Near + Far (4 page)

His lips were hot on my ear. "Okay then, chicoca. Stay nice and I'll be nice."

I heard the door open and close as he left. Shaking, I untangled myself from the hammock and went to the steering console. I turned on the Mary Magdalena's voice.

"You can't trust him," she said.

I laughed, panic's edge in my voice. "No shit. Is there anyone I can trust?"

If she'd been a human, she might have said "me."

Being a machine, she knew better. There was just silence.

When I was little, I loved the
Mary Magdalena
. I loved being aboard her. I imagined she was my mother, that when Mami had died, she'd chosen not to go to heaven, had put her soul in the boat to look after me.

I loved my uncle too. He let me steer the boat, sitting on his lap, let me run around the deck checking lines and making sure the tack was clean, let me fish for sharks and rays. One time, coming home under the General Domingo Bridge, he pointed.

At first it looked as though huge brown bubbles were coming up through the water. Then I realized it was rays, maybe a hundred, moving through the waves.

Going somewhere, I don't know where.

He waited until I was thirteen. I don't know why. I was as skinny and unformed that birthday as I had been the last day I was twelve. He took me out on the
Mary Magdalena
and waited until we were far out at sea.

He raped me. When he was done, he said if I reported it, he'd be put in jail. My grandmother would have no one to support her.

I applied for Free Agency the next day. I went to the clinic and told them what had been done. That it had been a stranger and that I wanted to become Ungendered. They tried to talk me out of it. They're legally obliged to, but I was adamant. So they did it, and for a few years I lived on the streets. Until they came and told me my uncle was dead. The
Mary Magdalena
, who had remained silent, was mine.

I could hear Jorge Felipe out on the deck, playing his accordion again. I wondered what Niko was doing. Watching the water.

"I don't know what to do," I said to myself. But the boat responded.

"You can't trust him."

"Tell me something I don't know," I said.

On the display, the mermaids' fuzzy shadows intersected the garbage's dim line. I wondered what they wanted, what they did with the plastic and cloth they pulled from us. I couldn't imagine that anyone kept anything, deep in the sea, beyond the water in their gills and the blood in their veins.

When Jorge Felipe went in to make coffee, I squatted beside Niko. He was watching the mermaids still. I said, urgently, "Niko, Jorge Felipe may try something before we land. He wants your share and mine. He'd like the boat, too. He's a greedy bastard."

Niko stared into the water. "Do you think my dad's out there?"

"Are you high?"

His pupils were big as flounders. There was a mug on the deck beside him. "Did Jorge Felipe bring that to you?"

"Yeah," he said. He reached for it, but I threw the rest overboard.

"Get hold of yourself, Niko," I said. "It could be life or death. We've got sixteen hours to go. He won't try until we're a few hours out. He's lazy."

I couldn't tell whether or not I'd gotten through. His cheeks were angry from the sun. I went inside and grabbed my uncle's old baseball hat, and took it out to him. He was dangling an arm over the side. I grabbed him, pulled him back.

"You're going to get bit or dragged over," I said. "Do you understand me?"

Jorge Felipe grinned out of the cabin. "Having a good time there, Niko? You wanna go visit dad, go splashy splashy?" He wiggled his fingers at Niko.

"Don't say that!" I said. "Don't listen to him, Niko."

Something flapped in the water behind us and we all turned. A huge mermaid, half out of the water, pulling itself onto the trash's mass. I couldn't tell what it was trying to do—grab something? Mate with it?

The gun went off. The mermaid fell back as Niko yelled like he'd been shot. I turned, seeing the gun leveling on Niko, unable to do anything as it barked. He jerked, falling backward into the cargo net's morass.

His hands beat the water like dying birds. Something pulled him under, maybe the mermaids, maybe just the net's drag.

I tried to grab him, but Jorge Felipe's hand was in my collar pulling me back with a painful blow to my throat. The hurt doubled me over, grabbing for breath through the bruise's blaze.

"Too bad about Niko," Jorge Felipe said. "But I need you to keep piloting. Go inside and stay out of trouble." He pushed me towards the cabin and I stumbled into it, out of the wind and the sound of the water.

I stood, trying to catch my breath, my hands on the panels. I wondered if Niko had drowned quickly. I wondered if that was how Jorge Felipe intended to kill me. All around, the boat hummed and growled, mechanical sounds that had once felt as safe as being inside my mother's womb.

I waited for her to say something, anything. Was she waiting for me to ask her help? Or did she know there was nothing she could do?

Underneath the hum, I could hear the mermaids singing, a whine that echoed through the metal, crept into the
Mary Magdalena
's habitual drone.

When I said, "How much farther?" she didn't pretend she didn't understand the question.

"Fifteen hours, twenty minutes."

"Any weapons on board I don't know about?" I pictured my uncle having something, anything. A harpoon gun or a shark knife. Something wicked and deadly and masculine.

But she answered, "No." The same flat voice she always used.

I could have wept then, but that was girlish. I was beyond that. I was the master of the
Mary Magdalena
. I would kill Jorge Felipe somehow, and avenge my friend.

How, I didn't know.

Outside splashing, something caught in the netting. I pushed my way out the door as Jorge Felipe stared down into the water. I shoved my way past him, unsure for a moment whether or not he'd hinder me. Then his hands were beside me, helping me pull a gasping Niko onto the boat.

"Welcome back, man," he said as Niko doubled over on hands and knees, spewing water and bile across the decking.

For a moment I thought, of course, everything would be fine. He'd reconsidered killing us. We'd pull into port, sell the cargo, give him the money and go our separate ways.

I saw him guessing at my thoughts. All he did was rest his hand on his gun and smile at me. He could see the fear come back, and it made him smile harder.

Behind me, Niko gasped and sputtered. There was another sound beside the hiss and slap of the waves.
Mary Magdalena
, whispering, whispering. What was she saying to him? What was going on in his head, what had he seen in his time underwater? Had the mermaids come and stared in his face, their eyes as blank as winter, his father there, driven mad by solipsism and sea song, looking at his son with no thoughts in his head at all?

I stood, Jorge Felipe looking at me. If I locked myself in the cabin, how long would it take him to break in? But he gestured me away as I stepped towards the door.

"Not now," he said, and the regret in his tone was, I thought, for the time he'd have to spend at the wheel, awake, more than anything else.

She was whispering, still whispering, to Niko. Why hadn't she warned me? She must have known what was brewing like a storm beneath the horizon. I couldn't have been the first.

I started to turn to Jorge Felipe,
Mary Magdalena
's voice buzzing under my nerves like a bad light bulb. Then weight shifting on the deck, Niko's footsteps squelching forward as he grabbed at Jorge Felipe, backpedaling until they fell together over the side in a boil of netting and mermaids.

In a fairytale, the mermaids would have brought Niko back to the surface while they held Jorge Felipe down below, gnawing at him with their sharp parrot beaks. In some stories, dolphins rescued drowning sailors, back when dolphins were still alive. And whales spoke to the fishing boats they swam beside, underneath clear-skied stars, in waters where no mermaids sang.

But instead no one surfaced. I turned the boat in great circles, spinning the cargo net over and over again. Finally I told the
Mary Magdalena
to take us home. It had started to rain, the sullen sodden rain that means winter is at elbow's length.

I took the yellow ducks out of my pocket and put them on the console. What did Jorge Felipe think I'd found? I stared at the display and the slow shift and fuzz of the earth's bones, far below the cold water.

"What did you tell Niko?" I asked.

"I told him that his father would be killed if he didn't defend him from Jorge Felipe. And I activated my ultrasonics. They acted on his nervous system."

I shuddered. "That's what I felt as well?"

"There should be no lasting effects."

"Thanks," I said. I stirred three sugar packets and powdered cream into my coffee. It was almost too hot to drink when it came out of the microwave, but I cupped it in my fingers, grateful for its heat.

I could have slept. But every time I laid down in the hammock, I smelled Jorge Felipe, and thought I heard him climbing out of the water.

Finally I went out and watched the water behind us. The
Mary Magdalena
played the radio for me, a soft salsa beat with no words I could understand. It began to rain, and I heard the sound of raindrops on the decking beside me, pattering on the plastic sheeting I drew over my head.

By the time I arrived back in port, the mermaids had plucked away all but a few tangles of seaweed from the netting. I'd be lucky to net the cost of a cup of coffee, let alone cover the fuel I'd used. Never mind. A few more seasons and I'd have the money I needed, if I was careful. If there were no disasters.

Neither body was there in the net. Perhaps Niko's father had reclaimed him.

The wind and rain almost knocked me off the deck as I stared into the water. The green netting writhed like barely visible guilt in the darkness.

The
Mary Magdalena
called after me, as she had not dared in years. "Sleep well, Lolo. My regards to Grandma Fig."

I stopped and half turned. I could barely see her lines through the driving rain.

Sometimes I used to imagine setting her on fire. Sometimes I used to imagine taking her out to a rift and drilling holes in the hull. Sometimes I used to imagine her smashed by waves, or an earthquake, or a great red bull stamping through the streets.

But the winter was long, and it would be lonely sitting at home with my grandmother. Lonelier than time at sea with her, haunted by the mermaids' music.

"Good night,
Mary Magdalena
," I said.

Afternotes

The title of the story, which most fellow English majors and poets will recognize, is taken from T.S. Eliot's
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
, a poem I love enough to have completely committed to memory at a stage in my life when my memory was less prone to lapses. The inspiration for the story itself, though, was a book I've always greatly admired, Ernest Hemingway's
The Old Man and the Sea
. When I sat down to write the story, I had in my head that I'd do an updated version of someone who finds something with the potential to lift them out of their troubles, only to see it vanish, bit by bit.

Katherine Sparrow, both a terrific writer and fellow Clarion West student, had recently posted online a news story about giant floating garbage masses. I'd also been thinking about feral mermaids when someone mentioned to me what a glut of mermaid stories they'd been getting lately. When I threw all that together, this story emerged.

The core of the story shifted in the writing of it to center on the relationship between Lolo and
Mary Magdalena
, becoming a story of coming to terms with and forgiving betrayal. The setting is an unidentified island with a Hispanic culture, whose main source of income is tourists.

Lolo's decision to become ungendered is one some reviewers have criticized. But the fact that bodies will become more malleable, more self-defined in the future, is a theme that fascinates me, and one that will be increasingly resonant with our day to day lives as we move into an age of electromagnetically-configured tattoos, of changeable hair color and lips and eyes and limbs.