The travel from the hospital back to his room was as agonizing as a twenty minute trip could be, with Swan leaning on the doctor for support while she harangued him. They left the gurney behind, but still she kept her arm around his waist as they limped back into the same deep-diving, ever-upbeat elevator.
Once inside, Swan let go of the doctor’s shoulders and slumped with his spine in the corner. He was just barely able to stand on his feet and was wearing nothing but a long shimmery smock with the words, Another Success Story printed along its sleeves. “We give these out,” the Madame had said, “To patients and other people whose clothing gets lost in the shuffle.” She helped dress Swan herself, pulling the filmy garment over his head and smoothing out its wrinkles with her fingers, massaging him here and there in the process. Besides this gown, he’d received a pair of one-size-fits-all slippers with the same slogan printed across the toes. Perhaps Dr Escobar had used her influence to have the elevator’s chatty tendencies reduced, as it was quite reserved during the trip to the surface. It only called out a few select floors as they flew past them. The doctor, however, was unrestrained.
“I hope you realize you came this close to becoming another smashed corpse!” she said, squeezing her thumb and index finger together in front of Swan’s face. “I couldn’t help but think of you as a doomed person. It took days to be allowed in to see you. Did you know that? Well, I’m sure you didn’t, but it’s true. I’m telling you now. Every morning I’d take the long journey down to the restricted area. Then, in the evening, I’d go back to my apartment to sleep. When I wasn’t checking on your condition or lobbying for mercy on your behalf, I was spending about forty minutes a day in these accursed elevators.”
“Very negative one hundred and ninety-six,” the elevator announced.
“Restricted area?” Swan asked.
“The hospital and Madame’s office are in the restricted area. Even deeper down, completely off limits, is where the various brains of our little city reside,” she said. “The Cloudscape and the Wormee servers. Just think: all those little characters you like to cavort with are down there, Mr Swan! Everything’s down in the deepest levels where they can never be damaged.”
“Well, thank you for looking in on me.”
“During the whole time I barely slept. I’d lie in bed wondering: on the day they drop Mr Swan from that drone, will his body explode on impact? You must forgive me, but I couldn’t stop making calculations and it spurred some interesting thoughts. Someone lucky enough to be as small as your imaginary girlfriend might be able to survive a fall of several hundred feet with non-fatal injuries. Can you guess why?”
Swan squeezed his eyes shut and let the elevator wall vibrate against his cheek. He only listened to the doctor in a detached sort of way from his left ear. Inside his head, he was still listening for Ottala, hoping to notice some small vibration or movement in his body, but in response to the doctor’s question, he grunted a feeble “no.”
“It’s because,” she went on, “at such an altitude, air friction might prevent a small, very light body from accelerating. Especially if she was wearing some sort of fluffy garment. This hypothetical person might even be carried away by a gust of wind to land in a different location, while a normal sized person such as yourself would plummet straight down, increasing speed by thirty-two feet per second per second. Dropped from five-hundred feet, your body would reach one hundred and twenty-two miles per hour by the time it made contact with the ground. You’d hit the pavement with the force of thirty-seven thousand two hundred and forty joules and you’d splatter like a sack of grease! I don’t know if you’ve ever delved into the physics of free fall, but it’s interesting.”
Swan said nothing.
“Negative one hundred and seventy-two,” the elevator said.
The doctor sighed. “Are you listening, Mr Swan?”
“Oh, yes. Very interesting.”
“I assume you can imagine the consequences—”
“Would the girl inside me also experience the force of thirty-seven thousand joules against her body?”
“Thirty-seven thousand two hundred and forty! My goodness, Mr Swan, I would think that’s obvious! Of course she would not realize any benefit from air resistance while enclosed inside you.”
“That’s what I thought,” Swan said.
“For her, it’d be the same as a catastrophic plane crash which, I think, is a good analogy for your life up to this point.”
“Thanks for clarifying.”
“I’ve tried to understand why you were willing to sacrifice all of your progress and new-found stability, not to mention the future plans we’d begun to formulate. I’ve thought about it and the only answer I can come up with is—you’ve been doomed by poor decision-making genes, something beyond my control.”
“Very negativistic one hundred and forty-eight,” said the elevator.
Swan restrained any urge he might’ve had to argue. “I did what made sense for me at the time,” he said simply.
“And, of course, you’ve had your hallucinations to contend with,” she said. “In that regard, I appreciate your struggles. I really do. Your ability to understand reality is limited. In fact, I have a theory that your everyday perceptions circumvent the parietal lobe and flow straight into the occipital. It’s something I want to test. We’ll be spending much more time together now and I’ll be able to look at any number of hypotheses.”
“Slightly less negative one hundred and eleven,” the elevator chimed in.
“Your imagination is a sort of tyrant,” Dr Escobar went on. “And I was naive. I thought that by staying off the Cloudscape and going outside and mixing it up a bit, you’d soon overcome this thing. I didn’t want to drug you. I prefer more natural modes of therapy. But clearly I wasn't aggressive enough, so I can’t entirely blame you for these repercussions…. I’m sorry, Mr Swan. In a way, I failed you.”
“Oh well,” said Swan. “That’s just the way it happened.”
“You’re right to be philosophical at this point,” she said. “My challenge now is to maintain your functionality in newly constricted circumstances. It will be a struggle to prevent the antipsychotics from turning you into a dull and passive imbecile.”
“You really intend to medicate me?”
“We both had to agree to the course of therapy.”
“Oh, so negative eighty-seven,” said the elevator.
The air was cooling, the humming that surrounded them seemed louder and the pitch was getting higher. The weight of the elevator cable was diminishing, and they were gaining speed. The elevator called out the floors in a more rapid succession.
“Negative sixty-nine. Negative sixty-one.”
“The good news, Mr Swan, is that you can go back to the Cloudscape whenever you want. Your old paramours will be waiting right where you left them. You can start frolicking again!”
“Negative and sarcastic forty-one.”
“I’ll never do that.”
“You must, Mr Swan. Everything is different now. In fact, I insist you go back to the Cloudscape.”
“That’s horrible! I can’t believe you, of all people, would say that.”
“I thought you’d be pleased.”
“It’s like a repudiation of everything—”
“Your recent actions were the repudiation of everything. Your sad exploits repudiated all that we worked together for.”
“Antipathetic thirty-three and a third.”
By the time they reached the surface, Swan felt he could walk on his own. They exited the building into the blasting sunshine, and as the outlines of HMD Square clarified themselves, Swan realized they’d been down in the lowest levels of the Nimbostratus, directly across from the Cumulus. He’d had no idea it was so much deeper than his own building.
After shuffling as quickly as possible over the hot bonecrete slabs, through the mirrored doors, and across the lobby to where Elevator 2 was standing open, Dr Escobar turned to Swan and announced that her house calls would take place at ten o’clock each morning. “The first one will be at exactly ten tomorrow,” she said as she peered directly into his face and raised her eyebrows. “Ten o’clock. You’ve been duly warned.” It seemed to Swan that she was saying this for the elevator’s benefit as much as his own.
“It’s been pleasantly surprising to see you again, Mr Swan!” Elevator 2 said when they arrived at his floor. Swan simply nodded as the doors opened and he stepped into the hallway. The maroon walls pulsed dimly just as they always had. Still, it all felt strange to him. It was as if many years had passed since he’d stood in this familiar place. After he lumbered a few steps toward his apartment, he heard the elevator’s doors close behind him. That’s when he broke frantically into a stiff and ungainly run.
The illustration of Dr. Escobar is the best yet, an intensely present visual. More and more, the thing uppermost for me is what in the world is going on with Ottala? I want to know!
"Finally here it is, the cursed appendage! With horror I notice the dark stain at its base. That means just a day longer and it would have burst… My heart seized up and noticeably slowed, my hands felt like rubber. Well, I thought, it's going to end badly and all that was left was removing the appendix." - "The man who cut out his own appendix"