A wild mountain sweeping down to the sea. Heather and grass. A circle of figures in green robes and white hoods. Two quarrel. It swells to a brawl. But they're all dressed the same--you can't tell who's who!

Gunshots! "Get down!" screams my friend; I hide with her in tall grass. Friends shoot friends by mistake. One screams "Medic!" But the doctor is partisan, only goes to those he's sure are on his side. My friend & I do our best...

We flee downslope to a cove. Board an unguarded yacht and hide in the cabin. I promise to try sailing it out later, but not yet; to steer, I'd have to stay exposed. Snipers.

Much later. Still on the cove. A little port has grown. Both factions in this fight have squads of partisans, now. And they both sign up the local merfolk as guides and helpers. They're useful--merfolk can change into dolphins for speed, or turn human for short excursions onto land, or just to pass as human.

I worry they're getting exploited the way Pacific Islanders were in World War Two.

On our side, a voluptuous blonde Marilyn Monroe mermaid has fallen in love with Scuba Man (by now the gear's advanced and light; he can even breathe when they kiss underwater). Marilyn the mermaid often comes on land, because her boyfriend is a leg man, and doesn't want to (as his human slang so charmingly puts it) 'fuck fish.'

I worry he can't see mer-folk as people at all--just usable creatures.

Our side assaults the enemy's headquarters. We have to cross the town's main street, El Camino Real--wide and coverless. We use decoys--cut and paste a few fake soldiers, armed with spearguns whose darts are tipped with grenades.

It's absurd: we'd be clobbered, if the soldiers we face weren't mostly just as fake.

Well, one isn't fake. The enemy captain is honorable. One local mermaid he hires, a slender brunette who rarely or never turns human, gets a crush on him. She's torn between this captain and a handsome soldier she met... well, and several others. Merfolk spread the love around.

Even though she's working for the other side, I have a crush on her too. Worry about her; the captain's the only one of the lot who sees her as a real person. The others sweet-talk--and I'm afraid she buys it. Seems almost as naïve as Marilyn Mermaid.

Not me. You just can't trust those landfolk.

At least Brunette listens to the Gruff Old Man: that wise pipe-smoking 19th-century clipper-ship captain, who now lives in the bay below the port. Ghost? Human reborn as a merman? Or was he mer all along, just passing for a century or so? Merfolk live long.)

At last, the human war winds down, and they go home to their seaport. From below, it looks confusing. Their piers and homes turn upside down and funhouse-mirrored, as if sea has become land, and land sea. I sketch it like this--broken shapes, cut by the undulating interface.

Postwar, the fishing's bad; landfolk grow poor. They don't starve, but the only fish caught are commercially worthless.

A Scandinavian port-official investigates. He concludes the fish stocks aren't depleted, they're just more cunning about nets. And he suspects he's found the cause: a mermaid (in dolphin form for deniability) has been teaching the fish evasive maneuvers.

Well, I see a certain justice in that. All through that war I had to watch those fast-talking cardboard boyfriends pulling just that on the mermaids.

Evasive maneuvers.

NEXT DAY

My job at the library's to find uncatalogued or lost books that scholars want rush-processed. Today, for the first time, my boss asks me as a favor to track down a book she personally wants--a new translation of Hans Christian Andersen.

I find it, but she's off at lunch, so on my own lunch break I read it myself, curious. I'm shocked. The Little Mermaid is nothing like the Disney film. She was told if a human loved her she'd share his soul and go to heaven; but she never wins his love. Instead she's his mute little best friend, and has to watch him fall for another. Her sister appears with a knife, urging her to kill the bastard and come home, but she won't do that either. Instead, she builds her own soul, bit by bit, as a spirit of the air.

Another book just in: a book on IQ testing, featuring the controversial Arthur Jensen. I flip it open and find... sample IQ test questions meant to measure spatial intelligence, presenting geometric shards you must mentally rotate and piece into something whole...

Familiar geometric shards. The shapes of the weird rotated upside-down port buildings I sketched in my dream!

ESP, IQ... you never know what's being tested.

YEARS LATER

Sadly, my 1986 journal lacks sketches of those geometric shapes--or the book's title. Jensen didn't publish a book of his own that year, but he did place essays in anthologies like 1986's What is Intelligence?. I've skimmed that and other likely candidates, seeking that article with broken geometric shapes, but so far no luck. So take my 2023 illustration, done from hazy memory, with a grain of sea salt.

But then, my mermaids weren't physically like Hans Christian Anderson's, either. Just... emotionally.

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