The Underwater City 

By Michael Stein

I.

She won't stop asking to hear about the underwater city. Every night when I tuck her in to go to sleep, I have to tell her. All her fairy tales take place there. For her, it's where all the princes and princesses in the world are from. She describes it back to me in detail as if she's the one telling the stories as if she's seen it but it's all in her head, its towery spires emerging from the watery floor like stalagmites in an underground cave. She's never even seen a drawing of it and I want to keep it that way for as long as possible, to keep it living in her imagination.

I tell her about its sailors, its explorers, and its adventurers, about its palaces connected to one another by water instead of roads. I tell her about the kings and sultans and emperors who envied its beauty and treasures and of the golden child who came from China only to get lost in the water and that no matter how hard they searched for him they couldn't find him. I tell her about the haunted palaces and about Namor, who fought against the city's enemies.

I know sometimes I get a little carried away. She is practically still a baby, and I can be in the middle of telling her about Giovanni Dario's cursed palace when I realize that she has no idea what a curse is, just as she has no concept of the past and present, so everything I'm telling her might just as well have happened all at once, which makes it even the more magical for her, I suppose.

There are times I'd much rather just tell her an ordinary fairy tale, something I can read from a book or just make up, but she insists. It's the underwater city or no sleep. Once she asked if my mother could tell her stories about it too but I said that it was our secret and that even grandma couldn't know about it. I almost told her that grandma had grown up in the city and was sad to talk about it now that she couldn't go back, but she would have been too young to understand that and it might have upset her.

Do I embellish the stories at all? No, not really. I don't need to because that's what she is doing while she's listening. That's the effect the best stories are supposed to have on our imaginations and why the best writers should never write too much. I don't mean in terms of length. Write a thousand-page novel if you like, but just don't fill in all the blanks, leave those to your readers. I can see my daughter adding her notes in the margins of her mind and sometimes it helps me forget what an ultimately sad story I'm telling her.

It's funny because when I was younger I wanted to be a writer, even made a half-hearted effort at it which faded more than stopped cold, but I never really found the story I wanted to tell or language to tell it in, at least until my daughter first insisted on these bedtime stories and now I finally have the inspiration I've always been waiting for, hoped for, but which never showed up, and now it comes night after night like a late-in-life lover. So this is my novel, and my little daughter is my one and only reader and when she grows up and forgets these stories my novel will just fade away, and that's fine.

What also makes it magical for both of us is that we've never once used the city's name. But then one night she waited for me with a smile whose expectancy worried me a little. There was something sphinx-like and mischievous in her eyes that intrigued me but also made me uneasy and I suspected what it was and it turns out I was right because after all, it was only a matter of time. I began to tell that night's story and she came out with it and said Mama, I know the name of the city. It was hard for me to conceal my shock and not just shock, but sorrow, because it was over now. I was telling her stories about a real place, I knew that, but once it was named all the magic would be gone and for me at least it would be taken out of the realm of legend and fairy-tale and be put into that of archeology. The city's reality would sink sadly and forever into the murky ocean floor, and the stories would dry up.

So tell me its name, I said to her. It was unavoidable now, but her smile just grew more luminous, so proud was she of her discovery and she made me wait longer and said Atlantis, and now it was my turn to smile but also to think about whether to lie and say she was right so the storytelling could go on, or tell her she was wrong and risk that she'll keep searching and find the real name, which of course she eventually, inevitably will.

II.

"There are very few people who can do what I do, very few. Being an ordinary tour guide, I mean, what is that? You take a group of people through a city, a museum, a palace, whatever, you memorize some names and dates and a few historical facts surrounding it, add a witty anecdote or two, and then take them to an overpriced restaurant for lunch. Any halfwit is capable of that. Is there any specialized skill involved there? Any danger? Will any of your group come back to you breathless, and I mean literally breathless, okay, not literally, but panting, full of gratitude and excitement over the tour you've taken them on when it's only been a walk through a museum? No, don't think so.

“I've been diving my whole life, since I was a boy, in rivers, the sea, exploring shipwrecks, and you know what, I never cared about the names of the ships or if they came from the 17th or 18th century or whatever, or if we found crashed Japanese or American planes from World War II. Sometimes the flags hadn't worn off so we could tell, but that wasn't the point and it's the same now. When I lead dives I don't care about the names of where we dive, they don't matter anymore. 

“Have you ever gone to a party or dinner where you're introduced to a group of people you know you will absolutely, positively never meet again? You politely hear their names or don't even do that. Yeah, let's face it, you don't listen when you're told their names because it's pointless. After that evening they will cease to exist for you, so why bother? That's how I feel about learning the squares, churches, fortresses, and landmarks I lead groups through. They're on their way towards non-existence. It's like learning the names of the critically ill.

“I've led tours all up and down the Yangtze. Of course, Shanghai is now the Disneyland of city diving back home, too commercial now if you ask me. I've led Sichuan village diving tours for business people wanting a weekend getaway or a last look at some rural areas before they wash away for good. I've led regular groups to the sections of Bangkok and Jakarta that are permanently underwater now and six years ago began taking groups of the elite, or actually, their spoiled, bored kids, on annual dives of Houston, though those were stopped because the Americans don't just rob you on the streets, they'll come after you on your boats and even underwater if you can believe it! But that wasn't my fault. I agreed with the decision to back out a hundred percent, though it was a shame. To swim above row after row of rusted cranes below you on the ocean floor, through the skeletal shells of abandoned oil refineries near the port, was intense. They loved it. We made a real killing on that one!

“But now I'm sticking to Europe. I mean, let's face it. This is the future. No one's interested anymore in dives in passing floodwaters that only cover a strip of the coast. It's the sinking cities that draw. Now I need to stay in a city in that short space of time when the skyline is still swimmable. I was doing the Italian tour nonstop ... until recently of course. I mean that was a diver's paradise. Did you know it was called the city of water? As if it had been made for divers in the first place."

Roma Danielovich stubs out his second or third cigarette as Shui finally takes a breath, his thoughts presumably still somewhere in Italy. The hefty unshaven Russian has been looking back and forth between the Chinese guide and some forms he has to fill out on the counter in front of him. Checking off names of mechanics to work on his fleet of boats working the waters of Amsterdam, St. Petersburg, and here in Prague among other cities. Shui glances down at the stack of pages, noticing them for the first time and the sheer number of boats in the water gives him hope.

"We are really living in a golden age," Shui mumbles, as if to himself.

"Ah golden, about that," Roma says, and Shui winces before the Russian goes on, "Well, you were leading tours, or okay sorry, not tours, dives - with the elite of China, with the golden youth of the country and what happens, you have the son of one of China's multibillionaires, number six on the rich list at the moment I believe, and a friend of the premiere, or confidant, whatever these people have, and he drowns on your watch. Doesn't look too good, you know."

"He didn't drown," Shui says, "They never found his body. If he had drowned there would have been a body."

"So what happened if he didn't drown?" Roma asks in a tone of voice well beyond skepticism, but also as if he might burst out laughing.

"I don't know, this was when the water was very high. It was one of the last tours. We were swimming through the top of the basilica of St. Marks..."

"Wait, I thought you didn't know the names of these places!"

"I remember the name of this one. If you swam through that church you wouldn't forget it either. But he couldn't have drowned, at least not there. Did he swim away? I don't know. There were, are, all kinds of rumors about his father, so maybe he wanted to get away from him. Maybe one of his father's enemies got him."

The Russian can't hold back his laughter.

"You mean his father's enemy was a shark?"

Shui didn't seem to be paying attention anymore. 

"All his enemies are sharks. He's a shark too."

"No, I meant...oh, never mind. Listen, if I can find an opening for you I'll be in touch, okay?"

Roma Danielovich shuffles his papers off to the side. He's had enough. So has Shui, though there's nothing he can shuffle off to the side, there's no side for him. City diving is all he knows. Roma lights up another cigarette and smiles.

"Don't worry Shui, there are black clouds on the horizon for you."

"Huh?"

"Rain, and then rising waters and tours, and you know, the Chinese will keep coming, and there will be work for you. You'll see."

"You think, really?"

Shui does finally shuffle off down Majakovského ulice so Roma can get his lunch at Bistro Piraňa around the corner before getting back to work sending out tour boats and then he catches a last look at the Chinese diver as he walks toward the ferry terminal by Prague castle and thinks, you're right, old man, it is a golden age, just not for you.

III.

"There is no rush like it, not even fucking close, that burst of speed when your kayak slips through the narrowest of spaces, an alleyway, a window, a break in the wall, you know, something that was never meant to have a boat go through it but you are in one and you sail right through like you're in a dream but you're not in a dream because you need all your concentration to make sure that after you sail through that window, or hole, or turn into an alley that you don't flip over because if you do you don't know where you'll end up because there are a lot of flood-riders who were buried at sea - that's what we're called - but we made it through, at least we survived that part of it.

“There were four of us, from here, well, me and Ivan and Anke were all from Vienna. Hamid was born in Syria but grew up here. We started chasing floods whenever the Danube would overflow. We were always the last ones racing under the bridges as the water hit the top and the cops would come after us, which was why we started to go abroad.

“Some people were disgusted by our rides, saying it was like bungee jumping from the Twin Towers as the bodies fell, with us sheltered because we would eventually paddle our way back to our mountain homes, not that Vienna is in the mountains here, but still, and even when it was dangerous it was a danger we chose to face for our own kicks, which was true enough. But we weren't misery tourists and we didn't come to watch the end and there wasn't one of us who didn't feel the horror of what was happening around us, of all that beauty and history getting pulled under, drowning before our eyes without any of us being able to do a fucking thing.

“And that's what you have to remember. There was absolutely nothing we could do to stop it at that point. It was too late, so I mean, what —should we have stayed at home and watched the water rise on TV like everybody else? Would that be more fucking virtuous? Well, if that's what you think then go fuck yourself because even if you have an idea of what we saw because you saw one of the million documentaries they were making while we were there, all called 'Last Days of a City' or some shit like that, or had the word 'flood' or 'drowning' in their titles somewhere, like the one by that award-winning German director whose name I can't remember because, let's face it, he's such a self-righteous prick, and then when it won an award at Cannes, the way he stood on stage so proud as if his film had saved the city from going under as if it had done a single fucking thing.

“And you all went to see it, in 3D even, and clapped too, and yeah, to have been there early enough to have made it under the Rialto or to have slalomed through the Doge's Palace or tried to navigate where the canals used to be, it's fucking insane, yeah, but what we saw was nothing compared to what we felt and that's what none of you have the slightest clue about. You can't get that from a film, and now no one can get it at all." 

IV.

One by one the city's favorite sons are shepherded out under armed guard: Giorgione, Bellini, Titian, Guardi, and so on, until the Gallerie dell'Accademia is just an empty shell. Next, it is the turn of the churches, one after the other their walls emptied and whitened in lieu of raising flags. In each of them you could find a smattering of worshippers in knee-length rubber boots sitting in shocked mourning as if a funeral were being held for the living rather than the dead, their heads bowed less in prayer than defeat. 

Father Domencini stands on the steps leading up the altar though there isn't a mass or funeral at San Giovanni in Brágora, and won't be for the foreseeable future. He wants to feel like he is overseeing the workers removing the marble saints, the golden angels, and the baptismal font of Vivaldi. They have already rescued the more fragile paintings—Alvise Vivarini's Resurrection of Christ, the Madonna and Child, Cima da Conegliano's Baptism of Christ, along with all the rest. The remnants of frescoes are being left with a protective cover.

But the priest isn't overseeing anything now, having left that to the powers above, whether in heaven or Rome, he doesn't know, and now he has another problem altogether because there is a small but angry crowd confronting him and they aren't yelling or screaming at him as they sometimes do. No, this angry group of activists is confronting him with calm, collected theological debate, which in many ways is worse for him than guns and knives.

They are pointing to the workers with angels and crosses in their arms as they thickly wrap them in plastic as though they are putting them in body bags. These are supposed to be the symbols of a power beyond human intervention and understanding, the group's seeming leader says, a young, intense man with short black hair and thin malicious eyes who goes by his online activist name of Namor. In his yellow raincoat he is facing the priest, who calmly tells him that yes, God is sending the water.

Father Domencini is trying to follow the discussion, debate, argument, after all, he's a participant, but he can't help looking at the different colored raincoats and the faces of the activists and thinking that they look nothing like activists but rather actors, and for a brief, disturbing moment he feels like part of a theatrical performance.

"So you're saying God is surrendering to God?" Namor asks.

"Yes, my son."

"That's either very profound, symbolic and, I don't know, cynical in some way, a kind of eternal renewal maybe." 

He looks back at his followers who nod in smirking, furious agreement.

"Or," he continues, "it's one big con."

The priest knows this statement is supposed to provoke him but their city is possibly about to be submerged in the depths of the sea, never to be recovered, so a little provocation helps distract, even bring to life the otherwise placid, kindhearted man who has already daydreamed a few times of going down with his church the way a sea captain would go down with his ship. 

"My young friend, I must admit to being a bit confused. These streets are, or rather were, full of cons when tourists were fleeced changing money, and all other sorts of dirty tricks. But I can't figure out who is perpetrating this one, since it certainly can't be the water, can it, at least not on its own?"

"No Padre, the water itself is perfectly innocent in all this...it will swallow our city and its history for all eternity, but it's still innocent," Namor says, matter of factly.

"So then it's a con being committed by God himself, is that what you are charging him with?"

"God, a con man? Oh, he may be many things, and truthfully, the con man is almost certainly one of them, but this goes well beyond that."

Even the few parishioners seeking comfort or a last look in the church are listening now.

"Our churches are houses of God meant to embody his divinity and the fact that he is all-powerful. To take them apart and empty them is a concession that this divine power it expresses in stone and marble and paint is an illusion, just smoke and mirrors."

Father Domencini wants to answer Namor but he's used to formulating a response and now he is looking around at the white walls and wet floor and his mind is blank. A voice comes to his aid, not low and booming from the sky, but friendly and supportive from the back of the church:

"And what if it's a test, the water I mean, like Job faced tests, and Noah?"

4.

If the priest read comic books rather than just the Lives of the Saints and the sports pages of the Il Gazzettino he might wonder why an online activist trying to keep their city from sinking into the sea has taken the moniker of the Prince of Atlantis. It really makes no sense. But Father Domencini doesn't read comics and has no idea who Namor the Submariner is, nor that there is even a resemblance between the two. As he leaves the church and steps out into the night air he is too preoccupied with Namor's parting words about the rain, that same rain that is pouring down on his head now as he tries to find the most sheltered spot on the Calle del Pestrin to make his way home. 

Naturally, the bridge over the Salizada del Pignater is closed, so he has to find a route to the Calle de l'Arco if not even further up. 

Sometimes, rain is just rain, Namor said, and sometimes it's the rain you read about in your Bible, the rain that comes as punishment. But then how can you tell the difference, Padre? They're both just water, right, harmless and that we can't live without, two-thirds of our own body, they say. But we also both know this second kind of rain brings death and destruction. The dove and the olive branch in the story are touching to everyone on the ark but not to the corpses, the corpses of all the rest of humanity floating in the floodwaters below that poignant little scene, Namor said with such searing contempt, for God again perhaps, but even more, he was talking directly about the rain and the priest is wondering again just what kind of rain this is that's falling on his head - the ordinary, wet kind that might, at worst, flood some streets and basements, or yes, cause them to strip down his church and the museums as a precaution, or is it the kind that will once again drown the world to allow the whole carnival to start over from its absurd beginning.

With difficulty, he has found a crossing at the Calle Scudi and is now stepping into larger and larger puddles that his boots do nothing to protect his feet from, so preoccupied is he with all the loose threads of this pointless, nonsensical debate, and he can't help wondering why this firebrand came to him in the first place at all spouting his pseudo-theology and his arguments he didn't even care about winning. If he came to provoke a government official about failing to protect the city, to the press—that he would understand. It's like when someone comes to confession with no desire to unburden themselves, who doesn't really want to confess, doesn't even really feel like talking and getting something off their chests. Why come at all, and why to him?

Namor's face is so ever-present in the priest's mind that when he finally reaches the Campo de Pozzi, the far end of which has now become the water's edge, forcing him to make yet another of his daily detours, he isn't at all surprised to see the activist himself in the distance with a couple of his followers around him. This time they seem less like actors than dancers, modern dancers because he spots Namor in his yellow raincoat with a fellow activist in a blue raincoat on his right and one in a red raincoat on his left. Seeing the primary colors represented so symmetrically makes the priest think of a dance, and then it looks as if they are holding Namor's arms, though it is hard to see clearly through the curtain of rain descending. Are they performing? Are they just playing around, drunk, or exhilarated that their confrontation went so well? Or has he seen me, he thinks, and are they trying to hold him back, keep him from continuing our fruitless debate?

But the priest quickly realizes that of course, they haven't noticed him and that they already had a hold of their leader before he caught sight of them. He would like to keep walking but also wants to keep an eye on whatever is taking place among the activists, if that is even them, because after all, everyone who is outside in the rain is wearing a raincoat and hood and making out anyone's face is impossible, especially when your eyesight is far from what it once was. They could be a group of drunk tourists, because now it looks like they're wrestling, with the ones in the blue and red raincoats picking up the one who looks like Namor and holding him right against the barrier.

Father Domencini hopes it's just some young people being foolish and having fun but they should be careful because they're far too close to the water and the way they're holding him up he could fall in. He wants to get closer to see but he also wants to get farther away, to leave, actually. He does neither. He watches. It really does look like Namor though, as if he was staring at him in an old darkened baroque painting in which all his features have become too obscured over time except those angry, menacing eyes.

Then a third figure enters the picture, a third follower or fellow reveler or another party to murder, the priest no longer knows, just as he doesn't know and later isn't able to describe the color of his raincoat, as if he doesn't have one or as if it is black, or as if he is just a shadow. This third figure does come though and joins the obscure embrace, and now amidst the black of night and the yellow and red and blue of the raincoats there also appear to be streaks of red on Namor's face, but now Father Domencini truly doesn't know if his imagination isn't playing tricks on him, isn't turning a boys' night out into a canal-side death of Saint Sebastian and he wonders whether he shouldn't have followed his childhood love of cars like his brother had and also become a mechanic because then he wouldn't see martyrdoms where they weren't really happening.

But when he tries to look clearly, as if making himself wake up, he sees unmistakably that now there are only three of them. Did the fourth one-run away when he was lost in thought? No, he knows what happened. They threw him in. He doesn't know why. They are all on the same side, aren't they? He doesn't understand anything but he rushes as fast as he can to the police to report what he might have seen and that is the moment when the legend of Namor, the activist who fought and died to save his city, was born.

3.

"There is no drug to compare to the feeling of those last days when you could sail through streets and palazzos and churches. We knew we would never have another course like this, those other cities would flood, will flood, but you know, we knew it would never be the same...and it wasn't. Hamid and I used to look at the map of the world and plan where we'd go, always imagining someplace more spectacular and unreal to sail through than the next..."

Meike's voice drifts off. She seems to have forgotten about the group of people seated in a circle of chairs around her listening with rapt attention as she loses herself in imaginary adventures until the nature of those adventures and what they would rely on bringing her back to her train of thought.

"I mean, we didn't really want these cities to become places we could sail through, and for the most part, they didn't, not really, so that was good, of course. We enjoyed planning but after a while, we both felt and knew that we wanted something we didn't want and that even if we wanted it, if this makes any sense, we weren't going to get it. It's just that then we were going in fucking circles."

She loses herself in her thoughts again, less wondrous this time, it appears. A girl with tangled black hair and an army jacket leans forward to see if it's okay to ask a question. A woman surveying the circle with wire-rimmed glasses and a tiny notepad notices the look.

"Hanna, you want to say something?"

"Uh, I just have a question, if it's okay?"

"Of course, but first just introduce yourself to the group."

"Okay, my name is Hanna and I'm an addict"

"Hello, Hanna," the circle responds.

"I wanted to ask if it's okay if you and Hamid still go on these imaginary adventures because they sound cool...I don't know?"

Even before she finishes Hanna feels a few looks coming towards her, subtle but strained but it's already too late for her to stop and realize her mistake.

"No," Meike answers, "Hamid is gone. He OD'd."

Silence follows Meike's words but it's clear she wants to say more. She is trying to start again but looks up at the woman with glasses.

"It's fine, Meike," she tells her, "Go ahead."

Meike looks back at her and from the glassy look in her eyes it's impossible to tell if she's afraid, sad,  high, grateful, or some combination of all of the above.

"Are you sure, Anke?"

"Yes, really. I think it's important for you...for me too," Anke answers, placing her notepad on her lap.

Meike closes her eyes and goes on. 

"When the water got too high and dangerous all the flood-riders left. It was like a caravan. Of course, we were sad to see the city go under but we knew that our biggest sorrow was knowing it was all over and would never come back. As soon as we left and went back to Vienna, Ivan immediately regretted it, he said it was a mistake, that we were being pussies and he didn't understand why now when we had the best course we'd ever had, ever would have, why were we giving up so easily. We told him he was out of his fucking mind, that he'd seen the same high water and dangerous conditions we'd seen, the same ones that got us and all the other flood-riders to pack up and leave. 

“Staying would have been suicide, but it was as if he was talking about a different city, with different, milder water at a lower level, almost like we could go back in time like when we first got there, which when I think about it now, is of course what he wanted, it's what we all wanted, still want, but we knew it was impossible, it's just that he wanted it so bad that he talked himself into believing he would find it when he got there. So after hours or a whole night of arguing with Anke, uh… with you, with all of us, Ivan just stormed out. He'd had enough. When I got up the next day I saw that the car was gone and one of the kayaks too. He went there on his own."

No one asks her if Ivan came back. No one needs to.

Silence again.

"And why don't you tell them about your dream, Meike?" Anke suggests.

"On the nights I relapse it's always after a dream, the same dream. It's about halfway through the flood, not one of ours, I mean the one from the Bible or the myths, and we're sailing through the rains and somehow the downpour or wrath of Neptune doesn't wipe away or even tilt over our little kayaks and none of the ancient people who've managed to survive on mountain tops or floating on tree branches or pieces of wood or whatever seem surprised to see us because well, I guess it's a dream, and we sail through ancient palaces that historically I'm not sure even existed back then, though historically I'm not sure the great flood happened according to the Bible at all except scientists do say there really was a massive flood at some point in ancient times, so what do I know? 

“Anyway, we hit the perfect balance point, again, when the mountain tops are still visible and the canyons offer a passageway and we can navigate our way from one end of the world to the other but then we start to get tired or bored. We've had enough and want to land and get out of our boats but there is nowhere to land and we have to keep going, you know, you can't stay still in a kayak so if I wouldn't wake up, which I always do, then it would be just a choice of when and how, to keep sailing and let exhaustion take you or give up - either way, it's pointless.

“But whenever I wake up from this I go out and score right away like my throat is parched with thirst. I don't know if it's because of how it ends or how real it feels or how it's the same dream, again and again, familiar, sailing through palaces as everyone drowns, everyone in the world. I really don't know."

2.

It was the Mermaid who came to his rescue, that's what the Golden Child always insisted. She was the one who untangled him from the mess he had gotten himself into and if anyone suggested otherwise it would send this meek, sweet-natured son of immense wealth and privilege into a fit of rage. Li Xun, who the press dubbed the Golden Child from the time of his disappearance until the story died out, said it was love at first sight though it was the Mermaid who first spotted this golden child of the Chinese elite, who from her point of view might actually have been made of gold as if he were a sculpture by Benvenuto Cellini that the water had torn up and broken free rather than a lost or escaped scuba diver who had made his way to Prague and was working in a seedy strip bar under an assumed name.

After that was where things got sketchy. Here was a multimillionaire, or billionaire, or just the son of a multibillionaire, slaving away in a dirty kitchen because he didn't have papers and refused under any circumstances to contact his family and let them know he was alive. He had read about his lavish funeral, one only carried out after the exhaustive search his father had ordered was officially closed. In his few hours off he would go online and follow the search with morbid attention. Divers had gone into every corner, every hole, into every nearby crypt, yet without looking at the frescoes chipping away before their very eyes, sometimes in tiny pieces like snowflakes going upward in slow-motion and at other times in large chunks. They were like archeologists with no interest in the past and no chance to find what they were looking for because Li wasn't a bloated corpse but an exploited, happy dishwasher and cleaner watching their futile aquatic mission from dry land.

The divers did find bodies though, a lot of bodies in fact. There were more than local officials could explain away. Who were they all? People who had insisted on remaining in their homes? The elderly and infirm who weren't accounted for? The criminal element, addicts? No one could say with any certainty. Li Xun wondered more about them than about his father and former life.

Then came the Ukrainians. They got a cut from the bar, but he didn't know if they wanted extra from him just because he seemed vulnerable or because they figured out who he was. The Mermaid was Ukrainian too, though he said she had nothing to do with those thugs. She was a dancer at the club and got her nickname because of the tattoo that ran from the top of her left breast over her shoulder and all the way down her back to where her tail would be if she were a real mermaid.

Li Xun said that he and the Mermaid fell madly in love and she rescued him. They escaped together and went to Amsterdam, another city of canals, which turned out to be an unfortunate choice for obvious reasons. The Mermaid began to feel that her tattoo was bringing her bad luck and the water was following them as the city began sinking too, but Li Xun insisted it wasn't her fault, at least he would have if he had known she blamed herself. The problem was, and remained for quite some time, that the couple didn't have a common language. She spoke Ukrainian, Russian, and a little Czech, eventually even some English. Son of a billionaire, he only spoke his native language.

So the couple made for higher ground. But then the Ukrainians came again. Li Xun wasn't sure if they were the same ones or different and apologized for not knowing because he didn't want to sound like a racist, but he sincerely couldn't tell. To be fair, he said, he was terrified. The real question is, how had they found them? Had the Mermaid concocted a plan to hold her golden child for ransom and get his father to pay for his safe return? Had it been a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow all this time rather than love that had bonded this unlikely pair together, this pair that still, it must be said, could barely hold a conversation and yet seemed able to sit together perfectly content as if they had known each other their whole lives and knew what the other was going to say so didn't need to speak? 

Was it possible through all of that she was still planning to cash him in, that it had been her intention from the moment she had figured out his real identity? The truth was that none of the Mermaid's plans ever worked out, not a single one, so if this had been one of them then its failure was inevitable and perhaps even she knew that and knew that from the very start. 

Regardless, while Jin Xun was devoting all his attention to the search for his son (he truly loved him even though he had no idea how to show it) his enemies (who were sharks, it turns out) went on the attack, first financially, then in the more traditional and violent sense so that before long there was no one to pay a ransom and no one looking to find an heir.

The Golden Child became the stuff of legend and there were even old Italian ladies who walked on the everchanging coast and said they saw his ghost swimming in full scuba gear as if a ghost needs scuba gear to survive underwater. 

1.

"When I was a child I wouldn't stop asking to hear about the underwater city. Sometimes, I can still picture it as I used to see it, though only for a moment or two. You see, for me, it's exactly the opposite as it was for kids who grow up hearing about Santa Claus or God or justice, and then find out that what they'd always believed in was just a made-up story. I had been raised on stories that felt like fairy-tales and my disappointment came when I found out that it wasn't our own made-up bedtime, mystical world but a real place. 

“I was angry, the way someone formerly devout might become a fervent atheist out of spite and lingering belief. But my belief and all the stories still swimming around my head drew me back to the underwater city in spite of myself and when I wrote The Mermaid and the Golden Child and published it two years ago it became an instant bestseller.

“I had been able to track down Li Xun in Kharkiv, Ukraine, where he and the Mermaid, then working at a restaurant they ran together, were happily married. They were old and wanted to live their last years in peace so I promised to keep their secret if they would just tell me their story. A few years later, when the Mermaid died, Li Xun no longer cared about his secrecy or his safety or really anything at all and told me to publish my book because nothing mattered anymore. I hesitated at first, thinking to wait until his grief subsided, but my impatience and my publisher's greed got the best of me and we went ahead. There was also the fact that Li Xun's grief would never subside, so when the book came out it really didn't matter anymore because he was already dead.

“Though the book killed all the legends of the ghost of the Golden Child it reignited interest in his real story, in his father's murder, and in the city itself. So now I'm here on a boat with two Albanian scavengers who people say are the very best. If you think there is a candlestick in a particular palazzo and it's still down there they'll find it. They're not cheap but if anyone can find Namor's bones and finally determine if he was really murdered where they say he was or if he even actually existed then these guys are the ones to do it."

Her thoughts are interrupted when something breaks through the surface of the water outside the speedboat. She sighs in frustration as she sees a putti's marble head, broken off at the neck, held firmly in a diver's black-gloved hand as if he'd just torn it off, which in this case is entirely possible.

"You know, I'm not paying you to vandalize the remains."

"What, you mean this isn't your Namor?" the Albanian says with a laugh, "Look, you know it's time. We have to get out of here before the patrol boats come by. No harm in grabbing something on the way up. We can try again tomorrow but you know, this guy might just be a ghost." 

"There wasn't much research to do," she continues thinking about Namor as the second diver surfaces and the two of them get their loot onboard, "There was almost no direct trace left of him online but I found the witness who said he had seen him thrown into the water, though maybe also stabbed, a senile old priest who was rambling on about performance art and modern dance. Honestly, I thought he was joking after a while or that the cops had given me a false lead. Then he went on about Noah and Job and the rain and that he finally understands Namor and that if I see him tell him to come to visit him. Really, I don't know what to think. What else can I do but keep looking?"

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Michael Stein is a writer and journalist based in the Czech Republic and has published short stories and journalism with a number of European and American magazines. He is an editor at the Prague-based journal B O D Y and runs the Saturday European Fiction series. He runs a website on Central European writing called Literalab and has published essays for literary journals such as Asymptote and The Review of Contemporary Fiction and fiction in The Missing Slate, Night Picnic, Panel, and McSweeney's among other magazines.

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