The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [163]
When my eyes opened I was in a cage. Four walls, a ceiling, a floor: no way out. Through the miserly square of vision given me of the world outside my cage, further cut by the crisscrossing metal bars into a grid of smaller squares, I saw a long metal floor, wavy with corrugations, and beyond that, a slightly curving metal wall. I heard a low droning rumble, a purring noise that gave this storage room or cargo hold—for that was what it appeared to be—an ear-swelling, stifling acoustic character. My head felt groggy, sick, hot, and blood-fat, as if my ears were plugged with wax. I rooted around with my fingers in the recesses of my giant round ears, and found nothing in them. I noticed that by yawning my mouth wide or by clicking my jaw this wax-stuffed ear feeling abated, albeit only slightly and temporarily. I also felt an unprecedented sensation in my guts, there was a woozy inconstancy to the quality of the gravity in this room. I concluded therefore that I was aboard a ship that was sailing on the sea. I had never been on a boat before of any sort, but I had heard and read accounts of the experience from various sources, and these remembered descriptions seemed to roughly align with what I was then experiencing: this nauseous pitching and rolling of the room, this dipping and weaving feeling, my body’s yearning for solid earth, for the reliability of gravity to keep my feet planted comfortably to ground. I made a noise, just to hear myself. I called out: “HELLO!” It was hard to hear with that softly vibrating rumble all over the room. No one answered. I was alone. Piled up in this room with me were all sorts of crates, boxes, bags, suitcases—suitcases?—why suitcases? Whatever journey we were on seemed to be a long one. It was chilly in the cargo hold of this vessel. My abductors had supplied me with a thin, ratty blanket—their one humane nod to considerations of my comfort—and in this flimsy scrap of cloth I wrapped myself tight against my shivering until the end of the journey, silently awaiting my fate. But this ship did not slowly push into port and maneuver itself at the dock to drop anchor, as I had expected, based on my chance readings on nautical matters, but rather, the sound of the vibrant rumbling purr that permeated the long dark metal room suddenly escalated in pitch and crescendoed in volume, and as it did I felt all my precious innards jump up into my throat with the sickening rollick of the craft. You see, Gwen, I was not in a ship sailing across the bubbling waves as I had thought, but rather flying through the sky, in an aircraft—and we were descending. The sound of the jet engines’ howl as we approached the surface of the earth was more terrifying than even thunder—for it was the work of man—and my heart nearly exploded in fear when I felt what I now believe was the jolting b-bump of our wheels making contact with the ground. This was followed by a period of comparative calm. I still sensed motion in my belly, but I guessed that our craft, grounded now, had slowed to a gentle creep, and the earth beneath us was perfectly flat. Then we stopped. I heard the hisses and sighs of depressurization. The reverberant purr of the whole moving building was abruptly cut, and silence swept into the auditory vacuum left in its wake. I heard noises above me, shifting, thumping, banging. Then a door opened. I heard a pressure lock released, the unratcheting of a hatch, something shrieking on metal hinges, and then the rich audioscape of the outside world.