The Unknown Knowns Read Online Free Page A

door was the door that she would very soon walk through to abandon our marriage.
    I got into bed still wearing my swim trunks. Once I was comfortable, I propped the three-ring binder on my knees and wrote the following:
    Nautikon weaponry: shoulder-mounted sonic rifles, “startle” grenades, and hypersonic scatter guns for dispersing schools of marauding bull sharks. There was no war within Nautika because of women running the government, so the weapons were strictly for protection and could only be wielded by the Dolphinwomen cavalry—who were outcasts and sworn to self-immolation after battle!! See-thru glass breastplates?
    I woke up the next morning to a distant sense of toasting bread. I heard it before I smelled it, raisin swirl, discharging noisily out of the toaster. Then came the unmistakable sound of a butter knife rasping testily across a dry surface.
    â€œJean?” I said. No response. I paused a few seconds and called again: “Jean?” I heard the chuckling of her laser-pointer key chain. I heard the front door close, that horrific vacuum-seal sound. Then the town house was quiet except for my tentative breathing.
    That morning I spent writing, or really just taking notes and making pencil sketches in my binder. For a while I fell asleep on the couch. When I woke up it was Jean’s imprint on the corduroy upholstery that I felt, not my own. Her residual body heat was trapped somewhere deep in the cushions, and I tried with mindmagnetism to extract it, draw it into myself. I know everyone can understand this, because we’ve all been in love before. But it didn’t work, so I was forced to lie there feeling her warmth from an upholstered distance.
    I slept again and this time I dreamed about being trapped under an endless sheet of polar ice. Above me I could see the sun, weak and blobby like the beam of a flashlight through the wall of a pup tent. I looked for a hole or some slushy area compromised by algae, but there was no escape.
    When I woke up the third time it was well after noon. My hair was still ratty with chlorine, so I showered and even took the time to use a cream rinse. I made an egg sandwich and stared at the stainless-steel door of our dishwasher while I ate. By the time I realized that there was egg yolk in my hair, it was already dry. While I was sponging my sideburns it occurred to me that the day was slipping away. I had to get something done. So I drove out to the storage plaza, stopping at the Hot Mart on the way for a coffee and a chocolaty Paycheck bar.
    Stor-Mor is just past the airport, several acres of identical orange-and-white corrugated buildings inside a high security fence. When I signed my contract two years earlier, they gave me a four-digit pin number for the front gate, but I forgot it. And anyway you can punch in any four digits and the hydraulic gate opens. I located my unit, easing the Corolla close to the entrance. The combination to my padlock was 19L, 25R, 3L. I nailed it on the first try. (The agents would famously use a bolt cutter; maybe you saw the footage.) The garage door shrieked as I clean-jerked it open, then I stood back to let the hard Colorado daylight color my secret library.
    The storage unit was my only selfish space on earth. Untilthey got that warrant and hauled everything in for state’s evidence, no one else had ever been allowed inside. Not even Corey at the hotel had clearance to see it, and certainly not Jean. She would soon prove that she couldn’t be trusted around mint-condition comics.
    I slipped on my white gloves and stepped inside. At the center of the room stood a lopsided globe of Earth-Two, the Golden Age planet of DC Comics. This was a science fair project of mine, aged twelve, that took some two weeks to complete. Looking back, I see it as quite possibly my first curatorial effort, the precursor to the Museum of the Aquatic Ape. I did a Mercator projection and some careful research to map the many