Marina Fun

Aug 1

Written By Ariadna Castellarnau (Tr. Adrian Nathan West)

“There’s something magical in his movements. A liquid elegance that fills me with murderous rage.”

AUGUST 1, 2023

The pool Mom and Dad put together for my brother and me will no longer do. The family business is booming, and we need a bigger, flashier one, with waterfalls and a little island in the middle. And some bleachers for the audience to sit on and watch Nilo — all those people who come from different parts of the country, and even from other countries.

Every day, more than 100 of them line up outside the gate to our home. Dad takes tickets and lets them through in groups. He blows a whistle, and one goes in. Then another. Then another. And so on and so forth from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., Tuesday to Sunday. Mondays we close. I work the gift stand: sell drinks, grill sausages, try to keep the fryer oil hot.

I do it under the hot sun because there’s no trees in the yard. We chopped them all down. The shade’s no good for kids like my brother. Their skin rots, they get fungus.

Or so I’ve heard.

Mom runs past me. Some customers are gathering on the barrier around the pool and taking photos of Nilo.

“No getting on top of the barrier!” she shouts.

But no one gives a shit, they just keep at it. Nilo’s sitting on the edge of the pool. His tail is curled up, arms crossed over his chest, chin raised as though we’d offended him terribly. He’s been like that for weeks. Dad promised him we’d go somewhere when the season was over. Of course, that was a lie.

When the season’s over, we’ll have to fix up the yard and repaint the pool, same as we do when the season’s over every year.

“Hey, you, bring me a beer,” says an old man with his shirt unbuttoned to his navel and a gold chain thick as my thumb around his neck.

Mom’s still shouting like a madwoman and it’s throwing me off. I have to ask the old man to repeat his order, which I’ve already forgotten.

“You deaf or something? I ordered a beer. B-e-e-r.”

“A beer, right,” I say.

There’s no more drinks in the stand, so I run toward the kitchen, where we’ve got a commercial fridge like you see in restaurants. When I pass by the pool (not slowing down), my brother waves me over.

“What’s up?” I ask.

“Ice.”

That’s it. Just ice. No please. Nilo turns and I stand there wishing all kinds of indescribable sufferings on him. But my fury slides off his pearly skin and falls on the ground with its puddles of seawater — the seawater a tank truck brings us once a week.

“Bring the damn ice. Can’t you see he’s getting burned alive?” my mother shouts, still trying to get the people down from the barrier.

Sure, I tell her, I’m already going to the kitchen for beers, I’ll get Nilo his ice so he can cool down, too, but really what I want is to see him catch fire and burn to a crisp. Seriously. I want to actually see him burn. Forever and ever. Turn to a ball of fire and bye-bye, problems.

In the house, I realize someone has crept into our living room and is in there nosing around, opening and closing drawers. A girl.

She’s got on one of those flimsy hats we sell as souvenirs, with Nilo’s outline posted on a rock, like my brother was the Little Mermaid of fucking Copenhagen. When she realizes she’s been busted, she slams the drawer shut and hides her hands behind her back. I don’t know if she’s nicked something or she’s just ashamed. I don’t give a shit either.

The girl’s pretty. She’s got reddish hair and incredible long legs, with a dusting of freckles like pale dots … like sunflower-colored pollen.

“Where’s he sleep?” she asks.

It takes me a minute to figure out what she’s talking about because my attention keeps turning from her face to her hair to her legs.

“Tell me where he sleeps, please, please, please,” she begs, on the verge of tears.

I point toward the pool. That’s where he sleeps, in the water. Dad wants to stick an island in the middle of it with a little house so my brother can get some privacy, but Mom thinks it’ll take up too much room and people won’t be able to see him.

“Sure,” she says, slumping down on the sofa. “I guess I thought something else.”

“Like what?” I ask, sitting next to her.

“I thought he slept in a bed. I promised my friends I was going to take a photo of myself in his bed.”

“With him in it?”

She shakes her head, covers her face with her hands and starts to cry. I get it. It happens to all of them. Crying, shouting, attacks of hysteria. That’s the kind of reaction my brother provokes in them. In girls. All of them. In guys sometimes, too. Over the years, I’ve seen everything.

I’m talking stuff you wouldn’t believe if I told you. I’m not going to beat around the bush: It’s not just that Nilo’s unusual, it’s that his human part (from the waist up) is ungodly well put together. People say his face is perfect, he’s got a mouth that twists to the side a bit, in an expression of irresistible disdain. Mom says Nilo looks like a young Elvis Presley, before all the alcohol and the drugs. Anyway, my brother’s perfection, it’s insufferable, his beauty is so, so flawless that he’s turning into a stuck-up moron. But I’m the only one who notices.

“Wait,” I say. “I’m going to show you something.”

She looks up at me with a face bathed in tears. Be right back, I say. I go to my parents’ room and come back with the family photo album. I assume she’ll like that. None of our visitors has ever seen such a record of Nilo’s private life. Not that Mom and Dad have a problem with it, it just never crossed their minds. If they made picture postcards, they could sell them, but I’m not going to be the one to tell them that. I turn the pages of the album and show them to her. Here’s Mom and Dad with the two of us before all the weirdness happened, back when we were still a normal family. Nilo’s smiling and he looks just marvelous. Dad’s holding up his tail of silvery scales, Mom’s got him under the armpits and I’m raising my little baby hands up toward him. We were camping. I don’t know who took the photo.

“It’s amazing,” she says reverently.

Nilo’s 10th birthday. We’re in the same house as now, the one with the pool, which Mom and Dad bought when Nilo started getting on TV. Mom did the decorations — with sea motifs — herself. Nilo’s holding a trident, and he’s got Neptune’s crown on his head. His black curls frame a pair of eyes like white ovals clotted with dark blue, with a fringe of long caramel-colored lashes. I’m nowhere to be found.

“That’s all,” I say, slamming the album shut.

“I can’t snap a photo?” she asks.

“Of what?”

“Of the photo.”

She shrugs and leans into me a bit. I don’t remember selling her that hat she’s wearing. I’ve got them on display in the shop. Maybe she stole it, but who cares. I’d let her ransack the house if I could.

“Can I?” she asks.

I nod my head like go for it.

She’s euphoric, she flips the pages with her fingers with their nails painted black and finally she hits on the photo with the trident.

Freckle-legs smiles and clicks away with her cellphone camera, one, two, three, indifferent to me, absorbed by the image of that insufferable little monster.

At night, Dad and I count the money we’ve brought in. Mom comes in from the yard with Nilo’s food tray and fills the kitchen with the repulsive odor of algae.

“Would you mind throwing that slop in the trash can outside?” I ask.

“You’re always so particular,” she says.

Mom joins us to count the bills, and for a while no one opens their mouth. We’re concentrating here in this kitchen that’s like a spaceship, the single lighted room in the universe of our dark home. After a while, I ask, “Dad, can I have some money?”

“What do you want money for? You live like a king here thanks to us.”

“I’ve got expenses.”

Mom sighs as she ties a rubber band around a bundle of bills.

“My lord,” she murmurs between clenched teeth.

“Go get a job then,” Dad replies. “It’s not a bad idea, you earning your bread by the sweat of your brow.”

Wait a minute. Did he say a job? So working the gift stand isn’t a job? I ought to go turn them in for exploitation of a minor! But there’s no point in complaining.

Dad gives me the brush-off, turns to Mom and says, “Honey, I’ve got a new idea for the pool.”

“That’s exactly what we need to talk about,” she says. “Something occurred to me. It’s a little crazy, but I think it might work. Plus, it would help us make sure Nilo’s safe.”

“Shoot, hon,” Dad says.

Mom gives him a flirty smile and shakes her butt in her seat. The last time I saw her do that was when she convinced Dad to buy this place, put a pool in the yard and make me their servant.

“I want you to listen very closely,” she says.

“I’m all ears,” he replies.

This whole rigmarole makes me want to puke, so I get up and walk out to the yard. Outside, the high-intensity spotlights we set up so Nilo wouldn’t feel alone or abandoned brighten every corner, making it look like a prison yard. My brother hasn’t shifted. He’s still sitting on the edge of the pool and slapping the surface of the water with his tail the way I’ve seen him do thousands of times: a distracted, mechanical gesture of unadulterated boredom. With every lash, his tail sends up beads of water that glisten around it like a legion of little sparkles. Even when there’s no audience, everything about him has an air of spectacle. I’d swear I even hear clapping palms in the background surrounding him like an aura of fascination and stupor.

Nilo and I don’t get along. But it wasn’t always like that.

We used to play ball in his pool and hang out for long stretches. Now he won’t even let me dip my toes in. If people could look at him up close and see past his appearance, they’d notice something running through him that’s cold like snow, a fatal selfishness, a …

The blood curdles in my veins. Someone’s climbing the fence in the yard. Fast, agile, impressively so, and when they reach the top, they jump down on our side. They run toward my brother and suddenly I remember those door-to-door evangelists who showed up last year protesting in front of our house and holding signs that said, “NILO: ABOMINATION.” I fear the worst: violence, a murder, some crazy fucker trying to cut his tail off with a hatchet. I’m about to yell for my parents when the silhouette passes under the spotlight and I see that mop of reddish hair.

It’s her, the girl from this morning. She’s changed clothes.

She’s wearing a skimpy dress with a floral print and carrying her high-heeled shoes in one hand. She’s even prettier than before. She tiptoes around the pool and hurls herself into Nilo’s arms. He’s surprised. He straightens up, sighs, embraces her, kisses her on the lips, a long kiss, with tongue, and when the two of them separate, there’s muffled laughter, and they tumble into the water and the droplets splash me like dew, like a rain of glass splinters.

My father raises the blinds and now he’s shaking my shoulders to wake me:

“Come on, time to get up. We’ve got to go,” he says.

“Where?” I ask, eyes still half-closed.

“You — nowhere. But you still got to get up. There’s lots of stuff to do.”

Dad and Mom sit across from me during breakfast.

They’ve got something important to tell me. It’s obvious. They’re nervous.

The news is fluttering around inside them like they swallowed a bird.

Finally, Dad spits it out.

“Marina Fun,” he says, splaying his hands in the air to give a theatrical emphasis to his words. “What do you say? It was your mom’s idea.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. What the fuck is Marina Fun?”

“Boy, enthusiasm is the bedrock of success. Marina Fun is gonna be big. I’m talking real big.”

For a few seconds, Dad says nothing, then he looks at Mom while he tries to decide whether to tell me anything more. Mom nods.

“This family’s headed for the top,” he says.

And then he talks. He tells me. He’s ecstatic, and the words are pouring forth all jumbled, and Mom has to interrupt now and again and untangle and reorient them toward the target with her godforsaken sharpshooter’s eye. Marina Fun is a water park, like the ones they used to take me to as a boy, but better, he says. Way better, Mom adds. I tell them I don’t remember them ever taking me to any water park. Dad goes on: I’m talking slides, a themed restaurant, a real souvenir shop, not that garbage stand we’ve got right now, plus five pools. Six, Mom corrects him. I repeat that I’ve never been to a water park. We should talk this over, I think, but Dad’s let the emotion carry him away, he’s not listening, he gets in a tizzy about how Marina Fun will also have a saltwater pool shaped like a fish tail, and that’s where we’ll put Nilo. The thing about salt water reminds me I’ve never been to the sea either, and I point that out, too, but they couldn’t give a flying fuck.

“Boy, don’t you think that’s just the best damn idea you’ve ever heard in your short and up-to-now highly unproductive life?” Dad asks. “Can’t you see the scope of this thing? How far we could go if Marina Fun became a reality?”

As he talks, his voice gets louder and louder, like a politician’s in the middle of a campaign speech. This is demented, and it’s my duty to put a stop to it now. Get them to see reality. Or at least reality as it directly concerns me.

“So your idea is to have me running around like a goddamn slave,” I say.

Just briefly, disappointment casts a shadow over Dad’s enthusiasm.

“We didn’t expect you’d take it like that,” he says. “We thought you’d be excited. We’re excited.”

“You have no sense of belonging to this family,” my mother says. “This is a grave disappointment.”

Belonging to this family? To this company is more like it, this malignant corporation, this diabolical enterprise.

“Where are you going to get the money from?” I ask, deciding to play my wet blanket role to the hilt.

“We already thought of that,” Mom says coldly. “We’re leaving this very day, we’re going on a fundraising trip.”

“A fundraising trip to where?”

“You think we’re idiots?” Mom shouts, livid dropping for a moment her queen-with-the-heart-of-ice act. “Your father and I have contacts.”

“It’s time to put our shoulders to the grindstone,” Dad says. “For starters, you’re going to have to take care of Nilo while we’re gone.”

“What? Excuse me?”

“Oh, come on,” Mom says. “Can you not help us out for once in your life?”

I want to laugh, a long sardonic laugh, but what comes out is a pathetic falsetto screech. Mom gives me a series of orders about Nilo’s diet and maintenance. There are many of them, and they are very specific. There won’t be visitors while they’re away, she says, so I won’t have so much work, that’s a filthy lie, my brother is a full-time job and one of the worst you could ever imagine.

When they finally depart at nightfall, I take a pizza out of the freezer, stick it in the microwave and lie down on the sofa. Nilo is outside waiting for his dinner. The lazy fuck is used to getting everything served to him on a platter.

Let him wait, I tell myself. I don’t go to the pool until after midnight.

Nilo’s floating there, belly up, on a raft shaped like a seashell.

“Nice of you to show up,” he says.

“If you were hungry, you could have gotten your dinner yourself.”

“I would have if it wasn’t for this little baby right here,” he says, patting his tail. “Be right over.”

Nilo paddles his float over to the edge of the pool. There’s something magical in his movements. A liquid elegance that fills me with murderous rage.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

Nilo has stuck a finger in his food and is stirring it around with disgust.

“I’m tired of algae. How about you bring me a little pizza?”

“What pizza are you talking about? We don’t have any pizza.”

“Get the fuck out, I can smell it from here.”

I tell him I can’t. Mom and Dad would kill me.

“It’ll be our secret,” he responds with a smile. And that smile is so radiant I almost have to shut my eyes.

It’s a bad idea, but before I can get rid of it, it’s lodged in my head and it’s setting down roots. There’s something I haven’t mentioned yet: Nilo can’t handle human food. It’s not that he can’t handle it, exactly, but it makes him swell up and get all massive and appalling. Algae is the one thing that preserves his state of odious perfection. That fetid, rotten, probably radioactive algae Mom orders from a distributor who imports it from Japan.

“Fine, I’ll bring you the pizza,” I say, as if I were giving in despite myself. “You wouldn’t want a beer with it, too?”

Striking his chest with both hands, Nilo shouts in a cavernous voice, “Beer! Beer!”

I go to the kitchen and take a pizza from the freezer, ham with extra cheese, stick it in the microwave and dump a bunch of oil on it when it’s done. Then I grab a couple of cans of beer and go back to the pool, wondering how long the food will need to take effect.

“This is the life,” Nilo says, before pouncing on his meal like a hungry dog.

He takes five minutes dismantling the pizza.

Mozzarella filaments drenched in tomato sauce dangle from his mouth like bloody bits of bone marrow.

He looks like a cannibal. But a sexy cannibal. I don’t take my eyes off of him. It gets to me that even in moments like this, he’s still so insultingly handsome. And I’m like that, rapt, studying the sculpted surface of his stomach, awaiting the first signs of plumpness, when I hear footsteps behind me. I turn. It’s the girl with the freckled legs.

She smiles — at Nilo, not at me. I’m invisible. I have no idea how she got in.

“You were just leaving, right?” my brother asks.

Shit, I think. How long have I just been there staring at her?

“Yeah, right,” I say. “I’ve got stuff to do inside.”

I gather the meager remains of my dignity and turn on my heels. Behind me they laugh, suck face, whatever the fuck they feel like.

✺

Nilo’s fallen asleep by the pool. It’s past noon and he’s snoring like a son of a bitch. The pizza and beer have worked their magic. His stomach, once flat as a board, is round and blubbery now. It quivers like gelatin when he breathes. I kneel down to get a good look at his dewlap. It’s not much now, but soon it will be a sight to see, with perfect rows of overlapping folds.

Nilo opens his eyes.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“Nothing.”

“You were looking at me. Weirdo.”

“You’re one to talk. Here’s your breakfast.”

I’ve brought him buttered toast, a half-dozen slices of ham, and banana-flavored liquid yogurt. Early this morning, I went to the supermarket. As expected, Mom had left a big pile of algae for Nilo and absolutely nothing for me. So I filled the cart to the brim and paid with one of the credit cards from the drawer in Dad’s nightstand. Then I made breakfast for my brother, and now he’s looking with displeasure at the ham, the toast and the yogurt.

“Is this everything?” he asks.

“What else do you want?”

“I don’t know. An omelet. More meat.”

An omelet. Or meat. What’s going through his head? But still, I’ll bring it. Obviously. I go to the kitchen and take a whole roasted chicken from the supermarket out of the fridge. It’s wrapped in plastic and as I’m unraveling it, it slips out of my hands and falls to the floor, coming to rest under the table, where it picks up a dust bunny that’s been gathering there for a week. But that’s no reason to throw it out. I grab it up and blow on it and dislodge the dirt. Then I take the scissors and cut off the thighs. It looks like the scene of a massacre, I’ve got no idea how to cut up a chicken. But Nilo doesn’t care. He seems happy when I return to the pool and hand him the plate. His breakfast is gone and he’s very evidently fatter than before. The belt of shimmery scales that joins his tail to his torso has vanished beneath three rolls of flesh. It’s too bad you can’t see it now. Maybe you think it’s stupid, but that belt is what makes the transition between the human and fish parts look natural, like having a tail instead of legs is just the finest thing in the world.

“Hey, Nilo, just wondering … don’t you think you should ease off it a bit?”

“Why? Can you tell?”

Can I tell? Nilo’s chin is covered in chicken fat and he seems to be inflating in slow motion. His ribs expand at the very moment he sinks his teeth into the chicken leg. All of a sudden, I feel like a jerk.

I mean, obviously I love seeing him turned into that … big buttery rancid human muffin. At the same time, it’s a waste. Like I’m guilty of aesthetic homicide. Like I just trashed the “Mona Lisa.” This is just as bad.

Nilo reaches out with the plump little fingers of the hand not occupied with the chicken leg, as if asking me for help standing up. How absurd. “What?” I ask.

“Nothing, dumbass, give me five.”

I slap his hand, and he grabs my wrist before I can slip away.

“Wait a sec, I want to thank you.”

“For what?”

“Honestly, I’ve been having a blast these last couple days. You’re the best little brother in the world.”

I know he’s being serious, but now I feel a kind of shame that you can’t just apologize your way out of. A shame that heaps more shame upon itself. Nilo reaches high and waves at his girlfriend, who comes over to us happy as can be, holding a set of keys.

She must have grabbed them from inside, and that’s why she can come and go as she pleases.

Then she stops, as though only then taking stock of what her eyes see, and she points a finger at Nilo and brings her other hand to her heart.

That’s when I get it.

Fuck. What have I done? This is bad. Is there any turning back?

Because if there’s no turning back, I’ll kill myself. What am I saying? I’m not killing shit. He should kill himself. They should, Nilo and the girl both.

Or Mom and Dad. Or everyone. It’s not my fault. It’s not my fucking fault.

✺

I must have fallen asleep because I flinch when I hear a crunching sound close by. My brother’s girlfriend is at the foot of the sofa looking at me. I sit up, still a little groggy, and ask, “You want to sit down?”

She flops down next to me with a sigh of resignation. I ask her what’s up and she tells me, eyes lost on the wall in front of her, where there’s no photos, no paintings, nothing to tell you that the four of us live together in this house, nothing but a plasma TV:

“It’s him. Nilo. That.”

Her eyes fill with tears. I take her hand. She doesn’t reject it. Now I feel good. Maybe things will be easier than I thought. Maybe I’ve just been brooding too much my whole life when really all I had to do was take what I wanted.

“You can’t trust anyone, anyone,” she says faintly.

I stop dillydallying and stroke her neck and kiss her. She’s unsurprised. She opens her mouth wide enough for me to slip my tongue between her teeth. For a moment, she does nothing. She just stays there, immobile, and that scares me because it means I’m the one who has to make all the effort, and she’ll realize I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ve never been with a girl and now here I am, hand climbing her leg, trying to get under her shorts. What if I drool on her? What if my slobber drips out of my mouth while we kiss?

I lay her back on the couch, and for the first time, she looks up at me.

“What’s your name?” I ask.

“Dalila.”

I bring my lips to her ear and whisper her name the way I suppose my brother must have done a thousand times.

Dalila.

She laughs, wraps her arms around my neck and leans up to kiss me. We’re still dressed, and I don’t know if this is as far as it will go, or if I should push it further and take off my shirt. But at last, Dalila takes the lead. She pushes me aside, stands up and starts getting naked. She does it slowly, in thrall to thoughts that exclude me, and when she’s done, she gets on her knees in front of me and says, “Your turn.”

Out in the yard, we can hear Nilo making splashing sounds in the pool. He must be huge now because the noise is deafening, copious, blissful. It breaches the room, pervades us, imposes itself over our breathing like a soundtrack. Now I’m inside Dalila, and nothing is the way I thought it would be. My efforts to keep from ruining the moment were exhausting, and I’m afraid I’ll screw it all up. She’s so beautiful, her nipples glimmer, they look like they’re made of glass. And her skin is very white and luminous, as though there were tiny lights beneath it.

My movements turn more and more frantic.

Dalila starts to moan. I grab her hips, and my hands slip off from the sweat. At some point, she tells me, “Don’t stop,” I think.

I say don’t worry. How could I stop with that noise now so close, so urgent, that our bodies’ rhythms have synchronized with the rhythm of Nilo’s rowing. How could I stop when I have the feeling I’m getting nowhere. When the goal I thought I’d reached keeps drifting further off like a ball drifting out to sea.

No, the truth is I’m not going to stop, not even now when I lift my head and see it, on the other side of the window, pressed to the panes: an eye like a white oval clotted with blue, with a fringe of caramel-colored lashes, an eye of impossible size that observes us with sagacity and distance. Astonished by this world of ants.