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 playing 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 terrorist? 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.
“Jump out the window,” I repeated. “Right, Corey.”
Upstairs in room 319 I unloaded the contents of my shoulder bag on the desk. Binder, Uniball, candy wrappers, comb.
Entering a hotel room is like walking into a civilized world that was there before human occupation. It gives you the sensation that a habitat has been prepared in advance of our arrival, fully formed. I stood for a moment to absorb the quiet tableau: largely mauve and peach. I took note of the recessed lighting, the decorative wallpaper border that’s a survey of neoclassical stone-work, the brass lamps that are too brassy for brass. A cascade of dry air spilled down in one corner.
There were so many telling details. A metal stem with a rubber bulb stuck out of the wall, level with the kickplate, anticipating someone opening the door in rage or sexual haste. The bedspread, with its botanical or geological or fauvist pattern, waited there for a sleeper or a lovemaker or a traveling insomniac. The DO NOT DISTURB placard flapped gently in the central air, ready to be deployed. The red light on the bottom right-hand corner of the telephone flashed some uncollected message from the yet unpeopled outside world.
I sat on the bed and called home in the event that my marriage wasn’t over anymore.
On the answering machine I left the following message:
I know you’re gone, and you’ll never actually hear this. But I hope you’ll reconsider, because your husband might seem like a loser now, but that phase is coming to a close. I have some suspicions, and if they check out, the Museum is going to be even more awesome than I told you it would be. This is Jim—call me at the Hilton, room 319—bye. And I miss you. This is Jim.
Yesterday in the hearing, they made me listen to that message again. Not just me, they played it in front of all these reporters and dignitaries. It should have been embarrassing, but really it wasn’t embarrassing at all. My lawyer laid his broad advocating hand on my shoulder, anticipating a breakdown, but all I did was smile.
When I hung up the phone I could hear a muffled voice coming from the room next door, 321. I recognized it—the slightly honking tone from Rambles!—and I couldn’t believe my luck. The strange man who might be a herald from some nau
tical race but was also possibly just a traveling businessman with a neck condition, he was staying in the suite right next door.
“Talk about a high-pressure front!” I heard him say, to someone else in the room. “Movin’ in from the east, baby!”
I pressed one ear to the wallpaper. The TV could be heard cackling in the background, and it dawned on me that he was shouting at a meteorologist.
“How’d you like to do my pollen count, sweetheart?” he said. And then: “My lake levels are rising too—rising!”
It was weird. The guy was personifying the weather itself, a trait, I knew, of animistic societies. What is the connection? I thought, and then wrote it down. This question was underlined four times in my notebook. I sat at the Colonial secretary, so relentlessly waxed that I could see my own reflection in the grain.
“For the sake,” I wrote,
of conjecture, let’s just say that this guy is in fact an emissary from some doomed aquatic civilization [and no, I wasn’t convinced of this yet]. It might stand to reason that he would have a more intimate relationship with the weather. Maybe the people we land-dwellers disparage as “meteorologists” are revered figures in Nautikon culture, priestesses even, in some kind of thunder cult. He might be looking at the weather lady like we look at televangelists or saints.
The very locus of reason shifted in my brain; that’s how blown away I was.
I tiptoed around the ruins of my core beliefs for some time, marveling at the new possibilities, until the TV in the room next door was abruptly switched off. Silence followed. And though I should have gone to bed, I stood again to press my ear to the wall, and stayed like that for a couple of hours. As a conductor I used one of the complimentary water glasses, and I found that by not removing the paper sanitary cap, I could filter out the low-frequency hum of the central cooling unit. But all I heard was snoring—bold, stentorian snoring, but snoring nonetheless. Did he snore through his gills? I wondered. Do fish snore? This was something I’d have to look up. Finally I got a cramp in the side of my neck and went to bed.
So as not to arouse the suspicions of the cleaning crew, I slept on top of the blankets. The waxy duvet was a welcome bed companion after so many nights alone while the cold nonpresence of my estranged wife took the couch. Sleep did not detain me for long, though.
Morning came like sharks. And though the heavy pinch-pleated drapery didn’t let in much daylight, I was up and about just after sunrise. After using my palms to erase my impression on the mattress, I took stock of the previous night. Yes, I thought, I had gotten carried away. I was seeing things. There are no such thing as man-gills.
My hair was a mess in the mirror. I pushed my fingers through it to find that it was also a mess in reality. Then it came back to me in a rush: Jean, the absence of Jean, the death of happiness. It was as if all the air had been sucked out of room 319, out of the entire Hilton, out of Colorado itself. If I’d dared to open the drapes, I would have seen scores of people kneeling on the sidewalks, clutching their throats, eyes popping out. I fought for breath. Jean was gone. Jean, gone. Jim, alone. I blacked out but only for a second.
There’s no such thing as a Nautikon, I thought, swishing complimentary mouthwash in my cheeks in a crazy effort to revive myself. My forehead fell against the bathroom mirror so that my eyes could study themselves at close range. I had to confirm my own subjectivity, but this degree of self-regard only sent me into a feedback loop of identity and nothingness.
Then I spoke out loud, and the sound of my voice disrupted the loop: “There’s no such thing as a Nautikon. No such thing as a Nautikon.” The word came out smelling like spearmint.
When I think of how in denial I was that morning, I have to laugh. If I’d trusted my genetic intuition instead of some hyper-masculine concept of “reason,” I wouldn’t have tortured myself so. There was such a thing as a Nautikon. He was booked in the room next door. If I pressed my ear to the wall, I could hear him snoring. Gill-snoring.
I consulted the weather on television, keeping the volume so low that I had to sit very close to the screen. Who knows why I did this. Maybe I wanted to see what he was watching the night before. Maybe I thought it would explain something. But the lady on the Weather Channel didn’t look like a priestess in a weather cult. She was young and blond, her voice tuned like a pitch pipe. Her eyes were caked in thick shadow so it looked like she was staring at you from behind a painting. Then my suspicions were aroused all over again. She was wearing some kind of high Edwardian collar, which was weird for a broadcaster, or for anyone other than an Edwardian (which she wasn’t). It was unbuttoned to the sternum, a white-berried shrub that you parted and saw something naughty going on under the neighbors’ pergola. But what was she hiding under that high collar?
Malindra was the name she gave at the top of the five-day forecast. There was, she said, a diminished chance of thunder-showers. A high-pressure front would bring sun and breeze. It was the routine weather monologue, the hands caressing a vibrating magic map. But not all was right with Malindra. She turned slightly to the left, cupping a low-pressure front over the Mid-Atlantic, and her jaw gave off that now-familiar blue glow. Doubting my own eyes, I messed with the color function on the remote. Malindra’s complexion phased from pale blue to lizard green to juicy magenta. I smeared the whites of her eyes by pumping up the contrast. Then, when she turned to throw back to the anchor, it was there again and bluer than ever: her blueness. Her Nautikon blueness.
“Thanks, Malindra,” said the anchor as a hurricane graphic appeared over his right shoulder. “We’ll check back with you on the hour.” He too was more blue than you might have expected.
I shouldered my bag, clicked off the TV, and went downstairs to the lobby. Technically I was a freeloader, so I wasn’t sure if the Hilton’s complimentary breakfast applied to me. But Corey was just getting off the graveyard shift. He was sleep-deprived and maybe a little suggestible, so all I had to do was rub my stomach and he gave me the go-ahead to hit the breakfast bar.
It wasn’t long before the man from room 321 showed up. He chose a table by the glass wall that looked out on the pool. After putting his head in his hands for several minutes, he finally met the waiter’s eye. This was a surly kid, probably from the technical college. He handed the man an empty plate, then gave him a coffee and a rude gesture in the direction of the all-you-could-eat steam table. No words were exchanged.
As for my plate, it was already piled high with scrambled eggs and two pink boomerangs of melon. I was on coffee number four and was feeling a degree of intestinal distress. The men’s room was beckoning, but no matter how loudly my bowels beseeched me, I couldn’t tear myself away from the suspiciously aquatic-looking humanoid three tables away. I took several large bites of cantaloupe, reasoning that the fruit molecules might stanch the flow.
I don’t want to get on a soapbox, but I’m a vegetarian. I have concerns about genetic leakage in meat products. It’s a published fact that beef eaters are ten times more likely to develop bovine attributes. Look around you at the steak house and you’ll see what I mean. Eating pork products makes you several times more susceptible to airborne pig parasites, particularly if you live down-wind of a pig farm. Sure, you might call me a hypocrite. Jim, you’re eating eggs, you could argue; will that turn you into a chicken? And it’s a fair question. I guess it’s one of my inherent paradoxes. If any guy gets chicken attributes, it will be me. I eat eggs by the gross.
One day we’ll be able to resequence our DNA and choose whatever genetic traits we want from a drop-down menu. Some claim this will result in mutant warfare. I disagree. In my opinion it’ll diversify humanity to the point where “species” is no longer a valid way to classify. In the future we won’t be assigned to certain so-called Body Tribes at birth. That’s another museum I’d like to do: the Post-Taxonomy Museum of Anthropology.
The man returned from the breakfast bar, his plate groaning under a mound of sausage patties. It was then that I noticed something e
lse peculiar about him: he wasn’t wearing the turtleneck anymore. That morning it was a pair of red Jams and a white T-shirt adorned with a Hawaiian-type dancer and the words SPRING MIXER 2001—HULA LET THE DOGS OUT? This confirmed it for me: he was just some dude. Why would an emissary from the domed city of Nautika dress like a frat boy? Even worse, I couldn’t see any sign of the man-gills. For a second I considered the possibility that he was wearing neck concealer. Then I put it out of my head.
The other complication was that he was breathing our air. How to account for that? I wondered. Maybe he’s a hybrid, I thought, like Prince Namor—with an air-breathing mother and an aquatic dad. I shoveled in a few more forkfuls of scrambled eggs and tried to concentrate. Then I noticed that his gaze had drifted to the pool. His eyes were gauzy. He was pining. But for what?
Fair Nautika? With its soaring glass spires framed in coral? Its cavalries of dolphins outfitted with seaweed tack, mounted by broad-chested Nautikon warrior women? Queen Ô, Mother of All, wise and unsullied by man-rage? Nautika is widely known as a matrilineal society, which means women dominate the political and economic spheres of influence. They wear loose-fitting see-through robes of pearly fabric and crowns made of live sea anemones. They don’t have wars or stubbornness or rape.
Suddenly I snapped back to reality. The Nautikon (let’s just call him that; that’s what he is if you hadn’t guessed) was on his feet and walking into the pool area. Without breaking stride, he removed his T-shirt to reveal an impossible chevron of a chest. I sensed the other diners gasping, especially the women. The man-gill is a breathtaking adaptation, I thought, as I moved to a table closer to the glass partition, where I could get a better view. He entered the pool with a knifelike motion. No wake, no splash. This guy was flawless.
I remember once I went to an aquarium where you could walk through a glass tunnel while sharks swam overhead in a massive tank. But what I witnessed in that Hilton pool was even more awesome than sharks. I was watching a real Nautikon ply the deep. I knew at that moment; he was everything I imagined him to be. I counted so many Mississippis before the guy surfaced again that I lost track. When he went under for a second time, I made my move.
The Unknown Knowns Page 5