The Unknown Knowns (6 page)

“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:

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 nautical 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,

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 else 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.

Leaving a generous tip on the table, I slipped into the pool area. My favorite chaise longue was already occupied by a shirtless man in a jean jacket. He was reading the free newspaper that came with his room. I sneered at him and found an empty chair on the opposite side of the pool, where I opened the binder on a pebbled glass tabletop and started taking notes.

When the Nautikon surfaced at my feet, I was so freaked out that I almost chucked my pen into the Jacuzzi. In his hand he carried some kind of waterproof calculator. I call it a calculator, but I'm sure the technology was way beyond my terrestrial comprehension. There was no reason for me to panic. He took no notice of hairy little Jim Rath. For several minutes he hung on the edge of the pool, tapping his advanced aqua-calculator with a tiny stylus. Then he did something really confusing: he took out a plastic sample cup—eerily similar to the pee cup at the doctor's office—filled it with water, and sealed it. Then he flew up out of
the pool to stand right in front of me. I think he might have dripped on my shoe.