2009 - The Unknown Knowns Page 4

  The lead shot in my pockets dragged my body to the bottom, and I stood there for some time trying to enter the semi-amphibious state of ooeee, but it was no good. I couldn’t focus. When I tried the circular breathing, I could feel myself start to hyperventilate. I tried to summon up Nautika, the wondrous domed city, Queen Ô enthroned in Her grand alabaster ovum. But all I could think about was the noise. You know what I’m talking about, that weird noise in hotel pools, like if you glued a contact mike to a housefly and broadcast it over a transistor radio. It’s sexy and nagging and reminds me of Jean.

  Anyway, the ooeee was a no-go. Eventually I gave up, surfaced, and toweled off. On the way out I gave Corey a silent valediction. He responded with the two-handed big breasts signal and pointed toward the elevator. I heard the doors slide shut without looking at what I presumed was an ample-bosomed woman riding up to her room. On an ordinary night I would have definitely looked, but this was not an ordinary night.

  In the parking lot I stood for a while gazing up at the sky. Which is really something you can’t gaze at but into, because it doesn’t end. How far can we look when we’re looking into infinity? There must be a limit to human sight. I thought I should look that up. Then it occurred to me, standing there gazing into the night sky, that gazing into the night sky was something losers did and I got even more depressed.

  So it was with heavy heart that I dropped into the driver’s seat of my Corolla. I switched the key to the Electrical position and the dashboard glowed like an aquarium. If there was a button on the dash that I could press and send the car through a wormhole into a parallel universe without Jims, I would have gladly pressed that button. But there is no such button. Instead I started the car. And I drove out of the parking lot into a different kind of parallel universe, one that was so sucky it hurts to describe it.

  Fifteen minutes later, I was in the doorway of our town house. Almost at once I felt something, or the lack of something, emanating from within. It was, I would soon discover, the negative energy of loneliness, and it filled the vessel of my being with all the intensity of very bad sinus pressure. Every light in the apartment was burning, but I knew in an instant, I knew, my feet not even across the threshold, that my home had been drained of love. I rushed to the bedroom. The bra drawer stood bare.

  I said it aloud: “That’s it; she’s left me.” But was I convinced of this? Not yet. I was just trying out the expression on my tongue, readying the organ of speech for the impact on the organ of misery. Then I found Jean’s ‘good-bye note,’ and I wasn’t practicing anymore. It was true; she’d left me.

  I call it a note, but there wasn’t any note to speak of, not in the verbal sense. No tearstained condolence card or ‘screw you’ lip-sticked on the bathroom mirror. She didn’t scribble anything on the back of a utility-bill envelope like ‘I know this will be difficult for you, Jim,’ or ‘Someday I hope we can talk, Jim,’ or ‘These years together, Jim, have meant so much to me, but…’

  But.

  On the kitchen island I found my cherished copy of Sub-Mariner N°6. A paring knife pinned it to the countertop. Which must have taken excessive force because the surface is a slab of solid butcher block and our knives aren’t exactly Henckels. I needed to give my hands something to do, so I rubbed them together. Then I used them to rub my face. Then I wiped my nose on the collar of my shirt. Then I scrubbed the collar with a damp paper towel.

  I tossed the paper towel across the room, where it landed on the sofa. “Damn her!” I shouted, or wish I’d shouted. Why take this out on Prince Namor? (NM!; $125!; “The Sub-Mariner Fights the Periscope Peril!”) Why take our marital trouble there, to the comic-book front? Jean considered my comics rivals for her affections, but why? I guess I’ll never know. True, I often ran to them for consolation and what you might call succor when my wife’s arms would have done the job. But, honestly, I was never selfish with my inner life. Never. I invited her in. I opened the door to my inner life and made the sweeping gesture. Please, Jean, after you!

  But instead of stepping inside to see her husband’s marvelous passions up close, what did she do? She joined a book club. They met three nights a week that summer. What kind of book club meets that often? And that’s where she met the cabinetmaker. I think he played rugby. When I saw the Sub-Mariner comic pinned to the countertop, I thought immediately of this guy. I didn’t even know his name, had never laid eyes on him, but I could picture him all right. He was in the scrum, or whatever they call that stupid sublimated homosexual orgy. His ass in the air and his large hands callused by years gripping an auger or a jigsaw. Now they’re gripping the toned hamstrings of an opponent. He’s so equal to the moment, this guy! So – I don’t know – engaged with life. The buttocks tell you all you need to know. Very, very, very firm – too firm for flesh inside those mud-spattered nylon shorts. I gave this a lot of thought and nearly cried.

  As a boy I had never been afraid to weep. Mother told me that only men and the emotionally paralyzed can’t cry, so I tried to show her that her little boy was neither. I bawled my eyes out as often as possible. I wept at every stubbed toe and every imagined slight. And whenever I cried Mom took me to the Kress for a candy bar. (Yes, the Paycheck – sweet, chocolaty nexus of emotion!) Which may explain my rapid weight gain in elementary school, the tearful calls home from the principal’s office, and the names they called me. In playground terminology I was a textbook ‘crybaby’ and also a ‘fatty’. Or, when facing the most ruthless foes, a ‘fatty crybaby fatty-fatty’. Later, I was just a ‘fag’.

  But when I grew up, I stopped crying. I lost weight. It’s not that I wasn’t sad. It was like the tear machine rusted up. Maybe something had jammed in my lacrimal ducts. Maybe I was becoming the thing my mother feared most for me, either an emotional paralytic or a man.

  So there I was standing at the kitchen island, rocking the paring knife back and forth to save poor Prince Namor (even though I knew this issue would never be Near Mint again, knowing it was Good at best and would command no more than $45 from only the most pitying or nearsighted collector). And there I was trying to cry, but the crying wouldn’t come. I was a maudlin, tearless knife extractor. I wanted so bad to punish Jean with my hot tears. But I couldn’t cry and she’d never be there to see it if I did. Besides, what kind of a dicky move was that, punishing her with hot tears? I was such a dick.

  Left with little recourse, I went to a bar. And it was there that the real trouble started, the trouble you know about, the trouble that made the news and landed me here with an ankle bracelet. It was on that very night that I first laid eyes on the Nautikon. My life’s only pursuit and my life’s final disappointment. He was drinking alone at a corner booth in a hotel bar. But now I’m getting way ahead of myself.

  When I walked into the lobby, Corey looked up stiffly. His head popped out of his neck brace, turtlelike, and he regarded me with a kind of glazed-over alarm. His eyes were bagged but his hands were awake. They scuttled across the desk at the sound of the sliding glass doors. I could see that he was covering something up with a brochure, and when I got closer I understood why. He’d passed his shift making dozens of drawings of Red Sonja in all kinds of demeaning positions.

  “What are you doing back, Mega-Brow?” he said. It was a nickname.

  I winced but tried to shape-shift the expression into a smile. “Sub-Mariner N°6,” I said.

  “The one with MacArthur?”

  “No, the issue after, Chor-Boy.” This was another nickname, spoken here with malice.

  “Dude, you have that?”

  “Had. She destroyed it.” This wasn’t entirely true. I’d finished the job, feeding it into a shredder and then strewing the remains across our marital bed. It was an act.

  “Man, you have got to leave that wench,” said Corey, my friend.

  “Yeah.”

  The hotel bar is just past the front desk, through a pair of high green doors that never seem to close. The place is called Rambles! (The exclamation point is not
my own; it’s actually on the sign.) Rambles! remains crowded until well after midnight principally because they offer complimentary popcorn. You can order one beer and enjoy a bottomless basket. The decor is some kind of bizarre Manifest Destiny motif. Murals of the Northwest Passage adorn two walls. And the banquettes are made out of barrel staves and wagon wheels, if you can picture something so homespun and moronic. I picked an empty one close to the door, ordered a beer for the sake of the popcorn, and sat there examining my own escalating sense of doom.

  At the bar sat three unattached women, a vacant stool beside each one for spacing purposes. The bartender was an ex-Marine whose nose I had always suspected of being false. He’d worked as an explosives expert in Gulf I, which probably explains a lot. It was difficult in the dim light of Rambles! to work out the man’s true age, but he always nursed a miniature can of cranberryjuice, a sure sign of urinary-tract trouble.

  The music on the public address was rock and roll of some indeterminate era, with extended saxophone solos that were wildly out of phase with the decor. From where I sat I could just barely hear the bartender telling dirty jokes as he moved from one woman to the next, the pitch of his voice rising sharply when he met the punch lines.

  I heard him say: “That’s not my penis!” He blurted out the first syllable of penis like he’d popped a cork out of his mouth. When the women giggled, he wrinkled his fake nose, and his eyes actually twinkled. I laughed too, but with bitterness, a knife against the throat of everyone’s happiness. They all turned to look.

  I had been sharpened to a point by desolation. So lonely I was a danger to society. A pariah, a leper, quarantined by my own unsuitable stupidness. Jean had been the conduit between me and the rest of you. Would it be too cheesy to call our marriage my lifeline? Probably. But when she severed that lifeline I was set adrift, an astronaut. The earth receded beneath me and with it all the appurtenances of our small love. A pair of burritos, the afghan on our love-worn sofa, ankles entwined, soft kisses on the brow as I fell asleep, the TV talking to us about the nature of humanity and the humanity of nature – everything drifted out of reach as I hurtled off into space.

  But my loneliness ran even deeper than that. It felt as if I were being torn from the very scrim of reality, like a Colorform sticker peeled off the plane of being. I was too weak to adhere to reality. And I had no one to blame but myself.

  A little later, the bartender delivered another punch line – “I said Sasquatch, not Gas-quatch!” – and I laughed again, still bitter but less pointed, more resigned. I was getting tired.

  Then I heard someone else join in on the laughter. The sound was manly and honking. It made your gut curl up, like when the Fat Man blows his nose. I had to squint to determine its source, a figure seated in a dim banquette by the wait station. He sat low in the booth, and when he laughed again I could see his teeth flash blue in the compound bar light. I watched the man for a while, noticing how he kept stealing glances at the server’s boobs. Her name was either Donnie or Kareese, though it was hard to tell which because she wore two name tags, one on each breast. Maybe she’d named them. I’ve heard of that sort of thing happening. She was lining popcorn baskets with slips of wax paper. Every time she reached up to add another prepped basket to the stack, her knit shirt pulled taut across her bustline.

  The lights flickered and flared, and I turned to see the bartender toying with a rheostat. The effect was cheap and dramatic, like the light show in a low-budget rainforest diorama. Suddenly the overheads flared and it was as if a spotlight had been cast on the corner banquette. The laughing man was rendered in stark detail. The bright light revealed him to be a handsomer guy than I’d previously thought. He was sexy but in a desolate way, like a brakeman or a drifter. His hair was brown and he had the kind of upper lip you normally associate with a mustache, even though there was no mustache in sight. His face came to a point at the chin end and was flat at the top. The eyes were wide-set, fishlike. The man’s mode of dress was what they now call business casual: teal turtleneck, blue sports coat, putty slacks, shoes.

  Kareese sure seemed to like his look. The man’s drinks arrived with clockwork regularity, each one in a clean new glass. To me she was less attentive, though I required very little. Just more napkins. Which she never brought.

  Seated, his posture was rigid and chesty, suggesting that we were dealing with a tall man, but when he stood to go to the men’s room I saw that his long torso and powerful shoulders were just a ruse to conceal a pair of stubby legs. You might even call them underdeveloped. The guy waddled. But he kept his chin up, proud, almost like a sea lion balancing a cocktail on his nose. When he came to the pair of low steps leading to the rest-rooms, he hesitated.

  I examined his bulging pockets and determined that he was carrying breath mints or a complicated portable phone. Or both.

  But what really caught my eye was his curious tic with the turtle-neck. He kept tugging the collar up over his chin as if he were trying to conceal his throat. And there was something else suspicious about him: even in the fake gaslight of Rambles! his skin gave off a distinctly bluish cast.

  I wasn’t thinking about the Museum. I wasn’t thinking about much of anything. My wife had just left me; I needed to be alone with my beer and my memories. But something about this stranger redirected my focus onto Nautika. I looked at his bluish complexion and thought about how much he was drinking. I studied the turtleneck and considered what he might be hiding under that high knit collar. Were they hickeys, or were they man-gills?

  “Okay, slow it down, Jim,” I told myself, speaking softly into my beer. “Slow. It. Down.”

  I was losing my grip, or so I thought at the time. When your wife leaves you, I told myself, it rips the seams out of the fabric of your reason. Man-gills! As if. Blue skin! God, I felt like a jerk. Jean was right, I thought. I was obsessed, I didn’t let people in.

  I tried to concentrate on my beer, but a face kept appearing in its bronze surface. The man had plucked some kind of harp string in my consciousness, he’d played a suspended chord on the Lyre of Doom and it would continue to vibrate until this very day.

  Even tonight, so many months later, so many miles away, as moonlight registers on the bay, I can still relive that weird sensation. I was not going crazy. I was feeling something, like when you think you’re going to sweat but the sweat won’t come out of your pores.

  I needed to focus on something else. So I pulled the three-ring binder out of my shoulder bag. It was a little hard to see, but I started expanding my notes on Nautikon weaponry and doing sketches of dolphinwomen. The glass breastplates were translucent red, which made their blue breasts look kind of purple.

  My shoulder bag was army surplus, Vietnam-era, an heirloom from my dad. It was decorated with a dozen or more feminist buttons, souvenirs of my mother’s expanded consciousness, and by extension my own. I had started collecting them in elementary school. This was in the 1970s, when buttons had something to say. Like THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL. Or WHY BE A WIFE? I had one that was just a cameo of Betty Friedan in three-quarter profile. The notebook was a relic too, from the 1970s of my childhood. It was a denim-covered model, with a dungaree-style back pocket stitched on the outside where I could keep my Uni-balls.

  Why am I giving you all this boring detail about my boring possessions? Because I want you to see from the outset that I was just an ordinary citizen, doing things we all do day to day in this country. I didn’t ask for this burden. Didn’t ask to be the first terrestrial man in modern memory to come face-to-face with a genuine Nautikon. You might have reacted the same way I did. And then it would be you sitting in this deck chair, rubbing your ankle to get the feeling back in your toes. You and not me. And how would that feel?

  But I’m getting ahead of myself again. That night in Rambles! I wasn’t ready to believe what I was seeing. By all appearances this was just another business guy in a hotel bar. One of literally thousands across the nation.

  We sat for a while like
this, everyone listening to the music and the jokes and enjoying the bar atmosphere. Then I heard the man in the corner banquette crack his knuckles. He was standing again. I thought he was headed back to the bathroom, which would be his third trip of the night. Instead he started walking directly toward me. He had a big heroic-looking head and he was swinging it back and forth like some kind of assassin drone surveying the barroom for its next kill. I thought, and I was just toying with the idea, that if this guy really was a Nautikon, he might be seeing our world for the first time. What a trip that would be. It was such an intense thought that I had to put it out of my mind. That’s when he caught my eye (or maybe I caught his) and my hands started scrambling across the table looking for something to manipulate. He was just a few feet away, he was looking at me. But then he stopped short and hung a left toward the bathroom. I exhaled.

  I waited a couple minutes and then (why? why?) I slipped in behind him.

  What I saw in the men’s room blew my mind.

  It was a two-sink arrangement, with those spring-loaded knobs to discourage waste. The Nautikon had pulled the plunger and filled one of the basins, which must have taken a great deal of diligence. While I took up a concealed position behind the wall-mounted air dryer, he rolled down his turtleneck like a gym sock. Around his throat he wore a gold chain. I thought about what kind of amulet of Neptune might be dangling on his hairless chest. That is, if he was a Nautikon. Which I didn’t think he was. Not yet. The room was so quiet you could hear water giggling down the overflow drain.

  Then he plunged his face right into the basin and held it underwater for a long time. I used my imagination to picture the man-gills pulsing in the tap water, inhaling. Again, I was just playing with the idea that this guy might be a Nautikon. (Of course he wasn’t; that would be delusional. Or would it?) Then the guy reared back and slapped his cheeks, spraying droplets across the mirror. He actually made a roaring sound. It was animalistic and primal. It bounced off the tiled walls, a beast trapped in a toilet tank. He held still for a long second, pursing his lips in the mirror and examining his teeth. That’s when they were revealed to me. Along the left side of his throat, just under the miraculously stubble-free jawline, I saw two parallel slits. They flopped open once, twice, and then fell flush against his neck, disappearing in the folds of his mighty throat. Holy crap, I thought. Holy crap. I wanted to watch him forever, repeat this scene five hundred times. But my window was closing fast. The Nautikon had started toweling off, and if I’d stood there another second, he would have busted me for sure.