The force of the initial impact was against one eyebrow. One shoulder was smashed down against his jaw. One arm was flung back, the other pinned beneath his ribs. One leg folded under him while the other was flung out in a spectacular dance move. In short, Swan’s body was disarranged and mangled, tossed in a heap along with its frightened thoughts.
After a long period of painful bucking, the vehicle reached a smoother surface, accelerated for several minutes and stopped so abruptly that his body slammed against the front wall.
The next transfer was just as brutal. Light burst in very briefly as the rear doors opened. Then, along with the plank beneath him, he was ejected from the ambulance into a long cylindrical capsule.
With his body in a newly tangled configuration, the open end of the capsule banged shut and he was shuttled about again until it collided with another unyielding object. The capsule opened and he was pushed, by means of a piston, into a shiny metallic box, just barely large enough to accommodate his contorted body and its agony.
The burnished surfaces of the box gradually darkened. There was a short interval, followed by a sickening drop and Swan, inside this newly dark container, along with Ottala inside of him, fell together. They plummeted downward for a very long time, accelerating to such a degree that he could feel his center of gravity start to inch upward, giving a bit of relief to the parts of his body pressed hard against the floor and causing him to wonder if he might begin to levitate. The surface beneath him remained stubbornly horizontal, so they were almost certainly inside an elevator, moving down an abnormally deep shaft faster than mere gravity would have allowed.
They were plunging down while the temperature was going up. There was a shrill humming sound that corresponded to an oscillating vibration. The skin of the box was warming too, and now he feared they were about to reach the mantle of the earth. How many more seconds until the box, with Swan and Ottala, blistered and cauterized, would be thrust, along with all their hopes and memories, into the white hot magma?
The high pitched hum, which he’d managed to ignore, suddenly lowered by several octaves as the elevator decelerated sickeningly. He was pushed hard against the floor again as everything came bobbing to a stop. After several minutes, blood began to pool near his hip, and in the absolute darkness, his visual cortex buzzed with elaborate and mutating forms. Then, a bright light flooded in, along with the sound of a hydraulic lift. The silvery box slowly tilted and his body slid, boneless and gluey, along with his bodily seepage, into another vessel which, based on the momentary glimpse he had of it, was a large fibrous bag surrounded by a complicated array of tubes.
The pink tranquilizing smoke had not injured Swan’s mind and, if anything, all this brutality had quickened it. But his mind, out of necessity, had detached itself. It was a disembodied mind now, a separate sphere from which he could witness his helpless transfers between cylinders and boxes and fibrous bags.
And making it even worse, was his fearful awareness of the other mind lost along with his own. She was here too, somewhere hiding, he assumed, and frightened.
He thought of her, hunkered down, cast among his innards where she might be injured or dying, suffocating, or almost unthinkably, under attack from his digestive juices, or catalysis, or the ungovernable antigens of Swan’s own flesh.
Was this the intended meaning of Gut Wedding? The fusing of two bodies, the absorption of the wife into the husband? The thought was all too hideous. Would she subject herself to this kind of danger for her art? He couldn’t believe she’d ever planned to kill herself. Swan needed to talk to her, he needed to find her, but he couldn’t move, he couldn’t speak. He couldn’t probe his body in any way. He couldn’t alert her to the dangers that surrounded them; and his mind, reduced to a mean little sensor inside his chalky skull, could only try to detect any sort of relay from his shattered nerves. He strained to feel the slightest movement of her limbs, or the vibration of her voice, or the far away rustle of golden silk that might come from somewhere inside his twisted body.
It was because he was so engrossed in his search, that he didn’t notice certain things: The form of the fibrous bag that held him was slowly altering. Its interior surface, by applying pressure selectively, was coaxing his body back into its natural position. Very gradually Swan was being rearranged. His torso was straightened. He was gently rotated onto his back with his arms a few inches from his sides. His head was slightly elevated on a pulpy gelatinous pillow. The palms of his hands were swiveled downwards. His legs were pushed comfortably away from one another.
Later, and only gradually, did he become aware of the strange substance that enveloped him. It filled every space Swan’s body did not occupy, surrounded his arms and legs and hands and fingers, his penis, his testicles and toes, the crack in his ass, the holes in his ears and nostrils. It happened so incrementally that it never occurred to him that he might be smothered. This black amnion was utterly porous. He pulled air into his lungs without resistance and, in spite of his position deep beneath the earth, the air seemed fresh. It tasted clean, as if it had come skimming across the surface of a mountain lake.
Swan’s body, now freed from its painful contortions, began to relax. It felt weightless, comfortably suspended in this squishy cocoon, wrapped in an ethereal shroud with a soft pleasant breeze flowing through it.
This was how it was for a very long time—days or weeks—he had no way of knowing, as he worried and listened for any sign of Ottala.
It boggles the mind! A vivid glimpse into incarceration in an alternate future — at least for the entitled. I hope Ottala stashed an oxygen mask somewhere in her pajamas.