The exit from him was not nearly as elegant as her entrance had been, coming naked out of his ass into the cold air. It was the lowest and most ridiculous of the physical acts Ottala had undertaken for her art, but she only thought of this later. At the time, she was simply overjoyed with having escaped his oppressive body. She even laughed as she emerged, between gasps that is, and while waving her hands in the darkness trying to grab onto something. She wrapped her fingers around what turned out to be the nap of Swan’s fuzzy blanket and drew herself out sticky with his syrupy shit. She slid down the cheek of his butt and rolled into a dark fold of his fluffy blanket, pressed up against his sleeping body now, helpless with exhaustion. It took a long time to pull herself together. Her thoughts came slowly. She had no idea how long she’d been inside of him. She’d been unconscious mainly, lodged in a cleft between several unknowable organs in some obscure corner of his innards. It was hard to know how she’d survived at all. At first she’d pushed through viscera, some of which reacted to her touch, some of which throbbed, some of which expanded or shrank back. She’d lost her clothes in the process of shimmying away from all the pumping and gushing. She was upside down as often as not and eventually lost any sense of her body’s orientation. Something was always pressing against her as she stewed in the unceasing heat. These were things she’d sort of imagined beforehand but hardly could have anticipated. And that was the way with art. Unexpected phenomena cropped up and the artist made her adjustments. The direction and meaning of Gut Wedding was continually being modified in its details though its overarching concept remained constant. Thousands of micro choices were made of necessity. Each of them a small part of a longer sequence, the results of a lifetime of artistic decisions that were uniquely hers, all tied to her experience and perceptions. She took responsibility for every one of them.
After lying there for a long while thinking these sorts of thoughts, breathing slowly and deeply, even as her head pounded and her stomach churned, she began to wriggle her way through the blanket’s interior folds. This required another huge expenditure of energy and she stopped to rest more than once. Swan’s legs represented an immovable bulk, a mountain of flesh with wiry hairs she could grab onto to pull herself along. After feeling cooler air ahead, she finally crawled out from the trailing edge of the blanket, and lay there for a long time holding her stomach. His gigantic foot rose naked beside her like a marble colossus in the dawn light, while the sound of sloshing water surrounded her. Where was she? This was not the comfortable room Swan had described. It was not the scenario she’d visualized at all. A feeling of uneasiness was growing within her and she did her best to tamp it down.
She pushed herself up on her thin arms and strained to look around. The concrete shelf, littered with stones half the size of her head, was just becoming visible. It was so vast that even Swan’s mountainous form, asleep on the brink of it, looked insignificant. A cold black ocean extended out level with its edge. Even a small wave would swamp them. An enormous structure of some kind was hanging low above Swan’s body. She took this to be the underside of a huge pier that extended far out over the sea and was held up by pillars that rose just above the waterline. The new morning’s gray light shone dully beyond its edges.
Everything was odd. For what possible reason had Swan wandered to this place beside the sea? This had to be the sea. She’d heard about the sea and its vastness from the time she was a girl. But why would he come to the sea precisely now? Did he not understand this would further complicate her idea? Something was wrong. She pushed her face into the crook of her arm and, for a long time through a gap in her matted hair, she watched the shadowy forms of floating garbage collide against the pillars.
Muck from his body still coated her, and it was beginning to harden in the cold air. She sat up and began the task of scrubbing it away with her stiff hands and then thought, no. This was something that ought to be documented, something she’d never done with her work before. Swan was supposed to handle this part, but unfortunately, right now, he was asleep.
She let her weight collapse. It felt terribly cold and the air chilled her. Perhaps she should crawl back beneath the blanket to wait for him to wake up… but, no, she didn’t want to touch him again.
Maybe it was this aversion she felt for Swan’s body that made all these skeptical thoughts well up so suddenly: that Swan’s cozy apartment had been a lie, that Swan had always been a vagrant who lived under a pier beside the sea….
But this was absurd. It even embarrassed her to think this way. Swan was not the type to lie, and after everything that had happened, after she’d coaxed him from his path and forced him to chase her, after he’d done these things which he didn’t even understand… how could she be so cynical? She covered her eyes with her filthy hands and tried to clear her mind. When an art idea was strong enough, an unexpected obstacle might turn into a lucky accident, and every lucky accident had the potential to add resonance to a new creation.
The innocent intensity of Swan’s love had been like that. That was the accident that altered the way she conceived of her piece from the start. Without Swan’s love, she would never have considered a project as difficult and ambitious as this one. She looked up at the callused ball of his foot…. Where are the other giants? she wondered.
And where was her house? The house had been an important part of her idea too. Had he failed to build it? There had been a statement she planned to make when she first walked through its door: Our home is made of emptiness.
The idea that material nonexistence was the space every living being occupies felt trivial now. The paradox of emptiness, the passing in and out of things, the heightened awareness of nothingness, was making much less sense than it had before. Even if Swan had been available to document every movement with his recording machine, even if there was an audience to hear her thoughts, the sense of revealing something new, the feeling that accompanied her always in the creation of her art, the sense of importance she felt when she broke new ground, the sense of being a medium for ideas that were deep and old and universal (and don’t forget, suppressed!) Here, on the edge of this terrible ocean, these feelings were starting to run away from her and were being replaced with new ones. She needed to quiet these new feelings. There could be no room for doubts during a perilous time of creativity when it was so vital that she stay true to her artistic integrity.
Her art had always existed between life and death. This was nothing new. She stared into the gray water that sloshed beyond her feet. Swan’s bodily fluids had by now dried to a brownish sheen, a tough membrane that protected her from the cold air. At the same time, she was slowly becoming aware of changes that had happened to her body. As she lay back, she was getting cramps in strange places like her neck and jaw, the edge of one foot and one or two of her fingers. When she turned her head she could hear something scraping inside her neck and light seemed to flare at the edges of her vision. Ottala stood up with difficulty. Her movements were partly constrained by the dried resinous gunk that encased her and, as she stumbled forward, she felt its surface pull and rip around her waist, her crotch and groin.
She blundered her way along the ledge between Swan and the cold ocean as she snatched at the hairs of his fuzzy blanket with one hand to steady herself. She wanted to wake him. She wanted to see his sincere and gentle face. Swan… the bird of purity. She wanted to be together with him again.
What would his reaction be when he saw her naked for the first time? And coated in dried poo! This made her laugh for the second time that morning. And now, as she inched along, grasping at the fuzz of the giant blanket hand over hand, she could hear his breathing. His breaths were more like gasps, low and rasping with long pauses. It was so good not to be alone! And even before she could see his face, she cried out as loudly as she could: “Swan! Swan! I’m here! Wake up!”
This story’s plot has become completely preposterous and yet I wait anxiously for each new episode. It has been said there is a finite number of plot possibilities in the universe but our fearless author has invented a some new ones; Boy meets girl, Boy eats girl, Boy then......?