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The Mermaid Wall
Frances and her family were traveling to the Black Sea for holiday on the coast, in
hopes that the sea-salt air and the strange black waters, reputed to have healing powers,
would cure her father, sick now for more than nine months. Frances thought, though her
mother never said, that her father was dying, would die soon, and that the Black Sea was
their last hope. It was not a proper holiday. Only Benjamin, her little brother, was
excited to see the famous ocean, play on its dark sandy shores, build dark sandcastles out
of crushed alabaster and lava stones, create the lair of a dark but valiant prince. He
scrambled about the train in excitement, but Frances sat quietly, watching her mother
hold her father’s pale hand. He was so quiet now, so reduced; only a year ago he had run
around the yard with Benjamin on his back, chasing Frances and her mother through the
garden and around the croquet hoops, all of them whooping and hooting and singing in
the young summer nights. Now they were quiet, somber, Benjamin’s questions about the
dark water ringing unanswered.
“Why is the water dark?”
“The dark sand is made from crushed shells and rocks, right? Is it soft or
scratchy?”
“Is it true about the wall?”
But no one answered. Frances, who didn’t know the answers, hushed him by
wiping his blond curls out of his eyes and pulling him onto her lap so he could see the
country side go by their window, and they sat like that, quietly together, a long while,
until he fell asleep, and then she. Their parents took no notice.
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The sea was as black as its name, rising in small waves onto a sandy shore only a
shade lighter than itself, as if someone had stained the whole of it in dark ink. The sky,
blue today, cut a strange contrast against the black water, and the sun reflected off the
waves severely. A warning, thought Frances, and looked away.
The Black Sea came into a wide and natural but distinct bay. To the north were
rows of cottages and small hotels, all painted a fading custard yellow, white, and pale
blue, as if in protest to the enduring black of the seascape. To the south, several miles in
the distance, was a wearied pier with a merry-go-round, food stands under cheerful pastel
umbrellas, and the ocean-lift that carried tourists out past the wall and back, a string of
chairs on a tow rope that seemed to float above the water. Frances watched for a long
time, the chairs going out and back in, a slow rotation, with occasional sandaled or bare
feet dangling from the seats.
Benjamin pulled at her hand, tugging her towards the cottages, where her mother
had wheeled her father into a front room and was securing his blanket around his legs,
starting a kettle for tea, unpacking their bags into the larger room. Benjamin led Frances
into the smaller room, with two twin beds and a nightstand with two blue lamps. At the
head of each bed was a square stone, and on each stone a mermaid was etched, long,
terrible hair, and long terrible tails. Neither mermaid smiled; one had her head turned so
the viewer could see only her profile, the shape of her nose. The stones were framed in
larger glass frames, and Benjamin stood on his bed, mussing up his pillow and bed
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dressings, to put his nose right to the glass, breathing right over the lips of his mermaid
until the glass was too misted for him to see her.
“Is it from the wall?” Benjamin asked? And Frances shushed him again, pulled
him down from the bed, and set to unpacking both their bags, helping Benjamin into his
swim things, and then changing into hers, so they could go straight away to the beach that
lay just out the back door.
Their mother didn’t even make them stop for tea. Before, she would have. Now,
she was asleep in the large chair, next to their father in his wheelchair, also sleeping. The
nurse would arrive tomorrow. Frances looked at them both a moment before opening the
door and carrying Benjamin outside with her. To the beach. To build alabaster and
crushed lava sand castles, lairs for dark but valiant princes.
The sand, they discovered, was both soft and cool, even in the bright sunlight.
By the end of the day, both Frances and Benjamin had sunburns on the tips of
their noses and the tops of their shoulders, and sand between their toes, under their
fingernails, in their hair. It was the happiest they had been in months, both of them
forgetting the world around them and moving into the world of their sandcastles. They
had stayed away from the water, afraid to even put a foot into something so cold and
black.
So when their castles were built and adorned with seaweed and whole alabaster
shells, they walked back up the soft black shore, into the yard of their cottage, and
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showered in the outside shower provided, the cold raising chicken bumps on their young
skin, causing Benjamin to yelp and giggle and spray Frances, who laughed and sprayed
him back.
They went inside, dripping wet, having forgotten towels, and their mother rose,
just woken, from the couch, ran to the bathroom to get towels, their father smiling at
them weakly. There was no scolding for their forgetfulness, which did not matter, or
their long absence, which had gone unnoticed. They were simply handed towels, smiled
at, and turned away from as their father commenced a violent fit of coughing, which
ended only when the children retreated to their bedroom and shut the door against it.
Benjamin looked at Frances with wide eyes, so she drew him into her lap again, ran a
bath for him, and played bath time games. Only later, after he was cared for, did she take
a warm shower, the steam rising into the ceiling and collecting on the mirror so that she
had to wipe it away to see her face, which looked blurry and distant, not quite her own,
but not a stranger’s either.
That was the flow of days from then on: breakfast and tea, sometimes with their
mother and sometimes not, tiptoeing around their father, who sometimes managed to give
them a smile, and the nurse, who never even looked their way, and the trays of syringes
and medicines that glared at them with shiny, glinting grins. Then a day on the shore,
their burns now faded and peeling away to reveal tanning, freckled skin. They built
castles, ran up and down the shore, read on their blanket, and even, after a time, put first
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their toes, then feet, then legs, then bodies into the black of the water, which was not as
cold as they had thought, and which held them afloat in an odd way. The sea-salt air and
the black water did wonders for Frances and Benjamin, who grew strong and independent
in the long summer days, but did not seem to touch their father, who coughed more and
more through both the days and the nights, causing deep circles to appear under both his
eyes and their mother’s. The children, healthy and tanned, were lonely, but couldn’t have
said so, lost as they were in the way time stretches across the shore of a black ocean,
quickly, so that days disappear like tides, like sand castles left overnight.
Frances, finished with all her other books, turned finally to the book her mother
had bought her about the Mermaid Wall in the Black Sea. She couldn’t say why she
resisted, for she loved to read, and she loved the history of the worlds, and often got lost
in the strange words of strange places. But the Mermaid Wall frightened her, rising
mysteriously from the depths of the ocean floor (no one knew how deep) and ending just
under the surface, built by no one knows quite who. Strange places were one thing—
someone, somewhere, had been there, written a book about it, and therefore, through the
book, it was safe to read about them. But the Mermaid Wall was another kind of strange
entirely, and now Frances would have to read about it while she was within sight of it, a
thought that sent a shiver down her spine, as if the wall might creep into her bedroom at
night, or the mermaids on the wall behind her and Benjamin’s bed might swim off their
stones and into the sheets with her, their wet and tangled hair chilling against her cheek,
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the scales of their tail-fins slipping past her arm, her fingers. Frances found them more
nightmarish than lovely.
But once she was reading she was fascinated, morbidly curious, compelled by the
wall that stood only a few miles from her sunny spot on the beach.
The beach—and Black Sea—were actually quite small, stretching only a few
miles north and south, and a few miles out to sea. Frances learned that the black waters
of the Black Sea were a phenomenon scientists were still trying to explain. Early theories
proposed that the color of the water was, in fact, an illusion, simply a reflection of the
dark sand on the ground beneath the sea. The sand itself was a result of the rich black
lava rock in the area, itself a mystery, since there was no identifiable volcano in the
region above water, and must, therefore, reside underwater. Also mixed into the sand
were the crushed alabaster shells the region was famous for. This resulted in shining,
soft, and amazingly cool sand, sand in which Frances loved to bury her toes. The lava
and alabaster combined somehow reflected the sun rather than gathering its warmth,
making it cool to the touch. It was very beautiful, and very foreboding. Eventually,
scientists found that the water itself had a black pigment, as if it had been dyed, or was
full of octopus ink. But scientists had been unable to locate any special chemical
compound, anything other than the traditional hydrogen and oxygen. The black water,
then, remained a mystery.
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Studying the Black Sea was made challenging by its odd depth—the ocean sloped
out gently for about a mile, in which the shores were lapped at by gentle waves, the water
never more than five feet high, and children could safely play without much worry of
undertow. It was more like a swimming pool, in fact, than a dangerous ocean
(thankfully, Frances thought, since no one had been there to watch herself and Benjamin
play in the surf since they arrived). A few lifeguards spotted the shore, but did so lazily;
no one had ever drowned while swimming within a mile of the shore. But beyond that,
there was a sudden drop, a cliff, and while many scientists and divers had attempted to
dive it, no one could get very far, much less to the bottom. Whole teams of specialized
divers, scientists, and experts had attempted the dive. Not one of them made it more than
fifteen feet down before their instruments went haywire, their oxygen masks stopped
flowing, and they were forced back to the surface.
Artificial lights did little to cut through the blackness of the water. In short: no
one knew what was down there, because no one could see it, and there was no hint of it.
Two miles past the shore, one mile for the gentle waves, and one mile for the drop-off,
the sea turned to a regular blue-grey, the depth evened out again, and that was that.
Ocean, just like everywhere else.
In fact, when Frances lifted her eyes from her book, she could see the edge of the
Black Sea, the strange watery line where ocean met ocean, where the Black Sea ended
and the ocean as she knew it began. In front of her, Benjamin was eating a dripping piece
of watermelon, his arms covered in both juice and sand. He was humming in between
swallows, intently studying the area in which he planned to build his latest construction,
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another castle, or, perhaps, a series of cottages. Frances smiled at the back of his head
and turned back to her book.
The most fascinating thing by far was the wall. The Mermaid Wall. It was two
miles long, stretching north and south exactly in the middle of the Black Sea shores. It
grew, startlingly, from the depths of the drop off, as if to separate the gentle shore from
the drop off. What was startling about it is that it was built not on the side of the drop-off
that was only five feet, but on the other side, rising from the bottom of the inky depths,
wherever that was. It was about a foot wide. Scientists knew because they could see the
top, which sat just the tiniest bit below the surface of the sea, lapped in watery waves and
sunlight. The wall was as black as the sand and water it lived in. It was built from square
shaped bricks, each one about five by five inches—thousands of them, to stretch the
miles across and the miles down. Each brick was decorated, a drawing etched in the
stone. Most drawings were of mermaids and mermen, some also of shells, some of
waves, of seaweeds, of strange sea-beasts and other mythical creatures, some that no one
could identify. Hence the name: the Mermaid Wall.
When the wall was first discovered, ages ago, everyone came to study it:
scientists, of course, but also theologians, writers, philosophers, literary professors,
university students, cultists, spiritualists, and even hunters and fishermen. They would
swim out to the wall, or walk through the gentle surf, and peer at the etchings they could
see on the safe side of the wall, some of them taking snorkel masks and lights and fancy
underwater cameras. Braver souls leapt over the wall and looked at the pictures on the
other side, but could never swim down very far. When one man swam downwards and
never resurfaced, the hoards of wall-studiers, all of whom hoped the wall would be the
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key to unlock some mystical, universal knowledge, were frightened. The mystery of the
Black Sea and the Mermaid Wall proved either too great, or too frightening, or too
frustrating, and now those who persisted in studying it were thought mad, or foolish, or
both. The entire place was relegated to myth, placed by the mighty “those who know”
into the realm of the Sasquatch, the Lochness Monster, the UFO.
Eventually one enterprising man—foolish and possibly mad, decided to turn the
place (held sacred for so long as a place of science and study, from which the public was
restricted) into a tourist destination. Frederick Appenbaugh, he was called, built the pier,
the cottages, and devised the ingenious floating ocean-lift so that tourists could travel out,
above the water, to the wall, see the top of it, and maybe some of the squares on top, and
travel back without having to get in the water for fear of drowning, carried safely above
the unknown. For a while Appenbaugh’s seaside town boomed, making him a wealthy
(if a little foolish and mad) man.
The shore was reputed to have healing qualities, the book explained, and had, for
a time, been all the rage as a vacation resort. But often tourists found the water and the
sand unsettling, found themselves unable to swim in it, or relax on the beach in all the
blackness. So the place fell into some disuse and disrepair, visited only by the desperate,
or occasionally by those with little money, who couldn’t afford to go elsewhere.
Frances looked up again. The cottages looked lovely to her, despite their fading
paint, but there were only three or four others on the beach at all, in either direction; all
this lovely cool sand and no one in it. There were no shouting children or laughing
lovers. It was, Frances thought, a bit eerie, all the emptiness and lack of human sound.
She turned to glance behind her, saw her father wrapped in his wheelchair, sleeping on
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the patio of the cottage, her mother next to him with a book in her lap, also sleeping, the
nurse absent for the moment. Frances hoped beyond her wildest hope that the healing
qualities rumored of the place were real. After all, just because scientists couldn’t
explain a thing didn’t mean it didn’t exist. Frances looked back at the water and closed
her book, called Benjamin to her, and began, one by one, to answer the questions he had
been asking since they arrived.
That night, Frances dreamed. In her dream, the mermaid above her bed swam out
of her frame, slicing through the air as if it was water, whispering sea songs into her ear.
In her dream, she sat up and stared into the mermaid’s glowing eyes. She was saying
something but Frances couldn’t hear her.
When she sat up a second time she was awake, and the room was quiet, the
mermaid properly in the frame where she belonged, and Benjamin was sleeping soundly
next to her. Everything was normal, as it should be.
But the room smelled of brine and sea salt, and sand trailed its way down her
bedspread. As if the sea had visited while she and Benjamin slept.
As Frances drifted back to sleep, the mermaid’s eyes still glowing in her vision,
she heard her father coughing, his mother’s soothing voice. She didn’t dream again.
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Frances and Benjamin continued to spend their days on the beach, their father in
his wheelchair, weaker and weaker, on the porch or inside, coughing, not eating.
Frances, however, found her gaze drifting often towards the pier and the ocean-lift, the
inventions of Frederick Appenbaugh. Occasionally, when the wind was right, she
thought she could smell funnel cakes, or cotton candy, or hear the tinkling music of the
merry-go-round.
And so it was that, on a day her father stayed in bed, weak from coughing, and her
mother and the nurse by his side, Frances simply took Benjamin’s hand and walked with
him, away from their blanket, and towards the pier. She didn’t look back, and Benjamin,
running along the surf line and teasing small sand crabs out of their holes, didn’t either.
The walk was longer than Frances expected, and Benjamin had begun to whine
long before they arrived, encouraged on only by the promise of funnel cakes, cotton
candy, and a ride on the merry-go-round. They were thirsty and hot, although they had
stopped once to swim out a ways to cool down. By the time they approached the pier,
Frances was carrying Benjamin on her back. She forgot, sometimes, how small he was,
but now that his tiny wrists and ankles were locked around her arms and neck, and the
whole of his weight was upon her, she remembered that he was only a little boy, could
count his age with only a few of the fingers on one hand. She realized, watching her own
feet in the sand, that she was only a little girl, could still count her age using the fingers
on two hands. The distance between her cottage and the pier made her feel small, and
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she was relieved to see the distance close, to be able to see the details of the wood, the
boardwalk, the composition of the jetty.
So she didn’t notice for a moment that something was wrong: the pier was old and
empty. The umbrellas and awnings that, from a distance, had seemed so gay and bright
were, in actuality, faded and tattered. No food presented itself behind the windows,
which were streaked with humidity and salt. Frances put Benjamin down and together,
holding hands, they walked down the boardwalk. No one was around. The carousel
stood still and empty, an occasional wind whistling through the gaping mouths of the
horses, their lips curling over their teeth in terrible grimaces. The mirror in the center
was streaked and misty, and their reflections looked like dark shadows, ghosts of
children. The boards under their feet creaked, and in the shadows, they were cold.
“I don’t like it here,” Benjamin said, wise enough to see that, here, there would be
no funnel cakes, no candy treats, no carousel rides.
Frances didn’t like it either, but felt that, since they had come this far, they should
at least walk to the edge of the pier, look out over the dark waters. They walked by the
ocean lift, all of its chairs stilled and dangling in the wind, stuffing coming out of their
seats. Hadn’t she seen it moving when they first arrived, feet hanging down? Had it
been her imagination?
It was months ago that they first arrived, the beginning of summer, and now it
was fall, and the high season was over, Frances realized. People went home, children to
school, fathers and mothers to jobs. There had been no talk of school, or jobs, or leaving
at all. There had been little talk of anything—quiet dinners on their own, passing smiles
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and caresses by their mother, the sound of their father coughing, the stern glare of the
nurse if they fell into her path. Their talk was among themselves, if at all.
Now they were quiet, still holding hands, walking past the stilled ocean-lift and
towards the benches and bars at the end of the pier, where clouds were gathering over the
dark depths of the water. In the center of the rounded promontory was a circular bench,
and in the middle of the bench was a statue of a mermaid. She stood tall on her tail, her
arms at her sides, her hair flowing around her face in the wind. She gazed to sea, seeing
nothing around her. She was beautiful, and frightening, twice the size of the small
children. Frances was so entranced that she didn’t see the old man sitting below her, not
until she and Benjamin turned to go back, although his hair was a shocking white, and he
was dressed all in white, a dapper suit with matching lacquered shoes and a soft green
shirt underneath. He leaned on his cane, staring to sea just as the mermaid did, his eyes a
milky blue.
Frances started, frightened, wondering if this man was also a statue, the white
compliment to the black mermaid. But when she started at him, pulling Benjamin close
to her, he turned his head her way and nodded at her, both hands resting on the top of his
cane. She nodded back, swallowed, summoned her manners, and said in her best talkingto-adults voice, “good morning, sir.”
“Is it?” he asked slowly, and languorously pulled a watch from his pocket,
regarding it. “I suppose it is, for another three minutes exactly.” He replaced the watch,
moved to stand. Leaning heavily onto his cane, he righted himself. “It’s nigh on lunch
time, then. Best get to it.” He set off towards the shore, back down the pier.
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“Excuse me? Sir?” He turned his shoulders slightly, though not the rest of him,
and paused to let Frances address him. “Do you know where we can get any food here?”
The man turned and for a moment Frances thought he was coughing, until she heard a
strange wheezy sound, and realized it was a laugh, rusty from disuse. “Hasn’t been food
around here for a while, girl,” he said, then looked the children over, Frances standing
with her hands on Benjamin’s shoulders, Benjamin himself with his head lowered but his
eyes, like those of a puppy dog, pleading up towards the man. “But you look a might
starved, now, don’t you? Did you walk here?” Frances nodded, pointed down the
shoreline, to the north, where, just before the cove ended, her cottage was snuggled in,
parading its pale blue colors as if it was high summer.
The man raised his white eyebrows at them. “Long walk, children,” he said, and
repeated it. “Long walk.” And he chuckled again. “You two best come along,” he said,
and set off again, walking in an agile shuffle towards the carousel. Frances and Benjamin
hesitated a moment, looking at each other. But then Benjamin’s stomach grumbled, and
Frances remembered her thirst, and so they followed.
The man walked up onto the carousel, rounded the center mirrors until he found
one with a knob, opened the mirror panel like a door, and went in. His voice echoed,
along with the sound of footsteps (and a cane) clanking on something metal, as he called
to them to follow on up if they were hungry. They were. Their empty stomachs and dry
throats made them brave as they wound around the old horses and carriages to the center
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of the carousel, brave enough to go in through the mirror-door to the center, where they
found a room full of wires and switches on all sides, and a spiral staircase leading
through a hole in the ceiling where they could see light shining down, and where the last
foot of the old man was retreating. They followed, their own feet clanking on the metal
of the stairway, their bodies winding around the tight spiral until they reached the top,
climbing through a small hole and entering into a room Frances could have sworn from
the outside of the pier didn’t exist.
The room was a hexagon, and they stood in the center. Tall windows stood at
every panel, starting partway up and extending to the ceiling, and all the blinds were open
or tossed back so that the sea seemed to come in on every side. The walls were made of a
soft wood, a wood bleached by time into a soft ash, the color Frances’s mother’s blond
hair was beginning to turn as she aged. Beneath their feet, the wood floors of the same
color and age were occasionally covered by lovely thick carpets, the same bright white of
the man’s suit. Against one wall was a huge bed, plump and inviting, covered in a green
bedspread and adorned with more pillows than Frances could count. Against another
wall was a small wooden table with four chairs. Against another wall was a writing table,
piles of papers covering it. In the center of the room was a stuffed chair, a sofa, and a
wood-burning stove, atop which a teakettle was already beginning to boil. And near the
chair was a small kitchen area, complete with a sink, an oven and stove, and a small
refrigerator. The whole place was sparkling clean, immaculate, inviting anyone who
entered to sink into either the plush of the bed, or the sofa, or the chair, and simply watch
the sea until they were rested, or maybe forever, whichever came first.
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“The W.C. is up those tiny stairs, in case you’re needing it,” said the man, adding,
“It’s like a crow’s nest. Always did like a good view in the morning,” and he chuckled.
“The W.C.?” Frances asked.
“The water-closet! You know, the little girl’s room. Or little boy’s room. The
room of necessity. The outhouse? The restroom.” Benjamin, standing behind Frances,
giggled.
Frances nodded her understanding, and Benjamin drew away from her, headed
toward the stairs, looked back for permission, and Frances nodded. He came back a
moment later, clattering down the stairway, ran up to her and whispered, “the toilet and
the shower are in there and there’s windows all around, just like here!” And then
Benjamin, sandy feet and all, scampered across the plush lovely carpet and plopped onto
the sofa to watch the old man.
He was cooking in the kitchen something that smelled fried and delicious.
Something that smelled like…funnel cakes. Indeed, there was the splattering sound of
batter on a hot griddle, and the pancake smell in the air, and Frances watched with wide
and happy eyes as the man put a bowl of powdered sugar on the table. After a time he
turned to them and gestured toward the table, and the children went eagerly. Frances
remembered her mother’s table manner instructions, raised her eyebrows pointedly at
Benjamin, and both children placed their napkins in their laps and waited for their host to
both serve them and be seated before they dug in. But after the first bite, a bite of
heaven, a bite during which the crispy fried cake melted on their tongues amid the
sweetness of the powdered sugar, the children forgot their manners and ate with joy,
using their hands and licking their fingers until every last bit of funnel cake was gone
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from their plates. They looked up to see tall glasses of soda with crackling ice cubes and
gaily striped bendy straws. Frances sipped: watermelon.
“Thank you,” Frances finally managed, and the man, who had been patiently
watching them, smiled. He stood, and Frances noticed that he was still somehow
immaculately clean, and cleared their plates.
“Would anyone care for a ride?”
Frances and Benjamin both took a long time selecting their carousel horse.
Benjamin tried out the carriages, the chariot, and a cream-colored pony, but finally settled
on a tall black stallion, the fiercest horse on the carousel, with what must have once been
golden reins. His mane was laced with red roses (or what used to be red roses) and his
saddle was high and proud. Benjamin climbed up by himself, though the horse was high
off the ground, and sat in the saddle proudly. Frances thought, seeing him, of what
Benjamin would be like as a man: proud and tall. But kind, Frances hoped, and playful,
like their father.
Frances herself chose the black stallion’s mate, a white mare whose mane was too
wild and lovely to paint plastic roses into. She, too, had once had golden manes, and she
had also a high and proud saddle; she was nearly as tall as the black stallion. Frances
looped her foot in the metal stirrup and mounted in one graceful movement, her barefeet
just reaching the stirrups as she sat. It was a perfect fit. She rode just behind Benjamin.
They sat for a moment in the strange emptiness of the carousel, having lost their fright,
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with full bellies and smiles, feeling again like children. And then the man in white
flipped a switch somewhere from the mirror room, and the lights came up, and the music
started, and beneath a mechanical whirring, the carousel started.
The children rode their horses round and round, laughing, reaching their hands out
to each other as their ponies rode up and down their gilded metal bars. Benjamin learned
to stand in his saddle as it rose, there being no adult nearby who would scold him, and so
Frances tried the same, and the brown of their bare feet balanced on the moving saddles
as if they were in a rodeo.
The man in white leaned from the mirrored room as they whirled by him, and he
yelled: “Reach for the brass ring, and if you get it, I’ll give you a ride of a different sort!”
They saw flashes of his white suit as they went around, and then, in the center, on one
side of the mirrors, a brass ring dangling from the ceiling.
They reached their small fingers out each time they passed, but their arms were so
short! Finally Frances dismounted her lovely white mare, mid-ride, and climbed atop the
black stallion with Benjamin. Sitting behind him, she held his hips as they rode by the
ring, circling slowly, and he reached far, farther, her hands holding his tiny legs, until his
brown fingers grasped and pulled the ring.
The lights flashed and a new song started up, and then the carousel slowed to a
stop. The man in white emerged from the mirrored room clapping and smiling, a strange
glint in his eye. “Yes,” he said, “a ride of a different sort. You pulled the brass ring,
child. You pulled the ring.” And he looked up at the ring as if it were a terrible distance,
one he could never cover, a feat he could never muster, though he stood, even now,
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within arm’s reach. He turned away, and though he was still smiling, Frances felt that he
was somehow saddened by Benjamin’s reach.
Benjamin himself was ecstatic, climbing down from the stallion and hopping
about Frances. “I pulled it, then, didn’t I? I won the prize! Did you see me reach for it?
Did you see? I got it! And now we’re going on a ride of a different sort!” Frances
laughed and pulled him into a hug, which he scrambled out from, still hopping, and ran
down the boardwalk towards the man in white, asking him the same litany of questions:
“Did you see me? I pulled it all right, didn’t I? Just reached out and pulled!” The man,
too, smiled and nodded, and Frances set off behind them, sparing one glance behind her
at the carousel, its lights still flashing, its music playing, and the white and black horses
staring forever ahead into space, where they must have imagined a brass ring that would
pull them free from their metal holdings and let them gallop down the shore, out of the
bay, to freedom. Frances shivered and ran to catch up with Benjamin and the man.
They had stopped, the man bending to tie his shoe. He and Benjamin now sat side
by side on a bench, like old companions comfortable with silence. There was just enough
space on the other side of the man for Frances to sit, too, so she sat, and the three of them
looked out across the black water and toward the cliffs of the southern cove wall. They
were lovely, covered in dense green foliage and occasionally splashed by waves, which
here, at cove’s end, were larger. Frances had never noticed them before, fixed as she
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always was on the pier, which wasn’t at all how it had looked from afar. She wondered
if, once she got closer to the rocks, they would look different too, and just then, she
turned to the man in white, looking at him up close, really looking, for the first time. He
too was different than he had first looked. When she first saw him on the edge of the pier
he looked dapper and startlingly white, clean and fresh in contrast to the black of the
mermaid statue, the sea, the sand. But now she saw that he was old indeed, ancient, with
lines on his face and hairs straying from his eyebrows, his ears, even his nose. His blue
eyes were distant and watery, his mouth ever so slightly drooped, though Frances thought
it had once smiled nearly constantly, even arrogantly. His clothes, although white, were
old and out of fashion. He looked peculiar. And most of all, now that he was framed on
either side by children, Frances could see that he was lonely. Why, everything about him
reeked of loneliness! She could smell it, could see it in the crease of fabric at his elbow,
could taste it in the exquisite funnel cakes he made for them and probably no one else in
ages.
“What happened here?” She asked him, and he turned his head to her slowly, as if
there was all the time in the world for the question, then looked back out to sea again.
“It all happened here, once,” he said, then nodded, and said it again. “It all
happened here. The whole world was here!” He paused. “Oh, crowds of people.
They’d drive in for a day sometimes, seeing as the cottages were always full and so quick
to book up. People walked, sometimes, or rode their bicycles in, came in on the train, sat
on the beaches, slept on the beaches, sometimes. Oh, they rode the carousel and ate food,
hot dogs and French fries and sodas and funnel cakes of course. They sat by the statue
and looked out at sea. And of course they rode the ocean-lift.”
Curlee 21
Frances nodded, suddenly knowing that the ocean-lift would be their next ride: a
different sort of ride. A thrill of fear rose in her, a thrill of excitement, a thrill of dread.
“Why did you come here?”
“Well I started it of course! After the scientists and all the others left, I thought
someone should stay! So I built this pier. And everything on it. I was the first one to
come, child!”
Frances paused. “Mr. Appenbaugh?” she asked.
“At your service, child,” he responded, a smile finding his eyes.
“But…I read that you started this place…”
“One hundred years ago! Today, in fact. Today makes this one hundred years.”
He looked around at the pier, then at the children sitting on either side of him.
“But that makes you…”
“Old!” Appenbaugh said, and laughed. “It makes me very old. Best not ask how
old, child, and mind your manners.”
Frances smiled at him but her mind raced. If Appenbaugh was a scholar who
studied the Black Sea and the Mermaid Wall before the scientists left the place, well, that
meant he’d gone to school. Even if he was a university student, then…if he was even
only 20, then he’d be 120 now! 120! Far more than could be counted on even two hands
and two feet. Frances had never known anyone older that 81, which is how old her
grandmother had been when she’d died, and that had been very old indeed.
Frances looked again at the man in white, now Mr. Appenbaugh. He did look old.
But he also didn’t; Frances remembered how her grandmother had trouble walking,
dressing herself, how her teeth had yellowed and her hair thinned and the skin around her
Curlee 22
bones had loosened, making her look like a wrinkled, fleshy skeleton. In fact, she had
frightened Benjamin, who was little more than a baby at the time, so badly on one visit,
that he cried whenever he had to go back. But Mr. Appenbaugh, while he was wrinkled
and white-haired, also seemed young, sprightly, despite the cane or any other
appearances of age. He was so well, Frances decided. He was healthy. But old. Old
beyond anything she had ever heard of.
But before she could ask any other questions, he was rising from the bench and
walking towards the ocean lift. “Come, children! It’s time for a ride of a different sort!
And Benjamin, humming, jumped off the bench, landing with no sound on the balls of his
feet, and followed. Frances was once again left behind, so she picked up and walked
after them.
The docking station for the ocean-lift looked so old and rusted that Frances
thought it couldn’t possibly work. Yet Mr. Appenbaugh maneuvered his way through the
gates and to the large levers and began to fiddle with the motors. He pulled a key from
the breast pocket of his lovely green shirt, inserted it into a keyhole Frances would have
sworn a moment ago wasn’t there, turned the key, and began to pull at levers and turn
knobs. The motors jumped to life, purring and humming as if they were tuned up and
greased yesterday. Mr. Appenbaugh yelled above the motor: “I invented her myself!
She’s a beauty, isn’t she?” Frances and Benjamin nodded, but he was already turning
away from them, finding a new button, which advanced the line of chairs. “Pick your
Curlee 23
chair, then,” Appenbaugh said, and Frances and Benjamin stepped forward on the dock to
watch the chairs go by. Some of them had torn and ripped stuffing, some were just rusty
metal. But the last one still had remnants of the paint that had originally adorned it, hints
of green and gold and purple in old flecks of paint. Frances and Benjamin
simultaneously pointed: that one.
Appenbaugh smiled and slowed the ocean lift so that the chair hovered in front of
them, and he moved over to where they stood, standing between them and their chosen
chair, and grandly swept his arm in front of them. “Your chariot awaits, children,” he
said, and bowed as they stepped past him. Frances swung Benjamin up in the chair, then
climbed up herself—even her feet, from this chair, didn’t quite touch the dock beneath
her. “The Wall is waiting for you,” Appenbaugh said, and Frances looked up to see the
Black Sea, mysterious and ominous as ever before, expanding itself broadly in front of
her. It was the most beautiful thing. It was the most horrible thing. Benjamin slid closer
to her, and she was glad of his closeness. They held hands and the chair started, moving
forward first slowly, and then with exhilarating speed. In a matter of moments, they had
left the dock and were speeding over the glassy surface of the ocean.
The ocean was so black, and they moved across it so quickly, that from their
chairs, it looked like a piece of glass, like a dark opal mirror, but one whose reflection,
like a dark fairy-tale, should be feared. Frances wondered what a person might see,
looking into a reflection like that: his or her very heart? The secrets of the world? Or
just a blank face, staring back at them, white in all the blackness of the water?
Their feet dangled about four feet from the surface of the ocean, just higher than
the diving board that frightened Frances at the swimming pool at home, the diving board
Curlee 24
off which her father once could do great running swan dives, flips, cannonballs, and
belly-flops, eliciting screams of laughter from all the children and even the other parents,
the life-guards, the grandmothers and nannies at the pool. Frances closed her eyes
against the memory and only opened them again when the chair slowed and Benjamin
dug his elbow into her side.
“Frances, look! Frances, is that it! I think it is! It’s the Wall! It’s really the
Wall! The Mermaid Wall!” Frances hushed him and looked for herself. Here the chair
not only slowed but dipped so that their feet almost touched the surface. Frances gasped
at the closeness of it, of the wide blackness of it. They were still on the shore side of the
Wall, but they were just in front of it. They could see the top of it, a foot wide just as the
book Frances read had promised it, the black water lapping inches above it, but the weak
sun cutting through illuminated the water. The top of the Wall was nothing special, just
black brick. But Frances and Benjamin could see, from their chairs, the etchings on the
front sides of the bricks at the top of the wall: a conch shell, on one; a tumble of sea weed
on another; an oyster with a pearl in his throat on a third, and startlingly, a tall Mermaid
staring out at them from a brick directly in front of them. She was just like the one above
Frances’s bed, just like the one in the statue, and just like the one in Frances’s dream;
now, she stared at Frances with the same penetrating eyes, the same urgency, the same
speech almost, a speech Frances couldn’t understand but thought she should. She inhaled
again the smell of brine and sea, the smell of sand, of salty-wet hair.
“Isn’t she beautiful,” Benjamin breathed, and she was. Absolutely beautiful.
Frances’s heart pulled at the thought of it, of so much beauty. She looked up, beyond the
wall, to the sea-side of it, and remembered the depth of the other side, the mystery, the
Curlee 25
man who died swimming down, the way the scientists possessed no tools that could
navigate it. And right as she thought these thoughts, the chair lurched forward again,
taking them out over the Wall and above the depths, moving in a slow wide circle to
come home. Their feet were still just inches away from the water; if she had pointed her
toe, she might have touched it, but she kept her feet flat and high as she could. Beside
her Benjamin leaned forward, making her nervous; she held his hand as fiercely as she
could. The chair at last circled around and now faced the shore. From here Frances
could see the Mermaid statue at the end of the pier, how she looked longingly for home
over the black water. Frances looked back down at the water to see the approaching wall
and the sketched bricks on this side of the wall. These etchings were darker, more
frightening: a Merman, tall and terrible, with sharp pointed teeth and a spear; a creature
Frances could not recognize or name with teeth and spiked horns at the base of his fins, a
shark, a sperm whale with bared teeth. They all seemed to be monsters, things to be
feared, and Frances was glad to be moving towards the wall, because it meant they would
move away from the wall, over it, across the sea, and home to the pier, to the shore, to
their own cottage. Where of course her father would be coughing and her mother would
see them with tired eyes and there would be monsters, too, just of other types, and
Frances allowed, for just one instant, the sadness of everything to pile itself in her heart,
and she closed her eyes to prevent the tears that would follow such an allowance.
And that is when Benjamin’s hand slid out from her own, and Benjamin’s small
body wriggled off the chair, and slid into the deep side of the Black Sea so silently that
there was not even a splash, so that when Frances opened her eyes, he was simply gone,
and the thought to follow him, to save him, was so powerful that she didn’t even have
Curlee 26
time to call his name or be frightened for her own self before she, too, slid off the seat of
the ocean lift and into the cold of the black waters.
The water was cold here, much colder than the shore, and the black of it hid all
sight from her eyes, even though she was sure, from the salt-water sting, that she had
opened them. She groped about underwater for Benjamin’s small body. One hand found
the wall and she quickly pulled it away, flinching inwardly at the memory of the monsters
painted there. The other reached out and felt what she thought was a heel, a small heel of
a small foot, a heel that belonged to a little boy, a heel that tugged away from her grasp as
it kicked downward. Without moving up for a breath Frances flipped her body to point
where the heel had gone and kicked after it; she was a strong swimmer and was always
happy in the water, so she kicked with all her strength after the small heel that belonged
to a small foot that belonged to a small boy whom she loved with all her heart and who,
today in this world, was the only thing she had to care for and to care for her.
Sometimes her knuckles scraped the wall as her hands flew to her sides to aid in
her kicking, and sometimes the white flash of a foot, a heel, a toe, swept across her
vision, and so she kept kicking. After a time there was light ahead, or so she thought, and
she wondered if she was drowning. But then her eyes, still stretched wide open, could
see more than just black in front of her, as if the water were clearing, and then she was
sure there was light ahead, and there seemed to be almost no black at all, and then she
could see her arms reaching out in front of her, and then, illuminated by a vast light,
Curlee 27
almost as a city on a hill would be, she could see the ocean floor, her body upside down
as she came to it, and Benjamin sitting on it, legs crossed, holding a starfish and smiling
up at her proudly, saying, “Did you see me? Did you see how far I swam? Look at this
starfish! Its name is Alarick!”
Frances was so relieved at the sight of his smile, which she had thought for a
moment on the ocean lift had left the world forever, that when she gave her final kick and
touched the ocean floor, she merely gathered him in her arms and held him, even against
his protests, instead of scolding him. And her relief at his sweet presence was so great
that she forgot to notice several strange but very important things, for example that they
had found the bottom of the Mermaid wall, or that they were not (it would appear) dead,
or that they were standing effortlessly on the ground, though Frances had tried and tried
to sit on the bottom of the swimming pool and always the water pulled her up to the
surface. Other things she forgot to notice, for the time being, while Benjamin her brother
was wrapped safely in her arms, were that they were not breathing, but they were also not
not breathing, because they were underwater and yet quite comfortable; her ears, which
always hurt at the bottom of the deep end of the pool, felt just fine, lovely in fact, as
everything suddenly felt lovely. And oddest of all, the last thing she forgot to notice, was
that she had sworn Benjamin had been talking to her when she found him, but that she
never saw his mouth move.
(There were quite so many strange things Frances couldn’t pay attention to while
Benjamin her brother was in her arms and safe that she didn’t even bother forgetting to
notice the strange street lamps that burned a light that wasn’t fire, or the seaweed garden
in which they stood, or the bottom of the Wall to one side and the gates to the city
Curlee 28
betwixt a softer, sandier wall on the other side of them. Sometimes too many strange
things could happen to a person, and so a person must not pay attention to them at all,
focusing rather on the important things, like “You’re alive!” and “I’m alive!” And, “How
on earth are we breathing?” and “What happened to the Black Sea?” Mr. Appenbaugh
himself, and the shore above, were completely forgotten.)
At long last Frances let Benjamin out of the locked embrace she had pulled him
in, still holding onto his shoulders, and asked him (although her mouth didn’t move),
“Why did you jump in?”
“The pretty lady on the wall told me to,” he said, pocketing Alarick the starfish in
his swim trunks and turning away from her, headed towards the gates. “Come on,” he
said, “we have to go find her.”
Frances simply put her hand in the hand he had held out, willing, wrapped in
mystery, to follow her little brother.
She stopped only because, in a bed of seaweed, glinting white in the green murk,
were three perfect pearls. It felt like finding a heads-up penny, and Frances reached for
them, watching them glow in her palm, and without knowing why, put one in her mouth,
handed one to Benjamin to do the same, and pocketed the third in her own swim shorts.
The pearl floated lightly on her tongue, clicked against her teeth, and she and Benjamin
smiled at each other as if they’d just found candy.
Thus, hand in hand, with pearls in their mouths, they crossed through the gates,
their backs to the Mermaid Wall, two children who’d swam through the mystery that
plagued the best minds of their world.
Curlee 29
The city was much like the portraits of mermaids that hung above their beds in the
cottage: sharp and eerie with a terribly beauty that glimmered beneath the streetlamps
that weren’t fire. Seaweed gardens swayed greenly with long tentacle arms, and sandy
paths wound their way through sand castles with tall spires circled about with giant conch
shells, larger than life versions of the castles Benjamin and Frances had spent weeks
building.
Benjamin ran ahead on the path, pointing at the castles: “Look, Frances, there’s
the lair of the dark but valiant prince,” he said, and yes, Frances thought, it was an exact
replica of the castle they’d built their first day, and which had washed away to sea within
hours, taken by the tide like so many childish dreams. But here it was, a seaweed flag
cresting its top spire, large and lovely and foreboding.
“Dark but valiant,” Frances repeated. “Valiant.” The word reassured her. The
pearl clicked against her teeth, round and smooth but cold. Now that Benjamin was safe
and running ahead of her like always, she began to allow herself to take notice of the
strange things, of which there were many, but the strangest of all, the thing that sent a
chill down her spine that she could not shake off, was that the entire city was empty.
Only the seaweed gardens swayed.
The rest was still.
Curlee 30
Benjamin awoke her from her reverie. “The pretty lady said to find her,”
Benjamin reminded her, Frances had stopped in front of the lair of the dark but valiant
prince, staring into its dark windows.
“Yes,” she said, absently, mounting the stairs. A prince, she thought, would be
reassuring, a valiant prince who could hold their hands and guide them through this city
and back to a place where her father did swan dives and ran through the yard with
Benjamin on his shoulders. There was no door on which to knock—just a sort of
vestibule carved into the sand—and so Frances simply walked through. Inside the ceiling
were high and arched and finely decorated with etchings into the fine lava sand and a
chandelier hung in the center, grand and glowing with light. There was a tall curving
staircase which Frances climbed, but the top floor, also grand, was as empty as the rest.
No prince lived there. Perhaps none existed. There was only Frances, who felt small and
strange, and Benjamin, glowing with blond childish innocence at the entrance to the lair.
“She said to find her, Frances,” he repeated, and she came down the stairs and
bent to see his eyes, wide and true in the strange light.
“When did she say it, Benjamin?”
“When she visited us. Don’t you remember? She swam out of her frame and told
us to find her.”
Frances remembered the strange dream she’d had, many nights ago now, that had
left the room smelling of brine and sea salt. She remembered the sand on her bedsheets.
And the sharp teeth of the mermen on the Wall. She hadn’t thought, at the time, that
she’d understood the language the dream had spoken to her, but now she remembered,
vaguely, a watery voice, a whisper in her ear.
Curlee 31
“Bring me something pretty,” it had said.
“Let’s find her,” Benjamin said.
“Yes,” Frances said, and clicked the pearl against her teeth.
They left the empty castle of the dark but valiant prince, who wasn’t there—
perhaps he wasn’t anywhere—and wandered the sandy paths through the city again,
searching deeper and deeper into its depths. Frances became aware that they were
literally descending, that the ocean floor was a hill that pointed down. Though there was
light, ahead, and down, when she looked back, where they’d come from, all was
darkness. The streetlamps illuminated only small islands of space, which Frances and
Benjamin seemed to sail between.
“Let’s find her,” Benjamin had said. Because, he said, she told them to come.
What had she said to him, exactly, to compel him so strongly? Frances now felt the voice
inside her, watery but strong, rumbling like surf, like underwater scratchings of crabs and
sea things: “bring me something pretty.”
And what, Frances wondered, would that be?
“What did she tell you, Benjamin?” she asked.
“She said to come to her and that she could help daddy,” Benjamin said. Frances
was startled. Benjamin had said neither “daddy” or “mommy” in weeks, Frances
realized, speaking and behaving as if they weren’t there. Much like she had. She’d not
thought to speak to Benjamin of their father’s sickness, of the syringes, the coughing, of
their mother’s now tired eyes. She’d simply drifted into a dream of the shore, Benjamin
by her side, losing days like seashells which fell from her pockets. But now Benjamin
Curlee 32
was here, driven by a watery voice because he thought it would help his daddy. A valiant
prince, Frances thought, and remembered Benjamin tall and fierce on his carousel horse,
a tiny man.
But this did not feel like a helping place to Frances. It felt cold and dark. The
voice had not whispered words of help to her. No. It had wanted. It would take things,
Frances thought. It would hold them too tightly. She thought of the sea smell in her
room that night, thought of the man who’d disappeared down the far side of the wall.
She thought of the way the sea, so lovely on the surface, swallowed things whole without
giving them back: ships and treasure and men and dreams, all somewhere on the floor of
the ocean. She looked at her own feet sweeping the sand of that same ocean floor. She
saw now that they left no footsteps.
She felt it before she heard it: a sound emanating from what must be the lowest
point, the center of the city, and the sound started in her rib cage: a bass rumbling of surf,
of song, a gurgle of watery voices humming, and then they were upon them, the
merpeople, all the inhabitants of the city, thousands of them in the city center, gathered
and waiting.
Frances felt their eyes, all of them, but could not look back directly at them.
Their eyes were terrible blue white eyes with no center, fish eyes that saw without seeing.
All together, humming and swaying in the deep, the merpeople looked like so much
seaweed, like one giant garden with arms and fingers and nails and scales and ghostly
pale flesh glowing whitely amid the dark of the sea around them. They opened their
sharp mouths to reveal sharp fishy teeth in strange, grimacing smiles. They waved their
tailfins at the children, the scales glinting in the light. They waved their hands at the
Curlee 33
children, their nails like small claws. Around their briny bodies swam silver fish, and
small sharks, and eels, and all manner of sea creatures. At what would have been their
feet crawled hermit crabs and lobsters and all manner of bottom dwellers with claws,
with scuttling feet, with tentacles. Above their heads and in their hair were jellyfish,
squid, ribbons of seaweed. All life, all movement came together to make the sound, the
rumbling hum of the deep, which came rolling to a point at the children’s feet.
Frances felt afraid.
“She’s here,” Benjamin said. “We almost have her.” He reached for her hand,
and she took it, holding the comfort of her little prince’s hand in her own, gathering her
courage, and they stepped forth into the mass of the merpeople.
“Yessssssss,” their song sang as the children moved through them. “Yesss,” said
the song, in one long sound in Frances’s stomach. Frances walked forward with
Benjamin, their feet leaving no footsteps, the merpeople parting for them and then
closing around behind them as they moved towards the center of the circle.
It seemed to take ages to move through them, the city’s inhabitants, to reach the
center, where Frances feared what they would find. But when they arrived they found
what seemed like nothing, only a large rock, black as the rest of the world around it, with
a smattering of what seemed like small and insignificant treasures: two smooth sea
stones, one white, and one black; a shred of precious blue sea glass, a conch shell, a sand
dollar. And that was all. Behind them the merpeople receded, and the fish, and the
creatures of the deep, and suddenly all was quiet, and it was just Frances and Benjamin at
the rock and the rest of the world disappeared around them.
Curlee 34
“Where is she, Benjamin?” Frances asked, and Benjamin looked at her with his
wide true eyes. “Here,” he said. He pulled the starfish he’d found and named out of his
pocket and placed it on the stone reverently, like an offering to an altar, and the world
moved, a shuddering shift beneath them, and Frances reached out for her brother, but the
lights went out and her arms closed only around a swirl of water and then she was
drifting down, down, down, like Alice, only through dark murky ocean depths, as if to the
center of the earth itself, and she was afraid because she was just a little girl, and so she
closed her eyes and wished it to stop.
Which is when it did. She felt the stillness seep in again, felt the colder cold of
the deeper depth she had fallen to. She felt the quiet, except for one whispering watery
voice which now she understood, and she opened her eyes.
“It is pretty,” the voice said, and Frances saw Benjamin wrapped in the arms of
the most beautiful, terrible woman she’d ever seen, with the most beautiful, terrible face,
and the most beautiful, terrible smile, filled with sharp grey teeth. “It is very pretty,
child.” Frances understood that the woman meant Benjamin, who was still as if sleeping,
and was indeed very very pretty.
Frances felt more afraid than she had ever felt, the teeth of the merwoman glinting
more sharply than the syringes by her father’s bedside, the stillness of the trove she’d
fallen into worse than her mother’s tired eyes. She swallowed back her fear—the pearl
still clacking against her teeth—to look around her. The merwoman hovered in a pearly
Curlee 35
throne, which glittered with gossamer hints of purple and green and the black of an
alabaster oyster shell. Surrounding her, towering over her, were shelves formed of the
ocean cave, and on the shelves trinkets and treasures and notions of every type; Frances
could see shells and ocean wonders but also wonders of the earth, from rocks and crystals
to a piece of fine china, a golden fork, an anchor covered in seaweed and algae, a
glittering ruby necklace, a golden coin, the ghostly shape of an unstrung harp. Several
Christmas-like ornaments and baubles hung from the ceiling of the trove, gently flowing
with the deep tides.
And on the throne, this woman: pale and slender and sharp, holding her Benjamin
in narrow arms with sharp elbows, smiling down at him with sharp teeth, caressing his
face with sharp claws and crooning at him a watery lullaby: “my pretty, precious treasure,
my little earthen boy, my light prince.” Benjamin slept an unerring sleep in her arms and
the fear in Frances rose again as she looked back at the shelves, where she could see now,
perched among the objects, the shapes and figures of people: pale, sleeping children,
women, and men, all still and silent. They would be, Frances thought, dusty if they
weren’t underwater, not quite discarded or forgotten, but old somehow, fallen from favor.
Frances looked back at the woman holding her brother.
“What is this?” she asked.
“My place,” whispered the woman in her watery voice. “The place. It is the
place where all things come. It is the place of decisions.”
“But what are all these things?”
“They are my things now,” the woman said. Her voice had an edge of possession
that made Frances shiver.
Curlee 36
“Whose were they before?” Frances asked.
“It doesn’t matter. They are my things now,” the woman repeated, and Frances
looked, finally, into her eyes, pale blue white like the other merpeople but with deep
purple irises and dark, dark centers. Frances looked for a long time and the eyes looked
back and it was like looking into a deep abyss and Frances felt naked and small with it
looking back at her. Courage, she told herself, and still looking, she asked, “who are you,
then?”
“I am what I am. I am part of the deep. I am part of all things. I am part of your
heart.”
“You are not part of me,” Frances said.
“But I am,” the woman said. “The deep is part of all things and I am the deep.”
“Do you have a name?”
“I am Min,” she answered, “unless you know the old language where there is no
name.”
“But all things have a name,” Frances said. “The grass and the sea and the sky all
have names.”
“Do they? But what about the thing that makes you run in the dark up from the
basement stairs? Does that have a name? No? It is part of the old. What about the thing
that makes you laugh for no reason? What is its name? What is the name for the reason
children build castles out of sand? These things have no name. There are places where
things have no names.”
“But there are places where things have names, too,” Frances said.
“Yes? And what is your name, child?”
Curlee 37
Frances looked into Min’s ancient, cavernous eyes, and the pearl clacked against
her teeth, and she did not answer.
“Smart, girl, then,” Min said. Frances still did not answer.
“What do you want?” Frances finally asked.
“I want pretty things,” Min said. “I wait here in the deep and I collect that which
is beautiful.” She turned her attention back to Benjamin and smiled her fishy smile at his
sweet face. “Pretty thing,” she said.
Frances looked around the trove again. But she saw little beauty. She saw a
museum of old, unused things, things slowly ruining in the depths of the salty sea. She
saw ghostly shapes of sleeping beings, forever still on the ocean shelf.
“Aren’t they all pretty?” Min asked, an edge of petulance in her voice, and
Frances nodded.
“You’ve brought me something pretty, too,” Min said, touching Benjamin’s
cheek. “And so you get a wish. Don’t you want a wish?”
“You can’t have him,” Frances said. “He’s not a thing. He’s a person. He’s my
brother. He will grow up someday and be a man,” Frances said.
Min flashed her teeth. “He will not be beautiful, then,” she said. “He will die.
Death is not beautiful.”
Frances thought of her father, coughing in his bed. “No,” she agreed. “Death is
not beautiful.”
“If you leave him here, he will never die. He will always be so pretty,” Min said.
“And you, you also can wish not to die.”
Curlee 38
Just then Frances saw, on one of the shelves, a lovely woman in a white suit, a
clean and crisp white suit, with wisps of sweet blonde hair dancing in the tide. She had a
creamy green blouse on underneath the jacket, and a parasol opened above her to shield a
long forgotten sun from her face.
“Who is that?” Frances asked.
“She is his wife. He chose life over death, yes. He chose her enduring beauty.
He could not bear to see it fade. She was sick, too, like your father, so frail, so he dressed
her up and took her for a ride of a different sort before she was too sick to enjoy it, and
she came here, and he with her, and he gave her to me and now they’ll never die.”
“That’s…Mrs. Appenbaugh?”
“She no longer needs a name, child. She is mine. She is part of the deep.”
Frances looked at the woman on the shelf, swaying to the current, her pale face
grey and dull. She was not dead, but Frances could see, clearly, that she was not alive.
Nor even loved, though the merwoman petulantly paraded her beauty like a child with
picked flowers, unaware of their ruin.
Frances looked again at Benjamin. “You can’t have him,” she said again.
“You have nothing else to give me,” Min said, baring her teeth in a smile.
“Unless you give him to me you have no wish to make. Unless you leave him here you
must face death.”
Frances thought of Mr. Appenbaugh, lonely on the shore and looking out to the
sea. She looked at the sleeping form of his young wife, imprisoned on a shelf like a
museum piece, its terrible curator in search of a newer, prettier thing.
Curlee 39
“There must be something else you want,” Frances said. “You have so many
children already.”
Min hissed again through her teeth. “Thissss one is prettier,” she said, and
Frances knew it wasn’t quite true; this one was newer, maybe, shinier still with life
recently lived, with sun still in his skin.
“What else do you like?” Frances asked.
“I like secrets,” Min answered, looking up from Benjamin with fresh interest.
“Secrets are of the deep, too.”
“I’m just a child,” Frances said. “I don’t have any secrets.”
“You will,” Min said. “Everyone has secrets.”
“I don’t, yet,” Frances repeated. “I’m a little girl.”
“No dark wishes? No dark parts of your heart?”
Frances thought of the loneliness of the summer, the black of the shore and the
black of the sea and the black of her father’s sickness.
“Do you wish he would die already?” Min asked with a terrible smile.
“No!” Frances said. “But I don’t want him to be sick, either.”
“He could die and the sickness would end,” Min said.
“I am afraid for him to die.”
“Death is not beautiful,” Min reminded her.
“But…” Frances said. She thought again of Mr. Appenbaugh, old, old, old, and
not quite living, and apparently not dying either. Was that beautiful?
“I wish it could go back to the way it was. I wish…” Frances trailed off.
Curlee 40
“You can’t go back,” Min said, watery and deep. “No one can ever go back. You
are in the deep now and it is part of you. Like you will have secrets. Like you will have
death. You will lose beauty eventually.”
It was so fast, Frances suddenly thought. It all went so fast: like the country side
drifting by outside her train window, like her father’s swift feet running through the dewy
grass of the backyard. Would life always be like this, moving just beyond her grasp?
Would each precious moment be like the brass ring, reaching, reaching, reaching just out
of her grasp, until she finally got hold of it somehow and then it wasn’t…it wasn’t what
she thought it was? She’d helped Benjamin grab hold of the brass ring, this thing they’d
wanted in their childish delight, and now they were here, at the bottom of the sea, in a
cave with the princess of the deep, Benjamin locked inside her bony arms and Frances,
small and alone and contemplating things she ought not.
“I’m just a child,” she said again.
“Yesss,” hissed Min. “And he even more so. Think of it! Give him to me and he
will never have to think on it. He will never want again, never feel desire, never feel
despair. He will never have secrets or death. He will be forever pretty, here with me. He
will be mine. And you will get a wish.”
“Isn’t there anything else?” Frances asked, nearly full of despair.
“You selfish girl!” Min barred her teeth fully now and darted forward at Frances.
“You would take him from me and back to that world which will make him old and ugly!
All because you want him! You selfish, selfish girl! Leave him be! Leave him as a
child, lovely and sweet! Leave him as a little prince!”
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“But my dad is older and not ugly!” Frances said. “What if he grows up to be
like my dad?”
“What if he does? What if he falls ill?”
“But then at least he will have lived!” Frances said, and she thought of his small
little hands reaching for the ring, his pride and joy at having captured it. “At least he will
have tried!”
Min swam about her now, cradling Benjamin to her bare chest, her hair whipping
behind her. Her tail whipped fierce currents around the trove, troubling the waters. Her
treasures rocked and swayed and scraped along the shelf bottoms. Above them, the
Christmas baubles clinked against one another like chimes in a violent windstorm.
“Leave him with me,” Min whispered in Frances’s ear as she swam round her,
“and I will keep him forever pretty. Leave him with me and I will heal your father.
Leave him with me and go back to the world with a wish and the deep in your heart. It is
better to know the deep now, to feel it there. Leave him with me!”
“No,” Frances whispered back, and Min screamed a watery scream.
“Then you both must stay!”
“No,” Frances said again. That was when she felt the pearl click against her teeth,
and remembered it there, round and smooth. “I…I have something else pretty,” she said.
Min narrowed her eyes. “You have no secrets,” she said. “I see no treasure.
What else could you have?”
Frances rolled the pearl to the front of her tongue, bit down on it, and barred her
teeth at the merwoman long enough for her to see it, then closed her mouth around it.
Curlee 42
Min’s eyes widened, the purple deepened, the darkness dilated. “Where did you
find that?” Min asked. Frances did not answer. “That is mine,” Min said. Frances did
not answer.
Min laughed suddenly, a low rumble like waves at night. “That is very pretty,”
Min said, and then Frances noticed the crown on her head, a crown with five points, and
pearls—just like the one in her mouth—embedded in two of them. Three were missing.
“It is pretty,” Min repeated, “but it is mine.”
“But I have it,” Frances said.
“Then you must give it to me,” Min replied.
“I want my brother back,” Frances said.
“You think I would part with him for a little pearl?” Min laughed again.
“Yes,” Frances said. “I think you want your pearl very much.”
“It is a pearl of great price,” Min responded. It is made from the secrets of the
deep. It is the light within the dark,” Min said. “It is very pretty.”
“The light within the dark?” Frances asked.
“Yessss, child. There is dark in light. And there is light in dark. It is the way of
things. I am here in the deep. I am the princess of the dark.”
“But you seek some light,” Frances said. “You too seek beauty.”
“I gather it,” Min said carefully. “I guard it.”
“No,” Frances said. “You hoard it.”
“Stupid girl,” Min said. “You know so little.”
“I know enough,” Frances said. “It is dark, but I can see.”
Curlee 43
And she could see: she could see the way the crown was etched in light. She
could see, in the ancient purple of Min’s eyes, the hint of light that must have once been
there. “There once was balance,” Frances said, and Min’s eyes flashed. “But you lost the
pearls somehow.”
“I don’t remember,” Min said.
“You lost them. Why? Were you searching? Were you careless?”
“I don’t know!” Min yelled. “I am too old to remember. But they are pretty.
And they are mine.”
“You want them,” Frances said.
“They are very pretty,” Min repeated, but Frances thought it was more than that.
They would return her to something she’d been once, perhaps.
“I can give you two, if you give me my brother,” Frances said.
Min looked at the child in her arms. She traced the perfect line of his lips with
her finger claws, hummed at him some more. “He is so pretty,” she said again.
“You told him you could help our father,” Frances accused.
“I could, if you left him with me, and then you wished it,” Min said.
“That is a terrible price,” Frances answered. “Did you tell him he’d have to pay
such a price?”
Min did not answer. Instead she slowly unclasped her arms and Benjamin floated
away from her. Frances sprang from the ocean floor and leapt for him, gathering him
into her own soft arms, her own small arms. I’m just a child, she thought again, and
turned to Min, hovering terribly above her with a glint of desire in her eye.
Curlee 44
“The pearls, girl, the pearls,” she said, holding her hand out, and Frances first
fished the pearl out of Benjamin’s mouth, where it had been tucked, chipmunk like, in his
cheek, and then out of hers, and placed them in the cold flesh of Min’s open palm.
The moment they left her touch, Frances felt breathless, a horrible pressure
building in her ears, and she heard, underneath the terrible roar of pressure in her ears and
in her lungs, Min’s laughter: “The pearls of great price, child, are life, and you’ve given
yours away, just like that, and his too!” But Frances remembered the final pearl, the one
in her pocket, the one Min didn’t have, and reached to touch it with her fingers. She kept
one arm around the now heavy form of her brother and, touching the other pearl, pushed
off the sandy floor of the deep and kicked, kicked, kicked through the dark, hoping
beyond hope that she could break through the surface to the light.
It was the light that woke her, glinting through the hexagonal windows and
dancing sweetly on her eyelids. When she opened her eyes the light was gentle and
seemed to cast no shadow, though Frances knew that somewhere it must have an edge of
darkness. Still she looked around without fear until she saw, sitting at the large table,
Benjamin, covered in powered sugar, devouring the last of a funnel cake, and the crisp
clean white Mr. Appenbaugh’s suit. He turned to her.
“You came back, then, both of you, from your ride.”
“Yes, sir,” Frances answered, wary.
“I was there once, you know,” he said.
Curlee 45
“Yes, sir,” Frances answered again. He was quiet for a long time, and Frances
saw his hands tremble. Finally, he spoke.
“Did you see her?” His voice trembled with a painful, sharp, hope.
“Yes, sir,” Frances answered, and his eyes watered and his hands shook.
“Was she…was she…”
“She was very pretty, Mr. Appenbaugh,” Frances said, and he signed heavily.
“Yes, she was,” he said. And then: “She’s not dead then?”
“No, sir, not exactly,” Frances answered.
“Me either,” said the old man, and turned to Benjamin, who smiled with his wide,
true eyes at the old man.
“She said to come and we went,” Benjamin said. “But I don’t remember her
much. Do you, Frances?”
“No, Benjamin,” she said, and looked at the old man once more. It was her first
secret, her first lie. Like Min, she wanted to protect her treasure, at least for a little while
more. The old man nodded at her.
“I have something for you, I think,” Frances said, and took the small perfect pearl
out of her pocket. Mr. Appenbaugh inhaled sharply.
“It’s hers, I think. I think it should be hers. I think it will…change her back. Did
you see the light in her eyes? I think she was not always…so dark. Maybe she can go
back to the way she was?”
“But you can’t go down again,” the old man said.
“No, I suppose not,” Frances answered. “But still I think she should have it.”
“Then it’s not for me,” Mr. Appenbaugh said.
Curlee 46
“But it is,” Frances said. “I think if you give it to her, it will…it will change what
you agreed on, before. About…about Mrs. Appenbaugh.”
Mr. Appenbaugh looked out the windows, over the head of the statue, and out to
sea, where, deep down, his sleeping wife drifted in stilled beauty, silent, waiting.
“I can’t come back, can I?” he asked.
“No, sir, she says you can’t.” Frances said.
He held his hand out for the pearl, and, like she had with Min, Frances reached
out and placed it in his upturned palm; his hand was warm, and soft, and sad.
“I think perhaps it’s time for me to go,” he said, and Frances nodded.
“A ride of a different sort,” she said, and he nodded.
The three of them together walked to the end of the peer, where Mr. Appenbaugh
pulled a key from the breast pocket of his lovely green shirt, inserted it into a keyhole
Frances would still have sworn wasn’t there, turned the key, and began to pull at levers
and turn knobs. The motors jumped to life, purring and humming as if they were tuned
up and greased yesterday. Mr. Appenbaugh nodded appreciatively once again at his
invention.
“I thought I could keep her from being sick,” he said, and Frances nodded. “I
thought I could help her. But…it wasn’t all for her. I thought, if I just had more time,
then the things I could invent! The things I could create! But I never made another thing
after her. Never another thing.” Frances slipped her hand in his and squeezed, and he
squeezed back.
“She’s there, sir,” Frances promised, but he was already turning away, finding a
new button, which advanced the line of chairs. He waited for the oldest, the rustiest, the
Curlee 47
most derelict to approach, then perched precariously on it and let the chairs move him
away, forward, out to sea, with only a wave behind him.
Frances didn’t even see a splash when he slipped off the chair and out into the
ocean. She turned away; there was no point waiting. Either he would be lost, like the
scholar who disappeared so many years ago, or found; but he would not come back. In
that, Min was honest and true.
Benjamin looked up at her and she smiled at him.
“Is Daddy still sick?” He asked. “Yes, love,” she answered, and knew it was
true. Some things can’t be changed. Daddy was light and the sick was dark and that was
the balance, for now.
“Will he get better?”
“I don’t know,” she answered. I’m just a child, she thought.
She reached for Benjamin’s hand, but he was already gone, running back down
the pier towards a small flock of seagulls, flapping his arms. She closed her eyes and
hoped to push through the dark of what was, into the light of acceptance, as easily as her
small brother, the valiant prince of light had. She followed him down the peer,
eventually breaking into a run, chasing him, whooping. There were sand castles to build.
That night, in her sleep, the picture moved again, the watery voice slipped into her
bed, whispering in her ear: “there is light in darkness, too, child. There is that too.”
When Frances woke the sheets smelled of sea breeze and the pictures had changed, ever
Curlee 48
so slightly: the merwoman wore a crown with five pearly points and a serene smile, her
long hair cascading over rounded, smooth arms, floating sweetly in the deep. Frances let
her eyes open to the sun.