Inamorata is island born and island raised, not so much more than a sanderling herself, and in her twenty-seven years she’s seen her share of ugliness and misbegotten dragged in by the tides. There’s a whole drowned world out there, always puking up its secrets and mistakes, the shameful ghosts of a wasted, shining petrol city that went under before her grandmother’s mother was born. But this, this is something rare indeed, the milky green lump in Geli’s hand, and it catches her off guard.
“Looks Japanese,” says Geli. “Doesn’t it look Japanese? I think maybe it’s an oni. An oni or a dragon.”
To Inamorata, it doesn’t look much like either. Geli holds it out to her, and Inamorata leans forward and takes the thing from her hand. It’s about as big around as her balled-up fist and heavy—definitely stone—though she’s hardly qualified to say whether the thing is actually jade or not. She holds it up to the sun, and finds that it’s translucent. Whoever carved it, whenever and whyever it was carved, however many decades or centuries ago, they’d clearly meant to convey something terrible, and Inamorata would have to admit that they succeeded in spades. The word that comes first to her mind is troll, because when she was little her mother told her a fairy story about three nanny goats trying to cross the ruins of the Williamsburg Bridge. But there was an enormous sea troll nesting below the span, a monstrous, malformed creature of slime and muck and rusted steel, and whenever the goats tried to cross, the troll would rise up and threaten to eat them. This thing that Geli’s found on the beach, it could be the graven likeness of her mother’s bridge troll, a refugee from Inamorata’s childhood nightmares. Except, she always imagined the troll to be male, though she can’t recall whether her mother ever explicitly stated that it was. The maybe-jade thing, it’s unmistakably female, an obscene caricature of the feminine form, from the exaggerated fullness of its breasts, hips, and buttocks to the gape of its vulva. But its bulging eyes, those make her think of the fishmongers’ stalls down on the Row, and the mass of finger-like tendrils sprouting from its belly remind her of a sea anemone.
“It’s not the bridge troll,” Geli says, and Inamorata frowns and looks at her, then looks back at the ugly lump of green stone she’s holding. Emil Duarte, who’s seventy-three and went to school in some faraway dry place, has referred to Geli as an “innate twelfth-hierarchy intuitive,” and he has explained to Inamorata how people like Geli are used by the military and the multicorps. Down on the Row, there were folks who called her a witch, who thought she was possessed by demons, because of the way she often knows things that she shouldn’t know, that she has no way of knowing, and that she can never explain how she knows. Inamorata hasn’t ever told Geli Núñez about her mother’s bridge troll story.
“And Gasper offered you twenty?” she asks, passing the thing back to Geli. The stone feels slippery, oily, and when she looks at her fingers and palms, they glisten like she’s been handling slugs. She wipes her hands on her skirt.
“I can do better,” Geli replies.
“Probably,” Inamorata agrees. “Have Sully post it for you, full span. I’ll cover the tab. You want more than twenty, then the buyer’s gonna have to come from somewhere besides the island.”
“Will do,” says Geli, turning the thing over and over, examining the object from every angle.
Admiring it, Inamorata thinks, and the thought gives her an unpleasant little shiver. To her, it isn’t horrible at all.
“I wish you could have seen all those starfish and urchins,” Geli says, and she returns the green thing to her gunny. “Heaps of them, thousands and thousands, like maybe the sea’s gotten bored with starfish and urchins and sent them all packing.”
And just then, far out across the water, a siren starts to wail; a few seconds later, another pipes up, and shortly after that, a third joins the chorus, the shrill cry of the Hudson Authority’s hurricane warning towers. Inamorata picks up the spyglass again and scans the low waves, but there’s still no sign of a company crew, only a few ragged fishing boats, bobbing and rolling and going about their day-to-day business. The waves, the boats, and the slick. Nothing she can see to warrant an alarm.
“What’s happening?” asks Geli, sounding more curious than concerned. “Why would they wind up the screamers on a day like today? There’s not a cloud in the sky.”
“I don’t know,” Inamorata tells her, and then she focuses on the slick, which seems bigger than it did only five or ten minutes before. An enormous flock of gulls has gathered above it, and she watches as the birds dive, one by one, from the sky and plummet headfirst into the oil. There’s no splash when they hit. Not even a sludgy ripple. They’re just gone. But odder still, the slick seems to be drifting nearer Prospect Beach, moving south and east, even though the current from the sound should be pushing it west, off towards Liberty Bay.
“You go find Emil,” she says, and the way she says it, Geli doesn’t hesitate, and she doesn’t ask why. She just gets up and heads quickly back downstairs, shouting for the old man. Inamorata doesn’t take her eye from the spyglass, not looking away from the falling birds or the shimmering oily patch, hardly half a mile from shore now and creeping slowly closer. But she’s thinking of that ugly chunk of stone from Geli’s sack, and she’s thinking of dead starfish and sea urchins, and she’s remembering the way her mother did the voice of the
