The Unknown Knowns (10 page)

And if I was heartbroken, imagine what the maiden monarch of Nautika (the wise Queen Ô) would have said about this brazen act of macho jerkiness! The Council of Twelve would have censured him quite harshly if they'd known what he was up to. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but this guy was sent here on
a sacred assignment to spread estro-wisdom to the surface world. And I would do my best to see to it that he succeeded.

Then—I'm not making this up—they look right at me. Using his hand as a cloaking device, the Nautikon whispers something to June. She laughs. It's a pitying sound. I cringe and the humiliation makes itself felt in the pit of my chest, where the bad feelings cluster. I have to put this incident out of my mind, I think; the Museum of the Aquatic Ape is at stake here. This isn't about my pride. Spreading the great message of Nautika—that's way bigger than my own petty insecurities.

 

The remainder of the morning I spent in my room with the drinking glass pressed against the wall. It was hardly necessary; you could hear the Nautikon's heavy breathing all the way down at the ice machine. He sounded like a walrus. June was a porpoise, cooing and calm. Not like the bedroom groaner Jean, my erstwhile wife and sex partner.

I'm the sexually noisy type. I hyperventilate. I pant. I even have some kind of high-pitched whistling sound that I can't control. They're sounds that you'd be better off forgetting when the act is over. But Jean's groan of annoyance/lust was so understated and ear-tickling that, long after she'd stopped, you thought you were still hearing it. Even the next day, at Stor-Mor or in the Hilton pool.

In the early weeks of our marriage, sex was a priority. She and I left the futon as seldom as possible, and then only to order pizza or for Jean to go to mass. She had to go to confession now and then to tell Jesus what we'd done. Before she left, though, she always saw things through sexually. The blood shifted under the
surface of her face, and right at the very end the groaning escalated into a sharp chirp. That's how you knew it was over.

I would lie there on the mattress, still catching my breath, while she worked the waistband of her skirt over that broad superhot behind, pocketed her rosary beads, and walked out the door to make up with her ex-boyfriend, God.

I listened for close to an hour as the Nautikon went on treating his terrestrial bed partner to his aquatic love technique. Every time the headboard struck the wall my heart fractured a little more. My brain was still aboil with admiration: he was doing a good job. But it was funny, I remember thinking, how pleasure on one side of a divide can effect such sadness on the other. It was like Newton's Third Law, but for love. Equal and opposite reactions.

Finally the bed juddered against the wall and the two of them said
“oh”
in unison. It was lunchtime, and I fully expected them to call for room service, but a few minutes later I heard the long trill of a woman's zipper followed by the curt yelp of a man's zipper, and then the door to room 517 flew open. June gave a sleepy, satisfied giggle. I listened for the
ping
of the elevator, counted to ten, and then followed them downstairs.

When I arrived in the dining area, they were taking their seats at a corner table. The boy was with them, dressed in yellow from head to toe. He clutched a stuffed toy banana with startled plastic eyes and a determined grimace. It was a hybrid expression that you couldn't sort out. The boy's face, on the other hand, was easy to read. It was puffy from crying and his hair was matted down on one side. His Chuck Taylors were yellow too.

To cheer him up the Nautikon showed him a fun trick. He took a big sip of ice water and sang some weird, enchanting tune
while he gargled. The effect was like a whale song, or like pressing your ear to a pipe and hearing your neighbor's radio. The boy was not impressed, but I was. I scooted nearer, as if entranced by the Sirens themselves. For the first time in days I was totally calm. I thought of the robed Spermata, serenading the Queen in Her twin birthing chambers from their ornate chancel. Their nutrient song was a catalyst to Her gestation. Their harmonies delighted, quickened, and completed the oogenetic processes.

There was a two-top free just within hearing range, so I sat down and fell in love again. I forgave the Nautikon all his transgressions. He ordered something called the Rocky Burger, but I just smiled. God, he was nice.

“Medium well, honey,” he said, looking at the waitress's open collar.

I stopped her on the way back to the kitchen and whispered. “I'll have the Rocky Burger, medium well.”

My food arrived on a chipped oval plate, a patty of low-grade bison meat with grilled jalapeños and a big spooge of Monterey Jack. I lifted the lid on the kaiser roll to watch the elastic cheese sinews stretch and snap before settling into small taupe clots on the charred surface of the meat. Even its native garb of iceberg lettuce and frilled toothpicks couldn't make it appetizing. I pushed away the plate, trying to enjoy the sensation of hunger. I felt like an anchorite in a food court.

But the emptiness in my stomach was soon filled with bile, of the medieval humors variety. I started to resent the Nautikon all over again. I swore at that moment that if I could travel to the distant past for an audience with Queen Ô, I wouldn't hold anything back. I'd tell her everything. I wrote this threat in the three-ring binder, underlining the words no fewer than five times. Even
tonight I can see the greasy outline that was left on the page: Monterey Jack.

The Nautikon paid the check with a credit card. It hadn't even occurred to me before, but how was he paying for all this? He couldn't exactly bankroll the mission in
Eea,
the shark-bone currency of Nautika. He charged his lunch, he drove a rental car. Was some terrestrial concern underwriting his odyssey? If so, who? And why? Even tonight on the deck of the
Endurance
the conspiratorial possibilities give me chills. I tighten the afghan around my shoulders and look out across the bay. I guess I'll never piece it all together.

 

More than a day had passed since I'd practiced my experiments in human gill latency, and I was feeling a serious yearning for the pool. Moreover I was getting deeply stressed out. I decided a few hours underwater were just the thing. After lunch I went down to the parking garage to fetch my swimsuit and snorkel from the Corolla. I had to clear away a landfill of comics and grape-soda cans in the backseat to make room to change. My naked thighs slid over the vinyl upholstery on a film of sweat, which was not really that unpleasant, as sensations go.

My swim trunks were still around my knees when I heard the Nautikon approach. He was whistling an aimless tune. I recognized it at once—the “gargling song” from the restaurant. The notes pinballed through the low concrete garage, bounding from pillar to pillar until his music penetrated the very echo chamber of my head. There I felt it flood the halls of the Museum. I saw the aquatic apes in their dioramas, waxy and dead, come suddenly to life. Little sea children sat in a circle playing at Urchin-Jack.
They held hands in pairs, according to custom, singing their Urchin-Jack song: “Two by two, we are new, three and three, in the sea.” Inside her historically accurate weaving room, I saw a Nautikon Councilwoman quicken her pace on the loom of estro-wisdom. While his song filled the Museum, the tapestry took shape, pearly white and seaweed green, a study of the Queen in Her opalescent ova, birthing the endless stream of Nautikon nymphs. The harsh lovely light from Her loins. The laughter of the newborns. The choir in its graven chancel. The whistling intensified. I sat paralyzed, my thumbs looped under the waistband of the swimsuit. The trunks stretched tight between my quivering knees.

Suddenly I heard a loud metallic crunch, and the whistling was replaced by a man's booming voice.

“Whoa, sorry, bro!” It was the Nautikon. The door of his Ford had banged into the side of my Corolla, and he was standing right beside me. He looked inside my car and I felt his eyes land on my midsection. “
Really
sorry!”

I wriggled into my trunks, racking my brain for some kind of explanation. Improvising, I grabbed a half-empty grape soda and a rumpled
Thor
comic. I pretended to read, and took a long, ill-advised pull from the warm can. The taste was like dust bunnies in cooking sherry. I gagged, puked a little, but managed to hold it in and even swallow. Not that it mattered. The whole routine was wasted on the Nautikon, who by now was rooting around in the trunk of his car. I watched him in my rearview mirror as he retrieved a green plastic box the size of an egg crate. The effort on his face was considerable.

When he'd finally left, I crept out of the backseat and climbed the stairwell to the lobby. He was nowhere in sight, which was
frankly kind of a relief. I was more anxious than ever, so I didn't waste any time getting to the pool.

I sat on the smooth lip, dropped in, and clung to the edge for a minute, wetting my mask. I sucked on the snorkel and opened my waterproof notepad. The Helvner told me it was 2:35 p.m. I descended and began to dream about Nautika.

I
t is the age of Hercules and the hour of Moses, in the year modern scholars will call 1509 B.C. Decades will pass before Zeus washes clean the sins of the Pelasgians with his mighty Deluge, a century will elapse before the throne of Crete is mounted by King Minos.

This is the thousandth year in the reign of Queen Ô of Nautika. And it is most decidedly Her last.

Gaze for a moment upon Her undersea city—the vast dome of red coral, its minarets of milky glass. See the gentle blue Nautikons flee as the hot blood of the earth spills upon the seabed. See the blood coagulate into ghoulish figures that writhe on the sand. Hear their screams as they boil the sea to vapor.

These demons are mere messengers, the heralds of the hell to come.

The Great Kataklysm is upon us.

By day's end the city of Nautika will sleep beneath a thousand furlongs of cold young stone. Her dome, her spires, her temples, and her marketplace—her children of the sea in their bright thousands—will be buried, fossilized, consigned to the lost chapter of an unread history. What was once an acropolis, a utopia, and a motherland will be a museum without entrance or exit.

 

But this dread tale begins not in Nautika but countless furlongs above, on the island called Sicily, the land given by Zeus to Persephone, the unwilling bride of Dis, on their wedding day.

On the outskirts of the village known as Sica stands a tumbledown cottage with packed-mud walls and an irregular roof of matted reeds. Inside, arrayed on long shelves, are crude iron instruments and terra-cotta jars filled with unctuous powders and potions. In one corner a small furnace burns despite the hot Mediterranean morning. The air reeks of sulfur and burnt sugar.

The laboratory's lone occupant is an aged alchemist in a ragged tunic. He stands transfixed before an object on his workbench. As if borne by some invisible hand, a small pink nautilus travels across the wood surface. The man's wizened face turns resolute. Something has been decided.

On this morning the very pillars of the earth are atremble. The giants anciently imprisoned in the hollows of Mount Etna struggle against their irons. Such is their fury that Hercules himself could not restrain them.

The alchemist is the one called Aricos, scholar and wise man.
His appearance bears the scars of wisdom hard won. The gray hair is scattered and spare, the shoulders twist rheumatic, and his eyes glow as if from pits of permanent concern. Aricos has paid mightily for what his mind contains.

The nautilus continues its trajectory across the workbench until it comes to rest against an earthenware water pitcher. The seashell's merest touch causes the pitcher to glow like a blown-upon ember. The Phoenician moon goddess Tanit appears on the broad handle. A Berber hamsa—the hand of protection—pulsates on the full belly of the jar. Aricos takes up the little shell, and the pitcher resumes its dull earthy appearance.

Suddenly an excited knock sounds on the laboratory door, wrenching the old man out of his grim reverie.

“Papa, Papa, come out and celebrate!” A woman's voice rings clear and joyful through the laboratory. “Today is my Arrival Day, and you have promised me a great gift!”

Aricos contorts his face into a smile. With palsied hand he opens the door to reveal a young woman. Her name is Labiaxa, and she is beautiful despite—or because of—her unlikely arrangement of features.

The other girls of the village shun her, mock her deformities. Labiaxa's feet are grotesquely large and flared, advantageous when she swims the nearby cove but objects of mockery when she bares her feet at the bathhouse. To hide the disgraceful webbing between her fingers, she keeps her hands behind her back. But there is no concealing the moon-shaped slashes on either side of her throat. They gape open when she is out of breath or ill at ease. The others call her Fish Girl. Her father tries to comfort her. He praises often Labiaxa's flawless skin, tinged as it is with the blue of the Mediterranean. The other girls of Sica are
dark as terra-cotta and rough with blemishes, he says. Her body shines like the buffed inner walls of the nautilus.

But her father cannot prevent the village youth from insulting his Labiaxa, from hurling stones and hurtful words. No matter. Otherness has made her strong, youthful choler tempered her. Labiaxa has grown these eighteen years into her own woman, willful and brave.

But the secret she will learn on this, her Arrival Day, will shake the girl to her core—much as the earth, which just this moment belches and bucks, throws Labiaxa into her father's arms.

He guides his daughter to a long bench of pearwood. They sit gazing into one another's eyes, his earthly and unsmiling, hers limpid as a sun shaft in the bosom of the deep.

“This shaking!” She buries her face in her father's chest. “It frightens me so! That the world should quake on my Arrival Day—is this not a grave portent?”

With every tremor the mud walls shake loose clouds of red dust. Aricos collapses in a fit of coughing. His daughter strikes him gently on the back.

“Yes,” he says when the coughing subsides. “There is much to fear. I'm afraid your Arrival Day may also be a day of departure.”

“What ever could you mean, Papa? Who is departing?” She looks up into his wet eyes, her bluish cheeks streaked with white. “No!” she shouts. “I will never leave you! This day may make me a woman, but I will always remain your little girl!”

“I'm afraid you must leave me, my daughter,” says the old man. He fingers the pink nautilus and his eyes wander eastward toward the shore. “And when you go, everything you have ever known about yourself will vanish as well.”

He removes his skullcap and worries it in his hands. She is used to her alchemist father speaking in riddles, but this is something else entirely. Forcing laughter through gritted teeth, he continues:

“Today is a great day for you! A worrisome day for the world, but great for you! And now, Daughter—your gift! Long ago, when you were but an infant in arms, I made a solemn promise. Upon your Arrival I would reveal unto you a profound secret. A secret that would change your very destiny, and with it your past.”

“My gift, Papa, is a secret? Tell me, oh, tell me now! I have been so looking forward to this day that I do not know if it is the earth that trembles, or my own heart!”

“I pray to Poseidon that this secret will make you happy, gentle Labiaxa, but I am afraid—Now, child, take an old man's hands in yours.”

She does as her father instructs. And it is with grave hesitation that he begins to relate an uncanny narrative from his youth.

“When I was in my fourth decade,” he begins, “I worked as a navigator on a royal trireme. You may not believe this looking at your crooked old papa now, but I was handsome then and strong.”

“Oh, Papa…”

He closes his eyes and the story spills forth, interrupted only now and again by a rude ejaculation from the angry earth.

The day was mild. The sun generous. The sea glassy. The royal trireme was on its return voyage from Thebes. The journey had been long, but now Mount Etna was no more than twenty furlongs away. The crew could see the cliff houses of Sica in the distance, and the sight of their homes made them quicken their strokes.

The master was calling out a hearty oar song when a shout came up from the stern. On the horizon there arose a fearsome rogue wave. It swept across the sea, a curtain of water half as high as the cliffs themselves. There was no chance of escape. There was no time—and no way—to ready the warship for this churlish agent of Poseidon.

In an instant the trireme was lifted like a reed, overturned, and dashed into a hundred pieces.

All hands were lost. All, of course, except Aricos.

His last waking memory was of tumbling headlong into the fathoms, down and down beyond the reach of the sun. The cold of the abyss stung his bones. Next came blindness. And then, mercifully: sleep.

“I remember waking in a room whose dimensions and materials defied my understanding,” says Aricos, opening his eyes. “I was forced to conclude that I had arrived in some antechamber to the underworld, the salon of my death. Oh, what a curious room it was, Daughter! The walls, they might have been blown from milky glass. But this was no earthly glass. For the room, though roughly spherical, was in a state of constant change. The walls breathed and moved. In the center of the concave floor lapped a small pool of water.”

He scans the reed ceiling of the laboratory as if to conjure memory upon it.

“I lay on a low bed upholstered with the leather of some unknown but infinitely supple creature. Though the bed offered no covering, my body was warm, perhaps with fever. I sat up at once, my brain pounding and my ears singing, the better to survey my surroundings. The pool was clear, faintly touched with blue light—like an opal held up to a candle. I thought I heard,
somewhere far below me, the singing of a chorus. The words were indistinct but somehow—threatening.

“I stood to peer into the pool. In its depths I discerned a pulsating red mass surrounded by a school of, I thought, small fish. They looked to be feeding upon the mass. And all the while, that menacing choir—Then a single voice emerged from the chorus. Ah—what a voice! Strange syllables bubbled up out of the pool to slither and echo around the glass walls, quite like a Sican flute played in a bathhouse. Instantly, as if my flaming skull had been touched by a Punic balm, all my bodily pain retreated.”

Aricos touches his daughter's arm, another balm.

“That voice, dear daughter—it was your mother's.”

Aricos lets these words expand between them until Labiaxa's face tightens with an unformed question.

“I don't understand,” she says. “What are you telling me?”

“Patience, Daughter. Some mysteries may not be rushed.”

Aricos presses his palms into the rough wood of the bench, as if holding back a menace rising up from the deep. His eyes thicken with sorrow's-brine, and he goes on:

“As I stood there, lost in the miracle of this limpid pool, the red mass vanished and the fish darted away. In an eruption of bubbles I watched a woman rise to the surface. She emerged, beads of blue raining over her naked body, and slipped onto the glass floor as graceful as a sea snake. Seeing Her, my heart—it tightened like a pearl.”

The old man makes a fist.

“In his day your papa was considered a comely man! But before this most regal of creatures I felt like a monster. She was Athena, and I Polyphemus. She was a garden path no man should dare to walk. And I—I was a rude staff hacked from a yew tree.
I wanted to hide! To flee! But there was no escape! Another moment in the blinding rays of Her beauty and I would surely expire from shame!”

He touches his daughter's furrowed brow before continuing on.

“I will attempt to describe Her, though Her beauty, like the water itself, resists description. Words will only float across the surface of Her being, like so much flotsam. She was what wise men call the unknown made known. At one moment She appeared before me as a stately noblewoman, with all the bearing of an Aphrodite carved from agate. The next moment Her very anatomy would dissolve into a fountain of blue droplets. All around Her a corona of countless tentacles would writhe and dance.

“Perhaps it is best to describe Her human guise. She stood a hand taller than your papa. Her body was hairless, its mercury-smooth covering a pale blue. Along the crown of Her head ran a ridge, almost a fin. Her eyes were wide-set, nearly to the sides of Her tapered skull. When She spread Her arms in greeting, two fans of diaphanous skin spread between biceps and shapely torso. Her hands too were webbed, like a duck's feet but infinitely more graceful.”

Aricos stops for a moment to consider his daughter's eyes.

“And Her eyes—As I peered into their black dilations they combined to form a single bead of red light, a drop of blood that saw me as I could never see myself…”

He presses his lips together.

“Ah, but what is the use in describing Her?—You will soon see the Queen for yourself, dear daughter! But I—I will never behold your mother again.”

Labiaxa burns with questions—The Queen? My mother?—but she holds her tongue in deference to her heartsick papa. After a time, the old man regains his composure and continues on with his uncanny tale.

“She touched the walls that surrounded us,” he says, laying a hand on the invisible wall of his imagining, “and the milk white glass turned suddenly clear. I saw at once that we were perched atop a tower inside a fragile bubble of air. All around us lay the endless sea. Spread out below, to the limits of my sight, I beheld a vast undersea city. And though we must have been many furlongs under the surface, the scene was gaily lit. Luminescent jellyfish floated past like papyrus lanterns on a lake, casting everything in a ghostly life-light.

“Our own tower was merely the tallest in a broad ring of glass minarets. There might have been a dozen or more, each one crowned with an onion dome that glowed with an urgent blue light. In the middle of this circle of buildings was a kind of lawn, bespattered with reds and blues, that seemed to my weary eyes to simmer like soup in a cauldron.

“But that was only the beginning of the marvels that met my astonished eyes that first day. The city was patrolled by an aquatic cavalry of woman warriors, dressed in shining crimson armor and mounted on dolphins. I remember a manta more fluid than a hawk and big as a chariot. On its back sat a circle of children diverting themselves with a ball and jacks.

“Farther below, on the sandy sea floor, a marketplace teemed with vendors. Ladies strode the broad avenues, their male companions trailing several paces behind like footmen. I remember a garden of blossoming sea foliage that ringed the city. It seemed to me that it was springtime in this strange land.

“Gazing up through the concave lens of our roof, I spied the red ceiling of the city itself. It soared over everything like a great fisher's net. Perhaps it was a huge reef—I saw flashing schools of fish swim around it—that had been carved into a massive dome.