Swan didn’t wake up until the following day. He rubbed one eye, then the other, sticky with the goop of sleep. He did his best to push away the cobwebs and take in the scene that had barely registered in flashes of lightning before. He could see the massive dark stripe of the overpass suspended above him with blindingly bright sky bleeding in around its edges. Maybe the ferocious rain had happened in a dream… and maybe this was another dream…. He propped himself up on an elbow. The terrible feeling of bleakness seeped into his heart again. This was no dream. He’d fled the city. Ottala was dead.
The water, which had threatened to swamp him during the storm, had ebbed away, though it still covered the surface of the plain. He looked down on soupy-looking mud and great heaps of trash that had piled against the columns that supported the overhead structure. Partial outlines of the submerged road were barely visible beneath the shallowest water.
He managed to push himself onto its haunches until a jolt of pain made him topple sideways. He slumped, still holding himself up by one extended arm. The sensation he felt wasn’t exactly new. He’d been on the brink of starvation before, and now he remembered the buns inside his suitcase.
In spite of the storm, all his things were exactly where he’d left them. Maybe this was a dream after all.
He grabbed a sack and its contents spilled out. It must’ve torn open as the suitcase bounced along the road. Without a knife, the individual packets were almost impenetrable. He struggled to tear one open and it slipped from his hand. He gathered it from between his legs as his fingers cramped. Now he couldn’t let go of it. Finally, in desperation, he gnawed at it with his teeth. He sucked out a rubbery lump through the hole he’d made, and swallowed without chewing. Then he started the laborious process of squeezing and sucking out the rest.
Monkeybrites, the label read. Swirled yellow pap molded into little monkey heads with beady eyes and laughing mouths. As Swan sucked out the little faces, the breeze scattered the empty wrappers and tumbled them over the ledge. There were ten buns to a sack and he had eight sacks. His panicky feeling had begun to subside but he knew he should save as many as he could for later, and with this thought, he realized he intended to carry on.
He stared down at the lake. Something fantastical had happened here, like Noah’s flood. He’d never seen sky mirrored in water, and he’d never seen a sky so blue…. He’d seen the sea when he was a child. He’d seen great bodies of water in the Cloudscape, but nothing in his limited experience corresponded to this. The blue was so blue it seemed to make a humming sound. The humming stopped the moment he closed his eyes.
One shoe was an arm’s length away. He had to crawl on his knees to retrieve the other, careful not to push his suitcase over the side. The hospital gown was farther along the ledge. It was strange how none of these items had blown away in the storm. The silvery fabric was perfectly dry, so it seemed Swan had slept for a fairly long time.
He wadded up the gown to use as a cushion for his ass and pulled on his pink shoes. The air felt warm against his skin.
What should he do?
He imagined Dr Escobar back in the Cumulus, pounding on his door. Mr Swan! Mr Swan, open up right now! Since Swan was assigned to her supervision, she certainly must have access to his room. How long had he been out here anyway? It surprised him that an ambulance hadn’t shown up yet. As he considered this, he thought of the seed Cat injected in his scrotum. Of course the Department of Hominid Health knew exactly where he was. Maybe they could read his thoughts, and they might even be able to poison him remotely. The ambulance probably couldn’t reach him because of the flood… but there could be a drone hovering above him even now. Was that a drone he heard in the distance? When he held his breath he heard nothing. As he shifted, his shoes made a noise as they rubbed against the rough concrete. Maybe, because of the flood, an escaped psychiatric patient was not of the first priority….
His vague intent to walk until he died had failed from the moment he climbed up the concrete slope to escape the storm. Now that he was alive, he considered what he’d do if an ambulance came. He'd fend it off, he thought. He’d use his sword. He quickly glanced at where the cane sword lay pushed against the wall, and the ridiculous scene of a battle between an ambulance and a famished youth wielding a sword played briefly in his mind.
Obviously the first thing he needed to do was remove the seed. If he could remove it, the surveillance system might assume he was dead. He reached down and squeezed his balls. He carefully began to pinch every part of them. The actual seed was minuscule. It had to be as small as a grain of sand or even less, small enough to pass through a syringe. He couldn’t feel anything unusual. After a few minutes, he retrieved his sword.
He unsheathed it and was once again struck by the beauty of the florid script. Still naked, his sword beside him, his back against the wall and his head pushed up against the bottom of the overpass, he resumed the systematic inspection of his testicles. The seed ought to be somewhere inside the right one—that is, if it hadn’t moved. After kneading every bit of his ball sack with his fingers, he began to focus on one particular spot. It wasn’t that he could feel anything inside, it was more that this was the spot that felt most irritated by his probing, and he imagined that scar tissue might have formed around the invasive particle. He reached for the sword. How was he to operate upon himself with a blade as long as this?
By sitting so that his heels rested on the brink, he grasped the ebony handle between his two big toes with the sword pointing towards him. He held the flat sides of the blade with the fingers of one hand and, as he cupped his balls with the other, he positioned the sword to stab the precise spot he’d chosen. As he held his breath, he slowly pulled the point of the blade into his flesh. It was so sharp that it went through the skin immediately, almost before he could prepare himself. Blood spurted out over his fingers and he reflexively pushed the sword away with his feet. Luckily, it tilted upwards and clattered down the side of the embankment without wounding him further.
In spite of his bleeding, he was able to pull back the skin and look inside. It was like a minuscule flake of copper, only visible because of its metallic color. With a calmness that surprised him, Swan plucked it out, and as his blood leaked onto the hospital gown, he examined it on his fingertip before he smeared it, along with his blood, onto the dirty surface of the concrete. He pushed himself back into a squat, staunched his bleeding with the wadded gown, and scrambled down the concrete slope.
Now, ankle deep in the water wearing just his shoes, with Cat’s gown pressed against his balls, and with his muddy sword held tilted to his side, he looked back and forth across the flooded plain.
It was just a few steps to the submerged highway. The water was shallow here, but farther on, he could see it got deeper. To continue on this route would exhaust him. His suitcase would waterlog and he’d surely drown. But wasn’t that exactly what he’d wanted in the first place…?
He glanced up at the structure above his head. It was impossible to see beyond the first set of pillars piled with trash. If he were to wade out along the road he might be able to get a better view.
He went splashing to the right, his sword outstretched. Emerging from the shadow, he felt the sun on his naked skin. It occurred to him how this sensation had once been universal. It was an elemental sort of sensuality—the sun on one’s skin, on one’s fur, on one’s leaves. Even algae. Even protoplasm must have enjoyed the rays of the sun. Ottala said she could feel her animal spirit when she walked naked in the sun, and she was right. But now, in all this gigantic swamp, Swan was the only animal left to feel it.
He didn’t turn around until he’d waded out a hundred yards or so. When he stopped and pivoted, he saw, to his left, how the elevated road sloped up, out of the water, made a wide turn as it climbed higher, and carried on in the form of a viaduct. Its long arc passed between the ruins of distant buildings, and curved in the direction of the horizon. Pieces of it had crumbled here and there, but it appeared to be passable.
He decided to go to the top of it to see what he could see. The only way was to leave the asphalt and wade across a submerged field to where the freeway left the water.
The mud swallowed his feet and the water went above his knees. Soon it was over his thighs and his blood mixed with the muddy liquid. He worried that he’d fall into a hole and he used his sword to probe the mush ahead of him. Because of this, he moved slowly. His shoes were filled with sludge but, after an hour or so of struggle, he managed to reach the guardrail. It was bent outward as if some huge hand had tried to pry it away. Swan climbed over and got his first look at the condition of the highway. It was like a moonscape rolled out in a ribbon with its craters filled with water and much of its surface so eroded that the asphaltum had taken on the rough texture of gravel.
Freed from the sucking mud, he paused to look at the clouds. If only Ottala could have seen this! The densely white, high clouds were moving rapidly in the same direction as the road. Their tattered edges swirled and melted into this strange and luminous sky, so different than any sky he’d ever witnessed…. Again, he heard the bright blue humming.
He pulled off his shoes and shook them out and after slipping them on again, he started up the slope. This had been an expressway once, quite wide, four lanes on each side with a barrier between them, now partially toppled. It was hard to imagine that there ever could have been enough vehicles to fill a road like this. When he reached the high point, he was standing directly over the place where he’d sheltered through the tempest. It appeared the road continued at the same elevation for several miles. Atmospheric waves caused the view to vibrate, but he could see distant mountains—a watercolor stroke of palest blue. This was the direction open to him. The mountains, he thought. He’d try to get to the mountains. If he could get that far, then he’d go beyond them.
Man attempts self-vasectomy and lives to tell the tale! Or, now that Swan has grown a pair, he wants to see what they're made of!