“Friend of yours?”
“Yeah,” I said, not meeting her eyes. “He’s supposed to be.”
By the time I got back to my room, it was late. I could hear my neighbor whistling his ancient melody, his pitch severely compromised by alcohol. I heard a sound like a zipper, I heard the noise of a metal screw-top pirouetting on a desk and the tick-tock of liquid being stirred in a beaker. Alka-Seltzer, I surmised. Or something.
Three beers and the Nautikon’s bizarre verbal assault had taken their toll. It wasn’t long before I’d fallen fast asleep with one ear pressed against the wall. The dream I had that night was more complicated than I can explain in human language, but suffice it to say I was swimming with Steller’s sea cow.
At one point she turned to me and said: “Jim, the personal is political!” This was the sea cow, talking to me. I said, “I know.” Next thing I remember, she gave me a hug. The situation was borderline sexual until, with her whiskery muzzle right up in my ear, she shouted:
“Ping!”
I said, “Ping?”
She said, “Yes, ping.”
“Ping?” I said.
“Yes, Jim, ping is the sound of the elevator. The Nautikon is getting away.”
I jumped up, totally wide awake now, and ran out into the hallway, clutching my book bag under one arm and my wet swim trunks under the other. When I reached the elevator, it was already on a downward trajectory in the shaft. So I took the stairs, four at a time. At the ground floor I had to remind myself to remain calm. I inhaled with purpose. Don’t startle him, Jim.
I slipped out of the stairwell and hid inside a pay-phone alcove. The bar was closed for the night. The clerk’s shiny bell sat conspicuously on the front desk. The lobby was quiet and dim.
Then I detected motion by the source of the Lazy River. A brown dome of hair bobbed above the rocky outcropping. I crept on all fours to a spot behind the bar to get a closer look. The Nautikon knelt in front of the green box—I recognized it as the one he’d taken from the trunk earlier that day. He held a length of rubber tubing and a plastic jug filled with some kind of milky fluid. It looked like milk. Then he shifted onto his stomach, grunting as he fitted one end of the tube inside a crevice. He looked over his shoulder. The eyes were crazy with brown intent. He tipped the jug and funneled the liquid into the tube.
Even from behind the bar the odor was intense. Pointed, vengeful. His eyes narrowed, the mouth smirked. He looked like a bully with a chemistry set.
A few seconds later he was dusting off his khaki knees and packing everything in the green box. It was then that I noticed he was wearing yellow rubber gloves. I let him get as far as the stairs before I left my hidey-hole and summoned the elevator. On the fifth floor the hallway was weirdly quiet, quietly weird. As soon as I passed room 517, I knew I’d made a critical error in judgment. The Nautikon’s door hung open a crack. Every light was on.
The houseboat Endurance is on loan to me. This is thanks to a friend of my mother’s, a man I always knew as Uncle Keith. He’s gay, but he’s also a billionaire, and he was generous enough to let me use the boat for the duration of my trial. Uncle Keith isn’t a blood relative; he was one of my father’s fraternity brothers, and after Dad’s heart attack Keith gave us a lot of support, both collateral and moral. Now he lives in a sprawling lodge in Alaska, where he does something with oil pipelines and money. The Endurance he usually reserves for entertaining D.C. lobbyists and such, but when he heard about my troubles, Uncle Keith made a few calls. He got me sprung from the military holding cell (wherever that was) and arranged for house arrest. Every time the ankle bracelet starts to chafe, I think of Uncle Keith and try to remain grateful.
They arrested me in Prospector’s Bend, parked outside the video store, head in hands, hands palpating my head. A highway patrolman rapped on my passenger-side window with a pair of handcuffs. I started to get out of the car, but there was another officer on my side pointing a revolver at me. I rolled down the window and said: “Oh, my god. Is everybody okay?” I knew they weren’t. And I knew I wasn’t either.
“What do you care?” He yanked open my door. “Son, I’m arresting you on suspicion of attempted murder and—” something else procedural. Over the roar of fear and denial in my skull, I couldn’t quite hear the rest of the sentence.
I spent a urine-scented night in the Summit County lockup. Unless you count the “lunar reformatory” scenario Jean and I tried that one time, I’d never been in custody before, so I was pretty shocked by how unhygienic it was. Some time before sunrise I woke up on my feet, two men in Windbreakers on either side of me. I was wearing shackles. Actual shackles. And walking down a cinder-block hallway.
The sliding door of a van opened before me like a stargate to mystery. But not the cool kind of mystery, the other kind. The Windbreakers helped me inside, where I sat on a bench in the cargo bay and waited for something else to happen. The next two months would be dominated by this feeling, always waiting for the next thing.
The van didn’t have any windows, but they blindfolded me anyway. I sat there in a state of eyeless expectation for an hour or more. Finally I worked up the nerve to say: “Don’t I get to call somebody?” But my voice came out in a reduced state, like it was leaking out of my ears.
“What?” said one of my handlers. “What did he fucking say?”
I didn’t repeat the question.
Finally the van pitched to one side as a heavy body climbed in beside me. I could hear him breathing, and I smelled something like chest ointment. Eucalyptus and WD-40. The door slid shut, and then even the ambient light that had filtered through my blindfold was gone. I thought perversely of Jean. How was I going to explain this one? I pictured us in the kitchenette. I was pleading my case while she Purelled her hands and forearms and didn’t look at me. As if that scene would ever take place in a million years. Imagine the kid after the fireworks stand explodes thinking how pissed off his boss is going to be. That was my state of mind. I was way beyond the domestic sphere of complications. I just didn’t know it yet.
Then came the bright hypodermic stab that put me to sleep.
I remember, or picture myself remembering, waking up to the twin agonies of migraine and cabin pressure. Mother was throwing pottery into the air, and it stuck there between the stars. I smelled the ointment, and a man’s voice said, “Jesus, hit him again.” The blindfold was all sweat. I felt another needle in my arm. Saw Jean laughing at the stars. Then wheels skidded as they hit a tarmac. I smelled rain and my throat was dry.
Another van, or possibly the same one, carried me for many miles on unimproved roads. The ointment man sat beside me, farting. I felt something prod my groin area and laughter came from the front seat. The laughter didn’t sound American, but that’s all I can say about it. I heard a garage door grumble and then off came the blindfold. I was now awake enough to be fully terrified. I had wet myself at least once.
The holding cell wasn’t like you’d picture it, if you’ve bothered trying to picture where we bottle up our wraiths these days. It wasn’t some cinder-block latrine with a steel-grated window looking out onto a brick wall, or a bamboo cage in a dry lake bed. It was more like a conference room. There was baseboard heat. In addition to my reasonably comfortable cot, I got a table and a chair. Everything was bolted to the floor, but it was clean and new. On one wall they’d mounted a speaker, and that’s how I communicated with my captors.
I even had a real window. It looked out onto a courtyard with a single old tree. I have a very limited grasp of botany, but this didn’t look like any tree in the state of Colorado. It had fingery leaves like magnified pine needles and a fat trunk that looked like a tangle of calf muscles. In the moonlight the fleshy folds in the trunk appeared to open and close. I smelled sap and sex, and recognized these as pheromones. I knew the tree was trying to tell me something, but the language of the nose is subtle and hard to translate.
At that juncture I didn’t know I was in the hands of the CIA or Home
land Security or whatever federal permutation they ended up being. I didn’t hear the words enemy combatant until months later. But I’d read about renditions. And I thought no way were Colorado cops smart enough to pull that stuff off. This was a secret police scenario.
It was a covert matter, and I could think of only one reason for all the high-level secrecy. I knew about the Nautikon. I was most certainly the only civilian to identify him. The only civilian qualified to identify him. But maybe the Feds were tracking him too. It would definitely be in their interest. Here he was bringing a message of estro-wisdom to the brutish realm of the air drinker—and that’s not a welcome message, especially with the present administration. This was all speculation, of course. Nobody told me directly: Jim Rath, you’re under arrest for aiding and abetting an emissary from a lost aquatic species in his mission to reform humanity according to matrilineal law. Nobody came out and said that.
Most people in my situation would have been thinking about Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo. But my first thought after they locked the door was of a picture I’d seen several months before in the Colorado Springs Gazette. This was of a middle-aged man who’d been arrested in Baghdad. The guy resonated with me because he was a curator. He’d been working at one of those museums that got ransacked after the invasion. In the picture he wore two neckties, one around his neck and another around his eyes. His mustache was of the beefy dictator variety. You could see he was wearing plastic handcuffs, like he wasn’t even important enough to get real ones. He was sitting on a bench, and the bottom three buttons of his dress shirt had popped so you could see his hairy belly bulging over his lap. The soldier standing next to him pointed a rifle at the ground. His face was blurred out.
I remember thinking, That poor guy. It’s over for him. He doesn’t have a mother anymore or a wife or friends or hobbies. He’ll never knock off work in the middle of the afternoon again to see a movie. He won’t read Ursula K. Le Guin novels aloud in bed until his wife tells him to can it. He’ll never buy his mom tickets to the Maya Deren film festival to lure her out for a visit. He won’t spend the next two weekends making resin molds for an invisible submarine. His Wonder Woman action figure will never pilot that submarine to rescue the Plodex Marrina from her undersea coffin. He’ll never microwave another burrito or think about how a technical mishap might shower him with radiation, granting him the innate qualities of a burrito: thrift, convenience, and tastiness. This poor guy will never get to do any of that stuff.
I was subjected to a few interrogation sessions, although none of the questions made any sense. The voices came through the speaker all scratchy and scrambled, like they were crows with the power of human speech. The crows asked me for the “source of my lie,” whatever that means. They wanted to know the last time I’d been to London. Was I part of a cell? Did “Jeannette” participate in the planning? They said we know about the operations center and the maps. They told me we’ve seized foreign military materiel that was on my person prior to the incident. How many weeks had I spent in Saudi Arabia? They didn’t ask me anything about the Council of Twelve or Queen Ô or even the Nautikon, but I knew what the subtext was. These people never ask you a direct question.
Several days passed. I flipped through my mental Rolodex, looking for an ally on the outside, an acquaintance who might have the power to rescue me. There was Jean, but after my arrest and rendition to a secret prison, she was definitely off the list. There was Corey, but he was a hotel desk clerk. There was Queen Ô of Nautika, but She’d been killed in a volcanic eruption thousands of years ago. Then I thought of Uncle Keith. He was in petroleum. He had lobbyists on retainer. He watched the Washington Nationals in box seats with Dick Durbin. If Mother could get in touch with Keith, this whole matter might be straightened out. But another week passed and there was no word from anyone. I began to lose hope, which I now realize was a pointless virtue anyway. I was screwed.
This was actually happening. A situation weirder than anything that transpired in a comic book, and it was happening in real time on a material plane of being. So I decided that, to retain my sanity, I would have to replace this reality with a different, equally unreal circumstance that was more to my liking.
A month after Jean and I were married, Colorado Springs was bombarded by a massive blizzard. We made a final desperate voyage to the supermarket for microwave burritos and coffee beans before the heavy stuff started to fall. By the next morning the city was buried under two feet of snow. For days we were trapped inside the condo watching nature specials and huddling under blankets on the sofa.
To maintain our sanity we made up a story. We were two survivors of Shackleton’s doomed voyage to the Antarctic. Left behind on barren Elephant Island while Shackleton sailed for help, we built a makeshift shelter from the wreckage of our boat (the condo) and survived by eating penguins (burritos). We made love like a shipwrecked Adam and Eve, constantly, as if it were up to us to populate our island refuge.
The outside world of Colorado Springs, the bookmobile and Stor-Mor, the Hilton pool and the Hot Mart, they all ceased to exist, eclipsed by our cozy snowbound fantasy. I could have played this role for weeks, forever. I loved Jean so much that I wanted it to be me and her alone, even if that meant living in a world of self-delusion and make-believe shipwrecks.
Unfortunately Jean did not share my enthusiasm for the fantastic. After three days on Elephant Island, she hurled a penguin at the icebound timbers of our lean-to and screamed into the endless polar night.
“Enough of this shit!”
I tried to stop her as she raced for the door.
“No!” I said. “We don’t know what’s out there!”
It was like that moment when your best friend on earth stops being a kid anymore and you’re left playing with action figures all summer by yourself. I’d been abandoned to my realm of make-believe. It wasn’t the first time, or the last. Jean flung open the door, and we both looked out onto the parking lot, freshly plowed and salted. The sun was shining on the Corolla. The streets were clear.
There’s a lesson in this. As I sat there in that secret prison for countless weeks, I figured out what it was. Like Jean, I was trapped in somebody else’s fantasy, and that’s a grim place to be. This was somebody else’s twisted role-playing game, where an unemployed comic enthusiast could be an enemy of the state and it was okay to put him in a secret prison with crows yelling at him over a PA system. The lesson is it’s okay to live in a fantasy world of your own making, but you never, ever want to live in someone else’s. Especially if they have guns.
I decided to replace this forced fantasy with one of my own. I wasn’t a prisoner; I was the nascent Galactus, who having emerged from the Cosmic Egg in the second Big Bang, now lay in the incubation chamber of his starship waiting for life to form in the universe so that he could emerge and consume its newborn worlds! This fantasy was working for me. But then, randomly, a guy in a ski mask came in and shouted at me about my mercury levels. I said, “Maybe it’s the enamel model paint,” and he punched me.
After that I tried counting sunsets but gave up at fifty-nine or sixty. One morning a nurse in a ski mask walked in and gave me another injection.
This time I didn’t wake up until I was being carried onto the houseboat. To the neighbors I must have looked like a drunk being dragged home by some very big friends. There was a digital calendar on the kitchen counter. February 4. I’d been in my secret prison for more than five months.
The next morning I was given cereal and grapefruit juice. They showed me how to operate the TV. My Harry Truman shirt was draped across the sofa, cleaned and pressed. Uncle Keith had come through.
Some nights I think I’d rather be renditioned to Poland or wherever. Rather be back in that locked conference room. The marina is quiet tonight, but last night there was a dinner party on the little yacht next door. You could smell mesquite, and the strains of Jimmy Buffett wafted over the water to my deck chair. This made it hard to relax, and believe me I needed my
rest. This morning was a doozy in front of the Snowman. My lawyer told me the hearings are going well, but he says that every day, the Fat Man, squeezing my elbow and giving me a look of conviction. His smile is false, but at least it’s a smile.
“Hang tough, son,” he says as they escort me down the steps and into the van. But I can see it in the Snowman’s eyes. He wants to get me. He’s got reasons to get me that I’ll never understand.
The Fat Man tells me that “Diaz” is attending his own hearings. Whatever the Nautikon is saying about me can’t be good. I wish they would let me sit in, but whenever I ask, the lawyer just laughs. I just want to see him, I say. I won’t talk. This is the wrong court to try him in, I explain. It’s way out of his jurisdiction. He belongs in front of the Council of Twelve. Let Queen Ô decide his fate. Mother of Us All, Mother of Mothers. The crime is treason, but it’s not against us. Oaken Bucket is just a smokescreen. Even I can see that. And I’m just a jerk.
Meanwhile I’m trying hard to avoid the news. I don’t watch the plasma TV Uncle Keith has installed belowdecks. But we pass a newsstand on the way to the hearings, and there he is on the cover of a morning tabloid. He’s ducking into a dark sedan or drinking a soda on the Capitol steps. Even without reading the articles it’s impossible not to notice the shell game the Nautikon is playing with the truth. He has been misrepresenting himself. Or he’s been instructed to misrepresent himself, for the public good, whatever that might be these days. The captions all call him Agent Les Diaz, like the clerk called him in Denver, like my lawyer does. What a lame alias.
But let’s get back to room 517 at the Denver Radisson. Like I said, the Nautikon’s door hung open a crack. I peered inside. Every light was on, but the bed was neatly made and his luggage was nowhere to be seen. As I tiptoed into the room, the panic climbed from the arches of my feet and drove its sour tentacles into my bowels. I felt the urge to crap. And then:
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