The Unknown Knowns (19 page)

I
was having difficulty sleeping. Maybe it was the residual Pink Mine Shaft gumming up my circadian rhythms. Or perhaps it was all the redundant tan decor in my Prospector's Bend motel room. (Tan is a surprisingly provocative color; I've seen studies.) More likely it was the leftover shame that had spackled the creases of my eyelids and stopped them from closing properly.

I'd suffered another run-in with the Nautikon, and this one was way worse than the Lazy River episode. Without getting into the boring details, I'll say only that he pranked me at the expense of my research. I was having a fruitful session of
oooee
. Truly astonishing things were being revealed to me—undersea gardens, an earthquake in a subaquatic market, milk-glass towers touched by fists of magma, reverse ontogeny—until the Nautikon cut off my psychic flow. He knew what I was doing. He
knew I was getting closer to his secret. And for some reason he found this threatening. Which is a personal bummer to me because my intentions regarding him and his culture have always been positive.

Not that it matters, but he also made a laughingstock out of me in front of the Mills sisters. Who cares, right? It's not like I feel some untapped need to impress a pair of bosomy sorority girls with pastel brains. They were in on the joke, goading him on. The whole patio was charged with some kind of antiestro-wisdom, andro-jerkdom.

But if the Mills sisters tested my faith in womankind, Keesha Stephens restored it—with a kiss. She saved my life, mouth to mouth, but there's no real reason to retread that miserable experience, either my life or the saving of it. Let me say one thing: no matter who gets intubated or demoted or gitmoed or house-arrested or plutoed by the end of this stupid story, I want the record to show that Ms. Stephens was and always will be an unimpeachable and completely awesome person.

The bedside LED showed 3:40 a.m. I lay on the mattress replaying the previous day on the retractable white screen of my mind. As the minutes wore on, sleep became a more and more remote possibility, a rabbit you'd been chasing across a vast field until it finally occurred to you that you didn't even like rabbits, and that catching a rabbit would mean exactly nothing to you. So I stopped running and watched the cottontail of sleep vanish under the far hedge.

By then I had a serious headache. The pain started in my pineal gland, the most primitive site in the brain. It was an atavistic kind of torment that seemed to harken back to those dim days before we slipped into the sea, when rapacious humanoid preda
tors roamed the savannas, driving humanity to seek shelter in the fecund tidal pools of North Africa. Way back, way back before history, that's where my headache came from.

It wasn't a cold night, so I'd left the casement window cranked open. The breeze coming down the mountainside sent undulations through the curtains so that the pattern of Conestoga wagons appeared to be in transit. I could hear Flatiron Falls crash endlessly into the Waterin' Hole and thought of Labiaxa rushing up the cataract of estro-wisdom toward her audience with the Queen. Then I thought about what I'd left in my refrigerator back in Colorado Springs. I wondered if Jean had returned to clean out anything that might spoil, the ground beef for instance. Maybe she'd brought someone along to help, someone to run interference in case she crossed paths with her lunatic ex-husband. The cabinetmaker, or Josh from the office. And after they'd dumped the moldering tortilla pie and clumpy milk down the Disposall, they would sully our marital sofa bed with their lovemaking. Then I remembered that
Nova
was on TV that night. On the ceiling of the motel room I conjured up the hurtful movie of Jean and the rugby-playing cabinetmaker, knees pressed together under the afghan, draining glasses of pinot noir and watching dung beetles roll up their little shit balls. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't sleep.

I couldn't sleep. And in the storehouse of my insomniac mind, betrayal piled on top of betrayal. I looked up through the depths of the Waterin' Hole and saw the Nautikon's mocking face. His thumb stuck in the end of my snorkel. His smile, distorted by the water, looked fanged. His eyes glinted with caprice. The air, I thought, was poison to him. It was turning this innocent, this idol, into a cyclops, a total jerkwad.

I'm ashamed to admit it now, but I wasn't thinking only of
Nautika. I was thinking about myself too. If being let down by ordinary mortals is hard, the disappointment of an advanced oceanic being who starts acting like a frat boy is a pain without precedent.

Jean never really believed in God. She didn't have the supernatural bent for belief. But I know she was a big Jesus fan. She liked the sandals and the sermons, the whole messianic packaging. She liked the way He introduced a change in divine policy to a stubborn world with a gentle, lamblike smile, while the divine CEO, His father, sat upstairs threatening mass layoffs. Jean was in the field of organizational planning, and Jesus, He was her ultimate middle manager. So she clung to the concept of Christ without much in the way of belief.

Substitute the Nautikon for Jesus, and you get a sense of my own disintegrating situation. As I lay there in the dark, my faith was going to hell, while my
attachment
to said faith grew more and more intractable. Plus I couldn't sleep.

I couldn't sleep, so I got up and looked out the window. I knew from my most recent session of
ooeee
that the True Man must be tested by three maidens. I knew he would be led to the virtuous path by the one called Jim (i.e., me). We already stood atop the holy mountain, He and I. Before us lay water and blood.

I saw the Oaken Bucket out there under its tarp, the moonlit water lapping at its sides. It looked like the applecart of wanton fun—and who wouldn't want to upset that applecart? That's when it hit me. That was when I got the idea: hatched my evil plan, plotted my purported misdeed, initiated the alleged disservice to my nation that earned me a tracking device on my ankle and a guy with a headset watching my every move while I grow older day in and day out on the deck of a houseboat. The germ of
the scheme came to me in a flash of inspiration as I stood there in the motel-room window. I would do something bad with the Oaken Bucket. Something so shocking that it would remind the Nautikon of his true mission. Remind him that he was sent here to save a dangerous world from itself. I would do something bad. Something shocking.

If he thought this was all a personal joyride, a vacation from cultural extinction, I was prepared to remind him otherwise! Vengeance was in my eye. I saw it in the half mirror of the window, then watched the vengeance travel down to my legs, murky electricity. My hands felt restless, restless and evil. I left room 21 and let my cruel purpose guide me, let it propel my bare feet to the very precipice of mischief.

I stood on the patio. The moon and the water were enjoying each other's company as I began to climb the mountain. The flagstones were cold enough to numb the balls of my feet. Soon I found myself sniffing around the Oaken Bucket. At the back of the ride I discovered a low shed stuccoed to look like a boulder. The midget door was padlocked, but a sustained tug with one foot braced against the frame did the job. When I ducked inside I heard scampering, the scampering of paws. I had only a vague idea of what I was going to do. It was dark. My hands prowled the floor and walls. I felt sweaty pipes, the round glass face of a meter, a stopcock wadded with spiderwebs. Behind me the Oaken Bucket rocked gently on its rails and I could hear the wooden staves groan.

They weren't exactly speaking to me, the staves. No, that's what a crazy person would say relating the genesis of his crime. The ax or the howitzer or the piano wire spoke to me, told me to do it:
Do it! Kill her now! Do it!
The seabirds told you to sever the
cable and send the whole gondola of Italian tourists hurtling into the fjord. But the “talking dog” alibi has always seemed like a lame excuse to me. If a dog tells you to bind an old man with duct tape and pull out his molars with a pair of pliers, I don't know, that strikes me as kind of dubious. You wouldn't listen to a talking dog under ordinary circumstances, so why would you listen to a dog that was telling you to do something illegal? You'd have to be criminally insane to take orders from a dog. So the groaning staves of the Oaken Bucket, they might have made some suggestions, might have offered their point of view, but I didn't take them seriously. I don't listen to staves, and I never have.

Inside the boulder-shaped shed I came across a toolbox. I dragged it out into the sodium light and found a locking wrench with mean jaws. I looked at the wrench; I looked at the wheels of the Oaken Bucket resting underwater on their gleaming rails, and I made a mental connection, like a syllogism or something.

I remembered the Nautikon toasting the girls back in the restaurant: “Tomorrow I'm taking you three hotties for a ride on the Oaken Bucket!” I remembered his arrogance, his cruelty. My plan took form and stiffened with the starch of hatred.

I gazed down at the motel. His corner room was dark. The Helvner told me that the hour was 4:30 a.m. Soon it would be light. If I wanted to act, I would have to do it now. I picked up the locking wrench and stepped into the hip-deep water, gripping the rim of the Bucket for balance. The two right wheels were attached to the axles with single bolts.

I followed the path of the rails with my eyes. The Bucket would exit the pool and drop about twenty meters at a sixty-degree angle. It would level out before taking the first hairpin curve. Two small waterfalls would come next, then another hair
pin turn to the left, before the Bucket crossed the top of Flatiron Falls. There I knew from observation that the Bucket leaned hard to the right, giving passengers the sensation that they were slipping over the edge of the raging cataract. Just in the nick of time the Bucket righted itself and plunged shrieking into the mine shaft. From there it was a straight shot down to the safe harbor of the Waterin' Hole and the motel patio.

But not if I had my way.

I'm not mechanically inclined, but I had a theory. If I loosened the right-hand pair of wheels, the Bucket might not be able to recover from the tilting passage across Flatiron Falls. It would lean out—out—out—and more out until it met oblivion. Tumble end over end in the bleak summer air some fifteen feet to the shallow pool below. Not far enough to hurt anybody, I reasoned, only enough to scare them. And my theory proved to be surprisingly sound, all except for that last part.

I squatted down in the water and fitted the wrench over one of the hubs, just gauging the size of it. I adjusted the width of the grip by twisting the peg at the end of the handle. I repositioned the wrench on the hub and squeezed, feeling with satisfaction as the jaws bit the steel nut. Then I stood up to get some leverage.

But that, I'm happy to report, was where I stopped. The evil seemed to drain out of my hands like briny green seawater from a ballast tank. I loosened my grip on the wrench and stared into the dark pool, at the aborted inevitability of my would-be crime. At the alternate future that was but a wrench turn away. My reflection scared me—that poison Narcissus, the negative me who only seconds earlier was the only me. He scared me. I scared me. I could still feel his presence, my presence, the wake of his careless laughter throbbing across the water.

The Feds didn't believe me when I told them this; neither did the press or even the Fat Man, my lawyer; you won't believe me either, but I couldn't go through with it. I did not loosen the wheels on the Oaken Bucket. I wasn't the one who upset the applecart. I couldn't hurt anyone. Not Jim.

Why did I wimp out? Two words: Keesha Stephens. In my muscle memory I could still feel her soft life-giving lips pressed against mine. My mouth still burned with the urgency and concern of her breath, with the piney taste of liquor.

I let go of the wrench.

“Hey, buddy! You okay?”

The hairs of alarm stood up on my nape, and I turned to see the maintenance man, a flashlight swinging at his side. The guy's question seemed sensible enough. Was I, in fact, okay? I didn't know how to answer this. I did have a vague sense that I was totally busted if I didn't think fast. The tiny fragment of my brain that wasn't being flooded with panic hormones or self-loathing hatched a plan: remove the Helvner—let it drop to the bottom of the pool…

“Yo, you shouldn't be in there, man!”…try to act normal—breathe—look like a regular person doing something.

“It's just,” I said, affecting shame. “This is embarrassing—but I think I dropped my watch. I was out here taking a walk. It's a nice night.” I indicated the moon. He acknowledged it. “And my watch must've slipped off. It's waterproof.”

He shone his flashlight on the pool, but the oily surface gave back only his own rubbery beam. I squatted and picked up the Helvner.

“Ah! Got it!”

“That a Helvner?” he said, training the light on my dripping timepiece. “Let me see that.”

I handed him the Helvner. What I didn't need now was a protracted chat about wristwatches. What if he noticed the wrench? What if he spotted the busted padlock or the toolbox that still lay open on the path? All the evidence pointed to me being a bad person. I
was
a bad person, or almost.

“Saudi navy, right?” said the maintenance man. He certainly knew a lot about watches. “You got to be on a list to get one of these, yeah?”

“My uncle knows a guy,” I explained. The more I talked the more nervous I got, the more complicated the cover-up and the situation I had to cover up. “He was an admiral or something. He expedited the process.”

I hopped out of the pool and tried to angle past him.

“I always did want a watch like this,” he said.

“Keep it,” I said, or heard myself say.

“What?” I nudged the door to the shed with my foot. It swung shut without the maintenance guy taking notice. “You shitting me?” he said.