Page 109 of The End of the World As We Know It

Mole gave a contemptuous little grunt. Seth kept staring at him, and finally the old man said, “?’Course I love her. You felt what she can do. Let her do it a couple more times and you’ll love her, too.”

“I think I have AIDS,” Seth said.

“My pa had a tumor in his brain when he hauled her up. Doctors said he’d no more than a few months to live, but he hung around ten more years. She cured him. She’ll cure you. And she keeps the flu away.”

“So, she cures your sickness, and she gets you off. What doessheget out of it?”

“Don’t play stupid with me, boy. She came, too, you felt it. She needs to come every day, sometimes two or three times. She feeds on it.”

“You do that for her?”

“Yeah.” The old man held up a gnarled hand, gave his first two fingers an obscene little crook. “That’s how she keeps the sickness off you. She don’t just cure you once, she cures you on what you might call a daily basis.”

“That’s why you have to keep her.”

“Yeah. Won’t be able to do it much longer, though. Got a dickey heart like my pa. I feel it squeezin’ up in my chest every day now, and that’s not something she can cure.”

Seth’s patience was at an end. “What do you want from me?” he yelled. “Why are you showing me this?!”

“When I met you down on the beach there, you weren’t scared of the Jenny Haniver. And you struck me as a lad who might need curing. Fact is, you look a little peaked right now. You take care of her after I’m gone, well… she’ll take care of you.”

Seth bolted. He wrenched the shack’s door open, took the stairs two at a time, and raced toward his car. Behind him, he could hear Mole calling, “Come back whenever you’re ready. She ain’t going anywhere.”

A day, a week, a month went by. Seth’s throat hurt most of the time. He found himself nodding off in the middle of the afternoon. Hedidn’t care, just slept wherever he happened to be. He lost his appetite and dropped ten pounds from his already skinny frame. He didn’t check on any of the other islanders. One day he woke up with a Gobi-dry mouth and a stabbing pain in his tongue. The bathroom mirror showed him yellow blotches on his tongue and inner cheeks. He recognized these as oral thrush, one of the opportunistic infections his doctor had warned him about.

He opened the drawer, took out a bottle of AZT, felt his stomach clench. Shook two capsules into his hand. Poured a glass of water from the pitcher he kept there. Almost swallowed the pills. Then flung them away, cursing, and left the house.

He could smell the odor of decomposition as soon as he parked beside Mole’s shack. His feet didn’t want to climb the stairs, but he forced himself up. The door wasn’t locked, nor had Seth expected it to be; Mole would have been hoping he’d come.

The sight that greeted him was worse than he’d feared. Mole was in the hammock, and the fatal heart attack (so Seth assumed) must have happened at least a week ago, because Mole was ripe, riper than any corpse Seth had seen in the thick of the superflu. He wore only a pair of saturated boxer shorts. His eyes were like a pair of peeled eggs gone bad. His hands were great bloated gloves. His tongue jutted obscenely from his mouth. Worst of all, he had begun to drip through the netting of the hammock, producing little diamond-shaped runners of decay. Flies crawled over him and maggots churned in the hollow of his belly. The smell was monumental.

If he vomited, Seth thought he would pass out. He turned away from the awful sight. As he did so, motion caught his eye, and for a moment he thought he might join Mole in heart attack heaven. But the movement had come from the big tank.

The aquarium was dark with algae and smelled stagnant. Seth realized the pump was no longer working. When he looked into the tank, he thought at first that the creature was dead. Her midnight-blue color had faded to a sickly aqua, and the gold ripples under her skinwere entirely gone. Then she fluttered to the surface and a soft burbling reached his ears.

“What do you want? How can I help you?”

Her four eyes grew heavy-lidded. Her petals rippled in an unmistakably coquettish pattern.

“Oh, no, I can’t—”

But he realized that he was becoming aroused. That was impossible, in this stinking room, with this nonhuman but apparently female creature, and yet he was suddenly as hard as he could ever recall being. He did not remember that he shared the room with a corpse, no longer smelled its fetor. With one hand, he undid his fly and reached in to grasp his cock. He slipped his other hand into the water, and the mermaid flowed around it, engulfed it. Gentle muscles gripped his fingers, guided them to where they were needed. He stroked the firm little node. The mermaid shuddered and cooed, and Seth moaned. It was no longer his own hand on his cock; though she was still in the tank, he thought he could feel those tight petals sucking him in. They came together, not so much an orgasm as an explosion. Seth steadied himself on the edge of the aquarium. The mermaid fluttered quietly to the bottom of the tank. Her color was a little better now, more cornflower than aqua.

“Did you like that?” Seth asked when he was able to speak. “I mean, I know you came, but… is this what you want to be doing? Isn’t this the wrong place for you?”

What happened next was a sensation Seth never forgot. The mermaid’s mind flowed into his own, and it spoke there. “I. Take. Illness. I. Give. Pleasure. Are you. Unsatisfied?”

Seth shook his head.

“I. Pleasure you. Again. If you. Want.”

Hedidwant, that was the thing. Though only moments had passed since his orgasm, he already wanted to feel those phantom petals on him again. He wanted to slide his fingers into the mermaid and stroke her again. Most of all, he wanted her to take away hisillness. He could understand why Mole (and Mole’s father before him) had been compelled to keep her. But it still felt wrong.

“Where do you come from?” he asked. “Where do you belong?”

“I. Belong. Ocean. We make. Love. I make. Love. With others. Like. Me.”

The language was primitive, but as the mermaid spoke, a picture appeared in his head. Sapphire-clear water, seaweed forest, and on the sandy bottom, dozens of creatures like this one. Some were deep blue, some rosy pink, some silver. Golden light rippled beneath their skin as they flowed over and under and into one another. They trembled with orgasms. They were breathtaking, a multicolored collage of ecstasy. Mole had called the mermaidshe, but Seth saw now that there was no male or female among these beings; they were embodiments of pleasure and needed no other sustenance or meaning.