I waited for them to come up, treading water and getting more and more gaspy. When Chip finally surfaced his face was purple-red; he shoved his tube aside and pulled his mask up onto the top of his head, and I could see his eyes were wide, like when he’d been electric-shocked in the mud marathon.
“So? Did you see mermaids?” I asked him, in a joking tone. I assumed he’d report a sea turtle, a dolphin or stingray or what have you.
“Deb! There were some goddamn mermaids down there!”
Feeling a bit fed up, I snorted and turned to swim back toward the boat, shaking my head. Chip’s a fantasist, of course, a fantasy game-player; Chip enjoys the world of make-believe. I think I’ve made that clear.
I climbed back onto the boat, and when I came out of the head with the wetsuit off and my clothes back on, the captain wordlessly handed me a cold can of beer. Didn’t say a word, just handed it over. I was grateful. I sat on one of the white fiberglass benches drinking and taking a breather; before long the other two joined me, climbing the ladder with their faces shining oddly.
“Deb,” said Chip breathlessly, shedding his gear, “you thought I was kidding, but I wasn’t. Maybe it’s a hoax or like that, I’m not saying it isn’t, but down there were people with tails. People fully the size of you or me.”
“If it’s a hoax, how were they breathing underwater?” asked Nancy. “You didn’t see any breathing apparatus, did you?”
“Maybe it was a sleight-of-hand trick,” said Chip. “Or just like phenomenal timing. I mean, the two of us were down there, right Deb? Nancy and I. And we didn’t have oxygen tanks.”
“But have you seen anyone come up since then? There’s nothing but this boat around, as far as the eye can see!” raged Nancy. She turned to me. “Did you see anyone come up?”
“Come on, guys,” I said, and crumpled my beer can, which was already empty. “Enough, already. You got me. Consider me pranked. OK?”
Nancy glared at me with her eyebrows like angry crawlers. Then she turned back to Chip, as though I hadn’t said a thing.
“Maybe they had a submarine to go back to,” said Chip. “A submersible. Like in that movie, The Abyss. Or even Titanic. You know the kind I mean,” he said, appealing to me. “For research. Maybe they saw us, then swam back to their submersible. Technically, free-diving for long periods of time is possible. I mean some free-divers can go down two, three hundred meters on one breath. Competitive apnea! Deb, it’s an extreme sport! There’s one guy who can hold his breath in a pool for eleven minutes. I read it online.”
“Be reasonable,” said Nancy. “Manned submersibles cost a mint. There aren’t any commercial ones operating around here or I’d have found out about them. Plus, who’d strap on a tail and swim around in the middle of the Atlantic just for our benefit? Nobody.”
“You guys,” I said, “I’m sure there’s an explanation, other than you’re both messing with me. Maybe someone rubbed LSD onto your breathing tubes. Or the tubes got toxic mold on it in that box that caused hallucinations. And now I’m ready to go back. Can we please go?”
The boat captain didn’t wait on Nancy’s command; impatient as any man slighted by underpayment, he throttled up and we motored toward dry land.
THE DAY HAD started well, even gaily. First I’d shaken off the tinge of shame laid on me by the Heartland man; then Chip and I had kissed in a shady grotto, water running around our bodies in pleasing rivulets. We’d been living the American Dream, or the American-Caribbean Dream—call it the American-Caribbean Honeymoon Dream. Whatever you call it, I’d felt clothed in its raiment of sun and sex and booze, lassitude, freedom from opinion. I’d felt a pleasing vacuum of responsibility, filled with trade winds and ocean spray. Washing the salt from our ropy hair as sand, too, swirled down the shower drain. Lying spent and happy on cool white sheets, air on the skin, rustle of fronds in the breeze, the whir of time passing, warm wind of the turning world.
But after the boat trip the dream altered. Within the smooth fabric of the dream a thread of doubt had been picked, and suddenly the weave was unraveling.
The problem, at first, seemed to be Chip. I wanted the old Chip back, the Chip for whom there was real life on the one hand, without mythic creatures, and videogames solidly on the other hand, where mythic creatures cavorted quite abundantly. The new Chip was confusing, even frightening to me, because the new Chip was stubbornly insisting that those worlds weren’t separate. That went too far for me. It was a rude jolt. The earth was unstable beneath my feet.
And hadn’t even been Chip’s idea—someone we barely knew had brought the idea to him, and then he’d run with it. There was an arbitrary quality to the mermaid sighting. Yet Chip had signed right up! The honeymoon was supposed to be all about him and me, and instead he’d become a member of a secret society—Chip was affiliated, now, with a disturbed parrotfish expert.
It was as though he’d joined a cult. He was dazed, when we got back to the cabana; there was a look of sheer obliteration on his face. He barely talked to me. And pretty swiftly, there on the island of Virgin Gorda in the British Caribbean, it made me feel terribly lonely, a premonition of the grave. Sitting across the room from Chip as he ignored me—he was scrolling through pages of mermaid lore on the tablet he’d brought with him—I put
