

She and Ellis stashed their roller bags in an oleander and we kept going. Miyoko had a broadcast appointment to keep; we’d timed our walk to the minute because we hadn’t wanted to hang out, waiting, in the open. We hoped that, once we were broadcasting live, we’d have a little more protective cover.

As we hurried down to the beach in our group, heavily laden with AV equipment and numchucks, Gina explained she’d had to come. It was a moral imperative. Honeymoon or no honeymoon, she had to be in on the mermaids. It hadn’t sounded like we had much privacy anyway, right? “I’m being obviously euphemistic,” she added, “what I mean is, no time for sex.” (Chip and I acknowledged that reality with mournful head bows.) And once she decided to book her ticket Ellis had flatly refused to stay behind — the British Virgin Islands being, of course, Her Majesty’s territory.

I gave Gina the plot summary as we hastened along, breathless and no doubt confusing. She wanted to see the footage, couldn’t wait, but she also yearned to tangle with the parent company. She’d flirted with the law once, Gina had, I mean, not flirted with a cop — though she’s also done that, almost serially. I mean she flirted with the idea of becoming a lawyer, before she decided academia was more her speed (the law being, as she put it, a little too much real work). Still, she had a few law courses beneath her belt, as well as a brother who’s a hotshot litigator in D.C., and she was foaming at the mouth to threaten litigation.

Then we were there, on the sand, vigilant and purposeful, on the lookout for minions. At first the only people nearby were some early-morning beachgoers, who ogled us curiously, their eyes asking: Is that pretty young Asian woman a celebrity? Yes, I answered those curious oglers in my mind, quite a celebrity, well known to millions but not to you. Or me. Then we were setting up; then Miyoko was smiling and smiling and speaking in Japanese, while Rick filmed her and Steve held the small-but-heavy satellite dish. Her small black mic was on her small black collar and behind her stretched the blue-turquoise expanse of ocean, upon which, in the distance, the white dots of the armada could be seen.

But sure enough, before long we had company.

THEY MARCHED TOWARD us across the sand, parallel to the water, from the direction of the marina — men in formation, dressed as soldiers. Yes: soldiers, said their camouflage uniforms, and soldiers, said the long guns they were carrying. They wore berets, I saw as they got closer, which gave them an effeminate quality, or French at least. But then they chose the long guns for accessories, which lent a tone of seriousness to the outfits. They made you hesitate to laugh at the berets — the laugh impulse was certainly silenced. And the soldiers had tucked their pants into their boots; I wondered what Gina was thinking of that, the pants tucked into chunky combat boots. I couldn’t ask, while Miyoko was recording, but I did wonder.

It wasn’t only foot soldiers, either. From behind their ranks appeared some vehicles, and the vehicles soon overtook them. The vehicles were jeeps, and those jeeps, as far as I could see, were chock-full of soldiers, those jeeps without tops on them, those open-air jeeps bouncing over the creamy white sand.

Where had the soldiers come from? They looked like UN peacekeeping forces, with those berets — the guys that got sent out to deal with Somalia, the Sudan, war-torn, distant countries where their job was to resemble soldiers but not do anything. Here we’d thought it was only a few policemen, only the resort’s pathetic rent-a-cops, as Thompson had put it, but now we had soldiers on our hands. To go with the armada, there was now an army.

By this time, luckily, Miyoko was wrapping up her speech. The next part of our broadcast was to be the mermaid footage, safe in the computers in Tokyo. I was so grateful, in that moment, for those Tokyo computers, so grateful for the TV producers Miyoko implicitly trusted. I was so grateful for technology, for social networking even, and also for our Thompson, that Navy SEAL Santa, with his distracting incendiary devices and surprising skills of stealth.

We looked to Thompson now, all of us did. Chip did, I did, and even Gina did. We expected great things of him.

“Outmanned and outgunned,” was what he said, shrugging.

Miyoko was the one who told us what to do.

“Don’t stop filming,” she said. “Rick. Turn the camera. Film the soldiers. Keep it rolling. No matter what. We’re still live. We’re still broadcasting.”

And then she said something, I guess to her viewers, in Japanese, and Rick swung the camera around and pointed it right at the soldiers.

On they came till they were right beside us. Maybe twenty soldiers on foot, and more in the jeeps. Some soldiers jumped out of the jeeps. Among them were a couple of civilians — a man in a suit and the woman who’d pretended to be Mormonish, then fully reneged on it.

“I’m sorry,” said the non-Mormon, but her tone wasn’t apologetic. Not one bit. “Do you have a permit for whatever it is that you’re doing?”

“We’re hotel guests,” said Gina. “We have a perfect right to be here. Or do you tell all your guests they can’t set foot on your beach? Is that your policy?”

“You should know we’re broadcasting live,” added Chip. “Millions of Japanese viewers are watching this.”

The soldiers unhooked their guns from their shoulders and, in an unhurried way, lifted and more or less pointed them. At us.

I’d never had a gun pointed at me, other than a paint gun at a corporate retreat, and I have to say it felt more personal than you might think. It seemed it’d be far too easy for one of those guys to pull the trigger. Glocks, I’d heard, had hair triggers on them, cops shot themselves in the foot with those things, just taking them out of the holsters. These weren’t Glocks, though, I told myself — Glocks were mostly handguns. Weren’t they?

Words were what we had, I told myself. Words were the only weapons that we had, since the numchucks hadn’t come in handy, and this was the time to deploy them.

“You should also know,” I said, maybe a little shakily, “that we’ve sent them the video footage. A major TV station in Japan. They have it and they’re showing it. The Japanese are seeing the mermaids, too. The Japanese know.”

“You’ll have to stop what you’re doing and come along with us,” said the man in the suit.

He did look paler, didn’t he? Now that we’d told him about the people of Japan?

“This is how you want to be introduced to the world?” said Gina. “Really, Mr. Corporate Asshole? Does the term Facebook mean anything to you? The term Twitter? To say nothing of the lawsuits your company will be facing. We have a litigator lined up already, in D.C. Meyers & Finkelstein. Kidnapping of a U.S. citizen, just for starters. And trust me, that’s only the very tip of that iceberg.”

Miyoko spoke in Japanese. She was talking about the soldiers and the suits and who paid their bills, she told me later, and though what she said was pretty damning she smiled brightly throughout.

“You think people will come to see your mermaid zoo once they know how you started it? Like this?” asked Chip. “Kidnappings? Guns? They’ll boycott it. You’ll be notorious. And how about Nancy? She was the one who found them. And she wanted the mermaids to be like Darwin’s finches. Not — not Barnum & Bailey’s poor old elephants. These mermaids were her discovery.”

I felt proud of Chip, then, for his eloquence.

Miyoko translated for her audience, keeping up a rapid patter while the suit leaned close to the woman, whispering something.

“Stand down,” said Thompson loudly, in the direction of the soldiers. He had his balls back, suddenly. “You’re on the wrong side here. I am an officer of the United States Navy.”

One or two of the soldiers looked at each other insecurely.

“Then you’ve got exactly no jurisdiction here,” said the man in the suit.

“He’s just a retiree,” sneered the woman.

“You think I don’t have strings to pull, lady?” said Thompson. “I’ve got some strings. Don’t force me to pull them.”

“You don’t have strings,” she said. “You’ve got no strings at all. Now who’s the bullshitter.”

“That far out isn’t territorial waters,” said Thompson. “It’s still in the Exclusive Economic Zone, sure, but it’s contiguous zone, where those coral heads are. I measured it.”

I turned and stared at him, then back at the corporates. I wasn’t sure what Thompson was talking about. But the suit looked like maybe he knew.

“Last night,” he went on. “I measured it last night. It’s only inside the territorial zone, see, that they have a crystal-clear right to tell everyone else what to do. Assuming they’re in cahoots with the cops, a.k.a. what passes for government in the BVI. In the contiguous zone the law’s not so clear. So they’re trying to cordon the mermaids off with those nets, bring them closer in. So then they can claim the rights to them absolutely. No wiggle room, they figure, if they can just bring them closer in.”

That would have been good information to have earlier. The suit/non-Mormon looked shifty.

“The mermaids don’t belong to you,” said Chip. “They’re not a fish stock. They’re half-human! They don’t belong to anyone!”

“Look, people,” said the man, after a long pause. “What we have here is essentially a misunderstanding.”

“Then tell your toy soldiers to lower their guns,” said Thompson. “Remember you’re on live TV. Come on, Mr. Money. Give the order.”

The suit conferred with the non-Mormon again. After a while she nodded, and he gestured at the soldiers. Guns were lowered.

We all stood there, silent except for the sound of Miyoko, still talking in her native tongue.

“And how about Nancy?” asked Chip. “Dr. Nancy Simonoff? We want justice for her. You’re still claiming she drowned in her bathtub? A first-rate swimmer and diver?”

“The woman was an asthmatic,” said the woman. “Her accidental passing is regrettable.”

“Deeply regrettable. Yes, very sad. And also, no comment,” added the suit.

“I demand an autopsy,” said Chip. “By someone other than the locals. Say, for instance, the FBI.”

“We’re not prepared to discuss any of that, other than with her family,” said the suit. He whispered to the woman and gestured to the army again.

“Have they even been notified?” yelled Chip, as the soldiers executed a snappy about-face and began marching away. The suits, then the jeep soldiers hopped into the jeeps. “Release her cell phone! You have no right to it!”

“Neither do we,” pointed out Rick from behind his camera. “Technically.”

“We can talk to her family,” said Gina. “She was an academic, right? Look, there are avenues. I’ll do research. Just lead me to a laptop. Forget these ass clowns. We’ve got them on the run.”

As quickly as it had appeared, the convoy made a wide turn and drove off, foot soldiers bringing up the rear. Marching away, they looked almost foolish.

Miyoko finished her broadcast and signed off; now, she told us, the mermaid footage was running. We’d have to spread the word to other countries, send out our press release to as many places as we could — basically make sure that the mermaid footage went viral. That’d be no problem, Miyoko assured us. It took a lot less than the world’s first mermaid video to generate a viral scenario.

“I’m thinking we should stay somewhere else,” said Chip, as we walked up the beach toward the cabanas. “Another hotel. Another part of the island.”

“No kidding,” said Gina. “Let’s get the hell outta Dodge.”

WE THREW OUR clothes and toiletries into bags and drove down the road, some of us in Rick and Ronnie’s rental car, the rest in Thompson’s “jeep,” which turned out to be a Hummer, a car Gina admired with particularly hard-edged irony. She congratulated Thompson when she saw it, told him owning a Hummer was the most antisocial act a person could commit without breaking the law.

The sticking point was Janeane, who had a little trouble leaving her safe space despite the fact that it really wasn’t safe anymore. In the end Steve gave her a couple of horse tranquilizers and called it good. We practically carried her out.

A lot of the places were booked up, so we landed at a cheap motel in the end — probably just as well, we figured, since it wouldn’t have corporate ties. It wasn’t a chain and it wasn’t directly on the beach, either, though it was within walking distance. We had thin-walled rooms but there were enough for all of us; we needed to maintain our safety-in-numbers policy. (We’d thought of Thompson’s house, but we’d be too easy to find there if the company decided to come after us.) The pool had leaves floating in it, even a toad, and the clerk had to be enticed out of his back room with impatient shouts to check us in. He wasn’t a go-getter.

On the upside, it had WiFi and cable and it wasn’t too far from our previous location. Chip and I crossed the road and walked down to the ocean just after we checked in: we could still make out the dots of the armada.

Someone got the apathetic clerk to unlock the door between the two biggest rooms and we set up shop with our modest tech array and Janeane’s surprisingly large supply of groceries, sadly lacking in meat, dairy and refined sugar. We convened what Chip called a “leadership conference” to decide on our next steps. We’d broadcasted, we’d faced them down for now, evaded capture; but what was our next goal? There’d be a horde, Miyoko’d warned, descending on the island soon; that was the other big risk we’d run. Now that the mermaids were public knowledge, first in Japan, soon virally, there were new challenges.

We’d done what we had to do, but we’d also opened up a world-size can of worms.

“Not everyone who comes will be on our side, either,” piped up Ronnie. “We can depend on that. Half of them will probably just want to pay the price of admission to the Venture of Marvels.”

“More than half,” grumped Thompson.

“We need to call in some people who’ll be on our side, then,” said Chip.

“Like, who?” said Rick. “Animal rights people? Environmentalists?”

“No, people with power,” said Gina. “Shit. First off, we need some celebrity spokespeople. Like Miyoko. But more so. And American.”

“And scientists,” said Rick. “We have to get some of them. You need at least one famous scientist, in a situation like this.”

“At least one major politician,” put in Steve. “And a rich guy, someone famous for being extremely rich. Say a Bill Gates, a Warren Buffett.”

We brainstormed like that, as Miyoko slaved away on social media and did some phone interviews. Gina took a break to watch the footage, which was posted on YouTube; it already had six figures’ worth of hits, mostly from people in Japan, Miyoko said, but people in other countries were starting to catch on. Before long the hits would be in the millions, she told us confidently. Plenty of people thought it was a hoax, pure Hollywood — good, said Miyoko, that was just fine with her, maybe it’d keep some of the riffraff out.

“More likely it’s the riffraff that’ll come,” said Thompson. “Your alien abductees, your Bigfoot believers, your New Age freaks that go to Sedona to find the vortexes.”

Janeane looked startled at that last one, like maybe she’d made some trips to Sedona herself, but said nothing.

The rest of us thought he had a point.

“Jesus,” said Rick. “Maybe we’re the bad guys here. Maybe we shouldn’t have done this.”

We all felt the panic of that possibility, for a long moment. We saw the hordes, in our mind’s eyes, overrunning the island and the mermaids, and we didn’t like it.

“It was our only play,” said Chip finally. “This was our only play. We have to make it work.”

“I’m going to find a number for Nancy’s family,” said Gina. “We need to get them on board, then reach out to the scientists she worked with. Science will give us our legitimacy. Who’s got a spare laptop? Or iPad?”

Chip’s was still in the possession of the parent company, but Rick had one and he set Gina up. Ellis claimed he’d get in touch with a British embassy or consulate — there had to be one nearby, and maybe, since he was a citizen, they could be of some help.

“Ellis,” I said, in a private aside, “really, man. Listen. I’m always on your side, with the English thing. You’re free to be you. Completely. But you might have to, like, prove you’re a citizen, dealing with a consulate.”

Ellis gave me a hurt look. “Well-w, Deb-rah,” he said, “wot d’ya fink dis is?” (He goes cockney when he’s feeling confronted.)

And damned if he didn’t reach into a zip compartment on his roller bag and pull out a UK passport. The thing was red, with a gold crown on it and a couple of royal-looking animals standing up on hind legs. Seemed like the real deal. I’ve known Ellis a long time, and I still have no idea how he got his hands on it.

Anyway, we figured there was no harm letting him waste his time with embassies or whatnot. There were none on the island, that was for sure.

The group had decided no one should use words like murder or homicide, when one of us talked to Nancy’s family. Those words were not comforting words, and the truth was, without any cops to talk to, without having even seen the body (except for Steve, who’d seen it covered in a sheet) we didn’t actually know shit. Once Gina had a number for Nancy’s parents, which she accomplished with a speed that impressed me (“Failed academics run in families. Turns out her old man’s a professor too”), we decided Chip would make the call. He’d been the closest to Nancy by far, and Chip, when he wants to, can be tactful.

He needed privacy for the call, he said, so we let him out onto the balcony, where he fortified himself with a few swigs from a dewy beer before connecting.

Meanwhile Miyoko had started getting Tokyo celebrities on board; she also had ties to some American actors and rock stars, she told us, a lot of them did lucrative commercials in Japan, for perfume and jewelry and clothing, and she’d interviewed some of our A-listers now and then. Still, they weren’t her best buds so getting through their handlers would take some time, she said. But she was up for it. She didn’t have many ins with scientists or government officials, but pop-culture famous people were her stock in trade.

Gina and Chip would handle the scientist angle, Gina being in the academy herself and Chip having had Nancy’s ear. Rick would try to schmooze the wealthy, since, as an independent filmmaker, he knew quite a few of them. Plus his money contacts had friends among the nationally prominent Democrats, since many made sizable contributions to political campaigns. He’d handle that angle, and Ronnie would help him. Thompson insisted he could pull strings, that he’d call on some old friends still on active duty; he’d try to put together some military might for us, he said, though what he meant we weren’t entirely sure.

There they were, all on cell phones, all frantically dialing and talking. And then there were the rest of us, with no contacts at all. The best Steve could do were some astronomers in Palo Alto, who wouldn’t be much help. They were preoccupied, he said, didn’t have an interest in marine biology: their eyes were fixed on the heavens.

Janeane and I also had nothing.

So Steve, as a therapist (though apparently he didn’t practice anymore) and therefore a de facto interpersonal specialist, would try to do some coalition-building, visit some places of business and government locally, trying to reach out to the year-round community. He’d be armed only with a tablet and our footage, and he’d try to garner local support for a mermaid sanctuary.

We didn’t have high hopes for that part of the outreach, but it was a nice time-killer for Steve, who, like Chip, enjoyed meeting people, whoever they might be. He didn’t feel great about going out alone, but Thompson said he could drive the Hummer and I think the novelty may have encouraged Steve a bit.

Janeane and I were relegated to the menial jobs: Janeane was in charge of keeping us fed and watered, and I — well, I had the lowest task of all. I had to tweet.

Miyoko had several million followers, but they followed her in Japanese. So we established a mermaid-group handle linked to the Facebook page she’d set up, plus the footage of us on the beach, and I tweeted from that. I’d never tweeted before, but it’s not rocket science and I’m a quick study. At first the tweeting was slow-going, but soon enough, with Miyoko’s input, I gained a following for us. Re-tweets were everywhere.

We saw the TV tape on YouTube, our confrontation with the suits and the soldiers, the Japanese TV broadcast. I didn’t like the feeling of watching myself on TV — the shapeless garment I sported was a blot on the landscape. A lifetime of good dressing went out the window; now I was immortalized wearing Janeane’s floral quasi-muumuu.

Gina took my hand, the first time we saw that footage, and squeezed it in terrible sympathy. I would have cried, if I’d had the time and energy. But there was no pause to allow for tears, and the milk was already spilt. The world now knew me as a muumuu woman. I looked like Janeane.

Before long the personal calls and texts started rolling in to my cell phone. I ignored them all — people from work, friends, even B-school people I hadn’t heard from in years. There were three calls from Chip’s mother alone.

Chip ignored his calls too; the long conversation with the Simonoff family — Nancy’s mother, to be specific — was draining. As it turned out, the family had known something was terribly wrong, because someone unfamiliar had answered Nancy’s cell phone when her mother called to check in. That person had said Nancy wasn’t available and not to call again, then promptly hung up. When the father called back (by then the mother was too distraught), no one picked up, so they called the resort and were put through to Guest Services, where they were given the run-around. As a result, the father was already en route to us. Worried sick about Nancy, he’d simply gotten on a plane.

When Chip broke the news to Nancy’s mother about what seemed to have happened, the woman went into shock. It took a while to get her back on the phone, at which time, without prompting from Chip, she brought up the possibility of foul play. Nancy’d had her inhaler since she was in preschool and there was no way, her mother said, she would have failed to use it. She always had extras, too: she was always stocked to the gills.

The family had heard about the mermaids from Nancy before they ever saw the video — they’d been the first ones she called. Nancy had never been a liar or one whit fanciful, they said, on the contrary, she’d always been painfully literal. She had no interest in movies, except for documentaries on marine life; she never played non-educational games or read make-believe stories, and she abominated the frivolity of novels. When other girls dressed up as princesses for Halloween, she put on a snorkel mask and went as Jacques Cousteau. (And once as a blowfish, her mother admitted, which set off a bout of weeping that called for a phone handoff to a neighbor and delayed the conversation another twenty minutes.)

The parents had retired to Florida when the father went emeritus, so it was a short flight and Prof. Simonoff was due in shortly. Chip’s new directive was to keep him from falling into the clutches of the parent company. He’d meet him at the ferry, and this time there’d be no interception from the marine police: we were the only ones who knew he was coming. And not only was the Prof. coming, Nancy’s mother had told Chip, but he was bringing some medical expertise with him — a doctor friend from their retirement community. You never knew when that might come in handy.

The problem was, the armada was still out there. As far as we knew, they were moving full steam ahead with their plan to cordon off the mermaids and “bring them in.” The way we saw it, none of our activities, no part of our energetic bustle was going to bear fruit in time to stop it. We needed an injunction, a court order that would make them cease and desist their mermaid-corralling activities. And that was something we didn’t have.

Time flew that day, with many of us doing video interviews as well as phone — I made sure to shed the muumuu, now that I had access to my own clothes again — and a couple of meltdowns, like when Janeane first saw (against Steve’s explicit wishes) the beach footage, complete with soldiers/guns. She barricaded herself into the bathroom and we had to call in Steve, who was making his rounds in the Hummer, to lure her out again.

There was also an altercation between Thompson and Rick when Thompson referred to him and Ronnie as “the two fairies”; it ended with Rick getting First Aid from Steve for a small cut above his right eye, while Ronnie prepared an ice pack. Thompson refused to say he was sorry, claiming that fairy was a purely descriptive term having nothing to do with homophobia/hate crimes/being a giant bigot. Also, Thompson maintained, when he’d inquired whether Ronnie was “the gayer one” he’d just been honestly trying to understand their deal. They didn’t have to be so touchy about it.

Gina attempted to show solidarity with Rick by dumping a whole bottle of cayenne pepper from Janeane’s travel-size spice rack into Thompson’s whiskey flask when Thompson wasn’t looking, then admitting it openly after Thompson spit whiskey all over the motel bedspread and complained the skin was peeling off his gums. Thompson wouldn’t hit a woman, that was as much a part of his code as calling gay men fairies, so Gina was protected from brute-force retaliation. Still, she hid the other spices just to be safe, and watched her own food and drinks like a hawk subsequently. From then on she’d only drink beers she opened herself, and no cocktails at all, she vowed.

For there was some drinking going on, no harm in admitting it; the stress, the pressure was getting to us, plus we were all on vacation. Those of us who normally had five o’clock rules suspended them (save for Janeane, a teetotaler), and those of us with no such rules, such as Thompson, proceeded all the more vigorously.

Chip, in his cups by 2 p.m., needed a designated driver to pick up Prof. Simonoff, so I, who at that time had only had two light beers, volunteered. I didn’t like going out just the two of us, so Thompson got the Hummer back from Steve — who’d met with rudeness and disbelief, for the most part, in his outreach activities and wanted to spend some time with the fraught Janeane — and we set out for the marina as a threesome. Thompson was a sight, by then, wearing some rolls of gauze in his mouth, soaked in hydrogen peroxide, that covered up his teeth. I glanced back at one point from the driver’s seat to see him loading shells into what looked to me like a high-powered rifle.

“Thompson,” I said, “you’re not packing that thing. You’re drunk, for one. Put it away right now. That violates every rule of gun safety.”

“Lock and load in my sleep,” mumbled Thompson through his gauze. A piece of it fell out as he spoke; he fumbled the rifle as he tried to shove it back in.

“No way, man,” said Chip. “You know how much I respect you. But we have to be cool here. You’ll scare Nancy’s father half to death. He’s already gonna have a personal tragedy to deal with. He’ll think we’re a bunch of crackpots.”

Thompson grudgingly put the gun aside, harrumphing through his gauze, and contented himself with donning some kind of camouflage cargo or fishing vest, with multiple bulging pockets in it, that held knives and sundry other objects of utility and aggression. I saw him sneak something that looked like a grenade into one of the compartments, but right then we passed a convoy of jeeps that alarmed me and I forgot about his doings, too busy watching the rearview mirror to see if any of the jeeps turned back around and followed us. (They didn’t.)

Then we were at the parking lot near the marina, where we waited until the ferry was pulling up to the dock, Thompson scouting all around, first with the naked eye, next with binoculars, for other gun-wielders. Finally they jumped out and walked, as calmly as they could, I guess, toward the disembarking passengers. I waited in the car, doors stoutly locked, gas-guzzling engine running noisily and doing its part for runaway climate change, for the two of them to come back with our distinguished visitors.

PROF. SIMONOFF WAS an elfin man, smaller than Nancy had been; his wife must be a giant, I thought, for Nancy to have come from the two of them. He looked the part of the emeritus he was, balding on the top of his head with a monklike fringe of white hair, and wore glasses. His doctor friend was on the portly side, black, and might have had a jovial way about him, I sensed, in happier times. They both wore suits and ties, and carried briefcases and laptops. No roller bags at all. I was glad of that. It lent them a certain gravitas none of us had in our tourist playgear.

The Prof. had talked to his wife when he got off the plane, and she’d delivered the bad news. But that emeritus seemed to be in denial — he was pale, he was wan, but he wasn’t weeping. He wasn’t conceding anything.

Chip gave them the rundown as we drove, Prof. Simonoff up front with me. He left out certain parts, including the minor bombing and the gay-bashing scuffle that had led to Thompson wearing gauze rolls in his mouth—“His gums are bothering him,” was all he said on that.

Thompson seemed to be on good behavior now; he’d even kicked the rifle beneath the backseats. It was as though, faced with two educated men of his own vintage, he finally had peers and wished to impress them. He even took the gauze rolls out, after a few minutes, and stashed the bloody pieces in one of his many pockets. I winced when I saw that. He hadn’t been exaggerating, I guess, when he said his gum-skin had been peeling off in strips. Also he took a call from someone who purported to be military, and while he talked gave a quite passable impression of not being drunk at all.

But things weren’t rosy back at the motel.

“What the hell,” said Chip, as we drew near. “Deb, don’t turn in, just keep driving! Don’t stop!”

For it seemed the parent company hadn’t given up on us. The motel parking lot was full of jeeps — the same ones, I warranted, that had passed us on our trip out; the same ones from the beach.

“Shit,” said Chip. “Damn. How’d they find us?”

He lost no time in putting in a call to Rick, hitting his speakerphone button so we could all hear it.

“They just got here,” said Rick. “We wouldn’t let them in. It’s been quiet for a minute, after we refused to unlock the doors, but it won’t be for long. We think they’re going to get the clerk or something. We’ve got the chains on the doors.”

“That won’t stop them for a second,” said Thompson. “They’re just maybe warning the clerk they’re busting in.”

“Unacceptable,” said Simonoff calmly.

We’d passed the motel by then; with no destination anymore I drove aimlessly down the coast road.

“We can’t abandon them,” said Chip. “We have to go back, Deb.”

“I’ll talk to them,” said Simonoff.

“You don’t know who you’re dealing with,” said Thompson, shaking his head. “They won’t listen to reason.”

“It’s not reason,” said Simonoff. “I’m going to threaten them.”

He was such a tiny emeritus, sitting there next to me in his glasses, light glinting off his pate. I felt like patting him.

“We already mentioned litigation,” said Chip.

“You better find a place to turn the car around,” said Simonoff to me.

“But we were trying to save you from them,” said Chip, a little plaintively. “They have guns, sir. They have soldiers.”

“And I’m an old man with no daughter anymore,” said Simonoff. “I’ve got nothing left to lose.”

“Except your freedom,” said Chip, worried.

“I do have weapons,” offered Thompson modestly.

“Are private citizens allowed to keep guns here?” asked Simonoff, surprised, I guess, into a general knowledge question.

“Not to carry,” conceded Thompson. “For display only. I have special permits. It’s a historical collection. But all in excellent working order. They happen to be in the vehicle here, currently.”

“I see,” said Simonoff, almost gently. “Still, guns or no guns, they have an advantage, when it comes to brute force, I’m sure. Unwise to sink to their level. No, I’m a grieving father; I have the moral high ground, and I’m prepared to use it.”

I noticed, in my rearview mirror, Thompson fingering his grenade wistfully. The doctor, seated on Chip’s other side, was not in a position to glimpse it, but I could.

“You heard the man, Thompson,” I said sharply.

He tucked it away, a bit downcast.

“OK,” I said, once I’d pulled off onto the dirt. “Back to the motel, then?”

“We need a plan,” said Chip.

“What plan?” I said. “It’s an army. And there’s no back door.”

“Leave it to me,” said Simonoff. “Just let me do the talking.”

As I drove us back, I thought of being in jail. I didn’t want to. I thought of those long guns pointed at me. I parked with fear in my heart. I wanted to stay in the Hummer; I wished to exhibit cowardice.

The first thing I noticed, dismounting reluctantly from that large, possibly armored vehicle — because Thompson’s wasn’t some glossy poseur H2 or H3; it was a battered, old-school original — was that a couple of soldiers were leaning against their jeeps relaxedly. One smoked a cigarette while another nodded to me, then smiled almost flirtatiously. Flirtatious smiles were what I could look forward to, when I was thrown in jail, I guessed. And worse.

But as we made our way along the catwalk to our rooms, more soldiers seemed to be loitering. Instead of pointing any guns at us, they stepped aside to let us through. We reached the door to our room: it stood open, but wasn’t bashed in. And from inside the room, I heard laughter issue.

Miyoko was sitting on one of the beds, an open laptop on her lap, showing two soldiers the footage from the beach. One of the soldiers held a beer; the other pointed delightedly at the screen.

“That’s me!” he said.

“Oh man,” said the beer soldier. “You looking fierce, Jerry. I hope Annette saw that, she won’t be holding out on you now. No way.”

More laughter.

A couple of soldiers were talking earnestly to Rick and Ronnie; another stood in the kitchenette with Steve and Janeane, munching on one of her soy-chicken taquitos. “Not bad at all,” I heard him say, and Janeane offered him another. In a corner, Gina appeared to be showing a handsome soldier her lower-back tattoo, pulling up her shirt while Ellis eyed her uncertainly/jealously.

Was it some kind of trick? I looked at Chip; his mouth was hanging open just a little.

The ones talking to Rick and Ronnie seemed to be the most serious, from which I deduced they might also be the ones in charge. So I took a deep breath and stepped near.

“. . end of the day, we don’t take orders from them. Not if we don’t have to. And what I thought was, hell. We don’t have to. As long as we don’t hear to the contrary from the higher-ups, that is. And so far I haven’t heard squat from them,” said one of the soldiers.

He had some flair above his pocket, a couple of badges or something.

“It’s a goddamn relief,” said Rick. “I’m not going to lie to you.”

“Thanks, man,” said Ronnie. “Yeah. Big relief.”

“Hey,” said the CO, noticing me. “What’s your name, honey?”

“This is my wife, Deb,” said Chip.

“Gotcha,” said the CO, and winked.

“No harm done,” said I.

“Whatever she says,” said Chip, and put out his hand to shake. “I’m Chip.”

“Chip’s the one who found the mermaids,” said Rick. “With Nancy.”

“So anyway,” said the CO’s wingman, “until the order comes down—if it does — we thought we’d swing by, see if there’s anything we can do. To help out. We don’t want to see this place turned into Disneyland either.”

“We already got a Disneyland,” said the CO.

“And Disney World,” said his second.

“Lots o’ Disney,” agreed the CO.

“You sound American,” I said to him.

“Grew up on St. John. Sam here did too. I’m Raleigh. Virgin Islands National Guards. The Brits have bupkes here, armed forces-wise. We lend a hand. But hey. Tell you my life story over a beer?”

“He doesn’t give up easy, does he,” said Chip, and put an arm around me. “But seriously, this is awesome, guys. Having you on board. It really is. Kicks ass.”

“Let’s put our heads together,” said Rick. “Right, Chip? See what we can come up with.”

“My troops’ll have to keep a low profile,” said Raleigh. “Far as the suits know, we’re out on a drill. We can’t get in their faces. Other than that, though, we’re here for you.”

The six of us stood around the small table in the room, though we really didn’t fit. Raleigh said he had some information, first off, which was that the armada still hadn’t spotted any mermaids, even with their dozens of divers.

They were painstakingly crossing quadrants off their grid and moving the nets in, but there was low morale, out there, with a growing majority of skeptics. The parent company had shown the mermaid footage to the searchers, but many still didn’t believe it was genuine, said they’d seen better CGI mermaids in kids’ movies. With each fruitless search there were more divers who thought the video was simply a hoax.

Raleigh thought the best move would be to “take ownership,” as he put it, and come out and admit it was a hoax — our hoax, that we were the hoaxers. We’d buy ourselves some time that way, he claimed, although the parent company wouldn’t be swayed; they claimed to have had the footage “authenticated” by “experts” before they took action in the first place. If we pulled back, he said, in essence pulled a hoax now, claiming to have hoaxed before, they’d lose a lot of manpower. They’d lose logistical support, and it would set back their project, at least temporarily.

Miyoko wouldn’t like that at all, said Chip, she’d staked her reputation on this being real, she’d gone the whole nine yards for us.

Rick nodded. We didn’t even want to bring it up with her.

“We don’t need to go public with it,” said Raleigh. “Losing face here, with the teams they’re depending on to find the mermaids for them, that could do it. Without their divers, see, they’re screwed, and the divers are already pissed and impatient, chomping at the bit.”

“How would we do that, though?” said Chip. “We don’t have access to their divers. Do we?”

We knew a few of them, of course; Chip had emails for the ones who’d been in our group before they defected.

“They won’t believe the hoax angle,” said Chip. “I mean, some of these people were with us. They saw the mermaids. Personally.”

“You’d say it was all a setup,” suggested Sam. “Some kind of elaborate publicity stunt. Say you put the mermaids there.”

“Like, they were free divers,” said Chip. He’d always liked that angle. “Wearing fake tails.”

“Maybe it was a gambit to protect the reefs all along,” said Rick. “Nancy’s gambit! To save her parrotfish!”

“Hold it,” came a voice from behind us. “What’s this?”

Prof. Simonoff was hovering.

“You’d make my daughter out a liar?” he went on. “Is that what I’m hearing?”

“We’re just tossing out ideas,” said Chip, apologetic.

“It wouldn’t be public,” I added. “We’re just trying to think how we could undermine the parent company.”

“I can’t support any scheme that would tarnish my daughter’s reputation,” said Simonoff. “I’m sorry, but I couldn’t allow it.”

I did a glance-around to cover my feeling of embarrassment. Janeane and Steve were talking intently to the soldier who liked soy taquitos; Miyoko was doing another phone interview, pacing and talking as the bed filled with soldiers, piled up there practically on top of each other, watching themselves on her laptop. It was like a clown car, only the car was a bed and the clowns were wearing camo. Thompson and the doctor were examining Thompson’s array of what he called “folders,” a.k.a. folding knives, in a corner.

I had to turn back to Simonoff eventually, who stood there, humble in his demeanor but with a resolve I can only call steely.

“You understand,” said Raleigh after the silence, “this would be temporary. We could spread a rumor, in effect, just among the divers working for the company.”

“Rumors have more life than fact, in our economy,” said Simonoff. “I’m sorry, but I can’t risk it. Even afterward, once you set the facts straight — if you were able to — some of her colleagues would think of her as a purveyor of hoaxes, if it got out. And it would. Everything gets out, nowadays. You know I’m right on this. To some people, she’d always be the person who committed fraud. No, the risk is too great. I’m very sorry.”

“What if she were the victim?” offered Chip. “I mean she was. She is. We could make me the villain of the piece, say the scam was my doing, that I roped her in—”

“No,” said Simonoff. “That makes her look foolish. My Nancy was not a gullible woman.”

We’d thought, for a moment, that we had an idea with maybe some traction, but now we had nowhere to go.

“So the disinformation campaign is off the table,” said Raleigh, with difficulty.

“We have to see my daughter’s. . remains,” said Simonoff. “If this wasn’t a drowning, or if it was and there are any signs of a struggle, well, that’d be a game-changer. Wouldn’t it.”

“Then you’ll need to go straight to the. .” began Chip.

“Mortuary,” said Simonoff solemnly.

That guy was really keeping it together.

“The trick will be the local police,” said Raleigh. “These guys aren’t serious. They do what the corporates tell them. So we need to get Mr. Simonoff here—”

“Professor Simonoff,” corrected Chip, deferential.

“—I’m sorry, yes of course, Professor Simonoff — to where his daughter’s remains are located, and make sure we get him and the doctor out again after that examination without the parent company interrupting us.”

“They’ve got no business interfering,” said Simonoff. “I have a right to privacy. Anyway, the mortuary’s just a private institution. We couldn’t get a hold of anyone at the police station or the resort, but they must have moved her — they don’t have the right facilities at the police station. There’s no. . er. . refrigeration.”

He could barely say it.

“Still, we’d be more comfortable if these gentlemen had a couple of your guys with them,” Rick told Raleigh. “An escort, as it were. Possible? Or is that too obvious?”

“Sam and I will supply the escort,” said Raleigh to Simonoff. “As long as it’s not all of us, we may not raise any red flags. We’ll keep a lookout, is all, when you go in.”

So they went off, Simonoff and the doctor, Raleigh and Sam.

“MAN,” SAID CHIP, after they’d left. (The rest of the soldiers were still with us. They loved Miyoko; they clustered around her wherever she went. Which wasn’t far, in our connected rooms.) “I really liked that hoax idea. Too bad.”

“I see his point, though,” said Ronnie.

“Yeah,” said Rick. “Still. Nancy would have wanted to do whatever it took, for her mermaid sanctuary.”

We sat around the small table, meditative. Nancy would have done whatever it took. She wouldn’t have worried about posterity. We knew that. But then, she’d been alive back then. Like all of us.

We felt the ridiculous sadness of her being dead — worse, then, than it had ever been.

To take our minds off the waiting, we busied ourselves with tasks. I did some more tweeting, responding to other tweets, updating our status on Facebook. It was tedium, all the social networking, it was Boring Central, plus I got agitated thinking about Simonoff and the doctor looking at Nancy’s body — I thought of how Simonoff must be feeling, the punched-in-the-gut devastation. My eyes glazed over as rows and rows of comments rolled in, each one less interesting than the last. I drank an extra beer, lamented its weak impact to Gina, and thought fondly of the days, back in college, when I used to put anything I felt like in my body. Kids think they’re immortal, I mused, giddy. Then, before they know it, they’re no longer good-looking.

Chip, using Miyoko’s laptop while she talked on the phone, immersed himself in aggregators and quickly discovered an anti-mermaid backlash. It seemed the mermaid tapes had enraged a highly vocal contingent.

“I think it’s some folks in the Heartland,” worried Chip.

He peered in close at the screen, scrolling through comment lists. The defection of the toe fetishist had been nagging at him — he’d wanted for so long to craft new friendships among the fellow citizens he doesn’t understand, the ones from the vast unknown. With the Heartland couple he’d made a special effort at outreach, an effort dating from that very first dinner, but he had failed; the Heartland couple had turned on him.

“It is! Deb! It’s Middle Americans!”

Chip knows his Internet research, he knows how to trace trends and memes and what have you, and so I didn’t doubt his opinion.

The Heartland had spoken. The mermaids were against God, the people of the Heartland said: the mermaids were unholy.

Some said the mermaids were descendants of Lucifer: when he’d fallen from grace he’d grown a tail and been condemned to swim the deep. Couldn’t the ocean’s depths be hell? Others said mermaids were the hybrid spawn of ancient hippie-pagans. The long-ago hippies had loved animals more than humans, much like their current-day equivalents, the mermaid haters said. And it had driven them crazy. Therefore they mated with some fish.

There was confusion there, I guess, because, though most of the threads Chip found were staunchly creationist, there was some chatter about mutations that looked a little science-y to me. We tried to imagine olden-time people mating with fish, Chip and I did, as we hovered over the screen, but we couldn’t muster it, not a single obscene mental picture could we call up on the blank walls of our brains.

Some of the haters claimed God had just stuck those fish tails on people suddenly — a penalty for a heinous crime against the Bible’s teachings. One day the mermaid ancestors had been walking around free and clear, on two fine, dandy legs; the next, flop, swish, legs gone and hello tails. Then, probably embarrassed, they had to slide all snakelike to the nearest body of water. “Wriggle on their bellies like unto the Serpent that tempted Eve!” posted a Churchgoer from Tuscaloosa in a newspaper’s op-ed comments.

These people had convictions, no one could argue against that. They didn’t agree on how the tails and gills had happened, on that point they were all over the map, but as to why the tails/gills had happened — on that front they were perfectly united. It was the bestiality aspect. The crime was loving animals, whichever way you sliced it, they said. For it was clear as day, to all these hundreds, then thousands of commenters — as the movement gathered steam across the web and reportedly on right-wing radio — that the punishment had been tailored, by none other than God, to fit the crime.

“If a woman approaches any animal and lies with it, you shall kill the woman and the animal!” posted an irate blogger called No Monkeys Here. “Leviticus!” He thought God had been too lenient, electing not to obliterate the first mermaids. God had been too liberal. If he weren’t so deeply respectful of God, so deeply pious, personally, the blogger wrote, he’d almost be tempted to voice a suspicion that God had been, in a word, weak. He wanted to say right out that God had been a fuckin’ pussy, said Chip, but he didn’t have the stones.

“One man’s weakness is another man’s mercy,” said Ronnie.

By that time the others had joined us; every screen was tuned to the groundswell of mermaid hatred.

“What did the mermaids ever do to them?” asked Janeane. “It’s unloving.”

WE WERE STILL huddled like that, scrolling and scrolling, peering and peering, when a knock came on the door: Simonoff, the doctor, Raleigh, and Sam.

“She wasn’t there!” said Simonoff.

You’d think he’d be distressed by this fact, his inability to locate the physical evidence of his only daughter, but his face was glowing with energy, a fine sheen of sweat. I saw a glint in his eyes.

“What do you mean?” said Chip. “It’s the only facility on the island. With, um, the necessary — cold storage.”

“Exactly,” said Simonoff. “The attendant said they never saw a body. Not only that, they never heard of a body. No one ever called to make any arrangements. No one got notified. We talked to everyone there. Literally every single person on staff.”

He took his glasses off and wiped the lenses on his tie. Scrubbed them, more like, scrubbed furiously.

We looked around at each other, mystified. There was a feeling of being dumb, a feeling of stupidity.

“But here’s the kicker,” said the doctor. “They didn’t know about any death certificate.”

“It’s a small place,” said Raleigh, nodding. He had a hearty quality to him, Raleigh, an admirable meat-and-potatoes attitude a person might find almost attractive, if they were unmarried. “Usually they know right away, pretty much, when to expect business. The news gets out. But this time, nothing leaked. None of the local doctors signed a certificate. No one in an official capacity.”

Simonoff put his glasses back on, poked them up onto the bridge of his nose with the tip of a finger. He did a quick tic of a half-smile, nervous, almost imperceptible.

I saw where he was going: our emeritus was getting his hopes up. I didn’t want it to happen; it was like a slow-motion roadkill, and I couldn’t stand to watch.

“Well,” I said, in a measured tone I meant to sound matter-of-fact, “she could still be at the resort. They may not have ever released her. Although that’d make them look pretty guilty.”

“I wouldn’t put it past them,” said Chip, shaking his head. “Keeping her.”

“Did you call?” Rick asked Simonoff. “I mean, they’d have to know where the — where she got moved to, wouldn’t they?”

“I put in the calls myself,” said Raleigh. “Just to make sure management didn’t get its hooks in the professor, I went ahead and handled the inquiries.”

“And?” asked Chip.

“And nothing,” said Raleigh. “I got passed down along the admin chain, and in the end they sent me to the cops. And the cops passed the buck back to the funeral home.”

“But I saw them!” protested Steve. “The cops were the ones who rolled out the gurney.”

“You know,” said Thompson, cleaning a folding knife with a handle made of bone, maybe antler — sort of a dirty, white-brown color, narrowly ridged like corduroy. “The place has big restaurants. Restaurants that serve hundreds of people at a time. Big restaurants have big freezers.”

Gina put her hand on Simonoff’s arm, like Thompson’s bluntness might injure him. Normally G. doesn’t give a shit about bluntness/offending, if anything she aims straight for it, but after the homophobic name-calling episode she’d appointed herself a general anti-Thompson deputy, an anti-Thompson missile defense shield with broad jurisdiction.

Thompson flicked his antler knife open and closed, open and closed. With the pinkie of the other hand he rooted around in his ear.

“Looks like we need to send a contingent over there,” said Raleigh to Sam. “Doesn’t it.”

With Gina guiding him, Simonoff turned away, followed by the doctor; they needed refreshment, maybe some rest. The doctor opened the door of the mini-fridge and bent over, rummaging.

“But like, undercover,” said Rick. “We need access to the kitchens. To the. . to all the storage facilities connected to the kitchen areas.”

“Whoa,” said a soldier standing behind me, and yelled over his shoulder. “Jerry! You hear that? They need someone with restaurant access at the Big House.” Then, turning back to us: “Jerry can get you a backstage pass for sure. His girlfriend waits tables up there.”

Raleigh signed on the girlfriend, Annette, with lightning speed. Her ringing, strident voice on the other end of the speakerphone reminded me uncannily of Chip’s mother, that same combo of raw power and fingernails on a blackboard. Jerry had to promise to pay some bills if Annette lost her job as a result of the spying — her own mother had racked up a sizable debt to a psychic hotline. He got a bit sheepish when she brought that up, with all of us listening. But Annette couldn’t have cared less about Jerry’s embarrassment: that much was abundantly clear. She was slaving to pay off her mother’s credit cards, she reminded him. “This is serious shit, Jer,” she shrilled. “Serious shit.”

We had no doubt of it.

Simonoff was restless, as the late afternoon wore on, impatient for Annette to begin her shift. He had a flicker of hope now, he wasn’t as defeated as before; he stood up slightly taller, though it kept threatening to break my heart — there’s nothing more piercing than seeing hope lighten the face of a devastated person, that futile, doomed, and lovely bird of hope with its bright wings and round, dark eyes. First rising over a warm nest, wings softly spread, sheltering tiny chicks — then struck and flattened.

But there was no denying it, he and the doctor both looked better than they had an hour or two earlier. They’d been invigorated by the missing corpse. In my view, a missing corpse isn’t something to rejoice about. The absence of a corpse, well, it doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as one.

I tried to ignore their hopefulness, the easiest way to deal with it. Meanwhile Steve, I noticed, trotted out references to Nancy’s body at regular intervals, speaking about it with an attitude of clinical firmness. Our Freudian was on the case.

All of us had turned off our phones by then, save Miyoko and Chip who were doing interviews, because we couldn’t handle the call volume. Rick and Ronnie were obsessing over the mermaid haters, who had their own social media pages now — even their own funding. Their cause had been embraced by undisclosed sponsors. These sponsors, Chip opined between phone calls, seemed to be paying for rapid dissemination of the anti-mermaid message on screens across the world. Hunt them, they said, and put them down. This is a test of faith!

That lust for blood worried me; it even seemed to worry Gina, though her ironic distance prevents her from showing too much concern, typically. As she and I stood there, shoulder to shoulder at the counter of the kitchenette, and studied the chatter on the screen, I had a feeling of compression. I felt those lines and lines of speech pressing me down and overpowering me — the weight of all the haters out there, a juggernaut of loathing. What was their problem? Our problem, as a race? (I was woozy on beer and lack of sleep.) We started out soft and warm, trusting. I’d seen babies — held a couple, even.

It seemed to me the virtual world was even worse than the real one, when it came to humanity. To look at screens like these, you’d think there was nothing left of us but a pile of pixilated ash. We were a roiling mass of opinion, most of it mean. Here we sat at civilization’s technological peak, and what we chose to do on that shining pinnacle was hate each other’s guts.

First I’d been excited about the social networking; now it seemed, like nuclear weapons, to be one of the worst ideas ever.

“Where are the nice people?” I asked Gina. “Seriously?”

She patted my hand.

“The meek shall inherit the earth,” she said.

“Uh huh. The meek with six legs,” said Thompson.

Gina hadn’t been heavily ironic, it occurred to me, since she got to the island — but this was evidence, wasn’t it, that her approach had merit. This mass of humanity that hated the mermaids demonstrated how right Gina had been, our whole lives, to divide and separate, to detach herself from any earnest passion, to preemptively give up on the ideas of goodness and of meaning. People would disappoint you every time.

Rick, on another computer, was fixated on some ugly animations that were proliferating on the web — crude images of mermaids with tridents that morphed into Satans with pitchforks. There was a clean version and an X-rated one, with oversize sexual characteristics.

He had to be pulled away, finally, for spending his time and energy on fruitless anger — much as he’d tired himself, over our first dinner, unleashing a torrent of anti-climate-denier rage on the hapless toe fetishist. I couldn’t help recalling the toe man as he’d been that evening, first claiming with a smirk that the Arctic would be a nice vacation spot once all the ice and polar bears were gone; then feeling the accidental, stroking touch of my own foot upon his hairy calf; then saying in his juicy voice toe-genital intimacy.

Yep, Rick was rising to the bait, joining the fray, and we couldn’t let him go there, so in the end Ronnie shut him down with some kind of appetizer tray Janeane brought out involving caramelized onions.

Tired of the hater opinions, Gina and I turned away too. We turned our faces away.

WE’D FORMED THREE teams by then, adding to our media and stealth divisions a Simonoff department — devoted, obviously, to the question of justice for Nancy. I wanted to switch off the media team, I wanted someone to change places with me, and to that end I persuaded Ronnie. He’d be with Rick, once they were both media, and he’d enjoy that; meanwhile, I’d be with Chip.

So Ronnie officially took over my tweeting duties and I joined Chip, Thompson, Gina, and Ellis on stealth detail. While the Simonoff team waited for bulletins from Annette, we’d spy on the parent company’s mermaid search. That would be our gig, as soon as the sun finished setting and darkness took over: we’d be investigators.

Thompson had borrowed a friend’s powerboat, which was waiting for us at a slipway down the beach road. We walked out of the motel smelling the sweetness of jasmine, hearing the faint splashes of kids in the motel pool (which I idly hoped had been divested of toad corpses). It was a balmy evening. Thompson had his own rig for fishing, he said, as we drove over in the Hummer, but it was an old rustbucket. This one, I saw when he parked the Hummer, was sleek and high-end. We got out and approached: the vessel was black with red detailing and looked like it went fast. A monster pickup was towing it, and backed down the ramp as we walked over; someone ran down and set up a stepladder deal.

“Not too shabby. I feel like 007,” said Ellis, busting out a gleeful, preteen grin at Chip as we clambered aboard.

Gina was sour-faced.

Inside it looked swank, with modern leather appointments and polished surfaces. We arranged ourselves near the front — bow? — and hovered behind Thompson as, above a futuristic-looking display, he flicked toggles and turned on headlights.

“Hold on,” he said, after a minute or two, and I grabbed the back of a seat as he prodded a couple more buttons. Chip and the others did the same — just in time as the engine roared to life. We reared, bucked, and set off bumping across the incoming waves.

“How are we supposed to sneak up on anyone in this small-dick cockboat?” said Gina.

Thompson pretended to be deafened by the din.

From the beach I’d briefly made out the lights of the armada, a scattering of yellow pinpricks on the horizon where dark met dark, but now those far-off twinkles were lost in the bright foreground of the boat’s headlights. It was surprisingly hard to see, at night, with the glares and shadows, confused by speed. I’d let Thompson be in charge of our fate, I determined, at least while it depended on this flashing dart of fiberglass. If I closed my eyes I felt queasy, so I kept them open and stared out through the speedboat’s moonroof — a thick, tinted Plexiglas sheath. Once my eyes adjusted I thought I could see a raft of stars, the blurry Milky Way, though my neck ached from craning. Being inside an enclosed cabin was a negative; I would have enjoyed fresh air, salt spray.

Neither Chip nor I wanted to sit, we wanted to stand with our feet planted firmly, holding on to something, feeling the bumps and the insane freedom of fastness. Still, after a while our necks hurt from standing/craning and we were forced to sit down. Our posture went from triumphant to vanquished then as we slumped into each other on the seats, his arm around me, my head in the crook of his neck. Across from us, on the opposite bench, Gina and Ellis took up a similar position, with Ellis doing his best to execute a familiar, possessive arm-over-shoulder maneuver and Gina ignoring the draped appendage, trying to yell across to me over the engine roar.

Chip and I were reminded, in our physical proximity, of how our tropical honeymoon concept had been derailed — of how, despite not choosing the Tibetan monastery trip, we’d ended up monklike and sexless after all.

FINALLY THOMPSON CUT the engines; our boat slowed down and bobbed a bit, quietly. Then he cut the lights too. I was queasier, with the slow rocking motion, than I had been when we were going fast. (Would I vomit? When that’s the question you’re asking, you don’t have time for others.) I fixed my eyes on a small, thin door at the back where the toilet must be.

Thompson fiddled with some controls. I drew a couple of deep breaths and felt slightly less inclined to empty out my stomach.

“What’s happening, Johnson?” asked Gina.

She’d taken to calling him by the wrong name whenever she addressed him, each time a different one.

“Fishfinder,” he muttered. “Sonar.”

We got up and gathered behind him, looking over the console at a screen with some numbers in the corners, some scraggly fields of color. A radio emitted staticky voices, but the codes and terms meant nothing to me: it was a drone of noise. Through the acutely slanted windshield I could tell the armada rose up ahead of us, its lights the tall geometry of cities, buildings. I couldn’t see the shapes of the ships, only their clusters of brightness.

“The bad guys have these toys too, don’t they?” asked Gina.

“A buttload,” said Thompson.

“With all that gear, those greedy cretins haven’t found the mermaids yet?” said Ellis.

“Maybe the mermaids have burrows,” suggested Chip. “Some fish do, Nancy told me. They camouflage themselves beneath the sand. Those flat ones, kind of ugly. I mean, no offense. The sonar wouldn’t show them there, would it? Maybe the mermaids are hiding.”

Thompson went hmph.

“Hey, can’t the other boats see us?” asked Chip. “Aren’t we too near?”

“Nothing on the channels I checked,” said Thompson. “There was a window, sure. Where someone might have noticed. Don’t think they did. I woulda heard the hail. Believe me. These morons couldn’t find their asses in a shit tornado.”

“A shit tornado,” savored Gina. “You’re a wordsmith, Swanson.”

“No training, is the problem. Morons,” he said, turning and glaring at Gina, “with no training.”

“We need people like you, Dobson,” said Gina. “In academia, where I work. Man, do we ever need people like you. People who have been trained. To do the high-level work. Such as killing.”

She smiled, of course, when she said that. Gina tends to.

“Whoa,” said Chip. “What’s that?”

On the fishfinder, a formless mass appeared.

“School of bait,” said Thompson.

“So what are you looking for?” asked Chip. “The mermaids? The divers?”

“This right here is the edge of one of the nets, where they’ve set it. Between that ship over there”— he inclined his head to the left—“and a ways off to the south-southeast is where this net stretches. I propose to cruise the perimeter of the nets, sounding and scanning. I’ll tune the radio to the frequency they’re probably using, see if we hear some shit. Meanwhile we’ll keep a lookout on the screen. See what we can see.”

“And if they notice us?” asked Gina.

“What do you think? We’ll book it out of here. Their boats’ll start up slow.”

So Ellis and Gina got tasked to radio, while Chip and I gazed at the fishfinder’s screen, with its frizzy fields of color. It was interesting enough for a while; Thompson pointed out fish, reefs, and the lines of nets as he steered us along, the engine putt-putting at a low murmur, running lights shining on the waves. He showed us what undersea objects looked like, in those blazes of false hue. Fishes were fish-shaped, long crescents, mostly; bait schools moved by in slow blobs. I thought of how it really must look down there, the darkness of the depths, the warmth of the water. Waving seagrass, maybe, bulbous long whips of kelp.

It was peaceful and black out there, peaceful and nauseating; I wished I’d taken some Dramamine, cursed my poor planning. I kept hoping to see the shape of a human torso on the sonar, the shape not of a diver but of a person with a tail — I stared and stared, while Gina and Ellis listened to the radio. But the minutes soon ran together, my eyelids felt heavy, and elements of the scene blended. There were no mermaids; the closest we came was spotting a few night divers, which Thompson had to point out to me. But they had no tails, and so they didn’t hold my interest.

Thompson muttered to Chip, describing features, using lingo: honeyholes, he said several times, as my attention drifted. I heard it quite distinctly. Honeyholes.

After a while — it must have been past midnight, and I’d given up on watching and dozed off atop one of the leather benches, imagining myself in the electronic purples and blues of the sonar images, my own body, its legs like scissors, then fused in a long, graceful triangle, tranquilly sinking down into the waving eelgrass beds—

“Shut up,” said Thompson.

I vaguely registered Gina retorting — he must have been talking to her — and heard the radio squawk. I struggled to sit up. The boat’s satellite phone was lighting up and ringing. Thompson hovered over the radio, turned up the volume, and reached out to pick up the sat phone receiver, I guess to stop the racket — I personally couldn’t parse the radio exchanges, a mere patchwork of sounds. We waited anxiously, not knowing what was going on, until Thompson handed the sat phone to Chip and nodded at him to deal with it, while he leaned in close over the radio.

Chip had to talk low so Thompson could hear the radio chatter; I couldn’t tell who was calling about what until he dropped the phone and was leaping around oddly, a raw nerve of excitement, trying to contain himself.

“What is it, Chip? What is it?”

“We have to go back,” said Chip, after he grabbed the receiver again and hung up, beaming. “We have to go back!”

“Not yet,” said Thompson, who was rummaging in a heap of duffel bag on the floor. Holding a padded case in one hand, he used the other to steer the boat this way, that way, around the glare of lights. “Gotta see what’s going on. U.S. Coast Guard cutter is almost here. Boarding the flagship. They’re taking someone into custody.”

“Custody?” echoed Chip. “You mean, arresting them?”

“Not us, I hope,” said Ellis.

“These binoculars are night-vision,” said Thompson, and waved the case in my direction. “Get ’em out, wouldja?”

“Sure,” I said, but as I did it I whispered to Chip, “Tell me!”

He shook his head stubbornly, still wearing that grin.

I handed Thompson the binoculars as he throttled down, as we took up a position near a much larger vessel, maneuvering around a bit, this way and that. It was one of the soaring white yachts. Sure enough, another boat was pulling up alongside, the small police boat we’d seen once or twice before; then there was a gangway-type deal, a walkway was being lowered. We didn’t need the night-vision goggles, as it turned out: the scene was flooded with halogen-white lights, and there were crowds on the decks of the yacht, looking down. My problem was I couldn’t get a good angle on the scene, Gina and Chip were blocking my line of sight. I tried to peer between their heads, around and over them, but it wasn’t working out for me.

“Well bugger me,” said Ellis, “it’s the bird from the beach,” and at first I thought he meant a waterfowl — a seagull, possibly a tern.

“The woman from the parent company,” crowed Chip. “Look, Deb. And the guy with the spray-on tan!”

I got a good, solid five-second glimpse, between the heads of my companions. They were walking across the gangplank: the previous Mormon and her coworker, Mike Chantz, Janz or Djanz. They wore polo shirts and shorts, dressed for leisure, I guess, but there were plastic twist-ties around their wrists, and their wrists were behind their backs, and they were walking a little awkwardly.

“What’s the game now,” growled Thompson.

But Chip nodded. “I think I know, I think I know,” he said. “Thompson, you have to get us back!”

I stayed frustrated with Chip as the boat sped toward the shoreline, Thompson talking sometimes on the radio, other times hunkered down over the controls. I was frustrated because Chip wouldn’t tell me what the good news was: Chip was flat out convinced his information-withholding was in my own best interest, a point on which I flat out disagreed. He was like a small child on Christmas morning, during that trip back — the nearer we got to terra firma, the more excited he.

I tried some tactics: I tried to freeze him out, completely stonewalling him, my face shut tight and bitchy, my eyes dead like a shark’s. I wished, by signaling my coldness, to force him into confession. But it did no good.

Long story short, we achieved the shore without anything surprising happening. Next we scrambled out of the boat and trudged/hastened up the beach, each according to his mood. Thompson exchanged a series of grunts with the boat’s owner, who sat in the small parking lot idling his truck. Finally, when Chip had almost expired of pent-up energy and boiling impatience, Thompson hauled himself into the driver’s seat and drove us back to the motel.

There, in our room, surrounded by a raucous crowd, was Nancy.

Not dead at all. Au contrary.

I DON’T KNOW if you’ve ever been sure someone was dead, then found out you were wrong. It’s not really a standard experience — there’s no card section for it.

Prof. Simonoff, for obvious reasons, was the hub of startlement/amazement; we were bowled over and stupefied, but the professor was in a different category. That guy’s whole self was completely transformed, his bearing, his voice, even his face looked new to me. Although, in any of these arenas, I couldn’t have told you exactly why. The instant change taught me a lesson about mood or affect or what have you — not quite sure what the lesson was, per se, but it was in there somewhere. Something about the spirit animating the body. Or not animating it.

My point is, there was Nancy, a smidgeon paler but alive and well, not decomposing in the least — except insofar as we all are, dying as we live, or living as we die, taking that opportunity. Depends if you’re a glass half-full type or a glass half-empty, I guess.

Nancy was full color, animated, and life-size.

We charged up to embrace her, plowing through the cluster of others, Chip just ahead of me — though Nancy was never much of a hugger, if I’m being honest. Even at that moment, appearing among us like Lazarus from the tomb, the risen Christ, etc., she wasn’t big on hugging. She’s more the kind of person who stands there stiffly, passively enfolded. When she gets hugged her cardboard form sends out a signal of awkward unresponsiveness, with her plainly wondering when the “display” of “affection” will be completed. In that realm she has a maybe autistic quality.

Imagine my shiver of recognition, then indignation when she told us she’d been kidnapped. My kidnapping was extremely small potatoes, next to hers; mine was a casual, throwaway kidnapping where hers was serious (though also highly incompetent). I felt embarrassed by the inadequacy of my personal kidnapping. I was in the bush leagues, as a kidnapping victim.

Unlike me, Nancy had been stuck with a syringe, covered in a sheet, and rolled out of her cabana and across the grounds on a gurney, dressed up as a corpse. Then they’d stowed that expert in a windowless room, a room off the hallways behind the main restaurant, where she’d been found an hour before, while we were on the boat. Annette had been passing the door on her way to a walk-in freezer and heard Nancy’s thin wail of help, help through the wall; she used a key off the ring she’d snatched from the staff pegboard and voilà, set her free.

Not one of the refrigerators, no — the place had simply been a disused storeroom, standard room temp, but they kept Nancy on a cot, shot up with drugs to make her sleep. (“Benzodiazepine, I’d guess,” she said.)

Periodically a man would come in and hustle her to a small bathroom down the hall or give her a tray of restaurant vittles; he wouldn’t talk much at those times, she said, no one had deigned to tell her what she was doing there until she got it out of a second guy, who subbed in with the food one time. The Venture of Marvels needed a certain number of days, he said, to put its claim in place, to establish its rights. Until then, she was stuck.

“No one told me they faked my death,” she said, as her father stood close beside her and gazed fondly at her living face, with its many-legged eyebrows (Homely virtue! I thought. How good to have her back). He kept a hand posed quasi-formally on her shoulder, as though to indicate to himself that his daughter was there, actual, real and independently breathing — without, however, showing excessive affection: like daughter, like father.

“They never mentioned that,” went on Nancy.

“Why would they,” said Thompson. “No advantage in it. A female; possible hysterics.”

“I don’t get this,” said Simonoff. “Why do that? Why tell everyone she — she had drowned? Good God! I mean! It almost gave her poor mother a myocardial infarction!”

“Probably thought it would shut us up,” said Chip. “Shut us down, right? Keep us from going after the mermaids. Plus we’d stop asking annoying questions about her whereabouts sooner or later, if we thought she was done for. Right?”

“They took my cell records, my email, contact info, the signed paperwork from the excursion,” said Nancy. “And Riley’s digital video? Listen to this. See, Riley was my only visitor, other than the food guys. He felt a little guilty so he asked to see me, but his conscience didn’t go too deep. He talked to me, though, so I do know what happened. He sold it to them. Just outright sold it.”

“He had a contract with us!” said Chip. “With you!”

Nancy shrugged. “He sold it.”

“I thought they stole it,” I said.

“First,” said Nancy. “But then they actually watched it. And decided they needed to own it. So they just made him an offer.”

“We still don’t know who they even are,” said Rick slowly. “Do we, Nancy?”

She shook her head.

“We know who some of them are,” added Raleigh. “But we don’t know how far up the chain it goes.”

“They just arrested two of them,” I said. “We saw it! On the ship. The woman and the guy with the really dark tan. Arrested. The cops came in a police cutter and arrested them.”

“Scapegoats,” said Thompson solemnly.

“Sacrificial lambs,” agreed Rick.

“Thrown under the bus,” said Chip.

I thought how much I disliked the non-Mormon and the Mike Chance guy: I felt an instinctive distaste for both of them, and had from the get-go. Still, distaste or not, they hadn’t seemed like criminal masterminds. They seemed more like consultants, maybe sales reps.

“Were they acting alone?” I asked no one in particular. “Or was management pulling the strings?”

“I think the point is we can’t know,” said Rick. “Kidnapping Nancy — and you too, Deb, for sure—that, for one, they’re going to want to pin on the PR people. At least, that’s what I’m suspecting.”

“Our orders, which they called a ‘request for emergency assistance,’ came from the suit on the beach,” said Raleigh. “He’s the GM who runs the resort. Reports to the regional veep. I’m gonna make a call, find out what’s going down.”

As he turned away the rest of us fell upon Nancy like a flock of chattering parakeets, trying to pull out strings of explanation with our curved little beaks. How could it even be that Annette had just walked up and unlocked the door, patrolling on her fifteen-minute break, using a ring of keys from the pegboard in the staff break room? (Ronnie.) Why didn’t the company guard its prisoners? (Rick.) Especially when I’d escaped, too? (Me.) Wasn’t she pissed that Riley had turned out to be a Judas? (Thompson.) He’d seemed so cool at first, hadn’t he? (Chip.) And (closely related) how much had they paid him? (Ellis.) Was she starving? (Janeane.) Didn’t she need a shower? (Janeane.) Where were her belongings? (Janeane.) Did she want to go back to her cabana and try to get them? (Janeane.)

Wait. Very important. Did she have legal counsel yet? (Gina.)

Prof. Simonoff, the doctor and Thompson announced their intention to make a sortie to Paradise Bay to reclaim Nancy’s personal items. Thompson, I could tell, was spoiling for a fight, even if it had to be over nothing more epic than a biologist’s toiletries. The three of them, all men of a certain age, went out to the Hummer and roar/chugged away. Gina wanted to debrief her brother on the litigation possibilities, and Ellis wanted to cloyingly massage her shoulders while she did so. Miyoko assented to yet another video interview, Janeane made a midnight snack, etc.

But Nancy had only one objective, amid the hustle and bustle. Grass didn’t grow beneath her feet, the solid feet of that kidnapped parrotfish expert; she waved away the questions, she splashed cold water on her face, she shoved handfuls of salted peanuts into her mouth without even taking a seat. Then she ushered a bunch of us outside, so she could breathe the trade-wind breeze in more limited company. The rooms had gotten claustrophobic.

Once out there, standing beneath some rustling fronds beside the pool, she asked Raleigh for a full report on the status of the Venture of Marvels.

“Here’s what I’m being told,” said Raleigh. “The general manager’s claiming he had no knowledge of your kidnapping. He says he, too, was told you’d drowned. That he wasn’t in on that bullshit. He’s helming up the Venture, of course, that much he’s copped to — he’s taking ownership of that part of it. But where the backstory’s concerned, his version is: Mike and Liza brought him the mermaid video. He had no idea they’d taken it from Riley, he thought you’d just drowned and the tape and other mermaid-related texts, excursion records, and all that shit was in your personal effects. In a nutshell, he’s doing his best to avoid criminal liability over what happened to you, Nancy.”

“Why’d they bother with that meeting? Where we first met, uh, Liza?” I asked.

“That was to get everyone’s contact info,” said Raleigh. “That was part of our briefing a couple days ago. They had a manifest from the boat trip, that’s how they knew some of the people to invite, but they needed everyone’s names, emails, and cells. Hadda make sure everyone came under their umbrella, ideally came over to work for them. At that point they only had Riley on board.”

“Sleazebags,” said Chip.

“But they never got you guys signed up, so the plan was, instead, to round you up, lock you up, and shut you up. Like with Nancy,” said Raleigh, looking at me. “Mostly, I get the feeling, they screwed up. They had some miscommunications. There were a couple power struggles, with them and the Keystone cops — a lack of unity, some confusion. So honestly? You lucked out.”

“How about the search?” asked Nancy. “And my colleague from Berkeley, what’s happening with him?”

While Chip talked to her I ran inside, went through my clothes and threw on a swimsuit. (I’d lost the bikini by then, but I had reinforcements.) I was unkempt and I needed liquid immersion, so I listened to the conversation from down in the water, clinging to the concrete lip of the pool. Occasionally I’d reach for a cocktail Janeane brought out to me, a tepid, mojito-like beverage in a flimsy plastic cup. I listened as Chip and Raleigh told stories, occasionally interjecting an anecdote of my own, and watched velvety bats flit under the patio overhang of a vacant room.

I floated in the pool throughout the planning session, in fact, dipping my head occasionally, smoothing back my wet hair. Periodically I’d hold a mouthful of mojito in my cheek pouches, just see how long I could keep it there. After a while Gina joined me, and we hung side by side, our arms adrift in the chlorinated water, our fingers pruney. A soldier would pass by, now and then, stopping to refill our cups. We felt strangely content. (“Here we are,” said Gina, “in a swimming pool in the tropics, and at regular intervals young, muscular men in uniforms supply us with intoxicants.”)

She’d already shelved her vow to drink no cocktails, in fear of Thompson, and I didn’t remind her of it.

It was so satisfying, such a relief to watch Nancy sitting, talking, every bit as alive as a person can reasonably be. A reassurance of comforting proportions — almost enough to dispel the fear I’d been nursing earlier of loathing, of all the loathing crowds, the mermaid haters descending.

And I could consign them to the screen, almost, for a brief time: I could believe they only lived in that small, glowing rectangle. When I was a child and got scared by a TV show or movie, my mother used to say to me, “It’s not real, darling. It’s just pretend.” I’d loved it when she said that. I willingly believed everything bad was made up only for entertainment — nothing terrifying was real, nothing real was terrifying. Only in stories did the witches cackle, their mouths gaping open to show yellow, razor-sharp teeth; only on Hollywood sets were there wars, cruelty, the tragic deaths of unspeakably beautiful and innocent creatures. In life there were none of these.

I said that to myself when I thought of the screen, full of the angry words of people who had never seen the mermaids but nonetheless hated them.

How small it was, that screen. Irrelevant, maybe. A triviality.

Anyway, Nancy was determined to go out again first thing in the morning. We’d line up some boats, we’d motor out to where the armada had dropped anchor, and we’d boldly confront it. Nancy said she didn’t even know if it was legal to drop those commercial fishing nets where they were dropping them, near the reefs — in fact, she strenuously doubted it. She’d like to hire a local attorney, she said, but that would have to wait — at least till businesses opened on Tortola, maybe even the U.S. islands, St. Croix, there had to be some lawyers familiar with the local situation.

In the meantime, we’d go out onto the ocean and board the armada, take on its leaders. Why, we’d defy them openly.

I swear, that parrotfish expert seemed to have no fear. She’d been far less affected by her death than we had.

In her experience, she’d been kidnapped; she’d been locked in a storeroom for a few days, treated with casual rudeness and brought paper plates of cold French fries to eat. There hadn’t been a microwave, plus the ketchup was watery. And they’d unlawfully injected narcotics. But still, she hadn’t particularly feared an escalation of the violence (Janeane could barely believe this, thought Nancy was the bravest woman ever to walk the earth). She’d fallen asleep fully clothed after the party in Chip’s and my cabana; next thing she knew she woke up on a cot in a storeroom that smelled of disinfectant and onions.

So that’s what Nancy had endured, but meanwhile, we’d endured her death — possibly even her murder!

Later she’d come back to life, but still. Attitude-wise, we’d taken a hit. Nancy had a can-do sensibility, while the rest of us were hesitant — with the exception of Thompson. He was still waiting impatiently for a chance to lob his grenade.

Anyway, Nancy got Miyoko on board — this scene too, she said, we needed to broadcast live; could Miyoko arrange for it? — and then she asked Raleigh for the loan of his beret-clad troops.

At first he hemmed and hawed, mulling it over since it wasn’t exactly low-profile, but eventually, once he had enough mojitos/beers in him, he seemed to give his consent. You got the feeling the soldiers hadn’t seen too much action, there in the British Virgin Islands. You got the feeling what they really wanted was just for something to happen.

Plus Miyoko had just agreed to go out to dinner with Sam, once the mermaid emergency was past. I think Raleigh wanted to show his solidarity.

IT WASN’T EVEN light out when Ellis came barging into our room. He and Gina’d been sleeping in the adjacent one, through the unlocked door, and now he stumbled across the threshold in a torn, oversize Sex Pistols T-shirt and Monty Python boxers, mumbling and pushing his bangs out of his eyes. He typically sports a tousled, Hugh-Granty look. “The deputy governor’s here,” he said, having reverted to his approximately Oxbridge accent and away from the fake cockney of indignation. “Also a minister. I rang them yesterday.”

I was groggy, but awake enough to register shock: apparently Ellis had accomplished something. In general he carries off the dentistry, the accent, and the women; there the triple whammy ends. Things Ellis doesn’t do and rarely remembers to delegate: Stock his refrigerator. Clean his condo. Pay bills. Fix what’s broken.

Chip and I pulled on some clothes and joined Gina and Ellis in their room, where they stood at the door talking.

“Let them in!” said Chip. “Please. We’re decent.”

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

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

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

Luckily, the natives seemed friendly.

“Look here!” said Ellis to the bureaucrats. “I really am dashed grateful you took my phone call seriously. I’m chuffed to bits.”

Usually when he went old-school Gina accused him of “getting lordy.” But this time she let it sail right past.

Soon the others were up and bustling, Nancy “over the moon,” as Ellis said, about the presence of the two civil servants (the man was the head of some government ministry). There was a shortage of vessels, she’d found out the night before, so if Ellis hadn’t reached out to the colonial authorities a lot of us would probably have been stranded on land. Thompson’s borrowed speedboat could have been called back into service, possibly, but its capacity was limited.

Before long we were driving straight to the main marina, no fear this time, no need to hide. We had the government with us; we had the troops. Steve and Janeane watched us motor away from the dock, as — Chip with one arm slung over my shoulders, the two of us floating in a crowd of soldiers — we stood at the bow in the leaping spume.

Janeane waved a yellow scarf in the air. It looked so old-fashioned, lifted by the breeze.

THE DEPUTY GOVERNOR invited us to call her by her first name, which was Lorna, but we both felt awkward so we avoided calling her anything. The minister guy didn’t chat with us much, he mostly hunkered down talking to the Simonoffs, but the deputy governor talked to Ellis, and because we were near Ellis, she also talked to us.

This was on the deck of the Coast Guard cutter, you understand — there was a kind of excitement, a festive atmosphere, a bonded, band-of-brothers situation, though detail-wise, on a technical level, we weren’t brothers or even all men and some of us didn’t like each other.

But we dismissed the issue of not liking each other, then. Liking each other, not liking each other, who cared, was our thinking aboard that charging white vessel of law enforcement. It was beside the point. Gina’s disgust with Thompson, Thompson’s pathological fear/hatred of “the gays”—it was meaningless, on the deck of the Coast Guard cutter.

I thought of when I’d first met Janeane, harshly indicting her sandals, observing the plantlike tendrils as they wound up her fishbelly calves — my frustration as she talked to me during peeing. How small it seemed to me now. I felt a real pang of affection for her, the way I’d seen her just minutes before, standing on the shore and waving her yellow handkerchief. She’d looked nostalgic then, as though we’d boarded the Titanic and away we steamed.

I’d first deployed my devil/Gina half, judging Janeane, but then my angel/Chip half had taken over. Yet seeing Gina and Janeane together, I’d noticed there wasn’t any conflict between them. Sure, they were opposites — Janeane deploring polymers while Gina ironically loved them, Janeane getting choked up over industrial meat production while Gina ironically ordered full plates of bacon at the all-American diners she frequented.

But still there was a kind of understanding between them, right? I thought of Gina raising a sly eyebrow at what Janeane was saying; of Janeane, sometimes, gazing at Gina in startled confusion.

We didn’t know what was going to happen, but at last something would — we had a trajectory. We had new strength with the government on our side: from what Nancy said to me, passing us on the deck, it seemed the civil servants might be interested in her idea for a mermaid sanctuary. They already had some plan in mind, she said, for “marine protected areas.”

We were aloft, moving forward at last, and not a single one of us was currently dead.

As we neared the armada, though — the first time I’d approached it in daylight — my mood changed rapidly. Damn! It was a floating citadel. It was a whole city on the ocean, with nets and cranelike structures, complicated metal architectures of utility. Small boats were moving among the larger ships, serving them, ferrying. My stomach flipped when I saw the armada/citadel. Who were we, really? And what was the law, even? We were a handful of men wearing berets, we were two very polite civil servants, one of whom was named Lorna; we were a small group of tourists, vacationing from our lives.

As the yachts and the trawlers towered over us, some soaring up gracefully in their white fiberglass slickness, some stolid as factories in their black rust and barnacles, what I saw was mass — I saw solidity. The law was ancient runes on a parchment, a parchment you might see in one of Chip’s gameworlds. Law was a tale and government was more a wish than a reality. A smart dresser, maybe, but simply not effective. For the first time I understood its quaintness.

Government! Once we’d believed in it.

Those ships were really big.

We did have guns, at least (I reassured myself, looking sidelong at Raleigh’s face). He stood straight-backed at the prow, hands clasped behind him, jawline firm. The guns were a factor in our favor, I could see the logic there, but where there are guns there are always more guns. Seemed like another can of worms. The guns didn’t comfort me, for that reason.

There’d been some radio communiqués back and forth, I guessed, because we had a destination in the vast armada: the flagship yacht, where management resided. Now we circled the periphery, engine rumbling and wake churning as we cut a swath. I looked down at the white curls, at my flip-flop-clad feet on the deck, damp from the spray. I thought of the defectors, those former dive companions and partygoers. Where were they now, the blond-headed profiteer Riley, the toe fetishist from the Heartland, the substitute teacher? Where was the Fox News spearfisherman who’d rummaged around in my tampons?

I looked up at the rails, the gunwales, idly hoping to catch a glimpse of a familiar face. But if there were any people there, they were hidden from my sight.

Then the bureaucrats were climbing into an orange rubber motorboat — a Zodiac, Raleigh called it. Then he was boarding, then Nancy, then a couple more soldiers. I thought we’d all be left behind, till Nancy waved impatiently at Chip and he gave me a quick kiss and hurried to board too.

My husband was among the chosen people, but I wasn’t, apparently.

I raised an eyebrow at Gina and tried not to resent it, the fact that I hadn’t made the cut. I did resent it, though. I wondered whether I had offended Nancy somehow (bad breath? Or had she read my mind about her caterpillar eyebrows?). I felt only a bit better when, as the boat sputtered away toward the flagship yacht, Raleigh turned, smiled, and saluted me mockingly/flirtingly.

“Man. You could totally date him,” said Gina.

SO THERE I was, cooling my heels with the rest of the rabble. It was me, Gina, Ellis, Sam, Thompson, Simonoff, the good doctor, and some leftover soldiers, still standing at strict attention on the deck, waiting on Sam’s orders. Thompson was talking to a crewman and Rick, with Ronnie’s help, was busy filming Miyoko. That Japanese VJ never stopped working; right then she was broadcasting an update from the stern of the cutter, where the mics wouldn’t pick up the interference of our background noise.

We watched quietly as the orange boat ferried our diplomatic dinghy over to the yacht with soaring lines, a pearly white vessel whose name, emblazoned in ornate gold curlicues, seemed to be Narcissus. I wasn’t sure why you’d name your luxury yacht that. Was it self-aware/ironic, or more straight-up toolishness?

I opened my mouth to ask Gina, but she was already talking.

“What are they going for, an injunction?” asked Gina.

“They’re going to ask them to simply pull up the nets,” said Ellis. “The minister says they don’t have the legally required permits.”

“And they think the parent company will just say, Oh, OK?” said Gina. “And, like, go gently into that good night?”

“Not really, no,” said Ellis. “They’re also filing for a PI. Not sure where that’s at, though, judicially.”

The arc of my confidence fell. Gone was the rush I’d felt as the Coast Guard cutter crested the waves, when speed was ours and we’d seemed to be duty-bound.

We’d had a higher calling, then.

“Hey,” said Sam, squinting into his binoculars, “I can see them talking, there on the upper deck. I can make out Nancy. . that’d be the deputy governor, yeah. There’s the GM.”

“GM?” asked Gina.

“The resort’s general manager,” I said.

“Sam!” called one of the cutter’s crewmen, sticking his head out the door of the wheelhouse. “Get in here!”

Gina and I followed Sam over, looking sidelong at each other — we were hoping to get in on the action, whatever that might be. No one stopped us.

Inside, near the control panel with the steering wheel, a TV jutting out from the wall was playing CNN. We hung behind Sam and the crewmen and craned our necks.

It was live footage of the airport in Tortola, according to the news ticker. Very crowded: people hurried along pulling their roller bags, hefting their suitcases, pink-faced from the strain of hefting their duffel bags. Disorder seemed to reign, and the reporter’s voice was barely audible. Then the scene changed: the ferry dock, also Tortola. I recognized it, since I’d been there less than a week before. Two ferries were docked at once, full of people; crowds were still pressing to get on them, crew pushing them away.

Then there was a reporter talking, a woman who stood on the quay with strands from her mound of polished yellow hair blowing across her face. She had a British accent, not unlike Ellis’s — and for all I knew, equally fake.

“. . tourists descending on the island in numbers that have simply never been seen before,” I caught. “Every single hotel room on Virgin Gorda is full to capacity, according to the reports we’re getting, and frankly no one knows where the rest of the arriving crowds will be accommodated. Some are based here on Tortola, of course, where hotels rooms are also overbooked. . ”

“Feculent shite,” said Ellis.

“It’s happening,” I said, and my throat closed gaggingly.

“Shhh,” Gina hissed.

“. . these are not all your friendly neighborhood scuba enthusiasts and beachgoers, which these tiny islands in the British Caribbean have depended on for decades,” said the reporter. “No, many of them apparently have a very different reason for visiting this tropical getaway.”

A man was talking, a microphone held up in front of his angry, slightly sweaty face; his backpack bobbed behind his head.

“. . gotta get in there and take care of these things. Get rid of them. Our mission is annihilation. What if they interbreed with humans? What then?”

The camera panned to the woman beside him, who smiled and nodded.

“What our pastor is saying,” she offered eagerly, “is this could be the Fifth Trumpet. Like it says in Revelation 9, you know, a man’s face with lion’s teeth, the wings of locusts and the tail of a scorpion—”

“Point being is,” interrupted the man, “these things are not the work of the Lord. These things are filth and abomination.”

I felt cold, and my scalp tingled. I backed out of the wheelhouse, hitting the deck rail with the small of my back. There was dizziness: the sky was too white. The sky attacked my eyeballs. Light was everywhere, when all I wanted was shade. I thought I might faint, although I’ve never fainted my whole life. I’m not sure why it hit me so hard, but basically, when I heard the man say that, my personality collapsed.

“Hey, hey,” said Gina, her hands firm on my shoulders. “Honey. You need to get a grip.”

“They’re coming,” I said.

“Well, that’s right,” said Gina. “What of it?”

She put her face close to mine and gazed into my eyes in what was, for Gina, a pretty strong bid for sincerity. I looked into her brown irises, her warm, almond-shaped eyes, so familiar and comforting, with their impossibly thick eyelashes courtesy of Latisse.

“Listen. Deb. It’s not your fault, sweetie. This was always going to happen. The mermaids were living on borrowed time. You see that, right? It’s amazing they weren’t gone centuries ago. Like the giant sloths. The mammoths. The saber-tooth cats.”

It didn’t comfort me.

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

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

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

I really couldn’t breathe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And anyway who was I to judge?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“There aren’t,” said Sam.

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

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

“Then what are those?” I asked.

“Shit,” said Sam, raising the binoculars.

“What?”

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

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

“Whales.”

“Huge whales,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

“Five,” said Ronnie. “Six. Seven. .”

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

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

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

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

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

“He’s getting it,” nodded Ronnie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We sped off along the edge of the nearest net.

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

We drew closer to those gray masses, and they, I guess, were moving closer to the nets and to us as we approached them, and I couldn’t see much because Sam and Thompson were the only ones looking through binoculars as we motored. Just as we were getting in close enough for me to begin to study the weird curves of the tops of their bodies — because frankly I had no idea what I was looking at — one by one they dove, the edges of their massive tails leaving a waterfall of white as they sank beneath the waves. They were great smooth-moving crescents of gray-blue, and just like that those crescents slid under and disappeared from view, leaving only a faint, lacy wash of intercrossing waters on the surface. In fact there was hardly any turbulence at all. Those giants’ movements were seamless.

The guy at the steering wheel slowed us down; now we were chugging along a line of green oval buoys that marked the edge of a net. Beyond them was nothing but water.

“Damn it,” said Gina.

“Patience. We’re not done yet,” said Sam.

The sailor cut the engine and we sat there in the boat, the boat that was suspended on the water, dancing a bit, up and down, side to side in the lazy rhythm.

For a short time it seemed to me — and I remember this moment better than anything else from my honeymoon trip — as though the light over the ocean was a different light from any I’d seen before. It was morning, I know that rationally, but I have a strong recollection of a golden light, a gilded, amber light you might associate with retirement, peace and tranquillity. The light that seems to tremble in the air before the dusk descends, before a darkness falls upon the earth.

I’ve always liked to talk, as long as they’re someone worth talking to. I’ve always been bored by silent people. But right then I was so glad that no one was talking, that no one in that lifeboat was saying anything at all. . I wondered: What if we’d never spoken in the first place? Where would we be, our race? Would we have machines, even?

Or on the other hand, maybe we’d already be long gone. Fallen to stronger animals, the ones with smaller brains and bigger muscles, longer claws and teeth.

Still: right then I wanted nothing more than for the wordless quiet to persist. I wished we’d never speak again, at that particular second — that the pure silence of waiting for the appearance of the blue whales, that wide-open, neutrally buoyant hope, that expectation would stretch on forever and a day.

No. Breaking the peace was the loud, abrasive noise of a ratcheting, a winching, scraping cacophony — mechanical, groaning. I understood after a second that a thick cable was creaking, the net slung beside us in the water was being moved. I wondered why; had the parent company found something? Or was this just part of the process of reduction, the process by which it was shrinking its search area and supposedly also forcing the mermaids nearer the shore, bringing them closer in?

With the hawser, or whatever it was, grinding away I had the urge to cover my ears with my hands, and at the same time I was struck with the conviction that either the whales or the mermaids were getting caught down there, convinced that the hauling of the nets was intended for them, that we were about to witness their willful death, what you might call their murder.

I was terrified, and for a while — I can’t say how long — that feeling of dread, plus the whine of the moving cable, was all I was really aware of.

Rick was filming, though there was little to see, he had the camera pointed at the patch of ocean where the whales had been. The rest of us did nothing, just watched and waited and endured the groan of steel.

With no warning except a single, slight back-and-forth rock, the Zodiac was pushed up onto one side, and we spilled out of it before we could register what was happening. It flipped on top of us, as we splashed, gurgled, and squawked. Blinded, choking on salt water and flailing around, I panicked — maybe I wouldn’t be able to get out from under the boat again, the surprisingly bulky inflatable boat that hung above me, upside-down, as I struggled to find its edge, get up around it and into the air to breathe. I felt my flip-flops slipping off my feet, and saw belongings floating near me, debris I bumped into, someone’s foot landed a heavy kick on my thigh, and then a hard, smooth surface scraped along me — not quite smooth, no, actually very rough at times, later I’d find I was bleeding all down the outside of one leg where barnacles had scraped the skin open.

There would be scars, I’d understand later. Gone, in a single instant and for the rest of my life, were the days of perfect legs. Those barnacles are sharp as hell. They’re vicious, truthfully. But at the time I wasn’t conscious of pain, only desperation as I tried to scrabble my way to the surface to breathe.

And when I got there — because I made it, obviously, since here I am, not dead, not telling my story as a sad ghost full of wisdom and longing from the grave — the water was still turbulent around me, and I was hearing shouts, faintly, and I was deeply relieved I’d put on the bulky, foolish-seeming lifejacket (Thompson, by contrast, had refused to wear one) because I couldn’t grab onto the side of the boat at first, it was too far up there and too slick/slippery and I was weak and out of breath, though I must have had some adrenaline on my side. There seemed to be chaos, and I couldn’t see right away, it took me a minute to blink the salt water out of my eyes and clarify the bobbing boat alongside and the floating objects that, I guess, had been dumped out when we were overturned (my eyes fixed, while I was getting my breath back, on a two-liter soda bottle, its brown syrupy liquid sloshing inside; a white first-aid kit with the telltale red cross on it; and a large running shoe). There was still the overwhelming racket of the cable grinding, too.

Was Gina OK? Miyoko? The others? I looked around, called out, sputtering. But I was too low in the water, all I could see was the churning froth itself, right around me — I had to have a better vantage point. With more scraping of elbows and knees I hoisted myself up onto the upside-down boat, I found a rope to hold on to and hauled myself onto its bottom, which had ridges, almost shelves along it that made it easy to get a grip on, once I was up there. For whatever reason I was the first of all of us to clamber back on.

The whales were surfacing again. It was a blue whale, of course, that had come up right beneath us — I realized it only when I saw them, it took me that long to get a clue why we’d capsized. The whales were rising from the depths, and there were a fair number of them — too many for me to count, given their size. The only thing that made them seem less than frighteningly huge was the fact that you didn’t see their whole bodies at once, only sections as they arched out of the water and then under it again, sliding along like sea serpents in movies. They had risen. They rose still.

And the mermaids were with them.

They’d dived down by themselves and come up with mermaids.

The first two I saw were clinging to a dorsal fin, really far back on the whale — those dorsal fins were pretty small, considering how massive the whales’ bodies were. That whale dove briefly and the mermaids went under; then he/she rose and they were visible again. And so it went. Whales surfaced, then dipped under, with a few mermaids holding fast to those lone fins but most of them grabbing onto the great white armatures of barnacles across the whales’ massive backs. For a mermaid, I guess, those crusted, razor-sharp crustaceans weren’t too lethal to grab onto. There were whole rows of mermaids arrayed along the whales’ backs and sides, like so many kids in a full school bus.

I’d left my cell phone in my bag, on the Coast Guard ship, but Rick had brought his, and bizarrely enough it hadn’t gotten completely waterlogged/ruined.

Later, turning the sight over in my mind, I’d figure the mermaids had to hold on somewhere; they weren’t big on sitting, being half-fish and all. You don’t see a fish in a chair often. Maybe they could sometimes manage on a stable base, say a pile of rocks or a coral outcropping, to brush their hair and sing seductive ditties to sailors, but not on a moving whale. They didn’t have asses. It was that simple.

I barely noticed as the others joined me on the capsized boat, scrambling atop it one by one — there was Gina, there was Miyoko, then Ellis, with one limp arm that seemed to be bothering him — and we stared as the whales came up, one after another. After a bit we understood that they were heading out into the open ocean. The whales were moving away from the armada and the nets, and with them went the mermaids.

I watched a pair near me, one particular whale and one mermaid—my whale and my mermaid, as I thought of them afterward, though the mermaid wasn’t the same one I’d seen before. She was a different mermaid, younger and prettier. I saw her shining tail hanging along the side of the whale’s great, flattened head, the whale curves I didn’t understand anatomically (nostrils? ears? blowholes?). Sun glanced off the scales on her tail and the mermaid’s long, light hair was plastered down her back and sides. There were others like her on that whale, but she was the one near me.

There were far more mermaids than we’d seen before and far more whales than we’d seen before, too. I couldn’t count them, it was too fast and too multiple for that — it was like a storm or a battle, a frenzy of movement, a confusion of images and sliding, foaming water. Struggling to stay on the overturned boat as the last stragglers climbed on, rocking it as they clambered, and at the same time watching the whales in a daze, I had no time to draw conclusions, right then. I vaguely registered some discord about organizing — whether we should jump off the boat again and work together to turn it right side up — but I ignored the shouts, tuned out the argument, I wanted it to stop. I was laser-focused.

In the sound and the noise, grasping at the hard plastic ridges as I slipped back and forth on the bottom of the Zodiac, I watched the whales recede, watched them dip and surface, dip and surface again in a graceful motion (Sam said later it wasn’t the usual way whales swam but more the way dolphins did — possibly for the benefit of the mermaids). They quickly put a good distance between us, eventually a great distance, and I was just beginning to shiver and feel the sting of the cuts and scrapes on my leg and elbows when they grew indistinct. Soon they were nothing but ripples in the plain of ocean beneath the horizon line.

And finally they disappeared from my field of view and I knew I’d never see those whales or mermaids again. I’d never see another blue whale, the vastest creature ever to live on earth, and I’d never see a mermaid again, either.

They’d taken our mythological creatures, the blue whales had. They’d come to the rescue as the nets were closing in and the hordes were descending with their burning swords. They’d come to claim their own and taken the mermaids far from the armada — far from the Venture of Marvels. They saw what we were, those whales, and wanted nothing to do with it. They simply swam away, those ancient goliaths of the sea.

They took the marvels with them.

I’M A PERSON who doesn’t like aftermaths, as I may have mentioned earlier — in general they’re depressing. But this one wasn’t like that, at least not for me. I could tell some of us were let down, some people felt kind of robbed — Ellis, for instance, who’d been nursing a possibly broken arm and hadn’t seen much of anything — but I didn’t feel that way at all. From the time we headed back to the cutter (we’d finally righted the rubber boat, but its motor wouldn’t start so Sam, Thompson, Miyoko, and Gina paddled us in) I felt euphoric.

I was shivering in my wet clothes, even under the tropical sun, but a curious sense of peace kept me sitting quietly, contented. Blood ran down my leg from the barnacle scrapes: it welled up in thousands of microscopic pinpoints from one place where the outer layers of skin had been sheered off, plus there were thin, deep lines scored into my thigh and calf that drooled blood all the way down to my ankle and heel.

I barely noticed it. I mean, I did notice — sitting on the wet bench-seat of the Zodiac I stretched out the leg and peered down at the red lines and ribbons of blood — but it was less out of urgent concern than with a sense of friendly interest.

I knew I shouldn’t feel peaceful, necessarily, because those mermaids wouldn’t be safe now anyway, no matter where they went. Still, for today they were safe, and somehow the knowledge that the blue whales had taken them far away comforted me.

What if the whales, I thought dreamily (happily resting my dripping leg on the side of the boat and letting the others handle the paddling), what if the whales were in charge of the whole shebang? Those behemoths had obscure ways of knowledge, obviously. Somehow they’d heard a mermaid distress call: that alone was astonishing.

I let myself daydream that the whales had great, all-encompassing wisdom, far greater than any commanded by the race of men. The whales weren’t going to fall prey to our mischief this time (although they often had, in centuries past and even more recently). Their songs carried hundreds of miles; we hadn’t even known about those songs until the 1960s. Sam and Thompson had both trotted that out.

So we knew little of them, and for eons they’d wandered the quiet deep, masters of that dark and liquid kingdom.

They might be anyone. They might know anything.

WE MADE IT back to the cutter just as Gina was becoming annoyed by having to paddle; we toweled off and sat in the sunlight with towels wrapped around us, tamping the moisture from our soaking clothes.

In due time the rest of our party returned from the Narcissus. Though our Zodiac was out of service now, the yacht had her own inflatables; so over they chugged, finally, aboard one of those (larger, newer, and cleaner than the one we’d capsized in). When Chip came back aboard the Coast Guard boat again I saw he was elated too, just like me. Behind him was Nancy, satisfaction shining from her like a beacon. She went up to her father right away, for he and the doctor had stayed on the cutter this whole time, and they shared a heartfelt, emotional greeting: each grasped the upper arms of the other, briefly yet firmly.

Gone were her hopes of a sanctuary, I assumed, and yet — and yet I could tell she was pleased.

We’d been far closer to the spectacle than they had, but aboard that yacht, with its lofty decks, the diplomatic party had had the boon of height, a panoramic view. Chip had made a phone video; on the small screen the whales weren’t anything, you couldn’t see the mermaids at all, but it was HD, he said, it would look better on his laptop screen.

As the cutter headed back to shore, he knelt down beside me and tended my hurt leg, smearing on some antibiotic ointment and then wrapping my calf lightly in bandages from the cutter’s well-stocked first-aid cabinet. The thigh would be harder to bandage, he thought; we’d get the doctor to handle that.

Chip took a lot of care over the cleaning and bandaging, talking to keep my attention off the pain; he said he’d practically had a heart attack when he saw the rubber boat flip. He’d watched the whale’s head rise beside it, the great whale-chin ridged with curving lines, and he’d been thunderstruck. He realized I could swim perfectly well, but who knew, he said — I might have been knocked unconscious by a hard blow to the head, I could have sunk beneath the waves, drowning.

It was the worst minute of his life, he said, waiting for me to come up again, waiting to make sure it was me heaving myself onto that bobbing orange oval.

Negotiations hadn’t been going that well anyway, he added, when the whales came. He looked around then, not wanting to hurt anybody’s feelings. The civil servants had been very polite, said Chip — well, too polite, honestly. They’d been so polite it was hard to tell what they wanted, if anything. Their words, as they spoke to the representatives of the parent company, were so matter-of-fact, so bureaucratic (Chip said these words included stakeholders, as well as win-win and orientated toward the long term), that even to Chip it wasn’t clear they had a compelling interest in progress. So yes, they’d spoken to the GM, Chip said, the guy from the beach who really was a ten-gallon ass hat.

But on the other hand it was as though they hadn’t spoken, pretty much.

There’d been no forward motion at all until Nancy, out of sheer frustration, had broken in, and just as she was taking the conversational reins away from the civil servants, just at that very moment the blue whales had arrived.

They’d all stopped talking and stood at the rails and watched, and the GM went from disbelief to astonishment to rampaging anger, so that by the time the mermaids were riding into the distant horizon he was in the grips of a temper tantrum, Chip said, you really could call it that — he raced around yelling at underlings, expressing his outrage. He tried to rally crewmembers and volunteers alike, tried to rally them to the cause of chasing down the whales, somehow trapping the whales or possibly attacking them, making them yield up those mermaids; but heads were shaken, for once no one cooperated with him, Chip told me.

It seemed more like a strike than like a mutiny, but either way it was calm and reasonable, and in the face of his crew’s indifference the GM blustered uselessly.

Gina hovered over me, along with Chip and Raleigh; Raleigh had a glass of water, some painkillers he wanted me to take, where Gina mostly wanted to gape.

“That’s gory,” she said, admiringly, and raised her phone. “I’m going to post it to Facebook, when I have bars again. Do they have toxins in them, barnacles? Like sea urchins?”

As we sped shoreward, I turned back and gazed at the armada. On our approach it had soared above us like a citadel. There’d been no doubt in my mind that it was a seat of power, that armada, a bastion of mindless force. It was impervious to our opinions, cold to the good of others. Yet with the mermaids gone — for all of us knew there were none left behind — it struck me as a ghost fleet. Even a ghost city.

Thompson had talked about diving in the sunken warships of Truk Lagoon, full of the skulls of Japanese fighters. . Thompson had told the tale, that night after first contact at our drunk party, of how he had swum through those mossy, rusted hulks, seeing small fish dart through the eye sockets of sailors. Those sailors killed a lifetime ago in a distant war, long forgotten by all who knew them, the forgetters even forgotten.

And here I was looking at a new fleet of ghosts, the remnants of a rapacious army of commerce. Already it was floating around uselessly on top of waves that had been stripped of assets. The whales were gone, and so were the mermaids; the coral reefs were on their way out. I felt like I saw the future of these ships, from the private yachts to the workhorses of the fishing industry, and it seemed to me that future was a sad one, in some respects — a future of decay and dereliction, a future where the ships floated on the vast waters with nowhere to sail to anymore.

For the yachts, no pleasure stops along the sumptuous coasts. For the fishing ships, no schools to catch in their high-tech nets, those endless skeins of white monofilament that would drift for millennia in the oceans, immortal.

I was waxing pretty eloquent, in my mind, about all this, when we got back to the marina. We stepped onto the jetty and said our goodbyes to the civil servants. With Chip’s arm around me I hobbled into the Hummer.

Ellis and I got the places of honor, being the injured ones: he perched in the front passenger seat, gritting his teeth and trying to hold his arm immobilized, while I stretched out in the very back, my scraped-up leg propped up on a pile of dusty blankets. The good doctor said he’d tend to our wounds back at the motel, that he thought Ellis’s wrist was fractured; he’d borrowed some supplies from the ship’s first-aid station.

I lay on my side looking out the rear windows — there were a pair of them, the Hummer had two doors at the back — and seeing the sky, with occasional pieces of tree looming. The rear of the Hummer was sandy, full of diving gear, wetsuits, knives, guns, and ammunition, and the fine white sand got all over me. At first I brushed at it irritably, but then I let it stick. I should appreciate the sand, I thought. The parrotfish expert had said it before she died: the white sands would be leaving us soon.

Maybe they would appear in another time and place, I comforted myself. There were so many stars. These days the scientists said a zillion planets might support carbon-based life, out there. Maybe a planet in a triple-star system would grow these fish with pouty lips, these hills of white sand beneath clear saltwater.

Over the history of the earth, I learned in high school biology, the eyeball has evolved, died out, and then evolved again. The eye can’t be kept down.

Maybe the fish couldn’t be kept down either, the fish and their beautiful reefs.

One time, not long before our wedding, Chip had come home from work with a factoid he’d learned, a piece of new research uncovered in the course of doing business (insurance adjustment). Ashes had been discovered in some cave in South Africa, ashes from cookfires a million years ago, he’d read it in a magazine. Or he had found it on Wikipedia. Something. Anyway, that was us, Chip said — our grandparents, practically.

We’d had short foreheads then, eyebrows that were even bushier than Nancy’s. A million years ago.

“Did we talk?” I asked Chip, propping myself up on an elbow.

I may have sounded fuzzy. My leg was stinging a lot by that time. It really hurt quite a bit.

Chip was chatting with Raleigh in the backseat, and at first they didn’t hear me, so I repeated my question.

“Chip. When we were Homo erectus. Did we know how to talk back then?”

“Relax, honey. Lie back. She may be delirious. Just rest, OK honey?”

“I mean it, Chip, did Homo erectus talk?”

“Uh, hmm. Let me think. I mean no one knows for sure about this stuff. And Homo sapiens were the first real talkers, right? Like maybe fifty thousand years ago. But some people think maybe the later specimens of erectus spoke some kind of pre-language. Like maybe they didn’t just grunt like apes. Still, even if that’s true, it wouldn’t have been anything fancy. They didn’t write or anything. It took us, like, five million years to learn how to do that. Evolution-wise. If you count australopithecines.”

Five million years, I thought, lying back again.

It was warm in the back there, stuffy and warm, and as the sting sharpened and then abated, sharpened and abated, I wondered if I was falling asleep. The Hummer bounced over potholes, leaving behind an invisible stream of global warming. . it had taken our ancestors four million years to figure out fire. It took them five million to develop writing. And then, in a great acceleration — just a brief, screaming handful of seasons — we got electricity, nukes, commercial air travel, trips to the moon. Overnight the white sands of the parrotfish were running out. Here went the poles, melting, and here, at last, went paradise.

The writing gave us everything all of a sudden, then nothing forever.

I WOKE UP to a mild wind sweeping in from the open doors of the motel bedroom. I lay alone on our bed, my leg wrapped in gauze. It was dusk, I saw from the pink sky. No one was in the room with me, but I could hear their voices outside, where they were milling around the pool.

I must have needed the rest, I thought; maybe it was the shock of the injury. I didn’t have much experience with pain, accident, or trauma — I’ve had an easy life, let’s face it. I’d thought the leg was no big deal. But still I’d slept through the afternoon.

I didn’t want to move yet; I saw my cell phone lay on the bedside table, and I reached out for it. There was a text waiting: Call me when you wake up. <3 C.

So I did, I lay there on my back on the cool linens and I called Chip, and he came in. He sat on the side of the bed, then lay down beside me, careful not to nudge the hurt leg; he asked if I wanted more painkillers.

It wasn’t so bad, I said.

He said that was because they’d given me codeine.

I wanted to know what I’d missed.

“The crowds — the haters? — they’re not accepting that the mermaids are really gone,” he said. “They’re everywhere, looking for them. Trying to hire out boats, dive equipment. It’s a madhouse at the marina. A lot like it was before. The armada’s come back in, mostly to service them. So even without the mermaids, the Venture of Marvels is making a tidy profit. Right now, at least. It’s going to be all the local authorities can do to keep the crowds from destroying the reefs here.”

“Oh,” I said weakly. I closed my eyes again.

The sense of peace I’d had after the whales took the mermaids was dispersing like smoke.

“The good news is, the Coast Guard’s going to be pitching in and Thompson’s reinforcements came through. Wild, right? Can you believe the old guy actually has pull? So there’s a Navy boat on its way. That’s the good news, honey. There’s pretty solid help coming.”

I was tired. It wasn’t just the codeine, the leg ache — I was more tired than that.

“But there’s not so much you and I can do,” he added. “I mean, Nancy’s staying. She’s on sabbatical anyway, so she doesn’t have to go back and teach. And she feels like she has to go to bat for her parrotfish. Plus the locals can use her biology expertise. But I was thinking — since obviously we don’t want to go back to the resort, and this motel’s booked up now, even this crappy place is full, so we’re going to be kicked out in the morning — well, I was thinking we’d get on the ferry and go to the U.S. Virgins, just the two of us plus maybe Ellis and Gina. We can spend the rest of our vacation there. I’m thinking the best would be St. John. I was going to book us there in the first place, you know, before I saw how Gorda had that floating restaurant.”

“Aren’t there crowds on St. John too?” I asked.

I still wasn’t opening my eyes; I lay tucked into Chip like a small child. I’ve always liked that about Chip, his height and broad shoulders, the fact that he can enclose me.

“No, the haters are only in the British Virgins. None of them really went farther west than Tortola, apparently. It’s too far away from where we saw the mermaids, you know, in the U.S. Virgins — people wouldn’t have the access they’re looking for. But listen. On St. John there’s a two-bedroom bungalow on the top of a small mountain that had a last-minute cancellation — we can rent it for a whole week. I checked. It has a private yard, these flowering bougainvillea vines all over the place, even a rose trellis. It has one of those infinity pools, Deb. You always wanted to swim in a pool like that, didn’t you?”

“I’ve always wanted to swim in an infinity,” I murmured.

“And it has a great view of the ocean.”

“Chip? Sweetheart? I wonder if we should just go home,” I suggested. “Home home. Back to the Golden State.”

I thought of those angry crowds teeming onto the coral heads out there, slashing the corals with those long rubber fins, of Nancy’s silly-looking parrotfish with their bulging lips, those innocent fools of fish. Poor things. Just swimming around with no idea what was coming.

I felt like crying again.

“Deb, no, hey — this was a victory. Maybe not ours, exactly, but still, it was a victory for the mermaids. The Venture didn’t get to them, and maybe some small part of that timing was us. Maybe, partly, with our distractions and our interference, we held them off until the whales came. Think of it that way, babe.”

“I’ve always loved your optimism,” I said.

“Deb, look. The reefs are going to weather this invasion. All right? So don’t be discouraged.”

“But if we hadn’t gone public with the mermaids, there wouldn’t be these crowds,” I said listlessly.

“But if we hadn’t gone public with the mermaids, who knows? Maybe the GM wouldn’t have had to take time out to intimidate us on the beach, with his posse. Maybe they would have found the mermaids themselves. Before the blue whales ever got there. And the mermaids would be in a cage right now. And a lot of them might be dead.”

I shook my head. It sounded paper-thin, to me, Chip’s logic. The truth was, I thought, we’d tried our best, we really had. But we’d been bulls in a china shop, and now the reefs were being invaded by hordes of our very own barbarians.

For the first time I had a glimpse of something: I got an inkling of why Chip was obsessed with the Heartland. He knew it was our fault, the ape denial, the fear of science, the epidemic of obesity. He knew we’d done it to ourselves, made our own village into idiots. We’d put our best-looking idiots on thrones, those empty pawns and shiny dolls. And then we had the balls to act surprised — even superior! — when people began to worship them.

Some people worshiped the false idols and in the face of that some other people turned away. We weren’t this sordid mass, they wanted to think, we were children of God, special and better than the rest. Once you weren’t beautiful, you needed God to love you.

Between the two groups a fault line rumbled, ominous.

“. . I know your leg hurts,” Chip was saying. “But the doctor says it’s going to be fine, maybe some light scarring. As early as tomorrow, he said — as long as you keep a waterproof bandage over the part without the skin — you can maybe go swimming. I’ll take care of you, honey. Let’s relax, OK? We’ll have that lazy honeymoon you wanted, I promise. We really will. St. John’s is like, rainforest green, one big national park with mountains, and around the edges is a ring road that stops at tons of white-sand beaches. You can snorkel on every one of them, if you want. We won’t do any diving. We’ll take it easy.”

We lay there for a while, with the babble of conversation from the pool, a splashing, every now and then, and the whir of the ceiling fan.

Chip kissed me, and so forth.

“OK,” I said finally.

FOR OUR LAST night with everyone he carried me out to the pool — just for the hell of it, since of course I could have walked, albeit painfully. The leg looked savaged, but it was just lacerations. He laid me down on a chaise and people took turns coming over to see me. I felt like a gimpy queen.

Someone had picked up takeout food, on the pretext of taking the burden of cooking off Janeane, and everyone (except Janeane) was chowing down on pulled pork and fish tacos. A few of the soldiers had come, dressed in their civvies, cargo pants, swim trunks, et cetera, which made them look much younger — like college kids with neat haircuts, I thought, or maybe high school jocks.

Guns age a person, I decided. If you want to look young, you probably shouldn’t carry one.

Miyoko was talking to Sam, who looked enthusiastic about the conversation; Thompson and Gina seemed to be playing darts, with a board stuck up on the trunk of a palm tree. Rick and Ronnie were talking to Janeane, who lay in a hammock knitting, as Ellis (one arm in a sling), Simonoff and Nancy pored over some maps spread out on a table and the doctor floated in the pool ensconced in a pink lifesaving ring. Raleigh leaned over the food table, putting together a plate for me.

Of all of them, I thought, watching people stand around in their drinking-and-talking gaggles, I’d miss Steve and Janeane the most. Their niceness was warming. Even their boringness grew on you after a while, because they meant so well. They really did.

And Raleigh: I liked him too. I liked so many people, when I got to know them, and when I was drinking.

When I was drinking I could almost be Chip, I thought, almost that nice.

But not quite.

I wouldn’t think of the crowds, I told myself, I wouldn’t think of them, the crowds with their swords burning.

That’s right. I would refuse to think of them.

I watched as one of Gina’s darts struck Thompson on the hand. He shrieked. I nursed my smooth bourbon on the rocks, looked up at the darkening sky. There was the planet Venus, and a few stars were out; purple was turning black. The end of our day was ending.

“You should come down and see us, man,” said Chip to Steve.

They were sitting beside me in yellow-and-white deck chairs; Steve was squeezing some kind of resistance ball that’s supposed to make your hands stronger.

“You live in the Bay Area, right?” persisted Chip. “Five-hour shot straight down the 1. We’re literally just a couple minutes off the PCH. Brentwood. Stay overnight! Plenty of space. We’ll move Deb’s Pilates machine out of the guestroom. That thing’s gathering dust anyway, isn’t it, honey?”

“Kind of it is,” I admitted.

“Hey, I really wish we could,” said Steve. “Just not sure there’ll be time.”

He looked up then, tipping his head back pensively, and Chip and I did the same.

In the sky the asteroid was blazing. That earth-crosser was so near, these days. I’d almost forgotten.

“True dat,” said Chip, nodding.

“You read the GAO report?” asked Steve.

“Of course,” said Chip.

We’d all read the report, something from Congress that the papers and blogs picked up. It’d been translated into more than a thousand languages; when Chip saw that figure he said he didn’t even know there were that many. (Gina ridiculed him.) Anyway the study said the asteroid could probably have been stopped, the impact prevented if we’d prepared in time. Well, technically it could have been redirected, not stopped per se, deflected just microscopically along its path so that it wouldn’t hit and wouldn’t bring on the extinction event. Like in a high-concept blockbuster movie, we could have knocked it off its course with a missile, or maybe a few. Apparently, some of that Hollywood shit was true.

But the time for whining had passed.

So in the end we’d failed the whales, much as we’d failed the mermaids. I wondered if they already knew. Did they see to the end, the way we did?

I wished there were some perfect retreat for those whales and those mermaids — the beauty we knew, the beauty we thought we’d made up or maybe only dreamed, we’d never been quite sure. I wished there was a safe haven for them, locked deep in the endless blue.

We smiled at each other, Chip and Steve and I, sadly. I flattered myself that the men were thinking fondly of each other and of me, as I was thinking so fondly of them — of all the milling friends and partygoers — longing for what couldn’t be.

When it came to the future, we all acted as if. Only way to proceed, said Gina firmly, and Chip and I agreed.

So we did the wedding, we did the honeymoon. There’d never be a better time for it.

Still there are instants when it pierces me, it pierces all of us — we all have those instants of remembering — a terrible love that passes in a flash, our terrible love of everything.

It brings us closer than we’ve ever been.

But the closeness is fleeting.

Tears stood on my bottom eyelids again, twice in a single day now, but I wouldn’t let them spill over — not this time. This time I restrained myself, determined to keep my personality intact. From now on, that’s what I’d do. No more slipups. It wasn’t the best personality, I’d been reminded of that recently, but it was mine. You work with what you’ve got.

I’d keep my personality intact, I decided. Give it the old college try.

I raised my cup and toasted; the others raised theirs too. We went on smiling, smiling, and smiling, until the very moment when the whiskey touched our lips.