ROBERT GREENMAN AND THE MERMAID by Anjali Sachdeva
In Portsmouth, Maine there lived a fisherman named Robert Greenman. He was the latest in a long line of fishermen, thirty-five years old, quiet and ruggedly built just as his father had been. He had a pretty wife, Carol, a nurse he’d met at Portsmouth General Hospital when a cut on his arm threatened to turn gangrenous. Sometimes when they lay in bed at night she liked to run her fingers along the scar that cut had made. They had been married a year and so far had no children, though certainly not for lack of trying she liked to say sometimes, with a little laugh like wind chimes. Robert was, above all else, a sensible and sober man, and he adored Carol as only such a man could, with a love built on a list of reasons and proofs of her goodness. She was a charming woman, cheerful and intelligent, with strawberry blonde hair that she kept cut short, just below her ears. For work she wore sneakers and scrubs but at home she favored dresses that showed her shoulders, and shoes with low heels which made a particular clicking noise that had become, in her husband’s mind, the signature sound of women.
Now Carol was standing on the end of the Portsmouth dock in her bright blue wool coat, waving at Robert as his ship headed out to sea. He didn’t wave back, he never did, but he knew that she didn’t mind and wanted to wave anyway.
He was on board the Ushuaia, a cod-fishing ship headed up toward Newfoundland. The captain, known in Portsmouth simply as Tomas because his last name was considered unpronounceable, was an Argentine who had moved to Maine when he was a young man. Robert had worked for him before, and liked him. The trip would last five weeks, if it took that long to fill the hold, and it probably would. Over the past several years fishing around northern Maine had dwindled – the result of overfishing in previous decades – so that every season the captains had to push their crews out farther to make a profit. Robert had spent most of the year since his marriage at home with Carol, working odd jobs in town to supplement the money she made from nursing, but lately he had been going to sea again. He knew most of the crew on this trip. They had been fishing as long as he had, if not longer. The only person he did not know was Mark Leslie, a man who was new to town and, from the look of him, to fishing as well. Mark was pale, with limp blonde hair and brown eyes that seemed too large for his face, like a child’s eyes. He was thirty years old but acted much younger. As the ship moved out into the bay leaving Portsmouth, Mark leaned against the rail and stared down into the water, then turned and grinned at the other men on deck as though the mere sight of the ocean were something delightful.
The first night at sea was clear and warm. The fishermen sat on deck, talking and smoking. Mark pointed out the constellations, not just Orion and the Big Dipper and the ones they all knew, but others as well, the strange Greek names sliding easily off his tongue. When he finally stopped talking there was an awkward silence until the captain told a joke, and Jim Barner – the cook and a friend of Robert’s from high school – started laughing his high, shrill laugh that made him sound like a teenage girl. The other men began laughing and telling jokes as well. Robert chuckled and nodded along but he was watching Mark, who sat across from him on the other side of the circle of men. There was a thin line on a fishing ship between men who were useless and those whose incompetence was dangerous to their shipmates, and it was still unclear where Mark would fall.
Their target fishing ground was five days northward, a swathe of ocean around the 55th parallel, just outside the bounds of Canadian fishing laws. As they traveled they worked, rechecking the nets, making sure that the ice machine in the hold was in working order to preserve the fish they would catch. On the fifth day, an hour before sunset, the captain looked up from the sonar and said there were fish around. He sent Robert and Mark to pay out the nets, and the motors of the net drums growled as they slowly unwound twenty miles worth of woven monofilament line that would float through the water like a spider’s web, reaching hungrily for the passing fish. They would let it drift with the tides and haul it in the following morning, and see what their fortune was for this trip.
By the time they finished with the nets the rest of the men were asleep. Robert felt his way through the dim bunkroom, and heard Mark stumble in behind him. They both got into their bunks, but as soon as Robert lay down he could tell this was one of those nights when the insomnia that sometimes came over him at sea would be at work. He stayed in bed for an hour anyway, listening to the other men’s breathing as they sank into heavy sleep, then donned his boots and jacket and went up on deck.
The moon had come out, and the waves were black, edged with foam and shivering streaks of light. Robert leaned against the rail, eyes drifting aimlessly over the waves, getting lost in their pattern. Then he saw the mermaid.
At first he thought she was a large fish breaching the surface. He saw only her tail, silver and glittering in the faint light from the moon, as it slid beneath the waves. But even the sight of the tail created a nervous sensation in the pit of his stomach. She surfaced again, and the nervousness hardened into a knot. Her skin was pearly white, and gave off the kind of glow he’d seen in certain jellyfish. She was perhaps forty feet from the ship, and she floated at the surface of the water with her tail submerged, facing away from him. A line of silver scales, identical to those on her tail, marked her spine and disappeared into her hair. She slipped in and out of the water, her tail propelling her quickly, gracefully, its movement delicate. She seemed to be looking for something, turning her head side to side, and every time she turned he hoped to catch a glimpse of her face, but never saw more than a thin crescent of her profile. As he watched her, an ache filled his bones. The light from her skin made everything around her dull; the moon-capped waves, the stars, even the black water lost their gloss. Eventually she dove underneath the waves and didn’t reappear. Robert watched for her until the sun came up, and when the other men shuffled onto deck, yawning, he joined them.
They pulled in the nets and Robert scanned the deck, afraid that he would spot a pair of white arms among the lines, but he saw only fish. It was a fair catch, nothing to brag about but enough to put a little money in each of their pockets. Robert loaded fish into the hold. He was not superstitious, as many fishermen were. His eyes and ears did not play tricks on him and he was not given to daydreaming under any circumstances; certainly not while onboard a ship, where so many things could go wrong. He trusted himself completely. So the mermaid must be real; he only wondered where she had gone when she disappeared.
The mermaid had been born at the bottom of the ocean, a place beyond the reach of sunlight, warmed only by the muttering of geothermal vents. She had wandered up out of those depths and spent her early years on the slopes of an underwater mountain near the tiny islands of Tristan da Cunha, thirteen hundred miles from the next piece of dry land. Every memory from the moment sunlight had touched her eyes was clear, frozen, perfectly preserved even decades later, but of her birthplace she retained only a vague impression of magnificent creatures with skin like a carpet of teeth, of tentacles that snapped and plucked blindfish from the water and currents that burst from the lips of the vents like magma, warmth from the very core of the earth. Among these hazy memories there was no picture of another mermaid.
Eventually she had followed a school of swordfish north, along the coast of South America, and then up to Newfoundland. The water, as she traveled, turned from sapphire blue to a murky gray-green, and the fish grew larger but lost their bright colors. She did not find the northern seas as appealing as those she was used to, but she was a creature of endless curiosity. Still, she might have turned around and gone back to warmer waters were it not for the shark.
He was hard to see, even when he was moving. He blended so completely with the deep sea that he could have been a shadow, a swell of agitated water, a cloud of black sand sent up by a manta ray. The mermaid observed him from a distance, watching for the white flash of his belly whenever he twisted to change direction.
She had decided that it was best to approach him when he had just eaten. Not that he ever made any move to attack her – he preferred to surprise his prey, and the mermaid was watchful. But he was calmer after eating. When he was hungry the shark dove deep into the water until he was invisible from above. As she waited for him to resurface, the mermaid felt a strange electric trill at the back of her neck. She became suddenly aware of the water against her skin, something she seldom otherwise noticed. The shark circled slowly until he had spotted his prey, and then he shot upward, mouth open, sometimes bursting above the surface of the ocean with his attack. After gorging himself he swam in lazy circles while the blood still clouded the water.
The mermaid began to search for fish, finding the biggest ones in the surrounding ocean, corralling them towards him. She experimented first with a snapper, slashing a piece of sharpened shell against its side. The fish jerked away from her with a powerful flip of its tail, but a stream of blood trailed behind it. She kept the snapper in sight, and waited.
The shark could smell blood miles away, could feel the telltale vibrations in the water that a wounded fish made. He charged up from below in an explosion of turbulence, bit the snapper in half and swallowed it in two bites. When he had finished eating, the mermaid swam cautiously toward him. His flat, black eyes followed her, but he did not seem disturbed, and she edged closer and pressed her hands against his side. His skin was rough, covered with serrations too small to see, and his blood beneath it was not the cold blood of a fish; it was as warm as her own. Touching that skin thrilled the mermaid, propagated broods of memories that skittered through the depths of her mind. The shark was a solid whip of muscle, carelessly lethal, and his presence transformed the drab green of the northern sea into a place she longed for even though she could not properly recall it. He dove deeper, the water changed from green to gray to nearly black, and eventually the mermaid left him and spiraled away on her own.
She swam to a spot she especially liked, a large chunk of volcanic rock that rested on the sea floor, worn smooth by years of tides and sand. The mermaid sank down into a hollow of it and began to sing. Her voice had a deep, liquid sound like a separate current within the water. The shark could hear it but it meant nothing to him, and he paid no attention to it. The fish heard it too, though, and they were charmed by it. The song was the sound of joy without depth, of clear waters and warm blood and the sunlight that pierced the tops of the waves. Fish were drawn from miles away. They orbited the mermaid in a slow swirl of fins and scales, and she could think only that the shark would be well fed, that she could be close to him more often.
When Robert arrived back at port, twenty-nine days after setting out, Carol was standing at the end of the dock waiting, as though she had not moved during that entire month. In the parking lot she hugged him tightly. He kissed the top of her head and tried to find the scent of her hair beneath the smell of disinfectant and the sickly sweet air freshener they used at the hospital.
“Was it a good trip?” she said, as they got into their car.
Robert thought about the mermaid, and knew he wouldn’t tell Carol about her.
“Not a bad catch. Nothing spectacular, though. It won’t be much money,” he said.
“Did you miss me?”
“Of course,” he said, but realized he hadn’t.
Usually, like all the fishermen, Robert enjoyed being back on land after a long trip, but now he felt restless. Sometimes he found himself, in the middle of one of Carol’s stories about the hospital, ignoring her words and thinking that her voice had a shrill edge to it. He wondered why he had not noticed it before. He began looking for projects to keep himself busy, cleaning out the attic and the basement, repainting the tool shed. He did not know how to doubt himself, which would have been the easiest thing to do, and so was forced to try to live his life as though steady work and a watertight roof and a loving wife were still just as important as they had been before he had seen the mermaid.
Every night Robert went to the Lock and Dock, the local fishermen’s bar. It was a place he usually avoided, telling Carol that he’d seen more than enough of his friends during their time at sea. Now he went and the talk was always about the same thing. No one was catching. Men on land-leave drank all night, running up tabs they couldn’t pay, and fights were frequent. Some of these men had been to sea every month for a year without ever being home for more than a few days at a time, trying desperately to find the catch that would give them money for their car payments, their mortgages, for the debts they had accumulated back when fish were plentiful and it wasn’t uncommon to burn through a thousand dollars of pay within twelve hours of returning to land. Robert realized that the crew of the Ushuaia hadn’t faired too badly with their mediocre catch; most trips weren’t even making back their expenses.
He often saw Mark Leslie at the bar, sitting alone in a corner booth. One night, against his better judgment, Robert joined him. Mark was reading a book, which he politely put down when Robert approached. They made small talk for a few minutes, until Mark said, “So, will you be going on the next trip?”
“Will you?” said Robert, surprised. They’d hit a train of small storms on the way back to Portsmouth, and Mark had spent most of the return trip throwing up over the side of the boat.
Mark nodded. “Tomas said he’d take me on as an apprentice if I was willing to work without pay for a few trips. He and my grandfather were friends, back when Tomas was just starting out. And I’ve always loved the sea.”
Robert looked down at his beer so as not to frown directly at Mark. Taking on a man with no experience, whether he was free labor or not, was irresponsible. Mark had a romantic’s vision of the sea, which was nothing like the understanding of men who earned their living by it. During the last journey Mark had made a fool of himself, and of the other men, by asking ridiculous questions: what was the best time of year to watch the sunset, what did native legends say about this part of the sea, were there any endangered species in the area? They did not know the answers, although they had been fishing Portsmouth Bay since they were teenagers. These things did not matter to them and, they were sure, did not really matter to Mark. Robert gulped the rest of his beer and said his goodbyes.
The next afternoon, when Robert came back from the hardware store, Carol said that Tomas had called, that he was planning to head for Newfoundland again in two weeks, and had asked if Robert would ship out with him. Robert nodded, and let out a slow sigh that belied the nervous quivering in his stomach. Carol, still wearing her scrubs, sat down beside him on the couch.
“You just got here,” she said.
“I’ll be back soon. Maybe with some real money this time.”
“I could just work an extra shift or two. We’re doing all right.”
Robert put one hand against the back of her neck. He wanted to see the mermaid again, and he did not. He rubbed the ends of Carol’s hair between his fingers.
“It won’t be too long,” he said.
There were high winds the day the Ushuaia left Portsmouth, but when at last it reached the spot that had provided its meager bounty the last time, the ocean was smooth and glassy.
For a week Robert spent his evenings watching for the mermaid while the other men drank and played cards, but did not see her. Finally one night, when everyone else was asleep, he stole up onto deck and unlashed the lifeboat that was tied to the edge of the ship. Climbing inside, he lowered it into the water with the ropes and pulleys that were attached to it for that purpose. He took the oars from the side of the boat and began to row until he was about five hundred feet from the ship. With every pull of the oars he felt increasingly uneasy. The waves were larger than they had looked from the Ushuaia, pitching the rowboat on their backs, and the sound and smell of them was inescapable. For all his years at sea he had spent precious little time this near the water, and there was good reason for it. The ocean here went down for a mile or more; if they were to move a few knots further eastward they would be over the edge of continental shelf, and the water would reach down forever into bottomless trenches of blackness. He tried to put it out of his mind as he brought the oars in and looked over the edge of the boat. He thought about calling out, but realized it would be useless. If the mermaid were on the surface and near enough to hear him he would see her, with that glowing skin, and if she wasn’t she wouldn’t hear him through the waves. He dragged his fingers slowly through the water, imagining for a moment that he could feel the plankton in it, all the thousands of invisible creatures that float on the surface of the sea. Then he saw a faint white glow beneath the waves several feet away, coming closer, and he pulled his hand back as though it had been burnt, and held it against his chest.
She rose to the surface and hooked her long, pale fingers over the edge of the boat. Now that the mermaid was close enough to touch, Robert still could not say if she was beautiful. She had large, wide-set eyes, dark green in color. Her lashless eyelids were translucent. He would have said that her hair was tangled except that it did not look as though it should be otherwise; he felt that combing it out would be like trying to comb a person’s limbs. Each indigo strand was as thick as a pencil, and had the moist look of an anemone. All her veins were clearly visible beneath her skin. Her breasts were small, and he realized that this would be necessary, that her whole body should be streamlined for moving through the ocean. She had a wide mouth, with lips the color of seawater. He could not see, through the tangle of hair, whether she had ears. Her nose was thin and her fingers were webbed with the same tissue that made up her eyelids, flesh that looked delicate but which must, he decided, be incredibly strong.
He reached out slowly and touched her arm. She flinched but did not move away. Her skin was cool and moist. Robert felt as though the tips of his fingers where he touched her were dissolving.
He stripped off his clothes and lowered himself into the water. The chill cut through his skin instantly. He hadn’t actually been in the ocean in years, although he was used to being drenched in spray or rain while he was on the ship. He was a strong swimmer, had been swimming since he was five years old, but the cold was debilitating. Forcing himself to let go of the edge of the lifeboat, he reached for the mermaid. She stayed afloat easily, flicking her tail back and forth beneath the surface of the ocean, and did not move away when he placed his hands on her shoulders. He ran his fingertips tentatively over her collarbone, her face, through her hair, and below the water her tail fins stroked his legs, caressing his feet and toes as nimbly as fingers would. The feeling the mermaid inspired in Robert was not lust, or love, or curiosity; it was a feeling he did not recall having before, a sense of wonder that seemed to travel with his blood and invade every part of his body. While he was touching her the rest of the world faded from his notice, and it was only when she ducked beneath the water that he saw that the lifeboat had drifted a hundred feet away. If his muscles cramped, which seemed increasingly likely in the frigid water, he would never make it back. He could see the mermaid below him in the water and lunged for her, but she dodged him. When he surfaced he turned reluctantly away and swam to the lifeboat.
As he pulled himself over the side his leg muscles began to spasm, and he fell into the bottom of the boat. He grabbed his t-shirt and used it to dry himself as well as he could, then struggled into his sweater. He pulled on his pants and rowed back to the Ushuaia, pulling hard, his arm muscles threatening to seize up. By the time he managed to climb on board and haul the lifeboat up he was shivering uncontrollably, and the sky was beginning to lighten.
When everyone had had their breakfast and assembled on deck with the hooks they used to move the fish, Jim Barner began to draw in the nets. The captain was sitting in the wheelhouse, trying to act as though he was prepared to take whatever happened to come up. The net rose, foot by foot, and Jim closed his eyes and listened to the sound of the motors and whispered something under his breath. A moment later the first fish came into view.
There were more fish than Robert had seen in years. The net was heavy with them, the monofilament lines fairly creaking. The men all stood blinking for a moment, then grinned at one another. Jim whooped like a cowboy and moved swiftly to the controls that would bring the fish on board.
The crew spent the rest of the day putting fish into the hold and cleaning the deck. In addition to cod they had caught a few tuna, some snapper. Those that were still alive thrashed around the deck, trying to make their way back to the water, their slick scales turning dull in the sun. There was a dolphin, too, and Mark Leslie was distraught when he saw it, dropping his hook, running over to it and throwing his arms around the animal as though it were his sister. Robert had always considered that dolphins, though different from fish, were not much different from cows or lambs or most other mammals, but seeing Mark nearly in tears made him uncomfortable.
“Just look at it,” Mark said. “It’s practically human. Look at the eyes.” He struggled with the dolphin until Robert came to help him and they heaved the animal, all three hundred pounds of it, back over the rail into the water. Mark stood and watched it swim away with a look somewhere between awe and grief, and Robert had the feeling that Mark would have called a goodbye to it, if he hadn’t known that the other men would ridicule him for it.
That night Jim Barner cooked a feast in the galley, grilling the frozen steaks they’d brought with them and setting Mark to work mashing potatoes while everyone else got a head start on the drinking. Robert sat among them trying to look pleased with himself, but he could feel the emptiness of his smile. He was light-headed with exhaustion and yet, when the other men finally finished toasting their good luck and went to bed, he found that again he could not sleep. The world shifted around him in patches of gray fluorescence, every sound in the bunkroom seemed magnified, and a dull buzz began building at the back of his skull. Eventually he went to the deck. He watched until sun-up, but did not see the mermaid.
The mermaid was ecstatic. Her shark had more food than he needed; he glutted himself, and after every feeding the mermaid circled around him and sang. As weeks passed her melody gained a deeper resonance, reverberated along the great ridge that marks the spine of the Atlantic and spread farther. She called fish from the deep sea, swordfish and bass, whole schools of mackerel. And others, fish who had never before ventured north: angelfish, clown fish, spotted eels. A school of orange and pink parrot fish followed the sound of her voice from the balmy waters off Florida up toward the north seas, their body temperatures plummeting as they went, until they died suddenly, as a group, and rose to the surface of the ocean in a multicolored cloud. The fish that followed the mermaid’s song ignored migratory patterns and potential prey and the baited lines of the trawling boats; they thought of nothing but moving north toward her.
On the Ushuaia the catches were good every day, ridiculously good, so good that the fishermen began to feel uncomfortable about it. This kind of abundance hadn’t been seen since most of them were children, if ever. The nets threatened to break with the weight of the fish. One day Robert walked to the bow and found the captain staring down into the water.
“I can see them,” Tomas said, “I swear I can.”
Robert looked, and through the glow of the sun on the waves he thought he, too, saw shifting layers of movement just below the surface, as though the ocean were so full of fish it was preparing to overflow.
It took them two weeks to fill the hold, and in that time Robert slept a total of fifty hours. For the most part everyone else was too busy hauling fish and getting drunk to notice, but he thought Mark Leslie looked at him strangely sometimes as they passed in the hall between the galley and bunks. Robert saw the mermaid every night. He had found an old wetsuit in the storage room and now lowered himself with a rope that he dropped from the prow of the ship, straight into the water. The suit gave him an extra layer of protection, but his arms and his legs below the knees were still exposed, and going into the ocean inevitably left him drained, weak, shivering. Still, he wanted to be as close to the mermaid as he could. The chill of the water faded into obscurity when her moist, searching fingers were trailing along his calves. She was fascinated by his legs, spent long minutes wrapping her arms around them, every touch sending painful pulses of electricity through his body. He stayed beside her until he could feel hypothermia edging in and, against the pull of his desire, forced himself to leave the water.
Robert could not say that he enjoyed being with the mermaid, only that she was the only thing that seemed to be real. The phosphorescence of her skin, the silver reflections of her tail were more tangible than the ocean or the ship or the food he ate every day. The sparks of energy that went through his hands or face when she touched them were the only sensations that fully pierced the veil of exhaustion and lethargy that had settled over the rest of his life. When he slept now, which was seldom – he got so little sleep he sometimes thought it should have killed him – he dreamed of nothing but blue-green light, growing dimmer as the nights passed.
When the hold was full they went home. They were weeks ahead of schedule but Carol had heard, somehow, and was there waiting on the dock. She took his face in her hands and kissed him. Her body seemed to have very little weight or scent, and she looked paler than usual, as though she had been bleached by the sun.
“Are you feeling all right?” he asked.
“The house gets lonely without you,” she said. “There’s nobody to get dock grease all over my hand towels and keep me up at night with his snoring.”
Robert leaned against the car, looking toward the docks although he couldn’t see the ocean from the parking lot, listening for the sound of the water.
“I’m joking,” Carol said.
“What?”
“I’m glad you’re back.”
He nodded, and let her hug him again, and opened the door for her so she could get in the car and take him home.
That night the crew of the Ushuaia, all of them but Robert, made their way to the Lock and Dock to celebrate their success. They were bursting with money and magnanimous good will when they entered the bar, but their exuberance quickly faded under the bitter stares of the other fishermen. While the Ushuaia had been hauling in thousands of dollars a day, no one else’s luck had changed. The faces around the bar were still grim. The crew gathered at a corner table and quietly toasted their luck until they had drunk enough that they forgot to be quiet. Then they started singing, endless choruses of misremembered lyrics. When Tomas heard about it the next day he called every one of them and told them that if they wanted to have another good haul and another payout in a few weeks, they had better stay quiet and keep their money low.
Robert Greenman found himself finally ready to sleep. Over the course of the next week he slept twelve, fourteen, eighteen hours a day. Now he dreamed of monsters from the deep, jagged teeth and wide-open jaws, suction cups as big as tires adhering to his chest and back. He moved through ranges of underwater mountains covered in waving seaweed, a place both terrifying and alluring, while the shadows of large fish passed over him.
When he was awake the world was drab. The buzz of insomnia in the back of his head had relented, but Carol’s voice took its place, so that she always seemed to be speaking to him from far away. He found that if he concentrated, everything she said made sense, that her voice was the same pleasant, soothing voice she had always had. But it was an effort to perceive her this way, and when he didn’t bother she seemed strange: her movements awkward, her features too sharp, her eyes small and dim.
All he could think about was getting back to sea, but Carol did her best to divert him. She began planning trips for them on her days off, to the movies, to new restaurants that they had to drive three towns over to get to. She invited friends he hadn’t seen in years over for dinner, and when he dragged himself from his bed at noon the house was already filled with the scent of sauteed onions or chopped herbs, smells that he found cloying.
One Sunday morning Robert woke to find Carol shaking him gently as pale sunlight poured over her shoulders, leaving her face in shadow and making him squint.
“Get up, we’re going shopping,” she said.
“Go without me.”
“I need your opinion.”
“We don’t need anything, anyway.”
“You bring home more money than we know what to do with,” she said. “What’s the point in making all the money if we can’t spend it? Get up.”
He dressed, drank a glass of water for breakfast, and slumped against the window in the car as Carol drove. He wanted nothing more than to go back to sleep, but there was such a crispness about Carol’s actions, the way she wrapped her fingers around the steering wheel and held her head, that they didn’t seem to brook any disagreement. It reminded him of how she had acted when he was her patient – firm and capable, radiating assurance.
When they reached the mall Carol walked up and down between rows of overstuffed leather sofas that reminded Robert of great overfed cows, not the kind of thing Carol would buy at all, and he wondered why she was even looking at them. She led him through a department store, examining pots and pans, rubbing bath towels against her face to check their softness. Eventually she found the sporting goods section, where she picked up a cheap rod and reel set and examined it minutely, as thought it held secrets in its plastic casing.
“We should go fishing together,” she said. “We could go out to that lake by Wamset.”
“Lake fishing is just waiting with a pole in your hand,” said Robert.
“Well I guess I’ve gotten pretty good at waiting,” she said. “And I think it would be fun.”
She tucked the rod under her arm and began looking at bait, fingering through tubs of sparkling green rubber worms that only a thirty-pounder could swallow, peering into jars of cinnamon-red salmon eggs as though selecting expensive produce. She chose a jar and shook it, then held it up along with the handful of worm lures and said, “Which one?”
Robert envied her for a moment, her ability to focus so intensely on trivial things as though they were important. He knew that he would once have done the same, that cleaning gutters and ordering meals and admiring the fine curve of Carol’s neck was once substantial material to fill the days of his life, and that it had all dissolved now into sea foam, a puff of nothing. Carol would go along happily forever, he thought, and just then she put the jar back on the shelf and said, “Are you sorry you married me?”
“What?”
“I don’t like you being gone all the time, but I could stand it if you were different when you came home. You don’t even talk to me any more.”
“I’m talking to you right now.”
“Don’t play dumb, Robert,” she said, her voice rising.
“We’re in a store,” he said. “Don’t yell.”
“Who cares? Do we know these people? I’m worried about you.”
“I’m fine,” he said, but he knew it wasn’t true. Many things had been wrong lately. He had trouble concentrating, and his bed sheets seemed to scratch his skin when he pulled them up at night. The people he passed in the street all looked as though they had contracted a disease; they were slow, squint-eyed, their skin the color of dishwater.
“Then why are you acting this way?” she said.
“Maybe I haven’t been feeling quite well.”
“Well, why don’t you say so,” she said, crying now and wiping her face with the back of her hand. “You can’t just walk around sick all the time, and you’re scaring me. I want you to talk to one of the doctors at the hospital.”
A doctor would not be able to do anything, he thought. A doctor would not even begin to understand. “All right,” he said.
He looked down at the bucket of sparkling rubber worms, thought of the creatures of his dreams, the glimmers of phosphorescent life that were teeming through deep waters somewhere every minute of the day, unseen, even now. He thought of the glimmer of a silver tail, skin like mother of pearl.
“Promise?” said Carol.
He squeezed his eyes shut. What had he promised? When he opened them again Carol was staring at him, her eyes rimmed pink, lips taut with unhappiness.
“Yes, yes, I do,” he said, and she sniffed and pressed her warm, wet face against his chest.
The doctor she sent him to prescribed an antidepressant, and told Carol to keep Robert off the boats for a while. So the Ushuaia sailed without him, and he sat at the end of the dock and watched it go. The antidepressants gave the world a different sort of unreality where everything was excessively bright, where he found he could not stop talking even though he was not a talkative man.
For the next three weeks he spent most of his waking hours at the Lock and Dock and returned home every night exhausted. Carol pulled him into bed, made love to him desperately, and as soon as they were finished he was asleep. His dreams were more vivid than ever, and their images spilled over into his waking hours. When the Ushuaia came back into port with another full hold he told Carol he was going on the next trip no matter what.
She argued with him and finally refused to drive him to the dock when the departure day arrived. Robert was so close to being back at sea that he was nearly twitching with anticipation, but he forced himself to stay in bed with her until the last possible moment, to hold her; he remembered to wipe the tears off her face and tell her that he loved her, that he would be back soon. He called for a taxi, boarded the ship with his duffel bag and began helping with the final preparations for cast off. As the Ushuaia was pulling away from the dock he caught sight of Carol on the pier, half-hidden behind one of the pylons, trying not to let him see her, and he waved.
There was heavy rain when they got to the fishing ground in Newfoundland, and the possibility of a storm, so they didn’t let the nets out right away. The crew members spent their time huddled in the cabins smoking, but their spirits were high. They were certain that another hold full of fish awaited them as soon as the weather abated. Robert sat on his bunk in the midst of the chatter and curling smoke and tried not to fidget. Eventually he put on his rain slicker and went on deck, and instantly felt much calmer. A moment later Mark Leslie was standing beside him, holding tight to the rail and looking as though he might vomit.
“Get back below,” Robert said. “You’ll get soaked.”
“I saw her,” said Mark.
Robert tried his best not to let his expression change, to tell himself that he was jumping to conclusions. He said nothing.
“All those nights you came in late, I knew you were up to something. Smuggling, I thought. I even followed you once, but you were just standing, looking at the water. So on the last trip I went up there every night and stood in your place, trying to see what you saw. There was nothing and I thought, maybe it’s just the ocean. He wants to look at the ocean. But then I saw her. She was swimming with that thing.”
“What thing?” said Robert.
Mark’s eyes became sly, smug, veiled in possessiveness. “I wondered whether you knew, but no? No.”
Such a stab of bitter loathing passed through Robert that he turned away. The clouded sky had made the sea truly dark, as no place on land ever was. He could hear the patter of raindrops against the waves as a sweet, clear slick of fresh water formed on the ocean’s surface. Mark was still talking, empty words to tempt his interest, but Robert shut his ears against it until Mark said, “It was the biggest shark I’ve ever seen. Twenty feet long and swimming past the side of the ship, and she was right behind it.”
Robert tried to picture this, to cast the image onto the black waves below them, the pure white-and-silver body of the mermaid pursuing the grim bulk of the shark. “Hunting it?” said Robert.
“No. She couldn’t. If it wanted to it could destroy her in one bite, it’s that monstrous. I don’t think it even knew she was there.” Mark was sopping now, his fair hair dark with water and sleek against his skull, rain dripping from his chin and nose. “You weren’t going to tell anyone, were you? I mean, of course you weren’t. Who would even believe us?”
Robert shook his head. He didn’t care for Mark’s moist-eyed reverence, and yet he saw that Mark took naturally to the mermaid, to the intrusion of such implausibility into his life. That he had in fact been waiting for just such a thing to happen to him, so its coming to pass could not harm him. Robert turned to leave, but Mark grabbed his arm.
“Tell me something about her,” Mark said. “You must know something, you’ve known about her for months. Does she talk to you?” Robert stared at him, tight-lipped, wordless, wondering what would happen if he simply punched Mark in the mouth, but Mark held tight. “I want to touch her,” he said.
Robert avoided Mark after that, as much as it was possible to avoid someone within the confines of a ship. The thought of the shark troubled Robert, but it bothered him at least as much to think that Mark might know something about the mermaid that he, Robert, did not. Robert spent every night pacing the deck. Mercifully, Mark did not have Robert’s capacity for sleep deprivation, and after working a sixteen-hour day was often too tired to last the night, whatever his intentions might have been. When Robert finally saw the mermaid and the shark, he was alone.
The shark was cutting through the very top of the water, its dorsal fin exposed. The mermaid held onto the fin, and pressed her body against the shark’s. Robert watched. And then he began to yell at her, to scream like a madman, waving his arms to gain her attention. She did not respond; he had decided she couldn’t hear sounds that were airborne, but that didn’t stop him screaming. Finally she glanced up, by chance, and saw him, but as quickly as her eyes registered him she looked away again. He watched her and the shark trace the edge of the ship, and her expression was one of pure delight. It made her face beautiful, and it was nothing like the look of searching curiosity he saw when she stroked his legs. He stood at the rail, watching them, until the shark dove underwater, and the mermaid followed.
In the morning the crew of the Ushuaia hauled up the nets, and the net drums creaked in a way they had all become familiar with. The men stood around, grinning, shifting on their feet with anticipation, thinking that by the end of the day they would have moved several thousand dollars worth of fish into the hold. But when the nets were up and the fish spilled onto the deck, the crew stood still and quiet. There were no cod, or mackerel, or swordfish. The fish they had caught were lemon yellow, magenta, electric blue. They were striped and spotted, fish the crew had never seen before outside of photographs, fish that had no business being in the northern Atlantic. They covered the deck like a brightly colored quilt, and the sound of their bodies slapping against the deck filled the men’s silence. Too many fish was something they could rejoice in. They could ignore the fact that it made no sense, could believe that God had created a special fountain of fish off the coast of Newfoundland just for them. But this was unnatural. The rainbow fish were shocking and aberrant beneath the gray sky, against the backdrop of the dark green water. Jim Barner nudged one with his foot, a two-foot-long yellow fish that had a blue crest and a blue ring around its eye and little puckered lips that made it look like it wanted a kiss. The fish’s gills flared half-heartedly, and Jim bent down and grabbed it and flung it over the deck.
“What did we do?” said Tomas.
“Help me,” said Jim, and he picked up another fish and threw it back.
They worked at it all day. Most of the fish were dead by the time they got back in the water; they littered the sea around the Ushuaia like confetti. Robert worked along with the rest of the crew, although less frantically. He kept thinking about the mermaid and the shark, wondering if he would see her again. He thought at first that he would not dare to go back into the water with her, knowing that the shark might be close behind, but he realized that he would go anyway, that he would brave the shark the same way he had braved the cold, and all for a creature who found him nothing more than a curious diversion. Because she was still as entrancing as she had been all these months, even if he meant nothing to her.
Every night the fishermen sent the nets out, and every morning they brought in another net full of strange fish. They did not bring them on board anymore; the captain simply lowered the net again, dumping them back into the ocean. The men began to tell Tomas that the place had become cursed, that they should turn back, but the captain could not settle with the idea of returning to Portsmouth empty-handed. So they kept at it, and two weeks passed without a single fish being put into the hold.
Robert watched for the mermaid by night but did not see her. He knew she had brought the tropical fish, although he couldn’t say how. He wondered where she was, what she was doing. After seven days and six nights of watching, he finally slept.
When he woke the bunkroom was empty. He dressed quickly and headed for the deck, buttoning his shirt as he went. The sky at the top of the hold was a square of pale blue, cloudless, that grew as he approached it. He heard the other men laughing and talking, and realized that this was a sound he had not heard for days; grim silence had become the usual state of the ship.
On deck the men were gathered around Mark Leslie, slapping him on the back, all of them drinking beers while Mark grinned idiotically. Robert stepped farther out onto the deck and saw the shark. It was hanging by its tail, jaws open, two-inch teeth displayed in rows. They had measured it; it was not twenty feet, it was twenty-three. Even out of the water it was slick black, even dead it was terrifying. Robert walked up to it, past Mark and the men, and Mark sobered as soon as he saw Robert and turned to watch him. Robert reached into the shark’s mouth, thinking that his entire torso would fit into that maw, and touched one of the teeth, pressing downward until the tip of it punctured his fingertip. A drop of bright blood appeared, and it glowed with color that the rest of the world lacked. Mark was standing behind him now, nervous and wheedling, all his drunken bravado gone.
“It would have killed her,” Mark said. “I had to get rid of it. I threw some bait in the water and I got it with the harpoon gun. You should have seen it fight. I shot it right through the skull and it still kept going. I thought it was never going to die. I was scared stiff, even from up here.”
Robert nodded. He turned to the rail and looked down at the water. There was no sign of the mermaid, but he knew she was there. Waves smacked against the side of the boat, and Robert thought he could feel their vibration in his hands, and with them another sound. He leaned closer to listen, and leaned farther, and then he was pitching over the rail, into the water below.
He was surrounded by the green of the seawater, and the water was full of sound. It was a sound that made him feel as though he could start crying and never stop, as though his blood were turning to brine, as though the world were nothing but shades of gray. The mermaid was singing, and he knew from the song that she had seen the shark’s body, and that she would not come back. She was going, but for the moment the ocean, the salt that filled his mouth, the rush and swell of the waves, all of it was real, all of it was as vibrant and as painful as anything he had ever known. The song twisted through him, and the last tenuous line that moored him to what had been his life gave way. He was laid open, filled to overflowing. Then there was a splash beside him, and a thick arm around his waist, and he was pulled, struggling, from the water.
Anjali Sachdeva’s work has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Northern Woman, and Pittsburgh City Paper.