EXCERPT: Davos (3)

Here are the next two paragraphs of Davos, the first book in the Franco Fasiolo series, which recounts the adventures of its eponymous protagonist, who is a forensic botanist and reluctant cosmopolitan. I hope you enjoy them!

Eventually Franco reached some curves, just a small cluster of switchbacks, but welcome nonetheless to relieve the monotony of the long slow trudge up the bituminous slide. Franco wished he could see inside of his lungs. He could feel them but he could not see them. He looked out and down to where he had come from and could see the layer of moisture he had passed through. He could feel it in his lungs, the heavy cloying moisture that coated and soothed but also congested them. What would it be like to have lizard lungs, hot and dry, with fine strong veins that soaked up the oxygen without having to extract it from water? How fast and light his body would be, like a balsa wood airplane passing through thin summer air. He regretted his jacket already, and it was not even nine o’clock yet, but this was always the way. There seemed to be no escaping it. When he had stepped outside the door the cold had surprised and delighted him, but already he felt the sweat on the back of his neck, either sweat or moisture from the air. Was there a difference? Who could tell? When did one become the other?

What would he say at Davos? What would they ask? Franco always tried to prepare but no more than a few minutes in, he would abandon the effort, overwhelmed by the infinite number of considerations that could sway his testimony one way or another, or another, or another. His idea was always to use these walks to collect his thoughts, but without the ta-dum, ta-dum, ta-dum of the train, and its rhythmic slowing and speeding, he had no mechanism to order and propel his thinking, except for his heartbeat, footfall and breathing. Wasn’t that enough? Too much? No, the problem was his brain, with neural circuits that ran like highway overpasses, with entrances, exits and overpasses, cloverleaves that produced sudden and unplanned proximities, enlightening tangents. His body had been replaced by the world, especially by the city, the urban world. ‘I can’t not read words in front of me’, a woman had said, not to him but to another woman she was talking to. Franco thought of people he knew who read deliberately, and with effort. It was not natural and ineluctable for them as it was for that woman and as it was for him. What were their brains like? How nice it must be to decide to read something, or otherwise to be able to ignore it. Is this what he liked about the goat and the donkey, the poor sad cow, the fig tree, the stone that sits in the sun and rain, indifferent to the world of words? Davossssss. It was too late for Franco.