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"I hate this."

Afternoon.

Skyscrapers concealed what was left of the setting sun's light with hard lines, cold stone and sharp angles. Mano missed the reassuring ocean depths and iron hull wrapped around her like a protective cocoon. The swarming masses around her were the current as a whole; every humanoid they were composed of, a piece of driftwood. She made a conscious effort to casually swing both upper arms by her sides as she walked, imitating the most naturally occurring motion around her as her four other hands fidgeted under her cloak and she sent a short mental prayer to Ganesh that none of the nervous ticks she felt bouncing around inside her would pop out and give her away.

You could become very used to solitude after having spent long enough by yourself, which had its pros and cons, to be sure. Mano wasn't used to having to feel so many eyes on her anymore, eyes overflowing with boredom, staring without reserve and judging without mercy. 'You don't care what other people think', she lectured herself in the privacy of her mind. 'You know you're much better than that.' The words wavered in her mind as though she was looking at them through a body of water's surface. 'Of course, whether I care what they think or not, the very process of being examined and evaluated is already unsettling in and of itself.' Repressed a twitch from the eyelid in her forehead beneath her hood.

The world never felt like there was enough space in it. It's not just that most of it had been built with two-armed people in mind, it seemed like it had been built for people who not only didn't mind but actually enjoyed being packed like sardines and herded like cattle. Mano believed that people's minds were like turtles insofar as the less room they had to grow in, the smaller they grew to be.

"Beaches, seashells, oceans in my mind, will you drown out the crowd for me?"

Rubbing elbows. No polite way to correct the assumption that she didn't mind. If people bumped into her and felt more elbows than expected under her cloak, she didn't want to think about what their reaction could have been. To be fair, many would have apologized for getting startled before shuffling off, but some previously observed reactions of those who wouldn't have had a way of gripping the mind.

For a long part of history, among humanoids, sea life as a whole had always been a breed apart. It had stopped being socially acceptable for mammalians to discriminate against reptilians about five decades ago, but whether or not sea dwellers deserved to be treated with the same kind of dignity as over-grounders was still a new question for the public to ask itself, and its answer still depended on who you asked. Amphibians were generally treated like most bilinguals, bisexuals, agnostics, moderates and hybrids, rarely ever fully accepted among over-grounders or surface dwellers. Insects were a spectrum: butterflies could pass just about anywhere, but arachnids shared yet one more distinction than non-red blood with her for which they were also even more reviled. Six limbs was already a lot to take in, but eight was simply too much; if you had that many, it made you shifty and threatening by nature because you just couldn't need that many for any honest purpose, it stood to reason.

What this all boiled down to was that if you were seafood, not only did hiring and firing policies of your low-paying employer have a few strategic omissions which could affect you to varying degrees, but people had been taught to fear you and to assume that if things went badly for you then you must have brought it on yourself, which could kind of throw a wrench in your bike spokes if those people were cops or judges, and Mano couldn't wipe the fact that muggers and perverts were aware of this from her mind. She often wished she could have more inconspicuously opened her third eye in public and that it would have been in the back of her head instead, because that would have made her a much less nervous person.

"I don't want to be here."

She tried to imagine what Klein might have said. Of course Klein would have said something about this, it was exactly the kind of thing he would have had something to say about. He might have told her to focus on the fact that the whole ordeal was going to be over soon and that things were going to be better after that, that her internal state didn't have to be determined by her external conditions, that she should make a conscious effort to push the thoughts which worried her out of her mind, all suggestions which would have been so much easier said than done. She knew he meant well and she generally took his advice in stride, but whenever he talked about hell in myths, games, nightmares and literature, about hell as a social manipulation tool and hell as a state of mind, she couldn't help but think that he really must have had no idea of what hell was like, and that wasn't because she'd been told what hell was supposed to be like but because she felt like she'd lived through it herself. One thing he was right about was that hell was other people, and he did seem to have developed a slightly less idealized and abstracted perspective from his conversations with her, in his defence.

A city that sprawling shouldn't have felt more claustrophobic than the confines of a one-woman sub, and she shouldn't have felt more afraid of getting lost in a city with street names everywhere than in the ocean where she had to get directions from the stars. It felt like a maze she was being experimented on in, the bus station a whale having swallowed up a six-armed female Jonas and slowly digesting her in its stream of humanoid antibodies.

You didn't have to look at people twice to figure out that most of them would have rather been somewhere else doing something else. They moved with all the emotionless-ness of robots without any of their precision, stomping ahead or strolling along, wearing purposefulness or world-weariness like veils. Everyone was busy trying to get somewhere else as fast as possible without any consideration for anybody else around, especially whenever it seemed like the latter would have depended on forfeiting the former. Gaits forged by formative years spent being told to stand up straight, think straight and walk straight because People Are Looking and while staring may have been rude, not looking like what other people expected you to when they did stare was much, much worse.

She was so not looking forward to the bus ride. She could get landsick in motorized vehicles the way surface dwellers could get seasick on boats, and as much as she wanted to be able to assume the best about people, she still never enjoyed having to put her faith in and fate in the hands of a driver she didn't know. She didn't know whether she was going to be able to sleep that night without the calming motion of her bedding caused by the ocean's currents which she'd gotten so used to. Yoga may have been designed for getting people used to enduring being in uncomfortable positions metaphorically as well as literally, but it did, like everything else, have its limits. Mano clutched the ripped whale song disc in her beige canvas cloak pocket like a talisman, hoping it would be enough to ward off the demons of urban cacophony.

While fish didn't need to sleep to live, it was still something which as humanoids they'd become able to do (like blinking and breathing air) to gain back lost energy and turn their minds off for a while. Sleeping and blinking were like short breaks from reality which scattered all throughout the day could make getting through it a whole lot easier. Not looking at the world could let you temporarily forget that it was looking at you. The best part of sleeping had to be the dreams. Dreams could give you a break from what you had to think about every day, a Jungian journey into uncharted mental territory, an antidote to some of the social conditioning you'd been force-fed throughout the day, new insight into situations by taking elements of them apart and putting them back together in unexpected ways or a look at things from a perspective it wouldn't have occurred to you to look at them from while awake. Of course, dreams came with the risk of nightmares, but nothing ventured, nothing gained, and her worst nightmares had taken place in her waking life, not asleep.

"I'd rather be somewhere else doing something else."

At that point she saw the downward spiral her mind was inching toward and decided she might as well try to find something more positive to think about. She was looking forward to meeting up with Klein again after all that time, despite everything. He had his flaws, but when he really got into the right kind of mental space he could contribute to making her think more about the here and now than about past regrets or future worries. She'd met quite a few people who were a lot worse than him, that much was certain.

She'd made a conscious decision to excise that kind of people from her life as much as possible, but one thing about Klein was how he had a tendency to associate with some pretty disreputable people, if his bizarre relationship history was any indication of it, anyway. Of course, maybe the fact that she'd only been in one long serious relationship herself made his long string of short non-committal ones seem exaggerated to her eyes by comparison. Maybe he'd been better off going through a bunch of weirdoes than she'd been with the love of her own life, in a way.

Mano sighed.

There just wasn't going to be any way to get around it. She'd never understood why poets had to be so depressed all the time for most of her life, but she was beginning to. It's not that she'd always liked everything about her life, it's just that the fact that she didn't like everything about it hadn't seemed to matter all that much to her until recently. The currents hadn't always been warm, but as long as she could have enough money to live, a friend or two to chat or spar with, good food, good drink, hot baths and someone to care about, she figured she could live through almost anything, or still had enough of a reason to get up in the morning, at least. Self-preservation was an inborn instinct to her, it wasn't something she could transmit to someone, and her failure to do just that was something she still couldn't forgive herself for to that day. She could forgive others most of the time, but forgiving herself always seemed too easy, always felt like forgiveness shouldn't have been hers to give.

Of course she wouldn't have been able to think about Klein without thinking about Brazil or to think about Brazil without thinking about her. After all, Brazil had been when the former had come into her life as well as where the latter had gone out of it.