The Unknown Knowns (24 page)

E
verybody has their own way to describe water. But water? It can absorb any description you throw at it without ever accepting any of them. Look at the Chesapeake Bay at night: it's one big soggy thesaurus of adjectives and verbs that poets and politicians and scientists and regular people have dumped into it by the truckload: unalphabetized, unconjugated, unpunctuated.

Brackish, crystalline, emerald, white, deep, shallow, filmy, unfathomable. Swell, surge, break, blow, buffet, shiver, shine. Glisten in the moonlight.

I rub my foot for a second to get the feeling back, then sling my other leg over the railing. My neighbors are having another one of their endless chitchatty dinner parties. I hear music and close my eyes to let it touch the lobe of regret in my overfull brain.

We're beside the Lazy River in Denver. The Nautikon is singing his gargle-song to the child. But this time it's different; I'm the child. Jean is there too. She takes me by one hand. The Nautikon takes the other. I can feel the fine webbing between his fingers. Jean tousles my hair and I look up to see the two of them smiling down at me. I pull my knees up toward my chest so that they can swing me out over the water, like a monkey. It's fun. If I lean way, way back, I can even see Jean's face. She's upside down and laughing and everything is all right. I'm swinging back and forth and back and forth over the water, back and forth goes their little monkey. The Nautikon's hairpiece is slightly off-center, but that's okay too. Everything is okay. It's nice to see the moon painting the water at night. It's nice to let go and swing free over the water.