But the dazzle wasn’t just pain: a golden glow of light was coming down the hallway. The Oreth had given the Athenians one of the torches, too, along with the sword. They caught her, or nearly: she staggered up even as she saw them coming in a pack around the corner behind, staying close to their leader. She shut her eyes to keep the glare from getting into her eyes, and groped for the wall and went onward dancing instead, her stamping dance meant to wake her brother up, the dance her feet knew even in the dark.
That knowledge was what saved her. She kept her hand on the wall as she danced, along the familiar long curving stretch where the passage turned back outward, moving away from the center and back out to cross a great half-circle from one quarter to the other, and halfway along it, the wall fell away suddenly and unexpected from beneath her fingers: another way to go, a branching in the path, where there shouldn’t have been one. She kept going several curving steps past it on sheer habit, until her seeking fingers bumped against the wall on the other side of the opening, and only then stopped, shivering. The passage air was warm and moist around her, but out of the branching the air came spring-cool and brisk, a scent of olive oil and wine.
She made herself keep going, keep the dance going, and before she reached the next turning she heard the Athenians arguing behind her in the mainland tongue: which way to go, which way the wholesome air was coming from. And the footsteps seemed fewer, afterward, as if some of them had gone the other way. Ariadne went on dancing, putting her feet down as quietly as she could. She passed another branching, another breath of clear air and freedom, even a hint of roast spring lamb, a smell of feasting. In the passage, the sense of something breathing was growing stronger: the slow rise and fall of enormous lungs. More of the Athenian footsteps fell off. Only a handful left behind her.
But she was coming closer. There was one more long curving, back into the last quarter. It wasn’t far now to the seal, to the central chamber. When she passed another branching, a pungent waft of sweat came out of it, sweat and honeyed mead: a living, human smell, full of wanting and lust and strong liquor. On the other side, the thick air was so humid the walls were dewed with moisture, and they almost felt spongy, like the marble of a bathhouse worn into curves by years and bodies, next thing to flesh itself, yielding to an impossible pressure. Ariadne stood with just her very fingertips on the surface, her hand wanting to cringe away. She was afraid, so afraid. She wanted to turn around and run back to the torchlight flicker she could just see coming up from behind her. The god looking out of that golden youth’s eyes wasn’t the god down here. The god down here was the god in the dark, the god grown large and terrible, maybe too terrible to bear.
She remembered suddenly without remembering, a voice that burst into her ears and came out of her again, bloody. She still couldn’t remember what it had said, but she remembered feeling it move through her like an earthquake, cracking open fault lines. She felt a whisper of it moving through her now, finding its way.
She had been pleased when the god had shook the earth under her, so pleased when she’d seen fear on her father’s face, looking out of the high priest. She’d liked it, walking back up the hill to the shrine that made her a priestess and a power, that spared her the fate of her sisters. She’d been angry, and she’d been brave, and she’d brought her brother one offering after another to distract him in his prison, but there was the one thing she hadn’t done, the one thing bigger than all the others: she hadn’t told. She’d told Reja, and she’d told Staphos, small whisperings at night in dark places, but when the priest had come asking questions—Staphos’s cousin, the one who had asked her in the light of day—she hadn’t told him what was in the labyrinth. She hadn’t told the high priest, either the first time he’d come up beside her father or in the palace—the high priest who would have cast her whole family down if he’d believed her. She hadn’t told the people in the square, when she’d come out of the king’s palace with the earth trembling beneath her feet, and she hadn’t told the people come up the hill reveling. Her brother, her little brother, had pulled his hand out of hers and gone down into the dark to save her life, and she hadn’t run down the hill shouting, begging a shepherd, a priest, a rich man for help.
So it was her lie, too. She was in the lie, and the lie was in her, and the lie couldn’t go any farther into the dark. If she kept holding on to the lie, she could only take this last branching. It wouldn’t take her to death. It would go somewhere living and human, because there was no death for her in the labyrinth. Her brother wasn’t angry with her. He didn’t blame her. It wasn’t her fault, and he loved her, and he would never hurt her.
Anyway, she knew where it went. She had watched them dig every inch of the passage out of the ground. There were no branches. The only magic in the labyrinth was what was in it. Her, and her choice. If she followed the branching, she would come to the chamber at the end: and it would be an empty chamber, with a stagnant well, and an open hatch above that she would be able to reach. There would be no one else there. It had been three years. Her bastard half-brother had starved to death; his bones were somewhere in the passage, along with the bones of those poor workmen, and the priest, and Staphos, and soon the Athenians, who had all gotten confused and turned around in the dark. The lie would come up out of the ground with her and turn into that truth. And the people would see her come out of the ground, in the first light of morning, and they would kneel to her. Her father himself would kneel; he would make her high priestess, and she would have a voice that no woman had in Crete, and be safe and powerful, all her days.
She stood there, and then she turned around and waited while the torchlight came down the passage, until the last handful of Athenians came around. The golden one held the torch and the sword, and there were three others behind him, a young woman and two youths, all dark-haired, pale, shivering. They saw her and stopped. “Which way is it?” one of the dark-haired boys blurted, a little older than the others, and taller. “Tell us or we’ll make you!”
“There’s only one way,” Ariadne said.
“There’s a branching right there!” the girl said, a little shrill.
“No, there isn’t,” Ariadne said. She looked the golden-haired young man in the face. “There’s only one way. The branching’s in us, not in the labyrinth.”
He looked back at her, his eyes clear and brilliant as jewels, but somehow familiar after all, and then he said, “Will you lead us?”
“Theseus!” the elder boy said. “Don’t be a fool! The only way she’ll lead you is straight into the maw of whatever thing they have penned up in here.”
“Why would she help us?” the girl added. “Minos is her father; I heard them say so. Androgeos was her brother.”
Then Theseus did pause, and looked at her. “Well?” he said, quietly. “Why would you show us the way?”
“I have another brother,” Ariadne said. “And my father put him down here. If you’ll help me get him out, get away with him, then I’ll help you.”
The other three Athenians wouldn’t come. They stood at the branching, watching them go, holding the torch. The curve of the passageway swallowed them into the dark almost at once. Only Theseus came with her. She heard his footsteps following as she danced her way onward, finding the way with rhythm, the thick heavy damp smell ahead, a warm stink of sweat and musk, a breathing all around her, getting stronger, and then suddenly the wall slipped out from under her fingers, going not into a branching but into a round chamber, and there was a little brightness ahead of her. Not much, only the glimmer of starlight seeping in through the tiny grating, which she could see in darker lines against the night sky overhead and reflected in the still waters of the well.
“Minotaur,” she said softly. “Minotaur, I’m here.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
* * *
I wanted to go further afield for my myth, but the Labyrinth has been occupying my head lately—not in the sense of a synonym for a maze, with many branching paths, but as Ar
iadne’s dancing ground, the ancient pattern that pilgrims used to walk, the single road that winds incomprehensibly until it comes with a final turning to the conclusion. Our journey in time, where only one road can be taken, and the paths are pruned as we pass them; a journey toward truth and revelation, the journey to the story’s end. The only way out is through.
* * *
NAOMI NOVIK
THE THINGS ERIC EATS BEFORE HE EATS HIMSELF
BY
* * *
CARMEN MARIA MACHADO
AT FIRST: A LOAF OF rye, two pheasants, half a goat. A wheel of blind Emmental cheese, wax and all. The cooking oil meant for the other half of the goat; then, the other half of the goat, uncooked. Seven oranges, a basket of berries that gives him the runs, a cluster of bitter rampion. Some kind of exotic reptile that belongs to his neighbor’s son, cut into thin slices to make it last longer and sautéed in butter. Old Halloween candy. Boats of bone marrow. Honey from the hive, then the waxy comb, then the protesting bees. He sends his housekeeper out for more food, and when she returns he eats it steadily and sullenly at his table: cereal by the handfuls, shrimp (at least he lets her cook it first), beef stew, salted radishes, boiled dumplings tossed in vinegar and butter. Four eggplants; a dozen eggs, raw. A pallet of single-serving bags of potato chips. A bushel of in-season apples.
He is still hungry. He empties his bank accounts and sends his housekeeper away with the cash; she comes back with duck hearts and pâté and caviar and rare Sardinian cheese leaping with maggots and illegal dead French songbirds and truffles and lobster and foie gras and a gold leaf cake. He folds all of it into his mouth with no comment and goes to bed. He tries to sleep, but is awoken an hour later by an indescribable hunger, as if he hasn’t eaten since boyhood. His housekeeper gets up in the morning and finds him mixing the spices with water and eating the paste by the spoonful. She calls his daughter, Mia, who shows up with her famous banana-nut muffins and a Tupperware sloshing with soup. She asks him, “What kind of sick are you? Should we take you to the doctor?” But he drinks the soup and eats the muffins and tells her to get lost, applesauce, which she does.
Later that afternoon, his housekeeper finds him chewing on the house itself; the house he’d cleared the grove to build; the house that began all this trouble. She goes to the cottage on the hill where the women are gathered. She begs them to make it stop, but they decline. They tell her, “Look, you don’t know our sister. She loves barrenness, hunger, destruction, and even more than that, she loves comeuppance. You cannot stop her any more than you can stop the tides. Have you explained to him the nature of consequences?”
The housekeeper is loyal, but she is also smart. She recognizes the unstoppable forces at work, the incontrovertible physics of the situation. She sends Eric a text message tendering her resignation, but he doesn’t get it because he’s already eaten his cell phone. (An experiment gone badly; now he has no way to order delivery, and it’d done exactly nothing to slake his hunger.)
Back at the house, Eric tries visualization exercises. He imagines that his stomach is a basket and the food he is eating is a thick quilt being folded into the basket, but as he eats, the walls of the basket fall away, and behind them is an infinite nothingness. He is wallowing in this sensation when Mia returns with more soup, more muffins.
As he eats he sends off an email to an old friend of his, who’d always admired Mia’s shapely forearms. His friend, a businessman with unclear designs, arrives soon afterward, having purchased Mia for a handsome sum. Eric takes the proceeds and buys four pregnant cows from a local farmer. He knows he should be patient. He knows he should wait until the cows give birth, then breed them to ensure more cows—a self-perpetuating machine of food, the way mankind has fed itself since time immemorial—but as he lifts the unborn calf from the opened womb, he thinks, Waiting is for suckers. His father taught him that; his father taught him to strike while the iron was hot, to take what he wanted and suffer no fools. Consequences were for poor men, for effete men, for women. But soon the cows are gone, and he still feels as if his body is a whistling, barren tundra.
Mia returns. Her boyfriend freed her, she explains, though she does not specify how, precisely, her boyfriend freed her, or what, precisely, she was freed from. “I’m back,” she says to Eric, “to take care of you.”
“Thank goddess,” Eric says with no small amount of sarcasm, and even as he says it he is putting an ad up on Craigslist, and soon another man has come to take her away. Eric takes the money and orders cases of MREs, and the deliveryman says to him, “You getting ready for the apocalypse, buddy?” “It’s already here,” Eric says, and as he eats the MREs in his living room—the wrappers scattered around him like leaves—he thinks about how the apocalypse is just a giant, disproportionate consequence, a consequence that has gotten distinctly out of hand.
The second time she escapes, Mia decides not to go back to her father or her boyfriend. She has learned what she needs to learn about the perils of duty. She flies to Cuba, and lives there still. The ad remains on Craigslist, though, and the men who show up hungry for her forearms have plenty of cash on hand. Eric steals it and sends them on their way, but when one of them fights back, Eric takes a minimalist Scandinavian sculpture that he recently purchased for his home office and bashes the man’s skull in. Great, Eric thinks. There is some terrible jump between selling his daughter and the murder of a fellow businessman, and he has made it. Now he feels a vague sense of guilt as he sets about boiling the man’s brains in a stockpot. (The jump between murder and cannibalism is, somehow, smaller.)
As he eats, Eric has a couple of regrets: Did he need to build his house right here, precisely? Did he need to hire such superstitious workers, the kind who would balk at the slightest impediment of a sacred grove? Did he need to chop down that beautiful ancient tree, which stood precisely where his new kitchen was supposed to go? Did he need to lift his axe above the dryad’s body, bring it down through her crossed arms and wailing mouth and bare breasts? Maybe not, but did she need to curse him with her dying breath? Women were, he observes while sucking on the dead man’s femur, chronic overreactors. She was wailing even as she split in twain, even as she bled sap, even when he buried her in the raised flowerbed next to the house. (Remembering this, he goes outside and unearths her body, which now more closely resembles a gnarled root. He roasts it in the oven and eats it piece by piece, and he is pretty certain she is still wailing even as the soft wood tumbles into the void of him.)
As he peels away the drywall and stuffs the house’s insulation into his mouth, he has a memory of his boyhood, when his father took him to a county fair. His father was a real estate baron and not a particularly affectionate man, and he had never simply taken Eric somewhere on a whim, and yet they were out together! They ate cotton candy and funnel cake and went on a rickety Ferris wheel and threw darts at balloons, and then, finally, his father took him to a dark building where unknowable mysteries were on display. There, he directed Eric to a gnashing head in a cage, which you could feed a goldfish to for one dollar.
Eric asked his father for a dollar, and his father said he needed to earn the dollar and could do so by eating a goldfish himself. Eric watched as his father paid the attendant, and then did as he was told; it wiggled all the way down. After that, his father gave him a second dollar, and Eric fed the goldfish to the gnashing head, and even after it had swallowed the goldfish it continued to gnash and gnash and gnash. It did not seem to matter to Eric’s father that he’d spent twice as much as necessary making Eric earn what might have been freely given. That was, in fact, the lesson. After that, Eric vomited little orange scales for days.
As he dices his couch into bite-sized pieces, he remembers the way his father displaced a marshland for a shopping mall, the way he evicted a neighborhood to build high-priced condos, the way he bought a struggling church and tore it down and used the materials to build himself a deck that he never went out on. He remembers asking his father when he woul
d have enough money and no longer need to build, and his father laughed like he’d made a very funny joke. He remembers how, once, a topless woman showed up in front of his father’s office with a sign: HAVE A HEART. It was not clear who she was with—she might have been an environmentalist, or a feminist, or a poverty activist, or an artist or a biologist or a mother. Her sign was not clear. But as the police hauled her away, his father said to him, Your heart can’t hurt if you don’t have one. His father was always saying such things: useful metaphors pregnant with unyielding practicality. Eric has always admired the unflappable structure of his wisdom. He supposes, were his father still alive, he’d say, Your stomach can’t gnaw with emptiness if you don’t have one, and it is a very good point.
Eric tourniquets his legs and saws them off one at a time. His nondominant arm is next, and then the pale shells of his ears. (They tasted like shark fin, which had been one of his father’s favorite meals.) He arrives at an impasse; how to feed himself more of himself without rendering himself incapable of feeding himself. He pokes out a message to Craigslist with his remaining arm, and the man who arrives an hour later is happy to assist, no payment required. The man is cheerful. He whistles while he works. He thoughtfully brings his own supply of aromatics, and the garlic and onions do improve the taste somewhat.
Eric’s intestines taste different than he would have thought: sweeter. His heart tastes exactly like he expects: metal and muscle. His lungs are airy and light and the texture of tripe. When his stomach is cut away, he waits for the hunger to cease, but if possible, it redoubles, a compounded ache the breadth and width of the universe.
“How much can we take from your head before your mouth is no longer a mouth?” the man from Craigslist asks with genuine curiosity, and it is a very good question. A mouth is a space, a gap; it is only defined by what’s around it (cheek and bone and cartilage), and once those elements have been peeled away, it becomes nothing more than a metaphor. It is the ultimate challenge, filling a void with matter so that the void might cease to be a void, except that the void is, by definition, eternal, and cannot be filled, and so the matter is used up in service of the void and then no longer surrounds the void and the void both ceases to exist and continues for all eternity.
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