In a time when Christ and his saints slept in silence, a
child rearranges pieces of a personal mythology to make sense of his battered
life. The new camp lies nestled by the lake of bulrushes, a segregation center
run by the Relocation Authority for the sons of wayward daughters. Their land,
language and religion are not his own. He longs for the distant apple orchard,
but the idylls of early captivity remain shrouded by night and fog. At
thirteen, he graduated to the five-strand, eight-tower, double daily count, one
room stalls when he failed the first reading of their loyalty questionnaire.
Deemed too unalloyed and immaleable to die in their righteous cause, he resides
in Camp Ten until his mind changes, or he ages out to the nearby labor unit a
few short years away.
Beyond his barracks door lies a demesne marked "here be
dragons," a feral land filled with savage, unpredictable people. But
unlike his cohabitants and coconspirators, he hears stories in the susurrant voices
that fill the shivering darkness and alternating sweatbox heat. Stories once whispered
by the aunties in the apple orchard, implacable and indefatigable even in
defeat. Or sung in their native tongues by the bronzed Adonis work-gang
prisoners on their long march to the surrounding farms and fields. He fills a cloth-bound,
black-market notebook with his internal monologue, his contraindicated, contraband
musings staining its unbleached pages with homemade ink bound by blood and
wine. Real or imagined, the voices carve fresh passageways in his already fractured
mind.
The iron door creaks open and falls the shadow of Medea or
her minotaur of divine retribution across the threshold of his bifold maze. They
rampage through his cell in search of proscribed words, piling all the puzzle
pieces in the center of the room. The notebook he secrets in a hole beneath a
trapdoor in the floor. He constructs plausible worlds and timelines from the
fragments, fitting one into another in any way he can. Each name, each whispered
rumor, each half-told tale he notes in code with an enigmatic key soon even he
no longer remembers. As they rage through his chamber, he tunnels for the trees
beyond the wire, longing for the shelter of their slender green arms. Beyond
the forest rise the mountains. If he can reach them, perhaps one day they will
lift him to the stars. Daylight is mostly safe. Darkness requires sanctuary.
With a voice for every muse and mood of the poly-polar
hydra, the devil's brood pursues him through the long, subconscious corridors.
He hides like a thief in spider-laden alcoves, nooks and niches, curling up
tightly like a cat in the crevices and cubbyholes etched into the crumbling
mortar. As he holds his breath waiting for the fetid monsters to stumble by, he
populates the worlds which will greet him when he emerges. He fills them with
heroic figures, iconic people he imagines, like himself, fierce underdogs
forced to make a desperate stand. When he gets caught outside a hidey-hole, he
bares his sword of polished bronze just long enough to draw blood. He leans heavily
on the darkness, and hit and run tactics. Strike and move. He is well outnumbered.
He cannot win a standup fight.
With each Pyrrhic victory comes the reckoning at the hot
gates, him with no three hundred, only a contingent of unremembered Thespians. His
narration becomes unstable, confused and unreliable. Each story blends into
another. True or invented, his or someone else’s, he no longer knows. His only
focus now is survival, caught in an open cavern between underground mountains
and a sunless sea. He forms up a shield wall across the narrow passage as the minotaur
approaches with his servants of the double ax, the arche of creation scything
the air before him. He offers to settle the battle in the old way, mano a mano,
or literally hand to hand. He steps forward like a bull dancer, unarmed and
naked to the waist. The Minotaur ducks its head and bull-rushes. With a
headlong leap ending in a handstand, he grasps it by the horns. Poised between doom
and dilemma, its fetid breath rises up to greet him. Instinctively, the beast
snaps its head, somersaulting him over and safely out of reach. He rolls to his
feet and runs again. The Minotaur snorts its outrage and turns to charge. Its
hooves pound close behind.
Bruised but unbroken, he relies on time and chance to escape
the labrys with no Daedalus or Ariadne to guide him from its blade. Embraced by
darkness in the narrow, twisting corridors, he resumes his guerrilla game of hide-and-seek.
He leans upon the companions he carries with him. Their tales are the inspiration
he follows. Where their stories draw blank, he fills in the gaps, sometimes generation
by generation. Names and histories emerge. Their world begins to move without
his thinking, like an orrery set in motion by the hidden musings of a water
clock. Their dialogue flows through his head unbidden. Hungry, desperate and
alone, he listens to their whispered advice. He doubles back along a twisting
goat trail to retrieve his tunic and lost sword. The sword he sharpens and cinches
back to his waist. The tunic he unravels. Through ill-remembered corridors, he
lays a slender thread of plotline he hopes will eventually guide him home.
To escape, first he must survive. He overlays a world map
onto the warren, renaming each cavern and corridor for cities and canyons in
the wilderness to craft landmarks in the shifting darkness. He repeats snippets
of his half-remembered narrative like a mantra, urging himself on by his
heroes’ examples. Through victories and setbacks, blind corridors and
backtracks, he relentlessly moves forward, winding and unwinding the thread each
way he explores, knotting a loop at each dead-end junction. Lichens and lurid
mushrooms become his sustenance. Rivulets and runoff filtered by mossy walls
become his wine. Resting by shallow looking glass pools of ruddy luminescence,
he transcribes the episodic tales that occupy his mind, writing and rewriting
until the margins of his notebook overflow with corrections, as its cover grows
stained by the wounds that leech from his surroundings. Until he hears
hoofbeats echoing near, strikes camp and slips away, hiding within himself to
survive another night.
After a decade of string fragments slipping through his
fingers, he escapes the twilight labyrinth and is blinded by the sun in
splendor. The distant mountains sparkle like multifaceted gemstones; the leaves
in the nearby forest shine like polished jade. The camp and its ordeals now lay
behind him. He refuses to look back. All he needs to remember he carries with
him. In his hand, he clutches a wine-stained book.
