(21/02/24 - 05:30) (Sunday February 21, 1524)
Uma wrapped a length of clean linen around his head twice, covering his eyes completely. He tied it at the back. He stood at the entrance to the narrow root path outside the Grove 8 warehouse.
Total darkness.
He took a step forward. His right shoulder clipped the edge of the root wall immediately. He adjusted and kept walking. At the first turn he misjudged the radius and walked face-first into the opposite wall. He pulled back, found the path with his hand, and continued.
He walked the route 6 times. Crashed 23 times. Catalogued each one without stopping. The angle of the miss. The speed at which the wall arrived. The fraction of a second between when he could have known and when he registered.
By the sixth pass the progress was real but thin. Half a second of advance notice on the right wall. Barely anything. The path was memorized by now anyway. His feet knew the turns. He was navigating from memory, not from Observation.
He stopped in the center of the path.
'This is too slow,' he thought.
He pulled the cloth off his eyes. He looked at the narrow root path. He looked at the towering Yarukiman Mangrove rising above the warehouse, its trunk wider than a Marine warship, its bark rough and uneven and ascending into the dark canopy far overhead.
He tied the cloth back around his head.
He found the base of the trunk by touch. He pressed both palms against the bark.
He started climbing.
(21/02/24 - 06:00)
The first fall happened at roughly 8 meters. His left hand misjudged the depth of a crevice in the bark, his fingers closed on air, and he dropped. He hit 3 protruding roots on the way down and landed on his back on the petrified wood below with a sound like a sack of iron tools being dropped from a height.
"Hahhh..."
He lay there for 4 seconds. His spine crackled as it realigned. He got up.
He found the trunk again and started climbing.
The second fall came at 11 meters. His boot found a section of bark coated in dried resin that felt like solid ground and was not. He went sideways this time, rotating in the air, and hit the root surface shoulder-first. Something in his collarbone gave. He felt it knit back together before he finished rolling to a stop.
He got up.
By the ninth attempt the falls were coming from higher up. 15 meters. 18. He was learning the texture of the bark by pressure through his palms, by the sound of hollow versus solid when his boot made contact, by something at the very edge of his awareness that was not quite either of those things and did not have a name yet.
He fell 31 times before the sun was fully up.
He stopped counting after that.
(21/02/24 - 09:45)
The coastal inlet near Grove 10 was quiet at this hour. The resin bubbles drifted upward in slow, iridescent columns off the surface of the water. The ocean was dark green and deep.
Uma stood at the edge of the root, the wet linen still wrapped around his eyes. His clothing was torn across the back and both shoulders from the tree climbing. Several long abrasions ran down his arms, already closing at the edges.
He stepped off the root.
The cold ocean swallowed him. He kicked his legs and oriented himself horizontally, letting the current move under him while he floated blind on the surface.
He lasted approximately 40 seconds before the first fish hit him.
It came from below and to the left. He registered the displaced water a fraction too late. The impact caught his left thigh, a heavy, blunt collision that rolled him sideways in the water. He righted himself. Something large circled beneath him. He could feel the pressure of it moving through the water against his legs.
Then there were more.
He could not see them. He could not count them precisely. He tracked them by the water displacement, by the sudden absence of current when something large moved between him and the open ocean, by the brief, sharp pressure differentials against his skin when they passed close.
13, he counted eventually. Roughly. He was not entirely sure about the 2 on his right flank, they might have been the same fish on a second pass.
He fought his way back to the root over the next 25 minutes. He used his elbows and his knees more than his fists because the water resistance made full swings useless. He headbutted one that came at his face. He got bitten twice, once on the calf and once across the back of his right forearm, hard enough that he felt bone flex before the fish released.
He hauled himself onto the root. He lay on his back on the petrified wood, water streaming off him, chest heaving.
The linen blindfold was still on his head. Soaking wet. Still tied.
He stared at the inside of the cloth.
'That last one,' he thought. 'On the right. I felt it coming.'
Not the water displacement. Something else. Faint. Directionless. Like a color that did not have a name.
He sat up and wrung the water from the hem of his shirt.
He left the cloth on.
(21/02/24 - 16:38)
Vance looked up from his desk when the warehouse door opened.
Uma walked in. His shirt was torn in 4 places. A deep bite wound on his calf had soaked through his trouser leg and dried to a dark brown stain. A section of his left forearm was wrapped in a strip of his own sleeve, already soaked through. He had a fresh gash running from his left temple to his jaw from what appeared to be a very large piece of bark. His linen blindfold hung around his neck, waterlogged and filthy, like the world's worst scarf.
Vance put his cigar down.
He picked it back up.
He put it down again. Contemplatig..
"Sit," Vance said.
"I have work at 18," Uma said.
"You have a chunk of your calf missing," Vance replied. "Sit down."
Uma sat on the surgical table. Vance walked over. He unwrapped the makeshift sleeve bandage from Uma's forearm and looked at the bite pattern underneath. He turned the arm over once, checked the depth, and dropped it.
"Fish," Vance said.
"Yes."
"How many."
"Around 13."
Vance was quiet for a moment. "Around."
"There may have been 11. 2 of them were moving fast."
Vance picked up a clean cloth and a bottle of alcohol. He began cleaning the calf wound without ceremony. Uma absorbed the sting without moving.
"Shakky will make you scrub the floors on your hands and knees if you bleed on her bar," Vance said.
"Rayleigh spoke to her," Uma said. "A few days ago. She has been letting me finish earlier some nights."
Vance looked at the destroyed state of Uma's clothing, the bite wounds, the bark gash along his jaw, the soaking blindfold around his neck.
Vance said flatly. "You are clearly using the time productively."
He finished cleaning the calf, packed the wound with clean gauze, and wrapped it tight. He moved to the forearm. He worked in silence for a few minutes.
"The blindfold," Vance said eventually.
"Observation training."
"Is the blindfold required to be wet."
Uma looked down at the soaking linen around his neck. "It was dry this morning."
Vance said nothing. He tied off the forearm bandage and stepped back.
"You have one hour before your shift," Vance said. "Eat something. Your metabolism will close most of this before you reach the bar, but the calf will still be seeping when you walk through the door and I am not replacing my gauze every time you decide to go swimming with the local wildlife."
Uma slid off the surgical table. He walked to the stove where Koro had left a covered pot of boiled fish and sweet potato from the morning. He lifted the lid, picked up a chunk of fish with his bare hand, and ate it standing up.
Vance sat back down at his desk. He picked up his cigar and found it had gone out. He struck a match.
"Any progress," Vance said. He said it the way he said most things, clinically, without particular investment in the answer.
Uma chewed. He swallowed.
"Some." he said.