The Unknown Knowns (20 page)

I wasn't. “No. I'm not shitting you,” I said. But dear god, I wish I'd been shitting him.

“You're shitting me.”

“No. I'm not shitting you in the least. Take the watch.”

“Yeah, you are.” Jesus, when was this going to end? “You're straight-up shitting me.”

“Look, I wouldn't shit you,” I said. “Keep the watch.” He slipped it on and a lump formed in my throat that you could probably see from the outside.

“Thanks, man. Hey—what's your name anyway? I'm Roland.”
He extended his hand. The hand that was attached to the wrist that was wearing my watch. My mouth—the mouth that was allegedly attached to my brain—hung open, but no name came out. What
was
my name?

“Diaz,” I said at last, remembering the stupid alias the hotel clerk in Denver had used for the Nautikon. “Les Diaz.”

It was a pleasure to meet me, Les Diaz. He shook my hand and the watchband caught in the sodium light. Just when I thought he was ready to let go, when I thought the handshake had reached the outer limit of sociability, Roland gripped me even tighter and started shaking again. We shook hands for what seemed like hours. I took advantage of the awkward interlude to get one last farewell glimpse at the face of the Helvner. The time was 4:47 a.m.

As I scuttled back down the path toward the motel, I felt that I had jettisoned a vital part of my life. In an attempt to lose some deadweight, I'd ditched the parachute. Losing the watch felt like losing Jean all over again. Or to be more specific, it felt like the completion of a long phase of loss that began with Jean's good-bye note and ended with the passing of the Helvner. I was morphing into a new Jim, entering the third act of my life. I had no idea the curtain would come down here, on my uncle's houseboat on the Chesapeake with a bracelet strapped to my leg. In retrospect, it's almost like I'd traded a custom Saudi Arabian timepiece for an ankle-mounted tracking device. It was a symbolic exchange and it was totally depressing.

“Good night, Les Diaz!” The maintenance guy was calling to me from the top of the mountain. “I'll never forget this!” he said.

My heart was beating at an astounding rate. I broke into a run. I couldn't control my trajectory. There was no way I could go
back to my room. I was a rat or a rhesus monkey, a lab animal that had just been released after years of experimentation, an animal with unacknowledged intellect and emotions who had given his pancreas and his teeth to test glow-in-the-dark taffy or lip balm that tastes like steak. At least I had my life, I thought, though I wasn't entirely convinced of this either. I circled the motel two or three times before coming to a halt in the parking lot. There I noticed the little door in the seat of the Old Prospector statue. I needed to collect my thoughts. Needed solitude. I approached the pants of the colossus, climbed the three or four iron rungs, and tried the knob.

Inside was bright. I could see the bank of bulbs that backlit the gold lettering in the prospector's pan, the ones that spelled out
PROSPECTOR'S BEND
. A second ladder took me into the torso of the big man. The electric light was hot on my face, and I realized I must be level with his heart. I touched the inside of the man's rib cage and felt the hatch marks of raw fiberglass. The arms flared out on either side of me, two tunnels stuffed with pink batting or insulation. I heard something rooting around in his left biceps. Maybe it was a rat or a vole.

I climbed on, shrugging my shoulders to squeeze in through the narrow passage of the throat. On the other side I found the cranial cavity, a small, roughly oval room with a ledge where the hairy chin jutted out. Opposite this, above the brim of his floppy calfskin hat, was a low rectangular window. If I perched on the chin ledge, I could look out over the roof of the motel, clear up to the top of the mountain, to the starlight above Summit County.

The Oaken Bucket was in plain sight, but the maintenance man, Roland, was long gone, presumably showing off his cool
new watch to the desk clerk or her weird twin sister. A breeze picked up, cascading down the mountain. The slope was dotted with firs, and they responded to the wind in a dark undulation that began at the top and worked its way down to the patio like a green bird ruffling its feathers.

I observed all these details through the walls of the Old Prospector's skull, like I was looking through his pie-size fiberglass eyes. The panic subsided while I considered my unique vantage point. I thought to myself, How would an old forty-niner, awoken after 150-odd years, see this twisted-up world of mine? Maybe he would have some homespun, grandfatherly advice. How would he judge the Nautikon? I wondered. How would he see Jean? How would he see the crime that I'd almost committed on his own mountain?

But the Old Prospector only saw what he'd always seen: gold. His eyes were like sieves that sorted every substance into two categories: gold or not-gold. He saw the world in nuggets and flakes and granules. If it wasn't gold, it didn't need to exist.

It's not so weird, the Old Prospector's solid-gold worldview. Everyone's world is like that. Because the world is actually the museum of your world. Your own personal museum of everybody and everything that's organized into dioramas that suit your own expectations. If you walk through the Old Prospector's museum, you see gold leaf on the walls and gold plate in the water fountains. A gold elevator and golden-haired patrons to ride in it, each one wearing a little gold visitor's pin clipped to her gold lapel.

If you're a Nautikon, all you see is loss and ruins, a British Museum of aquatic plunder and failure. Mothers live in a museum of sharp corners and electrical outlets and bullies. Chil
dren live in a museum of mothers. The president lives in a museum of terror. Jihadists live in a museum of outrage. And if you're Jean, the museum of the world is all about the Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church and about what a dope your husband is. It's organized like the Stations of the Cross, with Jim Rath starring as one of the other guys who got crucified that day, but for totally unmemorable reasons.

I was startled out of the Old Prospector's head space by the sight of a dark figure emerging from the mouth of the Mine Shaft. The man scrambled up the loose scree to the lip of Flatiron Falls, where he crouched in the shadows. I saw his head dart from side to side, looking. Then he was on the move again. As he sprinted across the flagstones to the Duck Pond, I recognized him. It was the Nautikon.

Seconds later he zigzagged the rest of the way up the mountain, from the Water Wheel to a clump of firs, and finally to the Oaken Bucket. He stooped by the boulder-shaped shed with his hands on his knees, like he was trying to catch his breath. I leaned in closer to the narrow window and saw that he was snooping around inside the shed on all fours, his backside to me. Then he stood and scratched his head. I heard the gentlest splash and watched the Nautikon wade into the pool toward the base of the Oaken Bucket. He dropped out of sight for several minutes, then I saw him straighten up. The locking wrench was in his hands and his head was darting from side to side again. Next he was on the walkway, pushing the toolbox back inside the boulder. He shut the door, rubbed his hands together, and sped back down the mountain, following the same spazzy trajectory he'd taken on the way up.

Minutes later the light came on in room 22. Then it went off,
and once again Prospector's Bend was as quiet as the ghost town it should have been.

 

I woke up fully dressed under the oily motel blanket. The clock radio told me that the morning had transpired without me. Music was playing on the patio below. The girls sang along with some grim tune about everyday people and the power of love.

I ate my late breakfast alone in the dining area. Scrambled eggs and a bottomless cup of coffee. Then I walked to the patio to review the site of last night's weirdness, returning to the scene of the crime I'd failed to commit. The Mills sisters and Keesha were at their table swaying their pretty heads to the sounds of a jambox. I had just settled into my chaise longue when the bellow of the Nautikon split the serene afternoon in two.

“Woooo-hoooo!” He was shouting from his balcony. “It's Oaken Bucket time, ladies! And you can't deny it!”

The girls responded in kind, all but Keesha. I buried my face in my three-ring binder and made some sketches of Nautika's Zone of Estro-Wisdom and Governance. The milky glass spires. The spectral Nautikon embryos. I heard someone uncap a bottle of beer.

“Looks like we got company, girls,” said the Nautikon, now standing at their table. Obviously he was talking about me, but I refused to rise to the bait.

“Come on,” said Keesha. “Leave the guy alone.”

“Sure thing. Anything for you, my sweet Caribbean queen. Matter of fact, let's be neighborly. Maybe we should invite your little lover-boy along for the ride.” The Mills sisters laughed. Keesha did not.

“I think it would be nice if we asked him,” she said. I looked up to see her smiling at me. “I mean, he's all alone here.”

Silence. Then: “Somebody's got a boyfriend!” The Nautikon delivered this line singsong-style, like he was in a middle-school lunchroom.

“All right, G.” He turned to address me. “What do you say, ready for a white-knuckle hell ride? Or are you too chicken to ride the Bucket?”

They were the first civilized words he'd ever spoken to me, but I couldn't help feeling that there was some threatening subtext. I closed the three-ring binder and slipped it into my satchel.

“Yeah,” I said, looking at Keesha. “I'll ride the Bucket.” My hands went to work on the zipper of the satchel. I zipped and unzipped. I buckled. I unbuckled. Then I slung the bag across my shoulder and crossed the patio to join the party.

We started up the flagstone path, the Nautikon leading the way followed by the sisters. I was far enough back to be about eye level with their ankles. He was wearing Tevas with tube socks, an unusual combo. And suspicious too: he must have been concealing his flippered feet. The sisters had on matching leather sandals. A friendship bracelet made a slow rotation around Brenda's ankle. Keesha walked beside me, her feet bare.

“What are you doing here all by yourself?” she asked.

I thought for a minute.

“I used to come here when I was a kid,” I said, making it up as I went along. “Guess I'm just sentimental.”

“That's sweet.” She touched my shoulder and the kiss came back to me, the lips of memory on my lips of flesh. “Keesha,” she said, indicating herself.

“Jim,” I said, indicating me. “Thanks for what you—the thing you did yesterday.”

“Oh, that. Happens all the time where I work.”

“Where's that?”

“I'm a swim teacher at a geriatrics center.”

“Want to hear a cool fact? I heard humans would age forty percent slower if we lived underwater.”

“That's fascinating.” I'd recited this same statistic to Jean once, but she didn't call it fascinating.

“Yeah. I know a lot of that kind of stuff. Anyway, thanks for letting me live. Seemed like your mouth is really well formed for that sort of task.”

I'm not sure where I was going with this, but Keesha just laughed nervously. Her eyes exploded at me like blue flowers, and my diaphragm did something weird.

Suddenly I heard a splash and saw the Nautikon standing up to his knees in the shoals of the Duck Pond.

“Fuck!” he said, leaping back onto the flagstones. “My fucking socks!”

I saw him rip off his tube socks and wring them out. The water painted fingers of dark blue on the dry stone. With some difficulty, he tugged them back onto his feet and stood up. “Fuck! I've got to go back and change socks. You guys better just go on without me. I'll go next time. Fucking socks!”

“What do you mean?” said Jenny, or maybe it was her sister. “Just lose the socks. You don't need socks on the Bucket.”

“No.” He seemed genuinely bummed, boyish. “I've got this thing with my circulation. Have to keep the feet covered at all times or they, you know, seize up.”

Without another word he started back down the mountain
toward the motel. When he passed me, I could hear his feet go
squish, squish, squish, squish
. Just then I remembered the tube socks I'd bought at the Radisson gift shop in Denver. They'd come in a bargain two-pack, but I'd only worn one pair. I reached into my shoulder bag.

“Here,” I said. “They came in a two-pack.”

I wish I could describe the fury in his eyes. The brown irises flashed gold in the hard Colorado light. His blue face reddened, which made it look kind of purple. He shook his head and hissed like a moray eel.

“Problem solved,” said Keesha, giving me a congratulatory look. I held out the pair of socks. They were still bound together with the little plastic coupler. The Nautikon didn't move.

“What's wrong?” said one of the Mills sisters. “Take the stupid socks.”

“Yeah, take the socks, Les,” said the other Mills sister. “Take the socks.”

The Nautikon snatched them from me, cursing under his breath. He shot me a glance and I looked away, up the mountain.

When we reached the Oaken Bucket, the maintenance man was there to greet us. He had traded the gray jumpsuit for a yellow knit shirt with a name tag that said
ROLAND
.

“Mr. Diaz!” he said, flashing me a smile. The Nautikon looked confused.

“Hey, G,” said the Nautikon to Roland. Roland looked at the Nautikon. The Nautikon looked at me. I looked at Roland, completing the circuit of suspicious glares. It was a tense moment.

“Got the time?” I asked, hoping to break the tension.

“Two fifteen, on the dot!” said Roland. He extended one fist. I processed this gesture quickly: I was expected to hammer his fist
gently with my own. I did so and Roland flashed me a smile. I saw with some satisfaction that his canine teeth were capped with gold. We were friends.