12: The Vividness of Everything

For more than a month he’d been traveling to and from the Nature Preserve and he’d worked out a route that took him along the widest, most unobstructed streets. His walk was a bit longer this way, but it felt safer to have some space around him.

Saiga Street had once been a grand thoroughfare. Now it was lined by petrified tree trunks with broken off tops, as well as hundreds of metal poles that sprouted rotting wires from their ends. Most of the buildings were sheathed in faded graffiti-covered boards, curled and bleached by the sun. Here and there a doorway had been roughly sawed out of them.

And from these doorways, people would occasionally appear. They took to the street just ahead of Swan or just behind, as if the building he was passing had spit them out. This caused Swan to veer off the sidewalk and into the blazing sun of the open street, where he’d rush stumbling over streetcar tracks and potholes.

These sudden appearances frightened him, though the bedraggled-looking strangers didn’t seem to take much interest in his nervous scurrying figure. They were old people for the most part, of a variety of races, hardly any under forty-five or so and some even older. They dressed in rumpled incongruous clothing, faded Zinqtex, disposable pajamas, or overly large and tattered underwear, or anything else that a person was likely to find among the dregs of an already-looted discount store. He saw a man wearing a bathrobe so hardened with filth that it hung like planks off his body. He saw men in frilly dresses and women in starchy military uniforms. Everyone wore a hat of some kind to ward off the sun. He heard laughter occasionally—something he rarely heard in the Cumulus. It came over fences, through windows and doors left ajar. He was never able to see who was laughing or find out what they laughed about, leaving Swan with the uneasy feeling that they were laughing at him. Odors of unknown chemicals, or of gasoline or sewage, showed up here and there. Once, he thought he could smell thistle soup simmering on a stove.

Whenever one of these random strangers appeared close by, Swan was terrified he’d have a panic attack. The thought of losing himself to a paralyzing breakdown on the street was an ever-present worry. One of these Unnumbered old people, seeing that he was incapacitated, could easily assault him, slice off part of his body or his face, or molest him in some other, still-to-be-imagined way.

Despite his fears, he always moved forward resolutely as if he’d been entrusted with an important mission. He looked straight ahead and maintained a rapid pace, regardless of the heat, even when he was tired. It was because of this, the way he pushed himself every morning, taking long lanky strides while he pumped his arms, that he was becoming stronger. His travel time diminished. He noticed that he was less clumsy, and he was gaining stamina.

Every morning he had no choice but to pass through the square at Trinity Place. The old hotels with their mysterious residents, loomed above him. He imagined that many pairs of eyes observed him from the windows, though he was too cowardly to look up to see if it was true.

Once inside the park, he kept up his search for the miniature people, at least for the first several weeks. It had been difficult to locate the exact place he’d seen them. The symbolic scenery that featured the man with his head in a vice had never reappeared. Because of this, on his first morning back, he thought he’d gone too far and had to reverse himself. Then, he reversed himself again. All the while, messages were flashing. You are going the wrong way, Mr Swan! You are moving too slowly! Finally, nearly out of time, he had to dash for the exit.

The next day he proceeded carefully past the ring of polished steel, keeping his eyes trained to the ground. He found the place, at least he thought he did. It looked very much like the clearing where the girl had pranced about, and he thought he recognized the artificial stones the little men had scrambled over.

But there was no sign of them. There was no sudden rustling of the flower tops either. Swan slowly pivoted, scanning the terrain. As he did this, he was struck by the overall vividness of everything. The little garden exploded with color, and this set him to thinking about how flowers had looked when he was a child. They hadn’t been so uniformly bright and large he thought, and it seemed to him that real flowers had grown in clusters of one singular type, while here they came in a hodgepodge of many random shapes and pigments. He remembered, unless he’d dreamed it, that his mother showed him how to put his nose into the middle of a blossom and inhale its fragrance. Swan bent down on a knee and sniffed the closest flower. The stiff polyethylene petals scratched his lip. There was no particular scent beyond the general chemical smell that hung over this place. He moved a few feet farther along and sampled some of the others. The bluish one might have been a daisy. He held the stem between his fingers and tilted it to his nose. The gold one was almost certainly a rose. If nothing else, it was a marvelous creation for the eyes. If only the miniature people would come back here again!

You are 11 minutes, 29 seconds behind schedule, Mr Swan!

He hurried forward. Perhaps he would find them elsewhere.

As the days went on, and then the weeks, he found himself becoming more and more disappointed. His health was improving, but his main impetus in coming to the Nature Preserve really had been to discover the miniature people. He kept resisting what was becoming more obvious: the agile diminutive girl and the little men in suits were products of a new type of hologram. It was hard to believe that such a seamless and vivid illusion could be achieved in a place so thick with stems and stones and blossoms. Still, they’d shown up on the same day as the hermit and the naked dancer, and it made him think that the little people might have been another aspect of his symbolic scenery, even if this made the symbolism harder to untangle. He hated to admit it, but he’d been tricked by the automatic systems of the Nature Preserve that turned out to be much more sophisticated than Dr Escobar seemed to know.