The first thing I did after my discovery was to go back inside and make myself a pot of coffee. I told myself to drink at least half of it before I tried again, because surely I’d made some kind of mistake. With my thoughts out of order, I found myself wondering what her skeleton looked like under her flesh. It was actually pretty easy to imagine.
A while later, I got up from my breakfast nook and wandered back out there, meandering and wasting time like I really had somewhere else to be that day. She was under the water again when I arrived, and I watched with interest as she made laps of the pool, rarely surfacing and always staring at me when she did. As if I was the intruder. I must have stood there like a dumbfounded ox for half an hour. She stayed away from my end initially (maybe my stature really did intimidate her); after some time she ventured closer.
“So,” I started in the hopes of making conversation, “what’s your name?”
She tilted her head again in that curious and blank way of hers. I wondered if she was even hearing me; she made no move to answer. Maybe we don’t speak the same language, I thought.
“I’m Dante,” I continued, and received the same stare.
Standing there alone, gazing at a mythical creature in my backyard, I began to feel somewhat lightheaded. Maybe it was because I was blinking less than usual. Maybe too it was time I called someone who knew something about mermaids.
*
Gil was a guy, my best friend, who probably would put a fish in my pool to cheer me up. It’s the odd kind of practical joke that a screenwriter would perpetrate (odd in the sense that it probably wouldn’t cheer anyone up); he wrote scripts about all sorts of things, most recently a sea-faring pirate film involving mermaids, in a loose sense. Although he did it to cash in on the recent Disney pirates craze, and therefore needed to keep things easy to understand and cliché enough to interest Disney fans, he always does extensive – adequate, at least – research on the subjects he writes about. I doubted his script was in development now, but I was sure he’d know a thing or two about mermaids.
I phoned him from the kitchen, looking over the pool with the wary eye of a man who might be insane, and who knows it well. Gil lived in the same area as me, a hillside smattering of houses overlooking a cozy ocean cove in Northern California. His house was further from the water than mine, but I could sort of see him from my back yard, if l leaned past the overhang and used binoculars. We were a bit isolated in this community; there were no close neighbours. Gil and I, we were close; but physically, in the real world, he was at least half a mile away.
“Dante,” he said in way of hello.
“Gil,” I replied. “I have to talk to you about something.”
“Shoot, my friend.”
“About mermaids…if I had one, hypothetically, what would I feed her?”
“I would think that you would feed her whatever her fish species eats, Dante,” he answered without skipping a beat. He’s good about not asking questions like that. “What is her fish species?”
“What is her species? I don’t know, man, mermaid. If I had one,” I refrained from stammering here, “I wouldn’t know her species. Are there really different kinds of mermaids?”
“Well, in our reality there are not different kinds, Dante, because there are no mermaids, at all. But in our hypothetical realm, there would probably be about as many races of mermaid as there are of man.”
“But that doesn’t mean anything to the fish side, right? Do I feed her human food, or fish food?”
There was a silence then, as I imagined Gil thinking this over while squeezing one of those squishy stress-relieving tennis balls. “Fish food, I think,” he finished then. “Not fish, though. God knows we don’t eat our own species. Kelp, you know. Maybe mussels, shrimp, small animals like that.”
“Okay, great. Now how would I communicate? If she didn’t speak English?”
“Have you tried Spanish?” Gil said in what sounded like a serious tone. I prepared to tell him off. He started again before I could go on. “I’m not sure where this mermaid business is coming from, so I’ll just assume you have a new girlfriend and your deep social anxiety is forcing you to introduce her as a fictional creature. What’s this girl’s name?”
“Well, my social retardation prevents me from talking to her in a language she understands, so I don’t know. In my delusional fantasy land, she appeared in my pool this morning.”
“Well, then, you need to name her.”
“That’s a great first date strategy.”
“What are you making her for dinner?”
“You’ve already suggested kelp and small sea animals, I guess I’ll go with that and brine. Would you care to join us?”
“No, thanks. It’s always been awkward pretending to talk to your imaginary dates, so I won’t intrude. If this natural water baby is in your pool, spending a lot of time there, you might consider removing the chlorine.” Gil has always had a deep mistrust of chemicals, antibacterial and otherwise. “It’s not good for fish. Or people, really.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. “Thanks, Gil. I might call you back later.”
“You better. I’d like to be kept abreast of your dates more than I have been.”
“Here’s news: no one since Jessicka.”
“Right. You’re not still praying for her to come back, are you?”
“I’m way past madness, Gil.”
“Good, glad to hear it. This imaginary fish woman is much, much better for you anyway. Later, Dante.”
-end excerpt-
