The Unknown Knowns (16 page)

The counter came up to her bosom, and her bosom rested on the counter. She was wearing a bonnet.

“Give me room 21,” I said.

“Pretty particular, ain't you?” said the desk clerk. “You been here before?”

“Nope. Just my lucky number.”

“You don't look so lucky.”

She gave me a skeptical look, or maybe it was just the way her face was made. Her features were drawn with worry lines. Alarming red hair poked out from under the bonnet like fire under an Easter basket. And her mouth was the kind that never stopped moving, even when it wasn't saying anything.

“How many nights?”

I showed her the number one with my hand.

“You got to pay in advance,” she said.

Room 21 was several shades of brown, including deep chocolate wainscoting and a shower curtain that covered the whole spectrum of tan. The single bed was humped up on one side, and when I sat down the springs complained openly. The wallpaper behind the headboard was worn in the outline of a headboard, suggesting countless nights of coed amorousness. I was becoming a real archaeologist of hotel decor.

When I opened the curtains, they hissed on the traverse rod like spilled rice. The sun was coming up behind the mountain, so that the whole mass of geology appeared to be on fire. This was my first glimpse of the Oaken Bucket, concealed under its nighttime tarp. The twin tracks gleamed under the water. Flatiron Falls emptied endlessly into the Waterin' Hole. I lay on the bed and listened to the raging cataract, and it wasn't long before I was totally conked out.

What woke me up was the crazy noise of girls having fun. My sorority neighbors bounced down the breezeway past my room, three pairs of flip-flops slapping against six neatly pumiced heels. There was laughter and singing and playful shrieking. I lay still with my eyes closed thinking about Jean. I thought about her responsible hemp sandals, and her voice hollering at me from the
bathroom: “What's wrong with you? Why can't you get your own razor?”

It was well after noon when I got up and went to the window, and what I saw wiped Jean completely off the surface of my mind. There was the Nautikon. He wasn't wearing a shirt, just the Jams and a pair of Tevas with calf-length athletic socks. He stood on the patio speaking to a custodian in a gray jumpsuit, their heads close together. The Nautikon gave him one of those elaborate soulful handshakes and jangled a ring of keys. Then he found a free deck chair close to the Waterin' Hole, cranked it into the horizontal position, and lay down. I watched him smooth his hair and gaze over his chin to admire his own sculpted chest. My heart had been battered and chipped by his crass behavior, but it was not yet broken. Nothing could buff the luster of myth off his marble body. What I beheld before me was still a Nautikon, and I could not allow myself to forget that core truth. A few seconds later out came the girls.

You know their names; everybody does. The famous Mills Sisters, Brenda and Jenny, and their friend Keesha Stephens. The Mills girls had apparently performed some kind of mix and match with their bikinis. Brenda wore a yellow top with safety orange bottoms; her sister wore the converse combination: orange top, yellow briefs. With their big eyes and lemon-colored ponytails, they cut alarming figures, like a warning of oncoming fun. Keesha's appearance was more understated. I think she might be of West Indian descent. Her kinky short-cropped hair framed a sweet, reliable face. In their resting position her eyelids were droopy, but when she laughed the eyes exploded at you like blue flowers. I liked Keesha from the moment I saw her.

The girls grabbed three lounge chairs at the opposite end of
the patio and started applying sunscreen with great vigor. The teamwork was amazing, and I wasn't the only one enjoying the view. The Nautikon sat up.

From Elaine Morgan we learn that “sexual selection—sometimes operates to a point where it cannot be said to be conducive to the comfort or convenience of the individual animal.” Think of the peacock, or certain male porn actors, or the proboscis monkey with its huge lusty nose. The Mills girls too were afflicted by the Darwinian sex burden.

I'm dancing around the subject probably because the breast issue is a big one for me. Jean said that being raised by a single mother had turned me into “a boob guy.” I disagree, but I can't disagree very strongly. I remember the night when the Mars Rover
Opportunity
was having all that trouble broadcasting back to earth. It was late January 2004, and Jean and I had been together for a little more than six months. We lay naked on the futon worrying, like the rest of the country, about how NASA would fix the signal.

I playfully mentioned the idea that womankind is the earthly receptor of galactic knowledge. You know, just kidding around. I was only thinking out loud when I said that all information in the universe passes through the Great Cervix of Epistemology. I said: “Think about it, Jean; maybe if we could tune all the earth's females to the Great Cervix of Epistemology, we'd know everything we wanted to know about Mars and everything else in the universe.”

I was just joking, of course, kind of. And I'm pretty sure she laughed, at first. I do remember she pulled on her pajama bottoms and said something about keeping her “receptor covered.”

At this point the mood in the bedroom was still mostly positive. But then I went too far.

“Or maybe”—I propped myself up on one elbow and looked her in the eye—“maybe it's the breasts that act as receptors. Maybe every bosom on earth is tuned to the frequency of some All-Knowing Space Breast. Like how when a baby enters a room all the women start lactating.” I was too excited now. My ideas were outpacing my reason and my tact. I knelt on the mattress.

“Christ, Jim,” she said, hiding her face underneath the blanket. “Do you have any idea what a sociopath you are?”

I didn't stop to answer this question. “If we could just find the frequency,” I said, and here's where I really took things beyond the accepted threshold of marital bedroom banter.

I peeled back the blanket, took her left breast in my hand, and turned it, ever so gently, like you would tune a radio. I think I made a beeping sound, a sonar sound, which was probably a mistake. Jean is what they call a statuesque woman. She has about seven inches on me and maybe twenty pounds. Her bosom is not to be beeped.

“Can you feel it, Jean?” I said, still beeping softly. “Can you detect some kind of signal coming in?” I was half-joking and half-not joking. And trust me, the whole thing made a lot more sense at the time.

Before I knew it she was on my chest, pinning my shoulders under her knees, but not in a romantic way. I could see her breasts heaving above me, and for the first time they looked really threatening. She reached back and took my left nipple between thumb and index finger, twisting until I gasped and nearly lost consciousness. Then she stripped the blanket off the bed and walked to the couch. Though she accepted my proposal of marriage a few months later, I think this was a harbinger of negative feelings to come.

So maybe you can see why I'm reluctant to dwell too much on the now-famous chests of the Mills girls. But empirically speaking, they are stacked. The Nautikon was keenly aware of this fact as well. I heard the screech of a deck chair being dragged across the patio and watched him take a seat beside Jenny. He was looking at her breasts, I was looking at him. Then it hit me. Of course this guy's a breast man; he comes from a matrilineal society. The breast would probably be like an object of devotion, an emblem of social, political, and economic power, like the presidential seal.

I spent the afternoon writing in my room, occasionally checking out the window to see what the Nautikon was up to. The bedside radio was on a twenty-four-hour news station. I wanted everything to seem normal. It
was
normal, of course, perfectly normal; but sometimes people can get the wrong impression.

I was sitting there at the foot of the bed immersed in a state of utter normalcy when the radio began to speak to me. As a teletype chattered in the background, I heard the words
Denver, Lazy River,
and
Single Mom
.

We each exist on a separate bandwidth. I honestly believe that. But sometimes those bandwidths get crossed. The radio had gotten tuned to the frequency of my individual experience, it was addressing my own peculiar circumstances, and it was freaking me out. Walk into a pet store, a turtle speaks your name; that's how I felt.

I stood up and pushed aside the Conestoga curtains. The Nautikon lay facedown on his chaise longue.

The reporter spoke in fake grave reporterly tones about the alleged victims, June Fresto of Albuquerque and her son. Second-degree burns over eighty percent of their bodies, the man said, irreversible blindness a distinct possibility for the boy. By the time
they pulled June Fresto out of the River, said the radio, the acidic compound in the water had eaten through the straps of her swimsuit. The Denver police were still treating it like an accident. They weren't ruling out a bad batch of chlorine. There was no talk of foul play or terrorism.

“June,” said my mental Nautikon. “Give the rug rat a little time-out. Let him watch
Dora the Explorer
. Cut loose, girrrrl!”

He crouched behind the rocks at the source of the Lazy River. Probing the crevice with his rubber tube, he turned to me—the insignificant little me who occupies my mind—a finger laid across his lips.
Shhhh
.

Meanwhile the radio had traveled on to someone else's bandwidth. The next item was about a Fort Collins woman who had been married to five anesthesiologists simultaneously. Somewhere an anesthesiologist was listening to this story. He was thinking about his wife and wearing an expression much like my own. Wide eyes, downturned mouth. Crushed astonishment.

I shut the curtains and stared into nothing, the blank geometry of my room. The rubber tubing snaked into my consciousness like a conspiracy. It flooded the ventricles of my brain with a most caustic fluid—suspicion. Everything the Nautikon had done to disappoint me, every small act of betrayal, burned suddenly like hydrochloric acid.

But come on, Jim! I actually slapped myself. Don't be ridiculous. The Nautikon had nothing to do with this! Why would he hurt a defenseless woman, especially after all the loud, energetic love he'd shown her? I expelled the milky fluid of suspicion from my mind. If I lost faith in the Nautikon, my whole project would be meaningless. I would be single, adrift, homeless—for what? For nothing. I couldn't afford to doubt him.

But after that day, something changed. If doubt does germinate from seeds, my husks were splitting. The green tendril was reaching through the dark soil to find the sun. There was something wrong with the Nautikon. I knew it. I just didn't know that I knew it.

At about four o'clock he parted company with the girls and started making the rounds of the amusement rides, lugging his green box up the hillside. He took samples from the Waterin' Hole and the Duck Pond. For several minutes he disappeared inside a brown hutch at the base of the Water Wheel. The wheel turned on and off and every time it did the lights dimmed in my room.

By 6:00 p.m. I was starving. The Old Prospector's Kettle Cabin serves up items like the Grizzly Dog (a beef frank wearing a bearish coat of chili) and the Forty-Niner Sirloin (actual weight: sixteen ounces). When I entered the nonsmoking area, the waitress was serving side salads to Keesha and the Mills sisters. She turned toward me and I saw that she was the same woman who'd checked me in at the front desk earlier that morning—or was she? Same fiery hair, same bonnet, same top-heavy build and worry-wrought face. But something was different.

I seated myself and waited.

“You don't get a day off, do you?” I said, when she finally came to my table. I was trying to make conversation by saying something to her.

“What?” She set down a laminated menu. It was a bifold layout and stood about a foot and a half tall. I had to move it aside to see her face.

“They've got you working the front desk too, huh?” I said.

“No.”

It wasn't turning out to be much of a conversation, so I changed tacks.

“I just want eggs. Can you do that at dinner?”

“Huh-uh.”

I studied the menu as the waitress unsheathed a drinking straw and pulled a tightly swaddled bundle of flatware from her apron pocket. There must have been a hundred choices for dinner. I picked the third thing I saw under “Vittles.” The Golden Yardbird. It came with something called Nuggets and a choice of dipping sauces.

“I'll take this.”

“Comes with Nuggets,” she said. I acted surprised to hear this.

The waitress turned on her heels and headed for the kitchen. I watched her ruffled skirt sway from side to side, watched her bump a rolling cart out of her path with her hip before she pushed through the swinging doors. Inside I heard the
click-clack
of ramekins; a deep fryer chuckled in the distance. The sound of laughter caught my attention. I turned toward the girls' table and saw teeth spread from one pretty face to the next. They were all smiles, all except Keesha, who was blushing. She swatted Brenda or Jenny with the giant menu. Then she caught my eye and I heard a throat being cleared. The laughter stopped. The girls were drinking a pink fluid from Mason jars. A pitcher stood in the middle of the table half full of the same lively substance.

My food arrived with suspicious speed. The Golden Yardbird and the Nuggets were served in a small skillet with a stack of ten or fifteen napkins.

“Can I get some more napkins?” I said with a smile. It was a joke.

“That was my sister,” said the waitress.

“What?”

“That you saw this morning.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Did you want something to drink or was water okay?”

I looked over at the girls' table. The waitress followed my gaze with pinpoint accuracy.