The Unknown Knowns (5 page)

The music on the public address was rock and roll of some indeterminate era, with extended saxophone solos that were wildly out of phase with the decor. From where I sat I could just barely hear the bartender telling dirty jokes as he moved from one woman to the next, the pitch of his voice rising sharply when he met the punch lines.

I heard him say: “That's not my penis!” He blurted out the first syllable of
penis
like he'd popped a cork out of his mouth. When the women giggled, he wrinkled his fake nose, and his eyes actually twinkled. I laughed too, but with bitterness, a knife
against the throat of everyone's happiness. They all turned to look.

I had been sharpened to a point by desolation. So lonely I was a danger to society. A pariah, a leper, quarantined by my own unsuitable stupidness. Jean had been the conduit between me and the rest of you. Would it be too cheesy to call our marriage my lifeline? Probably. But when she severed that lifeline I was set adrift, an astronaut. The earth receded beneath me and with it all the appurtenances of our small love. A pair of burritos, the afghan on our love-worn sofa, ankles entwined, soft kisses on the brow as I fell asleep, the TV talking to us about the nature of humanity and the humanity of nature—everything drifted out of reach as I hurtled off into space.

But my loneliness ran even deeper than that. It felt as if I were being torn from the very scrim of reality, like a Colorform sticker peeled off the plane of being. I was too weak to adhere to reality. And I had no one to blame but myself.

A little later, the bartender delivered another punch line—“I said Sasquatch, not
Gas
-quatch!”—and I laughed again, still bitter but less pointed, more resigned. I was getting tired.

Then I heard someone else join in on the laughter. The sound was manly and honking. It made your gut curl up, like when the Fat Man blows his nose. I had to squint to determine its source, a figure seated in a dim banquette by the wait station. He sat low in the booth, and when he laughed again I could see his teeth flash blue in the compound bar light. I watched the man for a while, noticing how he kept stealing glances at the server's boobs. Her name was either Donnie or Kareese, though it was hard to tell which because she wore two name tags, one on each breast. Maybe she'd named them. I've heard of that sort of thing
happening. She was lining popcorn baskets with slips of wax paper. Every time she reached up to add another prepped basket to the stack, her knit shirt pulled taut across her bustline.

The lights flickered and flared, and I turned to see the bartender toying with a rheostat. The effect was cheap and dramatic, like the light show in a low-budget rainforest diorama. Suddenly the overheads flared and it was as if a spotlight had been cast on the corner banquette. The laughing man was rendered in stark detail. The bright light revealed him to be a handsomer guy than I'd previously thought. He was sexy but in a desolate way, like a brakeman or a drifter. His hair was brown and he had the kind of upper lip you normally associate with a mustache, even though there was no mustache in sight. His face came to a point at the chin end and was flat at the top. The eyes were wide-set, fishlike. The man's mode of dress was what they now call business casual: teal turtleneck, blue sports coat, putty slacks, shoes.

Kareese sure seemed to like his look. The man's drinks arrived with clockwork regularity, each one in a clean new glass. To me she was less attentive, though I required very little. Just more napkins. Which she never brought.

Seated, his posture was rigid and chesty, suggesting that we were dealing with a tall man, but when he stood to go to the men's room I saw that his long torso and powerful shoulders were just a ruse to conceal a pair of stubby legs. You might even call them underdeveloped. The guy waddled. But he kept his chin up, proud, almost like a sea lion balancing a cocktail on his nose. When he came to the pair of low steps leading to the restrooms, he hesitated.

I examined his bulging pockets and determined that he was carrying breath mints or a complicated portable phone. Or both.
But what really caught my eye was his curious tic with the turtleneck. He kept tugging the collar up over his chin as if he were trying to conceal his throat. And there was something else suspicious about him: even in the fake gaslight of Rambles! his skin gave off a distinctly bluish cast.

I wasn't thinking about the Museum. I wasn't thinking about much of anything. My wife had just left me; I needed to be alone with my beer and my memories. But something about this stranger redirected my focus onto Nautika. I looked at his bluish complexion and thought about how much he was drinking. I studied the turtleneck and considered what he might be hiding under that high knit collar. Were they hickeys, or were they man-gills?

“Okay, slow it down, Jim,” I told myself, speaking softly into my beer. “Slow. It. Down.”

I was losing my grip, or so I thought at the time. When your wife leaves you, I told myself, it rips the seams out of the fabric of your reason. Man-gills! As if. Blue skin! God, I felt like a jerk. Jean was right, I thought. I was obsessed, I didn't let people in.

I tried to concentrate on my beer, but a face kept appearing in its bronze surface. The man had plucked some kind of harp string in my consciousness, he'd played a suspended chord on the Lyre of Doom and it would continue to vibrate until this very day.

Even tonight, so many months later, so many miles away, as moonlight registers on the bay, I can still relive that weird sensation. I was not going crazy. I was feeling something, like when you think you're going to sweat but the sweat won't come out of your pores.

I needed to focus on something else. So I pulled the three-
ring binder out of my shoulder bag. It was a little hard to see, but I started expanding my notes on Nautikon weaponry and doing sketches of dolphinwomen. The glass breastplates were translucent red, which made their blue breasts look kind of purple.

My shoulder bag was army surplus, Vietnam-era, an heir-loom from my dad. It was decorated with a dozen or more feminist buttons, souvenirs of my mother's expanded consciousness, and by extension my own. I had started collecting them in elementary school. This was in the 1970s, when buttons had something to say. Like
THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL
. Or
WHY BE A WIFE
? I had one that was just a cameo of Betty Friedan in three-quarter profile. The notebook was a relic too, from the 1970s of my childhood. It was a denim-covered model, with a dungaree-style back pocket stitched on the outside where I could keep my Uniballs.

Why am I giving you all this boring detail about my boring possessions? Because I want you to see from the outset that I was just an ordinary citizen, doing things we all do day to day in this country. I didn't ask for this burden. Didn't ask to be the first terrestrial man in modern memory to come face-to-face with a genuine Nautikon. You might have reacted the same way I did. And then it would be you sitting in this deck chair, rubbing your ankle to get the feeling back in your toes. You and not me. And how would that feel?

But I'm getting ahead of myself again. That night in Rambles! I wasn't ready to believe what I was seeing. By all appearances this was just another business guy in a hotel bar. One of literally thousands across the nation.

We sat for a while like this, everyone listening to the music and the jokes and enjoying the bar atmosphere. Then I heard the
man in the corner banquette crack his knuckles. He was standing again. I thought he was headed back to the bathroom, which would be his third trip of the night. Instead he started walking directly toward me. He had a big heroic-looking head and he was swinging it back and forth like some kind of assassin drone surveying the barroom for its next kill. I thought, and I was just toying with the idea, that if this guy really was a Nautikon, he might be seeing our world for the first time. What a trip that would be. It was such an intense thought that I had to put it out of my mind. That's when he caught my eye (or maybe I caught his) and my hands started scrambling across the table looking for something to manipulate. He was just a few feet away, he was looking at me. But then he stopped short and hung a left toward the bathroom. I exhaled.

I waited a couple minutes and then (why? why?) I slipped in behind him.

What I saw in the men's room blew my mind.

It was a two-sink arrangement, with those spring-loaded knobs to discourage waste. The Nautikon had pulled the plunger and filled one of the basins, which must have taken a great deal of diligence. While I took up a concealed position behind the wall-mounted air dryer, he rolled down his turtleneck like a gym sock. Around his throat he wore a gold chain. I thought about what kind of amulet of Neptune might be dangling on his hairless chest. That is, if he was a Nautikon. Which I didn't think he was. Not yet. The room was so quiet you could hear water giggling down the overflow drain.

Then he plunged his face right into the basin and held it underwater for a long time. I used my imagination to picture the man-gills pulsing in the tap water, inhaling. Again, I was just play
ing with the idea that this guy might be a Nautikon. (Of course he wasn't; that would be delusional. Or would it?) Then the guy reared back and slapped his cheeks, spraying droplets across the mirror. He actually made a roaring sound. It was animalistic and primal. It bounced off the tiled walls, a beast trapped in a toilet tank. He held still for a long second, pursing his lips in the mirror and examining his teeth. That's when they were revealed to me. Along the left side of his throat, just under the miraculously stubble-free jawline, I saw two parallel slits. They flopped open once, twice, and then fell flush against his neck, disappearing in the folds of his mighty throat. Holy crap, I thought. Holy crap. I wanted to watch him forever, repeat this scene five hundred times. But my window was closing fast. The Nautikon had started toweling off, and if I'd stood there another second, he would have busted me for sure.

By the time he returned to his booth, I was already back in mine, hunched over the three-ring binder, astonished at the words my Uniball was forming on the page. Astonished and faintly queasy. Maybe it wasn't so crazy, this idea that he was aquatic, that he was gilled, that he was a sea ape. I have to admit that I'd completely forgotten about Jean. Forgotten that just three hours earlier my own marriage had imploded and decayed.

These days my mornings are spent in hearings. My evenings drag by on the deck of the
Endurance,
where I stare out at the bay like it's going to explain everything. At night the deep shipping channel way out there is haunted by supertankers. Their red eyes signal to each other in the fog. They're exchanging rumors; they know things. Sometimes I like to ask them: “Supertankers, tell me, am I way off base here with this Nautika stuff?” I speak these words aloud. “Is there a valid reason they're treating me like a ter
rorist? Is this what it feels like to have convictions in a world that's grown so suspicious of conviction?”

Conviction. Such a funny two-faced word. The minute I started having them, they wanted to give me one.

The supertankers don't answer, of course. How could they? But sometimes I'm convinced that they're trying. They're using a code. If you wait until the wake of the tanker reaches the marina and then count the number of times
Endurance
rocks on her hull, it can tell you a lot about what's going on out there. If the
Endurance
rocks a certain number of times, we're dealing with a supertanker of staggering tonnage. Just a few rocks and it's empty, going out to pick up more merchandise. It's the way the world works. Right now I'm counting three, four, five, six. I hear a buoy drumming against the
Endurance
's hull. Seven, eight, nine. The ropes strain against the dock. Ten, eleven. And then the marina slackens and the night restores the calm.

Back in my booth at Rambles! I watched in amazement as the apparently aquatic businessman finished his fourth drink. It was approaching 1:45 a.m. One of the ladies at the bar got up to leave, prompting the others to follow suit. That left me, Kareese, the bartender, and the other guy, whom I hadn't fully identified yet as whom I would soon identify him as. If there wasn't hard rock music pumping mercilessly out of the speaker system, we might have been in the grips of an awkward silence. I looked at the other eyes and they in turn marked my expression, my dress, my undrunk beer. Each of us was a mystery to the others, if not a mystery to ourselves.

There were seventeen bubbles remaining in my nearly stagnant beer. I ticked them off in my three-ring binder as they burst. Seventeen, sixteen, fifteen. When the last bubble was gone and
optimal flatness was attained, I decided that would be my cue to leave. But the stranger got up before that could happen. I paid my tab and slipped out after him, looking back once to see the four surviving bubbles clinging to the rim of the glass. In the lobby I hid behind a fern while he mounted the elevator. After the doors closed, I watched the lights climb to the third floor.

“Give me something on three,” I told Corey.

“Jim,” he said, not looking up from Red Sonja. By now he'd done a whole stack of napkins. “Go home.”

“I'm serious, Corey. Jean left me. I can't go home.” I realized there was a disconnect between what I was saying to Corey and what was happening to my face. I was smiling.

“Dude,” said Corey. He'd always been a sympathetic friend. “I could have told you that would happen. What're you grinning at?”

I shook my head. What
was
I grinning at?

Corey slid the key card to room 319 across the desk with a wink and a scowl.

“When room service comes in the morning,” he said, “do me a favor, Jim, and jump out the window.”

He was talking, but I was barely listening. All I could think about was wow. The Museum would really be a different matter now. Jean would definitely have to come back. People would begin to recognize my contribution and my insights. If I was right. If what I had seen was real. And it definitely was; or it definitely wasn't. Wow, I thought, registering the gravitas of my situation. Wow. My hands were hard to control when I slipped the key card into my breast pocket.