The Lady Will Pay For Everything
By AJ Bermudez
Alpine Fellowship 2021 – Writing Prize Winner
The fish come from nowhere. They are at once, suddenly, everywhere.
Ian is the first to notice. He traces the glass, his knobby finger squeaking erratically against the pristine blue sheen of the window. The window is, of course, also the wall, also the ceiling, very nearly the floor, arching in an extravagant curve over the scope of the living area. The place is a luxurious little glass balloon, a bubble-shaped dollhouse, tastefully ascetic amid a riot of coral and blindingly blue Indian Ocean. The fish is the colour of wine, a honeycomb of scales etched in popsicle-green, lips bright orange, eyes candy-red.
'What do we do?' Ian says.
'We only kill spiders indoors,' Marie says sagely, and goes back to her paper. 'Leave him alone.'
'How do you know it’s a him?' says Ian.
But Marie is no longer listening. She is entrenched in the Times, a civilised treat squirreled away from home, a bastion of what people are saying 15,000 kilometres away and 18 metres above. In any case, she isn’t a monster. Isn’t it maternal enough to have brought her children here, to have given them the experience of a lifetime?
Leslie traipses in with her suitcase. It and she are both daintily small. She plops her luggage onto the carpet and looks around, gracefully nonplussed. 'Should we be down here?' she says, but the way she says it sounds like something else, something worse.
Marie loves her daughter, more than life itself (more than Ian), but there is a queasy sort of reverence, a fear and awe of the misunderstood, in her devotion. Leslie had come out perfectly––a short but draining labour for which Marie had been blissfully stoned––but with her skull slightly raised in the back (had Marie pushed hard enough? fast enough?) beneath an enviable swirl of wispy baby-blonde hair. This minor malformation, together with a nearly translucent complexion and pistachio-green eyes, gave her a slightly alien aesthetic. A few days after Leslie was born, Marie had begun to brutally, pragmatically scour a gamut of fashion magazines. She subscribed to everything, riffled through the pages with a ferocious, jungle-cat vengeance. She was looking for models who looked like her baby––lengthy and lithe, nearly diaphanous––ensuring safety for another season. So far, so good.
Ian presses his nose against the glass. The fish does the same.
'Look, Mama!' says Ian, and Marie pretends to look. She watches instead as Leslie takes a full step backward and sits at the centre of the room, peaceably bored.
'Can we go swimming?' says Ian.
'No,' says Marie. There is a small lift at the remote end of the suite, which rises to a slatted dock, where a narrow ladder dangles into the ocean. But that’s the trouble with a transparent underwater hotel. One can see the sharks, rays, hawkfish, barracuda. One knows too much.
#
Christian had learned of the Royal Pisces Underwater Resort from someone else at the firm. Christian’s colleague said it had 'changed his life,' though Marie couldn’t fathom what was so special about his life to begin with. Ultimately, Christian had persuaded her with an orchestrated slideshow of Google images and the promise of exclusivity, an experience she could lord over her friends and weaponise against her social media rivals.
Marie had hated it instantly. It was like being relegated to the basement during a family reunion––private, yes, but so much obviously worse than upstairs. And it was small, oddly shaped in the style of a row house or submarine, bathed in a distortion-prone, perpetually marbled blue light. What would her friends say? All her pictures would look the same.
'Listen, I’ll pay for everything,' Christian had said. He had often said this, since the earliest phases of their courtship, sparking in Marie something between obligatory indignation and massive relief. Marie had laughed. As though money were the problem, her and the children footing their portion of the bill. She was apoplectically bitter, but there was, as always, an overwhelming sense of ease, being married to this wonderfully rich dumb fuck.
'It’ll be the experience of a lifetime,' Christian had said. Marie had cheerfully repeated this expression to their children, and here they were.
In her youth, Marie had felt a strange, precarious disquiet when visiting aquariums. Unreasonable, she knew, but she dreaded the giant vestibules of glass, electric with jellyfish or swarming with African cichlids, certain the glass would break and the foreign world would come spilling onto her shoes, subsequently drowning the entire field trip. Here, she realises, in this meticulously designed bunker of glass and stone, they are the aquarium.
The hotel’s remoteness is the crux of its charm––that’s what Christian keeps saying––but the methods of travel required to get here had seemed endless, each more exhausting and antiquarian than the last. There was the cab to JFK, then the shuttle, then the plane to Hong Kong, then the smaller, worse plane to Sri Lanka, then the boat. God, the boat. They had weaved through little islands with names like Gemanafushi and Rathafandhoo, impossible little scraps of earth atop an undulating sheet of crystalline blue. Christian had observed all this with the doe-eyed incredulity of a student on his first school outing. Marie had never hated him more.
Ian places his nose against the glass and taps, taps, taps. On the opposite side of the window, his iridescent, ichthyoid acquaintance does the same. Then the latter turns, slick and shimmering, and returns to its school.
#
The morning passes without incident. Leslie stumbles back and forth across the living area, clumsily mirroring the path of sting rays and undersized sharks overhead. Christian lies on the carpet alongside Ian, making a big show of pointing out various creatures––scorpionfishes, cow sharks, tripletails, emperors, goatfishes––although Marie suspects he’s making it all up. Ian writhes in laughter, imagining fish as the animals they’re named for. Leslie watches as Marie fetches a pashmina from the master bedroom, then hops up from the carpet and follows her mother to the lift.
The surface-level patio had been a selling point in Christian’s pitch. Now, here, Marie is, at best, underwhelmed. The patio is a stripe of wood in the middle of true nowhere, saved from its identity as a raft only by concrete pylons and an exorbitant price tag.
Marie and Leslie dangle their legs in the water, a flirt with danger. They have seen the goatfishes.
#
The chef arrives, a spry, unpretentious local named Aiham whose credentials from Le Cordon Bleu seem highly suspect. The children flock to him, enchanted by his sun-flecked complexion and satchel of food, which holds the combined mystique of a magician’s kit and medic’s bag. 'Aiham!' Christian exclaims, his mispronunciation drenched with confidence. 'What have you brought us?'
'Papaya, kohlrabi, and…' Aiham lifts a final prize from his bag with a sorcerer’s flourish: '...Kalhubilamas.'
The last of these items, a flat, shimmering tuna, dangles from his fist, rivulets of dirt and salt in the gills. Leslie steps forward to touch it, but Marie swats her hand away. 'It’s raw,' she says. 'You have no idea where it’s been.' Later, the children will marvel that they can eat something they aren’t allowed to touch.
Aiham likes to tell stories as he cooks, and tonight his pleasure is a Maldivian folk tale about birds. 'You might not like it,' he says. But the children are insistent, and in the end he cedes to their whims above the languidly amused, politely impatient expressions of their parents.
'There is an island,' Aiham begins, 'which is not perfect, for nothing ever was, but that was once the closest thing to paradise you could imagine. It was a sanctuary for a flock of seabirds, chosen especially by the god of the sea. One night, a land bird arrived at the island, weary from travel. He begged the birds of the island to let him stay, just for one night. The leader of the island––a wise old seabird––warned his companions that if they let the visitor stay, the island (or at least their way of life on the island) would be destroyed forever. The leader spoke with great passion, but his power was limited (as you may know, birds are democratic), and the seabirds decided to let the visitor stay. In the morning, the land bird awoke from his roost on the beach, thanked his hosts, and flew away. Nothing bad had happened. The seabirds laughed at the old leader, and congratulated themselves on their generosity. But the following day, a strange tree began to grow on the beach. The land bird’s droppings had contained a seed from another island, and soon enough, the seed sprouted and blossomed into a coconut tree. Soon there were more and more trees, until the beach was thick with them. New birds, new animals, and finally human travellers arrived, eager to harvest the fruit of the trees. The humans shot the seabirds and ate them, and wore their feathers as jewellery.'
Leslie and Ian listen in rapt silence as Aiham speaks. When he finishes, Christian clears his throat. 'Does the hotel know you tell stories like that?'
Aiham laughs. 'There are no other guests here in the off-season. You are the hotel,' he says.
#
That night, Leslie cannot sleep. She retrieves a box of coloured pencils from a secret compartment of her suitcase, along with a sheaf of plain white computer paper, and sets to work.
She draws the fish as they are, magnificent and terrifying. She draws the prickly little buttons of coral and macaroni tendrils of anemone.
She considers the floor of the ocean, beneath the carpeted floor beneath her feet, and draws this little patch of earth and sea––wildly sumptuous, insatiably violent––as it might have been, as it would have been, had their present accommodations never been built.
#
Christian gets up in the dark, slips on the plush pair of Royal Pisces branded slippers beside the bed. He crosses through the eerily lit master bath, a wonderland of sea glass and stone, past the lift and dining area, into the living room. He pauses at the closed door of the children’s room on the opposite side, fingertips resting on the brushed metal handle. He would swear he hears little scratches––Leslie’s pencil set or a scraping of fingertips against glass––coming from inside. He leaves the door and helps himself to an ambiguously expensive, unrecognised bottle from the blue crystal bar. Glass on glass on glass. He turns back toward the window, which is also the wall, also the ceiling, very nearly the floor. He leans his forehead against the surface, curious to see what all the fuss is about.
But no fish come, and Christian goes back to bed.
#
Leslie and Ian have begun to walk differently, slackening their limbs and swiveling as though moving through water. Marie watches them with lax amusement, envious of their capacity to make the most of such a ridiculous family vacation.
She imagines them now as a quartet of underwater sentries, ancient statues in a range of poses: fighting an underwater war, building an underwater barracks, planting an underwater garden. She imagines tourists coming to visit them, descending the narrow glass block of the lift, taking photos with their phones sheathed in waterproof cases.
#
The fish comes back, this time with friends. The entire school––dozens, then hundreds of fish––race in a silvery kaleidoscope of laps around the hotel. Ian is thrilled, dashes from the living area to the bedroom through the bathroom and kitchenette, attempting to match their speed with the alacrity of a puppy chasing a car.
At long last, he returns to the living area, exhausted. He collapses on the floor, near Marie’s graceful perch on one of the living room chairs. Leslie continues to draw, her coloured pencils weaving in merciless strings of sherbet orange and cerulean blue, watermelon pink and electric lime. Each fish appears to be not merely a fish, but all fish at once.
Marie, who voraciously collects and half-heartedly pretends to understand art, glances at the raft of white computer paper surrounding Leslie. She makes a mental note to keep an eye on this habit, to nurture it if needed, to bring Leslie to the next Gagosian opening and see how she responds.
A fish hovers idly just beyond the glass, then smacks its fluorescent pink maw into the window. It does this again, again and again and again. More fish arrive, a wriggling swarm of speckled fins and glimmering scales. The fish’s snout blossoms into a delicate spray of blood, whiskers that sprout and slither outward in every direction.
The windows love the blood, seem to be hungry for it. Droplets of red freckle and smear like rain on a windshield. Christian is already on the phone, calling hotel management. Ian has stopped running. Leslie has dotted her slew of drawing paper with pimples of crimson, poison apple, brick red. Marie is reading about the Dow and its subservience to foreign markets.
It is a special kind of glass, and when it breaks, it cracks in a clean, straight fissure, like two halves of a plastic Easter egg. Leslie is the first to understand what's happening. She takes her brother’s hand and stares across the living area. The light above them, slick with blood, wavers with an ethereal sheen.
The children stare at their parents, as though having rehearsed this, and the ocean falls like a curtain between them.
#
Marie is nearest the lift and stumbles toward it, fists of ocean curling about her ankles. A crack of glass erupts behind her and a swirl of water slams against the backs of her knees. She reaches the lift bay and slaps the button. She looks up, into the very real tunnel and toward the light. The lift drops down, inexorably slowly, designed to resist sudden changes in pressure and to maximise the view.
When the water reaches her waist, she hears herself scream, a nightmare scream of trivial volume. And then, as though casually visiting a familiar place, the fish are in her hair and mouth, squirming between her legs and swirling around her neck. Christian is elsewhere, dead already, arms spread wide as though to say: one day this will all be yours.
Silence prevails, dense with a percussion of glass and heaviness of ocean. Amid the water, vast and violet with blood, the silk sheets sway like kelp; artwork puckers and disintegrates; the top-shelf whiskey is irretrievably watered down. Already the vases have become nests; pillows blossom with squirrelfish and sprats. Fish are everywhere, an eye on each side, seeing everything.
Eruptions of light freckle Marie’s vision. With her second-to-last thought, she mourns herself, then, fearful of some cosmic reprisal for her ego, thinks of the children. She imagines the fish taking pity on them, like wolves in fairytales, raising them as their own.
She feels herself becoming a nest.
She imagines Leslie breathing underwater, and hopes she’s not too old to learn.
About the author:
AJ Bermudez
Is an award-winning writer and director who divides her time between Los Angeles and New York. Her work has been featured at the Yale Center for British Art, the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, Sundance Film Festival, and in a number of literary journals, including The Masters Review, McSweeney’s, Boulevard, Columbia Journal, Gertrude, Story, Chicago Review, and elsewhere. In addition to writing and filmmaking, Bermudez is also a former boxer and EMT, and her work gravitates toward contemporary explorations of violence, the architecture of privilege, and the evolving dynamics of nature and industry.
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