Those Who Escape the Labyrinth

Those Who Escape the Labyrinth

Fis collapsed in a cloud of dust and tears. The hand clutched to his mouth stained yellow with his disgust and made wet with his sorrow. His hat had slid quietly off of his head, throwing powder off of the arid ground. Just beyond the hat was a spectacle not unique to the setting yet eternally new to Fis. The smell of rotting corpses and that of rotting people even more deceased permeated the dry air of the shadow-cast hall. The flickering light of tiny candles was just enough to see them, propped grotesquely against the flaking wall, some moaning deliriously; it was more than enough for Fis, though too small to cure the odor. In a heap not unlike the one before him, he wept for the living among dead and his own tortured existence. His tears glinted in the scant firelight before they turned to salt and vapor on his very cheeks.

How long had it been since he’d come to this black maze, this pitch labyrinth with more chambers than a Dark Heart? The cursed tangle of hallways and dark corridors wound through and around the Darkest of Hearts: the City of Suratrat.¹ High above the city was the single wall, the ceiling, the sky, the dome that enclosed everything. A barrier, thin as paper, yet more opaque than the blackest coal. To all inside, the wall was the gate of heaven. The dry petals that fell at five centimeters per second assured them that there was hope. Like lucky leaves they fell with the flakes to the ground, landing on hands and knees next to the wall, waiting for even a glint of light from beyond.² Sometimes eroded bits loosened by the toiling fingers of desperate hands would yield such a treasure. The resulting white light was more divine than the light of any candle, but no brighter. These tiny moments of holiness were enough to shame the whimpers of Tantalus, a benign torture to the hopeless.³

Fis jerked as a cold, starving hand touched his shoulder, rousing him from his melancholy state. Yor, his sister, stared callously with her deep-set eyes at the wretched, inhuman sight before them. Though she was five years younger by birth, here she was ten his elder. Fis had found her within these doleful corridors, a success worthy of credit but of little reward. Though reunited, neither was whole. Freedom from solitude could not recover a broken mind. Fis gave a nervous chuckle and a sob. His quivering finger indicated a small form under the dim orange glow of a fallen wick. There lay the remains of a lungfish, a monument to everything they had seen and everything that had once been.⁴ “Look at it,” Fis moaned. “It’s so pathetic. Even with all of its effort, the height of its function, it could not survive these barren halls of false hope. I’m sure it waited patiently for the promise of water, just as we have…”

Yor stared blankly at the brittle bones of the creature. At long last she spoke, “We have received that promise more than once within the city. We are not comparable to this noble creature that died ever perseverant. Leave it be.” Fis gazed at his sister in disbelief. She spoke of the fish as if it were a fallen comrade, like it was the emblem of virtue. Perseverance of this kind was no virtue to Fis. He pitied these things. He pitied his sister who had begun to join them. Had she forgotten light, the outside? No. She had made it her God. To her there was nothing else. She cared for nothing but that light. No candles. No brief gaps in the walls. No Fis. In his mind he understood all of this, even his own insignificance to her. He could never accept it.

Suddenly, Fis awoke to find himself parallel to the tiled floors. A stream of blood trickled from his forehead. He grasped his fallen hat and stood, ignoring the blood that now stained his sleeve. He glanced around. He recalled faintly that he had been following Yor, deep in thought. He began to panic. He recalled all the traps he and his sibling had avoided together during their journey out of Suratrat. Luck had been on their side until now. Fis felt along the walls, blind and desperate. He could not afford to lose his sister. He couldn’t allow her to be alone again. He stopped. He slumped under the candle resting softly above his head, illuminating his white fisherman’s cap.⁶ Dejected, he came to a cold realization: she would continue without pause. She had no issue going alone. Her God awaited her, and He would not forgive her for faltering. What did she think of this as? A trial? Some kind of holy tax? His clenched hand knocked flakes from the wall. He knew how she was. How she had changed in the bleakest chambers of the labyrinth, in Suratrat. She would wander through the darkness, taking every obstacle willingly, trusting that her efforts would be rewarded. She was no different from that pathetic fish she admired so. Fis looked up toward where he imagined the center of the dome was. “Nothing but black… can we ever escape the chambers of this Dark Heart? It seems anything can happen here.” ⁶ He craned his neck to see the candle above him. As he stared at its dim aura he felt his troubles seep away. It reassured him. He’d never noticed how wonderful these little beacons were, that they stood alone in darkness as the only constant source of guidance. These tiny aids were his only company now.

Fis reached out and lifted the candle from its resting place. Such a simple gesture would provide him light in the darkest stretches of the maze. Fis began to laugh. Despite the loss of his sister, he couldn’t help but be amused at how easy it was. All of the traps, the obstacles, the dead end hallways they had suffered could have been quelled by the smallest of things. Fis was beside himself with excitement. With confidence he rose from the dust, lifting the candle to his eyes. Darkness was scattered by the quivering flame he now held, and the path became clearer. Confidently he walked through the maze, finding the path far less tangled than he’d imagined. Warmth came to his face as he walked. His step quickened. The traps that had once been hazardous became no more threatening than a simple stumbling block. It wasn’t long before he reached the largest of chambers, lit by candles everywhere. He smiled. Across the room he recognized the edge of the dome once more, but this time the air smelled not of corpses, but of grass. A soft breeze murmured past his ears, carrying the scent of the sea. He surveyed the walls and noticed an inscription:

“Here lies the source of our utopian city, who, by his suffering, allowed us to live a fantasy for many years ⁷ Let the farthest point of his escape mark the end of our dream, and the edge of a far greater happiness. Our city has fallen to a choice. We were forced by conviction to join those who walked away from it, so long ago.”

He looked below the text and saw the skeleton of a boy no older than fifteen. “I see,” Fis sighed. “You were their candle, because they could not find their own.”⁸ He sat down next to the boy and waited. He felt comfortable next to this long-passed child; one who, despite the most terrible of fates, saw fit to escape it. Yor would soon come through that passage, and they would leave through this final gate together. With this in mind, Fis slept with a soft, reticent smile.

Fis awoke to a sudden weight on his chest. Confused, he sat up with a jolt. A ghastly thud next to him quickly brought his eyes to the floor. He stared in horror at what lay at his feet. As his shirt grew damp and warm with crimson spots, bits of hair clinging to his jacket, he began to quiver. “What has happened to you? Yor!? What have I waited for?” He cradled his sister in his arms and let his head go lame. Her eyes were swollen and bruised, her body riddled with cuts and on her left hand there was nothing one could call a finger.⁹ She had lost everything to get here. He began to sob, “It was so simple. Even with your small body, you could have grasped happiness to sustain you. Why put yourself through agony for happiness? Why?”

She looked up at him and closed her eyes apologetically, “It seems I’ve already found my peony bush. I rejected the small and it was there, always in front of me. Even now, it sits in the way of my happiness, that shrub. Those little candles, I see them now. The light no longer drowns them out.”

Fis laughed as he had before, his smile displaying a happiness twice betrayed by water, “It’s a bit late for that isn’t it?”

“I suppose so,” Yor returned the laugh. They sat there like that for a while, laughing to give strength to one another, to keep the light of the candles going. “Hey, Brother?”

“Yeah?”

“We can’t keep these candles lit forever.”

“Yeah…”

“We can light them again right? These small things? We can watch over them, can’t we?” ¹⁰

“We might. Not now. We have a door to open, Yor.”

She nodded in understanding. At long last, they stood. Fis approached the great door that many who remained in Suratrat would have called the door to heaven, and, with a light tug, opened it. Wind rushed in from outside to a glorious ocean. On the shore was a fishing boat that had long lost all functionality. They saw the sky and clouds that should have been so familiar but were to them a fantasy made real. Yor walked through the door, and as Fis closed it behind him, fell to her knees. Fis watched the final moments of his sister without pain. He had known she was at her limit, and her eyes were not used to light. Her right hand loosened, and in it were the crushed bones of the lungfish.¹¹

¹ This one is pretty obvious, so you’ll see it repeated a lot in the story. The heart of darkness in this is the labyrinth. God of Small Things talks about Heart of Darkness a lot. What I interpreted that as is the place that is, to outsiders, terrible. Also, in God of Small Things I think some characters find happiness, or at least define it for themselves in the heart of darkness. It was a place beyond society, beyond boundaries where everything was chaos. I think it was fitting for my character to realize his happiness within it.

² The edge of the labyrinth correlates with the river in God of Small Things. It serves as a sort of distraction, a way to occupy oneself. The river is also a kind of boundary line, not meant to be crossed. In my story, it goes a bit further than that. People make their lives about retrieving what’s on the other side, but they don’t expect to really get it, and, even when they are so close to being happy, they don’t seem to ever get any closer, eventually wearing away. It’s a horrible sight. I’d also like to note the speed of five centimeters per second. This is not something most readers will understand, but it’s a reference to my favorite story. Five centimeters per second is the speed at which cherry blossoms fall. In the story I’m referring to, the main character lives most of his life at this speed, living life like a falling petal. In other words, he simply waits and hopes life puts him where he wants to be instead of actually going for it. Thus, five centimeters per second could be called “the speed of longing.” In this context, these living corpses waste away, waiting to get what they want. They don’t behave as Fis and Yor , who seek happiness actively. This is also an indication of Aristotle’s idea that people who lack virtue and have given up their function, like these people, are never happy. They don’t seem to aim towards the highest good any longer.

³ Again, not something we covered in class, just a note in case some people don’t know. Tantalus was someone from Greek mythology who was punished by the gods by tempting his hand with fruit, but never letting him actually get it. Think tantalizing.

⁴ The lungfish is the strange eel-like fish mentioned in “God of Small Things” that can breathe air and survive without water for long periods of time. It is a survival mechanism. Yor associates with the lungfish here because she tries to live without happiness until she attains it. This is made clearer at the end of the story when she finally does make it out, but dies, having gone through far too much to get there. I personally thought “The Death of a Ball Turret Gunner” correlates well with this, in that the gunner woke up and died, or in other words, attained happiness only to lose it immediately. There is also a loose reference to Aristotle’s work when Fis mentions that he doesn’t see any virtue in this fish. It indicates that the fish does not meet the requirements of being happy, even though it’s supposedly at “the height of its function.” I’m also going to go ahead of myself and mention how Yor makes the light her god. It’s similar to the briefly mentioned spiel about replacing Marxism with Christianity (Roy 64). It simply indicates that she makes the outside world a goal at the end of an obstacle race. A goal so big that she can no longer see the small things that could so easily lead her to the happiness she sought.

⁵ The fisherman’s cap is sort of indirect. In God of Small Things the fishermen are mentioned very briefly and on a single occasion (Roy 30). They are mentioned in a passage about always having a sense of knowing where the sea is no matter where they are. Fis (yes, his name is Dutch for “Fish”) seems to have a constant awareness of how to obtain happiness and how to navigate to the sea that lies beyond it. I was hoping to hint at that by making him a fisherman. The hat is also reminiscent of “Waiting For Godot,” because Lucky can’t really think when his hat is off. When Fis puts it on, he comes to several realizations.

⁶ “Because she knew that when you travel to the Heart of Darkness [b] Anything can Happen to Anyone” (Roy 311) This is a light reference I used as an excuse to separate my characters abruptly. It also kind of hints at the nature of the place as it did in God of Small Things. It’s chaotic, unpredictable. The traps are placed without design and have a wide range of functions.

⁷ This is a pretty blatant reference to “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” by Le Guin. In fact, you might say the entire setting is more about this story than God of Small Things. There are strong correlations. I have to mention the city in the center. Feel free to think of that as what was once Omelas after losing the child who they rested their happiness on (I changed the name of the city to Tartarus backwards, in the spirit of Le Guin’s naming process). My perspective is meant to indicate that those who walk away are more virtuous, and know true happiness. Happiness found within one’s self, to be more specific. Happiness dependent on other’s suffering is considered bad in this story.

⁸ The boy reference is inspired by a number of things. The first is the above-noted story by Le Guin, the second is The Giver. The reference implies that when the boy leaves the utopia its faults appear.

⁹ This is not a reference but I think it deserves clarification. The damage to Yor’s left hand is almost not even part of the theme. The left is considered the artistic side of people and, more generally, the part that creates and uses intuition. It’s also her dominant hand. This indicates that she relented towards the end, but it took a lot of pain and suffering for her to do so. She took the hard way and paid the price of her functionality. (If you like, you may reference that to Aristotle once again, but that is up to you)

¹⁰ This is meant to loop back into The God of Small Things. Yor demonstrates her appreciation for these small things, the candles (mentioned several times before this note) that preserved and guided their happiness out of the Heart of Darkness. How they were, in the end, more important to her than her final goal. She wasn’t able to reach that goal until she paid attention to the small things. The whole conversation here can be considered my own prudish version of Estha and Rahel’s reunion (Now incest-free!!!).

¹¹ These last lines are open to a lot of interpretation. After hearing the thoughts of many people on this, I think it best to leave this fairly open ended. The only thing I want to make clear is that the lungfish has not suddenly become virtuous, it is dead. The boat is definitely an allusion to Aristotle’s “highest function” idea, but not necessarily a negative one. It depends highly on interpretation. Finally, both Fis and Yor were able to reach happiness. The only difference is that Fis didn’t use everything he had to attain it. Because Yor became happy, Fis was not hurt by her death, even though, like the ever-fasting protagonist in “Hunger Artist,” she suffered pointlessly for this end.