The hour was at hand and so were my tools. There was nothing more to be done.
“If I’m not back before the end of the day, you know what to do.”
My second gave me the thumbs up, and then there was nothing more to be said either.
The peak lay ahead of me. All that had to be done was to enter it. Twin blackened holes lay beneath the summit, odd fumes wafting out from their silent gapes and down the long, overgrown path. The ground roiled uneasily, and if I weren’t wearing an oxygen mask I’d be turning green already.
No room for self-pity. I had a job to do.
***
My machete was blunted and chipped by the time I gained the entrance, better-served as a club than a blade. I discarded it; my walking stick could serve the same purpose now, and any weight could be fatal here. My headlamp was a masterpiece of modern engineering, but in the cramped and humid recesses I moved through it was the atmospheric equivalent of a flashlight in a muddy lagoon – any space in front of me it illuminated was just as much hidden by reflected glare from filthy air particulates. Sight fell away in favour of touch, and that was an iffy prospect at best with my hands wrapped in three layers of insulation and antibacterial coating. I walked on three limbs, stick swinging and prodding and shuffling me onwards, finding the bumps and dips and divots before my feet could and only half-stumbling, half-falling – collecting bruises instead of breaks, strains instead of sprains.
Then my head slammed into a slimy, low-hanging hummock and I moved at half speed, tapping my stick up and down in a full arc, pushed onward by the hissing clock of my air tank and held back by the need to make sure neither foot nor skull went awry. Minutes passed like hours and three times I was reduced to crawling, squirming, forcing myself through crevices that caught and clung at my clothing before I took a step and swung the stick and felt nothing.
Nothing below.
Nothing above.
I used my eyes – straining harder, harder, coaxing the useless things to give me information – and in the distant reflections of hazy air and fetid depths I saw my destination.
The cavity. And beyond it, carved rough and wet through the murk, clogged with long, fibrous strands of indescribable colours and textures, the canal.
I was in.
***
The air cleared in here. Farther from the fetid fumes of my entrance, kept cloistered and pure by the buffers of the spaces I’d suffered through.
Pity that there was less of it than ever. What space that existed grew more cramped by the moment, and every step I took I wrested farther, fought harder. It was like wading through a tide of passive-aggressive waterweeds coated in molasses.
I thought of my machete and indulged in a brief and gloriously violent fantasy that sustained my muscles through another twelve steps. Then I focused like a professional, which would have to do for the remaining uncounted hundreds.
The space only grew thicker. And then it started to bite. Small shocks and sparks leapt from surface to surface as a matter of fact, snapping against my mask like dying fireflies, dancing through my fingers and out through my feet, making my jaw twitch and clench and my fingers ache.
I knew where I was going. I’d looked at the charts, made them myself, based my theory in fact and my fact in well-proven evidence and my faith in myself. I was in a warren of lumpen murk and endless lightning where the sun was never meant to shine and there was no space and there was no time and there was only me and my rising pulse and my falling oxygen levels and oh.
There it was.
***
It was small and cramped and thick and dull. The liveliness that infested the entire rest of this dank pit didn’t touch it, the endless mass that weighed down on me was pushed back by it. Here it stood in one of the most bizarre places on earth or anywhere else with resolute, placid, unthinkable solidity and changelessness.
It was almost admirable. But I had a job to do, so I reached into my backpack – which took two years, or, if you trusted my mask’s clock, four minutes – and pulled out a collection of large, sharp, cruel implements, which I assembled with breathtakingly premeditated cruelty.
The swollen intrusion squatted at my navel, uncaring. It had created itself through denial, it had enlarged itself through denial. Denial would serve it well against me as well.
But not well enough. .
I pounced.
And slid.
And cut.
And hacked and swore and sawed and fought and spat and swore and snarled and kicked and punched and pried and got up to my elbows shoulders chest in it and took it apart piece
by
piece.
Still, that first pounce really felt good. Not as good as I did afterwards though. Arms aching, lungs heaving, covered in the worst of things and feeling the adrenaline slick my thoughts down to a nice lean nothing. I even had enough space to stand up straight for the first time in forever, in the shrinking hollow that the swollen lump had made for itself.
So I stretched, breathed in, breathed out, and tried not to think about disassembling my cutting instruments and packing them again along with placing every single fragment of my prey inside a drag-bag and pulling it and myself down the entire damned way I’d just taken.
Well shit.
***
Light bloomed so joyously it was almost offensive, my feet crunched on thick carpet, and I was well downslope of my entry.
I looked up, up, up, up, up into the sky, which was filled with the face of my second: surgical nurse James Holiday.
“Clear,” I said.
He gave me the thumbs up with one hand and aimed the perispectralizer with the other. Everything crackled and tasted like limes and then I was on the floor of the operating room with a terrible and deeply ironic headache.
I peeled off my oxygen mask and took a deep breath that wasn’t from a can for the first time in ever. “Fuck,” I said with its exhalation.
“How’d it go?”
“Oh, just peachy. Fuck. Wish they were all just peachy. Fuck. We can chuck him in the CT scan later to be sure but FUCK FUCK pretty sure I got the whole lump root and stem. FUCK there’d better be coffee waiting. I HATE this.”
“Speaking of that….a surprise trip just came up for tomorrow,” said Holiday apologetically.
“Shit.”
“Sorry.”
“Is it not more brains at least?” I begged. “Anything but brains. I think I almost got crushed to death by ganglia back there. I can feel the sinuses in my sinuses, don’t ask me how. I BROKE a titanium machete on nose hair. No more brains, please.”
“No more brains,” said Holiday.
“Great.”
“It’s a colonic tumour.”
Exploratory surgery really could be a shit.