The Nautikon took a single pee break, at a rest area designed to look like a corporate retreat center. You could see the colorful humps of Winnebagos and hear their generators humming. I pulled in beside a big one. Through the side curtain I could see the silhouette of a couple playing cards while their nasty pachyderm sump-pumped the contents of its waste tank into the loose summer soil.
The Ford was parked several spots down. I waited until I thought the Nautikon was in the men’s room, then I crept over to the vending machine kiosk. The rest area had one thing to recommend it, a considerable stock of Paycheck bars. I fed eight dollars into the slot and was rewarded with a whole night’s worth of nutrition. Actually I only got seven bars. I must have keyed in the wrong code (4D instead of 4B), because the machine gave me one baggie of edible pectin worms. I tossed them in the backseat, where they remain to this day in a secret CIA impound lot, unless they’ve been entered into evidence.
We got under way again. I remember a tanker truck rumbling past. The driver tipped a cigarette out his cracked window. It skittered toward me on the road, spraying up a little fanfare of sparks whenever it struck the blacktop. We entered a long tunnel, the screaming orange-lit bore swallowing our cars like a wormhole to destiny. On the other side the interstate had been carved out of solid rock. A stepped wall rose on my right, bristling with pines. I remember thinking I was in a model train set in a child’s dark basement. But not mine, not my basement. I never had a basement.
I was tired, but I drew sustenance from the familiar taillight pattern on the road ahead. Every time the Nautikon hit the brakes, which was often enough on this winding road, my heart issued a corresponding throb of exigency.
When we cleared the Eisenhower Tunnel and passed the sign for Summit County, my dashboard clock registered 4:15 a.m. COLORADO’S PLAYGROUND, said the big green sign. Several more miles passed before the Ford exited onto a steep rural route going south. I followed carefully behind, eventually killing my headlamps to fly by the glow of the parking lights. The two-lane did its best to confound my expectations, winding and wiggling with sadistic asphalt glee. There were times when I felt like I was steering a car on TV, just steering and steering with no reference to reality. On the few occasions when I thought I’d lost him, my forehead went cold and wet. The mountainside soared up on my left; on my right was the Lite-Brite display of towns and ski resorts. Every single one of those lights, I told myself, represented a cell of humanity, a family, or a business. Something I ought to cherish. Something I should want. But when I pictured my own light, the light of the town house as viewed from the high satellite of nostalgia, it looked cold and empty. Every light was on, but Jean wasn’t home and I wasn’t either.
Another half hour passed before the Ford braked abruptly. He cut a gravelly left onto an even crappier rural road. I followed uphill for a few more miles until the road leveled out. Together we rounded a tight bend and I saw a video-rental shop and auto-supply store combo shuttered for the night. The Ford took a hesitant left onto an old logging road. Trailing him any farther would have been seriously pushing my luck, so I pulled over in the auto-supply parking lot to catch some sleep. It was about 5:00 a.m. The Nautikon couldn’t go anywhere from here but up. And if he came back down, I’d be waiting for him.
I woke up a couple hours later to a rapping on my driver’s-side window. The knuckles were knuckly in the extreme and scored with axle grease. The man was missing one index finger, his face old and empty of expression, but he looked friendly enough.
I rolled down the window and rubbed my forehead.
“You been here all night?” the man asked.
“No.” He looked at the heap of candy wrappers on the seat beside me. “Just a couple hours,” I said.
“There’s a motel up the mountain.” The man pointed with his right hand, but without an index finger the gesture seemed incomplete. “More like a water-park-type place. It’s got ducks you can ride in, but the rooms are reasonable priced. Looks like you could use some shut-eye.”
It was a eureka moment for me. That explained my Nautikon’s strange trajectory. He was like a human divining rod, seeking some mythical mountaintop water park where he could continue his arcane experiments.
“Just up there?” I felt self-conscious about my own index finger, so I pointed with my pinkie, but this didn’t feel right either. We both looked up the dirt road that ran beside the auto-supply store, the same road the Ford had taken hours ago.
“Can’t miss it. Look for the giant prospector.” He slapped the side of my car.
The giant prospector is molded from concrete and rebar and stands about thirty feet high. He’s your stereotypical forty-niner in a droopy calfskin hat and dungarees, with a grizzled beard and wild eyes that scan the valley below. In his outstretched hands he’s carrying a pan filled with gold nuggets. They’re actually yellow lightbulbs and they spell out the name of the amusement park: PROSPECTOR’S BEND. At the back of the statue an iron-rung ladder leads to a small door in the seat of his pants.
The parking lot was nearly deserted. I took a spot beside a mini SUV with Colorado plates and most of the Greek alphabet decaled on the hatchback window. The backseat was littered with mail-order clothing catalogs and frozen yogurt cups. On the way to the motel office I passed the white Ford. Its hood was cool to the touch. I looked up at the motel, a two-story box made to resemble a mountain lodge. Most of the brown paint had peeled off the fake timbers, and an array of satellite dishes waddled in the high wind on the rooftop.
Above the motel the sky was a waxy blue. Little swabs of cloud stuff moved swift and high overhead. The weather suggested all kinds of change and inevitabilities. I sneaked up the exterior stairwell and pressed my ear against each of the doors on the second floor. The rooms were dead quiet until I got to room 19. From inside I heard perky morning TV and a hair dryer. A girl’s voice was singing ‘I wanna sex you up’.
Two doors down I came to room 22, a corner suite. A window faced the breezeway, but the curtain was drawn tight. I concentrated and thought I could hear the Weather Channel prognosticating from somewhere within. Then I heard the familiar booming voice, chanting along with the forecast.
Downstairs in the front office I found a pamphlet that provided the history of the place. Prospector’s Bend was built in 1969 during that weird revival of Gold Rush nostalgia. The site really was a prospecting town back in its day, and when the park first opened kids could still try their hand at panning for gold. But by 1972 all you could expect to get was pyrite and pull tabs, so the owners started adding water rides to keep the customers coming.
The oldest attraction is called the Duck Pond, built in 1973 (coincidentally the same year Marvel Comics premiered Howard the Duck). The Darn Tootin’ Straight Shootin’ Water Chute arrived a year later, followed by a pond stocked with actual trout and a Ferris-type wheel shaped like a waterwheel. The existing swimming pool was rechristened the Waterin’ Hole. Then in 1976 they debuted the now infamous Oaken Bucket. You’ve all seen this one on the news, so I won’t bore you with the specs.
In the 1990s local college kids made Prospector’s Bend a shrine of hipster kitsch. Along with their insincere mustaches and T–shirts promoting little league teams they never played for, every Colorado coed’s irony training included a pilgrimage to Prospector’s Bend. At spring break they’d converge here to get their faux-bois jollies, get ironically wasted, and ironically have sex. This wasn’t in the pamphlet; that part I learned by observation.
“You just here to read, or do you need a room?” The woman behind the desk was talking to me. “This ain’t a library, you know.”
The counter came up to her bosom, and her bosom rested on the counter. She was wearing a bonnet.
“Give me room 21,” I said.
“Pretty particular, ain’t you?” said the desk clerk. “You been here before?”
“Nope. Just my lucky number.”
“You don’t look so lucky.”
She gave me a skept
ical look, or maybe it was just the way her face was made. Her features were drawn with worry lines. Alarming red hair poked out from under the bonnet like fire under an Easter basket. And her mouth was the kind that never stopped moving, even when it wasn’t saying anything.
“How many nights?”
I showed her the number one with my hand.
“You got to pay in advance,” she said.
Room 21 was several shades of brown, including deep chocolate wainscoting and a shower curtain that covered the whole spectrum of tan. The single bed was humped up on one side, and when I sat down the springs complained openly. The wallpaper behind the headboard was worn in the outline of a headboard, suggesting countless nights of coed amorousness. I was becoming a real archaeologist of hotel decor.
When I opened the curtains, they hissed on the traverse rod like spilled rice. The sun was coming up behind the mountain, so that the whole mass of geology appeared to be on fire. This was my first glimpse of the Oaken Bucket, concealed under its nighttime tarp. The twin tracks gleamed under the water. Flatiron Falls emptied endlessly into the Waterin’ Hole. I lay on the bed and listened to the raging cataract, and it wasn’t long before I was totally conked out.
What woke me up was the crazy noise of girls having fun. My sorority neighbors bounced down the breezeway past my room, three pairs of flip-flops slapping against six neatly pumiced heels. There was laughter and singing and playful shrieking. I lay still with my eyes closed thinking about Jean. I thought about her responsible hemp sandals, and her voice hollering at me from the bathroom: “What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you get your own razor?”
It was well after noon when I got up and went to the window, and what I saw wiped Jean completely off the surface of my mind. There was the Nautikon. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, just the Jams and a pair of Tevas with calf-length athletic socks. He stood on the patio speaking to a custodian in a gray jumpsuit, their heads close together. The Nautikon gave him one of those elaborate soulful handshakes and jangled a ring of keys. Then he found a free deck chair close to the Waterin’ Hole, cranked it into the horizontal position, and lay down. I watched him smooth his hair and gaze over his chin to admire his own sculpted chest. My heart had been battered and chipped by his crass behavior, but it was not yet broken. Nothing could buff the luster of myth off his marble body. What I beheld before me was still a Nautikon, and I could not allow myself to forget that core truth. A few seconds later out came the girls.
You know their names; everybody does. The famous Mills Sisters, Brenda and Jenny, and their friend Keesha Stephens. The Mills girls had apparently performed some kind of mix and match with their bikinis. Brenda wore a yellow top with safety orange bottoms; her sister wore the converse combination: orange top, yellow briefs. With their big eyes and lemon-colored ponytails, they cut alarming figures, like a warning of oncoming fun. Keesha’s appearance was more understated. I think she might be of West Indian descent. Her kinky short-cropped hair framed a sweet, reliable face. In their resting position her eyelids were droopy, but when she laughed the eyes exploded at you like blue flowers. I liked Keesha from the moment I saw her.
The girls grabbed three lounge chairs at the opposite end of the patio and started applying sunscreen with great vigor. The teamwork was amazing, and I wasn’t the only one enjoying the view. The Nautikon sat up.
From Elaine Morgan we learn that ‘sexual selection…sometimes operates to a point where it cannot be said to be conducive to the comfort or convenience of the individual animal’. Think of the peacock, or certain male porn actors, or the proboscis monkey with its huge lusty nose. The Mills girls too were afflicted by the Darwinian sex burden.
I’m dancing around the subject probably because the breast issue is a big one for me. Jean said that being raised by a single mother had turned me into ‘a boob guy’. I disagree, but I can’t disagree very strongly. I remember the night when the Mars Rover Opportunity was having all that trouble broadcasting back to earth. It was late January 2004, and Jean and I had been together for a little more than six months. We lay naked on the futon worrying, like the rest of the country, about how NASA would fix the signal.
I playfully mentioned the idea that womankind is the earthly receptor of galactic knowledge. You know, just kidding around. I was only thinking out loud when I said that all information in the universe passes through the Great Cervix of Epistemology I said: “Think about it, Jean; maybe if we could tune all the earth’s females to the Great Cervix of Epistemology, we’d know everything we wanted to know about Mars and everything else in the universe.”
I was just joking, of course, kind of. And I’m pretty sure she laughed, at first. I do remember she pulled on her pajama bottoms and said something about keeping her ‘receptor covered’.
At this point the mood in the bedroom was still mostly positive. But then I went too far.
“Or maybe’ – I propped myself up on one elbow and looked her in the eye – ’maybe it’s the breasts that act as receptors. Maybe every bosom on earth is tuned to the frequency of some All-Knowing Space Breast. Like how when a baby enters a room all the women start lactating.” I was too excited now. My ideas were outpacing my reason and my tact. I knelt on the mattress.
“Christ, Jim,” she said, hiding her face underneath the blanket. “Do you have any idea what a sociopath you are?”
I didn’t stop to answer this question. “If we could just find the frequency,” I said, and here’s where I really took things beyond the accepted threshold of marital bedroom banter.
I peeled back the blanket, took her left breast in my hand, and turned it, ever so gently, like you would tune a radio. I think I made a beeping sound, a sonar sound, which was probably a mistake. Jean is what they call a statuesque woman. She has about seven inches on me and maybe twenty pounds. Her bosom is not to be beeped.
“Can you feel it, Jean?” I said, still beeping softly. “Can you detect some kind of signal coming in?” I was half-joking and half-not joking. And trust me, the whole thing made a lot more sense at the time.
Before I knew it she was on my chest, pinning my shoulders under her knees, but not in a romantic way. I could see her breasts heaving above me, and for the first time they looked really threatening. She reached back and took my left nipple between thumb and index finger, twisting until I gasped and nearly lost consciousness. Then she stripped the blanket off the bed and walked to the couch. Though she accepted my proposal of marriage a few months later, I think this was a harbinger of negative feelings to come.
So maybe you can see why I’m reluctant to dwell too much on the now-famous chests of the Mills girls. But empirically speaking, they are stacked. The Nautikon was keenly aware of this fact as well. I heard the screech of a deck chair being dragged across the patio and watched him take a seat beside Jenny. He was looking at her breasts, I was looking at him. Then it hit me. Of course this guy’s a breast man; he comes from a matrilineal society. The breast would probably be like an object of devotion, an emblem of social, political, and economic power, like the presidential seal.
I spent the afternoon writing in my room, occasionally checking out the window to see what the Nautikon was up to. The bedside radio was on a twenty-four-hour news station. I wanted everything to seem normal. It was normal, of course, perfectly normal; but sometimes people can get the wrong impression.
I was sitting there at the foot of the bed immersed in a state of utter normalcy when the radio began to speak to me. As a teletype chattered in the background, I heard the words Denver, Lazy River, and Single Mom.
We each exist on a separate bandwidth. I honestly believe that. But sometimes those bandwidths get crossed. The radio had gotten tuned to the frequency of my individual experience, it was addressing my own peculiar circumstances, and it was freaking me out. Walk into a pet store, a turtle speaks your name; that’s how I felt.
I stood up and pushed aside the Conestoga curtains. The Nautikon lay facedown on his chaise longue.
The reporter spoke in fake grave reporterly tones about the alleged victims, June Fresto of Albuquerque and her son. Second-degree burns over eighty percent of their bodies, the man said, irreversible blindness a distinct possibility for the boy. By the time they pulled June Fresto out of the River, said the radio, the acidic compound in the water had eaten through the straps of her swimsuit. The Denver police were still treating it like an accident. They weren’t ruling out a bad batch of chlorine. There was no talk of foul play or terrorism.
“June,” said my mental Nautikon. “Give the rug rat a little time–out. Let him watch Dora the Explorer. Cut loose, girrrrl!”
He crouched behind the rocks at the source of the Lazy River. Probing the crevice with his rubber tube, he turned to me – the insignificant little me who occupies my mind – a finger laid across his lips. Shhhh.
Meanwhile the radio had traveled on to someone else’s bandwidth. The next item was about a Fort Collins woman who had been married to five anesthesiologists simultaneously. Somewhere an anesthesiologist was listening to this story. He was thinking about his wife and wearing an expression much like my own. Wide eyes, downturned mouth. Crushed astonishment.
I shut the curtains and stared into nothing, the blank geometry of my room. The rubber tubing snaked into my consciousness like a conspiracy. It flooded the ventricles of my brain with a most caustic fluid – suspicion. Everything the Nautikon had done to disappoint me, every small act of betrayal, burned suddenly like hydrochloric acid.
But come on, Jim! I actually slapped myself. Don’t be ridiculous. The Nautikon had nothing to do with this! Why would he hurt a defenseless woman, especially after all the loud, energetic love he’d shown her? I expelled the milky fluid of suspicion from my mind. If I lost faith in the Nautikon, my whole project would be meaningless. I would be single, adrift, homeless…for what? For nothing. I couldn’t afford to doubt him.
But after that day, something changed. If doubt does germinate from seeds, my husks were splitting. The green tendril was reaching through the dark soil to find the sun. There was something wrong with the Nautikon. I knew it. I just didn’t know that I knew it.
2009 - The Unknown Knowns Page 14
