feet in the hall behind me. I picked a door at random and pushed through it, finding an emergency stairwell on the other side. I started down the rectangular spiral of whitewashed metal stairs. The building roared and flashed everywhere with the alarm. I hadn’t descended two flights before my pursuers came through the door after me. They were men in shiny blue jumpsuits—they had walkie-talkies clipped to their belts and vests, beeping, crunching and squawking with static, and they carried electric prods. I jumped off the railing down the shaft, bouncing from one flight down to the next, in my animal agility gripping, swinging, releasing, swooping myself down the stair shaft by my long arms and four hands. The sickening spiral of stairs above me shrank rectangle by rectangle to the ceiling. The staircase wobbled and clanged with shoes, and the tall blank room resonated up and down with the echoes of shouting human voices. I jumped onto the next landing and saw a door with a narrow window in it, and I saw that the window was bright with the natural light of sun and sky. The green light of an institutional EXIT sign glowed above the door. I slammed myself into the bar of the door, it fell open for me, and I was out. I was in an alley behind the building. I looked to the right: a long flat brick wall, beyond which I could see what looked like a parking lot. I looked to the left: more wall, several dumpsters, more parking lot. I looked straight ahead: a chain-link fence with a pigtail coil of razor wire strung along the top of it. Beyond the fence: a forest of thin brown dead trees—and the possibility of escape. Now I was climbing the fence, which wobbled with my weight against its poles, metal chiming against metal, and I heard the handle of the door jitter open behind me. I did not look back. I scrambled over the top of the fence and dragged my naked body through the coil of razor wire. I felt the blades lacerate my flesh in a dozen places as I scrambled panic-blind and unthinking through it. I heard gunshots, actual gunshots behind me, but the bullets missed me. I was already swinging by my long arms, crashing through the dry branches of the trees, brachiating from canopy to canopy, before I even felt the pain, or saw the freely flowing gush of my own bright blood leaving my body.
XXXIV
The previous day (or whenever it was—my sense of time was garbled, the string of memories that led me here all tangled up in a knot) I had woken up in Chicago—and now here I sat, far away in an unknown place, in a tree, no less, like my fathers before me, and also like my fathers before me, naked. And I was bleeding profusely. I had cut myself badly on that fence. Cuts all over my legs, my chest, my arms. They were not rough cuts either—which are actually less painful—but thin, precise, deep slices. I was covered in blood. I was filthy. I was hungry, I was thirsty. I was lost. Oh—and, this being March, I think, while not abjectly freezing, it was very cold. And let’s not forget I was hairless, too, and to add insult to my compounded injuries, nude: therefore I was shivering. And I knew that they would be hunting after me. Thus was the state of my affairs: bleak. I sat there awhile, my arms hugging my legs for warmth, rocking back and forth, bleeding in a tree. I was an endangered animal.
By and by the bleeding stopped, but my skin was tingly, hypersensitive, swollen with pain for days afterward. I still have faint white scars. After escaping from the biomedical research lab, I crashed blindly through the woods in this place yet unnamed to me, until I came to a narrow paved road with a shallow ditch running beside it. I slogged through the ditch awhile, my naked feet stepping on rocks and twigs and squelching in the mud, diving for cover beneath muck and dead leaves and pine needles every time I heard a car coming. I lost myself in another thicket of these knotty, spindly brown trees, thrashed through the leaves and bushes until I came to a pond, which was frozen except for a hole in the center. At the pond’s edge I bashed the ice in