“So, after thinking about it for a while,” he told me as we spoke in the museum courtyard, when I asked him what had changed his mind, “I realized, sadly, that this speech was the last good thing I’d done.” He shrugged his shoulders, popped an hors d’oeuvre into his mouth, and looked like he was about to say something else, then thought better of it, and then looked over and past my shoulder and said, “Uh-oh. Looks like they’re draining the pool now.”
III.
When I first met Karen Long, two days before the museum opening party, she had an easy and relaxed air about her. Karen is the events planner for the museum, and she was giving me a tour of the exhibits and party space and laying out for me the itinerary for the opening night celebration. She walked slowly and talked very quickly, and for a while I worried that she would finish telling me about the exhibits long before she had finished showing them to me, and I wondered if she was perhaps more nervous than she had been letting on.
“This is my first big event for the museum,” she told me when she met me in the front hall. Then she laughed and said, “Not that I haven’t done a ton of other big events.” And then, a few minutes later, as she was demonstrating an interactive world model for me (“For the kids, you know, who love this kind of hands-on stuff. See? Here? If you push Japan down with your foot, how it stays down? But if you push Spain down, it pops right back up? We’ll provide galoshes, of course.”), she interrupted herself: “Not that there could be another event I could have planned for the museum, since this is the opening night, right?” Then she slapped me playfully on my shoulder.
“Now I’ll take you to see our exhibit of relief trailers. I think you’ll like it. It’s quite impressive.”
Before she took her current position with the museum, Karen worked in publicity and events planning for the Walt Disney Company, and before that she worked as an intern in the administration’s communications office, where, briefly, she worked for Owen Mitchell before Mitchell left.
She deftly led me through the museum and its exhibits and answered almost all of my questions, knowledgeably and smoothly, but would not confirm or deny the rumor that the museum wasn’t able to find anyone from Old Africa to attend or speak at the opening. Instead she said, smiling her wide and toothy smile, “We’re very excited, you know, about the delegation from Old Japan. And of course the representatives from Costa Rica. Or maybe it’s Honduras. I’ll have to check my notes.”
The first time I saw Karen the night of the opening, she was standing over the pool next to Cornish, watching as the water drained out of it. I walked over to her, not sure exactly how I would phrase the question I wanted to ask her, namely, How’s it going? Or, for that matter, any other question I might ask her, since the answer to those questions—Is the pool working all right?, Is it true that the waitstaff is almost out of champagne?, and Is it true that a number of the bottles of champagne have gone missing? — seemed either obvious or, in light of the situation, mean-spirited. Not to mention that she would, in each case, I was certain of it, decline to comment.
It didn’t matter as she saw me coming toward her, and before I could even say hello, she asked me, “Do you know anything about fixing hydraulics?” I said no. “Then I can’t use you right now, but thanks for your kind effort to be helpful.”
I smiled at this and then asked her if it would be okay if I shadowed her for a few minutes.
“Really?” she asked. “Watching me watch this pool drain is newsworthy?” That was all she said before she turned back to look at the pool, which had almost completely drained, and so I took her nonanswer as a yes, and for five more minutes, the three of us — Karen, Cornish, and myself — stood there and waited as the pool dried up. Then Cornish stepped over the wall and got on his hands and knees, the wet spots at the bottom of the pool turning his gray wool trousers black, and he opened a gear box, or something like a gear box, and after another few minutes, he said, “Oh. Okay. I think I’ve got it.”
“You sure?”
“Oh, yeah. Won’t be but another ten or fifteen minutes.”
“Fine,” Karen said. “I’ll leave you to it.” Then she looked at me and shook her head, with disgust or anger or frustration, I couldn’t tell, just as I couldn’t tell if this was directed at me or at the situation or at Cornish or at the world at large. Then she walked past me quickly enough to make me hurry behind her, but not so fast that I couldn’t have kept up.
Over her shoulder, she said, “I’m sure you’ve heard about the champagne by now.”
I feigned ignorance, and she stopped, and I nearly ran into her. She looked me square in the eyes, and the beginnings of a smirk or grin made one side of her mouth twist up. Karen Long has piercing blue eyes and pale, pale blond hair that she often uses to cover her face, which is a soft, oval face brought into sharp relief by a long, not unattractive, angular nose. It seemed for a second, as she stared at me, that she might punch me in the face. That, or lean in to kiss me on the mouth. It was an unsettling look, and then it passed, and then she said, “And you no doubt know that ten bottles of champagne went missing entirely?”
I nodded, afraid of what she might do if I tried lying again.
“Well. That’s what I’m doing right now,” she said, “looking for those bottles or the people who took them. If you’re going to follow me around, you might as well know what I’m doing so you don’t think I’m just wandering aimlessly.”
I nodded again and said, “Sure thing,” and said, “After you,” which was when the commotion started, and the three men with the water hose showed up.
“Never mind,” she said. “I think maybe we found our guys.”
IV.
The general consensus, for a long time, was that Africa was too big to sink. By the time Africa sank, we had already lost Central America and some of Australia and all of Japan. I had been in the city only a few months after we lost Japan, and I had started working my first job as a reporter around that time, too. In my office, a few of the reporters and editors started a betting pool, and to make me feel more at home, I suppose, they invited me to join the pool, and before I fully understood what we were betting on, I said okay. Then they asked me what I thought would go next and how much money I wanted to bet on that. It was fairly crass. I thought so at the time, and I think so now, but at the time, thinking so, I still placed a bet. Most people figured somewhere in Europe. Spain, maybe, or Portugal, or the British Isles. Especially the British Isles, as those seemed ripe for sinking. A couple of people figured Greenland would go next, and one guy put a couple of dollars on North America, or maybe just on any part of North America, Nova Scotia, maybe, or Alaska, because he said the odds were too good to pass up, but even he didn’t put any money on Africa. In fact, when they were making the pool sheet, no one even thought to include Africa on it, not the whole continent, anyway, because everyone knew. To be safe, then, I told them to add Africa and that I’d put money on Africa. They told me I should just bet on South Africa, maybe, or Egypt, or Madagascar, which, at least, was an island. I made them give me odds on Africa, on the whole thing, and then I put down a quarter and that was the only thing I bet, and they rolled their eyes at me, the rest of the reporters and editors in on this pool, and they acted like I was the biggest jackass they had seen, and this made me defensive, and so I said to them, hardly serious at all, “If you think I’m an asshole now, you just wait until after it sinks and I win.”