Oh God, please don’t let it be a mirage.
The tank was maybe four feet deep, maybe a trifle more. Bigger than the trunk of a
car, but not—unfortunately—the size of a pickup truck’s bed. There was no way to
tell for sure, but he thought his hanging hair was touching the disinfected water, and that the top of his head must be within inches of the muck filling the bottom. His left arm was still pinned against his body. Pinned at the wrist now. He couldn’t get it free.
He shimmied from one side to the other. His arm stayed where it was. His worst
nightmare: caught. Caught after all. Caught head down in stinking blackness.
Panic flared. He reached out with his free hand, not thinking about it, just doing it. For a moment he could see his fingers outlined by the scant light coming in through the
bottom of the tank, which was now facing the sunrise instead of the ground. The light
was right there, right in front of him. He grabbed for it. The first three fingers of his flailing hand were too big to fit through the narrow gap, but he was able to hook his
pinky into the split. He pulled, feeling the ragged edge—metal or plastic, he didn’t
know which—first dig into the skin of his finger and then tear it open. Curtis didn’t
care. He pulled harder.
His hips popped through the hole like a cork coming out of a bottle. His wrist came
free, but too late for him to lift his left arm and help break his fall. He crashed
headfirst into the shit.
Curtis came up choking and flailing, his nose plugged with wet stink. He coughed and
spat, aware that he was in a very tight place now, oh for sure. Had he thought the
toilet was tight? Ridiculous. The toilet was the wide-open spaces. The toilet was the
American west, the Australian Outback, the Great Horsehead Nebula. And he had
given it up to crawl into a dark womb half-filled with rotting shit.
He wiped his face, then flung his hands to either side. Ribbons of dark stuff flew from his fingertips. His eyes were stinging, blurring. He wiped them with first one arm,
then the other. His nose was plugged. He stuck his pinky fingers up them—he could
feel blood running down the right one—and cleared his nostrils as best he could. He
got enough out so he could breathe again, but when he did, the stench of the tank
seemed to leap down his throat and sink claws into his stomach. He retched, a deep
growling sound.
Get hold of yourself. Just get hold, or it’s for nothing.
He leaned back against the caked side of the tank, dragging in deep gasps of air
through his mouth, but that was almost as bad. Just above him was a large pearl of
oval light. The toilet hole he had, in his madness, wriggled through. He retched again.
To his own ears he sounded like a bad-tempered dog on a hot day, trying to bark
while half-strangled by a too-tight collar.
What if I can’t stop? What if I can’t stop doing that? I’ll have a seizure.
He was too frightened and overwhelmed to think, so his body thought for him. He
turned on his knees, which was hard—the side wall of the holding tank, which was
now the floor, was slippery—but just possible. He applied his mouth to the split in the floor of the tank and breathed through it. As he did, a memory of some story he’d
heard or read in grammar school came back to him: Indians hiding from their enemies
by lying on the bottom of a shallow pond. Lying there and breathing through hollow
reeds. You could do that. You could do that if you remained calm.
He closed his eyes. He breathed, and the air coming in through the split was blessedly sweet. Little by little, his runaway heartbeat began to slow.
You can go back up. If you can go one way, you can go the other. And going back up will be easier, because now you’re…
“Now I’m greasy,” he said, and managed a shaky laugh…even though the dull,