Water World

Water World: The Strange Case of Martin F.
The idea, he was strongly inclined to believe, was to do good and net a profit, there
being no competition to speak of. Sulphate of copper poison SO4 or something in
some dried peas he remembered reading of in a cheap eatinghouse somewhere but
he couldn’t remember when it was or where.
–James Joyce, Ulysses.
Isn’t that so?

–James Joyce, Stephen Hero.
Ooh, that’s a long time ago. I know it was some chemical washing that we used. I
can’t remember, I think it was sodium hydroxide and then boiling in distilled water
and then filtering and drying, that sort of process.
–National Life Stories: An Oral History of British Science — Interview
of Mike Hall.
What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to

the range, admire? . . . the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of
hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen:
Isn’t that true? That’s a fact.

Unless I’m greatly mistaken. What do you think, Martin?

Well? . . . Do you remember the rest?

–James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
“What did she do then?”

–Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native.
She entered the corridor into which the laboratory door opened.
–Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary.
I looked back and she was standing at the door.

—James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
That’s so, says Martin. Or so they allege.

On arriving she drank off a large glass of water.

Good old Fresh Water Martin!

—James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
‘No, it was poison,’ he declared.

—Ivan Turgenev, Knock, Knock, Knock: A Study.
What is the poison?

It was arsenic.
Arsenic! You might have poisoned us all.

He had a portfolio full of Celtic literature in one hand, in the other a phial
marked Poison.
And then?
—Irvin D. Yalom, Love’s Executioner.
Woe, alas!
—William Shakespeare, Macbeth.
I could not save her. Waters: bitter death: lost.

Madeleine!
–Clemens Krauss and Richard Strauss, Capriccio.
Scorning an ordinary life, Martin F. (Dr. F. or simply Martin to

his friends and colleagues)—lover of Celtic literature, busty
women, cheap eatinghouses and Straussian opera—lived
quixotically in pursuit of his ideals in an elsewhere far from the
vulgarity of the commonplace, eluding prudence and practicality,
spending his days brooding on scientific and business schemes,
bathing in a sea of technological and entrepreneurial narcissism,
exuberantly carrying out seemingly absurd experiments with little
more than reason and imagination even as he embarked on a
prodigally dubious commercial venture, entertaining illusions of
attaining a moment of infinite emotional fulfillment—the
achievement of a scientific discovery that would insure his place
among the immortals of physics—and simultaneously do good
and net a profit in a bottled water swindle, inventing a method of
extracting boundless energy from a glass of heavy water (with the
aid of a car battery) by means of cold fusion, pushing hydrogen
atoms so close together that they would fuse into a single atom,
releasing an abundance of energy in the process, reshaping our
understanding of physics and changing the course of civilization
while, at the same time, aspiring to land a gold mine in arsenic-
laden water . . . and now, forsaking a transcendence that never
arrived, surrounded by the gray walls of a prison cell no larger
than a sizeable elevator, a single dim bulb hanging from the
ceiling by a cord, lit day and night, scarcely sufficient to read by,
Martin, dwelling partly in a federal correctional institution and
partly in his limpid fantastications, returned in far-flung
reflection to the years before his incarceration, immersing himself
in thoughts and images—a mental aggregate suspended in a
bounding main of cerebral ether—that thread through obscure
passageways lined with the residues of abandoned passions,
obsessing on his years in the University of California’s forward-
thinking nuclear fusion laboratory as co-grantee of a top-secret
federal program code-named Water-World that endeavored to
achieve nuclear fusion in a glass of water; aggrieved by his ill-
starred association with Stanley P., a self-deceiving part-time
hustler and Martin’s erstwhile co-grantee and conspiratorial
business partner; agonizing over his fruitless professional quest
for scientific recognition to say nothing of the stigma of financial
washout; and haunted by his failed romantic liaison with the red-
haired Madeleine C. . . . then that “all-nameless hour” on the day
that changed his life, 9:00 a.m., Saturday, September 4, 1976,
when ten FBI agents, accompanied by four Santa Cruz police
officers, appeared at the front door of his ocean view residence—
said agents and officers awkwardly (and with bemused contempt)
interrupting Martin’s gratifying encounter with an amply-
endowed, fair-haired pornographic film star—to execute a search
warrant issued by a magistrate judge based on probable cause that
Martin (having absconded with, and retained in his beach house
basement, documents relating to hush-hush nuclear fusion
experiments in violation of The Espionage Act; operated a
ludicrously sordid bottled-water business that violated the Clean
Water Act; and might have been involved in the suspicious
arsenic death of Madeleine, a one-time typist in his office)
committed a shitload of felonies that would ultimately lead to a
decades-long imprisonment, following a court case and
subsequent appeals that continued for ten years, enslaved by his
dependence on a team of five lawyers, hitchhiking the road from
prosperity to bankruptcy and financial ruin . . . then lying on his
back, with his hands behind his head, once again lapsing into
sullen grievance, delving through time to the beginnings of
Nevada Springs (his tapped-out bottled water business), the now
defunct enterprise that—to highlight the incremental audacity of
the ultimately unprofitable aquatic misadventure—drew
groundwater from the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada
mountains (water that contained naturally occurring arsenic)
(Stanley’s idea), used sand filters to reduce the concentration of
arsenic so the water would meet federal drinking water standards
(Stanley’s idea), back-flushed the filters with a sodium hydroxide
solution, which generated thousands of gallons of arsenic-
contaminated wastewater (Stanley’s idea), and discharged said
arsenic-contaminated wastewater into a manmade pond, “the
Arsenic Pond” (Stanley’s idea), landing Martin and Stanley in
federal prison on, among other crimes, a conviction on the
charge of illegally storing and transporting arsenic-laced
wastewater . . . and, presently, at this juncture, denuded of his
dignity as well as his discretion to make choices, but fervidly
invoking the resources of memory and nostalgia to shape a
voluptuous inner calm (“the English say cawm”), the opera-
intoxicated Martin, preserving some measure of personal freedom
in defiance of the conditions of overwhelming government
constraint, guarded his sanity by daily and systematically going
through the orchestral score of Capriccio, Strauss’s final lyric
drama (which he knew by heart)—whose central trope weighs the
relative merits of words and music, asking the question, “What is
more important in opera, the lyrics or the melody? . . . and, at this
moment of tranquil disengagement, Martin reached under the
narrow mattress resting on the prison-issue metal frame bed in his
cell to retrieve and read a letter he had written to Madeleine years
earlier, but had never sent:
Dear Madeleine,
I often think of that day at the beach when I ran into you and we went
to the movies afterward. I had a hard time getting up, because I was tired
from the day before. While I was shaving, I wondered what I was going
to do and I decided to go for a swim. There were lots of young people. In
the water I ran into you. That was some time after you left our office. I’d
had a thing for you at the time. You did too, I think. But you’d left soon
afterwards and we didn’t have the time. I helped you onto a boat and as
I did, I brushed against your breasts. I was still in the water when you
were already lying flat on your stomach on the boat. You turned toward
me. Your hair was in your eyes and you were laughing. I hoisted myself
up next to you. It was nice, and, sort of joking around, I let my head fall
back and rest on your stomach. You didn’t say anything so I left it there.
I had the whole sky in my eyes and it was blue and gold. On the back of
my neck I could feel your heart beating softly. We lay on the boat for a
long time, half asleep. When the sun got too hot, you dove off and I
followed. I caught up with you, put my arm around your waist, and we
swam together. You laughed the whole time. On the dock, while we were
drying ourselves off, you said, ”I’m darker than you.” I asked you if you
wanted to go to the movies that evening. You laughed again and told me
there was a Woody Allen movie you’d like to see. The movie was funny in
parts, but otherwise it was just too stupid. You had your leg pressed
against mine. Do you remember? I was fondling your breasts. Toward the
end of the show, I gave you a kiss, but not a good one. You came back to
my place. When I woke up, you had gone. I remembered that it was
Sunday. 1/
I shall always think of you—always, Madeleine, always.
Yours,
Martin
P.S. The other day Stanley said to me, “Marty, you know the story of the
Englishman who asked the professor, ‘what’s more important in water,
the hydrogen or the oxygen?’” What a tool.
___________________________________
1. The letter to Madeleine is a paraphrase of a passage from The Stranger by Albert
Camus.

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Water World: The Strange Case of Martin F.

Isn’t that so?

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to

Isn’t that true? That’s a fact.

Unless I’m greatly mistaken. What do you think, Martin?

Well? . . . Do you remember the rest?

“What did she do then?”

I looked back and she was standing at the door.

That’s so, says Martin. Or so they allege.

On arriving she drank off a large glass of water.

Good old Fresh Water Martin!

‘No, it was poison,’ he declared.

What is the poison?

Arsenic! You might have poisoned us all.

I could not save her. Waters: bitter death: lost.

Scorning an ordinary life, Martin F. (Dr. F. or simply Martin to

I shall always think of you—always, Madeleine, always.

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