ANGELINE WOON
In the end, he threw me into the Ottawa river. He leaned over the sun-kissed railing, looking for me, burning his hands and a band of skin across his chest as he did so. He tells me he still aches from the burn. I tell him it’s because his heart’s on fire.
He says he saw a cold glint of silver in the water. It could’ve been light reflected from the scales of my fishy tail. Or it could’ve been his imagination: the light, as well as the splash he had heard, coming from a long way down.
Cars roared behind him, supplemented by the high-pitched, angry hum of the metal grids, a teeth-grinding noise characteristic to the Alexandra Bridge. They drowned out the placid lapping of the river beneath. His internal seas crashed against his head, broke in his gut, thudded in his heart. I was gone.
He was supposed to join me; just one leg over the burning railing, then the other, bringing along the rest of him, and, lo and behold! A kingdom of magic awaited.
But then came dizziness. The river was too much for him, too deep, he thought.
The summer sun bid good day, and he lost all chance of finding me in the darkening water. He mounted Moby and drove on to our empty home.
Spare some change? Thanks. Hey, wanna hear the rest of my story?
Home. Could be anywhere, couldn’t it? Doesn’t have to be a place; you can feel at home with someone, or yeah, an idea. Wild, huh. So long as it’s like, a bubble you can sorta sink into…
Anyway, growing up, my sisters and I were nomadic; we travelled from hunting ground to hunting ground according to season. We didn’t set up shop. We didn’t root ourselves to anything. That wasn’t what the tails were for.
Some people get a sense of belonging when they’re in a group, among family. My sisters did, they loved each other. I was the odd one out; the youngest fry – a big surprise to my mother, I can tell you. I got left behind a lot.
At times, I lagged on purpose. I thought elder siblings were like sand, ya know? They got everywhere, like, in my face, on my nerve, and in my way! Great Poseidon, the ocean was crowded with big sisters and their inane chatter. Oh, look at my mother-of-pearl, look at my hair, look at…
It was enough to make me gag.
I’d often stick my head out of the water just to get away. Pretty soon, I learned how to hold my breath in air and to climb on rocks like seals. I’d look at the sky, the birds, and the waves. I wondered what was there, far beyond the ends of the sea. My sisters told me it was Land. Well, Land seemed static. Dead. It made me wonder what a world is like without movement. Scary. But yet, I was drawn to contemplate it, time and again on the rocks.
One or more of my sisters would show up eventually, once they figured I was lost. They’d yank me into the water by my tail, like I was some naughty little seal cub, then they’d fall on me like sharks at a feeding frenzy: “You’ve made us late, the whales will be gone and what would we eat, huh?” or, “What if someone saw you from the boats? If they catch you, we’d never get you back.” Nag, nag, nag, nag, NAG!
Why won’t they leave me alone? I thought. But that wasn’t their way – and geez, were they ever set in their ways. We’re mermaids, they said, we stick together. We hunt and eat as one, or we’re the one hunted and eaten! It was all about survival, man. Tooth and, er, more teeth. Nature stuff. In any case, my sisters would never abandon me. It was the one thing they had going for them.
After a while, they got tired of stopping everything just to look for me, so, to prevent me running off on my own again, they assigned two siblings to follow me around. These two took it as punishment. I did as well.
In revenge, they mocked me, asking me if I were looking for a prince on the rocks. Oh, a prince wouldn’t care to fall in love with you, they said, and swam circles about me. That puzzled me, because as far as I knew, princes were food, no different from whales and sharks. Why would I want a prince to fall in love with me?
I asked, “What is ‘fall in love?’”
They twittered and laughed at me for being a silly little know-nothing fry. I bet they didn’t know either, heh.
Oh yeah, in case you haven’t caught on? I’m a real mermaid. Half-human, half-piscine – you know, fishy. For real, not like those girls who wear plastic things to the pool to get away from men, tying up their legs like that. A real, honest-to-goodness mermaid with a tail.
One time, there was a behemoth of a fight between a kraken and a whale. My two prison guards, er, sisters, were distracted. That gave me an idea, and faster than a squid can squirt, I was away.
Unfortunately, they caught up to me. I realized then that if I wanted some freedom, I was going to need a better plan. I had to go somewhere far away, somewhere they wouldn’t want to go.
I’d been thinking about land for a while, and been tired of my sisters for longer than that. But more importantly, Something had happened to me, Something good and fascinating that I couldn’t understand. All I knew was that I had to go on land to find out what it meant. And the only person who could help me do that was the sea witch.
Ironically, it was my sisters who had told me about the sea witch in the first place. Stay away, they cautioned, from those shallow waters. In particular, they warned, do not under any circumstance go near that rocky outcrop.
But why not, my sisters, I had asked, my eyes wide open, my lips trembling.
With ominous tones they told me that there be a witch with powers to take away my tail and turn it into legs. They had shuddered after saying that.
I asked them what legs were and they said, little fry, don’t ask silly questions.
Flaming fishballs, they were so stupid. I couldn’t wait to get away from them.
It took some doing to get away from my guards. I had to wait until we were hunting near the sea witch’s domain. Like before, I took off, but this time, I headed for the shallow waters as quietly and quickly as I could. They spotted me leaving, but once they saw where I was heading, they milled about in fear and confusion. I headed for a hole in the rocks, covered ominously by fronds of vegetation and bones – it was obvious what the place was – and shouted to the sea witch, “For half the length of my hair, keep me hidden from my sisters’ sights, so that we may bargain further.”
I still can’t believe that worked.
Anyway, I told the sea witch I wanted to walk on land. I told her that I wanted to see what it was like, if it was a dead thing, or if it was alive, like the sea. After all, there were things that came from there, that floated about upon their boats.
The sea witch heard me out. She sucked on her talons for a bit and stroked her gills. Then she laughed. I thought she was going to tell me to go away and not talk about silly things, the way my sisters would, but she grabbed my tail like she was going to spank my butt. And, she pulled – that nerve, you know, the sensory one that tells you where you are when you’re in the water? Oh, you wouldn’t know about that. Imagine if someone went and stuck their talons into your back and snagged your spinal column. Yeah, now you get it, haha, so, she pulls and she pulls and… She did this thing, and, it was like I had a big fucking zipper running up me, splitting my tail in two.
That’s how I got my legs.
Damn right it was painful. It hurt so fucking bad that after, when she stuck breathing bags and tubes into my chest, and sewed up my gills – look, you can hardly see the wounds on my neck – I didn’t notice the pain as much. That’s how much it hurt.
She smacked my ass. Told me to get going. So I toddled out of the water into a shitty little seaside town, stocked with oily men smelling of dead fish. I must have been in shock, because it took me a while to notice that that bitch, the sea witch, had taken my voice! She had said there would be extra payment later on for services rendered, but I thought it would’ve been standard stuff. Tradeable items, like lice off a great white, the eye of kraken, or the life of a prince or something. Easy payment plan.
Only, it wasn’t.
Speaking of princes… I met this guy at the corner grocery store, where I watched him grip, knuckle-white hard, the handle of an empty shopping basket. He seemed to be building a philosophy of toilet paper. I didn’t blame him. Man just wanted something cheap, so what did furry creatures with glassy eyes, like mounted fish, have to do with wiping ass? Which of them should he trust? Soft or strong or supreme, all kinds of sibilant words just for a sh—
Anyway, everything goes down the toilet in the end.
“Tough call, isn’t it?” I broke in.
His gaze travelled down. There I was. Girl in motorized wheelchair. He had a glum sort of face, like an escargot missing its shell. I’ve seen happier, less-confused faces on a flounder. Well, he was like that before I showed up! Could’ve been the toilet paper, or, more likely, the lack thereof. Could’ve just been his face.
“I’d get the one with the kitten. No, the other one, about to get flattened by a piano. That’s it. The usual price is a fucking joke, but it’s on discount at the moment. A good catch, if you ask me. Toss me one, please.”
He passed me a pack of the (temporarily) cheap, but soft, strong, and supreme toilet paper. I saw him hesitate, then take one for himself.
If I had known then that he had just set himself up for a week of breakfast at St. Luke’s and dinners of mac ‘n cheese from the food bank, I would have discouraged him. But apparently, he tells me later, my “eyes like seaweed twinkled at him in expectation” and he felt he needed the fancy toilet paper as a conversation piece. What a sweetheart.
Anyway, I told him my name, Annalee, and asked him for his.
Liam.
“Like the prince? Not even half of one? Haha. Joking. I have a thing for princes,” I said. “You see, I’m a mermaid.”
Bastard left me on aisle 8. So I powered up Moby – that’s my wheelchair, recently overhauled with new batteries and tires, and man, that baby could do up to 6 mph on a straight, clear aisle. Too bad the aisles weren’t exactly empty. Toot toot. Schools of fish can dodge me, why couldn’t humans? It was Saturday afternoon, and there were the usual line-ups for taking away our money, so I caught up to him three laden shopping carts and four full baskets away from freedom.
“Mermaids love princes,” I continued, as though he hadn’t, a moment before, bade me a hurried goodbye. “We pluck them out of the water, when they’re drowning.”
He shuddered and took a half-step away. I should’ve toned it down maybe, but she who drops the trident hath not cod for dinner.
“Sometimes we rescue them even when they’re not drowning, maybe having a pleasant little swim out in the sea. Some of us try to snag princes by actually causing them to jump into nasty waters. Sirens, you know. Totally unethical bitches. Can you swim?”
Great Poseidon’s seahorses, what a loaded question! I found out just how loaded, much later, along with everything else.
At that point though, Liam merely stared, for the longest time, at the Old Farmer’s Almanac, sold beside the payment counter among the candy, gum, and blazing tabloid lies. The cashier rang up two cartloads of groceries before he responded. It was like I wasn’t there.
He unfixed his eyes from some celebrity’s cleavage, or maybe it was the roast turkey on Canadian Living, and told me that, no, he did not swim. Then he chuckled. A rather alarming prospect after all that gloominess. He said – don’t you laugh – that he walked on water during winter.
OK. So I laughed.
(Liam says my laugh is like an otter’s bark. Like the ones he saw during a school trip to the Biodôme de Montréal a long time ago. Heh.)
“Oh, Liam,” I said. “Why do you want to walk on water? You should swim in it. I can teach you. You’ll be one with the waves. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a tail. People swim all the time without tails. Though, I admit, tails are nice things to have.”
I must have looked at my legs then, wistfully, and with great longing. I can’t remember, because we’d reached the cashier and busied ourselves with packing and paying. I lent Liam a quarter because all he had in his pocket was fluff and expired bus transfers.
Liam says my otter laugh and that look of longing when I looked at my legs made him stay with me the rest of the afternoon.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s go back to when I first got my legs. There I was, fresh out of the sea. Walking, yes. On land, true. But I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t sing. Bet you didn’t know that a mermaid’s life, her very survival – escape from predators, the control of great beasts during a hunt; life and death stuff – depends on her voice? On her siren song? You did? Huh. Good for you.
Well, it didn’t matter anyway, not in that town. People treated me good there, despite being a stranger. Not sure why. Anyway, while I couldn’t sing or speak, I still had a mouth, right? I used it. For what? Geez. Use your imagination.
In that town, I could also dance. I danced like I was in water still, sweet and slow, in and out like the tides. Liquid. Ah. And all that while, it felt like I moved on burning, freezing, diamantine sea urchins. I wasn’t used to it, see? I wasn’t used to having feet.
I danced, made some money, and as soon as I could, I went looking for somewhere else to live. Somewhere more alive.
Don’t ask me how I ended up in Ottawa.
Liam, who had also stumbled, somewhat confusedly, into Ottawa, found out about the scales the first time he ran his hand under my skirt, up my thighs, across sand, across broken shells, rotting seaweed and driftwood, across the desolate beaches of my legs, polluted by an oil slick.
“It’s not as bad as it feels,” I said. “I’ve got mild ichthyosis vulgaris.” Why did I say that? I’d already told him I was a mermaid, it sounded like a fucking apology. Maybe I was just nervous. We’d known each other, what? A month? A week? Um, wait – it was less than an hour.
His roving hand returned to port, innocent and flaccid of intentions, and he reached for the toilet paper, still in the plastic bags beside the couch.
I got mad. “You’re not going to catch anything, you dick. It’s a genetic skin disorder. If I don’t moisturize, my skin turns to scales.” It’s not a disorder. It’s my skin. My gorgeous, scaly, mermaid skin.
He pulled far, far away, out to sea, where the big ships sailed, his with a broken mast.
“Useless dollar store crap moisturizers.” I grabbed Liam’s hand and placed it somewhere slick. I gripped firmly and leaned over to glare at him. “Make up your mind. If not, see if I put out next time.”
He made up his mind. And, I might add, didn’t regret it. Then he chose that moment to muse out loud that all in all he had considered it quite pleasant, despite the faint odour suggestive of fish. It reminded him of sea scent.
“Say what?” I asked.
He said, you know, smells like the hand-washing liquid.
“You mean the stuff that’s not quite blue nor green, but teal?”
He supposed that was what he had meant.
“That weird blue-green globby thing that we’re supposed to believe will sanitize our life? The one we get from the dollar store, in bottles where the labels have pretty pictures on them mimicking expensively designed bottles, so we can pretend we are better off than we are?”
Er, yes? He asked if that was a problem, the scent. Women were all like that, weren’t they? They smelled like the Atlantic, he said.
The Atlantic! He hadn’t been near that body of water, nor women either, it would seem. Rivers and canals, ye-es. Lakes and ponds, ye-es. He was of the royalty of dirt, born of farmers who harnessed freshwater (which was anything but fresh by the time they’re done with it).
“Sea scent, my briny ass,” I said, ignoring what he said about women. “The people who make this hand-washing crap, the ones who name the things, have they actually been to the sea? The sea smells like salt and dead microbe shit. Even under water. That’s not sea scent. It’s high fantasy.”
He was forced to agree with me. After all, he wasn’t a fair judge. He had never seen anything as grand as the ocean, he said. Never anything that undulated away into eternity.
He had never been grand, this prince without land.
But he was, ya know, kinda my prince.
You want to know what made me want to come on land in the first place? I said already, I saw Something and couldn’t understand what it was.
Wait. What? You think…a prince on a fucking boat? For fuck’s sake, who gives a fuck about princes and their fucking Olympic yachts? I bet they learned to swim in their fucking Olympic pools, building their fucking Olympian muscles. I could wait forever and never have to rescue one, thank fucking Poseidon. Unless he had cramps or something. Or a norovirus. And then I’m not sure I’d want him.
OK, sure, I was sort of dumb before. I thought princes were food (maybe you don’t want to go too deep into this?). But after I came on land, I found out they were men. Still not impressed.
Look, mermaids are pretty democratic beings. The individual is only important because they add to the group. Got that? No? Whatever. The key is that we don’t elevate ourselves with land (don’t have it), money (also don’t have it) or titles (laughable and related to the previous two).
Now, a real prince, I think, is the sort of person who exudes unadorned kindness. The real shit, not sorry-ass stuff like giving patronizing handouts… Say, you wouldn’t happen to have a smoke on you, would you? Chocolate bar? Coffee Crisp! My favourite. Thanks.
Where was I? Right. The Something. You seriously really wanna know what it was I saw?
Here goes. I saw a man on a lobster boat in the Bay of Fundy. He was red and flabby, and swore to God Almighty. He dropped traps into the water, chummed with fish guts – herring, it tasted like – mixed with molasses in a little net. So, you know, I fell in love with the idea of men on legs, all because one of them bought me lunch.
Lame, huh?
For some reason, that made me think of Liam. He’d grown up on a farm, you know. He used to swim a lot, as a kid. To swim, he had a choice of many ponds – each dominated by fearsome fertilizing geese that messed up everything in their path, including, on one memorable occasion, Liam – and the Lake.
The Lake was pretty, and made up the cottage-country part of Liam’s otherwise remote hometown. The water was clear and clean. Thus, Liam saw everything, and was terrified, that time his legs had been caught by the skeletal branches of the ghost grove that lay beneath.
He said he had visited Heaven. He was sure of it. He just didn’t recall much, not even memories of china dogs. The china dogs came into it because the feeling of going to Heaven was much like that time they had gone to Simcoe when he was three years old, to visit Great-Aunt Jane, famous in the family for her dog figurine collection. All he remembered from that trip had been butter tarts. Try as he might, he could never remember the china dogs.
After the Lake, Liam no longer swam and was averse to bathtubs. Showers were barely acceptable. He avoided skating, even, because of the possibility of falling through the ice.
All I could think of, when he told me his tale, was that he must have seen something really awful in Heaven, to fear it so. I don’t think he saw china dogs, they’re nice.
Anyway, he’d seen Something too, but I don’t think it make him feel as great as my Something made me feel.
My voice? Of course, I can talk now. Look, I mentioned sisters, right? They’re – what would you call mermaid chauvinists? Mermaidists? Fishists? Those people, anyway. They believe that a mermaid isn’t a mermaid without her siren song. I mean, for me, the song is a survival tool I carried with me. It was a part of me, not all of me. To them, the song was everything. The song was more important than the back-end. You know, the tail? They couldn’t stand it (swim it?) that I had done gone given up that beautiful singing voice of mine.
A short while after I got my legs, when I was still dancing in that awful joint in that dinky little town, a few of my sisters got brave enough to go to the sea witch.
Before the sea witch, they beat their gorgeous breasts and pulled their lustrous hair (additional mermaid must-haves), and tried to make a deal.
The sea witch listened to them.
Said she, “Well, I reckon that if she wants her tongue back, you could return her legs.”
My sisters loved the idea! It would solve their problems at one go. They came and told me the deal, thinking I’d jump at the chance. Thinking I was tired of being gawped at by horrible things on two legs, that I was tired of the pain of moving on legs.
But I wasn’t going to dance forever, that was just for money to get out of town. And sure, the legs still hurt. But otherwise it felt so right, especially when I walk about barefoot in dirt. It made me feel at home, for once.
So I signed at them, “No fucking way.”
Had my own plans, you see. I was going to find my own happy ending.
So I did leave that no-name town, ending up somehow in Ottawa. And I met Liam on aisle 8, and he, the silly guy, said to me he wanted to take care of me. I was like, what? I told him I could damn well take care of myself, I didn’t need another sister. He got rather upset about that, and sulked about for a bit. He said it was what people do for each other when they like each other.
“Is that love?” I asked. Honest, I had really wanted to know. He clammed up and I couldn’t get any answer about that point from him. I thought, well, what’s the harm in giving it a try, maybe I’d figure love out. So we moved in together.
We shared an apartment on the third floor of a high-rise, in a building that used to house junkies, where, once upon a time, those driven beyond desperation would fling themselves off of the Brutalist balconies, leaving behind a legacy on the street below. Things were different now. People weren’t driven to such desperation, only to the kind of resignation where they sit about, yes, in one piece, but hollow and with empty eyes. I don’t know. Maybe things were better in the old days – we had more heart.
The people who lived in our building had bedbug bites, cats, dogs that looked like pit bulls but were said to be boxers, and Yorkshire terriers that may as well have been clones, the way they yapped and looked alike.
The place swarmed with construction workers, because the new owners wanted to fix it up so they could double the rent and attract a better class of people. Not us, in case you haven’t guessed. We were both on disability, and while the place wasn’t exactly a turreted castle, at least the elevators worked…most of the time.
Who am I kidding? It was a cloaca pile.
The balcony made up for the inside, and was wide enough to fit the wheelchair. I loved sitting there, listening to seagulls scream as they followed the stream of the street, looking for – who knew what? Fish that swam in tar? Sitting there reminded me of those moments of peace away from pesky elder siblings.
Sometimes, Liam came out and sat with me.
“I feel like I’m on a high rock over the open seas,” I said to him once, with my eyes closed. “I love the feel of the wind in my hair. I love the sun on my skin, but not too much, because I burn. Doesn’t this make you happy, Liam?”
To sum up his speech: he replied that happiness was never much of a consideration for him. Money, or the lack of it, made up his mental state. Further, he seemed plagued with the fundamental inability to believe that such things as joy existed for the likes of him. Others, perhaps, but not Liam. Because Liam was the boy who went to Heaven, and the man who could almost, but not quite remember it. A lot of work went into chasing the memory of something profound day after day, not knowing if he’d recognize it when he saw it. Every time a potential Heaven pops up, the klaxon goes off in his brain, lights start flashing and people yell at him with advice. The people in his head, that is.
He suffered the repetitive drumming, thumping, grinding construction that drilled into his head. Drilled so that his brain split open to the world, side-to-side and front-to-back. Rat-a-tat-a-tat, said the jackhammer. Rat-a-tat-a-tat, said the man in the yellow hat. Rat-a-tat-a-tat, said my man one day, through gritted teeth, in the throes of his agony.
And he reminded me that on that day, we’d just been to the office of the provincial disability support program. The well-apportioned office, whose carpeting did not smell of cat dander and stale beer, had a wall-to-wall painting which to me, was a metaphor for the frenzy and violence that followed a whale hunt, but, after prising apart the artist statement, seemed to be about the painter’s revelational relationship with his addictions. Same thing. All Liam saw was a migraine.
Further, the case worker, some new lady with carmine nails and a suspicious smile, had stared pointedly at my legs, saw that I couldn’t be faking it, looked disappointed (I swear she did), had then turned to Liam and asked, “What’s wrong with you?”
Judgemental bitch. You won’t last long. And hey, you’ve got lipstick on your teeth. Nyah.
It had bugged me that she only saw the wheelchair, though really, she wasn’t the only one. Can’t tell you the number of times I wanted to yell, “Lookit me here. Here! I’m a person,” but anyway, that’s another story. At least she didn’t give me any shit over my cheques. It bugged Liam that she gave him trouble. So he was a bit grumpy at that time. I got it.
But I asked him, “Don’t you believe in fairy tales?”
He asked if I meant a happily-ever-after. Because if so, no. If I’m talking about love, he’s not too sure if he knew how to do that. He wanted me around, wanted to take care of me, but what was love? Heaven in a butter tart?
However, he said, he was moved by my sense of conviction, and that my faith “shone from nacreous eyes, with a fervour reminiscent of the saints depicted on stained-glass windows” so he’d think about it. I think he was a little high from the painkillers.
Maybe I was a little high too, or maybe I was irked by his bitterness – I mean, I had to put up with all that shit too, and I was trying to be happy – because I said, “Humans fall in love because they have souls. Mermaids don’t have souls. When we die, we don’t go to Heaven or to Hell. We go back to the sea. We become the sea. Whadaya think about that?”
He looked thoughtful, and a little cross-eyed, and asked what mermaids do for love.
That made me laugh. I barked like a cute otter.
“Dearie, mermaids don’t love each other. We just get born, eat and shit, fuck and die, and turn into sea foam. Sea foam, for Poseidon’s sake. What’s sea foam but whale sperm or something.”
For a moment, his eyes cleared. He said that it seemed that regular people, those without tails, did the same thing. He wasn’t too sure about the sea foam.
Another week went by. He was high again from the painkillers. He said maybe the sea foam thing happened to regular people too. Who was to say that it didn’t? Who was to say that the afterlife wasn’t a wave, beating fanatically upon the shores?
Sea foam. Sea spray. Weird glowing globs of waterless sanitizers that smelled of teal hand-washing liquid. Sea spray that smelled of dead microbe shit.
That was what was waiting for me.
I don’t know what made me think my sisters would leave off easily. They had wanted me back, even though I’d showed them the finger (maybe it would have been more effective if they’d understood what it meant). They still thought they could get me to trade my new legs for my tail and song.
The attention was touching, but no way was I going back. I’d just got enough cash to leave that gloomy town, and my future was sparkly.
Now, in the stories my sisters would have killed my prince. But, haha, I didn’t have one at the time, the lucky dog. My sisters went back to the sea witch.
The sea witch, she said, “Nice hair, sisters. Give me that. All of it.”
My idiot sisters protested. The hair was important too.
The sea witch sighed. “OK, give me most of it. But it won’t be enough, because now I want the legs, too. I’ll be nice. Just half. Your little rebel can keep the other half, either the left, or the right, or cut off at the knees. I don’t care. Your choice. Have a good one.”
Truth is, I didn’t give a shit about singing again. Or heck, talking. Walking takes you places. But you can’t argue with people like my sisters. They know what’s best for you, get it?
One day, they showed up with their hair in bobs and pixie cuts, and sang to me until I fell asleep. When I woke up… Voilà! C’est no legs below the knees. You know what they said to me? They said, “It hurt you to walk anyway.”
Bitches.
I had thought that Liam and I were solid, like iceberg… No, that’s not quite right. Too brittle, too cold. We were more like the earth beneath us, warm and, well, earthy.
The pain came suddenly. All over. One day I was fine, the next I looked in the mirror and what I saw there was like a shark unravelling in formaldehyde. I began to understand Liam’s migraines, how he behaved the way he did sometimes due to the pain, because I too wanted to blame everyone for my sickness.
Couldn’t pin it on a god, too far away and I had no soul. My sisters? Blamed them for everything anyway, but they too were too far away, in the past and locality, so it didn’t stick. Poor Liam received the brunt of my accusations.
I thought, maybe, it was all about love. But what did I know about love? I mean, come on, I once thought lobster bait was part of love (help yourself to this metaphor, can’t stand to look at it myself).
All I understood about love was Liam’s daily kindnesses to me. The stuff that made me re-evaluate my definition of princes. He did simple things, like rearranging items in the apartment so I could reach them without having to depend on someone all the time. Like raising the floor of the balcony, so I could get my wheelchair out there without a problem. Doing the laundry, changing the sheets…
I chafed at some of the stuff he did. I didn’t want to be babied. But then he pointed out that I had to do the cleaning, the cooking, and the grocery shopping when he was sick. There was a synergy between us, he said. It all worked out in the end.
Or it did for a bit anyway, until I got sick. Then I wondered, maybe that wasn’t love.
I thought, well, mermaids didn’t have souls, right? Humans did. Mermaids lived in water, humans lived on land. What if, to live on land properly, to be human, one had to have a soul? And to have a soul, one needs to love, or be loved. Since mermaids didn’t love, I had to depend on the other.
Why was I still sick then? Was it because Liam didn’t love me enough? He said those kindnesses of him were a sort of love, and maybe the only kind I could get from him.
I wondered then if maybe Liam didn’t love me enough because he wasn’t properly motivated. Maybe he didn’t actually think I was a mermaid.
Did he buy the explanation that my scaly skin meant I was a mermaid, and that being a mermaid, I had no soul? Or did he just think it was a skin condition that other humans have? That I sat all day on Moby because of some accident that had happened to me, and I had blocked it out from trauma? That I’m making everything up as some healing fantasy? That I, too, had a version of Heaven and clamouring voices in my head?
Somedays I thought maybe I did.
So I couldn’t even hate him for thinking that.
When it got really, really bad, I went to Liam in the shower, while he was naked in mind and body, so that I could hear, really hear what he thought about me being a mermaid.
I showed him a handful of hair, that had come out of my head in clumps. “Look at me. I don’t have a soul, nothing to tie me to this place. I need love, Liam, and you don’t love me enough. Look.”
“I thought mermaids don’t love either way,” he said.
“They don’t come on land either.”
“I give you that. So how would loving you help?”
I explained my reasoning, and his face was an unfeeling blank. I gasped like a fish out of water, whether from anxiety, or my sickness, I didn’t know. And in the midst of all that, a thought came to scare me further. It may be too late to be loved, to get a soul. It may be that the only thing that may help is the sea witch, but… I had a prince now. What would be her price to make me whole again?
“Let’s go to the doctor,” said Liam.
“No, there’s a long wait time.”
“We’ve put it off long enough. You’re really sick, Annalee. They won’t make you wait. We’ll go to Emergency.”
We didn’t go to Emergency. I went out to the balcony and he finished his shower. He took a long, long time. Odd. He’d always been afraid of water before. There were no seagulls that day to take me away, so I thought about Liam’s lack of reassurance.
“Why didn’t you tell me you loved me?” I said, to my slightly damp prince, when he finally came out.
“How am I supposed to answer that? If I said I loved you enough, and loved you more than enough, here’s proof that I don’t.” He leaned forward and brushed my cheek, and ran his hand through my hair. He sat back, staring at the dull lock of hair in his hand.
“It’s my sisters’ fault. If they hadn’t done what they did, this wouldn’t happen,” I said. “If they hadn’t chopped off my legs, I would grow into the land. I’d be able to ignore the call of the ocean.”
“Not everyone has legs, Annalee.”
“Did they come from the sea? No. So who’s to say it isn’t the reason why I’m sick?”
“I thought it was my fault,” said Liam. He had his secret smile on. It was a sad smile.
“Oh, my God, the air is hurting my lungs,” I said. “This is tearing me apart.”
“I wish it wasn’t,” he said.
No one had spotted the madman in their midst. No one had seen anything, had done anything. Yet, in their horrific, heartbroken pain at my “death,” they, the media, the public at large, ate up the news with ghoulish delight. They called Liam names. They wanted to bring back capital punishment, just for him.
Of course they were afraid. They did not want the same things to happen to them. Let one man throw his common-law wife from a bridge, and soon we’d all be screwing gay dolphins. Bye-bye civilization!
What gets me is that all along, they’ve always only seen the wheelchair. All of a sudden, I’m somebody?
Liam couldn’t speak. He couldn’t understand anyone. They probably sounded like seashells over his ears. I imagine he sat shackled to a leg of a recalcitrant table in a grey, grey interview room, listening to the sounds of the ocean he had never seen. They must have questioned him, in a loop, expounding clashing opinions and theories for a motive.
Disability checks? An accident? Murder-suicide pact, forgetting one vital component? Or just plain evil? Pick one, said the Good Cop, for the sake of a cup of lousy coffee. Pick one, we’d all like to sleep.
Just like TV.
You know, I saw it. I saw that it was going to happen. There had been a rapid succession along the street: a seagull, a lady on a bicycle with a red tuque, and a grey car.
I remember frowning, and chewing on my thick, plaited hair. I mulled over it for days. When Liam asked me what was wrong, I told him about the sequence and said, “There’s a message for me. Whatever it is.”
“I think it means that people use the street and birds fly over them. Now, if a squirrel had come by on a bicycle, and a raccoon in a car after hot-wiring it, I’d stop to think twice.”
I glared at him like he was escargot marinating in garlic.
“It’s a mermaid thing,” I said. “You wouldn’t understand.”
And how could he? A mermaid has mermaid thoughts. Seagulls were bringers of messages. Red followed by grey meant violent death, or maybe passion then peace. A small vessel followed by a larger vessel meant big things were going to happen. But I’m not an oracle, and I was all alone and playing at being human, so I couldn’t ask anyone what it really meant. I had never before yearned to speak to my sisters, to find out what they knew. Was that what was making me so bitter all of a sudden? The realization that maybe I wasn’t even mermaid enough?
All those people thought Liam had killed me, because they found out he’d dropped me into the river. They thought that way because that’s how things happened on TV.
I think Liam agreed with them, the social media commenters and the police, because maybe he had TV thoughts too, notwithstanding the Heaven hiding in his head. Perhaps he nodded for their benefit, nodded, like a seabird bobbing upon the water, placid on the surface, frantic paddling beneath. Poor Liam.
Could I blame him for abandoning me? He was scared. I don’t completely understand that feeling, it was one I never had the luxury of exploring.
I’ve always ignored warnings, those from my sisters, or from well-meaning folks who only saw the girl in the wheelchair. To be fair, sometimes you need to listen. But sometimes, life isn’t about staying safe, but about doing stupidly risky things – the kind of things that makes life worth living.
But I can say shit like that, cos, “I’m a survivor!”
I’m not saying you need to go down the difficult path. There are all kinds of dying, ya know?
He tried to cheer me up. He tried to show me that he loved me. He wrapped me up, nice and warm in blankets because I was shivering; and because I asked him to, he took me to the wide pedestrian walkway on the Alexandra bridge. We stood and looked at the boats on the river beneath. It was late evening, and the sun was drifting, lingering, waiting to set. Few people were about.
“Those are gorgeous,” I said, pointing. “There, in the water, the rocks standing tall, like pillars. Tufas. I see them, rising out, reflecting – red, white, and gold. Oh, hear them sing. A song a wind chime would make if it was made of shale. Listen, when the waves touch the pillars… Listen. They’re just rocks, you know. Beautiful rocks. They’re not alive, but they sing. They don’t have souls, do they? How weird would it be if they did? Where is my soul, Liam? Where?”
He didn’t reply with words, but I felt a slight squeeze on my hand. We stayed there together, me on Moby, staring through the bars, Liam leaning against the railing, until it got a little darker, but the sun stubbornly clinging to day.
“They’re not really there, are they? The tufas,” I said. “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen tufas. Was it a dream I remembered? Is this all a dream?”
He shook his head. “No, there aren’t any tufas. And no, this isn’t a dream. I don’t think.”
“Oh.”
“Where,” he said softly, “is our happily-ever-after?”
“We’re not there yet.”
I was lying, he knew. And the voices in his head, what were they saying? Where was that Heaven I wanted for us? Suddenly, I realized that my time there, on land, was over. I couldn’t continue on, not in that form.
“Liam, if you love me, you’ll throw me into the river now.”
“Don’t even joke about things like that.”
“I’m not joking.”
“I love you, Annalee. But…” He looked at the river beneath.
“Tough call, isn’t it?
“This isn’t like choosing toilet paper,” he said.
“You don’t believe that I’m a mermaid.”
“Annalee, I do believe you. I’ve been with you all this while.”
“Yes! You cleaned up after me, and took care of my dinner, and made sure I was happy.”
“Well, then. I don’t understand.”
“You let me pretend to be a mermaid. See. You can’t deny that. You want it to be true too. You don’t want this world to be the kind of pathetic place that prints images of soft kittens on plastic packages so that people are persuaded to buy pulped dead trees. You don’t want to believe in the sad truth of a girl in pain. You want to believe in something other than the mundane. You’re chasing, chasing, chasing after your Heaven, like a dog chases his tail, but unlike the dog, you’re afraid to catch it.”
“I don’t know what you want. Do you want me to believe you or not?”
“I want you to believe the right thing for the right reasons. I want you to believe, truly believe, that I am a mermaid. Then maybe you’d find that this, this life is your Heaven, and that it’s OK.”
“How the heck do I do that?”
“Drop me into the water. Watch me revert to type.” I was pretty sure that that was what would happen.
“You’re crazy!”
“Help me, Liam. I can’t do this by myself.”
“No. No! Why are you—?”
“Help me. Please. And…come with me.” It was selfish of me to say that, but I wanted him with me. I suddenly realized that I couldn’t do without him in my life. I’ll keep him safe from the sea witch. There are other things to trade with besides princes.
Liam didn’t speak for a while. Cars rushed by at intervals, thump, thump, thumping, the high-pitched humming of the bridge, hurting.
“What is the alternative?” he asked. “If…if I don’t do what you say. What else is there?”
I smiled at him. “In another world much like ours, you are a sane, evil bastard. That makes me a sick, pathetic fool. Believe, Liam. Let me go into the water, and then come with me. I’ll take care of you.”
“How? How would that work?”
“I…I don’t know. Just come with me, please? You didn’t know how to take care of me either, before, but you figured it out.”
“Yeah, I did.”
“The sea witch would help. I know she would. Here’s an idea. You could give her your memories, the ones of Heaven. She’d be able to get them out. She likes shit like that. And you don’t really want the memory, do you? Whadaya say?”
“Um. How do you know you’ll become healthy again? A healthy mermaid, I mean.”
“I don’t know if we’re ever healthy, I mean, what with sea lice, fungal and bacterial infections, and squids, octopi and careless turtles, and don’t forget the oil spills and plastic, and—”
“You know what I mean!”
“Look. I don’t know if I’d go back to what I was. Maybe it’s straight to sea foam for me. But I know what will happen if I stay. So…Liam?”
“OK.”
He took the blanket from my lap and folded it with care. Then he picked me up from Moby, with no effort at all. I’d lost so much weight. I hadn’t even realized. I clung to Liam, and he held me tight.
“I’m going to miss Moby.”
“Annalee,” said Liam, his voice urgent as he clutched me painfully, “What if I can’t love you because I don’t have a soul? Is that why I’m like this? Maybe that’s why you’re sick. I’m not human enough.”
“My dear, dear prince,” I murmured in his ear. “In that case, maybe this is the best for both of us. We’re both of a kind. I am sea foam. Soulless I may be, but I love you.”
He lifted me onto the railing. My truncated legs dangled over the water.
Now, it was time for our happily-ever-after. He held me and didn’t seem to want to let go. I wriggled violently. “I love you, Liam.”
And I was falling, falling, free.
He called out my name. He said he loved me.
There was a desperation to his cry. A ring of truth. Maybe, facing my loss, his heart opened. Maybe he thought I wouldn’t be able to hear him, and that absolved him of his inhibitions. Maybe he found that he had a soul after all. Whatever reasons he had for saying those words, I knew he meant it. Finally.
Amazing how many thoughts you could cram into such a small, significant moment between a bridge and a river.
Still, he didn’t come after me, not for a while. He tells me that in his cell he had wondered if he would have liked the Atlantic. Every day, during exercises in the yard, he would wonder what I was doing. Cavorting with other mermaids? Swimming with the dolphins? Sometimes he thought I had
gotten sicker and died. He wondered if I felt as cold as he did, as he sat in that north-facing cell, day after day. It was so cold, he says, he could walk across the water in his paper cup.
I never got around to teaching him how to swim, so he worried about that, if he needed it in the Atlantic, or if it would come naturally. He learned to take longer showers, and the fear of Heaven that he had picked up as a child lessened in intensity, until one day, it wasn’t there. In its place was the strong wanting to go to the sea, to be with me.
He wanted, he says, to walk on water, to fall into the water. He wanted to break upon the shores, like a giant heart beating, together with everything, with me.
He wanted to dissolve into Heaven.
OK.
Once upon a morning, dull and grey, there was a prison cell that faced north. In it, they couldn’t find the man, Liam. Upon the empty cot, was a pillow, wet, wet with the sea.