Chip, using Miyoko’s laptop while she talked on the phone, immersed himself in aggregators and quickly discovered an anti-mermaid backlash. It seemed the mermaid tapes had enraged a highly vocal contingent.
“I think it’s some folks in the Heartland,” worried Chip.
He peered in close at the screen, scrolling through comment lists. The defection of the toe fetishist had been nagging at him—he’d wanted for so long to craft new friendships among the fellow citizens he doesn’t understand, the ones from the vast unknown. With the Heartland couple he’d made a special effort at outreach, an effort dating from that very first dinner, but he had failed; the Heartland couple had turned on him.
“It is! Deb! It’s Middle Americans!”
Chip knows his Internet research, he knows how to trace trends and memes and what have you, and so I didn’t doubt his opinion.
The Heartland had spoken. The mermaids were against God, the people of the Heartland said: the mermaids were unholy.
Some said the mermaids were descendants of Lucifer: when he’d fallen from grace he’d grown a tail and been condemned to swim the deep. Couldn’t the ocean’s depths be hell? Others said mermaids were the hybrid spawn of ancient hippie-pagans. The long-ago hippies had loved animals more than humans, much like their current-day equivalents, the mermaid haters said. And it had driven them crazy. Therefore they mated with some fish.
There was confusion there, I guess, because, though most of the threads Chip found were staunchly creationist, there was some chatter about mutations that looked a little science-y to me. We tried to imagine olden-time people mating with fish, Chip and I did, as we hovered over the screen, but we couldn’t muster it, not a single obscene mental picture could we call up on the blank walls of our brains.
Some of the haters claimed God had just stuck those fish tails on people suddenly—a penalty for a heinous crime against the Bible’s teachings. One day the mermaid ancestors had been walking around free and clear, on two fine, dandy legs; the next, flop, swish, legs gone and hello tails. Then, probably embarrassed, they had to slide all snakelike to the nearest body of water. “Wriggle on their bellies like unto the Serpent that tempted Eve!” posted a Churchgoer from Tuscaloosa in a newspaper’s op-ed comments.
These people had convictions, no one could argue against that. They didn’t agree on how the tails and gills had happened, on that point they were all over the map, but as to why the tails/gills had happened—on that front they were perfectly united. It was the bestiality aspect. The crime was loving animals, whichever way you sliced it, they said. For it was clear as day, to all these hundreds, then thousands of commenters—as the movement gathered steam across the web and reportedly on right-wing radio—that the punishment had been tailored, by none other than God, to fit the crime.
“If a woman approaches any animal and lies with it, you shall kill the woman and the animal!” posted an irate blogger called No Monkeys Here. “Leviticus!” He thought God had been too lenient, electing not to obliterate the first mermaids. God had been too liberal. If he weren’t so deeply respectful of God, so deeply pious, personally, the blogger wrote, he’d almost be tempted to voice a suspicion that God had been, in a word, weak. He wanted to say right out that God had been a fuckin’ pussy, said Chip, but he didn’t have the stones.
“One man’s weakness is another man’s mercy,” said Ronnie.
By that time the others had joined us; every screen was tuned to the groundswell of mermaid hatred.
“What did the mermaids ever do to them?” asked Janeane. “It’s unloving.”
WE WERE STILL huddled like that, scrolling and scrolling, peering and peering, when a knock came on the door: Simonoff, the doctor, Raleigh, and Sam.
“She wasn’t there!” said Simonoff.
You’d think he’d be distressed by this fact, his inability to locate the physical evidence of his only daughter, but his face was glowing with energy, a fine sheen of sweat. I saw a glint in his eyes.
“What do you mean?” said Chip. “It’s the only facility on the island. With, um, the necessary—cold storage.”
“Exactly,” said Simonoff. “The attendant said they never saw a body. Not only that, they never heard of a body. No one ever called to make any arrangements. No one got notified. We talked to everyone there. Literally every single person on staff.”
He took his glasses off and wiped the lenses on his tie. Scrubbed them, more like, scrubbed furiously.
We looked around at each other, mystified. There was a feeling of being dumb, a feeling of stupidity.
“But here’s the kicker,” said the doctor. “They didn’t know about any death certificate.”
“It’s a small place,” said Raleigh, nodding. He had a hearty quality to him, Raleigh, an admirable meat-and-potatoes attitude a person might find almost attractive, if they were unmarried. “Usually they know right away, pretty much, when to expect business. The news gets out. But this time, nothing leaked. None of the local doctors signed a certificate. No one in an official capacity.”
Simonoff put his glasses back on, poked them up onto the bridge of his nose with the tip of a finger. He did a quick tic of a half-smile, nervous, almost imperceptible.
I saw where he was going: our emeritus was getting his hopes up. I didn’t want it to happen; it was like a slow-motion roadkill, and I couldn’t stand to watch.
“Well,” I said, in a measured tone I meant to sound matter-of-fact, “she could still be at the resort. They may not have ever released her. Although that’d make them look pretty guilty.”
“I wouldn’t put it past them,” said Chip, shaking his head. “Keeping her.”
“Did you call?” Rick asked Simonoff. “I mean, they’d have to know where the—where she got moved to, wouldn’t they?”
“I put in the calls myself,” said Raleigh. “Just to make sure management didn’t get its hooks in the professor, I went ahead and
