The Unknown Knowns (23 page)

Labiaxa's eyes brim with sorrow's-brine. Her voice comes remote and whispery.

“Father was right. This is the greatest gift a daughter could receive on her Arrival Day, even if her Arrival must also be her departure. But what shall I do? Without a consort of my own, how will I birth this True Man?”

“All will be clear momentarily, once the Transnautification is complete.”

Queen Ô pulls Labiaxa to her feet. She touches the wall beside her and the glass turns suddenly translucent. Sprawling below is the entire city of Nautika, a marvel even in collapse. And these are indeed its final moments. Fists of magma burst through the seabed, incinerating the gardens, routing the helpless Prophylaxes on their shrieking steeds.

“Gaze upon your queendom, while you may.”

Labiaxa surveys her dying city. The marketplace has already vanished under a suffocating blanket of stone. The Zone of Estro-Wisdom and Governance is aboil, its Lawn of the Anemones flooded with creeping black rock. The magnificent spires craze, scream, shatter in the heat. Soon the andro-rage of Earth-Man will find its prize, the Royal Ôvum itself, the Queen will perish, and Nautika will be no more.

When Labiaxa turns back to face her mother, her mother already holds the crown above her head.

Labiaxa bows before the Eleventh Queen of Nautika. Ô settles the squirming diadem on her daughter's head, and Labiaxa
feels—almost nothing, just the merest shift in her mass, as if her bones have lost a portion of their weight. For a last, long moment, mother and daughter stand close together, regarding one another through sorrowful eyes as the tower trembles below. The moment is love, but the moment cannot endure.

Even now Earth-Man's fiery fingers are strangling the spire, cupping the very sphere in which they stand. The water around them grows hotter by the second.

Labiaxa screams at the flames. “No! Not yet!”

She looks again to her mother. The woman has already changed, withered. Her skin is now a shallower shade of blue. The eyes sink in their sockets. The webbing under her arms sags, and her fingers twist into rheumatic knots.

Ô gives one last maternal smile as a swollen probe of liquid stone shatters the sphere and plunges daggerlike into her back.

A second dagger pierces the wall. It draws so near to Labiaxa's face that the water boils before her eyes. Taking a step back, Labiaxa falls into the opening in the floor.

“No! Mother! Mother!”

But it is too late. Labiaxa is already elsewhere. She is already someone, or something, else. The Transnautification is complete. When she draws her next breath, the walls of the Royal Ôvum swell like bellows. Her name is Queen  and she flexes her million tentacles of pure menses to rouse the Court of the Spermata to song. Her name is the Mirror Queen and she is eternal with estros. Her name is Only Mother and her single eye swells through the folds of her flesh to keep watch over all of Nautika. The eye weeps. The Queen groans. She convulses in pleasure and in hurting. Her manifold flesh pulses and tightens, pushing until with great effort a small plume of blood is discharged from her folds.

Queen  watches the lonely egg descend into the Mirror Hall. Watches it float down and ever downward past the choir loft. She watches the egg pause for a moment, held in stasis by the nutrient hymn of the Spermata, until it unfurls a blue tail and lies down at the threshold of the Vulvorum.

The child will be a boy. The One True Man. The irony does not elude her. The last example of a once mighty race ruled by womankind will be—a man. She watches Him now with a mother's adoring eyes. His legs are drawn up, and she can see that they are somewhat stunted. But even through the walls of His fetal sac, she can tell that His back will be broad and strong.

The Vulvorum pinkens and parts. The One True Man, last true Nautikon, sheds His meniscus and spirals down into the folds. But seconds before He vanishes into the apocalyptic fire below, His boyish brown eyes peer up through the collapsing tower, seeking Queen —Mirror Queen, Mother of Us All, Only Mother, His mother—and she hears, as the crescendo chord of the Great Kataklysm resounds and the tower shatters around her, the final Nautikon's first thought:

I will not fail the world.

M
y mother leaves and I have to do something. Have to do something so I won't do the last thing.

I step out onto the deck and dial Jean's number. For the first time she actually picks up. I'm speaking to her on the phone. Or I'm speaking through the phone in the direction of Jean, and she seems to be listening. At least I think she seems to be listening. There's too much nation between us. From the Chesapeake Bay to Colorado Springs adds up to some sixteen hundred miles of all-American interference. It sounds like I'm shouting into one end of a steam pipe with the weird vapor of telecommunications clotting and condensing in between. You can feel the pressure build and hear the
clank, clank, hiss
of expanding steel.

She says, “Hi, Jim.” I hear that part. Her voice sounds resigned and maybe a little scared. Like she's talking to a criminal,
not her husband. The divorce is on hold while they resolve this other matter, the federal one. Right from the outset it's the tone of her voice, the timbre of disassociation you might call it, that's hurting my feelings.

I say, “Hi, Jean.”

A plane flies over and the signal starts to fade. I pull the cell phone away from my ear to watch the little chiclets of LED go pop, pop, pop.

“I'm so sorry, Jean,” I say. Then I shout it again and wait for what seems like minutes. I think she says she's sorry too, but I can't be one hundred percent certain.

I say, “I love you, Jean,” and it's like a magic incantation. The signal returns and for a moment I can hear everything so clearly: the room she's sitting in, our living room, the cushions of the couch huffing under her backside. I can hear the car keys jingle on the hook by the door, hear the lovelorn
ping
of our microwave oven. Burritos, I think.
Nova
plays softly in the background, Turkana Boy chipping at his hand ax, Richard Leakey's plangent voice reciting the prey of early man like evil poetry.

Jean groans, and for the first time in recent memory, I'm crying. Big tear-shaped drops, they pool up in the fissure between the cell phone and my cheek. But it's amazing how quickly the wind turns them icy and alien. All of a sudden they're someone else's tears that have landed on my cheek. Then it's someone else's cheek, someone else's life happening on the deck of a houseboat I've only seen from the height of a cliffside village, the houseboat anchored in a harbor far below. My emotional moment slips away.

I hear a tanker talking to another tanker in the far reaches of the bay, I see a pinprick of light wink and wink somewhere out in
the shipping channel. The beam of the lighthouse wipes the black stucco of the bay, catching in the whitecaps. They used to spell things out for me, those whitecaps. There used to be messages written on the water, but not tonight.

The next sound I hear is the nauseating
beep
of the cell phone telling me my call has been lost.

The groan and the dial tone. Jean's last sound and then the cold pulse of a conversation ending forever. It was a code; a sentence. A farewell.
Good-bye, Jim
.

All along I'd been telling myself I wouldn't go. Jim won't say good-bye. Jim won't die for them. If they wanted Jim Rath out of the picture, they'd have to wait a long time. I'm not a suicide or a scapegoat. But when I hear Jean groan over the cell phone, it sounds like a directive, a command, or maybe just a strong suggestion: die, it says. Jean's groan is her way of saying she'll never take me back, nobody will. I'm damaged goods, and I might as well go away. That single groan makes me realize that it is in fact time to depart.

I put down the phone and look at the water.

 

I never really told you what Jean looks like. Seeing as this is my last chance to set the record straight about how lovely she is, I'll do it now and quickly.

She is, as I said earlier, taller than I am by at least six inches. Her build is on the magnitude of what you might call Amazonian, even though the press has been less charitable in the way they describe her. But to me her big figure is sexually unimprovable, a Platonic model of sexiness.

Like with most women, everything starts at the top of her
head and works its way down. She's got a jaw-length brown bob that conveys Catholic certainty and righteousness. It moves in counterpoint to her head. When she shakes her head no, like she did a thousand times during our brief marriage, the hair rotates at a different frequency and in an opposing direction. If you had the right equipment, you could measure its spin and number like those of an electron.

She has the most profound eyebrows ever worn on a woman's face. They're like brown rivers that converge at the bridge of her noble nose. And underneath the beds of these rivers, like old organic forms compressed by slow geological forces, lie the flashing diamonds of her eyes. The eyes themselves, they're coal-colored or brown-colored depending on the light or her shirt or the severity of her thoughts.

In the mornings her eyes would open several seconds before she was actually awake. I would lie there beside her, waiting for this magic preconscious moment, watching her lids for the faintest first quiver. When she woke up I wanted to be the first thing Jean saw, and I wanted to be the first one to see her seeing the first thing she would see, which in turn would be me. This, at the risk of sounding reductionist or stupid, was the only reason I ever did anything.

For the first few seconds after her eyes opened, she wore the expression of an Alzheimer's patient trying to recognize her own face in the mirror. Her eyes remained hazy and questioning, the eyebrows pressed down in confusion or disbelief, as if she was trying to figure out the puzzling final scene in a dream. That's how I knew that sleep showed her ugly things.

The next part to open was the mouth. Her lips formed a pink fissure straight across the lower third of her face. It made Jean's
chin seem almost puppetlike, so whenever she opened it, it was quite an event. The mouth would open, she would start to speak, but then she wouldn't. That was the moment every morning when I knew she'd recognized me. The perplexed dream look would solidify into disappointment. As cruel and false as her dreams might have been, they were better than waking up to Jim Rath as a husband. I watched the resentment congeal behind her eyes as she remembered all the bad events that had passed between us the day before, the week before, the whole year. Jean was remembering the town house, remembering our parking spot with the stenciled number on the yellow curb, remembering the candy wrappers on the floor of the Corolla, the storage space, my comics, my unemployed status, Nautika, and the Hilton pool. She'd say:

“Jim, what the hell are you staring at?”

Most nights Jean slept naked, and she didn't care if I saw her when she got up to go to the bathroom. This wasn't a sexual provocation, not in our case. Her nakedness, especially in the last weeks of our marriage, was a sign of indifference. The bare flesh said she didn't care if I saw her, didn't care if I ogled her breasts or objectified her backside. I wasn't important enough, didn't matter, wasn't a sexual object, so I couldn't objectify her even if I tried. I might as well have been a tree watching her, or a crab.

She'd get out of bed and stand in the doorway, stretching first one leg, then the other. Her glorious big behind cinched in on either side as she moved, the calves turned glossy and hard. There was a slight bulging at the level of the coccyx as she reached for the ceiling. The color raced up her broad back, she shivered, and left the bedroom.

I would listen for the changing timbre of her footsteps as she
moved from the deep-pile carpet of the hall to the slappy bathroom tiles. She pissed shamelessly. The toilet paper roll tumbled on the other side of the wall. Water ran in the sink. She handled the toothbrush with so much conviction that I could hear each bristle flexing in turn across the enamel of her molars. I lay there worrying about her receding gums.

The next thing I knew she would be back in the bedroom rifling through drawers. Rejected underpants piled up at her feet as she made her selection for the day, this pair expelled for being too frilly, this pair discarded for its frayed piping. She worked her legs into glossy black pants like the blades of a posthole digger. Even the bra was strapped on with ruthless efficiency. Her wide mouth twisted into a sneer as she sought the clasp between her shoulder blades, the breasts pulsing up over the cups of the bra until she repositioned her nipples. On cold mornings it was easier to see if she'd centered them properly.

When she was dressed she took one last inventory of the bedroom, taking notice of every single object but one. I sat propped against the headboard, watching her.

While I listened to her move about the kitchen, while the coffeemaker gargled and coughed, I would gradually lean forward until my head fell between my knees. In this depressing and painful yoga pose, I listened for the car keys to cackle and the town house door to close behind her with a mean suffocating sigh.

 

I throw one leg over the railing.

Rep. Frost:
I'm afraid there's been an unforeseen turn of events, Agent Diaz.

 

Diaz:
That's what I hear.

 

Rep. Frost:
As I think everyone knows by now, a body was retrieved from Chesapeake Bay in the early hours of the morning. It fits the description of the defendant, of Mr. Rath, and all indications are of a suicide.

I don't know what to say about this. Death is tragic. Death is a negative under any circumstances. But sometimes death is only divine justice attaining its own verdict.

 

Diaz:
Maybe so.

 

Rep. Frost:
Agent Diaz, it seems that this case has outlived its perpetrator, and this subcommittee outserved its purpose. But before I close up shop I'd like to give you a minute to deliver any closing statements you might wish to make.

 

Diaz:
I just hope he's gone to a better place.

 

Rep. Frost:
Amen to that. I guess.

 

Diaz:
Sure. Amen.

 

Rep. Frost:
Well, then, this hearing is adjourned.

 

Diaz:
Adjourned, Congressman? Adjourned? All due respect, but you can't just adjourn a thing like this! Is Brenda Mills adjourned? She'll never walk again. Is my wife adjourned? She's gone. You going to adjourn her too? And Rath? Just because he's dead doesn't mean you've got the right to adjourn a man.

 

Rep. Frost:
There isn't really much else to say, Agent.

 

Diaz:
Oh, there's plenty more to say, Congressman. And you know it. I don't want anyone to suffer from any illusions anymore, like I used to. I want the facts laid out there. I want them held up to the light of scrutiny. I do indeed have something to say!

 

Rep. Frost:
I'm afraid you'll have to say it somewhere else, Agent. Our time is up here.

 

Diaz:
But you don't understand—there's something else I have to say! Something that's gone unsaid and has to be said.

 

Rep. Frost:
I think I understand you very well, son. Look, you're under a lot of stress. We get that. I just don't want you to lose your focus and say anything that would impugn you or your department or the effort that we've all worked so hard to develop. Reflect on what you're doing before you do it. There's no reason to incriminate an innocent party when the culprit has already been apprehended.

 

Diaz:
Oh, I know full well what I'm doing, Congressman—

 

Rep. Frost:
I'm warning you, son. These hearings are officially—

 

Diaz:
I know very well what I'm doing, old man. Put this in your official record:
.

 

Rep. Frost:
—adjourned.