The Watermen, fifth chunk
Animal Control
Okay, I curated the last chunk of story—Kuf here, your favorite, and slightly (to more than slightly) intoxicated mind prisoner. There are two questions that I ask myself when I dig for story.
The first question is, why bother? You are stuck in Happy’s mind, there is nothing you can do about it, and you’re probably going to die in Happy’s mind. True facts.
I dig for story because I have nothing else to do. I have tried to amuse myself by drinking and smoking, remembering the world I came from and imagining what I would do if I could get back there, but that isn’t enough to ease the boredom.
I pay attention to Happy Julius Pipe, his human ways and shitbag tendencies, not to help him or even find a way to improve his lot, but due to the immense and overwhelming hopelessness of my situation. In other words, I curate Happy’s mind because I don’t have better options.
The second question you might ask me is, does digging for story take a lot of work? Not really. It’s not the equivalent of physical digging with the exertion and sweat and rapid heartbeating. It’s more like sifting through floating puddles of water and pulling out jellyfish - or such shaped things.
I then organize them in a way that makes sense. Think a tree or an aardvark - or whatever - sculpted from little jellyfish things I pulled from Happy’s mind. I then convert these jellyfish into chunks that I upload to Substack. It’s pretty simple. Pull. Organize. Covert. Publish. Drink.
Here is the last chunk of Happy’s story, The Watermen, found and curated by yours truly. Read it. Dream a little subterranean dream. Then hold your breath for the next tangle of jellyfish from the underwhelming tangle of Happy’s mind.
-Kuf
Now, the story…
The Watermen, chunk five: Animal Control
It takes everything we have to get the kids to bed, R1 especially. We promise him that, although we won’t be able to keep a dog (if there is a dog in the hole), we’ll find an acceptable family to adopt it.
After an exhausting bedtime, Renetta and I fall into the sofa chairs on the front porch and reminisce about what we used to do before kids: have sex, drink freely, see friends, sleep in. Now, the infrequency of these activities borders on severe, and we seize any opportunity to stoke the calling of our youth. The cocktails we consume make us nostalgic.
“What a shit show,” Renetta says. More people have come to the spectacle of our hole. The degenerate watermen stopped working until animal control does an inspection. Given this unforeseen delay, little is being done to stop the leak. Teenagers start another meme on their phones. The ice cream man retires for the evening. The taco truck has run out of salsa. The scene reeks of excitement and uncertainty. “What happened to that man?” Renetta asks about Jenkins.
“There are a few theories in circulation,” I say. “The prevailing one is that an animal attacked him in the hole.” Renetta shakes her head. “Alternatively, the waterman may have crossed into a different dimension, aged considerably, and had an epic confrontation with a stone racketeer. This seems more plausible if you ask me.”
“You said stoned racketeer?”
“No. I said ‘stone racketeer’ as in, made of stone.”
Renetta doesn’t register my words. She doesn’t know what the truth is, but has enough alcohol in her system to wax poetic on my bullshit.
“I need another glass of -,” she says without affirming what the “of” is.
“Fill me up, please.”
Renetta returns to the inside of the house for alcohol. On the outside, there are tens to hundreds of witnesses who can testify, under oath, that I did not leave the porch; that I did not ascend the mound in my front yard; that I didn’t plunge in, Jenkins-style, to the depths of the hole. Without question, many people see me sitting on my sofa chair, sipping an empty glass, yet I find myself dislodged from my porch, in the tunnel system allegedly below my house. Like before, I glide my hand along the smooth bioilluminescence of the walls.
Surely, this marks an odd but natural transition?
I find a clearing that emerges from the depths of the hole. There is a lake and green space - not the hollow earth exactly, but something far more intricate and hidden. I let my intuition go ape shit with the prospect that The Nation of Agartha runs like a seven-layer dip into the depths of Suburban America. This wild, illuminated space beckons me to explore it, and I would have if not for the golem.
He lifts his stone hand. Eyes blink. “Where ya goin’?” The golem asks. It doesn’t appear threatening, but I wouldn’t cross it. The voice has a human quality, which is strange since the thing doesn’t have a voice box. There is an underlying sense that it knows a lot more than your average human; it has lived on its own for so long, seen everything, done whatever its inflexible stone limbs have allowed, that nothing I say can surprise it.
“Argartha,” I say, pointing to the opening behind him. I correct myself, “The Nation of Agartha.”
“Got papers?”
Is it asking me for documentation? “Passport?” I ask.
Eyes blink. “If ya don’t know, ya ain’t goin’.”
“I live up there,” I point vaguely above me, although I have no idea how I’m oriented in this subteranean realm.
Eyes soften, which is also strange since it doesn’t have eyeballs. “Look,” it says. “I haven’t seen a surface goombah in like 100 years, and today it’s like a parade.” It sounds like PUH-RAID. “Ya seem less pushy than the other guy, so I won’t beat ya to two inches of yer life.” The golem stops talking, opens a compartment from its side, pulls out a cigar, and lights up.
“You smoke?” The physiology of the thing is remarkable.
“Mushrooms. Ya don’t live thousands of years smokin’ the filth up there. As I was sayin’, first, if ya want in, get papers.” It takes a deep hit from the mushroom cigar. “Figure the shit out. Second, and this is important, so listen up bettercup, ya can’t live in two worlds. Ya can’t be here and there, up and down. Know what I’m sayin’? Look in the mirror. Ya barely have enough juice to tread water up there. We don’t want strung-out humans toolin’ around down here.”
“We? There are more?”
“I was using the royal we, gimbrony. Point is, ya want to live here, live here. We don’t sell timeshares.”
The golem is getting animated and colorful. It glows. The mushroom smoke wraps around me and carries me off. “Take a beat, human. The stairs are that way. But before ya go, there is one thing I gotta ask.” Eyes blink. “Can I interest you in Jesus Christ?”
The holy man has returned, and so have I. I’m swirling an empty glass on the porch, staring at the bulbous solicitor. “Didn’t we do this already?”
He shrugs. “Can I interest your wife in Jesus Christ?”
“She’s in the house, getting some -um- tea,” I say.
He leans in and uses his normal, excited voice. “Watch that video I gave you?”
“I did. It’s all bullshit, right?”
“The lord works in mysterious ways,” he says.
Renetta opens the front door and hands me a large glass of bourbon. “I drank all the wine,” she says. “What the fuck,” she points to another wave of “oohs and aahs” coming from the crowd. “Who the fuck are they?” She doesn’t notice the holy man, which is odd since he is difficult to miss. Then she sees him. “Who the fuck are you?”
“Pardon my wife, your honor. She has been alone with the children today and has been drinking.”
The holy man doesn’t mind Renetta’s intoxication. “That’s my choir,” he says. “We practice at the church down the street.”
“There’s a church down the street?”
“We do Christmas carols.” He lifts the tree trunk of his leg a step and stretches towards the front porch. “We are nationally ranked. We raise a lot of money.”
“For what?” Renetta asks.
“Jesus Christ,” the holy man says. “Anyway, we heard about the dog in the hole.”
“I don’t know who started that rumor, you honor,” I say. “The dog is wild speculation”.
The rain slows down. Renetta and I are too drunk to notice. The choir of holy men performs a spectacular rendition of “Oh Holy Night”, which the teenagers record on their phones. The crowd has been thinning out with the rain, and the giant mound, which once rose twenty feet above the fence, has melted into nothing special.
“Wasn’t that bigger?” I ask Renetta. She shares my oversized sofa seat. The full weight of her head rests on my shoulder, but she keeps a firm grip on her glass. Faint snores tickle my neck.
The crowd cheers before I can answer my question. Yes, the hole has gotten smaller, and with its reduced size, has lost whatever made it fascinating. Nonetheless, cheers become deafening as the animal control vehicle bumps over the curb and crashes into what’s left of the front fence.
Two men between the ages of nineteen and fifty fall out of the truck. They jump up like rock stars. The crowd eats it up. The animal control guys stand on the fringes of what any of us would call “professional,” but they move without hesitation.
The tall one has a long, angular face and traces of a beard. The short one has the physique of a snowman with a large, round head resting atop a large, round middle. They both wear bandanas with an “Animal Control” logo to keep their hair in check. The bandanas are the only articles of clothing that are well-maintained, because, despite the uncertain conditions of the hole, the rest of their uniforms consist of cutoff shorts and shirts with no sleeves.
The animal control guys move quickly, like children ready to jump in a pool and then heave themselves into the narrow opening in my front yard. Immediately, the crowd goes silent.
“Heroes,” says the holy man, who, after a beautiful rendition of “O Christmas Tree”, has interested at least six more people in Jesus Christ. “Come, my brothers,” he says to his choir. They turn on flashlights and break into “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” by the road-closed sign. The voices flow like a stream of water, except “Emmanuel” rises into what sounds like “A-A-Ahh-Ahh-HOLE.”
The crowd backs them up with a rhythmic chanting of “A-hole”. They get louder and louder.
Renetta wakes up and takes a long sip of her drink. “Are they chanting ‘asshole’?” She asks.
“Sounds like it. Maybe animal control?” I shrug. The two of us lapse into sobriety when we both realize that the singing and chanting could wake the kids. Our fear subsides, and we return to being intoxicated when the choir fades. Silence captures us all.
The snowman-like animal control guy emerges from the hole. He is dirty and disheveled, but looks more or less as old as he did when he jumped in there. The tall animal control guy springs up like he jumped on an enormous trampoline. He lands on his feet and does a double cartwheel at the bottom of the now non-existent mound. He is holding the smallest animal trap.
“Raccoon,” he screams. It’s the “rock on” moment after the encore.
We all feel a little exalted, as if we’ve witnessed a miracle, but aren’t quite sure what it is. Whatever is in the trap can’t be bigger than a pound, but they sell it. The crowd is shouting “A-hole! A-hole! A-hole!” Even the choir is chanting.
“The water stopped,” Renetta says, pointing to the top of the driveway. And sure enough, all appears to be well with the world.
I don’t know how many drinks we had after that, but it was more than a reasonable amount. The last thing I remember is the crowd dispersed. The degenerate watermen put my yard back together, and the scene felt increasingly still. The digging machine covered and flattened the hole, and when the watermen drove away in their aerodynamic truck, I saw the outline of a brown suit. I was too drunk to make it out, but I’m sure it was Halloway, the man-in-brown, covering up the last traces of a miracle.
When I woke up the next morning, the hole was sodded over, and the fence fixed. Any traces of last night’s spectacular were gone. There were no candle vigils, taco trucks, moshing teenagers, or government vehicles. The Water Company sent Renetta an email stating that they had addressed the cause of the leak. Our house looked the same as it always has, more or less.
Despite my substantial hangover, standing on the front porch feels strange. Yesterday was intense, illuminating, but I can’t hold onto the memory. I want to say that it happened, Jenkins, the hole, and Halloway. I confronted a stone racketeer and tapped my fingers to choir singing Christmas carols. The crowd was shouting “A-Hole”. Or was the other way around? And despite their fanfare, the animal control guys ended up fixing everything. Maybe nothing needed fixing after all. The only thing I can’t say with certainty, the only question I can't answer, is the one R1 asks me when he wakes up.
“What’s God?” He is standing on the front porch in his pajamas, holding a stuffed bunny. I think about it for a second. I want to answer honestly, if possible.
“He could be a small raccoon that fell in the hole,” I say. “But I don’t know, probably everything.”
It is something we should all ask ourselves, without the help of the water company or in moments that unwind our lives, when the world is confusing and beautiful, and somewhere, maybe deep below the surface, is a miracle waiting for us to find it.
You can find previously published chunks of The Watermen here:
The Watermen, first chunk: Jenkins is nuts
The Watermen, second chunk: the soup (I got intoxicated and published this one on a different platform - whoops)
The Watermen, third chunk: Ever hear of Agartha?
The Watermen, fourth chunk: We call ourselves the men in brown.