Now he lay on a gurney, in the middle of a jungle, hovering. A paper thin blanket covered his naked body and gently swaying creepers surrounded him. He realized how small he’d become when a bee, one of many that buzzed around the gleaming blossoms, strayed close to his face. The linty clots of pollen on its legs blotted out the sky.
“Welcome, Mr Swan!” A woman’s affectionate-sounding voice was speaking. “Welcome to the living!”
A jolt of fear passed through him. He felt humiliated and confused. The tropical forest was actually a room. The lush jungle was a wrap-around illusion and some unknown entity was observing him. Then, in a moment of heightened intuition he grasped what happened: He’d never once moved from the very same elevator that carried him here from the surface.
The elevator was much larger than the ones in the Cumulus and its voice module was set to mature female. Now that he understood, he began to shout.
“Help me! Help me, somebody!”
The jumbo-sized elevator did its best to soothe him. “Please calm yourself. Dr Escobar will be here in a moment—”
“No. Not her. Someone has to listen to me! Someone has to cut me open. I need someone who can save her!”
“Mr Swan! Whatever has come over you?”
Even while it was speaking, the elevator was descending to the floor below. The doors slid open and the doctor came in.
Except for the muscles that governed speech, Swan was still paralyzed. He could pivot his eyes however, and he could see there was someone else with her.
It was this other who stepped to Swan’s side and bent over him. Her full, warm and imposing bosom rubbed against the thin blanket that covered his clammy body. Swan could not make out her features, except her bright blue eyes and dark red lips which looked as if they were superimposed on the tangled bigonias that crisscrossed the ceiling. It was a confusing avalanche of impressions that cascaded down on him, and it took a moment to understand—the woman’s skin was also a screen. And the same image that played across the elevator’s surfaces was playing on her flesh. Her face and neck and bosom were covered by the same leaves and blossoms and toiling bees that played across the elevator’s ceiling and walls.
Besides her mouth and eyes, her dark shimmery low-cut garment, which was not activated, moved in and out with her breathing as did her many dangling necklaces that pitterpattered against his crinkly blanket.
It was these necklaces that made him suddenly think of Cat… Could it be? She’d been such a kind and welcoming person when they’d met before.
When he heard the sultry voice, he knew it was her.
“Mr Swan!” she purred. “Our cas célèbre! We’ve been so concerned about your condition!”
“Cissy?” Swan asked. Her name had landed on his tongue in the nick of time. “Please help me! I need to be opened at once!”
“Opened?”
“I need a surgeon! My girlfriend’s trapped inside!”
“Dear Mr Swan. Of course we wouldn’t dream of cutting you open!”
Dr Escobar arrived on the opposite side of the gurney then. In contrast to Cat, she stood out starkly against the jungle in her black and violet striped muumuu. Her brows were contracted, so that a vertical crease appeared in the narrow space between them. She was not smiling.
“Fear and delirium!” she announced. “I’m sorry, and I take full responsibility, Madame Chief Executrix.”
“Nonsense,” said Cat. “You can’t blame yourself. With a case like this, outcomes can never be certain.”
“He is my patient. I allowed him so much leeway because I believed his mental illness was improving.”
“Poor thing,” Cat said. “I think he’s suffering from shock…” She straightened up, leaving her long fingernails to play amid the folds of Swan’s blanket. “But he’s gone very far off the path indeed.”
“As I told you before,” the doctor said. “He’s proven himself an earnest and intelligent person. He’s only held back by these residual bouts of fantasy.”
Swan was struggling to understand why these two women, who had spoken to each other so casually in the past, were talking about him in such a stilted tone now. And why was Dr Escobar calling her old friend, “Madame?”
“I know,” Cat responded. “I remember how much our handsome swan impressed me.”
Swan’s eyes moved from one pair of lips to the other. In this situation, it seemed Cat was Dr Escobar’s superior, and they spoke as if they were performing for somebody else. Of course, the elevator was observing, but—
“Please!” Swan interjected. “It might be too late. I need an interior body scan!”
Dr Escobar took hold of his arm beneath the blanket and put her mouth against his ear. Swan could feel her breath as she spoke. “Quiet! Let me handle this,” she whispered.
She was smiling when she looked up. “It might be helpful if I speak to my patient privately for a few minutes…?”
“Of course. I’ll be waiting in my office. Take all the time you need.”
“It won’t be long,” the doctor said.
“Don’t leave me, Cat, I mean, Madame! I need you to help me save her!” As Swan called out, the doctor was digging her nails into his skin. Cat passed through the swooshing elevator doors without missing a stride.
As soon as she departed, Dr Escobar started in.
“I can’t believe it!”
“Doctor, please! This is an emergency!”
“It is an emergency. It’s just that you don’t understand the nature of the emergency.”
“My girlfriend—My wife is in me. You have to help—”
“Most of all, I’m disappointed—”
“I’m trying to talk to you!”
“I had very high hopes.”
“I’ve been to the Fairy’s town. You have to believe me! There are hundreds of them. My wedding was actually a work of art, a symbolical event, I can’t expect you to understand, but—it was our wedding! Everyone was celebrating. We got married. And she went down my throat, and I got hauled away!”
“Mr Swan—”
“You have to believe me, Doctor!”
“Your fantasies are tedious.” The doctor sighed. “And everything is different now.”
Swan screamed. He screamed as he’d never screamed in his life. His noises were wordless. No words were left for him. He had always been suppressed. For his whole life he’d been suppressed and ignored by everyone. And now, when everything was at stake, all he could do was wail uncontrollably.
The female elevator immediately tried to console him. Whenever Swan paused for a breath, it called out to him in the warmest possible way.
“A smile’s just a frown rotated to an inverted position, Mr Swan!”
Swan launched into another banshee wail.
“If ever water vapor should condense and fall, remember to look for an arc of spectral colors!”
He was howling. His face was crimson.
“For every angry minute, 60 billion nanoseconds of happiness are lost!”
His screaming at last came to a halt—he couldn’t sustain it. His chest heaved and he convulsed as Dr Escobar wiped his face with the edges of the ethylene-vinyl blanket.
“There, there,” the elevator said in an affectionate and nurturing tone.
The doctor tilted her face toward the junglified ceiling. “Please refrain from making comments,” she said before turning back to Swan. “You have no idea, Mr Swan. You’re in tremendous danger!”
Although Swan compulsively gulped at the mucous running into his throat, and though snot bubbled from his left nostril, he no longer felt hysterical. In fact, a sort of calmness had entered him from which he could observe things. Among the jungle flowers beyond Dr Escobar’s face, he noticed how the fluttering red and yellow butterflies traveled in one direction only. He noticed how the bees vibrated their wings in such a way that the maximum amount of pollen fell from the jungle flowers. He noticed that he could move his fingers.
“You need to keep calm,” Dr Escobar was saying. “Calm yourself so that I can get you out of here.”
“I get anxious sometimes too,” the gentle elevator chimed in.
Swan was able to flex his toes.
“You have to pull yourself together, Mr Swan. Or, at least, appear to pull yourself together.”
“I don’t care,” Swan said.
“You don’t care about what?”
“If I pull myself together. If I follow the rules. It makes no difference.”
The doctor shook her head. “You need to concentrate on your behavior now.”
“You don’t understand. My body’s going to digest her!”
“We’ll deal with your psychopathologies later if it’s still possible to do so.”
“Doctor, you have to listen to me!”
“You listen to me! You will be eliminated.”
“Fine,” Swan said.
“You’ll be killed!”
“Will there be an autopsy?”
“Why are you acting like such an idiot? When I heard you were arrested, I wanted to kill you myself but, of course they wouldn’t let me get close to the I.C.P.”
Swan finally met her eyes. “I.C.P.?”
“Where do you think you’ve been? This is the hospital. You’ve been in an Intensive Care Pod. You’ve been under repair, Mr Swan. And now you’ve recovered sufficiently enough to be executed.”
“All I’m asking for is a body scan!”
“You’ll be lifted 500 feet above the drop zone and… plop!” She slapped her hand against the blanket. “That’s the protocol.”
After his recent death plunge inside the speeding elevator, Swan could very well imagine such an experience. “Fine,” he said.
“What do you mean, fine?”
“Scan me! If she’s dead, go ahead and kill me.”
“We understand you’re overwhelmed and that’s okay,” the elevator murmured.
Dr Escobar stamped her foot and peered skyward again. “I need you to desist from making gratuitous remarks!”
“This is a loving space, Doctor,” the elevator said.
“And what does that mean?”
“A place where the totality of the psyche is given permission to undertake mindful transformation.”
“Where did you pick up this drivel?”
“We service three hundred and six floors—”
“This is a professional consultation!”
Swan, who, in the midst of their bickering, had been watching two yellow parakeets peck at each other violently, grasped at the doctor’s muumuu with his fingertips. “Dr Escobar, I used to believe you wanted to help me but…”
She turned back to him quickly, and Swan noticed, for perhaps the first time ever, a slight shadow of doubt cross her face.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that it’s impossible to get any work done here.”
“You don’t understand anything about me, Doctor.”
“I understand you’re hallucinating and you need treatment.”
“You’ve never really listened to a single thing I’ve ever said to you.”
“I listen, and I can even hear the thoughts behind your words. I know you better than you know yourself.”
“That’s what I mean.”
“And what do you mean?”
“You only listen to your own expertness.”
She laughed. “My expertness, as you call it, is your last best hope!”
“Then, there’s no hope.”
“We’ll work on it,” she said curtly. “And I’ll do my best to save you.”
“If they want to kill me, it’s okay. Let them do it.”
The doctor put a hand on his shoulder and leaned into him so that her lips were against his ear again. “Pull yourself together, Mr Swan. I want to help you. I care about you.”
Swan was quiet for several seconds. It was obvious she’d never take the horrible truth of Ottala’s situation seriously.
Again, it would be necessary to indulge Dr Escobar in order to escape her. And if he could regain his strength, he might still be able to tell if Ottala was alive. He noticed he could flex his ankles somewhat.
“I’m sorry, Dr Escobar,” he said.
“Sorry for what?”
“That I disappointed you.”
She pushed away so that she could observe him more completely. Was she trying to read his face for a sign of his duplicity? She sighed before she spoke. “Your distortion in body awareness is something we can address later. Right now, it’s imperative that Cissy knows you’re willing to cooperate.”
“Who is Cissy anyway?”
“Madame Viva Ananda is the Chief Executrix of the Department of Hominid Health. She is also its Judge and Executioner.”
“You mean, Cat’s going to kill me?”
“Madame doesn’t do the deed herself of course.”
“She’s going to have me killed because I left the path?”
“There are a number of crimes, Mr Swan.”
“Other than going off the path, I don’t know what I’m supposed to have done.”
“There’s Bun Smuggling. Selling Cumulus property to Unnumbered people. Scribbling on walls—”
“I traded things to get other things I needed to make the house. I mean, you also deal with the Unnumbered—”
“That’s different.”
“You said my house was beautiful!”
“Your house is beautiful, but you lied about it. Then, you left the path. You’ve also been accused of Sexual Annoyance.”
“What’s that?”
“A certain lady. I think you know—”
“What did she accuse me of?”
“The elevators accused you.”
The ever-consoling elevator spoke up again. “When a woman speaks, you need to listen to her eyes.”
“But I can’t see her eyes,” Swan muttered. “Nobody can see her eyes!”
“Ebony’s a dreamer, Mr Swan,” the elevator continued. “And she has every right to be beautiful.”
Swan could think of no response to this, but Dr Escobar who’d been uncharacteristically silent, suddenly raised her voice. “You forced yourself on her!”
“That’s not true. And Ebony told me she’s lonely—” He stopped. Arguing with Dr Escobar was always pointless. He did, however, want to go home. “…Maybe, I annoyed her accidentally… so something could happen… between us,” he said. “I’m sorry. What should I say to Cat, I mean, Madame Viva Ananda?”
Up on the ceiling, the sky, between the jungle leaves, was transitioning to purplish evening hues.
“That’s better, Mr Swan. I’m so glad you’ve regained your senses. We’ll be going into the Chief Executrix’s office. While we’re there, you simply need to be agreeable. Just tell her how sorry you are about everything, and especially for not taking your medicine.”
“But I don’t take medicine.”
“But pretend you were supposed to. Believe me, it’s better that way. It excuses a lot. We’ll get you on some real antipsychotics later.”
“Can I go home?”
“If you agree to everything, if you sign the documents, I’ll try to take you back to your apartment.”
Swan shook off the edge of the blanket and wiggled his foot. “Look, doctor!”
“Can you walk?”
“I’m not sure,” said Swan.
“Let’s give it a try.”
Stunning illustration!