The Unknown Knowns (22 page)

 

Diaz:
No? I don't get paid to make you comfortable, Congressman. Quite the opposite.

How about your wife? You'll be pretty surprised to see what the water can do to your wife. Have you ever seen a drowned wife, sir? Do you even know what a drowned wife looks like?

M
y mother came to visit me today. Uncle Keith must have given her the key, but I don't know how she got past the security detail. When I heard her voice I locked myself in the bathroom. This time was better than the phone call; she went away after half an hour and hardly even cried.

Keith has a nice houseboat, but it's more boat than house. It's cramped. Everything looks expensive, the paint job is subtle, and the carpet is soft like a bed of expensive moss. But all the furnishings are scaled down, almost like you're in the floating domain of some lavish billionaire gnome. The galley kitchen has a miniature fridge that makes miniature ice cubes. The microwave is barely large enough for a single burrito.

The walls of the living room are covered with downsize prints of American masterworks. I recognize Bellows's boxers and
Winslow Homer's children. The sofa suite is a shrunken version of those massive pit groups you see on talk shows. The plasma TV, though not large, is given prominence of place, partly blocking the mural window that looks out onto the deck and the bay.

The pink bathroom has a cute little scalloped sink, a standing shower with gold hardware and trial-size soaps. The rim of the toilet is of a circumference slightly too small for human buttocks. You have to shift a lot, and sometimes your legs fall asleep before you're done.

I could hear my mother moving in the kitchenette.

“Jim,” she called, but cautiously.

She knew I was there; a mother can sense these things. Plus I'm under arrest, so where else would I be? I heard her looking through the cupboards and the fridge. That was the first thing she did. Once she'd confirmed that I wasn't on a hunger strike (she shook the near empty cereal box), her cries became more emboldened.

“Jim,” she said. “Jim.”

It was my name. The name she had given me. Spoken by the first person ever to speak it.

When they pulled June Fresto out of the Lazy River, she was clinging to her little boy, his red legs punting her bare stomach. They showed me the pictures when I was in my secret prison, to break me down. (But to what?)

In the photos mother and child are both burning, but they hold each other tight, one flesh blistering the other. The boy's mouth is open at her ear. She presses her head close to his, leans to one side like she doesn't want to spill his screaming, like she can hear his pain away, swallow it down into her own nervous system so that he'll stop burning.

“If you're hurting, I want to help you.” My mother was talking in her reasonable voice now, small and large as she moved from room to room. “Jim, it's Mother. Mother is here.”

She too wanted to hear me hurt, so she could hold the sound, pluck it out, a thorn, only a splinter. But some barbs are buried so deep even a mother can't tweezer them out. I stood in the shower stall and toyed with the omnidirectional massage head, trying to do something absentminded. But my mind was right there, exactly in the middle of everything as it was happening.

After a while I thought, This is ridiculous, I can't hide in the shower forever. So I sat on the toilet. By then she'd reached the bathroom door. Her knuckles on the laminate, one knock, then a pause. I turned on the tap and the pink basin started to fill, an ear. She started knocking in earnest.

“It doesn't matter, Jim.”

I heard a single bulbous knuckle, rheumatoid, and then something sharper, the cast silver ring she wore on her wedding band finger. She was knocking backward, her palm facing in: the customary knock of caution. She was afraid of me. I turned off the tap and let one hand dangle in the water.

“Whatever you've done,” she said. “Or haven't done. To a mother it never matters.”

Her voice was muffled, and I realized that she had pressed her face to the door, the closest she could get to whispering in my ear.

“I love you,” she said. “Even if they never let me see you again, Jim, I love you.”

Hearing your own mother say those words, it was enough to make anyone throw himself over the railing. On the short list of things to say to make a guy kill himself, “I love you” has to be right at the top. I pressed my face to the small porthole window
that looked out over the bay. I was resisting the idea of my own reverse ontogeny. Resisting the easy way out. Open the door; hug your mother; kill yourself; stay here; wait; make them wait; unwrap a cake of trial-size soap; kill yourself; don't. I saw the gray water and offered my brain to it, opened the door to my skull and let it come rushing in. I wanted an elevated consciousness, a mind I could set afloat on the rising tide. I had to keep a level head or I really might do myself in.

I had a realization. Of course, I thought, perched there on the dwarf's toilet. That explains why they let my mother come to see me. It's all part of their game. I'm not naïve. I know full well why the authorities and the Snowman and everybody else were all so willing to let me stay on the
Endurance
during the hearings. House arrest is an unusual concession for a high-value prisoner like myself, and houseboat arrest—that's even rarer. But my uncle had no trouble arranging it.

Why? It's simple: they want me to drown myself. They're hyperaware of my ambivalent relationship with water, so they parked me in front of it hoping I'd dive in.

You're thinking, Wouldn't it be easier to lock me up forever, make an example out of me? They could drag me out of solitary confinement every five years for probation hearings, give Morley Safer an exclusive interview. Squeeze all the PR they could out of me, like they did Peltier or Padilla.

The trouble is there are doubts about my conviction. Doubts have been cast. Some rich civil libertarian is calling it a monkey trial. The Fat Man whispers to me about dissident voices. They're saying the real bad guy is the Nautikon. They're saying he was the one who dumped lye in the Lazy River, saying he loosened the wheels on the Oaken Bucket.

I'm not an unrealistic person. After all, I saw the Nautikon meddling with the Bucket the night before the incident. I know he didn't want to ride that morning. In retrospect even I can see that wet socks were a pretty lame excuse. When you add it all up, there's plenty of evidence that he did the bad things they want me to be guilty of.

And once I start traveling on this painful line of inquiry, it's like I'm on a sliding board covered with bees. Even though it stings, it's hard to stop. If he did it,
why
would he do it? Again the Fat Man supplies an answer. It was some kind of wake-up call. And that makes sense. The Nautikon wanted to spark a public debate on Nautika—initiate a national dialogue about his native land.

But evidence, as I told Jean a long time ago, can't be a precondition for knowing something is true. Even if I admit that the Nautikon did something bad, even if I acknowledge that he screwed up his one chance to bring estro-wisdom to the warlike humanoids of the surface world, my faith in the enduring power of Nautika will not be shaken.

But I don't have to worry about the Nautikon getting blamed for this. There are way too many shades of gray in that story and within those shades even more shades, grayer and less gray. And nobody wants subtlety at a time like this. I mean, what's easier to explain to the American people, that some rogue domestic terrorist (i.e., me) went nuts with spousal grief and perpetrated an isolated criminal act? Or that our collective disinterest in and ignorance about a lost aquatic civilization with an unapologetic feminist worldview has finally come back to bite us?

If I drown myself, the game's over. Any doubts about my guilt would vanish with me. Suicide would be as good as a sworn con
fession. Case closed. And then Nautika can go back where it was, to the volcanic purgatory it's been trapped in for centuries, go back to being some boring footnote in
Bulfinch's Mythology
that nobody ever reads, or some page in a comic book that nobody ever took seriously, or some diorama in a museum that some loser never got built.

But suicide? Please. I wouldn't give those congressional so-called investigators the satisfaction. I won't take my own life just to keep their stupid lie alive. I'm not the mastermind behind Oaken Bucket. Sure, I tried; I admit that; I didn't have the nerve—and I'll be damned if I'm going to go to my grave as somebody's scapegoat.

The bathroom window went white with my breath, but all it takes to erase human breath is a wad of toilet paper. And there it was again. There was the water. I needed to look at the water, so I looked at the water. Let the water in and keep a level head.

Unexpectedly I slipped into a deep state of
ooeee,
and it caught me way off guard. Such exo-aquatic trances are rare, usually brought on by episodes of high stress or profound misery. Whatever the cause, I let it happen; I sank into the water trance and let it saturate my mind. I heard music.

D
istant music. A mingling of male voices, now loud, now soft, as if a heavy curtain has been drawn and then draped before a vast choir.

Oôo has turned back to reclaim her womanhood, leaving Labiaxa to reach the summit of the tower alone. Her mother calls to her; a prophesy awaits. The Nautikon brood precipitates all around her, a joyous rain of wrinkled purple faces and shoulders matted with soft black hair. These are the newborns of their race; the birth canal, she reasons, must be close at hand.

Then—unexpectedly—the shaft ends! Overhead, Labiaxa sees folds of fleshy material that interleave to form a kind of inverted roof of large blue shingles. She treads water to study the soft ceiling, thinking: The end? So soon? Impossible. This cannot be my final destination. I must find a way through.

Gradually she becomes aware of a subtle change in the fleshy folds. A loosening, an expanding, like a braid of leavened dough on a sunlit windowsill. The color shifts, ever so subtly, from blue to pink to an exigent red. Finally the folds part and down pour a dozen more Nautikon infants, each shedding a meniscus of red jelly as she falls. Labiaxa presses her palms against her ears. The male chorus erupts into a crescendo. Then the folds of the fleshy roof draw closed again. Could this be what Oôo meant by the Royal Vulvorum? And that riotous music? It must be the vast choir she called the Court of the Spermata.

She waits, watching the barrier overhead. It will open again. And when it does, she will be ready. Finally, it happens, the slow organic dilation. Labiaxa squeezes past the falling brood and shoots up into the gap. Halfway through—she can see an opening on the other side, the chorus grows louder, the light, the light! But this is as far as she goes. The slick pillows of the Vulvorum constrict around her.

Trapped! Pinned, or so it seems, between conception and birth. So close to her mother, yet the more she struggles the more the sinewed portal tightens around her, denying her entry. Her legs are pressed together. Her rib cage is crushed. She expels the water from her gills with a groan. Freeing one hand, she uses it to cover first one ear then the other, trying in vain to mute the maddening music of the chorus that is now so close overhead.

She must focus, must relax. The pain will pass. Her head protrudes into the bottom of a large room. From her perspective it looks like a hollowed glass pear, with an irregular cup-shaped floor and a tapered dome for a ceiling. Halfway up the wall, arranged around the perimeter of the room, is an ornate chancel. She sees them swaying there, arm in arm, a host of robed singers
with mouths agape. Above the choir, at the apex of the dome, is a stemlike passage that burns with dazzling blue light. She must reach that far passage!

But how? The mingled voices ring so loudly here that the very atoms seem to strain against the hypersonic assault. This is no mere music; it is a siege on sensation. Tactile, hot, tormenting, bright, emetic, and orgiastic. An auditory drug that triggers a circuit of pain and pleasure from her loins to the recesses of her mind. She writhes in the grip of the Vulvorum, but for all her struggling it closes still tighter around her. She surrenders.

The floor nearby, she sees, is littered with gelatinous red parcels, each one attached to the floor by a fat rope of blue flesh. Labiaxa reaches out to touch one, and it turns on its tether. A small gasping face appears through the diaphanous wrapping. She screams. An embryo! She has entered the womb, the uterus of an entire race.

Then as slowly and discreetly as it closed, the Vulvorum begins to open again. The blue constraints pinken, and Labiaxa gasps for water, claws her way to freedom. Next she is standing on the concave floor of the womb, stepping carefully around the embryonic parcels as they spiral through the opening, like marbles down an unstoppered basin.

She kicks off toward the upper reaches of the chamber, but as if by some invisible force, she is thrown back to the floor. It is the Court of the Spermata. Their voices rain down upon her like a raging cataract. She can't go on; she must go on. Pushing off again, she paddles ferociously into the noisome blast, the determined minnow that fights the riptide.

At last, and with great effort, she draws level with the chancel. On all sides the singers shimmer and sway in pearl-cloth tunics,
each eyeless head open as they perform their endless canticle. Strangely, the nearer she draws to the Spermata the less violent is the force of their hypersonic hymn. The water is measurably warmer here, as if she has swum inside the belly of a great mammal. Suddenly she is becalmed, all turbulence and struggle cease. Can she recall a time when she felt more protected, more loved?

She pauses now to admire the ornately carved choir screen. Thereupon is engraved the whole long saga of Nautika. The primeval battles with rival humanoids. The enslavement. The famine in a bounteous land. The Great Estrodus that led the elders north to the ancient Berber sea. The convening of the First Council of Twelve. And finally the construction of Nautika herself. The foundries glowing in massive sandpits. A leviathan blowing hot glass to form a towering minaret with a blast of its monstrous air-hole. The century of labor by trillions of intelligent polyps to produce the city's coral dome.

Labiaxa is startled out of her reverie by a spray of small fish from above. They dart and caper all around her, pale blue creatures about the size of her fist with pointed tails streaked in red. One specimen hovers close to her face and she sees that it bears on its bulbous head the mild countenance of a newborn. A few of these larval children are already sprouting twiglike appendages, little arms and legs. Beneath their pale skin she can discern the ghosted tracery of bone. These must be the fertilized eggs and the song of the Spermata their nutrient.

She watches as they settle to the floor of the womb, where each is enveloped in its own red meniscus. It happens so swiftly, this strange aquatic oogenesis. Suddenly Labiaxa is racked with remorse. These are the soon-to-be-born. Here in this choir loft of birth, they will attain estro-wisdom and the force of being. But
what awaits them on the other side of the Vulvorum? Only death. Fire and death.

Pushing upward, she enters the stemlike passage at the apex of the dome, a narrow tunnel scarcely wide enough to accommodate her shoulders. She climbs and climbs for many leagues until quite suddenly the small shaft forks off in two directions, each way burning with its own blue light.

Before me lie two paths, identical in dimension and equal in ambiguity, she thinks. Which passage leads to my mother? Where do I turn?

Then she remembers Oôo's fragmentary counsel.

“Above the Court of the Spermata lies the Mirror Hall—this you must remember, Princess—it matters not which path you choose! Ô is the Mirror Queen—meet her in one Ôvum and she will greet you in the other as well!”

Labiaxa chooses one path and swims on, but she seems to travel in two directions at once. Her thoughts, her actions run in parallel with those of another self, her own self. She is her own twin. And through the diaphanous wall she can see the other shaft, see herself swimming, matching herself stroke for stroke.

The Mirror Hall curves left (or is it right?) before ending at another fleshy stricture about the circumference of a chariot wheel. She touches its veined surface and it opens like a valve. After hauling herself through, she stands in the most perplexing and magnificent chamber yet. The walls glisten with the hues of menstrual effluvia, red, black. But the shape of the room is unspeakable, unknowable. About its dimensions, its scope, its character, nothing rational can be said.

The walls are composed of red corbels, rounded bricks about the size of a fist. She thinks of the tempered clay building blocks
of her home in Sica. But this substance, this is hardly clay. The blocks are in constant motion, sliding in and out from the contours of the walls. Closer inspection reveals that each block, in turn, is an aggregate of tiny beads that are also in a state of swarming atomism, so that each block looks like a pomegranate quickened by some dark magic. The ceaseless movement of its constituent parts lends the room a decidedly shapeless shape—no fixed height, no measurable width or volume.

Before Labiaxa's eyes it slowly but steadily remakes itself, the architecture arranging and rearranging in a display of infinite geometry.

At last, she thinks, I have attained the Sacred Ôva!

Above her head one of the protean corbels begins to glow a fevered crimson. It extrudes from the wall, a bloodied tentacle, until the tip stops inches from Labiaxa's breast. She feels it, like the heat of a brand, the radiant intensity of its estro-wisdom. The tentacle touches her just below the navel. The merest touch, a tickle, and every sinew of her body slackens. Her flesh liquefies. Her belly flashes white, and in the center of this whiteness appears an embryonic red star. The star doubles, triples, spreading outward from her loins like a drop of blood in a bowl of milk until her entire body has metastasized into a furious cloud of menses. Then, just as suddenly, she resumes her corporeal form.

Another tentacle reaches out of the shifting vault to encircle her waist. Another toys with her hair like a child, another caresses her cheeks. Two more tentacles seize her around the ankles; then two more; and two more, until her entire body is swaddled in red ribbons.

The water falls silent. Even the convulsing walls and slithering tentacles produce no sound whatsoever.

All at once the mass of tentacles appears to melt. It recombines into a giant sphere of black-red gel. And Labiaxa is no longer inside the Ôvum; the Ôvum is beside her, rolling and pulsating, a throbbing bulk more massive than a pod of sperm whales. She drifts athwart this miraculous apparition in a limitless abyss, like a satellite orbiting a moon of congealed blood. But the surface of this moon is still changing. A small seam rips across its flank, and the sphere splits open to reveal a white interior.

A seedpod, she thinks, about to germinate.

And indeed the husk peels away to reveal a hollow core. And inside, a column of blue droplets.

Ô,
it says.

Mirror Queen, Holy Mother, Only Mother. Labiaxa's mother. A pillar of tears, exactly as her father described her.

Mother?
she says.

Sleep, child,
says the pillar of tears.

 

How long she has lain on the white divan, she cannot say. How long the world has been here, floating all around her, she does not know. Has she just been born? Or has she at last been transported to the realm of the dead?

A woman sits beside her. She cradles Labiaxa's head in her lap and strokes her hot brow.

“Daughter,” says the Queen, letting this single buoyant word hover in the water between them. She is young, her kind face drawn with the clean mirrored lines of a noblewoman. She has Labiaxa's wide mouth, the easy slope of her jaw, the changeable eyes. And save for her crown, a white diadem alive with a hundred tentacles, she is naked.

Precisely as her father described it, the room is a changeable sphere of milky glass. On the floor Labiaxa sees the round opening, the pool where her father first spied Queen Ô. This is the very room where Papa convalesced, where he lay with the Queen, the bedchamber where Labiaxa was conceived some eighteen years ago.

“Are you comfortable, Daughter?”

Labiaxa nods.

“I suffered greatly summoning you here,” says the Queen. Her inner agony registers in her eyes. They go black like buried things, fossils. “I need you to know that.”

Labiaxa cradles her head deeper in her mother's lap. She knows.

“But even a mother may not defy prophesy. How much has your dear father told you?”

“Not much. Nothing.”

“Of course,” says the Queen. “These are matters a dry tongue cannot convey. The secrets of water elude the language of air. I will try to explain.

“After the Great Estrodus, our ancestors sought shelter beneath the sea. For aeons our surface-dwelling cousins remained on dry land where they evolved to a state of absolute barbarism. Meanwhile, Nautika flourished without war, hunger, fear, rape, terror, envy, or the struggle for power.

“But our fate, our divine purpose was not to be fulfilled beneath the sea. We went under the waves to cultivate a gentler way of living, an ancient way. We built this domed capital to preserve kindness in a sort of museum of the humane, until such time as our surface brethren were prepared to receive it back into their hearts. One day, when the world above is ready, the One
True Man will carry estro-wisdom to the air and with it restore the virtues of humanity to mankind.”

The divan shudders as the room is pounded once, twice by a seismic fist.

“But Mother—Queen—surely it is too late for all that.”

Ô smiles. “No. You have arrived just in time, at the preordained moment. You, daughter, are the prophesied Mother of the One True Man. Born of the Eleventh Queen of Nautika, sired by her air-drinker consort, you will this very day give birth to the last of our species, a boy child with the gills of a Nautikon, the lungs of the air drinker, and the infinite compassion of a queen. He alone will survive the Great Kataklysm.

“When mankind is ready to receive Him, the One True Man will voyage to the barbaric societies of the air. In a city at the foot of a mighty mountain range, He will enlist the aid of the air drinker called Jim, and together they shall ascend to a lost city and commence the rehumanizing of man.”

“Jim?” says Labiaxa.

“But before the prophesy can be complete, before you can give birth to the One True Man, there is one more act you must perform.”

“Anything, Mother. If this be prophesy, then I accept its terms.”

“You must wear the crown.”

“The crown?” Labiaxa gasps. “But I am of air drinker born. A monster am I, an outcast. Never could I be Queen of Nautika!”

“You underestimate yourself, Daughter,” replies the Queen. “For you know not who you are. You are not Labiaxa, daughter of Aricos. You are the Mother of the One True Man, the Twelfth Queen of Nautika, the one called Â. Any other woman would have perished in the Royal Vulvorum. Any other woman would
have been unborn, embryonized. But not you, Daughter; you have arrived to claim your rightful place as the Final Queen of Nautika. Your coming has been prophesied. And prophesies must be fulfilled.”