THE VERY EXISTENCE OF THE TOWN of Gumbo Limbo, based on a murky distinction between land and fog and the gray-green waves, had always seemed doubtful at best, and in fact Gumbo Limbo may not be there anymore. But in the time I am thinking of—when a frail guest arrived on the shore, and lies spread like smut in a rotten hull, and rains of an impossible duration nearly smudged the village away—a boy did live in Gumbo Limbo. His name was Liam Murgen, born Van den Heuvel. He was the one who befriended the guest. This was quite some time ago, and both of them have long since left.
The boy lived there because when he was very little his parents died in the scenic railway fire in Canada, so he was sent to live with an uncle far down south in Gumbo Limbo. It turned out the uncle was dead, but the boy was taken in by the local apothecary Murgen, who’d been a friend of this uncle. The boy had little else than a box of clothing and toys mislabeled “Julius.” He had an idea that his parents were resting in a fancy sanitarium in Massachusetts or Maine, and would return when the fire was over. In his mind’s eye he saw a man and woman reclined on a balcony under a canvas awning striped yellow and lime; a nurse or butler pressed cool cloths to their foreheads and served them chilled milk in tumblers on a periwinkle tray.
But the boy no longer much imagined these scenes. He’d assumed his guardian’s name, and was not unhappy living with the elderly man in the apartment over Murgen’s Apothek on Creel Street. He watched the people of Gumbo Limbo in their long, inevitable parade through the pharmacy. He saw how, while one customer burdened with the most flagrant of maladies might futilely struggle to conceal it, another, with no evident disease of any type, would flaunt his imagined ill with vulgar show. He saw the discretion and care with which Murgen dispensed remedies for these afflictions, whether or not they were visible to the eye, whether they abided in the mind or the flesh. So the customers came with crepitus and albugo, quinsy and railway spine, split nails and sclerotic teeth, light sleep and dyspepsia. They came with rodent ulcer, stammer, and lily rash; Saint Clair’s disease, limping, and glomus. Murgen pressed granules of medicine into hard little tablets, mixed acetous tonics and dissolving powders, compounded pots of waxy or oily unguents. He fermented widow’s wood, crafted a debriding agent from the beards of blue mussels, and desiccated the milk from a rare deep-sea orchis. Sometimes these medicaments salved the afflictions and most of the time they did not. Murgen gave free treatments to those who could not afford them, like Mr. Hannity from the swamp, who came with an egg of a tumor on his face and went away weeping with gratitude and no hope, no hope. Murgen tried not to lie, and to those supplicants who wanted to be deceived he mostly kept silent. He knew their secret deformities and the fear those deformities wrought in them. He knew why they employed him: to kill off the half-dreamt, half-real monstrous versions of themselves they so hated and cherished.
Murgen cherished Liam, and worried for him. He believed the boy was losing his eyes. A customer standing near the medicine counter might have seen, through the wooden grille separating the front store from the back office, how Murgen would sit the boy across from the eye chart and, with practiced fingers trembling from palsy and concern, retrieve from the optical rack lens after thick glass lens, fitting them in the viewfinder and quizzing the child:
“Number one, or number two? Is this one a little clearer, a little sharper?”
The boy didn’t know; he couldn’t tell.
Then: “There. Something.”
Liam thought he’d discerned something clear and sharp refracted convex in one of the big glass jars.
“No. It was nothing. Sorry.”
Murgen sighed. “That’s okay.”
But it wasn’t okay. The eyes were sick. Murgen feared to try his tonics on the child because he couldn’t quite believe in them. He’d have gladly wrought an optical potion employing the blackest of diabolical arts if he thought its chemical burn might rend the veil on the boy’s vision. But there wasn’t any magic in Murgen’s craft.
“Still,” muttered Murgen. “Sometimes I think that boy sees everything.”
IT WAS TRUE LIAM’S DREAMS WERE STILL OPTICALLY CLEAR. And that was why, on the gray and mild winter morning when the boy discovered the strange visitor, he woke early and hurried down to the seashore with the peculiar sensation that he’d had the exact same dream as somebody else—he didn’t know who—and furthermore would see reproduced there in exact clarity the very thing he’d almost grasped in the dream. At the dunes he broke into an urgent lollop, but when he got there it was all gray on gray, beach and sky dissolving in a colorless mist: not the lapidary dreamscape, but the murky pannic haze of the boy’s waking eye. And yet something out there held its form between the solute phases of saltswell and sand-flat: a darkly saturate spot. A thing washed up. The boy approached: it was a creature, that was true. But even up close it was hard to tell what the creature looked like. Was that a fin or lobe—some kind of sac? A slippery part, some scales—a portion of claw? Maybe the adumbration of a face. But it was tricky, similar to the way the mouth on a stingray’s underside resembles a miniature little smiley face; but when you flip it over, it turns out the real face is on the other side: the eyes two wide-set dull expressionless beads. You’d rather have the more perfect little face on the underside. How much certainty ought one invest in a face, for fear it could be the false one? In the spirit of friendship, at least, one grants the benefit of the doubt to each and every possibility of a face.
“Hi,” said the creature.
“Hi,” said the boy. “What are you doing here?”
The boy bent his ear close, for the creature seemed to speak in the quiet susurrus of the surf itself.
“There is nowhere else,” it said. “No farther to go. The sea keeps putting me up here, always at night. Always at night.”
The creature sounded melancholy to Liam.
“Are you cold?” the boy asked.
“I start to forget what it’s like to be in the water,” it said. “And the air is cold. But I also forget that it comes again, the tide, and takes me back in. Then I remember water, and I’m not cold. But the next night it sends me up again, to the edge, where I’m cold.”
“What do you do when it rains?” asked the boy, for even now a light prickling of rain fell on them.
“When it rains on the sea? You can hear it but can’t feel it. It’s just more water. Hardly that. More like the shadow of a cloud. But up here on the shore, I can feel it.”
“Do you like it?”
“No,” said the creature.
The boy nodded. Then he said good-bye and ran back home, because he knew Yak was approaching in his rolling chair, coming along the road behind the dunes, and Murgen had told Liam to steer clear of Yak, who was a crazy person, though wealthy, a shrimp speculator and owner of lime mines upcountry.
THAT NIGHT LIAM DREAMT OF A CREATURE. He saw it lying on the sand in the dark. He woke at dawn and went back to the seashore, and again the visitor was there.
When Liam touched the creature it was cold; it quivered and sighed. It was rough like a cat’s tongue.
“Are you sick?” the boy asked.
“It’s different in the sea,” replied the creature. “Things have wisps and tatters, trail parts of themselves. Parts drift, tangle and separate. You’re always inside everything, and everything is around you, and you move in it and it moves you around. But on the beach here it is different. On the beach, yes, here I might be sick.”
“Are you sad?”
“Pick up that whelk shell,” said the creature. “Put it to your ear. Listen.”
Liam did so.
“That’s what I feel like,” said the creature.
Boy and creature spoke awhile, and though the creature had an elliptical way of expressing itself, they thanked each other for their friendship, because in the course of their talks they’d become friends. But kneeling in the sand the boy found a loose scale, a translucent tooth, a husk of something that snapped like a seedpod. He rolled the fragile bits in his fingers; he feared they were part of the creature, who was coming undone from the strain of being washed up night after night. It needed to be in the water all of the time and for some reason it couldn’t be. The sea wouldn’t let it.
The boy didn’t want his friend to disintegrate. He decided, with some reluctance, to confide the matter to Murgen.
The next day he led the old man to the spot.
“There it is,” said Liam, pointing.
Murgen craned his head (his hips were stiff) and peered. He seemed uncertain; there was a smell; he couldn’t make much of what he saw there. He’d heard of the gourami, a fish capable of breathing the air. He’d heard of things caught in the nets by fisherman in Ireland or China.
“We should put it out of its misery, I think.”
“No!” cried the boy, crouching protectively over the creature. Wordlessly the boy queried his friend. The creature indicated the waves—and just then there washed up a tiny snail shell. Liam picked it up and saw how the inside glistened royal purple.
“Look,” he said, showing Murgen. “It’s a gift. Like him. The sea keeps giving him back to us.”
The elderly man fondled the rare shell and handed it back to the boy, who put it away in his pocket.
“I remember an old story,” Murgen explained to the boy, “about a siren who slipped through the dike in Holland. She came to live among the people. Nobody could make out her speech, but they taught her to weave. It was argued that she was not a fish because she knew how to weave, but was not a woman because she was able to live in water.”
Murgen’s mind was drifting. The boy made no reply.
Murgen nodded. He agreed to the boy’s wishes. The old man helped the boy put the creature in a big pickle jar of clean water. First they dropped a little cake of sodium in the water and Murgen stirred with a wooden stick until the cake dissolved. They took the jar to the back room of the Apothek where it was safe. Liam asked the creature if it felt okay there and the creature said that it did, but could they put the jar up on the high shelf, because it felt safer and more comfortable up there, and so they did.
Now in the mornings when the boy came downstairs he went to the back room of the shop and climbed up the stepladder to see how his friend was doing.
And were it not for Murgen’s assistant—a youth by the name of Tim Rutter—the trouble in Gumbo Limbo might never have gotten started, and they all might have continued on okay.
RUTTER WAS A LANKY, FERAL-EYED PERSON with oily skin and a cruel streak that must have come from somewhere. He’d become attached to Murgen’s shop some years back. He was not a good assistant, and customers patronized the Apothek despite his presence. Rutter had a repertoire of malfeasance not so much methodical as it was impulsive, arbitrary, and weird. Not only did he overcharge the customers and keep the money but he hocked phlegm in the philters and touched himself behind the counter when a pretty girl was in the shop, or sometimes a boy, or sometimes no one at all. He seemed too cunning to be truly touched, as the physiognomy of his head and face might have evidenced, though some found the feral aspect perversely attractive or even irresistible. He suffered from an irregular form of Saint Vitus’ dance, whereby not a fit but a sudden glazed expression stole over him, a mask that suggested to those looking at him an odd mixture of contentment and consternation that seemed not to belong to his person. The frequency of the spells varied, but they tended to last several minutes. Privately Rutter referred to his condition as “the morbus,” because that is what his aunt, a Mrs. Croat, told him it was called. This aunt characterized her nephew’s rapt visage as peaceful, on account of Jesus was stroking his cheek in those times. She tried to take advantage of the spells to whisper in her paralyzed nephew’s ear of the need of controlling his weakness.
Many people in Gumbo Limbo suspected that Tim Rutter had caused a dreamy, wild-haired girl named Oona LeMur to become pregnant after she welcomed his attentions, having mistaken the boy’s hypnoid countenance for a complicated ardor. Oona lost her baby, though nobody knew for sure if the child had miscarried or if Rutter had employed some artifice he’d found in the pharmacy. Afterward Oona developed what they called the “woman’s epilepsy”; she wandered the quayside at night, pushing an empty stroller, and after a while they put her away in a home.
Then there was the matter of Liam. Tim Rutter had always despised the boy even more than he despised his employer, Mr. Murgen. But after the business with Oona LeMur, his malice intensified—despite (or even because of) the fact that the old man, who was absentminded and didn’t care for gossip, knew nothing of his assistant’s connection to the girl’s aborted pregnancy. Not only that, but Rutter’s hatred became even more maniacally focused on the little boy. Perhaps Rutter had a notion that the boy had seen something, or knew something that most others did not.
“I dislike that crazy little blind boy,” said Tim Rutter to Bobby LeMur, Oona’s older brother, who, oddly, Tim still counted among his reliable acquaintances.
“What’s wrong with the boy?” asked Bobby.
“He pees his trousers,” said Rutter. “He’s ugly. I don’t even think he is a real boy. I heard he has got water on the brain. Murgen is a fool for keeping him.”
Rutter said that he couldn’t even be sure Liam was a true boy and not a strange, sexless, large-headed imp of some kind. Rutter also knew about the special jar that was kept on a high shelf in the back of the shop. He knew of it and despised what was inside of it.
“I can hear him creeping back up in there,” said Rutter. “Saying baby talk to it. He is a spoiled child. I don’t think he is blind at all. I think he fakes it for attention.”
Liam knew that Tim Rutter knew about the jar. The boy couldn’t see the strange smile on Rutter’s face as the older boy watched him through the wooden grille, but he sensed it plainly enough.
Liam asked Murgen could they hide the jar someplace else.
“But why?” said the old man, laughing. “Who is going to mess with it?”
The boy suggested, without naming him, that Murgen’s assistant might mess with the jar.
Murgen laughed again. “Timothy? What would he want with a thing like that?”
But the boy wasn’t convinced. He carefully removed the label from a bottle of quinine and reglued it on the creature’s jar, hoping it might serve as a disguise. The boy asked the creature if it minded the label and the creature said it did not.
THE VERY NEXT MORNING, AN UNIDENTIFIABLE BOAT was spotted in profile on the horizon. By noon the boat had doubled in size and rotated slightly toward land. In the afternoon a fierce little squall passed over Gumbo Limbo, obscuring the boat from view. Purple clouds heaped up over the village, rain spat and lashed, wind drove sea nuts and the grit of oyster shell against the windowpanes. The listless surf beat itself into an angry froth and threw all manner of slimed and twisted wrack upon the sand.
When the squall had passed, the strange boat was gone. But in Gumbo Limbo there was a weird hollow noise, a kind of dysphoric reverberation that seemed to come from everywhere at once and no place in particular. It made people feel like their heads were filled with rubber. A man returning from the cinema house said he’d been issued a blank ticket, and so had refused the admission. He said he had gone to the cinema every week for the past eleven years. He believed the unnatural ticket meant that he’d been sold a viewing of a nightmare not his own. When released from his hand the ticket blew away down Mutus Street in a vortex of queerly charged wind.
The windless rains followed. It rained three days and didn’t stop. Gumbo Limbo receded behind a curtain of rain. The line between sea and sky dissolved, the line between sky and land. The lanes were canals of mud. Brine shrimp proliferated in the puddles. Instances of the sea louse and sea weevil were noted. A week went by; ten days. The rain was quiet, vertical, whispering, incessant. Mushrooms with unusual ocher labia sprouted in the cellars; rare black molds got a death grip in the walls. Mucus ran freely. Slimy heaps of refuse rotted in the breezeways. Some folks went a little deaf. The giant pods of some strange profligate plant crunched softly underfoot; the agglutinated seed husks clotted the wheels of local vehiculation. Two weeks into the slow deluge a kind of dentiform barnacle, lilac in color, had attached itself by way of a gummy tendon to every latch, newel, baluster, and gutter pipe; by the seventeenth day the peak of each chitinous bud had split and extruded a tiny fiddlehead nub, which within hours had unfurled, with obscene grace, into a false wind foot or storm tentacle. Citizens who sought the Apothek were obliged to ford a canal of mustard-colored slurry. They complained of head noise, skin blight, and geographical tongue; crepitus, night terror, and partial paralysis of the eye. Murgen shook his head and prepared tonics and poultices. Three whole weeks the rain went on. Instances of the marsh weevil were noted. In the unremitting gloom moods festered. Voices grew hoarse and decayed into angry whispers. Cases were mentioned of instantaneous death caused by lagoon-borne spores lodging in the lungs. It seemed that in some people the excess moisture had caused a perilous loosening in the delicate structures of the mind. Citizens complained of cryptopodia, cephalopathy, late rickets, anoesia. Snails and slugs reared their soft blind antennae from bed knobs and cupboard handles. In the cupboards themselves the water beetle clicked through the long minutes of the night.
The rumors Tim Rutter had begun to sow germinated in the fertile rot of Gumbo Limbo. Slouched on the porch railing of Mrs. Croat’s home, he muttered to his companions about a special jar on a high shelf in the back room of the Apothek. A jar in which old Murgen kept a thing that, while strictly speaking unspeakable, it would not be past his powers to describe, should he choose to do so. As Rutter spoke he shifted and smirked; yet the listening boys felt that Tim’s account, while definitely odd, conformed with what they felt they might already in some sense have known.
For indeed the attentive customer could have attained a partial glimpse, through the wooden grille, of a museum of the sort many apothecaries keep: specimens of local natural history as well as rare examples of corporeal perversion (omphalopagus, crinoia, cutaneum cornu), preserved in mineral spirits for the edification of specialists. But to those laypeople inclined to be appalled by jars of such prodigious content, their mode of display (obscured but not concealed by the wooden grille) might seem to reflect a subtle audacity on the part of the custodian—an implicit peep show, an inadvertent medical pornography. The pickled specimens could, in this way, be viewed as artifacts of life partially developed and misformed, stuck in time, suspended in globes of fluid, marinating in their own juices, unable to properly decay, disappear, pass on to the next world. Or else such examples of death enjarred might appear to conflict or, worse, conflate with the palliative, life-preserving purpose of the vessels of medicine alongside which they were shelved, making of the whole enterprise a relativistic and charlatanous fraud. The keeping of this sort of private museum may be one reason there has always been something suspicious about apothecaries, even kind and old ones like Murgen.
Whether or not the youths arrayed on the Croat porch believed the insinuations of Rutter is neither here nor there. They listened and would later repeat what they had heard.
Tim Rutter spat over the railing; the ejected matter plopped like a livid frog in a seething brownish pond. He asked, “What kind of abortions he got in those jars anyway?”
The question discomfited the fellows; and they went home wondering about it.
LIAM CLIMBED THE STEPLADDER, FULL OF MISGIVING. He’d had a bad dream, and no breakfast yet to dispel the gray net the dream had cast over his mind. He’d dreamt his friend the creature had rebuked him—had called him a name like “goony” or “fat ass,” or leveled some cutting accusation, such as the boy had failed to protect it or take proper care of it—then left the jar and gone back into the sea to become an argonaut, a night voyager that lives in a spiral shell, a narrow twisting house of diminishing chambers.
In his dream Liam heard a muffled scream and ran down to the beach, where a greybeard was hauling in his net—he dragged his catch through the surf and dumped it out on the sand. A little girl came running up to look. She jumped back and shrieked with terror or delight, while the old Triton worked at untangling his nets. . . .
When he woke, the boy tried to feel better about knowing it was only a dream, but the hurt feeling lingered until, having mounted the stepladder, he found his friend laughing quietly in the jar.
“Do you want to know a funny song?” it said.
“Sure.”
“It’s called ‘Turkey Foot,’” said the creature, who taught the boy the song. It was a very comical song and tears filled the boy’s eyes and rolled down his face because his friend’s joke had caused him to laugh so hard.
OONA LEMUR DREAMT THE MOON RELEASED her baby back into the sea. Its sea mother called the child back to herself.
It was going to be named “Nelly” or perhaps “Merceau.”
It had happened like this: The moon tugged and tugged until the bulb broke; it slithered out, oyster and seed pearl, over the cup’s lip, down the whelk’s tube, the finite whorl, hidden eye and sealed chamber, round and round to the vanishing point, till moonlight on cuttlewhite bone lit tiny stapes, no more than a whisper, seapolished glinting and gone.
“I named it Merceau,” she said when she woke. “It is out there on the wide world now. It has gone to an olden home.”
“OLD MURGEN, HE MADE A SIN,” said a man called Crippen, who was known to be congenitally morose.
“A bad sin,” he said. “I believe it cannot be put right.”
The talk that led the man to his conclusion came from many quarters. But the most influential testimony had come from Mrs. Croat herself. Croat was a woman who even before the long rain had suffered in the nerves, and whom Murgen had treated, at her own insistence, with salves of black mercurial lard, green belladonna, and even a silken hood thought to restore sense to the lunatic mind. Mrs. Croat maintained that Murgen had captured a she-beast with no hind limbs and malformed breasts and hands that were flippers or flattened lobes.
“Like a mermaid,” she said. “Or some type of female siren.”
The apothecary, she said, was keeping the mermaid hostage in a bottle. The rain would not stop on account of her fury. The unwholesome liquid had pickled and shrunk her. Yet even as she physically weakened (her skin or scales had yellowed and begun to slough off) her mental powers only intensified. Mute, she convulsed in her jar.
“Truly the rain will not stop,” declared the elderly woman, “until the mermaid is freed back into the sea where he got her.”
It is always a difficult matter when someone else’s nightmare gets caught in the tangled net of your dreams. A man named Onder said the creature had the head of a horse and the tail of a fish, but no one believed him. A man named Frye held that the creature was a tardigrade, otherwise known as the water bear, but no one believed him either. Nonetheless, everybody soon knew there was a mermaid ashore—or something close enough to a mermaid—and that Gumbo Limbo would drown like Atlantis, under a waste of waters a mile deep, unless the apothecary could be made to release her.
“If she is taken wrongfully from the sea,” said Mrs. Croat, “truly the sea will come to her. Wherever she is taken, there too will the sea follow.”
The man who said he’d been sold the blank ticket began to advertise a ten-cent fee for people to come inside his home and view something he called a “sea movie,” a hastily crafted zoetrope or flip book, which may or may not have purported to show a picture of the mermaid.
It is a difficult thing when not only two but many people feel they have shared the same dream. When they feel they’re still in it together. When suddenly everybody is.
“Murgen made a sin,” declared Crippen. “A strange and awful sin.”
Murgen himself, catching wind of the notion that a mermaid had been seen in the village, formed a hypothesis that a case of the sirenomelia or “mermaid syndrome” had at last befallen some unfortunate family. He said to the boy Liam that never in his long experience had he seen such a case, though he’d read of it once in a medical book, and the description of that particular birth deformity was so terrible it made him weep.
MRS. CROAT’S PORCH ROOF SAGGED under the weeks of water, seemed ready to break off like a slab of soft clay. Tim Rutter’s urine arced over the rotten railing into the soup of the submerged garden. He said, “I saw Murgen’s little retarded boy teasing the cripple fish-lady in that bottle.”
Then he fell silent. Bobby LeMur watched Tim Rutter, who was dribbling pee on his foot. He stood there holding his member and gazing into some unfathomable distance; the queer glazed expression had stolen over his face.
Bobby LeMur frowned. He had never cared much for this Rutter fellow.
MURGEN DIDN’T SLEEP, DIDN’T DREAM; he lay on his cot and listened. A murmured demand rose in Gumbo Limbo. There was a freshly rotten stench, of something damp and spoiled, and many people gathered by the water. The sanitary wagon with its pale canvas hood drew up.
Mrs. Croat, standing atop an upturned shrimp bucket, flapped her short fat arms like a penguin and expounded on her theory.
“She is alive!” cried the aunt, alluding to the mermaid. “It’s her baby—her baby has been abandoned in the sea. The mermaid must be freed unto the sea so she can nurse her child there.”
Croat painted for the crowd a picture of a baby floating in a cold limbo under the swells, a hungry baby crying out for its mama in the darkness far below the rain-pocked ceiling of the sea.
This news of a baby fanned the outrage of the stench. A chlorotic woman named Lucy Graves suggested the mermaid’s baby was dead. But such a thing was too awful to contemplate, for by that logic the rain might never stop, even should the furious and damaged mermaid be released.
From his window Murgen listened to the silence that followed the pronouncement of Lucy Graves; he listened while the wind drew veils of rain across the darkened plain of the sea; and he listened while, on the forty-seventh day of rain in Gumbo Limbo, the citizens coagulated in groups which, by the time they’d begun to clog the narrow lane before the Apothek, had formed into a veritable mob.
At the head of the mob was Tim Rutter. His face was red and strained and his sweaty arms gestured wild and inarticulate. An exhilaration swept through him like he’d never known except when he was fornicating with Oona LeMur. He shouted at the crowd, embellishing and reifying the dicta of his aunt: that Murgen the apothecary had a mermaid or other variety of fabled she-beast held hostage in the shop; that the mermaid was shrunken and deformed in Murgen’s bottle; that she raged impotently in a slightly viscous lime green solution; that, in addition, old Murgen had unnatural designs on the female creature; that for all anyone knew he might have already begun to pursue those designs; that the rain was a curse put by the mermaid to punish Gumbo Limbo for the apothecary’s secret crimes against her; that truly the rain would never end until somebody set her free.
As the words escaped his mouth, Rutter felt he believed them; as he convinced himself, so he hardened the resolve of the mob. They scooped up clots of mud and oyster shell and flung them at the shop. Two men climbed a drainpipe on the side of the building to try to get a look through the transoms at the famous hostage.
Murgen knew of the secret monstrosities wrought by nature in the bodies of God’s creatures. And he knew it was their fear that made them truly monstrous. He suspected their rage had something to do with the boy’s special jar, but he wasn’t sure what. He looked for Liam in his room above the shop but the boy was not there. A clam shell thick and heavy as a horseshoe hit the window and cracked it. Rain blew in. The old man went to the window; he held his hands before his face and wept and begged the people to stop. He raised his voice to ask why were they angry with him, with the Apothek, but the sound was swallowed in the din of the crowd. Blinking into the wind he tried to survey the crush of faces in the lane. He saw his assistant was among them.
“Is that you, Timothy?” called the old man, hoping for acknowledgment and help.
But the dead-eyed youth was buffeted and sustained in the surging press of people; his mouth hung open in a loose smile of childish incomprehension.
AGAIN AND AGAIN THE MOB SURGED against the Apothek. They had nearly smashed out every last shard of the display windows and were beginning to climb inside when a man appeared in their midst, a medical physician named Grover Stiles. Stiles was a large man and he pushed to the front and told everybody there to shut up and listen. He said Gumbo Limbo was sick—sick with rain. He told the people they had water on the brain and implored them to be still and regain possession of their persons. He told them they saw mermaids everywhere they looked. He said that he was going to walk into the Apothek and have a discussion with the apothecary Mr. Murgen.
“I intend to enter that store,” he said, “through the doorway, not the window, and take an accounting of what all is in there and what is not.”
So in the few moments of chastened bafflement the physician had bought with his speech, he entered and went upstairs to where Murgen sat on the glass-strewn floor with his back to the open window.
“I gave Leroy a syrup,” he muttered, “a syrup for the cancer. But the cancer come back.”
Stiles nodded. The apothecary’s reason was impaired.
“It is not about a cancer or a syrup,” he explained to the elderly man. “It is about this rain. And something those people think you got hidden down there in a bottle.”
“That’s all made-up lies,” said Murgen.
“It may be,” said Grover Stiles.
Murgen agreed to let Stiles search his shop in hope that the mob might desist. The physician went downstairs and announced that a deal had been brokered: He, Dr. Stiles, would search the premises. If any mermaid were discovered, she would be returned to the sea forthwith.
There rose a skeptical noise. The mob invested scarcely more trust in the doctor than in the apothecary, since in those days, as in ours, it was much the same business. A man named Horace Sympus stepped forward and demanded the liquid of the jar in question be tested for iodine to determine if the beast had lactated. Grover Stiles denied this request but said he would permit Sympus to join him in searching the Apothek. Sympus agreed, on the condition that he could, in turn, appoint two additional searchers, forming a citizens’ committee of three plus the doctor. Stiles agreed. Sympus looked around and couldn’t see anybody he knew, so he indicated at random a small round-shouldered man and a stern, sour-faced woman, whose names turned out to be Clive Dungeon and Elpiffany St. Clair. The four then entered the shop.
Murgen stood behind the counter, steadying himself. He tried to recall who these people were. He believed he’d treated the St. Clair woman for the limbic fever; to Sympus, who’d come confiding the shameful anomaly of his infant son Lyle, Murgen had been able to offer only condolence and discretion. Dungeon he’d neither seen before nor heard of. Murgen feared them: whereas before they’d come for help, they now came to ransack his shop because the wicked youth’s mad aunt had told them lies about a decayed girl in a bucket.
They searched the Apothek from top to bottom and front to back, and in the back room they found the wreckage of Murgen’s stores. Somebody had smashed a cobblestone through the deadlight. Glass and spattered liquid lay everywhere; volatile powders clouded the air, and the room was filled with the bitter smell of potent chemicals.
There lay a piece of darkish matter on the floor that must have come from one of the busted bottles. Clive Dungeon prodded it with the toe of his boot, but Murgen stopped him:
“That’s nothing to do with it. That is only my concern.”
Then they saw the big-headed child huddled in the corner, his skinny arms hugging what looked like a two-gallon jar. The boy wept over the jar and his knees shook.
The doctor approached the child and asked him what he had there.
Liam, gazing up, could not make out the face that was speaking to him. He said it was a creature, a creature who had been ill and was his friend.
“I am going to need to take a peek at your friend there, said the doctor.”
The boy shook his head. His eyes were rheumy and unfocused and he blubbered softly.
Murgen wanted to say something, but the words caught up in his throat.
The three members of the citizens’ inspection committee closed in. The doctor knelt and gently moved the boy’s arm off the jar. The boy cried out sharply. Then he began murmuring to the jar.
“Where are we going to go?” Liam asked the creature.
His friend didn’t know. It was comfortable in its liquid, unmoved by the great calamity.
“Do we have to let you go?”
Liam could imagine what would happen: The old man would put a hand on his shoulder—We got to let it go, son—and together they would carry the jar down to the seashore. In his mind’s eye the boy saw how the villagers followed at a cautious remove like a throng of sodden mourners. He saw how the long rain had smoothed the features from their faces. Then the boy and the old man knelt on the sand; the ground-glass stopper was pulled, an odor wafted up; the jar was tipped; with a gulp the thing slid forth, landing with a meaty splat on the sand where the foam purled over it; and tipped all the way over, the jar’s dregs piddled out like a faint green afterbirth. I forget that it comes again, and takes me back in, his friend had said. Then I remember water. The friend receded into the neutral gray distance where sea and sky dissolved; and Liam saw the rotten ropes of the fisherman’s net, hemp gnawed by sea lice, the scream of the little girl, the awful discovery. There’s nowhere else, no farther to go. Isn’t this the end of the sea?
“I just need to be able to see what’s in there,” said the doctor.
Grover Stiles peered into the liquid and frowned. He retrieved his spectacles from his coat pocket and had another look.
Then he glanced up at Murgen. Sympus looked to Dungeon, and Dungeon to Elpiffany St. Clair, across whose sour face a strange placidness had settled. St. Clair looked to Sympus and Sympus to Grover Stiles, who nodded and cracked his knuckles and stood and replaced the spectacles in his coat.
THE CROWD PACKED IN THE LANE received the news with despair. The rain fell on their hats and shoulders; heads bent, they stood in puddles in blank amazement. They were bereft. Anyone who had harbored in his mind a special picture of the secret captive in the Apothek felt robbed of the chance to see that picture brought out alive in a jar of fluid. None of it was real but the rain.
GUMBO LIMBO WOKE TO THE SAME RAIN after a night of dreamless sleep. In the gray dawn light Tim Rutter stood in the empty, sludge-washed lane before Murgen’s Apothek. He’d been up all night drinking a potent alcoholic clam broth. He was drunk and exhausted and vexed. He hollered in the lane and flung bits of refuse at the shop. A few people wakened by the noise, or who, like Murgen, had been unable to rest all the night, shuffled out to witness the commotion. Rutter cried forth deranged slanders against Murgen and the Apothek and the boy. He said the boy wasn’t a boy at all, but a hermaphrodite with the God-granted bodily parts of both the male and female species. He said the old man and the child had deceived the search party and all of Gumbo Limbo, but he knew just where they had hidden the grisly specimen: he meant to smash out all the remaining windows and go in there himself, this very minute, and haul the thing out in the plain light of day.
The crazed youth was shouting such things when, as tended to happen, he was struck dumb. A paralytic innocence smoothed his contorted face. And all of a sudden that charmed face was transfigured by an unearthly light. The light seemed to emanate from everywhere and nowhere at once. The sun shone through: and it made Tim Rutter look a little green.
THE CLEAR WEATHER DIDN’T LAST FOR LONG. A mist rolled in, but a dry mist, softening and soothing away the vision that had fixed itself in such hard and burnished outline in the mind of Gumbo Limbo, a desiccant mist that seemed to dry up all the rotting remainders of nightmare and panic, the wet stench of the terrible festering wrack—a mist that swept down the coastal plain from higher, drier ground, and a wind blowing dust through the village and out into the sea.
It has never been known for certain whether Murgen and the boy remained in their home for a few days, quietly sorting through the broken things, or whether in fact they left Gumbo Limbo in the rainy predawn hours of the night following the mob and the search. Or whether they almost didn’t make it out of town, the causeway being flooded, the marsh waters lipping the highway’s edge, so that it might have appeared to a distant observer that their odd vehicle was skimming the surface of a vast gray lagoon.
And the boy, going blind from a secret cause that was a mystery to the old man, said:
“What do you see out there?”
“Nothing but water. Water and sky.”
“All the same?”
“All the same. Lovely. And it looks like the rain has stopped.”
The big glass jar sloshed on the seat, wedged between the boy’s thighs, his hands on the lid.
The old man said:
“Maybe we’ll just let it go somewhere out there.”
LIKE THE RAIN PONDS AND STORM POOLS that took some time to drain, the rumors lingered. There had been a mermaid, but she’d grown so shriveled that no one could recognize her as such; or she’d shrunk to a size where the water in the jar suited her, and she stopped raging, and so the rain stopped. Or Murgen’s boy did have a secret jar, but with nothing in it except a dead seahorse or maybe a horseshoe crab, which through blindness or insanity appeared to the child as something more—and the old man, not wanting to hurt the boy’s feelings, had kept silent so as to protect his belief for a little bit longer. Or else a truly unmentionable thing had been quickly disposed of, out the back door in the night.
LIAM DREAMT HE’D WOKEN UP WITH A DISEASE, a seasickness that was an emptiness inside him, or a failing heart, seawater blood washing in and out of a grotto, a stony cave. He realized the creature was his heart and the creature was gone, back into the sea whence it had come.
“What do you think it means?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” said his friend.
Asking your own heart a question: how could it make a reply? It says only one thing ever, no matter the question you put to it. And even if you never ask one question your whole life, still it says that one thing, always and only that one thing:
I’m here. I’m going. I’m here. I’m going. I’m here.
The boy cradled the jar with a sad feeling of happiness in his heart: the feeling you get when you wake up from a bad dream to find out it’s not true, it’s still okay, and will be so for a long while yet, as far as you can see.