But of course the anthropologist wasn’t here yet. He was due in from Tortola on a late-afternoon ferry.
I watched officials mill around with a growing sense of despair. Chip wasn’t available to me, eyes avidly planted on his bright data-cell, attention utterly committed. This was a time of sad aftermath, and I’ve always hated aftermaths, with their dull, heavy weight of disappointed hope. Nancy’s body was already gone, so in fact there was nothing to watch. It was a matter of waiting for someone to speak to us.
And what about the mermaids? It was increasingly clear to me that we were shut out of everything now—the action was closed to us. Just a few hours earlier, with servers at our beck and call, we’d been members of an inner circle: we’d clustered at the nucleus, cleaved to the core.
Now we were far from the core, excluded, floating like weak electrons. Or something.
I worried, I felt queasy at the thought of Nancy, I still disbelieved the story of her demise—I understood it with my brain, possibly, but not the rest of me. The living Nancy, with her bushy eyebrows, was still realer to me than the dead Nancy.
Chip was busily texting when the videographer from Australia came galumphing toward us over the emerald grass, weaving between the spectators, flushed and sweating.
“It’s gone!” he said, panting, when he pulled up short. “Oh mate—my footage is gone! And my camera!”
“What do you mean?” asked Chip, looking up from the small screen at long last. “Gone where?”
“Stolen!” said the videographer. “They were both stolen!”
“Slow down there, friend,” said Chip. “OK. Let’s . . . maybe you left your camera somewhere? Our place, even?”
“I took it back to my hotel room last night,” he puffed. “You know—I’m at the Bitter End, about a half-hour drive, I got back to the room in the wee hours. Well, the camera was too big to fit in the bloody room safe, so I stuck just the video chip in there instead, and put the key under the pillow, just to be extra careful. Didn’t think I really needed to, but. Woke up this morning and the safe door was wide open. Looked under my pillow, the bloody key was still there! The chip is gone, mate! All the footage is lost. Stolen! It’s bloody gone!”
“And there weren’t any copies,” said Chip slowly.
“No copies,” said the Australian. “I hadn’t uploaded it. I promised her.”
Chip and I looked at each other. We had the feeling, I think, people describe as sinking.
“Oh,” said Chip. “Oh no.”
He told the Australian about Nancy. The three of us stood there limply.
We had nothing left. Poor Nancy, I found myself thinking, as though she were still alive. But no. We had no mermaids; we had no Nancy. All we had was a deceased parrotfish expert and a story people would laugh at.
And memories.
“We can go out again,” said Chip weakly. “We’ll find them. We’ll go right out again. Tomorrow! She would want us to. She would insist, you know she would. We owe it to her. It doesn’t have to be a big group. Maybe a backup camera this time. We’ll take the scholar from Berkeley. When we find them again, the scholar will give us credibility.”
But we weren’t comforted. Not even Chip could crack a smile. Our sadness stood there with us like a fourth person.
When we’d arrived on the island, buffeted by trade winds and cradled by the white sands and all for a few weeks’ pay, I’d felt like the American I was. It was a nice feeling, mostly. It had its minuses, sure (passivity, mental blankness), but also its pluses (vague background satisfaction caused by world dominance; non-starvation). When, carried by the white golf cart across the grounds, we’d jiggled inertly, I’d felt American then too—more American than ever, frankly. I’d felt American when we rented a boat and ordered a catered lunch and when we found mermaids. I’d felt American when we had the film of the mermaids in our possession, when we were drinking our fill and eating well and waiting for the anthropologist. I’d felt American when Nancy carried us along in the hubbub of her discovery.
We’d been Americans then, Chip and I; Nancy had too. Now we were spun off to the margins, us and our opinions, our visions, our memories—our singular knowledge. Now we had something to sell that no one would ever buy, we had a secret that cast us out into the wings . . . was it possible we’d stopped being American?
It’s like we’re not even Americans, I said to myself.
In fact, I thought as I looked around me at the officials milling in their damp costumes, the female reporters in pancake makeup . . . wait, they weren’t female reporters at all—they had no microphones! One looked like a secretary, the other someone’s girlfriend. Now that I looked more closely, their makeup wasn’t heavy enough—they weren’t even that self-important.
So where was the media? Was there no media after all? The van with the satellite dish—did it not have the call number of a local affiliate on it?
No, I saw now, it was the name of some kind of utility, maybe a cable provider. It wasn’t the press at all. There wasn’t any press here.
No one was watching us, as it turned out. We weren’t the focus of anyone’s interest. The death of one of our own seemed, as far as I could tell, to be passing without notice.
I looked around and saw no Americans—no Americans at all.
III.
THE MURDER MYSTERY
We stood on the dock a little while before sunset, Chip and I, with waves lapping quietly onto the sand behind us. I squinted into the distance, trying to make out the faint white dot of the island ferry.
Steve was there too, Steve the Freudian. By then we’d told him about the sighting. With Nancy and the mermaid footage both gone, we’d decided (over a
