At that point I happened to glance at the bathroom door and saw the drunken Fox News spearfisherman rummaging in my tampon box. I watched the spearfisher rummage, I took it in stride, and then I cruised over there, casually interrupting him. You don’t really get to ask why, when you behold a thing like that, but the politeness vs. curiosity dilemma can be tense.
The spearfisher snatched his hand out of the box when he saw me coming; as I led him out of the bathroom he made small talk about mer-people’s gills—claimed he’d once known a guy from Montreal, a regular human who had a vestigial gill himself. Right on his neck, where the mermaids’ gills were. It sometimes leaked a clear substance.
“Actually that would most likely have been a pharyngeal slit,” said Nancy, appearing with her eyebrows. “Or groove. Not a vestigial gill. A layperson might call it a birth defect.”
“I don’t get it,” said Chip, who’d detached himself from old Navy guy. “Why do those mermaids even have gills? I mean wouldn’t they be marine mammals? I mean they have breasts, right? And hair. So aren’t they, like, mammals? Like sea lions and dolphins? Those guys don’t need gills. So why would mermaids?”
“It’s very exciting!” cried Nancy. “Of course, gills are far more efficient than lungs at extracting oxygen. They have to be. It’s hard to breathe seawater. Less oxygen in water than air. Gills could have been an evolutionary advantage for the mers. Particularly if they have lungs too. They may have both, in fact. It’s not impossible.”
“The ‘mers’?” I asked.
“Mer-people could be read as a colonialist term,” explained the biologist. “Racist and hegemonic. It’d be my own proposal that, until we learn the culture’s own name for itself—assuming the culture has language qua language, which is a major leap—we shorten our label to mer, or mers, plural. It’s relatively value-neutral. Just the French word for sea.”
“Huh?” said the tampon fisherman. “French? Why goddamn French? They should be flattered we’re calling them people! It’s a goddamn compliment!”
“Well, imagine a highly intelligent race of eels . . .” said the biologist.
“No, man,” the fisherman interrupted. “I don’t want to.”
“. . . and when these intelligent eels discovered our own species,” the biologist went on, “they then referred to us as land eels. Would that seem like a compliment to you?”
“I wouldn’t take it personally,” said Chip.
“Makes no sense. We don’t look like an eel,” said the fisherman.
“My anthro colleague knows this stuff better than I do,” admitted Nancy.
I guess the sensitivity racket was mostly for the humanities.
We heard a crash and turned—it was the man from the Heartland, who must have snuck in, without his wife this time, when I wasn’t paying attention. Like the spearfisher he’d been nosing around in my business, it looked like, because he was squatting in the open closet, where my clothes were, and as I drew closer I saw an iron from the top shelf had fallen. He was prodding the top of his head with two fingers. Our clock radio lay entwined with the iron on the carpet, two black cords spiraling.
“What the hell?” said Chip, and dashed past me.
Sure enough, I saw from somewhere behind Chip’s shoulder, the man was holding one of my shoes. It was a Jimmy Choo. I knew now I wouldn’t wear it on this trip; it had a four-inch heel and there wasn’t enough pavement.
Chip snatched it away from him.
The man’s other hand was bloody from his scalp, which had a bloody dent in it made by the point of the iron. My shoe trembled slightly in midair as Chip looked down at the guy, unsure of his next move.
A thin drip of red trickled its way down the toe man’s forehead, so slow it seemed glacial. I had a sense of losing control, of borders fading loosely into fuzziness.
“Uh. You OK, man?” asked Chip, craning his neck to see the gouge.
The toe man nodded dazedly, then abruptly rose and zigzagged around us, through the living room and out the front door.
“Huh,” said Chip. “Hope he doesn’t have a concussion or something.”
I shrugged inwardly. I had no patience for the guy’s injuries, incurred during his shoe fondling. He hadn’t received them defending our free nation. He didn’t deserve a Congressional Medal of Honor.
I turned to the oglers loitering.
“Sorry, but it’s time for us to turn in,” I announced. The drinking and annoyance had finally emboldened me. “Chip and I are going to hit the sack now. We’ll see you again tomorrow. And thanks for coming, though.”
IT SHOCKED ME to see, when I struggled out of bed the next morning all headachy to answer a vigorous pounding on our door, that the man who stood there—visible through one of the large picture windows as I tottered out of the bedroom in my skivvies, nothing but a camisole and boyshorts—was the guy from outside the restaurant men’s room, two nights ago, who’d been wearing the Freudian slip T-shirt.
He wasn’t wearing the T-shirt now, but still I recognized him.
“What is it?” I asked, opening the door creakily. It felt like five minutes had passed since I collapsed into bed. I couldn’t have cared less that the Freud guy was seeing me half-naked and unkempt; all I cared about was sleep.
“I came to tell you, because I think you’re friends with—that is, I
