The trench was long and wide, the sides banked and smooth. It sloped to water, perhaps to a depth of four feet at the bottom, no more. A handful of people had chosen—or at least R. preferred to think they'd chosen—to slide down. They now cavorted and splashed there, though it was hardly wide enough at the bottom to qualify as a swimming pool.
There was no guardrail. R. teetered briefly at the edge, trying to see. Where those at the bottom is truly happy, or were they frantic?
"Can they get out again?" R. asked the person beside him just then, who was too near to distinguish exactly.
"We'd have to help them." The speaker's tone was not uncompassionate.
"How?"
"Form some kind of human ladder," the person mused, then squeezed off under a hedge of bodies, duckwalking to make an escape. The suggestion was adept, R. saw, though this level of organization seemed unlikely.
The waders had the pool to themselves, at least, for now. R., untempted, pushed away.
R. rode into the swirl, which had become almost like a human gear system. He found himself jostled upward, taken off his feet for an instant. His view of the plain of milling heads was instructive: the watery trenches were interspersed regularly throughout the vast concourse. The density of bodies made the gaps unmistakable. Had the floor slid open, at some point, to reveal the pools? Or was it that they'd become noticeable only now?
R. was pushed up against a structure that protruded quite unexpectedly into his path. Nothing so large as the trenches, it had been hidden in bodies until the last second. A kind of bench or table, it stood at elbow height. No—a minibar, a thing he'd heard mentioned earlier. Several bodies clung to it, like a raft.
Here, finally, a thing one might audition as a source for sculpture. Some portion of this bar or pedestal might give formal joy—to R., at least—if he envisioned it isolated from the whole configuration and sealed over with his distinctive green-gray oatmeal polymer. Yet how could he get far enough back to see it in its entirety? Hopeless. Anyhow, now that he bent to examine its join to the floor, the object was flagrantly, remorselessly uninteresting.
He should quit thinking this way.
****
