No splash. No gasping for air. I just float there in silent suspension. My first thought: the light has changed. And the sound. Both are dimmer, yet brighter. Muffled, yet clearer.
There are faint burbling sounds of surprised voices overhead. I see cellphones pointed towards me but it all seems like a French painting, dappled and pointilliar. There is a flash from above, from one of those phones but, between me and the flash, a large stick photobombs the picture in midair. But it isn’t in the air. Then more strange mixtures of objects float above me. A coffee cup, a slab of construction foam, some fallen leaves, a broken bit of two-by-four, more cigarette butts. Drifting in silent constellations above my head. No great alarm in my mind. Just part of the scenery.
I look down and see a rippled riverbed of Dijon-mustard silt. It is moving slowly beneath me, yet, when I turn my head to scan the other direction, I notice now the bottom is moving beneath me in the opposite direction. I am moving as if propelled by thought alone. Like some Segway rider, leaning, moving in any direction I wish to go.
I near the abutment of the bridge I had just passed under on the walkway above and notice massive electrical cables sprouting as ancient roots from the crumbling, old-growth concrete of the bridgehouse. The steel strands plunge beneath the mud and proceed across my path to the other side of the river. Before I know it, the cable crossing is yards behind and I turn again upstream — or is it downstream. I cannot discern the flow, only the vagaries of my own movements.
The sluggish flow means no more to me than it did to those mighty engineers of old, trying to save their city from the contagion that was its own waste, reversing the ancient waters to suit them and their fellow tribesmen, the modern inhabitants of the land of the stink-onions.
***
The first thing that gives me the slightest start is the sudden appearance of a shape, a figure of antique gold floating towards me through the murk. About the size of some sadly flattened football, its outline indicating it would pass me sideways if it proceeds on its present path. As it nears, an amber and brown grid with protrusions like handles above and below are all I can see. Then the oblong shape veers toward me and approaches, becoming more vertical but larger with each moment. Before I can react, a gaping hole in the form opens and closes, lazily, and the geometrically patterned flesh sweeps past my face and disappears over my shoulder. ‘Cyprinus carpio’ springs unbidden from deep memory, though I am no student of Latin. The strange words fade from mind, as the receding shape fades behind.
My ears begin to faintly hum, then slowly vibrate, then deafeningly pulsate as a blackening shadow looms overhead. Suddenly, what had naturally been ‘up’ seems tilted painfully to one side, then the other. My equilibrium is completely disrupted for what seems hours as this lumbering leviathan crushes down on my new world. I know what is passing me this time is not an organic, well-meaning creature like friend Cyprinus, but a menacing, mechanical monster from another plane of existence — the plane I had just so unceremoniously vacated.
This time, my arms and legs do respond to my brain. Flailing, thrashing, then finally forming coordinated movements resembling strokes, my body slowly … then more quickly … pulling itself out of harm’s way. One thing I cannot avoid is the pounding, eardrum-breaking thrum from deep within the planar beast gliding blackborne overhead, ringed with rivets and rust, shouldering me and my new element rudely out of its way.
I have almost adapted my still-newborn senses to the onslaught when a final torrential thrust envelopes me in frothy green-white, spinning me helplessly head over heels. Then it is done … and gone. Seasickness has, to this point, been strangely absent. But now my stomach swirls along with the new element surrounding me. I nearly give myself over to my doom when the turbulence finally subsides, the eddies unwinding in all directions.
I drift numbly, as my newly developed knowledge center files this moment away. An instinctual presumption tells me that it will not be my last such experience.
Read Chapter Three
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