The Unknown Knowns (8 page)

My subsequent recommendation to WATERT command was that in future all waterslide facilities be federally mandated to install Z barricades to hamper truck bombs. Or failing that, landscaped berms around the perimeter. All you'd have to do is calculate the approach slope…

 

Rep. Frost:
Yes, berms. Well, we all commend you on your good work, Agent. Nobody's not commending you. But I'd like to stay on track if I could; let's fast-forward to the quote unquote Rath case.

 

Diaz:
Absolutely. This would have been in Colorado Springs. It was middle of August—August sixteenth—by the time I checked in to the
Hilton. I'd been detained part of the afternoon under an overpass outside Pueblo. It was severe lightning, so by the time
I got to the hotel the hour had grown late. The clerk on duty, a Mr.
, offered me a suite on the second floor with two doubles. I had reserved a king, but it was late, so I didn't argue. It's a dynamic situation out there, as in the opposite of static, so you have to roll with whatever bedding configuration is handed to you. But when I got upstairs, I discovered that it was also a smoking room. Now, I have sensitivities to tobacco, and air impurities play hell with my lab gear.

So I rode back down the elevator dragging my rolling suitcase, with my laptop bag around my shoulder, and the clerk tells me he's got a junior suite on three with a double. No smoking. “I'll take it,” I said. He had to send in the cleaning crew to work it over before I could move in, so I asked him where a guy could get a Comfortable Screw while he waited. Fellow begs my pardon. And I say: “The cocktail drink? Everybody knows what a Comfortable Screw is.”

“I'm not everybody,” he tells me. That was for sure. The guy was one sad sack, if you don't mind my saying. He's got on a neck brace, ink stains on his fingers and lips, and he's doing these drawings of cavewomen or something on napkins. But even with all those shortcomings I sensed a high degree of dignity. “I'm a Roman Catholic, sir,” he says.

Well, so am I. But where in the Apostles' Creed does it say thou can't get a Comfortable Screw after a hard day's work? I explain that what I want is one part Southern Comfort peach and three parts OJ, a Comfortable Screw, and I want four of them, and then I want my forty-plus winks on a Sealy Posturepedic without any smoke damage. He points me in the direction of the bar.

The place was called
! Nice ambience, had all these authentic Wild West touches and complimentary popcorn. I ditched my bags behind the front desk and grabbed some pine as close to the
waitress station as I could. I hope the female congressladies present will not mind my saying this, but I have a constitutional weakness for the female contours. It's like an allergy—or like whatever's the opposite of an allergy. And it's not unusual for a cocktail waitress to sit up and take notice when I enter her server zone. But, hell, I'm not on trial for that, right?

 

Rep. Frost:
No. You're not on trial for anything.

 

Diaz:
You're the boss, Congressman. Well, I ordered my drink, but I started feeling, you know, self-conscious about my breath. I was wearing a turtleneck—my preferred shirt of choice, weather permitting. So I pulled the turtleneck up over my mouth like a—well, like a turtle, I guess. I exhaled into the fabric and then inhaled through my nose to evaluate the odor. Sure enough, it was rank. Four months of gorditas and rest-area coffee will do that to you.

Before the waitress came back—I recall her going by the name Caprice or Coreen or something—I'd popped three Altoids. As you might well imagine, wintergreen and peach liquor is not a winning taste combination. They interact negatively on the palate. So I hit the head to rinse out my mouth. It was then that I noticed Mr. Rath.

 

Rep. Frost:
Describe your primary impressions of Mr. Rath for the commission, if you will.

 

Diaz:
Gladly. He was seated alone at a booth right close to the door. Seemed to be in some kind of distress, although it was dark. I didn't want to stare, but I did notice that he was a small-boned man, kind of slight in the shoulders like a girl. His face was round and conveyed a pielike quality. His hair was a mess, kind of a straw color and a
straw consistency, almost exactly like straw. I'd never seen anything like it. And he had one high forehead. Jesus, you've never seen such a high forehead. Well, now you have, in the mug shot. The hairline started I'd say four or five inches above the eyebrows. At first I thought he wore glasses, but when I got to study him more closely in the light of day I realized I'd been mistaken. It was something about his eyes, how they looked magnified, like they were out of scale with the rest of his face.

Mr. Rath on that first night was wearing a green dress shirt and polyester slacks. He made the sort of style statement you might associate with an old Penney's catalog. You see guys in rock bands dressed like that, and pedophiles. His neck was fat and his cheeks were real sunburned. Type of guy who spends a lot of time out of doors but doesn't get much exercise.

 

Rep. Frost:
Sounds like you got a good look at him.

 

Diaz:
It's in our training, the profile. But yeah, I got a good look at him. And he got an eyeful of me too. And I think he liked what he saw, if you know what I mean. I'm standing at the bathroom sink a couple seconds later, washing the bad taste out of my mouth, when I feel this shift in the air pressure. Somebody had opened the door. When you're an agent, you get trained to sense these kinds of shifts. So I act natural, but I'm glancing up at the mirror and I see the guy, see Rath, standing behind the hand dryer like he's hiding from me. I think, Jesus—this never happened when my wife was alive. It's not really germane, but I was having trouble with let's say sexual perceptions. Having a wife sends out a certain signal, you know, of your preferences. I toweled off, and by the time I turned around, Rath was gone.

On the way back to my table, I see him sitting at his booth. Now he's got a notebook open in front of him. It's one of those three-ring binders like we had in grade school, and he's drawing pictures and taking crazy notes, almost tearing the paper he's writing so hard. I'm like, what's he writing, a love letter?

The bar is in this sunken pit area, so you have to walk down three steps to get to your booth. I got so wrapped up looking at this guy that I tripped and landed on my knees on the carpet. You know, no harm done, but I hear the girls at the bar start laughing. Then the bartender joins in. Great big guy; I figure him for ex-Marine—and that hunch checked out later. Then Rath, he starts laughing too. The little pie-face goon actually starts busting on me. It's like they're all in on the joke, you know, which is at my expense.

I dust myself off and take a seat, and Caprice comes over with a free one.

“Sorry about the steps,” she says, sweet as crumb cake. “Happens every night.”

She's like a dead ringer for a weather lady we had back in Maryland, and I tell her as much. Caprice takes the compliment and I get back to my beverage. This one would be number four, and like I'd promised the man at the front desk, four drinks and it's bedtime.

When I got back to my room, nothing was on but Spanish TV and weather, so I checked the forecast. I remember it was a load off when they called for a high-pressure front coming from the east. That meant a break from the lightning. I could do my tests in the morning and maybe get the heck out of this creepy place. The next city on my list was Denver, which I was looking forward to. They have a Radisson there with some really creative water features.

 

Rep. Frost:
Quick question before we move on, Agent Diaz. Were you ever made to feel as if your assignment—that is, swimming pool inspections—was of a lesser tier of value to the department?

 

Diaz:
Yeah, but I don't hear anybody joking about it now.

I
t's 6:35 a.m. and I'm seated on the tiled banks of the Lazy River. It rolls through the Radisson Hotel solarium in Denver, Colorado, a snaking cement trough of chlorinated pool water. True to its trademarked name, it's languid and more or less river-like. Just below the waterline, the tiles are embossed with blue zigzags that make me think of the Berber pottery my mom brought back from her sabbatical in Algeria. The water pitcher had one of those hands with the eyeball inside it, and all around the base were jagged lines. I looked all this stuff up. The zigzags are signs for water that date back to the Neolithic. Even multinational hospitality chains can't escape the iconography of the ancients.

The Lazy River issues from an obscure source under the cocktail bar. I follow it downstream with my eyes, to watch it pass
through a gap in the wall and out onto the patio where it feeds the big kidney-shaped pool. It's mid-August in Denver, and the interlocking red brickwork of the patio glares like radiation inside a pomegranate.

I'm starting to think I'll always be here, sitting in one deck chair or another, beside one hotel pool or another. But just like Heraclitus said, you can never step into the same Lazy River twice. I have engaged this day, the second morning after Jean left me, as if the whole world had overnight reinvented itself, repositioned itself and reordered its priorities. Even my iced hibiscus tea is a weak attempt at personal transformation. Yesterday it would have been coffee or grape soda.

I reach for the cool beaker on the tiles beside my chair, tracing the sweaty lip with my thumb while I think of other lips, sweaty and cool with passion. I remember those nights with Jean, the dalliances in the bookmobile and elsewhere. For some reason I'm having irregular pulse issues, maybe even a heart murmur. The three-ring binder is opened on my chest like one of those shiny foil tanning devices, and a film of perspiration has formed between the denim and my ribs. My heart beats fast, fast, and then everything goes slow and the light gets smeared. Then the pattern begins again. Fast, fast, smeared.

The Nautikon checked in yesterday around noon. I gave him thirty minutes to clear the registration process and exit the lobby before I entered. It had been a long drive from Colorado Springs. I was operating on very little sleep, but I was ready for anything.

“I'm here to surprise a college buddy of mine,” I told the clerk, a young woman of about eighteen. I was improvising, which is something I probably shouldn't ever do. “He's a barrel
chested guy with rich, glossy brown hair. You couldn't forget him. He probably checked in an hour ago.”

She looked at me, that guileless girl clerk. I searched her eyes for signs of life, then I searched her hair. Hair can tell you a lot about a person's moral compass. Hers was pointed in all different directions, the compass and the hair. She hadn't taken the time to comb it before coming to work that morning.

The clerk poked at the computer keyboard like she was picking lice from my scalp.

“You mean Les Diaz?” she said without looking up. I laughed.

“If he says so!”

“Room 517.”

“What have you got next door? I want to surprise my old pal ‘Mr. Diaz.'”

Hating me with her eyes, she handed me a key card in a small envelope.

When I tiptoed past room 517, I could see the stainless-steel carapace of room service already at his door. I eased in my key card and entered room 519 on the heels of my feet, pausing just inside the door to remove my shoes. Stealth seemed critical to whatever it was I was doing. I urinated with caution, striking the porcelain bowl just above the waterline so I wouldn't make a splash. I didn't dare to flush. Then I padded into the other room and pressed one ear against the skinny wall that separated our twin destinies.

I heard his door open, close. The muffled suctioning sound reminded me, for a second, of our town house in Colorado Springs. I thought of the desolation I'd felt when I entered our airless, love-free home two nights earlier.

From the adjacent room came the clang of the room-service
tray to shock me back to reality. I could hear the Nautikon eating and toying with the TV remote. Soft salsa music gave way to an unbeatable offer on dog necklaces, and then weather.

“—another
bea
utiful day in the Mile-High City.” The voice belonged to a man, clotted and gooey, like it issued from his groin. He sounded just like the Snowman, which is my code name for that Representative Frost from Indiana or Delaware who's leading the hearings. “Westerly breezes,” said the weatherman. “High fluffy clouds. My advice to you? Get out there and fire up the Weber, it's going to be a—” Click.

The swaying salsa music returned. I heard timbales and some trembling woman's voice crying for
corazones
and promising
mucho azúcar
.

I pressed my ear harder against the flocked wallpaper until the design was branded on my cheek. (Rocky Mountain columbines; the state flower; it's against the law to pick more than twenty-five in one day.) I listened for several minutes to the music, the chewing, and the sonorous nose breathing of the Nautikon. It was decidedly unaquatic conduct. I thought, He's toying with me. He's messing with my expectations. But why would he do that? Because he knows that I know, but perhaps without even knowing it himself. Sound weird? People know stuff all the time without ever knowing that they know it.

While my mind was on other matters, evening fell. The sun dropped behind the mountains and the room was filled with a bummed-out blue light. Exhausted, I fell onto the bed and rolled to the opposite side, dragging the starchy bedspread with me. I was a mummy or a blintz or a baby all swaddled up in blankets, but no matter what I imagined myself to be, I couldn't get any sleep. Jean, or the idea of Jean, the core essence of my wife, was
sitting right on my chest. She accused me of paying no attention to her, but the truth is I used to lie there every night doing nothing but pay attention to her. I could study her sleeping face in the light of our clock radio for hours. Her eyes were almost as pretty shut as they were open. The lids had a greenish thing going on just below the surface, and on top of that was a peachy pink overlay. I watched them flutter along with her mixed-up dreams, trying to decode the pattern of fluttering, render it into images and ideas. I know Jean's dreams were bad ones. Sometimes while I watched her, she would let out a little whimper. I always stroked her hair and said, “Jim is here, sweetie.” Jim is right here.

The wake-up call came at 6:15 the next morning. I felt like having a conversation, but the voice on the other end turned out to be mechanical. Not even a tape of a human voice. A synthetic woman person, scolding me. In the not-too-distant future, this will be the only kind of voice we trust. It will wake us up every morning and sing us to sleep at night. At least that's what I wrote in my notebook, which I'd kept at my bedside table.

From the deck of the
Endurance
I see a motherly lighthouse beam sweep across the bay, and it helps me a little to understand my own ideas. The lighthouse is another kind of mechanized wake-up call. Some drowsy captain sees it and thinks, Thank you, lighthouse. The rocky shoreline appears through the fog, he makes some corrections to his heading and feels right about what he has done and what he knows will happen.

I was beginning to know what would happen. This adventure would lead to some conclusion, to some meaningful place for my life to land. I hung up the phone and jumped out of bed, stretching first one way then the other to feel the loose skin on my sides tighten. Then I gargled the free mouthwash, took my prescrip
tion eyedrops, and smoothed my hair with tap water. Before I was even fully awake, I found myself standing at the breakfast bar just off the lobby. That's where I ordered the hibiscus tea and claimed my deck chair on the banks of the Lazy River. I checked the Helvner:

6:35 a.m.

The Radisson Hotel is booked solid with church groups in matching oversize T-shirts. But this early in the morning, even God's children are sleeping. Only a handful of vacationing families ply the Lazy River. A woman of about thirty floats past on a yellow inner tube. In her lap a little boy is clawing at the elastic top of her one-piece. I catch a glimpse of curving bosom, maybe even some nipple, and then look away thinking about candy bars.

I never floated down any lazy river in my mother's lap. I never as far as I can remember saw my mother in a bathing suit. She was way too serious-minded and safety-conscious for anything quite so reckless as an inner tube. The family phase of our lives was passed in the safe confines of faculty housing at the University of South Carolina. We were right next door to the graduate housing, but the faculty got bigger kitchenettes. Mom taught me not to discriminate against our non-Ph.D. neighbors. I could play Uno with anybody I pleased, she said, grad students or faculty. But the truth is we didn't get out much.

My dad died the night before his dissertation defense. Which means he died without a terminal degree. This was in 1974, when I was six. His topic was horseflies and something about mating. My father could have taught me everything I needed to know about horseflies, but after his death I had to pick up whatever I could down at the university pool. I was trying for my minnow badge, and the horseflies were bad that summer. You can't just
swat them away like normal flies. I never made minnow, and since then I've had to improvise my own swimming methods.

My dad had a heart attack, which I guess you could say is a pretty unimaginative way to die. But he had a genetic defect, so it wasn't like he had much choice in the matter. Mom found him at our kitchen table the morning of his defense. He was dressed to meet his dissertation committee, one hand frozen at the amateurish knot of his necktie, the other hand somewhere else. He'd been up all night cramming, and the momentousness of the situation must have gotten to him. He was weak, like men always are. I was six, but maybe I said that already.

By now the Single Mom and her kid have slipped down the Lazy River. They're under the archway that leads out to the patio. Pretty soon they'll sail off into the fake estuary where the Lazy River meets the pool. And I'll be alone again, me and my hibiscus tea and my memories.

After Dad died, Mom and I got a lot closer. By society's puritanical standards, it might have been considered pathological how close we got. We slept in the same bed and gave each other pet names. In our little faculty-housing efficiency we built what you might call an ideational domestic space. She read to me from the
Whole Earth Catalog,
the
Moosewood Cookbook,
and
Free to Be—You and Me,
the book not the record. When I was fourteen I wrote a term paper on the myth of the vaginal orgasm. I could identify spelt and bee pollen years before spelt or bee pollen came into vogue. I was a junior member of NOW. I knew how to operate a tampon.

End of memory. A brown hairdo has appeared above the cocktail bar. I see the fierce forehead, the ranging eyes: the Nautikon rises! This morning he's dressed in Jams and a clay-colored
Windbreaker, collar turned up. When he comes around the side of the bar and enters the pool area, I can see that he's carrying a beer. I'm shocked. Honestly. Scandalized. The feeling approaches total disillusionment, but then it gradually diminishes into mere annoyance.

It seems reckless, coming here as an emissary of a lost race and then ordering beer, well before noon. But then I have to ask myself: What meaning can our terrestrial “clock” have to a Nautikon? Indeed, what is daylight to a guy who was raised in the hourless fathoms of the Mediterranean? Whatever negligible sun filtered all the way down to their domed city, it was too pale to spirit their diurnal goings-on. Unlike the tacky ball of fire that is at this moment pounding the glass walls of the Radisson solarium, their sun was a bright cluster of jellyfish. Their moon a silvery cloud of migrating cod. Beer at 7:00 a.m.? Who am I to judge? I drink my hibiscus tea and feel the back of my neck begin to burn.

What happens next causes me even more consternation. The Single Mom is leading her boy back inside the pool area, roll-bouncing the inner tube beside her. The Nautikon takes up position at a nearby table and immediately starts to play eyebrow games with the woman. He's flirting with her, using the plucked circumflexes of his brows. I too feel the sway of their seduction. His, after all, are eyes that have watched the barnacled bellies of whales pass overhead. These are eyes that have seen ruin and crappiness on a colossal scale. They've delighted at swarms of phosphorescent shrimp and wept before an old crushed city that they once called home. The Nautikon has motherless eyes, and I think with some satisfaction of how they match my own fatherless ones. They're brown too.

But he's not exactly motherless at the moment. The Single Mom is practically ovulating under his gaze. He beckons with one finger, and she complies, taking the seat across from him. Meanwhile, the kid stakes out a position by the Lazy River, dangling his piglets in the water. We were all boys once. Or girls, depending.

The Nautikon turns his back to me so I can't read the sexy charms that are almost certainly convulsing across his face. But I can see the effect they're having. The Single Mom is laughing, showing a mouthful of teeth that are yellowed but straight. She tugs playfully at the hem of his Jams and gives him that straight yellow laugh. I have to hand it to him; he works fast, especially for an aquatic. This would never be tolerated in Nautika. A male approaching a female unbidden? That would be a brash transgression of ancient matrilineal law.

My heart resumes the weird pattern of beating fast and then faster and then slowing up until everything gets kind of smeared. It feels like falling in love, but mixed with the tiniest hint of inevitable loss. They're the imps who crank the gears of love: loneliness and betrayal.

He touches her hand and my hands grow cold.