by Elissa Malcohn
Elissa Malcohn burst into our pages in November 1984 with her intensely powerful story “Lazuli.” Although another tale appeared in our Mid-December 1986 issue, we’ve been waiting twenty-three years for the third. We’re delighted that the hiatus ends with “Flotsam,” a story that was partly informed by Elissa’s employment at a government contractor during some of those intervening years. Covenant, the first volume of her Deviations series, was published by Aisling Press in 2007. More information and free downloads of the author’s work may be had at Malcohn’s World [home.earthlink.net/~emalcohn/index.html].
Mercedes would remember July 8, 1973, as The Day of Dead Fish.
Her parents remembered other such days, and this would not be the last one for Mercedes. But it was her first, when she was old enough to know that something was different and very wrong.
The day began with little fanfare and many hugs. An early high tide meant a pre-dawn Mass, when all of the grownups looked to Maria to intercede and tell Jesus to make the fishes multiply again.
Mercedes floated through the sermon. The censer whispered past her and she inhaled holy air in a room filled with glittering jewels. More angels peeked down at her from their high stone recesses at night. All the candles burned brighter. The Heavenly Host paid more attention to everyone—Mercedes and her brothers, their parents, her aunts and uncles, and their neighbors, who then went home and traded their best clothes for worn jeans and thin cotton shirts. They dressed more like Jesus, who wore simple things, and then they all went to the beach.
Bare-chested men already lined the seawall, dangling their hands between their knees as they sat on concrete blocks and faced into the bay. Cigarette butts littered the sand close to the road. More ashes trailed a line of folding chairs curving along the water’s edge. Tubular steel frames backed away from fading imprints that told Mercedes the tide was still coming in.
Her brothers tied lures and practiced with the lines on their own small rods. Mercedes would learn, too, when she got bigger. For now, she cradled her orange play pail to her coveralls. She gazed beyond the crescent of chairs with their gaily colored, frayed webbing and their many cast lines, out to a skyline of gray smokestacks pouring their innards into the clouds.
“It’s bad today.”
Everyone tossed off talk of the air the way they cast their lines. Most times no one mentioned it at all. The air was better inside the apartment, which smelled like cooking; and best at Mass, which smelled like Maria.
Mercedes left the other little children and went in search of shells. Pretty fragments lay on the old jetty reduced long ago to a pile of rocks. Mercedes slipped her flip-flops back on, easing around jagged edges and pausing to watch the clams spit. In time the line of chairs receded and the air smelled worse.
That’s when she saw the fish. The sea reclaimed them now, but hundreds remained washed ashore, open-mouthed and bloated and covered with sores. They stared in all directions. Some stared back at Mercedes, as though they were still alive.
They stank, but they weren’t frightening. Mercedes clutched her orange pail and edged among them. The priest should be here, waving his censer over the stench and blessing them all, they looked so sad. One gasped, twitching beneath the rising sun and slapping still-wet sand. Mercedes edged closer.
Its gills fluttered on its neck above a flat, heaving chest discolored with bruises. Little arms fell limp at its sides. Instead of a tail, Mercedes gawked at a fin tapering to a single point, with skin pale enough to see through.
She looked back toward the head and met startling green eyes. The creature’s arms had risen. Now they waved and wavered in the air, struggling. Tiny, perfect fingers reached out to Mercedes, who dropped to her knees and thanked Jesus for the baby.
She made a bed of seaweed in her pail, curled the baby up, and tucked it in with a crown of more seaweed cushioning a concealing layer of broken shells. She said goodbye to the dead fish and was almost back to the line of chairs before her mother’s call of alarm made her hurry.
The sun had risen higher and the smells carried farther now. People reeled in eruption-covered catches and threw them back into the water, leaving their own pails empty and their talk filled with Watergate and Managua’s slow recovery from the earthquake.
* * * *
Somehow, everybody still had something to eat. Food magically appeared up and down the block, pulled from pantries and stretched into casseroles. Apartments shifted like sand with people coming in and out, echoes and laughter carrying down the bare-bulbed hallway.
Someone slipped a 45 of “El Galleton” onto a turntable. Honking horns melted through the walls as workers left for their shifts. Mercedes swam in currents of sound, following a thin cry that no one else seemed to hear. It clung to her, leaving brine on her tongue.
She didn’t know why she had placed the sea baby inside a garbage bag, or why she had emptied the rest of her play pail and filled it halfway with water from the tap. Knowledge of what to do came first as a gentle prodding and then as a certainty, making Mercedes industrious.
The wooden step stool hurt her toes as she lifted her load. The pail pulled on her arms as she wove around legs and ribbons of tobacco smoke, trying not to slosh.
She made the trip eight times, carrying water through clusters of grownups and past stained cinderblock. One look from her and the other children turned away. She descended a cannabis-flavored stairwell, ignored by older boys and girls whose fingers undulated beneath each other’s clothes.
The garbage bag sat inside a rusted metal tub behind the boiler. No one would use the tub until winter, when the boiler had to be bled daily to release the pressure that always built up. Now the nubbly gray walls felt cool and moist, a relief from summer heat.
The baby still looked sick, but its chest no longer heaved. Mercedes watched the calming rhythm of gills beneath a watery layer. Green eyes blinked at her.
She reached into the bag and caught her breath as the tiny hand grasped her finger and held on.
She whispered, “Are you hungry?”
The creature pursed its lips at her and made sucking movements, as though it understood. Mercedes stuck her other hand into the water and gave the baby her index finger to nurse on.
She had to find a bottle. Would she have to heat the milk? She wasn’t allowed to touch the stove.
Whom could she tell? If the baby came from Jesus, then why did everything feel so dangerous?
Mercedes knelt on the damp floor and prayed while the skin on her hands wrinkled and chilled and her fingertips grew numb. The rosary beads in her head turned into barnacles. Salty tears splashed into the bag and made ripples above the bruises.
* * * *
The next morning it was all over.
Mercedes awoke from a dream of placid waters, where she walked in her nightie on the bottom of the sea. Now she rushed past the breakfast table, where her brother Elian dawdled over his cereal. Hector, the oldest, was already doing odd jobs at the factory, helping their father with menial tasks and coming home covered in yellow dust.
Their mother yelled after Mercedes as she hurried down to the basement. Everything agitated inside. She was a massive goose bump, clammy and cold, marveling that her legs could move at all.
The strength left them as she spied the empty tub. The super had made the boiler room distressingly neat, as though preparing for company. The concrete floor was swept, and the film of fog had lifted from glass gauges and tubing. Even the windows overlooking the dirty alley gleamed, secure in reinforced caulking.
Mercedes swayed on her feet. Nothing called to her any more. Out in the alley were steel trash cans with their lids off, gaping at the sky. They’d been emptied into the garbage truck, which had lumbered off with loud complaints, wheezing. Carrying junk.
The sea baby had probably never happened at all. Mercedes accepted that fact later, her bottom smarting from a well-placed slap. Nobody left the breakfast table without permission, and certainly no one ran headlong past the grace of food. She was old enough to know better. What was she thinking?
Her first Day of Dead Fish and the thin, little cry in her head separated, until only the die-offs remained. Those, at least, repeated and were real. Other people talked about them and then fell silent.
The episodes of aborted fishing entered Mercedes’s mental category of inconveniences, taking their place beside booster shots, scrambling for rent money, and the sight of body bags whenever somebody turned on the evening news.
* * * *
On September 17, 1990, everything fell apart.
Esther Weitz listened to full-throated sobbing and didn’t know what to make of the daycare worker on the other side of the desk. The young woman rocked in her chair. Thick black hair brushed her shoulders and stuck to her face.
“Ms. Rios—”
Thin fingers brushed the wet strands back. Manicured nails. Mercedes Rios looked away, toward a blank spot on the Employee Wellness Office wall. For a moment she seemed to compose herself.
Then her shoulders began to shake and the wails began anew. Esther pushed her Kleenex box closer. “Ms. Rios, please tell me what’s wrong.”
She gasped, “I can’t.”
“I want to help you. I know you feel bad about frightening the children. You’re here because your record has been excellent until now.”
Fresh tears coursed down flushed cheeks and dropped onto a modest blouse. The tissues remained untouched.
Esther followed her client’s gaze to an expanse of cream-colored paint between bookcases. Almost everyone who sat in that chair stared at the same spot. Most eventually disclosed the images they overlaid on it.
Most were not as overcome as Mercedes Rios. Clients that broken-hearted had experienced a sudden death in the family, hit with unexpected, devastating news during an otherwise ordinary day. But that had not been the case here.
This time an innocent video had set off a response so incongruous and out of proportion that trauma had to be the cause. Mercedes sat with her shoulders hunched and clasped her hands above starched trouser legs pressed tightly together.
“Why don’t we go over what happened in the playroom?” Esther offered.
Mercedes said, thickly, “They gave you the report.”
“I want to hear it from you. You don’t have to tell me why it happened. Just tell me what happened.”
Black eyes blazed. “Why? It won’t change anything. It’ll say I’m unfit to be around children any longer, so just fire me and let me start over!”
“I don’t have the authority to do that, Ms. Rios. But I do have the authority to make recommendations to your supervisor, who is concerned about you. Your outburst surprised all of us.”
Rios looked ready to curl up into a ball. At least she wasn’t crying any more, but that was of little comfort to Esther.
“You have no children of your own,” the counselor observed.
“No.”
Something was making her voice flatten.
Esther asked, “Do the older children usually operate the VCR?”
Mercedes nodded, still staring at the wall.
“Your supervisor’s report says that you were fine until someone inserted a tape of The Little Mermaid. Then you seemed unaware of your surroundings. You dropped a juice cup. When the children started singing ‘Under the Sea’ in time with the movie, you screamed at them to stop.”
Mercedes whirled on her. “And how would you feel if somebody made a cartoon about the Holocaust?” The twenty-two-year-old’s face was inches away, her eyes wild. Her hoarse yell drove Esther’s breath from her. “How would you feel if nobody cared about what really happened? If they made it all pretty and funny and gave it a happy ending?”
She collapsed back into her chair, her chest heaving. Esther stared at her, stunned, and managed to say, “I lost grandparents in the Shoah.”
The tears began again. “Then you know what it’s like.”
The puffy face became a mask. Mercedes turned away, her expression disturbingly blank. She remained silent for the rest of the session.
* * * *
The Pollution Prevention Act passed less than two months later. The news reached Mercedes in a footnote on a crumpled sheet of paper titled, “Sample Statement of Work.” It was one of many numbered sections dumped into a large trash bin next to a laser printer still spitting out copy at seven o’clock. Fluorescent lights burned up and down the hallway on a frigid Saturday night in November.
Even the daycare center was open this late, but Mercedes didn’t go there any more. She absently smoothed her custodial uniform, as if doing so would unkink the print in her hand. Below it rested more than a dozen reams worth of garbage.
If the company knew how much she took home with her, it would fire her for sure. She was stealing proprietary garbage, whose final drafts would become government property. Mercedes had figured out that much.
She wheeled the discards from one room to the next, knocking on doors before she entered to empty smaller bins. The secretary thanked her. Most of the others remained fixated on their computer screens. Outside a locked door lay a small mountain of paper and a top sheet on which someone had scrawled BASURA in black magic marker. Mercedes added those piles to the rest of the trash.
The same people were still in their offices on Sunday afternoon and late into Sunday night. Mercedes wondered if they ever went home.
She had come straight from church, where one candle burned for Hector, who had died in a factory explosion in 1978. Another burned for Elian, who had died of liver cancer the following year. She had lit votives for her mother and father, for Aunt Amalia and Uncle Francisco. For lung cancer and for emphysema and for COPD, now that she knew what COPD meant. The garbage had told her.
They’d all smoked. That fact had hung in the air longer than any stack and fugitive emissions spewed from across the bay.
A tether connected her to the sea floor. She couldn’t see it, couldn’t touch it. But it was there, the pull of family, a baby’s green eyes, certainty wrapping her like seaweed. Her people.
Children of God, all of them.
Mercedes lit a last candle in its red-tinted glass for her imagination and didn’t tell a soul.
* * * *
“It made electrical equipment.”
Esther Weitz jotted notes on a legal pad. “The plant where your father worked.”
“Father and brother.”
Mercedes could talk about them more easily than about the thing that never was. Esther had lost family, too. She lit candles called yahrzeit.
“It closed down in 1980, when the—when the laws changed.” How much was a maid not supposed to know? The more knowledge Mercedes amassed, the more perilous everything became. “After what happened in Love Canal.”
Esther’s pen scratched. “Those people lived near the water, too.”
Mercedes looked down at the hands in her lap. “Si.”
“I’ve noticed that you revert to Spanish whenever you don’t want to tell me something.” Blue eyes blinked at her through bifocals. “Usually when we get near the beach.”
Mercedes tried to keep the misery from her voice. “I’ve told you about all of the dead fish. What more do you want to know?”
“I know that the dead fish are not the whole story, Mercedes.”
She laughed a little and reached for a tissue. “Circulo.” She dabbed at her eyes and twirled her finger in the air. “Spanish for ‘circle,’ you know? That’s what CERCLA means to me. I see the word over and over, and it keeps bringing me back to the same question: Why? They did a Habitability Study on Love Canal, but not where I lived. Just because the factory is gone now, does that mean nobody should look at the water?”
The air crackled around Mercedes until she couldn’t tell where one risk ended and another one began. How many sea babies were dying? How many were washed away from their mothers’ arms year after year in tides of effluents?
The questions were terrifying because they shouldn’t even exist. They sprang from the fantasies of a little girl, lying in wait for her like monsters under the bed.
But the monsters under the bed had gone away.
Her counselor squinted at her from across the desk. “CERCLA?”
“Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act.” The English formed jagged boulders, building a seawall in her mouth. “It’s on all the papers people throw away. They keep rewriting the same things. They’ve been doing it for days.”
“Proposals are like that, when you’re a government contractor.” Esther laid her pen down, eyebrows raised. “I see you don’t just collect the trash.”
“You say I use Spanish to hide things from you.” Mercedes stood, shoving her hands into the armpits of her uniform. No matter which way she teetered, it would be toward an abyss. She began to pace, from bookcase to bookcase. Only four steps. She had not realized the Employee Wellness Office was so small. “I shall tell you what filled my neighborhood when I was growing up. Cromo. Cobre. Amoniaco. Acetona. Glicol de etileno. El fluoruro de hidrogeno. Niquel and Estireno. Metanol. Diclorometano and Tolueno and Tricloroetano.”
Spines blurred. The labels on the three-ring binders could have been anything, wavering through salt water. “They sound pretty in Spanish, no? Poisons. They came in the air and in the water. Until one day everything burned, just before everything closed. Everybody said it was arson and nobody got charged, and for three days we were told to keep our doors and windows shut and not go outside. No work, no pay. No pay, no rent. No rent, no place to live. So people went outside anyway.”
Esther’s eyes gazed holes into her back. For a moment Mercedes thought that they were green.
“I’m sorry, Mercedes.” The sound of genuine sorrow made her want to turn around. “But that’s not what sent you to me, is it?”
Why couldn’t Esther be like the Father Confessor, happy with what she was given? Why couldn’t she just send Mercedes away with a prescription of Hail Marys? A penance for every fish and a prayer for every grain of sand? Instead, she kept probing, dragging her nets in search of bottom feeders. Dark and murky and not real. Not worth telling about.
What if every soul had to file a Toxics Release Inventory?
“Do you know what’s funny?” Mercedes asked, not turning around. “I overhear the office workers. They take these proposals, many copies in a big box, and they buy a seat on the plane to Washington just for the box because they will not let it out of their sight. You’d think it was a living thing, like that. But it’s only paper.”
Esther asked, “What did you let out of your sight, Mercedes?”
Nada.
She whispered, “I have to go.”
* * * *
Half a year after the Day of Dead Fish, the Endangered Species Act passed. Nothing on its list resembled the child. It was amended in 1988 and still nothing resembled the child.
Marine protection laws had passed the year before that day on the beach, but they didn’t reach where Mercedes lived. Neither had the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, though it was supposed to, or the Clean Water Act that followed. Mercedes searched through empty promises in leather-covered books and returned them to their shelf, beside economic and regulatory impact assessments bound in black plastic coils.
She maneuvered her Electrolux around the corner office, whose mahogany desk was as messy as the plastic modular ones in the rooms without windows. She shut off the vacuum and turned to a bin beside the file drawer. There, chocolate frosting and bits of yellow cake smeared the ink on a crookedly printed spreadsheet. A paper plate colored in Christmas wreaths leaned against a thin plastic liner. Mercedes gathered and tied off the bag, squeezing out a puff of sickly sweet air.
She worked her way down to the conference suite, whose partitions had been wheeled open to create a giant room. A mirror ball hung from one of the tracks, amidst green and red streamers looping toward a white board. She accepted a small apron from one of the kitchen staff, tied it around her waist, and set about harvesting discarded food and plastic ware. The fifty-gallon trash can in the hallway filled with sliced carrots, cubed red peppers, broccoli florets, and half-eaten cake contaminated by ranch dressing. The waste felt as palpable as a slap.
The people around Mercedes paid no attention to her, or to the singing deejay who segued from “Blue Christmas” to “Margaritaville” in the corner. Mercedes glided past him and past the tall, plastic tree hung with tinsel, advancing from a cluster of research assistants to a cluster of programmers and then to managers. She sampled the foreign tongues of shop talk. Almost no one crossed the lines, from one professional level to another. The few remaining support staff filled their plates with sweets and returned to their cubicles.
Esther gave a faint nod from the Human Resources table and turned back to her colleagues. This was not the Wellness Office, whose walls invited openness. Here in the enlarged conference suite, the invisible walls were obvious, separating Esther even from the electric menorah barely visible on the other side of the deejay.
Except for the free food, everyone could just as well have been working at their desks. Mercedes floated through a party that didn’t exist.
Yet it was strangely comforting.
* * * *
What did an exposure threshold mean for a sea baby? Who could say whether toxins had bioaccumulated inside it or not? Jesus had not measured the sins of the world in parts per billion, he had just absorbed them all.
Now he glowed on the cross beneath a crimson sky, flickering at Mercedes from the veladora on her dresser. After three days of burning, the light from its wick shone through his heart and lit his halo from beneath. Behind him, his mother La Virgen de Guadalupe grieved within her golden frame.
Discarded papers covered the floor.
Mercedes stooped to lift the sheets one after another. She set them down again, moving bits of analysis from one pile to the next. Throughout the night her bed remained undisturbed and tucked in as ink swam before her eyes. Between the lines she prayed to San Peregrino, patron saint of cancer and incurable diseases, who had stood on his feet for more than thirty years as penance for his sins. His sores became like those on the fish thrown back to sea.
What if she had never gone to bed that night? What if she had stood over the rusted tub and prayed long and hard enough for warm milk to spurt through her finger and for tap water to wash away the bruises? The thin cry in her head had itself been a miracle, percolating up from the basement and driving her on while no one else noticed a thing.
Mercedes paced in her stockings, still in her uniform. She stopped to retrieve a shawl from her closet and draped it about her shoulders, black against gray. Murky tones, like the bottom of the sea in a long-ago dream, when she should have stayed awake instead.
La enfermedad invade mi cuerpo, mi corazon y mi fe desfallece...
No.
It was Elian who’d been invaded by disease. It was her mother whose heart had stopped. Her father whose faith had drained away into a respirator. They lodged inside her, too, in a world where the people above the water were just as invisible as those beneath.
Nobody cared about them. They all cared about The Little Mermaid, the cartoon princess who’d lost her voice to a jealous witch and regained it for love. No one bothered to look for the actual mermaids, just as no one bothered to look at the neighborhoods whose bays and streams they inhabited.
How many communities were so blessed? How many were so cursed?
There was magic under the sea, and it was dying.
* * * *
I have written to Woods Hole.
Mercedes watched imaginary envelopes fly past cream-colored paint between the bookcases. How could she even formulate a plea?
I have written to EPA. I have written to NOAA. I have written to UNESCO.
Dazzling acronyms. They vacuumed her letters up and remained black blots. Every fantasy ended the same way.
She didn’t know how long she’d been staring at the same spot, refusing to sit in the chair beside the tissues on Esther’s desk. She was not as strong as San Peregrino. Even after only a few short weeks, even with snatches of sleep, she felt faint. Her legs had turned into lead. Her feet burned. Volatile organic compounds.
Don’t heal me. Heal them.
She struggled for breath.
On other people’s desks the Mother of All Wars raged in headlines, with more Scud missiles falling on Tel Aviv.
“Mercedes.” Weariness ringed Esther’s voice. “What do you see on the wall?”
She rasped, “Did you make it like this on purpose?”
“No, but the blank space has proved useful. You’re evading the question.”
Mercedes snuggled against a bookcase and laid her cheek on the paint. Teak-veneered particleboard held her up. “No one would listen.”
“I’m listening, Mercedes.”
She blinked dry eyes. “No one would believe me.”
“There are people who believe the Holocaust never happened, Mercedes.” Esther’s voice was a ragged line dropping through depths. “There are people who can’t conceive that my uncle has a boyhood friend who can’t travel out of Gaza now, because he is a Palestinian.”
Mercedes whispered, “This is different.”
“Is it?”
“We have no headlines.” She peered into the crack between the shelving and the wall. “We have no museums.” A chill spread across her chest, drawing her arms in closer. “Nobody had tattoos. The stigmata were all on the fish.”
The question from behind was almost too soft to hear. “And on what else?”
Did bones lie at the bottom of the sea? Fingers, a humanlike skull, a spine? Would they have all crumbled and vanished without a trace? Did the creatures live in caves, huddled so deep that no expedition dared search for them? Had they been driven into polluted waterways from a different habitat?
Did any of them reach out to the people above the water, to people with legs, who walked or drove or took the bus to the factories killing them both?
Esther asked, “What are you cradling, Mercedes?”
Mercedes looked down at her arms. She was a Pieta holding air.
She slipped under the sea, drowning.
* * * *
The counselor stayed with her in the emergency room as a saline solution shipped drugs into her veins. Diaphanous white curtains eddied about them both. Machines beeped as though from far away.
Then she was discharged, still muzzy-headed from the chemicals. Before the fog had completely cleared, Mercedes was standing in line at the Unemployment Office. She never saw Esther again.
She became a succession of uniforms, drifting among counters and filling bags. The beach where her family had fished grew a boardwalk and a gazebo. An apartment bloc of subsidized housing rose where the electrical equipment plant had once stood, across the bay from renovated condominiums. Rented yellow kayaks and sailboards chased the tide, buffeted by clean winds.
Computer screens turned from black-and-white to color. “El Galleton” became an MP3 stream.
She huddled in the public library between two adolescents headphoned into video games and listened to tinny echoes. With a keystroke she could access twenty-four GPS satellites in geosynchronous orbit and none of them could find what she was looking for, no matter how long she waited to use a machine or how often her time ran out. Mercedes sank her fingers into the gray at her temples and navigated keywords until the Internet became an undertow.
She became a quiet wraith, gliding past stacks between shifts. She awaited her turn crouched among the few monographs she could find. Almost everything was on computer now. Hearing the library staff call her name attained the weight of communion, even for fruitless searches.
The library’s central air labored on a sultry evening as Hurricane Dennis left casualties in the Caribbean and spun toward Apalachee Bay. Mercedes glanced over as a teenager with chopped purple hair dropped into the chair to her left and logged on.
Mercedes smiled at the girl’s Live 8 tee that promised to change the world and was about to turn back when the image on the neighboring screen began to load. Despite the weak A/C, her teeth chattered.
The girl turned toward her, pierced eyebrows in a squint. “You okay?”
The photo tags read “Monkey Island” and “Port Antonio.” At first glance the shot showed only broken branches and spiny sea urchins and not the battered doll in the mid-ground. Below its waist stretched an unruly mass of blackened plastic. Its legs had been partially melted, fused together, and stretched out like taffy.
Mercedes shook her head. “Is nothing.”
A silver stud ticced up. “Bullshit.” She peered closer. “The storm hit Jamaica. I wonder if it blew that in.” She clicked the zoom.
Mercedes said, “It must have been in a fire.”
“No, I’ve seen others like that. There’s one made out of wood in Indonesia. One made out of bread dough in some Ecuadorean village. I saw one made out of mud on a riverbank in a jungle somewhere. No, wait, that was the Mississippi. Like they were trying to make mermaids but nobody could give them a decent tail. It’s weird.”
Mercedes glanced at the user clock on her own computer. Eleven minutes remained before she had to yield the machine again. That left less than an hour for the forty-minute bus ride to her night shift. “What do I search on? What keywords?”
The girl shrugged. “I don’t know. The keywords are all over the place, too. Just don’t type ‘mermaid’—you’ll get a thousand bikini shots before you get one of those.”
“Who makes them? Who takes the pictures?” Relief workers? Tourists? How many people in the world didn’t have access to a camera, let alone a computer? How many were creating representations in the only way they could?
“Hey.” Black-painted fingernails touched her arm. “What’s with you and them?”
Mercedes fought to keep her voice steady. “They remind me of something, that’s all.”
“Suit yourself.” The nails returned to their keyboard. “I found them by clicking on Random, but it took forever.”
The doll vanished, replaced by a wedding photo from half a world away. Blurs on a dance floor.
* * * *
Random.
She hadn’t carried a child for nine months, she had carried it for thirty-two years. Mercedes couldn’t say whether the sea baby had invaded her dreams because she didn’t remember her dreams. Instead, memory hovered about her shoulders as she navigated daily fogs smelling of cleanser and fry oils. She caught snatches of sleep on a time-shared mattress and awoke with wrinkled cuticles, as though her hands had spent the night submerged in tap water. Her body ached.
Sometimes Mercedes almost hopped the bus to the beach. Maybe if she stood with her bare feet in the surf, she could touch what was underneath again. But it was not her beach any more. All that remained was the ever-present need that swept her to the library, to live her life in one, maybe two half-hour increments before she had to leave it again.
She found a new flyer tacked to the bulletin board between the rest rooms and blinked at its promise of “grassroots environmentalism.” On the other end of a pay phone line, a pleasant-voiced man agreed to see her after closing.
Mercedes watched the parade of street lamps as her bus carried her past a line of piers and left her between puddles of iridescent rainbows. She followed memorized instructions, careful of which streets to avoid and which to trust, however furtively, until Duvall Hix called her name out of the shadows and escorted her between the warehouses.
She thanked him for seeing her at such an irregular hour.
He waved it off. “You’re giving up a lot to come here.”
* * * *
“You’re talking about birth defects.”
Shirttails vanished around a corner, leaving Mercedes surrounded by posters and old wooden filing cabinets. She circled a large meeting table and listened to the uneven rhythm of steam pipes, then to bearings sliding on well-oiled runners as Hix checked his archives.
A pistachio-colored ceiling with stamped metal moldings shifted time out of the twenty-first century and back more than fifty years. Mousetraps dotted the corners on aged linoleum tile. Mercedes half-expected to find a black rotary phone beside the pamphlet display, the computer seemed so out of place.
They had traveled to the sixth floor in a freight elevator and walked down industrial-painted hallways. The director of the 58th Street Coalition had unlocked a metal door bearing a hand-lettered sign.
Hix returned with a black-and-white eight-by-ten and laid it on the table. “What you’ve described is not unheard-of. It’s called sirenomelus. Mermaid syndrome.”
A shriveled corpse stared up from the photograph. The typed line on its yellowed tag dated it to 1983.
Mercedes held the sheet in both hands. Agreeing with him would be so easy. It would make the most sense. She could point to an actual creature, to an actual cause, and tell the churning in her brain and her heart to stop.
Except it wouldn’t.
She said, “It’s not a birth defect, Mr. Hix.”
“Duvall.” He sat opposite her and laid out a series of fact sheets on PCBs and dioxins, followed by water and soil reports. “These will tell you what we’re up against. We’ve got kids playing in brownfields that were supposed to be remediated more than a decade ago. It’s no wonder you saw something like this.”
“Did they do an autopsy?”
“No, not to my knowledge. The effects were already obvious.”
She laid the sheet back down. “This was not a human child.”
She forced herself to watch the emotions playing across his face. His quiet distress made her throat close up. They could agree that the child in the picture was more than twenty years dead, and that it had once been alive and real, so why not leave it at that?
Did villagers in remote corners of the world fashion sculptures of birth defects?
Hix reached into his pants pocket, flipped open a battered wallet, and laid a smaller, color photo on the table. Mercedes looked down at a pair of buck-toothed smiles, sprays of dark freckles across brown cheeks, and eyes that looked just like Duvall’s. She guessed the boy’s age to be about nine, the girl’s about seven. “They’re beautiful.”
His words were measured weights. “I will do everything I can to keep them healthy, Mercedes. From what you’ve told me, I wish I could have done the same for your family.” His fingers caressed the image. “I wasn’t with you when you found whatever you found. I didn’t see what you saw, so I can’t speak about it. But when I go home every night, the faces here tell me what I have to do, with what little resources we have. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Less than a hand’s breadth of wood grain separated the shots. On one side were living, breathing children whose joy gave no indication of danger. On the other side lay a long-dead baby with collapsed gills and ruptured skin. Limp flesh tapered to a flat appendage.
Every case in Hix’s files had been washed ashore. If these were birth defects, then why were they all found near water bodies? Wouldn’t that assume they’d been deliberately drowned and then surfaced again with the tide? What were the chances of that happening?
Mercedes raised her face to Duvall’s. She did not withhold her arguments for fear of insanity this time. She knew he wouldn’t openly dispute what she told him, regardless of what he did or didn’t believe.
Funding evaporated faster than water. Even if he believed her, what could he do?
* * * *
He found her a cheap room in a patched-up, century-old Victorian subdivided into a dozen odd-shaped apartments with shared kitchen and baths. Sprouts grew in tall jars set in south-facing windows. Mushrooms swelled from flats spread across a musty attic floor. In the fall sunflowers bent beneath their own weight in a tiny, fenced-in yard, their heads tied up in plastic shopping bags to catch the seeds.
More food came from the community garden a mile walk away. Mercedes helped her housemates grow peas and tomatoes beneath a narrow strip of sun between slabs of triple-decker shade. She steered toddlers away from the crops and traded for lettuce and carrots from adjoining plots, then washed and peeled away as much lead uptake as she could.
Everybody spoke about the bad air at a public hearing on the reassessment of discharge ponds and drainage creeks. Reassurances rolled back to them as quickly as the tires discarded off the overpass four blocks away, piling up in the pond closest to the road. Mercedes counted nine tires when the drought hit the pond, cracking its muddy bottom.
The tires didn’t stop the ducks from returning with the rains, unmindful of the smell of rotten eggs. A muskrat commuted to points unknown. Life continued as before.
New tethers snaked around Mercedes, tying her to the people aboveground. Children clustered about her as she bent over the garden, sifting out sand thrown in from the nearby tot lot. They waited for the two-inch-tall GIs that surfaced out of the earth and for the other plastic-molded toys that spring brought. Marbles and jacks rose up like scattered seeds. Half an action figure raced broken crockery toward the open air.
Tiny fingers tugged on Mercedes’s dirt-stained pants. No one looked away from her, this time. No one cringed at her occasional outbursts. Eventually the small, pudgy faces all but eclipsed her memory of bright green eyes above sallow cheeks wavering under the water, lips pursed in hunger.
Hector and Elian returned in suddenly remembered dreams and Mercedes awoke clutching the sides of her narrow bed. For a few minutes she forgot where she was, and it was her turn to stumble down to the breakfast table, stunned by old grief. On those mornings her food lost its taste and she couldn’t recall riding the bus to work, but she remembered how many arms had held her, and whose.
Her trauma joined others and became one of the many grooves into which the household settled, so deep they were often buried in laughter. Music floated down the block from open windows after sundown in a confusion of reggae, Ca Hue, salsa, hip-hop, kpop. Smoke from tobacco and weed danced pirouettes in alleyways. Mothers yelled at pimped-up sedans to slow down. The city sank new Neighborhood Watch signs into fresh concrete, in place of twisted metal. Children painted a rainbow mural in a restored corner park barely larger than a parking spot. Shopkeepers swept up broken glass. Unsubsidized tenants dug deeper as rents increased.
In April the fireworks started up as usual, littering the streets with spent casings of Coloured Shots and Gulf War Rockets and lighting up police party lines throughout the night. In May an early heat wave overloaded the old power grid again, filling the stoops with gossip and sweat.
* * * *
In June, Tuan and Letitia dug a hole in the garden to bury a shoebox and changed everything.
Side by side they walked, counting the number of steps they each held the box and keeping their steps equal, because something this important had to be fair. Far behind them the muskrat continued its rounds, a black lozenge cutting through slick.
They walked past purple loosestrife waving from the corner lot. Past the hair salon and the Chinese take-out and the bail bonds. Over the train tracks and under the highway. Letitia scratched around her dress strap, where too much sun had darkened her skin to the color of burnt toast. Tuan stopped to pick wild mulberries from a tree crouched beside the on-ramp.
Their mouths and tongues were stained by the time they reached the tot lot. They continued on toward the vegetables and began scooping out the dirt from between two tomato cages while Tuan softly sang.
Their neighbor Mai turned from her weeding. “What died?”
Letitia mumbled, “We’re just playing.”
“That’s a funeral song, Letitia. You’re not supposed to touch dead animals! They’re full of germs.”
Tuan stopped singing. “This is different.”
Mai raised white brows at his uncharacteristic insolence. She rocked to her feet and shouted across the yard, calling for reinforcements in the neighborhood’s first-line defense against fallen birds, car-struck cats, and diseased rodents.
In the kitchen a mile away, Mercedes laid her cleaver down as her vision blurred. When it cleared she set her half-chopped carrots in the fridge, dropped the cleaver into soapy water, and fled the house. Halfway to the garden she was still unaware she was being followed, or that doors cracked open and curtains shushed to the side. The people calling her name faded into murkiness.
Eleven children entered the garden behind her, crowding in as she fought her way toward the boy and girl who’d thrown their bodies over the box and dug their fingers and toes into the dirt. She didn’t know what strength let her pry the yelling adults away.
“Water!” She screamed over the heads of her entourage. “Somebody fill a tub with water and bring it here! Now!”
Tuan’s voice was muffled against the ground.
“No, sweetie. It’s still alive.” They had so much to do. Mercedes touched a steely little arm. “Letitia ... let me see...”
A geyser exploded above the hubbub as a teen opened a hydrant. Re-directed splatter rang against metal.
Letitia raised a tear-streaked face to Mercedes.
“I know it’s a baby.” Her voice dropped. “You found it near the pond?”
Letitia nodded. Mercedes cradled the girl’s head.
The same cry as before lodged in her breast but much thinner this time, much softer.
Tuan said, “It’s a boy.”
“With a tail and no legs. Like a mermaid. Yes?”
High-pitched voices behind her broke into a torrent.
“Fish food! Get him fish food!”
“Where’s a pet store?”
“I dunno, I never saw a pet store!”
“Get seaweed then!”
Mercedes said, “He’s still too young for seaweed.”
She blinked back tears as the silent cry rang through every child. They all clung together like tentacles stemming from a single body. Her neighbors made way as two pairs of flame-tattooed forearms dropped a steel tub beside her, sloshing water onto the mulched walkway.
Mercedes took and opened the shoebox from Letitia and groaned. The sea baby looked as dead as the one in Duvall’s photograph. No wonder the children almost buried it.
Voices rose as she lowered the infant into the tub. Kinked gray hair fell over her eyes as she growled back, “I’m not drowning him. It’s not a birth defect. Ask the bebes, they’ll tell you.”
The sun beat sweat from her brow. Mercedes held onto the lip of the tub and blinked at people and tomatoes through waves of heat. Below her, the gills began to flutter more strongly.
Behind her, a man asked, “So, what do we do now?”
A tiny fist gripped her finger. Green eyes opened.
“He’ll eat earthworms.” This was a garden. They couldn’t be in a better place. Her voice rasped. “Look for earthworms. Mash them up.”
The children fanned out immediately, digging in the dirt.
The man said, “That’s not what I meant.”
Mercedes whispered, “I know.”
She listened to the buzz of speculation around the plots. Yes, there are more, she wanted to say. Yes, they’ve been here all along, just like us, she wanted to say.
No, they are not our competitors.
Wouldn’t they be? If Mercedes wrote her fantasized letters, if she sent them off to Woods Hole and EPA and NOAA and UNESCO with pictures and documentation, what then?
Which would the authorities relocate? Who would sooner be placed on an endangered species list?
You can’t fund everything.
No. The children understood. Tuan, grasping nightcrawlers in his hand. Letitia, holding another one at arm’s length away from her dirt-smeared dress. Even Ho, the biker sitting hunched against the garden fence and chopping up a plate of worms with his Bowie. They all knew this was a child like any other child.
Except it wasn’t.
The sea baby was a discovery.
Someone said, “Fire department,” amidst growing sirens.
Mercedes looked down at the bruised body and tapered tail, across at the filthy hands offering wrigglers to Ho, up at the tightly controlled fear in her neighbors’ eyes. Once the hydrant was closed, the fire official would take one glance at the crowd and summon a police cruiser. This was no block party.
What if all those years ago, while she dreamt she walked on the bottom of the sea, the super had lifted that other baby in its plastic bag and returned it to its polluted waters instead of dumping it in the trash? Separate peoples, living apart in their own poisoned worlds?
Tiny lips zoomed in on her pinky and began to suckle. Mercedes took the first batch of formula in her free hand, a slurry of worms and water in a bottle with a nipple hacked off at the tip. Letitia squatted by her side as she lifted the baby just high enough to get the nursing started.
The girl snuggled against her. “What’s going to happen to him?”
“I don’t know,” Mercedes said. “But pray for him, okay? And tell the uniforms to come see me.”
“What are you going to say to them?”
“Just do as I ask.”
She smiled a little at Letitia’s struggle to tear herself away. A housemate came forward, and then a second, marveling. Now that the sea baby was alert, now that it was feeding, it didn’t seem quite so unreal.
But if it were real, would that make it a threat?
Help me, Maria. Help me, Jesucristo.
Mercedes closed her eyes against the sounds of suckling, and opened them again as the water shut off.