The Watermen, fourth chunk
We call ourselves The Men In Brown
Kuf here. I’m half sober, but I’m ready to publish the fourth chunk of Happy’s story, The Watermen. We learn a little more about Happy in these scenes. A crowd forms outside his house, and at least one standout weirdo is present. Of course, none of this matters if he and Renetta can’t get the kids to bed at a reasonable hour.
What I like about this chunk - if I can give Happy any credit for writing it - is that we see him moving all over the place, going back in time, in and out of his house; failing to remember a small detail from his the past, and then, confronted with the nonsense in his front yard, trying to form a picture of Suburban America that makes sense.
If humans have a habit of being everywhere all at once, then Happy personifies humanity. He tries to package everything he sees, feels, and understands, as well as what he doesn’t see, feel, and understand, into his Suburban America - even though I have the feeling he is skeptical of his Suburban America.
Anyway, the story almost reaches its peak weirdness in this chunk. I say almost because I’m curating the final part for publication as we speak. Keep reading…
-Kuf
Now, the story…
The Watermen, fourth chunk: We call ourselves The Men in Brown
I have lapses. I wouldn’t call these medically concerning, but I haven’t told Renetta about them. Sometimes, I black out for seconds or minutes (or longer) and come back with lucid images that resemble lived experience. For example, an earlier memory of Jenkins comes up like an adolescent hard-on. He got lost in our old apartment. The details bleed from moment to moment in a haze that is just outside my reach.
Renetta and I once belonged to Urban America, an ecosystem that many consider more dangerous and beautiful than Suburban America. In Urban America, cars clog the streets, but nobody who lives there owns one. Coffee shops function as home offices for legions of unemployed job seekers, while underpasses transform into encampments for homeless communities. Space is a varied and unpredictable construct.
The density of Urban America bends you into it. For example, urban dwellings are vast abodes of openness that get smaller gradually, until they are small enough to wear like a jacket. While urban inhabitants can survive in the vastness of small spaces for years or even decades, the presence of children shrinks your perception until your apartment fits like the jeans you wore in high school. As it turns out, a child is an astonishing turn of events that diminishes one’s capacity to survive in Urban America.
I remember our apartment life — getting lost in the space before it shrank. When R1 was born, our apartment became uninhabitable, what we would call youth-sized, forcing us to migrate to the far reaches of Suburban America.
I recall Jenkins, but only as a footnote with just enough impact to advance the plot. I would not have thought about him ever again if he hadn’t returned to this story, exploring the depths of the underground and now fighting for his life in the hospital. Meanwhile, my driveway leaks, and visions of a mysterious underworld dance like an unwanted Christmas poem in my head.
A crowd has formed outside my house since Jenkins reemerged from the hole. You would think that I’m sheltering a rock star in my garage. Neighbors walking their dogs stop to ask what the fuss is about. Cars park in front of the road-closed sign to take a closer look at emergency vehicles and their flashing lights. Teenagers hold up their phones and wave them in a meme that has grown into a YouTube tribute (to whom or what remains unclear). A food truck (mind you, I’ve never seen a food truck in my part of Suburbian America) parks a block away, forming a long line for tacos. I can hear the ice cream man in the distance. Fuck that guy.
I want to tell the crowd that a man almost lost his life in the space below my yard (or saw something that made him accept his life); that whatever exists in that hole may change the world as we (or I) know it.
But I don’t speak of this. I don’t need to. The crowd seeks entertainment. They want to escape the vicissitudes of suburban expectations. Even now, my biggest worry is that Renetta won’t get the kids to bed on time.
I hear her roar from R1’s bedroom. The children are spinning up before bedtime, and we might only have minutes before the inside of the house resembles the outside. Time is running out. I survey the scene, looking for the person in charge, when I notice the guy in the brown suit.
It’s funny how the mind highlights what doesn’t blend in. Take a crowd of one hundred people with their idiosyncrasies and points of focus, and without knowing or understanding why, you spot the oddball: the out-of-place dickweed who holds your attention when he should get lost in the background. That is the guy in the brown suit.
He looks like someone who sustained a concussion and lost the ability to have normal discourse. He is shorter than average but not short. He is wearing a brown suit from a department store chain that went out of business years ago. His mustache is thinner on the right side of his face than on the left. The way he stares at me, I’m obliged to talk to him.
“Can I help you?”
He flashes his badge too fast for me to read it. “Holloway,” he says. “I’m a geologist.”
“Waterman?” I ask.
“No. No.” He pauses like he is waiting for his faculties to come back. “I’m the special unit - uhh, special forces - of the water company. We answer to no one.”
I didn’t know geologists carried badges or that the water company had a “Delta Force”, but today is a day for awareness, I guess. I lead Halloway to the base of the giant mound in my front yard to explain that it used to be my lawn.
“We want to know what is happening down there,” I say. I pick up one of the smooth rocks and hand it to him. Startled, he slaps it out of my hands, shattering it into a million pieces on the ground.
“Don’t touch what you don’t understand,” he says. His voice projects like he’s speaking through a mouthful of water. With great effort, he bends to one knee and takes an oversized magnifying glass from his coat pocket. He looks like a cartoon the way he examines the stone in his gloved hand, and for a minute, I think he is going to break into song.
He doesn't do anything but look more disturbed with each passing second; he crouches over the rocks. It’s getting dark outside, and I don’t think he can see very well. He pulls me aside, not too far from the other watermen watching TV on their phones.
“It’s probably nothing,” he says. “On the other hand.” I can barely make out what he’s saying. He pauses mid-sentence, like whatever words he would use are no longer relevant. His moustache is more uneven than I first realized.
“You think it could be something?”
“It may be something, although.” Again, the pause. “It may be nothing.” He leans closer, as if he’ll whisper a secret that will change my world view, but then he speaks so loudly that the other water men look up from their phones. “Are you familiar with the lost civilization of Lumuria?”
“The what?” I keep abreast of historical anomalies, myths, and legends. I daydream in the subteranean, but Lumuria is too much, even for me. This guy is just your run-of-the-mill kook.
“I don’t have time to get into it,” he says. “Our analysts tell us that you might be susceptible to the truth, so here I am.” He begins to shout. His voice is unmistakable when he shouts. “The Lumurians thrived tens of thousands of years ago. Long story short.”
“What, long story short?” I ask. “You can’t begin a story with outrageous bullshit and then cut off the details.”
“Look,” he says, visibly agitated. “Your hole isn’t the only one on my schedule. I have at least three more holes to plug after yours.” He pulls a flask out of his coat pocket and takes a swig. “Anyway. The Lumurians thrived. Lost a war to another advanced civilization. The world ended, and the survivors of Lumaria went underground and started what I like to call “the downtown”. He points to the ground.
“Most geologists don’t believe in underground civilizations.” He paces beside the waterman’s aerodynamic truck. “Most of my colleagues don’t believe in anything. However -” he holds up his thumb and points it at me dramatically. “I would argue that an advanced civilization has coexisted with the surface world for thousands of years. We live in peaceful coexistence, mostly, and since the Treaty of 1911, the water company recognizes this underground nation as sovereign. We call them the Nation of Agartha now.”
“And? You want me to go down there?” I ask.
He smiles. His mustache has gone perpendicular. “Of course not.” He turns to the other two water men and then back to me. “What happened to your friend?”
“I’m the customer here.”
The other watermen don’t look up from their phones. I am the only one listening to this weirdo.
“My job, as part of the water company’s special unit, is to stop contact between Suburban America and the Nation of Agartha.”
“You Men In Black?” I’ve watched a YouTube video about them. Halloway fits the profile.
He spits on the ground. “Those phonies. They think they’re sooo important because they’re in charge of UFOs.” He pulls me aside so he can talk to me in private. “We call ourselves The Men In Brown,” he says in the voice of a twelve-year-old boy claiming to have seen real boobs once.
I’m increasingly suspicious of this guy’s authority. “Brown? Why brown?”
“Because realities can only coexist when they are separate. The more you know, the more you’ll want to know. This creates an instability that threatens the very fabric of society and culture.” He takes another swing from his flask. “Here’s what I’m telling you. Go inside. Put your kids to bed. Get these lazy fucks to fill your hole. Then work your nine-to-five job for the next twenty years. Pay for the kids’ college. Go to Europe a few times and call it a life.”
Halloway flashes his badge at the useless watermen.
“I am a special unit, “ he says. “I believe a lone fox, or possibly a raccoon, attacked your colleague. A wild animal is probably causing all this hole stuff.”
The other watermen look up from their phones. “Whoa now. You say a wild animal got Jenkins?” They are giddy and energetic. The mention of a raccoon sheds new light on the situation. “Call animal control,” they say. “We can’t work with wild animals down there.”
“It could be something,” says Holloway. “It could be nothing.” He hands me his card. It’s a black rectangle with nothing on it. “I wish you luck. In the meantime, I would advise to,” he says, leaning close to my face, then speaking at a decibel level that will probably damage my hearing, “be suburban.” He fades into the crowd, which is remarkable given the asymmetry of his mustache.
On the front porch, my wife sends a distress signal.
******
R2 runs in circles, occasionally stopping to look out the window. “Ice cream,” he says.
“Son of a bitch.” The ice cream man has been public enemy number one since we moved to Suburban America. His little jingle transforms the children into sugar-craving zombies. When the jingle plays, we have no choice but to buy ice cream. “The truck is closed,” I say before turning my attention to R1, who, from the look on his face, is more interested in explanations than ice cream. I don’t blame him. I also want to know the truth about the hole, but Renetta gives me her “please censor yourself” face. She is an attorney and much better at making an argument.
“The waterman went into the hole,” I start. “He hurt himself, so the ambulance came to take him away.”
“To the hospital,” Renetta says.
“Is he really hurt?” R1 asks.
“No,” I say. I look to Renetta for support, but she magically blends the truth with her eyes. No one knows what happened in the hole, but I can tell you that Jenkins did not trip and age twenty years. “He was wearing a helmet,” I say. As a parent, it’s essential to promote child safety wherever possible. “That’s why it’s important to wear helmets.”
“Those men work for the water company,” Renetta says. “They have tools to fix the pipes. The man got a little hurt trying to fix the pipe, but he is okay.”
“Because of the helmet,” I say.
But R1 is good at asking questions I cannot answer. I wish I could explain the contradictions, the irreconcilable events, and oddballs that fray us at the edges of our lives. But how can I boil this down for a five-year-old? He knows my ineptitude.
“I opened the window up,” he says. This must have been when Renetta was chasing R2. Those guys said,” he points to the people accumulating around the vehicles in front of our house. God is in the hole.” He looks at me, Renetta, and back at me.
I look at Renetta, then at R1, and then back at Renetta. “Everything is fine,” I say. “They said a dog’s in the hole.”
“A dog?” His little head rattles in confusion. He wonders how a living animal fell into the space below our house.
“That’s right,” I say, looking very matter-of-fact. “It happens all the time. It’s fine, probably fine. They are calling animal control. Also, stay away from the hole and always wear a helmet.”
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)