On the Third Day, Boulder (barrier)
VI.ii. In Circulation
— ‘(two.)’
A slick morass of icy viscous liquid reached up to pluck Milo from his plummet, scooping him and Phantasmannie into its capricious floeing churn. They are digested into the belly of the human-made tidepool source, and Milo flailed his arms wildly which swam his lone torso, not with such intention, but to carve a pocket of air to breathe, unsuccessfully.
— Mamanina! Help me!
[Don’t speak, Milo, I can hear your thoughts. Calm down. Breathe in me. Breathe me in. That’s it, more slowly now.]
Surrounded by the fleeting hail of bubbles reversing their relationship with gravity, Milo was being enveloped by a stretching glistening violet conscious aura; the sun’s rays still penetrate this deep, and each photon should be coveted and appreciated, she not only reflected, her magic vaporous shell matched the incoming energy when she released it back into the wild, making it twice as bright when it found the next way station; and once completely covered his heart rate slowed drastically, and a nourishing gas so pure as he’d never remembered experiencing, never remembering the experienced. Always mirrormembering the inexperienced, your own wiggly ovum that spermsquiggily had zygotten itself glacially into reinexistence. Nick Nock.
Nick Nock.
Nick.
The amniotic gush piqued Milo to wakeful alertness. He reviewed his surroundings: they were deep down inside a sheet metal well. It took Milo a moment’s float to figure out which way was up.
Nock.
To their left side was a half-collapsed dark natural tunnel, perhaps burrowed by some small mammal or worm. The metal sheathing continued into darkness the other direction. A gentle current pulls them along the pipeline, but not so swiftly as to punish indecision.
[Aha! This is a clue!] — [Clue or not, wading here will not get us to the Nexus.]
Nock.
[I want to hear how the angels do it first.]
Milo’s torso agreed or capitulated to conserve energy, it was unclear, but they flowed away from the natural rupture in the otherwise industrial-precision construction.
— [Would worm tunnels likely go back to the surface?] — [My understanding is that generally that is so, especially in human-tended and cultivated land as topsoil is the most nutrition-rich.] — [I don’t imagine a ‘recently inhabited’ variant makes much difference?] — [It depends on a number of factors, baby.] — [I was really just being silly.] — [I know. Making my response even more irritating. Zing!] — [You’re incorrigible.] — [I definitely don’t cotton to corrigible, when I can help it.] — [Weird, it’s a little shitty to hear the word cotton…]
Nock.
The deeper they were dragged the more infrequent the light. Milo could sometimes pick out rivets and silicon, but perhaps more by feel as he and the fused phantasm bounced with the tide harmlessly against the pipe’s slick lining. The plasma warmed the further they traveled.
[Do you like lobster?] — [To eat?] — [No, to keep as pets. Yes, to eat.] — [That’s disgusting. They used to feed that to civil war rebel prisoners.] — [What? No, it’s delicious.] — [It’s alive. It’s conscious.] — [No, you cook it.] — [It’s a conscious creature. Just like you or I, it has experiences, sensory, it has thoughts, however rudimentary they might comparatively be. Without that, we’d have never found a way in. I would never intentionally extinguish another consciousness unless my survival was in dire jeopardy. So no, I have never been in a situation so mortal that the only way I wouldn’t die was to murder and devour a lobster.] — [Jesus. I am truly sorry I asked.] — [Then why did you?] — [Because I’ve been noticing how the water is…] — [Let’s use effluvia instead…] — […getting down-right hot. I’m worried it’s going to shortly get too hot; use your tentacles and help me swim against the current?]
Together, Milo with his arms and Phantasmannie with amoebally-generated propellers were able to make some progress against the burdensome counterflow. The current itself had increased in force without detection, and they were unable to maintain their momentum, rip-towed back downward.
[Who is it?] — [Who’s there?] — [there.]
Phantasmannie was sensing that Milo was falling prey to panic again. Strategically, when she clipped off his burdensome legs, she made sure to preserve his manhood toolkit. She stiffened her cell wall, and the parts of her in direct contact with Milo became more gelatinous, and she focused her own mitochondrial warmth to his lower extremities, from his groin to his buttock. He sighed a couple of times as he stepped down tiers of anxiety.
[Don’t worry, baby, I’m here with you.] — [God it feels so good.] — [I know, baby. Hush.] — [Oh God that’s good.] — [Mmm. Just relax.] — [Oooh, yea…-but we’re floating toward…] — [We’re fine. I’ve got you covered. A little heat can’t hurt me. I can just absorb it and turn it into affection. Mmm. Do you like this?] — [Oh god, yes!]
Milo was arching his spine backward, arms extended out into the bog of hot water so agitated that it’s begun to form bubbling pocks of gas demanding nearest exit. The air bubbles fizzled like pop rocks against her back, and she transduced the sensuously scintillating energy patterns to let him also feel what it was like, as he was fully encased in her.
‘(Donkey.)’
— [Mamanina! It’s Donkey! Hes alive!] — [Donkey who?] — [From the stables.] — [What stables?] — [Please be serious.] — [I am being serious; what stables?] — [I was just, I mean, it seems like just, but, once we hit the water, I’m not really sure how much time has passed, there is no way to tell time here…] — [It’s confusing inside this observational state; one isn’t usually asked questions in dreams, the relationship, pertinence and implications of everything is always understood in the moment of execution.] — [This communion is not a dream them?] — [No. Very curious… Who is this Donkey, then?]
[Donkey Who?] — [Donkey Who?] — [Donkey Who?] — [Donkey Who?]
— Where are you, Donkey? At first, it seemed as though they were being pushed downward along the current by force of gravity, but Milo came to realize that the intensity of this suction was now far greater than the slope of their descent. Donkey’s voice was coming from elsewhere, overhead, and upon revolution, Milo’s outstretched mystical violet-mittened fingertips found only sheet metal. — Where are you?
Without immediate response, Milo feared that they had passed out of audio contact range with his most recent compatriot.
— [I first noticed him when we entered the stables. You and I. We had listened to the anguishing wounds of generations of women… is any of this familiar?] — [Only from having reviewed random segments of the capture. But it will be quicker if you tell me. I remember the moments just before you approached the wailing stones.] — [So once we assuaged their apprehensions, on the way to the silo in the distance we encountered a red barn full of stables, pens, paddocks and fenced-in rotation fields. We told them The Unfolding Story of Ole Stump.] — [Oh! The one where Ole Stump the treant had lost his temper in a forest fire and stampeded all over Christchurch, setting blocks of residential homes on fire?] — [No, the one where he creates an automaton to become the New Stump, which frankly sounds like a much better narrative.] — [I agree. I must have misheard, I wasn’t paying the strictest attention.] — [So this bemused, timorous, emotionally wounded donkey colt pulled the last straw of the story, and I’d say we bonded immediately, reflections of symbiotic codependency, he brought us to the horizon of steam, and then we…] — [Oh, my, right, of course. Now that makes sense. Donkey. Got it.”
‘(Don Quixote.)’
Milo and his aural shield Phantasmannie had emerged from the confined piping into a large chamber of circulating at excessively high temperatures.
A gurgling red warning light strobed in the hyper-attenuated water overhead behind a cage of metal wire; to either side, rows of channels too small for them to fit vacuums in the rush of water.
— [He’s down in there, but they’re all too small. Do you think you could fit?] — [Oh, baby, if I left you for the slightest instant you would be boiled alive.] — [Could you separate off part of yourself and investigate?] — [Just on command, on-demand mitosis? No.]
They tread in this colossal chamber for a moment when they hear Donkey’s bray clearly through one of the straw hole openings.
Hee Haw.
The spine of the book was a faded soft blue. He ran his fingers over the inset lettering; it wasn’t braille, but the knowledge that there was a tactile relationship was titillating to Milo. His mother bent down next to him, and asked him if this is the one that he wanted to check out.
“How come there are no pictures, mama?”
“Milo, we talked about it, these aren’t generally picture books, that’s in the kids section for babies, but you said you wanted a big boy book and you love the musical and you love the movie.”
Milo bristled. “Yeah, mom, I know. I mean on the front, it’s just blank.”
“Oh, they remove the jacket sometimes in the library. The jacket is just a sheet of paper that goes around the book, see?” She picks up an illustrated book about birds, revealing the yellow scotch tape holding it down by one final corner. “I guess they don’t want you judging their books by their covers.” She tickled his nose. “I don’t know why they do it, but we can ask the librarian.”
“I think it’s ’cause people would just destroy them anyway.”
“That does sound like something people you’d catch people doing. Seriously, I’m getting impatient, something about libraries skeeves me out. Yuck. And makes me say things like ‘skeevy.’” Milo’s mother hooked her daffodil-yellow purse in her elbow, unclicked Milo’s release with her foot and began to push his wheelchair.
“No, I can do it!”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Milo!” She flashed him a salute. ”Get a move on then. Head over there, towards the desk. That older lady with the glasses will help us.”
*groan*
“I’ve never read it before, but we’ve seen the movie, and our school did the play — I was the Wiz!”
“I bet you were a terrific Wizard of Oz,” correcting the boy, who shook his smiling head in fervent agreement. “What does the Wizard do after they find out he was a fake?”
“He tells Dorothy how to get home on her own!” He chirped.
“Ugh! Now you’ve ruined it for me! I’ve never seen it!” Lamented his mother jocularly. The woman, older than her age and starting to wrinkle, peered over the rim of her glasses and stared humorlessly at Milo’s mother. His mother’s pulse started to rise, and heat flushed her face, turning to the automatic doors below the neon
“Here!” Milo stuck the hardcover on top of the circulation desk, his first library card in his hand. The librarian smiled again as she took it from him, removed the renewal slip and pressed in next week’s date with her spiky stamp, and handed him back the book.
“Have it back here or renew it by the date on the card.”
“I know! I’m going to read it right away.”
“We’ve got more when you’re done. Toodle-loo.” She reset the bridge of reading glasses and returned to paperwork. Uncomfortable and stewing, Milo’s mother impatiently waited for him to try and put the book in his school bag. Unable to wait any longer as she felt the eyes of all the patrons scrutinizing her in her belted tight, bright teal dress and white-stockinged heels. If you let the white worms burrow past your fortress defenses, they’ll destroy a system from the inside, from the roots. She felt herself unable to bolster her crumbling confidence, so she quickly yanked her sunglasses down and pursed her lips. She grabbed the back of Milo’s wheelchair and rolled him towards the handicap hyrdraulic door.
“Mom, I can do it.”
“We’re leaving.” She sneered. “Now.”
[That’s it!] — [What?] — [Tap on the wall for me. The wall with the light.]
Obligingly, Milo rapped against the metal.
[Hollow. These are tubes, they’re running through something behind the wall. The wall is a casing for something. Can you break it?]
— [No?] He volleyed as he knocked forcefully on unfazed metal.
[Really punch it.] — [I did.] — [No, you’ve got me with you now, I can diffuse the impact, trust me, I’ll absorb it, just punch it as hard as you can.]
Milo loosed a powerful Superman cross, and to primarily his own astonishment, the metal casing buckled and creased. He gaped in amazement and gleefully cackled open-mawed.
— [Take that, mothafucka.] Two more substantial dents were incurred. [You wanna piece of me?] A bludgeoning uppercut deeply dimpled the deformed metal. — What the fuck you lookin’ at, assfucker?
Where are you, Donkey? I want to to follow the sound of your story, to let Fate rejoin us again. Fate, I beg you, bring us together again I pray as the lead walls rupture and sizzling oceans evaporate instantly into heavens, told just once, by whisper of rook, crook, and crank jointly into the cauliflower ear of a simple bond between proxy and avatar, that the sun existed.
Yes, Virginia, that’s all it took.
The mere suggestion of the word ‘escape.’