People used to tell me I remember everything, but of course there is too much of everything for anyone to remember. It’s really just that the type of things I do remember are different, like I might be able to quote the script of a movie I’ve seen, but I wouldn’t be able to say whom I saw it with. Movies and other things tend to exist in a sort of limbo memory space. And for a while after we tipped back into the Great Cistern, events for me shifted into that unmarked class of sliding space-time. Maybe in another way it’s like if you’re listening to something or watching a movie on a disk and you’ve hit the REPEAT button and then fall asleep in your chair while it loops over and over. You might remember the scenes perfectly clearly, but not how they fit together or which repeat you saw them on. It was like an in-and-out dozy state when you might be sort of remembering a dream while you’re dreaming it, or getting ready to dream it again and sort of seeing it coming and getting ready to remember it. It never quite seems to be happening at the time. Instead it’s like you’re visualizing what’s going to happen or trying to make sense out of what’s happened already, and even though the events are all clear enough they’re not correlated against any clocks, internal or external. I certainly remember that feeling of knowing we were irrevocably off-balance. I don’t remember falling or hitting the water. I think my heart stopped for a beat and a half. I realized the blood I’d pulled in with me was still choking me, and I remember reaching over with my right hand and finding a shard of obsidian that was still stuck in my left one. I got it out, tightened my fingers around it, twisted my arm back, found the protuberances of the blood’s left floating ribs, felt up the costal arch, and cut through under the base of the sternum. He reacted but his grip didn’t relax and I could tell I didn’t have much consciousness time left. I got the feeling we were still sinking instead of floating up, maybe because of all his quilted padding and heavy spondylus shell wrist cuffs and ankle cuffs and everything. I dug the knife in again, got the tips of four fingers inside his skin, finger-crawled up under his xiphoid process, and cut through the diaphragm up into his hot pericardial cavity. I was in the wrong position to get all the way up to his heart but I found the inferior lobe of his left lung instead and grabbed it. It felt like a wet sea sponge. I yanked on it and it mushed and collapsed, but it must have triggered some real alarm because the blood’s whole body spasmed so that I could push clear of him. I gasped at the release and a croquet ball of water forced itself down into my throat. It was about halfway pleasant because I really did need a drink but more pressed into my lungs and I got a blast of preconscious reptile panic.
Last thing, I thought. I dug the bag of earthstar powder out of my crotch and fumbled with the knots. I couldn’t get it open with my shredded hands. Some of the shard was still stuck in the metacarpals of my right hand, though, and I stabbed the side of the little bag, twisted a hole in it, and punched the bag inside out though the hole, releasing trails of numbing death through the water. I even managed to cut the bag off its thong and let it sink, although consciously speaking I’d forgotten that it had been weighted with pebbles. I floated.
And that was basically it for a while. I don’t remember being wet, although being underwater doesn’t feel wet anyway. I do remember gazing at the circle of faint sky-blue below me, the opening of the well-although it was really above me-and considering whether to blow the rest of my carbonized air supply out through my lungs and die in one of the most pleasant ways possible, in the center of a jade sphere in the hands of the well gods, listening to the resonance of the water, room, womb, tomb, flume, shroom, plume, room, whoomb, boom, twroooowmb, twoooooommmmmmm.