Part I: Bikini Bottom

THE CHAOS of a Bikini Bottom winter storm coming through was palpable. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a faint light, a cooling star. Wave after wave of turmoil. Trees fidgeting, temperatures dropping, the entire underwater culture of things coming to an end. No fish in the yards here. Shadows lengthened on yellowing seaweed. Red coral and green coral and white coral rained pearls on houses with no rent. Storm windows shook in the empty bedrooms. And the drone and hiccup of a shell dryer, the nasal conflict of a fin blower, the ripening of local kelp in a paper bag, the smell of the seawater with which SpongeBob had cleaned the paintbrush from his morning painting of the love seat.

Three in the afternoon was a time of danger in these elderly suburbs of Jellyfish Fields. SpongeBob had awoken in the great blue chair in which he'd been sleeping since lunch. He'd had his nap and there would be no local news until five o'clock. Two empty hours were a sinus in which infections bred. He struggled to his feet and stood by the jellyfish net, listening in vain for Patrick.

Ringing throughout the house was an alarm bell that no one but SpongeBob and Patrick could hear directly. It was the alarm bell of anxiety. It was like one of those big cast-iron dishes with an electric clapper that send schoolchildren into the street in fire drills. By now it had been ringing for so many hours that the Starfish no longer heard the message of "bell ringing" but, as with any sound that continues for so long that you have the leisure to learn its component sounds (as with any word you stare at until it resolves itself into a string of dead letters), instead heard a clapper rapidly striking a metallic resonator, not a pure tone but a granular sequence of percussions with a keening overlay of overtones; ringing for so many days that it simply blended into the background except at certain early-morning hours when one or the other of them awoke in a sweat and realized that a bell had been ringing in their heads for as long as they could remember; ringing for so many months that the sound had given way to a kind of metasound whose rise and fall was not the beating of compression waves but the much, much slower waxing and waning of their consciousness of the sound. Which consciousness was particularly acute when the weather itself was in an anxious mood. Then SpongeBob and Patrick - he on his knees in the dining room opening drawers, SpongeBob in the basement surveying the disastrous jellyfish net - each felt near to exploding with anxiety.

The anxiety of coupons, in a drawer containing candles in designer winter colors. The coupons were bundled in a rubber band, and Patrick was realizing that their expiration dates (often jauntily circled in red by the manufacturer) lay months and even years in the past: that these hundred-odd coupons, whose total face value exceeded sixty dollars (potentially one hundred twenty dollars at the Goofy Goober's that doubled coupons), had all gone bad. Bubble soap, sixty cents off. Starfish oil, a dollar off. The dates were not even close. The dates were historical. The alarm bell had been ringing for years.

He pushed the coupons back in among the candles and shut the drawer. He was looking for a letter that had come by Registered mail some days ago. SpongeBob had heard the mailfish knock on the door and had shouted, "Patrick! Patrick!" so loudly that he couldn't hear him shouting back, "SpongeBob, I'm getting it!" He'd continued to shout his name, coming closer and closer, and because the sender of the letter was the Kelp Corporation, 24 East Industrial Trench, Bikini Bottom, and because there were aspects of the Kelp situation that Patrick knew about and hoped that SpongeBob didn't, he quickly stashed the letter somewhere within fifteen feet of the front door. SpongeBob emerged from the basement bellowing like a piece of machinery, "There's somebody at the door!" and Patrick fairly screamed, "The mailfish! The mailfish!" and SpongeBob shook his head at the complexity of it all. Patrick felt sure that his own head would clear if only he didn't have to wonder, every five minutes, what SpongeBob was up to. But, try as he might, he couldn't get SpongeBob interested in life. When he encouraged him to take up his cooking again, SpongeBob looked at him as if he'd lost his mind. When he asked whether there wasn't some yard work he could do, SpongeBob said his legs hurt. When he reminded SpongeBob that the husbands of his friends all had hobbies (Sandy Cheeks her karate, Mr. Krabs his money counting, Squidward his art), SpongeBob acted as if Patrick were trying to distract him from some great labor of his. And what was that labor? Repainting the porch furniture? SpongeBob had been repainting the love seat since the first day of summer. Patrick seemed to recall that the last time SpongeBob painted the furniture he'd done the love seat in two hours. Now he went to his workshop morning after morning, and after a month Patrick ventured in to see how he was doing and found that all SpongeBob had painted of the love seat was the legs.

SpongeBob seemed to wish that Patrick would go away. He said that the brush had dried out, that that was what was taking so long. He said that scraping wicker was like trying to peel a blueberry. He said that there were crickets. Patrick felt a shortness of breath then, but perhaps it was only the smell of gasoline and of the dampness of the workshop that smelled like urine (but could not possibly be urine). Patrick fled upstairs to look for the letter from Kelp.

Six days a week several pounds of mail came through the slot in the front door, and since nothing incidental was allowed to pile up downstairs—since the fiction of living in this house was that no one lived there—Patrick faced a substantial tactical challenge. He didn't think of himself as a guerrilla, but a guerrilla was what he was. By day he ferried material from depot to depot, often just a step ahead of the governing force. By night, beneath a charming but too-dim sconce at a too-small table in the breakfast nook, he staged various actions: paid bills, balanced checkbooks, attempted to decipher Medicare co-payment records and make sense of a threatening Third Notice from a medical lab that demanded immediate payment of $0.22 while simultaneously showing an account balance of $0.00 carried forward and thus indicating that he owed nothing and in any case offering no address to which remittance might be made. It would happen that the First and Second Notices were underground somewhere, and because of the constraints under which Patrick waged his campaign he had only the dimmest sense of where those other Notices might be on any given evening. He might suspect, perhaps, the family-room closet, but the governing force, in the person of SpongeBob, would be watching a news show at a volume loud enough to keep him awake, and he had every light in the family room burning. If Patrick were to open the closet door, he might be met with a pile of falling catalogues, House Eeautifuh magazines, and miscellaneous Merrill Lynch documents, incurring SpongeBob's anger. Additionally, there was a chance that the Notices wouldn't be there at all, as SpongeBob conducted random raids on Patrick's depots, threatening to throw everything away if Patrick didn't take care of it. However, Patrick was too busy trying to avoid these raids to properly organize everything, and as a result, the random Nordstrom shopping bag hidden behind a dust ruffle with a semi-detached plastic handle contained a jumbled collection of items—old issues of Good Housekeeping, black and white photos of Patrick from the 1940s, recipes written on acidic paper, current monthly bills for telephone and gas, a detailed First Notice from the medical lab instructing co-payers to ignore any subsequent bills for less than fifty cents, a complimentary cruise ship photo of Patrick and SpongeBob wearing leis and sipping coconut drinks, and the only remaining copies of their children's birth certificates.

Despite SpongeBob being Patrick's supposed enemy, it was the house that they both lived in that made Patrick a guerrilla. The furniture in the house didn't allow for any clutter, and included Ethan Allen chairs and tables, Spode and Waterford in the breakfront, and mandatory ficuses and Norfolk pines. There were also copies of Architectural Digest spread out on a glass-topped coffee table and various touristic plunder items like enamelware from China and a Viennese music box that Patrick would occasionally wind up and open the lid of out of a sense of duty and mercy. The tune was "Strangers in the Night."

Unfortunately, Patrick didn't have the temperament to manage such a house, and SpongeBob didn't have the neurological capability. SpongeBob's cries of rage when he found evidence of Patrick's guerrilla actions, like a Nordstrom bag unexpectedly discovered on the basement stairs, were the cries of a government that was no longer able to govern. SpongeBob had recently developed a habit of making his printing calculator spit out long strings of meaningless eight-digit numbers. After spending a significant portion of an afternoon trying to calculate the social security payments for the cleaning sponge and ending up with four different figures, he finally just settled on one of them ($635.78) which he managed to come up with twice (the correct amount was $70.00), Patrick staged a nighttime raid on his filing cabinet and relieved it of all tax files, which might have improved household efficiency had the files not found their way into a Nordstrom bag with some misleadingly ancient Good Housekeepings concealing the more germane documents underneath, which casualty of war led to the cleaning woman's filling out the forms herself, with Patrick merely writing the checks and SpongeBob shaking his head at the complexity of it all.

It's the fate of most Ping-Pong tables in home basements in Bikini Bottom eventually to serve the ends of other, more desperate games. After SpongeBob retired he appropriated the eastern end of the table for his banking and correspondence. At the western end was the portable color TV on which he'd intended to watch the local news while sitting in his great blue chair but which was now fully engulfed by Good Housekeepings and the seasonal candy tins and baroque but cheaply made candle holders that Patrick never quite found time to transport to the Nearly New consignment shop. The Ping-Pong table was the one field on which the civil war raged openly. At the eastern end SpongeBob's calculator was ambushed by floral print pot-holders and souvenir coasters from the Epcot Center and a device for pitting cherries which Patrick had owned for thirty years and never used, while he, in turn, at the western end, for absolutely no reason that Patrick could ever fathom, ripped to pieces a wreath made of omecones and spray-painted filberts and brazil nuts.

To the east of the Ping-Pong table was SpongeBob's workshop, now home to a colony of mute, dust-colored crickets. When startled, they would scatter across the room like marbles, some of them misfiring at crazy angles, others toppling over with the weight of their own protoplasm. The workshop was covered in the gray dust of evil spells and cobwebs of enchantment, and filled with jars of exotic rhodium and sinister cadmium and stalwart bismuth. There was a quad-ruled notebook with the latest entry in SpongeBob's hand dating back fifteen years. The only dust-free objects in the room were the wicker love seat, a can of Rust-Oleum and some brushes, and a couple of Yuban coffee cans that Patrick chose not to believe were filling up with SpongeBob's urine.

To the west of the Ping-Pong table was SpongeBob's great blue chair. The chair was overstuffed and made of leather, but it smelled like the inside of a Lexus. It was the only major purchase SpongeBob had ever made without Patrick's approval. When SpongeBob retired from his job, he wanted something really comfortable and a monument to his need for comfort. So, he went to a furniture store and picked out a chair so big that even a big man would get lost in it, and because the blue of its leather vaguely matched a blue Chinese rug they owned, Patrick had no choice but to suffer its deployment in the family room.

Soon, SpongeBob's hands were spilling decaffeinated coffee on the rug's beige expanse, and wild grandchildren were leaving berries and crayons underfoot. Patrick began to feel that the rug was a mistake and that in trying to save money, he had made many mistakes like this. He reached the point of thinking it would have been better to buy no rug than to buy this rug. Finally, as SpongeBob's naps deepened, Patrick grew bolder. He reconceived the family room in greens and yellows and ordered new fabrics. A paperhanger came, and SpongeBob, who was napping temporarily in the dining room, leaped to his feet like a man from a bad dream.

"You're redecorating again?" SpongeBob asked.

"It's my own money," Patrick answered. "This is how I'm spending it."

"And what about the money I made? What about the work I did?" SpongeBob argued.

"That rug is nearly ten years old, and we'll never get the coffee stains out," Patrick said.

SpongeBob gestured at his blue chair, which under the paperhanger's plastic dropcloths looked like something you might deliver to a power station on a flatbed truck. SpongeBob was trembling with incredulity, unable to believe that Patrick could have forgotten this crushing refutation of his arguments and this overwhelming impediment to his plans. It was as if all the unfreedom in which he had spent his life were embodied in this six-year-old but essentially brand-new chair. SpongeBob was grinning, his face aglow with the awful perfection of his logic.

"And what about the chair, then?" SpongeBob said. "What about the chair?"

Patrick looked at the chair and his expression was merely pained. "I never liked that chair," Patrick said.

This was probably the most terrible thing Patrick could have said to SpongeBob. The chair was the only sign he had ever given of having a personal vision of the future. Patrick's words filled SpongeBob with such sorrow that he felt pity for the chair, solidarity with it, and astonished grief at its betrayal. SpongeBob pulled off the dropcloth and sank into the chair's arms and fell asleep. (It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.)

When it became clear that both the rug and SpongeBob's chair had to go, the rug was easily shed. Patrick advertised in the free local paper and got a nervous jellyfish of a woman who was still making mistakes and whose fifties came out of her purse in a disorderly roll that she unpeeled and flattened with shaking fingers.

But the chair? The chair was a monument and a symbol and could not be parted from SpongeBob. It could only be relocated, and so it went into the basement and SpongeBob followed. And so in the house of the SquarePants-Stars, as in Bikini Bottom, as in the undersea world as a whole, life came to be lived underground. Patrick could hear SpongeBob upstairs now, opening and closing drawers. He became agitated whenever they were going to see their children. Seeing their children was the only thing he seemed to care about anymore. In the streaklessly clean windows of the dining room there was chaos. The berserk wind, the negating shadows. Patrick had looked everywhere for the letter from the Kelp Corporation, and he couldn't find it.

SpongeBob was standing in the master bedroom wondering why the drawers of his dresser were open, who had opened them, whether he had opened them himself. He couldn't help blaming Patrick for his confusion. For witnessing it into existence. For existing, himself, as a starfish who could have opened these drawers.

"SpongeBob? What are you doing?"

He turned to the doorway where Patrick had appeared. He began a sentence: "I am-" but when he was taken by surprise, every sentence became an adventure in the woods; as soon as he could no longer see the light of the clearing from which he'd entered, he would realize that the crumbs he'd dropped for bearings had been eaten by birds, silent deft darting things which he couldn't quite see in the darkness but which were so numerous and swarming in their hunger that it seemed as if they were the darkness, as if the darkness weren't uniform, weren't an absence of light but a teeming and corpuscular thing, and indeed when as a studious teenager he'd encountered the word "crepuscular" in McKay's Treasury of English Verse, the corpuscles of biology had bled into his understanding of the word, so that for his entire adult life he'd seen in twilight a corpuscularity, as of the graininess of the high-speed film necessary for photography under conditions of low ambient light, as of a kind of sinister decay; and hence the panic of a man betrayed deep in the woods whose darkness was the darkness of starlings blotting out the sunset or black ants storming a dead opossum, a darkness that didn't just exist but actively consumed the bearings that he'd sensibly established for himself, lest he be lost; but in the instant of realizing he was lost, time became marvelously slow and he discovered hitherto unguessed eternities in the space between one word and the next, or rather he became trapped in that space between words and could only stand and watch as time sped on without him, the thoughtless boyish part of him crashing on out of sight blindly through the woods while he, trapped, the grownup SpongeBob, watched in oddly impersonal suspense to see if the panic-stricken little boy might, despite no longer knowing where he was or at what point he'd entered the woods of this sentence, still manage to blunder into the clearing where Patrick was waiting for him, unaware of any woods—"packing my suitcase," he heard himself say. This sounded right. Verb, possessive, noun. Here was a suitcase in front of him, an important confirmation. He'd betrayed nothing.

But Patrick had spoken again. The audiologist had told SpongeBob that he had a mild hearing impairment. SpongeBob looked at Patrick with a confused expression on his face.

"It's Thursday," Patrick said, speaking louder. "We're not leaving until Saturday."

"Saturday!" SpongeBob repeated.

Patrick scolded SpongeBob, and for a moment the crepuscular birds disappeared from SpongeBob's mind. However, outside, the wind had blown out the sun and it was getting very cold.

*