Zen City Read Online Free Page B

my back and shimmying down head-first. I lay there for a minute to catch my breath, my legs up high, my head below.
    There were fragile, twisted rock noodles above my head—helictites—like loose handwriting scrawled on the air. Some had been broken off by Angela or Pirate or by me when I’d twisted over, if not by someone before us. There was a bubble, an enlargement in the cavity around my shoulders, so I could bend my arms and lace my fingers under my head for a pillow.
    I was resting, looking up at the strings of stone in the dull green light of the unguent, when I saw something Angela and Pirate must have missed, because, being smaller than I, they would never have bothered to twist onto their backs to get through. It was a line of writing on the stone overhead, the letters made up of little, straight scratches. They were upside-down to the way I was headed and must have been scratched there by someone going in the other direction:
    #
    I’M NOT YOU.
    #
    The words played in my mind like a children’s rag: “I’M NOT YOU-OOH! I’M NOT YOU-OOH! I’M NOT YOU-OOH!” until my head ached and I had to get away from there, as if I were squirming away from a place in my mind. Incredibly, it worked; I wormed forward, leaving the song behind to haunt that empty niche.
    In another twenty feet the tube connected with a grotto the size of a railway station. The floor was four feet below the hole I was coming out of, so that I was standing on my hands for a moment before I tumbled into the room, and the full light of me,glowing green with unguent, illumined the grotto. On one side, the grotto pinched down through a sort of barrel into a keyhole-shaped opening. The keyhole led out into a passage large enough to belly through; there were gypsum needles carpeting the opening and petals of it curling out from the wall, some of them a foot long and shaped like dried, burst milkweed pods. On the other side, the grotto connected to a wide crawl space between two collapsed strata of limestone, laid out like a slant tent roof with the canvas fly just above it; only this fly was thick with dogtooth spar.
    There was a third junction that I didn’t see until my leg was swallowed into it, yanked by the calf down into a hole near the floor. My zazen came through—I wasn’t ruffled. I grabbed hold of a bulbous projection at the edge of the opening I had just come from, and I pulled up for all I was worth. Whatever was pulling me down had a dozen hands, or else there were lots of the critters gripping my leg and foot. In a minute, the muscles in my arms would be torched, and they’d be all over me. So I tried a different tack.
    I kicked. Immediately, there were cries and confusion below. Some of the little hands fell away, and I was able to pull my leg out. Two small creatures were still clinging to it. They looked like rusted mufflers with the legs of an armadillo and the head of a human infant. When I grabbed one up, the other fled.
    “Let go of me, hick,” the one in my hand shouted. You could say I was surprised.
    “You’re a whaddayaget, aren’t you?” I had never actually seen one before.
    “Aw, why don’t you hie back to the Park’n’Ride, you stupid hayseed?” It had a voice like a bullfrog choking on emery cloth. It was flailing its appendages, the pointed, armored tail curling this way and that, trying to find a balance point. I pinched the back of its scaled neck and watched it dangle.
    “What are you?” I said.
    “I’m not you, you asshole. That’s for sure.”
    “Are you the one that wrote that?”
    “Wrote what?”
    “What are you?”
    “Are you gonna let me go, or do I have to take you apart?”
    “I’ll put you down if you tell me what you are.”
    It stopped struggling and angled its little bald head at me, sizing me up, squinting me up and down. “Okay, Glowbug, I’m a whaddayaget, second generation. Satisfied?”
    “No. Tell me what you’re made of.”
    “You son of a bitch! Tell me