carousel horse had stretched out its neck just for her as she’d floated past, allowing her to grasp the brass ring in his nose.
The nurse in the medical shed could not legally treat a mermaid in an emergency situation without filling out a kit of forms, getting it all notarized, submitting it to a government panel, and receiving in the mail (within sixty to ninety days) a permit to be posted within public sight. Fortunately for the mermaid, the nurse on duty that night had been a sympathizer, having worked for years alongside Dr. Penelope Clapp, a great pioneer in mermaid medical research (the Penny Valve, a cellophane innovation that partially humanized the mermaid’s esophagus, was invented by her and named in her honor). The nurse undid the pins that kept her paper cap to her hair, unbuttoned the top buttons of her blouse, rolled up her sleeves, and locked the shed’s door. She put on a pair of magnifying spectacles and ran her fingers along the rims of them, clicking through the various lenses for the correct degree before peering down the mermaid’s labyrinthine throat.
“Bring me the satchel that’s in the bottom drawer of the corner cabinet,” the nurse ordered Axel, but he stood still, too startled by all that was going on before him. The nurse reached out and grabbed his elbow, her fingers digging into his skin. “I need your help,” she said, scolding.
The bag was heavy and awkward — bottles of elixirs jostling around inside — and he nearly dropped it before reaching the bed. The nurse took from it a mask and a pump, syringes and scopes, all equipment that had been jimmied to best fit a mermaid’s insides. As she gently snaked a ribbed tube up the mermaid’s nostril, she handed Axel a square green-glass bottle. “Heat this up on the burner,” she said. “To exactly one hundred degrees. There’s a thermometer in the drawer.” Together they worked in lamplight that the nurse had dimmed away to practically nothing, becoming so quickly intimate that they hardly had to speak at all, relying on gestures and glances, grunts and sighs.
Finally the mermaid breathed easy, snoring with little puffs of breath at her lips, like blown kisses. Axel had never seen anything more beautiful. She must dream of handsome sailors, he thought. Exhausted, the nurse lit a cigarette and began to strip from her sweaty uniform, down to her bra and slip, her back to Axel. A few scars ran across the skin of her thin, pale back and you could see the segments of her vertebrae. “Get her out of here,” she said. “I could lose my license.” She handed Axel her blouse. “Cover her breasts with this. Do you have money for a rickshaw?”
Axel reached into his pockets, pulling the damp lining inside out, demonstrating that any money he’d had he’d lost in the ocean. The nurse gave him some dollar bills she’d had tucked in her bra strap. “There’s a cab stand in front of the fried jellyfish parlor down the street,” she said. “Tell him to take you to the nuns. He’ll probably say it’s not on his route, so you’ll tell him you’ll pay double.”
“Don’t I need something to disguise her fin?” Axel asked, as he buttoned the mermaid into the nurse’s blouse.
The nurse took a drag off her cigarette and exhaled heavy. “It’s the Mermaid Parade,” she said. “The place is crawling with people dressed up like her.” She gave Axel a corked vial of a green liquid. “The nuns will know how to administer it.”
“Tell me,” he said. “In case they don’t know how.”
“They’ll know how,” she said.
“In case they don’t,” he said.
The nurse sighed, shook her head, stuck her cigarette in the corner of her mouth, and squinted from the smoke that rose into her eye. She wiggled her finger toward the satchel. “Get the little red tea tin out of there,” she said, through clenched teeth. He did, and she showed him the double-pronged syringe inside. The tip of the needle was slightly curved. She demonstrated, on a vein of the mermaid’s arm, how to give the shot. “A shot in the morning, at noon, and at night.” She gave him more money from her bra and advised him to check into the flophouse at the corner of Atlantic and Pacific, “where the landlady don’t ask questions.”
But the landlady did ask Axel a question: “Need a drink?” She stood at the door to the room she’d assigned him and his mermaid, leaning against the jamb with a slouch intended to seduce. She wore a fuzzy, pink housecoat, roses embroidered on the lapels. Her dentures somewhere in a cup, her mouth sucked in on itself with a rhythmic smacking, and the downturned corners of her frown seemed to sag off her face entirely.
“No thank you,” he said.
“Well, you might as well start scratching now, you prissy little thing, because those bedbugs will itch like hell.” She slammed the door behind her.
But Axel and the mermaid did not sleep in the room; there were no other boarders on the second floor those first few nights, so Axel drew the mermaid a bath down the hall, and he lay on the floor beside her, the cold tiles cushioned only by a threadbare beach towel promoting a brand of cigarettes called Sailor’s Lung — Like having your head in a stormy cloud, the slogan promised.
Her hair spilled over the side of the tub and began to slowly spring with curl as it dried. He combed his fingers through her golden locks. “Rapunzel, Rapunzel,” he whispered, “let down your sweet hair.” He practically chanted it, in a soft monkish drone, easing his anxious stomach with its rhythms and repetition. He then turned the chant into a song, his sleepiness rendering it nonsensical and poetic, a song about spotted pears and senile dogs. He wrote many songs those few days at Rapunzel’s side, songs he then sang on the boardwalk when she got better, a hat overturned at his feet for coins, as the tourist season crept to an end. He bought Rapunzel a wicker wheelchair and a crocheted quilt to hide her fin, and she jiggled a tambourine he’d made from grapevine and sand dollars. As people stumbled from the casinos feeling they’d struck it rich, they took pity on the pretty girl in the chair, and would empty their pockets of coins into the hat. His banjo he’d bought with money he’d made working for a few weeks as a nanny to the sideshow’s monkey boy, who’d really been nothing more than just a hirsute infant with wild yellow eyes.
Though the boardwalk crawled with private gumshoes investigating infidelities and runaways, Axel was not recognized by any of the men his parents had hired. The ocean air and summer sun had quickly turned his face craggy and dry and his blond hair had gone as white as rice noodles. He’d never before even been able to grow peach fuzz on his chin or upper lip, but his concern for Rapunzel had led to a full snow-white beard in only a week or so, concealing a weak momma’s-boy chin.
Rapunzel’s first drawing was of Axel looking years younger, though it depicted him from only a few weeks before: Axel swimming against the raging sea, as beautiful as a young prince, to rescue her from the drifting carousel horse. Axel had known from the beginning that she’d been unable to speak due to the tongue cut from her mouth, the primitive stitches of which he could feel with his own tongue when he kissed her, but he had not initially noticed she’d been unable to see clearly — when he brought her glasses bought from the drugstore, it was as if it improved her mind’s eye as well, her backward glance blossoming in color and clarity. Her drawings looked as if torn from the pages of a book of fairy tales, the characters with eyes so round they consumed their faces.
Her illustrations also depicted Rapunzel in the life she’d left undersea, where she’d lived, like royalty, in the wreckage of a luxury liner. She’d eaten her octopus salad off broken plates of fine china and had drunk her kelp tea from cups of rusted silver. At parties, she’d made her entrances by swimming down the grand staircase lined with candelabra lit by phosphorescent jellyfish and she’d waltzed across a ballroom floor of Moroccan tile that chipped away with the sweep of her fin.
The drawings that made Axel cry were of the pirates who’d captured her and her sisters in a net as they’d swum, rebellious, near the surface to glimpse the ship’s figurehead, a carving believed to be based on the mermaids’ mother. Their mother, a stunning beauty who’d loved, as a girl, to swim up above the surface to sing torch songs, had become quite a legend, blamed for little yachts and sailboats capsizing in the rocky waters as sailors were lured forward by her melodious throat.
As one pirate had held Rapunzel down on the floor of the ship and another had held open her mouth, the captain had wrapped his fingers around the handle of a small knife and had pushed the blade against the tongue he held with his thumb, like slicing off a strip of apple peel. Onshore, professional singers and pop stars paid obscene amounts for mermaid tongue, which was believed to have enhancing properties. If licked within a few days of being cut fresh from the mouth, a mermaid tongue could strengthen the voice and perfect the pitch.
As Axel played his banjo on the boardwalk one drizzly evening, Rapunzel sat beneath the battered silk parasol he’d roped to her wheelchair and she drew a portrait of an opera singer collapsed on a fainting sofa in her dressing room, her spectacular breasts spilling over the top of her corset with busted laces, her wig in her lap, the tip of her long tongue curling at the tip of the mermaid tongue in her open palm. Madame Ernestine Swarth, the mezzo-soprano whose farewell performance at the Mudpuddle Hall had been selling out nightly for three years,
