He walked through the door, took off his coat, dropped it to the floor, walked past it to the fridge, opened it and pulled out a beer. Opened it.
He saw them like hurdles, ten he'd jump over, or like snow drifts one could slam through in a pickup over winter. At ten beers, he would be tired and sleep.
Because of the mermaids. Somewhere deep in the lake, their long, kelpy hair stringing out, about their faces and past their fish-pale breasts.
He had taken up fishing because he had no more work. On a steady diet of fish, he had just been moving through the money he had accrued, spending it on beer, on lotto tickets, the occasional movie. There was no end in sight and now these mermaids.
He had been at the pier, the power plant off on its little peninsula, catching the fish that liked its warm exhaust water, not really thinking of the heavy metals that were concentrated in their flesh, just getting drunk with the beat of the earth, climbing up and up it with a rack of Old Steel Beam, a high-gravity brew, as it announced itself.
He had seen a woman's back flash out some distance off and dismissed it because it was May, he was fishing in a lake where hardly anyone swam, in one of the most foul parts of an extremely befouled body of water. Then he saw another, a fish's flash of a tail, big as a marlin's behind the swimming woman. Another popped her head and shoulders out, exposing her naked chest and his mouth hung open. She reappeared closer to him, her head emerging from the water, smiled coyly and with a white, webbed hand, waved to him, like a delicate wind was blowing through her fingers.
What she told him was that he would meet them, out at the break wall. He packed his shit up and drove to it, walked all the way out and clambered down one side, where the break wall caught a strong current and made a bay. Two of them had come up and sat on a boulder. They motioned him over and sat with him, running their scaly hands through his greasy hair, cooed to him, flicked their fishy tails and had held him to their chests. He didn't say shit, needed to, but fought to control his breath. He thought he was dreaming, so he stayed in the contours of this world, did not pick apart any of its incongruities and stayed with what was happening. A hot sludge of comfort and fear rippled through him. When he started whimpering and losing his shit, the one had pried him away from her. She looked him in the eye. Her skin had a greenish pallor and her eyes were a dull yellow.
"This is all you get," she said. And then she smoothed his hair with her cold, wet hand, kissed her palm and brought it to his mouth. They jumped off the rock. And he noticed the cobalt sky and the dullness of the waves as they swam through them, saw the flash of their backs, their tailfins whipping up as they dove down.
In his house, which he knew he was losing and had no desire to keep, he drank the last beer. The obvious answer was to go and swim to them, because fortune favors the bold, they say, but he knew that it was madness and that when his bloated body was found floating at the pier, it would be deemed suicide. The mermaids had said that this was it. He knew he could fish and fish there and fill his stomach with mercury and the rank fumes from the power plant and he'd never see them again. He kept on the road he was on, drinking was waiting until he would be moved. And he would never speak a word of it. Thinking, briefly, while his bathwater chilled around him, he could not decide whether the world he had been shown was a gift or a curse, the one he had been returned to, which? His wife had told him he was a coward, when she had left and he knew this was absolutely true. The plant would not hire him back. He hadn't been particularly liked there and they could get someone else to get the tomato paste up to the vats with a hose. Was it a blessing or a curse, to be touched and for an instant, let oneself go over to it, when it could never be repeated, when the memory of it absolutely made no sense? He couldn't decide on any of it, as his mind sank further and further into the muddy depths of the bottom of the lake. Somewhere he had heard that a fish has no memories, that its mind is continually refreshed. He loved eating them for this. He pulled his head below his bathwater and imagined them, wished for the millionth time that he were a merman.
