32: Sanctum Sanctorum

In the dimness it took a second or so for Swan’s eyes to register the dozens of faces that stared down at him. They leaned over handrails and the sills of downward-canted windows. Their flowing, free-form dwellings covered the entire surface of the great central cavity inside the tree; a vertical village built in the sinuous shapes of petals and bones, just as he’d once observed in a long forgotten dream.

Frenetic paintings of animals and naked dancers were splashed over every wall. Catwalks made of planks and string crisscrossed the darkened hollow. Teensy lights and bits of mirror dangled. The town defied gravity. It defied everything. It was as precarious as Swan’s own reality, about to come crashing down at any moment. At the very top was a small bright passage into the air—a small round hole through the top of the vault that allowed in a shaft of daylight that illuminated wisps of unraveling pink smoke. Swan sniffed at the faint sweet scent. He inhaled the mystery that surrounded him. What was before him seemed both unreal and supernatural, an occult vision that seeped through his ganglion cells and into his astonished midbrain.

More and more faces with piercing eyes appeared along the rails of the sagging balconies. Again, he inhaled the smoke into the expanse of his body’s emptiness and let the gladness fill his heart.

These were her people, this was Ottala’s family, and he wanted very much to speak to them.

But in making the effort to speak he found he could not. Something was wrong. This was not a panic attack, this was different. His body felt utterly relaxed as if it had gone to sleep and left his mind behind. The perfumed smoke that clouded the room must be a sort of tranquilizing vapor, and now, his body was rendered motionless.

Still, he could breathe without difficulty. The muscles of his eyes kept working. He was able to focus and pivot them. With effort he could wiggle his two big toes, miles away, where they occupied a distant location in the sunny world outside the tree. No other muscle was movable, and very soon, his feeling of wonder was replaced with fear. Was it really the pink smoke that felled him? How could it be that the Fairies were immune to it? Or had, by coincidence, some other terrible physiological failure of his body, just at that moment, struck him down?

Most of the Fairies kept staring down at his face while a few of them conversed across the cavity. Kulp was there, in his burlap suit soiled with dust. He leaned over the railing, three levels up, gesturing and shouting instructions to Fairies up and down the town. Swan could not understand the Fairy dialect, but the atmosphere was one of merriment. Everywhere there were bursts of laughter.

Some boys leapt from the lowest of the balconies onto his face. There were three of them and he felt them thrust their hands between his lips. Swan bugged out his eyes in an attempt to see what they were up to while laughter rained down from above. A fourth boy clambered up Swan’s head, using his ear for a toe-hold. They were like a gang of miniature pranksters, and they yanked at Swan’s lips as if peeling back the blubber of a whale. They hooked something over his bottom teeth, something made of wire.

The thought came to him then: Did the Fairies mean to kill him? Did they mean to slaughter him and dismember him inside the tree? Would he be required to suffer this while he was still conscious?

The boys were outside now. They were tramping across his chest. There must have been a string attached to the hook in his teeth. Their heels pressed into his breastbone as they yanked open his jaw to its very limit, and Swan remembered the time he’d seen dead bodies in the streets with their mouths agape.

But all his fear melted away when he saw her: Ottala, descending from the high bright hole in the ceiling on a string. Her silhouette was unmistakable against the beam of sunlight. The folds of her golden pajamas shimmered, and the unruly town fell silent.

Down she came, perched at the end of her string, rotating, stagily blowing kisses to the crowd.

A strange sad music began then. It poured into the vault from everywhere at once—an oom pah pah sort of music, a world-weary polka-dotted polka. Nearly everyone brought an instrument to a window or a rail. Accordions, their bellows held together with gooey sap, wheezed through woozy passages. Drumsticks, made from the tibias of mice, banged with boozy fervor. Murmulpipes blew long murmurs. Trombones glittered with tears. The music seemed wistful and dreamy and Swan felt a residue of childish melancholy well up in him. He’d never heard music like this. The Fairies themselves could not help but become intoxicated by it, and the hollow was suffused with emotion. 

Ottala, the trapeze artist, filled Swan’s vision as she closed in. Her beauty took on another form new to him: a figure of poise and grace floating through the air. These words were the words he thought he’d chosen to describe her, but then he realized somebody—the Fairy children—were standing beside his head, chanting these very words into his ears.

Down through the smoke and music. She smiled at him warmly as she landed in his mouth. In its paralysis, his tongue had collapsed into a blob, and now the weight of one slipper and then the other pushed on its spongy surface. She released her trapeze which flew away and thrust her arms in the air as the entire town let out a cheer. It was a strange and outrageous thing to do, it seemed to Swan. The Fairies who weren’t playing musical instruments began to clap their hands rhythmically.

All this artistry was of secondary interest to Swan now that she was waist-deep in his mouth. The way she slapped his lips in time to the music felt extremely rude to him. Gut Wedding turned out to be quite different from anything he’d imagined. There were no vows or toasts or speeches, there was just a rowdy carnival, a ragbag, a jamboree. She danced on his tongue while the Fairies cheered and, if he hadn’t been felled by the tranquilizing smoke, he would have spit her out. But at the moment this thought came to him, Ottala slipped down his throat.

Swan’s eyes bulged as her pajamas rubbed his esophagus. He gagged and thought he’d vomit, but then she was beyond it. She was inside his chest, feeling her way around. Sweat beaded all across Swan’s face, his eyeballs rolled in his head while the town howled. The Fairy children tramped across his cheeks and made a contest of leaping over his nose. They pushed one another off his head so they could scale it again and again. Swan’s insides felt like rooms that Ottala stroked with her hands. She traveled from one to another of these rooms and, in this way, he began to discern their shape. She was in his pancreas, his liver, his spleen. She’d arrived inside his heart! Somehow the Fairy music penetrated right into the chambers of his heart where Ottala danced to its wild rhythms. He’d been invaded. He’d been ransacked. He felt helpless and strangely aroused as the entire town swayed and danced to the music and Swan was yanked by his ankles into the light.

The Fairy children abandoned his face instantly. The too-bright sky blasted his retinas and rendered him temporarily blind. Hard, many-knuckled fingers pulled his body across the yard.

His head bounced along behind it. Six arms of polyimide and steel, eight elbows on each, extended from openings in the sides of the ambulance that had arrived to gather him.

Swan wanted to scream but he could not. He wanted to shout that he was alive and was feeling tremendous pain. Two or maybe three of the arms, fingers splayed fanlike, scooped up his torso, tearing his clothes in the process. The hard metal appendages lifted him in quick short motions, while his arms and legs were dragged over the ground and scattered the Fairy stockpiles. The high pitched whine of gearing filled the air. The mechanical fingers tilted skyward and Swan’s body slid through a narrow opening in the roof of the vehicle. His body, like a sack of buns, crashed down on its thinly padded floor. The metal arms retracted, the various hatches closed, and the ambulance on its bulging tires slowly rolled away.