By a baffling effect of light and optics, the once-distant mountains became less blue as Swan approached them. Now that their sandy crags surrounded him, the dominant color was chalky brown, the average hue of a billion fragments of clay and sand. In the midst of this, the road stood out starkly, a dark gray ribbon riddled with cracks. Even after all these miles, his suitcase wheels still rolled along merrily.
He wore nothing but his wide-brimmed hat and pink shoes. From time to time, he’d pause to rub the chalky dust, which was heaped everywhere alongside the roadway, over every part of his body, and he’d finish by tossing handfuls of it over his head and shoulders. By this method he tried to ward off sunburn. As the miles of desolate roadway disappeared behind him, Fairy music was always playing in his mind. The cadence of his steps aligned with it, and he barely registered his physical surroundings as he mused over the imaginary relationship he’d had with Ottala. He resisted these memories at first, but in the end he thought he could take them for what they were—fantasies that no longer had the power to harm him.
And now he revisited a particular meeting that had taken place on the bench in the Autumn Garden, when he’d been lying with his legs draped over an armrest, while Ottala had lounged just beside his ear. They’d been talking about things that had happened when both of them were little, and Ottala had somehow steered their conversation into a sort of guided dream, and transported him to a reunion with his mommy.
He remembered how she’d been speaking more and more softly, until he heard her say: “Let’s do an experiment.” He could just barely feel her breath against his ear. “Imagine you’re lying on a leaf, floating down a river—”
“I’m too big to lie on a leaf, Ottala.”
“Shhh. Don’t worry,” she whispered. “Just go with it, okay?
“You’re on a boat that’s shaped like a big floppy leaf. It’s soft like a bed and you’re feeling really nice. You’re drifting down… down a quiet river…. Above you, fluffy tree branches slide by and you see little bits of sky glinting through their leaves….”
Swan played along as she directed him from one lovely scene to another, and then somehow, he forgot how, he found himself in a room, similar but not exactly like the one he’d lived in with his mommy. It was very dark at first, but gradually a few details became visible. He could see the sparkly flecks on the ceiling, the outlines of Mommy’s chair with its bulgy cushions. And then, she was there, sitting in the chair, as real as could be, down to the bits of lint on her fuzzy robe. Swan was a little boy again, and he ran to her.
“Mommy! I couldn’t find you!”
“I’m sorry, Sweetie. I went out to buy you a doll.”
“I was scared, Mommy! I thought you died!”
“Yes, Darling,” she said as she held the new doll up for his inspection: a male warrior with blue hair and three silver swords tucked into his belt. He wore a short black kilt over his beefy legs and shiny black boots. “This is Triavalon, Darling. He’ll be Astrea’s lover!”
“No, Mommy.” He shook his head sadly. “Astrea’s dead.”
“Don’t be silly! She's right here.” And, with her free hand, she reached beneath her robe and extracted a doll from between her breasts. It really was her! It was Astrea, except it was Astrea minus her head and foot that Swan had hidden in the purple box.
“Astrea!”
“You see!” She pushed the two dolls together and made kissing sounds: “Mmmwa. Mmmwa. Look how they love each other!”
“No!” It felt wrong that Astrea’s headless body should be treated this way.
Mommy smiled down at him as she tucked Astrea back beneath her robe and turned her attention to Triavalon. She whisked the miniature hero through the air with a whooshing sound before holding him up to Swan’s face. “Look, Darling! He’s anatomically correct and has a cute little penis!” She tried to pry open Triavalon’s kilt with one of her long painted fingernails.
“Stop!”
“I want to show you,” she said, as she tried to pull back the stiff plastic skirt.
“No, Mommy!”
“I want to show you his little peepee, Honey.”
“You can’t. It’s not separate!” He was feeling a kind of panic. “It’s not the kind that comes off!”
“It’s okay,” she said. “I did it before.”
As she concentrated, her eyes crossed and she bit hard into her lower lip. He wanted to make her stop but he didn’t know how. Minutes went by as she struggled to bend back the polyethylene skirt without chipping her maroon-colored nails—
“Wake up!” Ottala was shouting as she slapped his face.
It was like looking through gauze when Ottala came into view. She was crouched on his cheek while she smacked him with two hands. “Wake up!” she cried before she leapt to the ground. “You’ve got to go!”
“I saw her!”
“I’m so glad! But you’d better run!”
He sat up and stared down at the path: 4 minutes and 48…47…46…
Only moments before he’d been leaning up against his mommy’s legs, and now he had to run away. He got to his feet, completely discombobulated, and staggered a few paces before he glanced over his shoulder at her. “I don’t think my mother was as nice as yours was,” he remembered saying before he bounded for the exit.
The illusion of Mommy in the old apartment had been incredibly vivid and, in order to experience it, his mind had invented Ottala to guide him there. It was a very strange and sophisticated hallucination. The way his brain worked in those days was quite complicated.
The road became steeper and he was confronted by the sight of numerous switchbacks. Furrows and elongated troughs spread across the land as if a giant harrow had been pulled drunkenly across it. Whether these creases were a result of the recent deluge or some ancient geological event, he had no way of knowing. The higher reaches of the mountain looked like rotten molars—charcoal gray and reddish brown. The sun beat down on his skin, the air tasted like exhaust from a furnace. He figured he might reach the crest of the ridge by the following morning.
It took two full days, and on the second day he encountered Fairies. They appeared one or two at a time, perched on boulders that were close beside the road. They waved and even shouted at him in a language he couldn’t understand. At first, there’d been only two, a man and a boy. Swan stopped in his tracks and stared back at them. Then, regaining his senses, he looked down at his feet and resumed his plodding march.
That same evening, a Fairy came running up behind him along the road. When he caught up, he yelled in an odd accented sort of English: “I have news of Ottala!”
Swan was pained by this, by the lengths his subconscious went to trick him. He walked on silently, until finally the man blurted, “I’ve come to tell you she’s alive!” The man was jogging along beside him now. He wore a long gray beard. “She fell from a great height and was injured. But she’s recovering!” The Fairy waved his arms excitedly. It was obvious he expected some sort of response, but Swan plodded determinedly on.
“Her body was pierced…. She speaks fondly of you!” were the final words Swan heard from him.
That he’d begun to hallucinate again frightened Swan. He did not want to relapse into his old mental illness; still, he was impressed by how realistic his latest hallucinations had become. These new Fairies looked different from the old ones. They wore loose-fitting shirts and caps smudged with dye. They somehow seemed to perfectly match this desolate rugged place. The higher up the mountain he went, the more of them came out to watch him as he trudged along the road. One, who’d been digging with a little shovel, ran into his path waving it like a signal flag. The Fairy, with frizzy reddish muttonchops peeking out from his lumpy cap, took a position directly in front of Swan. He whooped and yelled, determined that Swan should stop and acknowledge him. Swan, who’d trained his gaze on a distant rock, did nothing to modify his pace. After diving to the ground to avoid being stepped on, the little man was nearly crushed by the rolling suitcase.
Swan crossed over the top of the ridge with the sun’s low rays on his back. Feeling more and more troubled, he hurried down the far side of the mountain in near darkness, his eyes locked on the dim centerline of the highway. To his relief, that had been the end of it. He never saw Fairies again.
Swan and his suitcase trundled on. It was disappointing that the huge glistening white clouds had disappeared. In fact, there were no clouds whatsoever on this side of the mountains. It was after six days of nearly ceaseless walking when he finally encountered other humans. He came upon them as he daydreamed, and didn’t notice them until he was nearly upon them. A pair of dust-covered, elderly people were resting at the side of the road beside their even dustier rickshaw. For the first time in his life, Swan felt overjoyed at encountering strangers. He burst into tears as he rushed up to them, and couldn’t stop assailing them with hugs. Then, in the midst of these embraces, he realized who it was: the old couple, the proprietor of Bon Air Supplies for the Artist and Craftsman along with his concupiscent wife!
They smiled sheepishly at the filthy naked wanderer who embraced them. “Here here!” the old man kept saying.
Their names turned out to be Frieda and Harold, and they told him how the Eltron Hotel had collapsed in the flood, and how all of Trinity Place was destroyed. They’d survived by a fluke, Harold said, drifting, along with the rickshaw, on a huge polystyrene palette, that had originally been the bottom half of a shipping container for a nuclear bomb. During their weeks afloat, they’d sustained themselves by eating the buns that Swan had traded for plyboard. They had no idea what had happened to Honeybee, but Frieda was sure she was still alive and that they’d eventually be reunited. Swan asked about Dr Escobar, but neither Freida or Harrold had ever heard of her.
After joining up with them, Swan put his pink and yellow underpants back on. Suddenly, he craved companionship. He no longer wanted to be alone and he became, what Harrold jokingly called, the third human.
After they tied Swan’s suitcase to the rickshaw, Swan took on the task of pulling Freida and sometimes Harold too. The rickshaw was a single-seater and when Harold squeezed in with his wife, the two of them couldn’t help but fondle and caress each other. It was the sound of their sloppy kissing and cooing, more than his extra weight, that caused Swan to finally ask Harrold to walk.
Frieda believed—though she never could explain how she came to have this theory—in a faraway place where plants still flourished. She also believed that when they arrived there, Honeybee would be waiting for them. Swan put little credence in her vision; a fantasy born of desperation. But he didn’t contradict her. He didn’t really care what she believed. He simply found pleasure in joining into their odyssey, trudging along like three ancient pilgrims. Swan learned many things from Freida and Harold that he wished he’d known before. There’d been many more people than he ever imagined living around the city, though they rarely came out during the day. In fact, from the way Harold described it, the city had been quite a lively place at night. Many of the Unnumbered actually lived quite comfortably, and Dr Escobar wasn’t the only one who knew how to grow edible plants. There was a great deal more activity and innovation outside the luxurious confines of the upside-down skyscrapers than there had ever been inside them.
This was the very beginning of the time of squalor, the period of Swan’s life to which he was most perfectly suited. As they wandered through barren lands, ransacking deserted buildings where occasionally some canned or pickled edible could be discovered, Swan felt almost buoyant in his self confidence and ever-burgeoning strength. Every muscle and sinew rippled near the surface of his skin which had changed to a color like rusted iron. He’d lost the hat. His once fine haircut with the flea ghost, whom he’d oddly grown to resemble, was now a knotted mane. Over time, they were joined by other stragglers and Swan became the de facto chief of a little tribe. Seasons were nonexistent in this seemingly endless desert. The weeks came and went, and then the months. They scavenged in every abandoned town and city, always managing to find just barely enough before they pushed on eastward.
The man arrived out of nowhere, came rushing across the wide highway, shouting and waving a pistol. His enraged face was covered in tattoos. Swan calmly unsheathed his sword and sliced him across the throat, nearly decapitating him with a single blow. It disturbed Swan to see that the man’s filthy overalls were splattered with pigment, and that one of his boots was painted red, the other yellow. Again, he wondered about his sanity. Harold squatted beside the corpse and copied some of the tiny symbols from the man’s skin using Swan’s pencil and notebook. As he stood watching him work, Swan thought how odd it was that he felt no horror, nor regret for what he’d done. He’d lashed out with unrestrained brutality. He’d acted without thought, and he was more and more convinced there was just one reality after all.
After they’d heaped earth over the killed man and shaped it into a fine mound, everyone turned to Swan who, after a moment’s thought, reverently chanted the name of every edible plant he knew.
There were days when the sky became dark almost instantly, and rain fell with tremendous force; not to the extent that it would completely inundate the land, but enough to cause fierce, fast moving floods across the hard, rutted earth. Whenever this happened the little tribe would struggle for higher ground to wait it out, shivering miserably and embracing one another for warmth. Then, in the days that followed, they’d search out the plants that suddenly sprouted here and there. It was Swan who knew how to identify which were safe to eat and which were poisonous, and taught the others how to prepare them. They made soup from Russian thistles, ate sorrel and curly dock, raw. Occasionally they feasted on spiderwort. One remarkable day, they came across a gully filled entirely with pigweed.
The music of the fairies continued to play in his mind. It was the one part of his madness he was happy to hold on to.
A day after they’d been assaulted by two bandits which Swan had casually slain, they met a woman in a ragged dress who came rushing along the highway in the opposite direction. They gathered—there were eleven of them now—in the middle of the expressway, as she faced them while nervously eyeing the embankments that edged the road. “Demons in the hills,” she told them, “Enormous man-eating demons who will rip off your arms and legs before they feast on your still-living body.” After the woman hurried on, Frieda and Harold wanted to turn back. They should reverse course to where they’d last crossed an intersecting highway, Harold said. They could travel north and then head east again. Everyone in the party agreed that this was the most prudent course.
Swan spoke up. “I want to keep going the way we’ve been going,” he said as he gestured with his cane sword. “We always steer to the sunrise.”
“It’s too dangerous,” Harold said.
Swan laughed. “Do you seriously believe in flesh-eating demons? You meet one crazy woman for a minute and you get sucked into her delusions.”
Swan felt prepared for anything. He’d left the blood of yesterday’s combat to dry on his chest. Some time before, he’d asked Frieda to gather his hair into a thick braid that fell along his back. A new sort of power had entered him—or maybe it was an intrinsic power that up until then had been suppressed and absorbed by the continuous deluge of imagery and illusion that had surrounded him all his life.
They traversed a high plateau with Swan in the lead as always. The only sounds were their footfalls against the cracked and ruined asphalt, and the rattling of the rickshaw that was no longer Swan’s job to pull. The color of the land transitioned to a murky lilac-color as it extended outwards. The horizon was striped with yellow. On the road, far ahead, he could just make out the back of a naked woman, very thin, with sharp shoulders. Her dome-shaped hair swayed with every step. Swan rushed forward to get a better look. Then, in a voice, so loud that it was startling even to himself, Swan bellowed, “Hawk! Hawk!” and, before she could turn, he went running to catch up to her.
Wait a minute. It just struck me. This whole thing is somewhat biblical. The cataclysmic flood; little Noah on his "arc" minus 2 of every creature— well, few creatures actually left; Swan/Moses leading his people through the desert to the promised land, dispatching "philistines" with his staff/sword. Tell me I'm crazy.
The author would have us believe that we are "coming" to the end of this story. However, it's not over until the fat lady sings and I doubt the last chapter is Operatic, so a 'sequel' is mandatory. Forget washing the dishes, Mr. Bix. Buy some paper plates and carry on!