The Unknown Knowns Page 2

  Sorry for the long-winded explanation, but that’s why I was spending all those hours underwater in a Hilton pool. I was designing a museum about water, so I had to immerse myself in it. And things were moving along at a good clip. They were. But then Jean smart-bombed the sacred bonds of our marriage, and then the Nautikon arrived on the scene, and the Feds got involved and—well, everything went to hell.

  Yes, to hell. Which is where I am now, doing all this remembering. Every story gets told from somewhere, and my somewhere is here on the deck of the Endurance, my houseboat and my holding cell. But it hardly matters where I am. Wherever I go now—hell, the federal penitentiary, a secret prison in the Balkans—I’m in Nautika, even with the security cuff strapped to my ankle. They can’t rendition you from your dreams. Even right now as I sit in my deck chair rubbing my foot to get the feeling back in my toes, I see it. Before me lies the chalkboard bay scribbled with whitecaps. Gusts of sleet wipe it clean, but not before I read the word that’s being spelled out there for me: NAUTIKA.

  THREE

  But I’m getting way ahead of myself. Slow it down, Jim. Deep breaths. Let’s go all the way back to the Hilton. To me, standing on the floor of the pool, looking into the water.

  In the amphibious state of ooeee, time does not pass with its usual rigor. The Helvner told me that it was after midnight (12:06). Meaning that I’d been under for more than an hour (1:17). I made a note of this and surfaced. My hair felt brittle and my eyes ached from the chlorine. I gathered my things and slipped under cover of darkness to my waiting Corolla.

  The drive home from the hotel that night was an exercise in mounting dread. Inside our suburban Colorado Springs town house, my wife waited for me—or maybe she didn’t. I was already beginning to suspect that she wanted out of our marriage. This suspicion would be borne out, and painfully so, on the night when she actually left me. Jean disapproved of my ambitions, the research in the pool, the museum; the mere mention of them plunged her into a sullen silence. She married me on the supposition that I would be a balanced helpmeet, that I would pull my weight. Oh, sure, she knew I was whimsical, a little flighty even. But she was drawn to my boyishness, my comics collection, the scale models that I’d had shipped out from my mother’s attic in South Carolina.

  The first year we were together I was still holding down the gallery job at the Center for Gender and Power. And even when Jilly asked me to clear out my desk, I handled the disgrace like an emotionally mature person. This was October 2004, when I was still reeling from my Margaret Sanger coup. I’d pushed the conventions of sociopolitical diorama design to the brink of acceptance. (Or maybe a millimeter beyond that brink, if you ask Jilly.) Anyway, I got fired. Jean had just accepted my proposal of marriage that spring, and I didn’t want any bad blood in the professional sphere of my life to hemorrhage into the personal one. So I put on a brave face.

  “I’m just going to dust myself off,” I remember telling Jean the night I was laid off. This was after three years at the Center, so there was a lot of dusting to be done. The silica of shame was thick on the knees of my downfall.

  “That’s the spirit,” she’d said. And it was.

  The next morning I made a few calls and got a job with a literacy group that paid well and allowed me to travel. If you’ve never seen a bookmobile, it’s a vehicle stocked with books that are doled out free of charge to underserved schoolchildren. Mine was a Chevy van decorated with a huge bespectacled worm. For months I rose diligently at 6:00 a.m. every school day to make my rounds of the local libraries. I sat Indian-style on the primary-colored carpets to read Clifford en español.

  A couple months later Jean and I were married, and I moved into her place. She owned a town house in the kind of complex where everyone wants to have dinner parties all the time and no one takes your designated parking space. I’ll never forget the night after our wedding, when I backed the Corolla up to the town house door. I was so excited I accidentally popped the hood and then the gas cap before finally finding the ejector lever for the trunk. The car was packed with my meager possessions, most of which were tied up in garbage bags and pillowcases.

  I didn’t get out of the car right away; this was a moment to savor. I remember thinking that if I savored it long enough Jean might rush outside to help me carry in my stuff. But she didn’t, and after fifteen minutes the car started getting cold, so I gave up waiting. I had to knead my backside to get the blood flowing again. I’d expected this to be a big moment, but instead my leg fell asleep.

  “That all you brought?” Jean said. I was standing at the threshold of married life with only a microwave oven in my arms. She was wearing a terry bathrobe and a big stocking cap. I wanted to kiss her, but the oven would have gotten in the way.

  “There’s more stuff in the trunk.”

  She gave a weird smile and stepped aside to let me through. I set the microwave on the kitchen bar and turned around to face my new bride. I still don’t know where she got the costume, but there she was—big, physically edifying Jean—wearing a leotard adorned with a stylized gold eagle. On her head she wore a golden tiara, and on her hip a golden lariat. On her wrists she flashed a pair of silver cuffs.

  “Diana Prince?” I whispered.

  “Steve Trevor,” said Jean—said Wonder Woman, my wife—with a wink. On the sofa between us lay a U.S. Army dress uniform, with a natty peaked cap and patent leather shoes. I wasted no time getting in costume. Then Jean lassoed me with the Lariat of Truth and dragged me into the bedroom. We made love in character once that night. And then we made love out of character, or rather in the character of ourselves, twice.

  Nearly two years passed. There were more playful sex scenarios and there was plenty of emotional growth, though in retrospect probably not enough. But in those heady first months of marriage we were into each other to a degree that suggested longevity. As an evolutionary strategy, love works too well. We should know what it’s really after, where it leads.

  By the beginning of last year the first blush of romance had peeled away and the rough glue-smeared underlayer of misery had become plainly visible.

  When I arrived home from the hotel that night, I could see the yellow curb stenciled with our condo number. I wish I could say this was a welcome sight, but frankly it filled me with apprehension. I parked, hauled up the hand brake, and listened to the engine tick as it cooled. To my freaked-out ears it sounded like some sort of urgent telegraph message. The message was telling me to restart the car and drive away. Do us all a favor, Jim: go. Disappear into some dull yellow obscurity where your ideas can’t hurt anyone you love.

  I walked to my doorstep and inserted the key in the town house door but waited a minute before turning it. I had good reason to hesitate. For many nights I’d come home to find Jean in a state of emotional nonpresence. What I mean is that she’d thrown up an invisible shield of isolation around herself. An empathy partition. You could walk all the way around it feeling for an opening or a loose panel, but there was no way in. She looked painfully pretty inside it, and completely unmarried.

  At last I turned the key. The sound of the bolt scraping in its chamber had all the finality of a cocked rifle. The door swung open and I stepped across the brass jamb.

  Jean sat on the couch, watching Nova. She didn’t look up. It was as if I reflected a frequency of light that was beyond her perception, ultra-ultraviolet. I could see her splayed form molded by the glow of our single torch-style lamp. She looked like a person of import lying in state. She looked dead. She looked at the TV.

  I closed the door softly. In these new condos there’s no other way to close a door. You can’t slam it no matter how hard you try, and I’ve tried, believe me. I hung my laser-pointer key chain on a hook, watching it bang softly against my wife’s laser-pointer key chain. Banging and intertwining and deflecting. Like us.

  Stepping in behind the couch, I spoke to the back of my wife’s head, but she didn’t turn to face me. So I circled the sofa and spoke to the front o
f her head. She shifted to the left and groaned to let me know I was blocking the TV. At my back I could hear galaxies being born. The soundtrack was synthesizers and wind chimes. In front of me, my own galaxy was dying, in utter silence. This went on for several minutes, me moving from the front to the back of the couch, until I finally got the picture. She clicked off the remote, sat up, and knotted the sash of her bathrobe.

  Our marital trouble boiled down to a difference of opinion. I contended that the world deserved a Museum of the Aquatic Ape, deserved to know the alternate truth of human ancestry. Jean contended that I needed to get a job. But I’d had jobs. I drove that bookmobile for a whole year before I hit the train. I challenge anyone to drive a commercial vehicle in a big red dog costume without incident. Besides, I wasn’t the first guy to be propelled toward great things by failure (take Gandhi, for example, or Don Quixote). And I’m definitely not the first visionary-like personality with a disapproving spouse.

  Her voice reached my ears like an incantation from beyond the grave, all echoey and slo-mo. I thought, naturally, of Doctor Strange, the shaman of Marvel Comics. How he sat lotus-style on that pentagram rug in his Manhattan town house, summoning genies with Sanskrit spells.

  “Are you even listening?” This was Jean’s voice, suddenly become clear, earthly. I realized that she’d been talking to me for some time. “I said your mother called.” She inserted an ugly pause. “Again.”

  There was resentment on that front. Jean was convinced that I’m unrealistically attached to my mother. She called her Betty, after Betty Friedan, although her name is in fact Gerry. Gerry Rath, Ph.D. Jean made fun of her drawstring pants and her cropped hair, her ceramic vagina art.

  I tried squeezing into the few available inches at the foot of the sofa. Jean’s foot recoiled at the touch of my thigh and I heard her groan. In fact she has a nice way of groaning. It’s the same sound she made during our lovemaking. Back when we still made love. For Jean irritation and amorousness have the same repertoire of noises. That was one of the things that turned me on about her initially.

  When I landed the job with the literacy group, we decided to go out and celebrate. The Corolla was in the shop, so I borrowed the bookmobile. When I pulled up in front of her apartment complex, she groaned at the scandalous nature of what I was driving. I winked. She climbed in the sliding side door.

  It was Jean who got the idea to read “bedtime stories” in the back of the bookmobile (although I was the one who took the heat for it from my superiors). And this wasn’t exactly Berenstain Bears or Make Way for Ducklings. The material was far more advanced.

  She groaned when I told her about what happens after hours in Busytown, when the Lowly Worm comes out of his apple. She groaned and groaned until the bookmobile was filled with the sound of her groaning.

  I mark that night as a watershed in my feelings for Jean. Those feelings have not abated, no matter what she’s done to me, or I to myself.

  “Are you even listening to me? I said Betty called. For like the fifth time.”

  “I made a lot of headway tonight,” I replied, raising my eyebrows in an expression of positivity.

  “Did you see Corey?” She asked this without any real interest. Corey was the night clerk at the Hilton. He was a nice guy who was weirdly jazzed about what life had handed him, despite what it had in fact handed him. We’re talking about a man who wore a neck brace and did the over-the-back slam-dunk gesture at every perceived victory. Our relationship involves comics. It’s a bond, so he gives me special access to the hotel facilities after hours. Jean always disliked Corey, or disliked the me that she saw through the lens of Corey.

  “I got some cool ideas about weaponry,” I said, placing my hand on her ankle—a mistake. “Normal weapons like lasers would dissipate in the water, so they used these sonic cannons—with like a burst of superfocused sound. They were pretty cool weapons.” I withdrew my hand and mimed a shoulder-mounted rifle, like a bazooka or something.

  “She said do you want her to send some vest to you. You left a vest there that you made in fifth grade.”

  “And also there are cultural echoes with like dolphin language and whale calls,” I said. “Which are supersonic too.”

  “A vest she said you made out of yarn or something. I can’t believe you made a vest.” She still wasn’t looking at me. “Do you want to know what I think the subtext of that phone call is?”

  “Come on, Jean. Everything doesn’t have a subtext,” I said. Jean has a degree in psychology, which has been a help/hindrance in terms of her own personal growth. “The thing about supersonic rifles is they could frighten and confuse an enemy without actually killing him.”

  “The subtext of the phone call is this: Look at my creative son, he’s so creative. You don’t deserve my son, Jean, you little bitch, because you don’t value how creative he is. He made a vest out of yarn and you can’t foster his creative vision.”

  I sat forward. “She wouldn’t say the b word.”

  “And do you know what the sub-subtext is? Or the sub-sub-subtext?”

  “No.”

  “Then I’ll tell you.” Here she Frisbeed a throw pillow across the room. “Your mother is a very lonely and depressed person.”

  I tried to put my hand on Jean’s ankle again but discovered that it was still a mistake. She sounded a meaningful sigh and picked up her water glass.

  “Will you turn off that light on your way out?” she said.

  “On my way out where?”

  “Out to the bedroom.”

  Jean had slept on the couch off and on for the past three weeks. The couch was close to the front door. And the front door was the door that she would very soon walk through to abandon our marriage.

  I got into bed still wearing my swim trunks. Once I was comfortable, I propped the three-ring binder on my knees and wrote the following:

  Nautikon weaponry: shoulder-mounted sonic rifles, “startle” grenades, and hypersonic scatter guns for dispersing schools of marauding bull sharks. There was no war within Nautika because of women running the government, so the weapons were strictly for protection and could only be wielded by the Dolphinwomen cavalry—who were outcasts and sworn to self-immolation after battle!! See-thru glass breastplates?

  I woke up the next morning to a distant sense of toasting bread. I heard it before I smelled it, raisin swirl, discharging noisily out of the toaster. Then came the unmistakable sound of a butter knife rasping testily across a dry surface.

  “Jean?” I said. No response. I paused a few seconds and called again: “Jean?” I heard the chuckling of her laser-pointer key chain. I heard the front door close, that horrific vacuum-seal sound. Then the town house was quiet except for my tentative breathing.

  That morning I spent writing, or really just taking notes and making pencil sketches in my binder. For a while I fell asleep on the couch. When I woke up it was Jean’s imprint on the corduroy upholstery that I felt, not my own. Her residual body heat was trapped somewhere deep in the cushions, and I tried with mind magnetism to extract it, draw it into myself. I know everyone can understand this, because we’ve all been in love before. But it didn’t work, so I was forced to lie there feeling her warmth from an upholstered distance.

  I slept again and this time I dreamed about being trapped under an endless sheet of polar ice. Above me I could see the sun, weak and blobby like the beam of a flashlight through the wall of a pup tent. I looked for a hole or some slushy area compromised by algae, but there was no escape.

  When I woke up the third time it was well after noon. My hair was still ratty with chlorine, so I showered and even took the time to use a cream rinse. I made an egg sandwich and stared at the stainless-steel door of our dishwasher while I ate. By the time I realized that there was egg yolk in my hair, it was already dry. While I was sponging my sideburns it occurred to me that the day was slipping away. I had to get something done. So I drove out to the storage plaza, stopping at the Hot Mart on the way for a coffee and a
chocolaty Paycheck bar.

  Stor-Mor is just past the airport, several acres of identical orange-and-white corrugated buildings inside a high security fence. When I signed my contract two years earlier, they gave me a four-digit pin number for the front gate, but I forgot it. And anyway you can punch in any four digits and the hydraulic gate opens. I located my unit, easing the Corolla close to the entrance. The combination to my padlock was 19L, 25R, 3L. I nailed it on the first try. (The agents would famously use a bolt cutter; maybe you saw the footage.) The garage door shrieked as I clean-jerked it open, then I stood back to let the hard Colorado daylight color my secret library.

  The storage unit was my only selfish space on earth. Until they got that warrant and hauled everything in for state’s evidence, no one else had ever been allowed inside. Not even Corey at the hotel had clearance to see it, and certainly not Jean. She would soon prove that she couldn’t be trusted around mint-condition comics.

  I slipped on my white gloves and stepped inside. At the center of the room stood a lopsided globe of Earth-Two, the Golden Age planet of DC Comics. This was a science fair project of mine, aged twelve, that took some two weeks to complete. Looking back, I see it as quite possibly my first curatorial effort, the precursor to the Museum of the Aquatic Ape. I did a Mercator projection and some careful research to map the many nations and kingdoms and then pasted all this onto a papier-mâché ball.