WHILE GINA WAS planning my party, my almost-mother-in-law was also making plans: Chip had asked me to let her help. Chip’s an only child, and his mother had retired the previous year from what was, as far as I could tell, a Nurse Ratched-type position. She worked at an old folks’ home where, before she left her job, we used to drop in on her sometimes; I saw some elderlies who quaked at the sound of her footfall. Around the time of our engagement and wedding her main hobby was going to hear motivational speakers, and after each one of them she’d bear some pearls of self-help wisdom home to share with Chip and me. Chip’s mother brings motivation to the table, that’s for sure. She buckled down to setting up our reception, and if she wasn’t bringing me a swatch of this it’d be a forkful of something else.

I told her that I didn’t want certain so-called traditional aspects of wedding receptions, that is, the aspects that are repulsive. No feeding each other wedding cake, for instance, then mashing it around the oral region like giant babies. Strict pedophile/infantile thematic. Also no disturbing miniature bride and groom dolls perched upon the cake with glassy smiles, a serial killer’s dream of love.

Chip’s mother wasn’t happy about this, of course, she feared the opinions of the other relatives, some of whom would be hailing from Middle America or Orange County. I shouldn’t say she feared, on second thought, since Chip’s mother has never been one to frighten easily; more like she shared their views and stoutly wished us to conform to them. People don’t even perceive the standard deviant quality of wedding receptions — to them it’s cute, the cake-on-face smearing, the frozen serial killer dolls with tiny startled eyes and pink slashes where the mouths should be. Not for one second is your wedding-going public bothered by things’ actual meanings — and by public I mean those women who pass amongst each other all the information about what weddings and receptions should be, spattered across the generations like so much female deodorizing spray across the shelf at a Walgreens. These women are the clear standard-bearers of the nuptial industry a.k.a. basic wedding perversion.

To them a wedding theme is “starry night,” “angel” or “antique vanilla.” Yes, they firmly believe vanilla is a theme, along with warm yellow, mauve and tangerine. To them the sight of a full-grown man and woman mashing white-frosted cake into each other’s nostrils and chin pores is traditional plus heartwarming. If it were tradition to eat human intestines at wedding receptions they’d garnish the plates with curls of spleen. When these ladies happen to glance at the food-ravaged faceholes during the cake-on-face smearing and feel a shiver of revulsion, they simply disregard that shiver and smile as though, somewhere within the floral centerpieces, iddle fairies are giggling.

Gina maintains the standard deviance is Freudian. To her, breastfeeding is non-ironic, earnest and the child-raising equivalent of making macramé wall hangings; also to her, all children wish to nurse at their mothers’ breasts until the age of at least six, and not being able to do so makes standard deviants out of them. Gina’s not bothered by her own conflicts of opinion, though: another benefit of the irony position. You can be a walking pastiche of opinions, if you’re deeply committed to irony. If Gina is drunk she’ll get even more into it, telling all those who care to listen — and many who would prefer not to — how our free nation is a carnival of stunted mental growth. “Arrested adolescence? We wish,” she’ll slur loudly, Gina, my wedding helpmeet, when she’s in her cups. “We never made it out of elementary school, buddy.”

It’s not always clear what Gina’s referring to.

Chip’s mother kept trying to shoehorn items into the reception, slip in repulsive elements without me noticing. For instance, party favors such as star-shaped fairy wands with a label on them inviting guests to WISH UPON A STAR. When I said no to that one she left me five messages, each one more indignant. Then she wanted bottles of bubble bath with swans on top, their necks disturbingly entwined; then a white-silk flower with CONSIDER THE LILIES stamped on the stem in gold.

I told her no favors, since Chip and I had passed beyond that phase. We were adults, I told her calmly but firmly: when we attended a party we didn’t expect to go home with sparkle-filled bouncy balls or a handful of Tootsie Pops. We were no longer impressed, like so many gentle natives on the wrong end of a cargo-cult trade, by the magical wonder of the monogram. Black and silver matchbooks, floaty pens, even high-priced cake knives or serving spoons engraved with Jon & Minky or Dick & Billy left us completely unmoved. My personal impulse, upon receiving such items as a guest, was to hurl them into the nearest trash can as soon as I exited the function.

No, we were perfectly pleased to leave a party empty-handed, our blood alcohol content somewhere above.08.

THE MARINE BIOLOGIST sitting next to me was a woman who loved fish. Fish in general, parrotfish in specific. They’re thick-lipped reef fish in bright colors; I saw some later, but at the time I didn’t know a parrotfish from a humphead wrasse. She was a parrotfish promoter, the biologist.

“You see that beautiful, fine white sand all around us?” she asked me, over dessert.

I nodded, though in the dark, to be precise, the beach sand had faded from our sight. Along the dark shore a row of tiki torches flickered orange.

“You’ve got the parrotfish to thank for that,” she said, and nodded emphatically. “Bioerosion. Major contributors.”

“Ah!” I said. “Bioerosion!”

“They eat the reefs! They make the sand! They chew it up and excrete it. A single parrotfish can make two hundred pounds of fine white sand per year.”

“I see!” I said.

“You like the beach? Then thank a parrotfish. That’s what I always say,” she went on.

She was eating a flan with gusto.

Still, I was happy to be talking to her, because the husband from the Heartland seemed to be at loggerheads with one of the Bay Areans, Chip standing by neutrally. The Heartland wife looked embarrassed, but the Heartland husband was sticking to his guns — something about global warming. He said it seemed to be nature — that various Ice Ages, also, had taken place now and then, and the warming was a non-Ice Age.

His logic went: It has been colder before, and now it will be warm. The film-industry Bay Arean, enraged by this, was raining thunder upon him.

Meanwhile the Heartland wife and the other Bay Arean were making small talk off to one side, trying to take the edge off any free-floating climate-change aggression with harmless domesticity. The Bay Arean designer recommended air plants for the Heartland living room, which could be placed in clear-plastic globes that dangled from shelves or light fixtures. They required no soil. You watered them with a spray bottle, he told her; couldn’t be easier. The Heartland wife received this wisdom with earnest nods.

Presently Chip latched onto a couple of words in the Bay Arean filmmaker’s angry tirade — the words carbon dioxide, I picked up — and used them to launch a friendly digression. Chip plays the fool to make peace, often, as well as to make people like him, and in this case he asked if carbon dioxide was the gas from car tailpipes that killed depressed people. If so we should reduce it, Chip suggested with modest buffoonery, absolutely — no one should die in a garage. Least of all a person who’s goddamn depressed. In my garage, went Chip’s transitional patter, there’s a garbage can that smells, some old strips of moldy carpet and an aging Nissan Sentra. Is that a fitting sunset to a life?

This led to a lighthearted discussion of which cars would be the worst to die in, with “minivan” leading, and the conversation was thus steered into the social safe house of irony.

All of this I heard in the background, in pieces, as the parrotfish expert enthused about how coral went in the fishes’ mouths and white, tropical sands came out their ass-ends. We wouldn’t have the tropics as we knew them — with highly visible reef creatures swimming over a pale background in water that looked turquoise — if not for parrotfish and other “bioeroders,” she chin-wagged to me. The tropics would look very different with no white sand, wouldn’t they, and without the reefs and their nibbling fish that sand would disappear, said the biologist. In fact, she elaborated, gesturing at the Bay Arean off to her left, what he was talking about, the warming, the rising acid of seawater, all that would kill the parrotfish, she said, in the event that it continued.

“. . generate models with fairly narrow margins of error,” she was saying through her final mouthful of crème caramel — because by then I’d realized it wasn’t a flan, strictly speaking. “Of course those models have been completely disregarded. Because, as I’m sure you know, an effective political response to the science, on the time frame needed, was always an impossibility.”

I was thinking of flipping the table switch, because the truth was that most of the wine glasses and beer pitchers were still full at our table and we wouldn’t be leaving that table and hitting dry land anytime soon. Yet once again nausea was rising in me, as we floated past a two-top where a poorly dressed couple seemed to be dipping fried squid rings into a pot of onion-scented sauce. I felt around with my foot for the center post of the table, but all I got was air; I was near the end of the table. So I had to scoot my chair over a few inches, then a few more, to come within range of the central post.

I didn’t want to call attention to my activities, though; I didn’t want to seem like a schemer, so I went on nodding and talking to the biologist while this was going on. Above the table’s edge I was normal, albeit feeling increasingly queasy; below it I was little more than a stuck-out limb with a sneaking, feely foot, making forays.

When my toes finally touched the table’s main post I cast off my shoe and inched the toes up and down the post, looking for the telltale bump of a switch. Listening to the biologist I got distracted, though, so it took several moments for me to notice the post wasn’t as smooth as it should be, the post was in fact furry, and furthermore it was a leg.

The leg extended from the Heartland man. He whipped his head around like it was being spun on its neck-stalk by a Linda Blair Satan.

I was startled by the abruptness of the head spin and snatched my foot back with a speed that rivaled his.

But it was too late. He was smiling at me. The Heartland husband thought I was making a pass at him.

And here’s where I made my second mistake, because instead of coming clean and admitting I’d been looking for the anti-vomit button, I lost my way in confusion. There was a guilty look on my face, I know, as I averted my eyes in embarrassment from his strangely avid gaze. I had to reach out my bare foot a bit in his direction yet again, in order to snag the abandoned mule and tumble said mule back toward me with my toe tips. Then I wriggled the foot back into it.

Making matters worse, I shifted my body neatly away even as I did this, recommitting my attention to the dismal future of parrotfish. For all the world as though I was either ashamed of my footsy overture or, worse, coy.

My eye-contact avoidance convinced the husband, I believe. He knew me for the strumpet that I wasn’t.

THERE WASN’T ROOM in the golf cart for all four of us so Chip volunteered to run beside the cart while Steve sat up front, squeezed in next to the buggy’s driver. This one wasn’t acting servile, I noticed — more casual. A relief. He and the Freudian started chatting about trivia; the driver couldn’t act fully servile, I guess, all thigh-to-thigh with Steve up there. The servile dynamic didn’t work smoothly, with two guys rubbing thighs.

At that point, with manly thighs rubbing — at that point even a servility professional has to throw in the towel.

It was just Janeane and me on the passenger bench in the back, left there to jiggle inertly. Janeane jiggled a good amount. What was it, I asked myself, about the jiggle that so captivated me? Then it occurred to me: this was a Gina thing, the small Gina that always traveled with me. Because Gina talked about fat quite a bit, in her career as an academic failure. She’d written an article once, which, she said, was published in a journal six people read, two of them exclusively while defecating. It was called “Death and the Fat American.” I remembered her telling me about it over beers. Or maybe that was her ironic wine spritzer phase, where she ordered cantaloupe spritzers, sometimes pomegranate/honeydew.

Of course, I didn’t remember exactly what she’d said. The bar scene stayed with me more than the details of Gina’s monologue. That often happens. She did say there was the phenomenon of morbid obesity and then, as a separate matter of study, our cultural and individual responses to it, the response of the non-obese as well as the actual obesity victims. Obesity was a piece of death we carried constantly, she announced to me as she scanned the jukebox lists for “Don’t Stop Believing.”

Not only physically, she rambled on in front of the jukebox — in terms of heart disease, the liquids pooling in the vast, giant bodies, the wrongness of any human being possessing ankles that could brush along the floor — but also spiritually/symbolically. Our fat was obviously our death, entombing us prematurely. But that’s not all, she said, there’s more! The passive, consumer posture of fatness was a perfect embodiment of our “object status,” I think that’s what she mumbled out, though I may have got it wrong.

Our life of abundance, our tragic lack of agency, our infinite foregone conclusion of abject uselessness — our fat was a death that went beyond death, Gina orated (as nearby men, with some belligerence, began to stare).

Fleetingly angry because the Journey song was not available, she settled for “Urgent.” A drunk guy stumbled over to us and asked Gina to give him some sugar, please. She said Fuck off and he asked if her sister was less of a bitch than she was (leering at me).

I tried to cheer myself up, after these unpleasant ruminations, by watching Chip’s lean, muscled ass as he jogged effortlessly alongside (Janeane did too, I noticed). It was a solemn time, an anxious time, but we still had eyes and there was still Chip’s ass, running. His beige cotton slacks showed it off — the grounds of Paradise were dark by then, of course, but the golf cart had headlights and there were footlights at intervals along the path.

When I turned to Janeane to talk to her, after a minute, she moved her eyes away in a small, shifty motion, like they’d alighted on my husband’s ass purely by chance, and purely by chance were moving off that ass again.

“We’re going into a rainforest,” she announced. It was a couple of scraggly bushes. “Look! Thick vegetation, big, waxy leaves, giant, bulging flowers like penises, gonads, flowers are sex organs, you know that, right?” Her voice was rising in pitch and volume. “In the tropics they’re huge — what does that mean? They threaten you! Tropical flowers are rapists! It’s a jungle! Giant rapist flowers!”

“Are you worried about, uh. .”

I trailed off. I didn’t know where to start.

“. . flowers?” I struggled on. “Hey. Don’t worry about them. You know — no legs. They can’t run after you. To get raped by a flower you’d have to, like, put yourself on it. But by accident. But then how could — no. Plants can’t be rapists, I don’t think.”

I was getting a little obscure, a little nitpicking, thinking about it. The day had been bad — man. So bad. I felt delirious.

But it didn’t matter. Janeane had already moved on.

“She was murdered. I know it!” she squeaked. “I’m sure she was murdered. Alone in her bathroom. Naked! In the tub! He burst in and he murdered her. He probably had a knife! Or gun! He wanted to shoot her face off! That poor, poor, poor woman. So full of life! Like we are now! Alive!”

I nodded. Nancy had been alive.

“The murderer could still be nearby. Concealed. He could be lurking in the bushes!”

By this time she was rubbing her hands together anxiously — wringing them, I guess you could call it. But the cart was already slowing down; we’d passed through the bushes and come out into a small parking lot, at the end of which was a dome-shaped building, gleaming gray. The cart stopped.

Chip was instantly pleased by the dome. He pulled up short. He hadn’t broken a sweat, and he hadn’t had to listen to Janeane, either.

“Deb, we should get a dome home,” he enthused.

I sprang out of the cart, leaving phobic Janeane behind; I wasn’t equipped to comfort her. There were lights shining out from the dome’s windows onto the parking lot’s pavement, making it look blackly wet. Light fell on the clumps of red flowers Janeane had talked about (admittedly they were large, roughly the size and shape of butternut squashes). Chip and I passed them, with Steve and Janeane lagging, and went through the door into a room with yellowing botanical drawings on the walls. It had to be some kind of disused educational facility. There was a small fleet of schoolroom desks near the back of the dome-shaped room, where the ceiling was low — wood, ink-stained children’s desks with chairs attached to them.

Some of the other members of our expedition were already sitting, legs awkwardly folded beneath the miniature desks. Some of them stood; some grazed along a foldout table against the wall. It bore a vat of coffee, a stack of plastic cups, and a couple of plates of cookies. I don’t know what I’d expected — a PowerPoint? Wreaths? There was a nondescript woman with a plastic name tag pinned to her lapel, wearing a long, Mormonish skirt and standing near the front of the room with her hands clasped.

“The gang’s mostly here,” said Chip. “Though I don’t see Riley the videographer. Still AWOL, I guess.”

“I hope he’s OK,” I said uncertainly.

“. . glad you could make it tonight,” the Mormonish woman was saying. We’d already missed part of her spiel.

“. . doesn’t feel like a safe space!” Janeane stage-whispered to Steve, nearly into our ears. She seemed to be gearing up to a panic attack. “How many bars does your cell have? Steve? Steve! How many bars?”

“We at Paradise Bay want to be sure that you, both our guests and members of our larger community, feel supported in this time of bereavement,” said the Mormonish woman.

It was her skirt, really, that made her a Mormon, an ankle-length floral thing a Mormon wife might wear; I couldn’t make out her name tag from where I stood.

“Here’s the thing,” said the old Navy SEAL, whose broad back I was looking at since he’d sat down in the front row. “We’re not buying the bathtub story.”

“Sir, my personal area is guest relations and community outreach,” said the Mormon. “Anything legal or technical — of course, you’d have to take that up with the police.”

“Don’t kid a kidder,” said the old salt. “I’ve been around the block. And back.”

“I’m sure you have!”

“I live here,” he went on. “The island cops? You’re joking, right? Those kids only take the job so they can dress up in the outfits. Not a man jack among them with half the sense God gave a Guinea baboon.”

“This is a time to come together,” said the Mormon. “Offer each other our mutual support. The healing can only really begin when we let go of the anger.”

“Shit on a stick,” said the old salt, and pushed himself out of his chair.

“It’s so important to us that our guests feel supported!” said the woman.

“Can you just tell us what happened to Nancy?” said Chip, becoming impatient. “That’s what we want to know. What the hell happened to Nancy?”

“We understand she had asthma,” said the woman. “There was, maybe, a breathing issue while she was in the bath, with the asthma, and then the bathwater, that situation in the bath, and so eventually, what we’re surmising, is what happened was, unfortunately, that.”

“What?” asked Steve, under his breath.

“What?” asked Janeane, loudly.

“Bathtub asthma drowning?” said Chip. “Is that even a thing?”

“In that scenario,” I said directly to the Mormonish woman, summoning my resentment, “she had an asthma attack while she was in the bath, is that what you’re saying? But then, instead of reaching for her inhaler, which she always kept close, she just, as an alternative solution, did a face plunge? Just stuck her face right under the bathwater to cleverly fix her major breathing problem?”

“Unorthodox,” conceded Steve.

“We don’t have the official forensic report at this time, yet,” said the woman.

“Bathtub asthma drowning?” repeated Chip.

“So then according to you,” said Janeane, her voice rising unsteadily, wobble-screeching, “no one came in? Snuck in with shadows disguising him and crept up behind while she relaxed in the soft bubbles, maybe with earphones in? Some peaceful music playing, like Zamfir flute? And then this guy never grabbed her and forced her under by the head? Burst in, strong and hulking, and murdered this poor, naked woman, meanwhile his dick raping?”

“Oh. My.”

“Rape-rape! Rape-rape! Rape-rape!”

Janeane’s brow was furrowed as she said that, her face red; one of her hands was clenched into a fist, her arm moving in a curious rigid, pumping motion.

“Oh dear,” said the Mormon woman.

“You know what, let’s head back to our cabana, why don’t we,” said Steve soothingly, his hand on her upper arm, rubbing, trying to slow the arm down. It was a raping arm. That much was clear. People were really embarrassed. “We’re maybe ruffling a few feathers here. And we’re all so tired, aren’t we? So exhausted. What a stressful day it’s been. Let me help you, honey.”

Chip felt bad for both of them, plain to see, and I felt restless, so in solidarity we followed them, filing toward the door. I figured the Mormonish woman wasn’t going to say much anyway. There was no point to her. At least from our POV, the woman had no reason for being. Sheerly from an outside perspective. I’ve noticed that can happen pretty easily: you look at a person from just about every side there is — except for from the inside, obviously — and there just doesn’t seem to be a good reason for them.

It’s frowned upon to say so, but if we’re being honest, come on — please. There are currently billions of humans. Even allowing for some repetition, are there billions of reasons for being?

“Before you go, though, would you sign in? Please? We really need to get everyone’s full contact info, emails, cell phone—”

She was cut off as we retreated.

WE THREW OUR clothes and toiletries into bags and drove down the road, some of us in Rick and Ronnie’s rental car, the rest in Thompson’s “jeep,” which turned out to be a Hummer, a car Gina admired with particularly hard-edged irony. She congratulated Thompson when she saw it, told him owning a Hummer was the most antisocial act a person could commit without breaking the law.

The sticking point was Janeane, who had a little trouble leaving her safe space despite the fact that it really wasn’t safe anymore. In the end Steve gave her a couple of horse tranquilizers and called it good. We practically carried her out.

A lot of the places were booked up, so we landed at a cheap motel in the end — probably just as well, we figured, since it wouldn’t have corporate ties. It wasn’t a chain and it wasn’t directly on the beach, either, though it was within walking distance. We had thin-walled rooms but there were enough for all of us; we needed to maintain our safety-in-numbers policy. (We’d thought of Thompson’s house, but we’d be too easy to find there if the company decided to come after us.) The pool had leaves floating in it, even a toad, and the clerk had to be enticed out of his back room with impatient shouts to check us in. He wasn’t a go-getter.

On the upside, it had WiFi and cable and it wasn’t too far from our previous location. Chip and I crossed the road and walked down to the ocean just after we checked in: we could still make out the dots of the armada.

Someone got the apathetic clerk to unlock the door between the two biggest rooms and we set up shop with our modest tech array and Janeane’s surprisingly large supply of groceries, sadly lacking in meat, dairy and refined sugar. We convened what Chip called a “leadership conference” to decide on our next steps. We’d broadcasted, we’d faced them down for now, evaded capture; but what was our next goal? There’d be a horde, Miyoko’d warned, descending on the island soon; that was the other big risk we’d run. Now that the mermaids were public knowledge, first in Japan, soon virally, there were new challenges.

We’d done what we had to do, but we’d also opened up a world-size can of worms.

“Not everyone who comes will be on our side, either,” piped up Ronnie. “We can depend on that. Half of them will probably just want to pay the price of admission to the Venture of Marvels.”

“More than half,” grumped Thompson.

“We need to call in some people who’ll be on our side, then,” said Chip.

“Like, who?” said Rick. “Animal rights people? Environmentalists?”

“No, people with power,” said Gina. “Shit. First off, we need some celebrity spokespeople. Like Miyoko. But more so. And American.”

“And scientists,” said Rick. “We have to get some of them. You need at least one famous scientist, in a situation like this.”

“At least one major politician,” put in Steve. “And a rich guy, someone famous for being extremely rich. Say a Bill Gates, a Warren Buffett.”

We brainstormed like that, as Miyoko slaved away on social media and did some phone interviews. Gina took a break to watch the footage, which was posted on YouTube; it already had six figures’ worth of hits, mostly from people in Japan, Miyoko said, but people in other countries were starting to catch on. Before long the hits would be in the millions, she told us confidently. Plenty of people thought it was a hoax, pure Hollywood — good, said Miyoko, that was just fine with her, maybe it’d keep some of the riffraff out.

“More likely it’s the riffraff that’ll come,” said Thompson. “Your alien abductees, your Bigfoot believers, your New Age freaks that go to Sedona to find the vortexes.”

Janeane looked startled at that last one, like maybe she’d made some trips to Sedona herself, but said nothing.

The rest of us thought he had a point.

“Jesus,” said Rick. “Maybe we’re the bad guys here. Maybe we shouldn’t have done this.”

We all felt the panic of that possibility, for a long moment. We saw the hordes, in our mind’s eyes, overrunning the island and the mermaids, and we didn’t like it.

“It was our only play,” said Chip finally. “This was our only play. We have to make it work.”

“I’m going to find a number for Nancy’s family,” said Gina. “We need to get them on board, then reach out to the scientists she worked with. Science will give us our legitimacy. Who’s got a spare laptop? Or iPad?”

Chip’s was still in the possession of the parent company, but Rick had one and he set Gina up. Ellis claimed he’d get in touch with a British embassy or consulate — there had to be one nearby, and maybe, since he was a citizen, they could be of some help.

“Ellis,” I said, in a private aside, “really, man. Listen. I’m always on your side, with the English thing. You’re free to be you. Completely. But you might have to, like, prove you’re a citizen, dealing with a consulate.”

Ellis gave me a hurt look. “Well-w, Deb-rah,” he said, “wot d’ya fink dis is?” (He goes cockney when he’s feeling confronted.)

And damned if he didn’t reach into a zip compartment on his roller bag and pull out a UK passport. The thing was red, with a gold crown on it and a couple of royal-looking animals standing up on hind legs. Seemed like the real deal. I’ve known Ellis a long time, and I still have no idea how he got his hands on it.

Anyway, we figured there was no harm letting him waste his time with embassies or whatnot. There were none on the island, that was for sure.

The group had decided no one should use words like murder or homicide, when one of us talked to Nancy’s family. Those words were not comforting words, and the truth was, without any cops to talk to, without having even seen the body (except for Steve, who’d seen it covered in a sheet) we didn’t actually know shit. Once Gina had a number for Nancy’s parents, which she accomplished with a speed that impressed me (“Failed academics run in families. Turns out her old man’s a professor too”), we decided Chip would make the call. He’d been the closest to Nancy by far, and Chip, when he wants to, can be tactful.

He needed privacy for the call, he said, so we let him out onto the balcony, where he fortified himself with a few swigs from a dewy beer before connecting.

Meanwhile Miyoko had started getting Tokyo celebrities on board; she also had ties to some American actors and rock stars, she told us, a lot of them did lucrative commercials in Japan, for perfume and jewelry and clothing, and she’d interviewed some of our A-listers now and then. Still, they weren’t her best buds so getting through their handlers would take some time, she said. But she was up for it. She didn’t have many ins with scientists or government officials, but pop-culture famous people were her stock in trade.

Gina and Chip would handle the scientist angle, Gina being in the academy herself and Chip having had Nancy’s ear. Rick would try to schmooze the wealthy, since, as an independent filmmaker, he knew quite a few of them. Plus his money contacts had friends among the nationally prominent Democrats, since many made sizable contributions to political campaigns. He’d handle that angle, and Ronnie would help him. Thompson insisted he could pull strings, that he’d call on some old friends still on active duty; he’d try to put together some military might for us, he said, though what he meant we weren’t entirely sure.

There they were, all on cell phones, all frantically dialing and talking. And then there were the rest of us, with no contacts at all. The best Steve could do were some astronomers in Palo Alto, who wouldn’t be much help. They were preoccupied, he said, didn’t have an interest in marine biology: their eyes were fixed on the heavens.

Janeane and I also had nothing.

So Steve, as a therapist (though apparently he didn’t practice anymore) and therefore a de facto interpersonal specialist, would try to do some coalition-building, visit some places of business and government locally, trying to reach out to the year-round community. He’d be armed only with a tablet and our footage, and he’d try to garner local support for a mermaid sanctuary.

We didn’t have high hopes for that part of the outreach, but it was a nice time-killer for Steve, who, like Chip, enjoyed meeting people, whoever they might be. He didn’t feel great about going out alone, but Thompson said he could drive the Hummer and I think the novelty may have encouraged Steve a bit.

Janeane and I were relegated to the menial jobs: Janeane was in charge of keeping us fed and watered, and I — well, I had the lowest task of all. I had to tweet.

Miyoko had several million followers, but they followed her in Japanese. So we established a mermaid-group handle linked to the Facebook page she’d set up, plus the footage of us on the beach, and I tweeted from that. I’d never tweeted before, but it’s not rocket science and I’m a quick study. At first the tweeting was slow-going, but soon enough, with Miyoko’s input, I gained a following for us. Re-tweets were everywhere.

We saw the TV tape on YouTube, our confrontation with the suits and the soldiers, the Japanese TV broadcast. I didn’t like the feeling of watching myself on TV — the shapeless garment I sported was a blot on the landscape. A lifetime of good dressing went out the window; now I was immortalized wearing Janeane’s floral quasi-muumuu.

Gina took my hand, the first time we saw that footage, and squeezed it in terrible sympathy. I would have cried, if I’d had the time and energy. But there was no pause to allow for tears, and the milk was already spilt. The world now knew me as a muumuu woman. I looked like Janeane.

Before long the personal calls and texts started rolling in to my cell phone. I ignored them all — people from work, friends, even B-school people I hadn’t heard from in years. There were three calls from Chip’s mother alone.

Chip ignored his calls too; the long conversation with the Simonoff family — Nancy’s mother, to be specific — was draining. As it turned out, the family had known something was terribly wrong, because someone unfamiliar had answered Nancy’s cell phone when her mother called to check in. That person had said Nancy wasn’t available and not to call again, then promptly hung up. When the father called back (by then the mother was too distraught), no one picked up, so they called the resort and were put through to Guest Services, where they were given the run-around. As a result, the father was already en route to us. Worried sick about Nancy, he’d simply gotten on a plane.

When Chip broke the news to Nancy’s mother about what seemed to have happened, the woman went into shock. It took a while to get her back on the phone, at which time, without prompting from Chip, she brought up the possibility of foul play. Nancy’d had her inhaler since she was in preschool and there was no way, her mother said, she would have failed to use it. She always had extras, too: she was always stocked to the gills.

The family had heard about the mermaids from Nancy before they ever saw the video — they’d been the first ones she called. Nancy had never been a liar or one whit fanciful, they said, on the contrary, she’d always been painfully literal. She had no interest in movies, except for documentaries on marine life; she never played non-educational games or read make-believe stories, and she abominated the frivolity of novels. When other girls dressed up as princesses for Halloween, she put on a snorkel mask and went as Jacques Cousteau. (And once as a blowfish, her mother admitted, which set off a bout of weeping that called for a phone handoff to a neighbor and delayed the conversation another twenty minutes.)

The parents had retired to Florida when the father went emeritus, so it was a short flight and Prof. Simonoff was due in shortly. Chip’s new directive was to keep him from falling into the clutches of the parent company. He’d meet him at the ferry, and this time there’d be no interception from the marine police: we were the only ones who knew he was coming. And not only was the Prof. coming, Nancy’s mother had told Chip, but he was bringing some medical expertise with him — a doctor friend from their retirement community. You never knew when that might come in handy.

The problem was, the armada was still out there. As far as we knew, they were moving full steam ahead with their plan to cordon off the mermaids and “bring them in.” The way we saw it, none of our activities, no part of our energetic bustle was going to bear fruit in time to stop it. We needed an injunction, a court order that would make them cease and desist their mermaid-corralling activities. And that was something we didn’t have.

Time flew that day, with many of us doing video interviews as well as phone — I made sure to shed the muumuu, now that I had access to my own clothes again — and a couple of meltdowns, like when Janeane first saw (against Steve’s explicit wishes) the beach footage, complete with soldiers/guns. She barricaded herself into the bathroom and we had to call in Steve, who was making his rounds in the Hummer, to lure her out again.

There was also an altercation between Thompson and Rick when Thompson referred to him and Ronnie as “the two fairies”; it ended with Rick getting First Aid from Steve for a small cut above his right eye, while Ronnie prepared an ice pack. Thompson refused to say he was sorry, claiming that fairy was a purely descriptive term having nothing to do with homophobia/hate crimes/being a giant bigot. Also, Thompson maintained, when he’d inquired whether Ronnie was “the gayer one” he’d just been honestly trying to understand their deal. They didn’t have to be so touchy about it.

Gina attempted to show solidarity with Rick by dumping a whole bottle of cayenne pepper from Janeane’s travel-size spice rack into Thompson’s whiskey flask when Thompson wasn’t looking, then admitting it openly after Thompson spit whiskey all over the motel bedspread and complained the skin was peeling off his gums. Thompson wouldn’t hit a woman, that was as much a part of his code as calling gay men fairies, so Gina was protected from brute-force retaliation. Still, she hid the other spices just to be safe, and watched her own food and drinks like a hawk subsequently. From then on she’d only drink beers she opened herself, and no cocktails at all, she vowed.

For there was some drinking going on, no harm in admitting it; the stress, the pressure was getting to us, plus we were all on vacation. Those of us who normally had five o’clock rules suspended them (save for Janeane, a teetotaler), and those of us with no such rules, such as Thompson, proceeded all the more vigorously.

Chip, in his cups by 2 p.m., needed a designated driver to pick up Prof. Simonoff, so I, who at that time had only had two light beers, volunteered. I didn’t like going out just the two of us, so Thompson got the Hummer back from Steve — who’d met with rudeness and disbelief, for the most part, in his outreach activities and wanted to spend some time with the fraught Janeane — and we set out for the marina as a threesome. Thompson was a sight, by then, wearing some rolls of gauze in his mouth, soaked in hydrogen peroxide, that covered up his teeth. I glanced back at one point from the driver’s seat to see him loading shells into what looked to me like a high-powered rifle.

“Thompson,” I said, “you’re not packing that thing. You’re drunk, for one. Put it away right now. That violates every rule of gun safety.”

“Lock and load in my sleep,” mumbled Thompson through his gauze. A piece of it fell out as he spoke; he fumbled the rifle as he tried to shove it back in.

“No way, man,” said Chip. “You know how much I respect you. But we have to be cool here. You’ll scare Nancy’s father half to death. He’s already gonna have a personal tragedy to deal with. He’ll think we’re a bunch of crackpots.”

Thompson grudgingly put the gun aside, harrumphing through his gauze, and contented himself with donning some kind of camouflage cargo or fishing vest, with multiple bulging pockets in it, that held knives and sundry other objects of utility and aggression. I saw him sneak something that looked like a grenade into one of the compartments, but right then we passed a convoy of jeeps that alarmed me and I forgot about his doings, too busy watching the rearview mirror to see if any of the jeeps turned back around and followed us. (They didn’t.)

Then we were at the parking lot near the marina, where we waited until the ferry was pulling up to the dock, Thompson scouting all around, first with the naked eye, next with binoculars, for other gun-wielders. Finally they jumped out and walked, as calmly as they could, I guess, toward the disembarking passengers. I waited in the car, doors stoutly locked, gas-guzzling engine running noisily and doing its part for runaway climate change, for the two of them to come back with our distinguished visitors.