(urth) Short Story 89: The Nebraskan and the Nereid

[Marc Aramini]

The Nebraskan and the Nereid

“The Nebraskan and the Nereid” first appeared in *Isaac Asimov’s Science
Fiction Magazine* in 1985. It is collected in *Endangered Species*.

SUMMARY: The Nebraskan, Dr. Sam Cooper, is a university employed folklorist
visiting the Saronikos Kolpos in Greece.  On the coast, he catches a
glimpse of a naked woman before she disappears into the Sea. He quotes
Keat’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” and imagines himself as
“Stout Cortez” and describing his adventure in the faculty lounge when he
returns.  He sees a tall, angular woman approaching him who calls herself
Dr. Thoe Papamarkos, an archeologist from the University of Athens, who
greets him with a regal gesture.

She says she is looking for Saros (see the discussion of the concept of
Saros and King Saron below), a city ancient in the time of even Pericles
and Plato. She thinks they should know and possibly assist one another as
well.  He identifies her as “an old maid school teacher” and reveals that
he is tracing the history of the Nereids.  He denies their reality, and she
says that she seeks out the temple of Poseidon, and adds that the mermaids
or sea fairies were the ladies of his court.

 She says, “You do not want a drink of my water, I hope.  … I have a nose
disease. … I must take my medicine to breathe, and my medicine makes me
thirsty. … Do you wish for some?”

Dr. Cooper reviews the types of mermaids in and expresses curiosity that
only the Nereid lingers in Modern Greek stories (which is accurate).  Dr.
Papamarkos speculates that they might be the only kind left.

He returns to his inn, and “stopped its dumpy little maid of all work and
mustered his uncertain Greek to ask her about Dr. Papamarkos”.  He wonders
if the naked woman he saw earlier was Dr. Papamarkos, but determines the
woman had been “younger, smaller, and – um – rounder.”

He returns to the spot that he saw both Dr. Papamarkos and the naked girl,
and sees a laughing face circled by dark floating hair.  After about ten
minutes the doctor reappears, and she has an ancient Mycenaean cup
encrusted with marine growths.  It represents a bearded man and a fish, and
on the back, beside a trident (no doubt psi) appears the letter pi, which
Dr. Papamarkos claims is for Poseidon. After the Nebraskan recognizes its
“deft energy” despite its crudeness, Dr. Papamarkos says, “Sailors prayed
to him, and captains.  Also to Nereus, the old sea-man who knew the future.
Now it is to Saint Peter and Saint Mark.  But it is not so different,
perhaps . The fish, the beard, they are still there.”

Thoe says that talking with him led her to think that perhaps the coast has
changed over time, and that the temple of Poseidon and the city of Saros
which she sought had been submerged. She had “no diving equipment” but
still found it. She does not let him accompany her back to his camp, and he
says, “I’ve seen a Nereid, Thoe- or somebody’s trying to make me think I
have.”

She says it is a Greek girl fooling him, and encourages him, since he knows
how to swim well, to explore the caves with underwater entrances along the
coast.  She does tell him that “If you are truly a good swimmer, you know a
swimmer must be wary.”

On his third attempt he enters the caves and finds a cave with air, and “as
he climbed from the water, two small arms encircled him.”  They make love,
and she sings a lullaby about a child safe in a rocking boat to him.

When he goes to the inn, he thinks of a song about a mermaid losing her
morals down among the corals and is upset that his bed hasn’t been made and
complains to the innkeeper.  The next morning he finds a body in the sand
and recognizes her as his mermaid from the cave.

Dr. Papamarkos arrives and says, “She was the maid at your inn … She loved
you.  Perhaps you do not think it possible. … I promised to help her if I
could.  This is all the help I can give her now, to make you understand
that once you were loved.  When you record love stories from the lips of
old people, remember it.” She instructs him to go tell the innkeepers that
he has found the body, but knowing that his Greek his insufficient he
returns to see Thoe undress and unbind her hair and dive into the sea,
leaving a symbol beside the dead girl’s body traced in the wet sand: “it
might have been a cross with upswept arms, or the Greek letter Ψ.  He
sniffs the canteen Dr. Papamarkos left behind, and as he expected it is
filled with sea water.

COMMENTARY:

This story of the Nebraskan is dripping with irony – he is looking for a
Nereid, and finds one almost instantly, but thinks of her “an old-maid
school teacher”.  The naked woman whom he sees at the start and to whom he
makes love remains unidentifiable to him, as he notices only a “dumpy” maid
even as he is thinking of her naked body as being rounder than that of Dr.
Papamarkos. (We here have a maid pretending to be a mer-maid).

His interaction with the maid when she is not unclothed is to ask about the
other woman and to complain to the management about his sheets being unmade
(because she was too busy making love to him in the cave to make his bed).  He
has travelled all this way seeking stories of Nereids and cannot recognize
anything as it truly is until he finally surmises that Thoe Papamarkos was
his real target all along.  He doesn’t even speculate as to the origin of
Thoe’s first name until the final scene, when he finally calls her by it,
though he is a folklorist.

Thoe seeks the city of Saros and the temple of Poseidon, as even to her, it
is ancient history, and, if we take her at face value, talking about her
own folklore caused her to truly think about what happened to the city. A
saros usually implies an 18 year cycle of lunar and solar eclipses in
astronomy, but at one point it could also mean 3,600 years; a “sar” is an
ancient Mesopotamian measurement.  The early Mycenaean cup that Thoe finds
would probably be between 3,600 and 3,900 years old. The Saronic Gulf
(Saronikos kolpos) is found along the eastern side of Corinth.  The origin
of the name comes from King Saron, who drowned at the Psifaei lake.  This
gulf was also reputed to be an entrance to the Underworld, and note the
somber warning that Thoe gives to Dr. Coooper when she suggests he explores
the cave – swimmers must be wary there.

There is some confusion over two symbols given for Poseidon, as Thoe
scratches a psi into the ground beside the maid’s body. Insofar as pi is a
symbol of Poseidon as she first said when displaying the cup, it is only
one which indicates the first letter of his name: ΠΟΣΕΙΔΩΝ. The later Psi
that Thoe actually leaves beside the body is the real symbol of Poseidon
and later Neptune, and the trident mentioned as appearing next to the pi on
the cup is of course a stylized psi.

Poseidon’s symbol is probably the best explanation for that psi, though the
story of King Saron involves his drowning at Psifaei Lake, and the
Wolfe-wiki speculates that psi is a symbol of Psamathe, the goddess of sand
beaches, but clearly the real association of the psi symbol is Poseidon,
with pi merely indicating the first letter of his name and not being a
“true” symbol.

(I rather fancy the reason for this is simple letter symbolism: the pi
symbol is an approximation of Poseidon but does not contain his essence, as
the maid at the inn only parades as a mermaid, while the real Nereid knows
the true symbol of power, the psi, and is genuine). In other words, there
are many ways to represent concepts such as Poseidon and his Nereids, some
more accurate than others.  The maid attempted to capture the imagination
of the American visitor by putting on the symbolic allure of the mermaids
and swimming in the sea naked, while Thoe hid her true form behind the
image of an aging university professor.

The syncretism between Poseidon and St Peter and St Mark is typical of
Wolfe’s work with mythology – a blending of myths over time, as if these
powers represented something that was an intermediary between God and man
or at the very least ultimately served a higher power as well, though they
are “different” than humanity.

The name Thoe is of one of the Nereids from Greek myth, the daughters of
Nereus and Doris who accompany Poseidon, and they are especially associated
with the Aegean Sea.

LITERARY AND OTHER HISTORICAL ALLUSIONS:

Since Sam Cooper fancies himself as a discoverer of new things, he thinks
of Schliemann, who discovered Troy and married a young Greek girl, and
thinks of Keats’ poem “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” – which is
Keats’ response to Chapman’s translation, much different and earthier than
the previous polished translations available.:

                MUCH have I travell'd in the realms of gold,

                And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

                Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

                That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne:

                Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

                When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes

                He stared at the Pacific—and all his men

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—

                Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

In the poem, the “new” translation of old familiar material strikes Keats
with all the sublimity and power of which art is capable.  Though he was
familiar with Homer, he had never experienced it in such a fashion, and
this echoes the experience our Nebraskan is about to have – familiar with
all the stories of mermaids, he cannot tell imitation from real until he
actually lives through his entire experience, an explorer mute before what
he has seen – as Cortez at the coast of a new world.

After the Nebraskan makes love to the maid, he remembers the song “Minnie
the Mermaid”, and here is one version:

O, what a time I had with Minnie the Mermaid,

Down at the bottom of the sea.

Down amongst the corals where she lost her morals,

My, but she was good to me.

Oh, what a time I had with Minnie the Mermaid

Down in her seaweed bungalow.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust;

Two twin beds and only one of them mussed.

Oh, what a gal was my Minnie the Mermaid,

Down at the bottom of the sea.

The ashes to ashes line is fascinating in light of the maid’s fate, but
there are many, many versions of this song, and one that even ends with her
being “a personal friend” who “does my laundry”.

He thinks of Thoe at first as Miss Minerva from Frances Boyd Calhoun’s *Miss
Minerva and William Green Hill*, a stuffy and proper aunt who insists upon
correct usage in the midst of Southern dialect, or as the self important
tutor from the comic strip “The Katzenjammer Kids”, a first impression
completely at odds with her final mythical transformation.

NAMES:

The name of Thoe is obvious in its reference to a mythical Nereid, and the
maid is unfortunately never named, for the Nebraskan never paid much
attention to her.  The small city in which the inn is called Nemos (Nemo in
Latin can mean “no one” … but we are in Greece).

Sam Cooper’s first name implies “God has heard” or “Name of God”, while
Cooper is an occupational name for those who repair barrels.  There seems
to be little relationship between his name and his function in this story
except that a barrel can contain water, and in this text he is most often
referred to as “the Nebraskan”.    Nebraska means “flat water”, so perhaps
this relates to his interest in water faeries in this story.

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS:

Since Sam sees the maid as “dumpy” and complains about her not fixing his
bed even though he is the only guest, has he cost the maid her livelihood
and prompted her suicide?  Has enough time passed between the morning he
discovers her body and the time he complains to the innkeepers for her to
learn of his displeasure, or was she merely incautious in the strong
current, as Thoe warned against? The coast is reputed to be a mythological
entrance to the Underworld. Suicide might be the more likely answer, in
light of how she might feel over his complaints about her service, failing
to realize that he never recognized her.

CONNECTION WITH OTHER WORKS:

Wolfe would write several other Nebraskan tales, and there is a very close
relationship with the more science fictional stories of Anderson in “The
Woman Who Loved the Centaur Pholus” and its sequel, though Anderson seems a
bit more perceptive and erudite than Dr. Cooper, especially in this opening
tale.  The syncretism between paganism and Christianity mentioned by Thoe
is quite prominent in Wolfe’s fantasy explorations and his novel series,
and there is even talk of “little green men” in connection with mythology
which links this story directly to the ubiquitous nature of the fey folk in
“A Cabin on the Coast.”
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