2009 - The Unknown Knowns

by Jeffrey Rotter

  Rep. Frost: Did you at that time inform any of your superiors back in Maryland about the Rath situation?

  Diaz: What situation? We weren’t at this juncture in any situation. I placed a quick call to my AB informing him that there was this suspicious character and I had him under observation. I was discouraged from taking any action at that time. And I’m sure the AB can corroborate on this.

  I did however put the perpetrator, put Mr. Rath, on notice that I was in possession of his number. I let him know in no uncertain terms that he had been identified as an enemy combatant and that I would deal with him harshly should the need arise.

  Rep. Frost: You yelled at the suspect.

  Diaz: Is that what Rath told you? Little [Censored] bastard. You can’t trust these people to tell the white toast truth! The truth is that all they do is hate, 24-7, and freedom isn’t the only thing they hate. They hate the truth too. I most certainly did not yell. Absolutely not.

  I simply gave our boy the heads-up that his cover was blown. There wouldn’t be any jihad perpetrated on my watch. I’d run out the kite string on tolerating this guy’s behavior, and he’d punched every single ticket on being an irresponsible member of the world community. I simply notified Jim Rath that the string had been run and the tickets punched. His number was up.

  After dinner, I retired to the patio. It was a cool night and totally clear. You could see all the way up the mountain past the rides and the waterfalls. Beyond that it was just stars and stars. I wished I knew some constellations because they were everywhere.

  We took a pitcher of Pink Shafts out to a patio table and just, you know, absorbed the ambience of being in the mountains, with the altitude and the Gold Rush scenery. Then along comes the suspicious party dressed in his bathing trunks like he’s Jacques goddamn Cousteau looking for the Andrea Doria. He’s got a scuba mask around his neck and a snorkel. I thought, What the heck is this? Well, the girls got a good laugh out of him, hairy little monkey with his diving gear. I maintained a professional demeanor because I alone could sense the threat that he posed, despite his comical, you know, appurtenances. And I tried to act professional, but what I did next I’m not proud of. If you’re going to convict me of anything –

  Rep. Frost: Nobody’s here to convict a federal agent of anything. We stand by the efforts of the men and women who serve on the front lines. Period.

  Diaz: Yeah, I guess you’d have to. But if you wanted to blacken my file with any misconduct, here’s your chance. Rath gets in the pool, what they call the Waterin’ Hole. He’s got a notebook, one of those waterproof kinds like they use on Nova programs about eels. Damn, I’m thinking, for a terrorist he sure is a weirdo. He doesn’t fit any profile I’m aware of. I mean, who recruited this guy? That’s the question I want this committee to answer. Jim Rath makes Jose Padilla look like the freaking Jackal.

  So he gets in the pool and all you can see from where we’re sitting is the strands of whatever he’s got for hair floating in the water above his head. The intake of the snorkel’s just barely breaching the surface. And he’s just, I don’t know, standing there – not even swimming – just standing there. I swear a half hour goes by and Rath hasn’t budged.

  I might blame the altitude and maybe the drinks for what I did, but mostly it was my own lack of sensitivity. I’m working on that. Anyway, the girls were getting a good laugh out of this guy, started calling him Aquaman, which was admittedly pretty funny under the circumstances. I mean, he was no Aquaman. So I said, Check this out, and I tiptoed over to the edge of the Waterin’ Hole. I looked in and I could see Rath’s eyes were closed behind the scuba mask, almost like he was asleep. I shushed the girls. Then ever so gently, ever so quietly, I placed one thumb over the snorkel hole.

  I felt the tube jerk away, but I held it fast. I saw his eyes shoot open and those long arms of his start thrashing around. Then he’s clawing at his scuba mask. The girls run over and they’re like, Come on, Les, that’s not funny. Let him go, let him go! You know: girls. But you could tell they were loving it.

  All of a sudden he blasts up out of the water and he’s gasping for air and his arms are slapping the water, and I think, I’ll be darned, this guy can’t even swim.

  I’m wearing socks with my Teva sandals – and this is an interesting footnote, but I have poor circulation, so even when I’m in flip-flops, as I was that night, I prefer to wear tube socks. It’s an unconventional look, but I believe in the principle of whatever works. Well, Rath is splashing around so much my socks get totally soaked.

  Finally Keesha jumps in. Turns out she was a lifeguard or something. She gets Rath in the tow hold and drags him over to the edge. Got him laid out on the patio, and the poor guy, he’s gasping like a guppy on a hot plate. Keesha has to administer some mouth-to-mouth, which was frankly pretty gross to watch. He certainly didn’t deserve any first aid, especially of the sexy young lady variety.

  Rep. Frost: This is the first time the committee is hearing this part of the story. Did you inform any of your superiors back at WATERT of this incident?

  Diaz: We’re talking about a delicate situation. Frankly I didn’t know how to relay what happened, and not just because I had mixed feelings about my own actions. I was concerned – believe it or not – for Mr. Rath’s own reputation. You start making accusations of any kind with Homeland, they stick. And this was before the incident, you’ve got to understand, so naturally I felt different about the guy. Now I don’t care who knows, but at the time I had to consider Rath’s feelings.

  To put this in as plain of terms as possible – and again I have to apologize to the congressladies for the coarseness of my language, but Mr. Rath, he – while Miss Stephens was administering the mouth-to-mouth – Mr. Rath appeared to attain orgasm.

  Rep. Frost: He what?

  Diaz: He spooged in his swimming trunks.

  FOURTEEN

  I was having difficulty sleeping. Maybe it was the residual Pink Mine Shaft gumming up my circadian rhythms. Or perhaps it was all the redundant tan decor in my Prospector’s Bend motel room. (Tan is a surprisingly provocative color; I’ve seen studies.) More likely it was the leftover shame that had spackled the creases of my eyelids and stopped them from closing properly.

  I’d suffered another run-in with the Nautikon, and this one was way worse than the Lazy River episode. Without getting into the boring details, I’ll say only that he pranked me at the expense of my research. I was having a fruitful session of oooee. Truly astonishing things were being revealed to me – undersea gardens, an earthquake in a subaquatic market, milk-glass towers touched by fists of magma, reverse ontogeny – until the Nautikon cut off my psychic flow. He knew what I was doing. He knew I was getting closer to his secret. And for some reason he found this threatening. Which is a personal bummer to me because my intentions regarding him and his culture have always been positive.

  Not that it matters, but he also made a laughingstock out of me in front of the Mills sisters. Who cares, right? It’s not like I feel some untapped need to impress a pair of bosomy sorority girls with pastel brains. They were in on the joke, goading him on. The whole patio was charged with some kind of antiestro-wisdom, andro-jerkdom.

  But if the Mills sisters tested my faith in womankind, Keesha Stephens restored it – with a kiss. She saved my life, mouth to mouth, but there’s no real reason to retread that miserable experience, either my life or the saving of it. Let me say one thing: no matter who gets intubated or demoted or gitmoed or house-arrested or plutoed by the end of this stupid story, I want the record to show that Ms. Stephens was and always will be an unimpeachable and completely awesome person.

  The bedside LED showed 3:40 a.m. I lay on the mattress replaying the previous day on the retractable white screen of my mind. As the minutes wore on, sleep became a more and more remote possibility, a rabbit you’d been chasing across a vast field until it finally occurred to you that you didn’t even like rabbits, and that catching a rabbit would mean exactly nothing to you. So I
stopped running and watched the cottontail of sleep vanish under the far hedge.

  By then I had a serious headache. The pain started in my pineal gland, the most primitive site in the brain. It was an atavistic kind of torment that seemed to harken back to those dim days before we slipped into the sea, when rapacious humanoid predators roamed the savannas, driving humanity to seek shelter in the fecund tidal pools of North Africa. Way back, way back before history, that’s where my headache came from.

  It wasn’t a cold night, so I’d left the casement window cranked open. The breeze coming down the mountainside sent undulations through the curtains so that the pattern of Conestoga wagons appeared to be in transit. I could hear Flatiron Falls crash endlessly into the Waterin’ Hole and thought of Labiaxa rushing up the cataract of estro-wisdom toward her audience with the Queen. Then I thought about what I’d left in my refrigerator back in Colorado Springs. I wondered if Jean had returned to clean out anything that might spoil, the ground beef for instance. Maybe she’d brought someone along to help, someone to run interference in case she crossed paths with her lunatic ex-husband. The cabinetmaker, or Josh from the office. And after they’d dumped the moldering tortilla pie and clumpy milk down the Disposall, they would sully our marital sofa bed with their lovemaking. Then I remembered that Nova was on TV that night. On the ceiling of the motel room I conjured up the hurtful movie of Jean and the rugby-playing cabinetmaker, knees pressed together under the afghan, draining glasses of pinot noir and watching dung beetles roll up their little shit balls. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t sleep.

  I couldn’t sleep. And in the storehouse of my insomniac mind, betrayal piled on top of betrayal. I looked up through the depths of the Waterin’ Hole and saw the Nautikon’s mocking face. His thumb stuck in the end of my snorkel. His smile, distorted by the water, looked fanged. His eyes glinted with caprice. The air, I thought, was poison to him. It was turning this innocent, this idol, into a Cyclops, a total jerkwad.

  I’m ashamed to admit it now, but I wasn’t thinking only of Nautika. I was thinking about myself too. If being let down by ordinary mortals is hard, the disappointment of an advanced oceanic being who starts acting like a frat boy is a pain without precedent.

  Jean never really believed in God. She didn’t have the supernatural bent for belief. But I know she was a big Jesus fan. She liked the sandals and the sermons, the whole messianic packaging. She liked the way He introduced a change in divine policy to a stubborn world with a gentle, lamblike smile, while the divine CEO, His father, sat upstairs threatening mass layoffs. Jean was in the field of organizational planning, and Jesus, He was her ultimate middle manager. So she clung to the concept of Christ without much in the way of belief.

  Substitute the Nautikon for Jesus, and you get a sense of my own disintegrating situation. As I lay there in the dark, my faith was going to hell, while my attachment to said faith grew more and more intractable. Plus I couldn’t sleep.

  I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and looked out the window. I knew from my most recent session of ooeee that the True Man must be tested by three maidens. I knew he would be led to the virtuous path by the one called Jim (i.e., me). We already stood atop the holy mountain, He and I. Before us lay water and blood.

  I saw the Oaken Bucket out there under its tarp, the moonlit water lapping at its sides. It looked like the applecart of wanton fun – and who wouldn’t want to upset that applecart? That’s when it hit me. That was when I got the idea: hatched my evil plan, plotted my purported misdeed, initiated the alleged disservice to my nation that earned me a tracking device on my ankle and a guy with a headset watching my every move while I grow older day in and day out on the deck of a houseboat. The germ of the scheme came to me in a flash of inspiration as I stood there in the motel-room window. I would do something bad with the Oaken Bucket. Something so shocking that it would remind the Nautikon of his true mission. Remind him that he was sent here to save a dangerous world from itself. I would do something bad. Something shocking.

  If he thought this was all a personal joyride, a vacation from cultural extinction, I was prepared to remind him otherwise! Vengeance was in my eye. I saw it in the half mirror of the window, then watched the vengeance travel down to my legs, murky electricity. My hands felt restless, restless and evil. I left room 21 and let my cruel purpose guide me, let it propel my bare feet to the very precipice of mischief.

  I stood on the patio. The moon and the water were enjoying each other’s company as I began to climb the mountain. The flagstones were cold enough to numb the balls of my feet. Soon I found myself sniffing around the Oaken Bucket. At the back of the ride I discovered a low shed stuccoed to look like a boulder. The midget door was padlocked, but a sustained tug with one foot braced against the frame did the job. When I ducked inside I heard scampering, the scampering of paws. I had only a vague idea of what I was going to do. It was dark. My hands prowled the floor and walls. I felt sweaty pipes, the round glass face of a meter, a stopcock wadded with spiderwebs. Behind me the Oaken Bucket rocked gently on its rails and I could hear the wooden staves groan.

  They weren’t exactly speaking to me, the staves. No, that’s what a crazy person would say relating the genesis of his crime. The ax or the howitzer or the piano wire spoke to me, told me to do it: Do it! Kill her now! Do it! The seabirds told you to sever the cable and send the whole gondola of Italian tourists hurtling into the fjord. But the ‘talking dog’ alibi has always seemed like a lame excuse to me. If a dog tells you to bind an old man with duct tape and pull out his molars with a pair of pliers, I don’t know, that strikes me as kind of dubious. You wouldn’t listen to a talking dog under ordinary circumstances, so why would you listen to a dog that was telling you to do something illegal? You’d have to be criminally insane to take orders from a dog. So the groaning staves of the Oaken Bucket, they might have made some suggestions, might have offered their point of view, but I didn’t take them seriously. I don’t listen to staves, and I never have.

  Inside the boulder-shaped shed I came across a toolbox. I dragged it out into the sodium light and found a locking wrench with mean jaws. I looked at the wrench; I looked at the wheels of the Oaken Bucket resting underwater on their gleaming rails, and I made a mental connection, like a syllogism or something.

  I remembered the Nautikon toasting the girls back in the restaurant: “Tomorrow I’m taking you three hotties for a ride on the Oaken Bucket!” I remembered his arrogance, his cruelty. My plan took form and stiffened with the starch of hatred.

  I gazed down at the motel. His corner room was dark. The Helvner told me that the hour was 4:30 a.m. Soon it would be light. If I wanted to act, I would have to do it now. I picked up the locking wrench and stepped into the hip-deep water, gripping the rim of the Bucket for balance. The two right wheels were attached to the axles with single bolts.

  I followed the path of the rails with my eyes. The Bucket would exit the pool and drop about twenty meters at a sixty-degree angle. It would level out before taking the first hairpin curve. Two small waterfalls would come next, then another hairpin turn to the left, before the Bucket crossed the top of Flatiron Falls. There I knew from observation that the Bucket leaned hard to the right, giving passengers the sensation that they were slipping over the edge of the raging cataract. Just in the nick of time the Bucket righted itself and plunged shrieking into the mine shaft. From there it was a straight shot down to the safe harbor of the Waterin’ Hole and the motel patio.

  But not if I had my way.

  I’m not mechanically inclined, but I had a theory. If I loosened the right-hand pair of wheels, the Bucket might not be able to recover from the tilting passage across Flatiron Falls. It would lean out…out…out…and more out until it met oblivion. Tumble end over end in the bleak summer air some fifteen feet to the shallow pool below. Not far enough to hurt anybody, I reasoned, only enough to scare them. And my theory proved to be surprisingly sound, all except for that last part.

  I squatted down i
n the water and fitted the wrench over one of the hubs, just gauging the size of it. I adjusted the width of the grip by twisting the peg at the end of the handle. I repositioned the wrench on the hub and squeezed, feeling with satisfaction as the jaws bit the steel nut. Then I stood up to get some leverage.

  But that, I’m happy to report, was where I stopped. The evil seemed to drain out of my hands like briny green seawater from a ballast tank. I loosened my grip on the wrench and stared into the dark pool, at the aborted inevitability of my would-be crime. At the alternate future that was but a wrench turn away. My reflection scared me – that poison Narcissus, the negative me who only seconds earlier was the only me. He scared me. I scared me. I could still feel his presence, my presence, the wake of his careless laughter throbbing across the water.

  The Feds didn’t believe me when I told them this; neither did the press or even the Fat Man, my lawyer; you won’t believe me either, but I couldn’t go through with it. I did not loosen the wheels on the Oaken Bucket. I wasn’t the one who upset the applecart. I couldn’t hurt anyone. Not Jim.

  Why did I wimp out? Two words: Keesha Stephens. In my muscle memory I could still feel her soft life-giving lips pressed against mine. My mouth still burned with the urgency and concern of her breath, with the piney taste of liquor.

  I let go of the wrench.

  “Hey, buddy! You okay?”

  The hairs of alarm stood up on my nape, and I turned to see the maintenance man, a flashlight swinging at his side. The guy’s question seemed sensible enough. Was I, in fact, okay? I didn’t know how to answer this. I did have a vague sense that I was totally busted if I didn’t think fast. The tiny fragment of my brain that wasn’t being flooded with panic hormones or self-loathing hatched a plan: remove the Helvner…let it drop to the bottom of the pool…