From the Labyrinth: Dorothy

I woke in a field. I was not in this field when I fell asleep. I was-- no, I couldn't recall. I could almost find the picture, but something in my head wouldn't let me get there. I knew I wasn't in this field. It made no sense to fall asleep in an open field. Even an animal wouldn't do that.

My mouth tasted metallic, but not like blood. My tongue felt around my mouth for sores, for pain that would justify the taste, but there was nothing. I must have eaten something metallic. This potential clue steadied my mind, as it gave me something on which I could build. What foods are metallic? Don't fish have mercury? What does mercury taste like?

I raised myself on my elbows. The sun was low. The air didn't smell of a day's heat and, even protected by the tall grass, my skin had not burned. It must be morning.

These were stalks. Like corn, but not corn. I tried to recall what I knew about fields, about falling asleep. A girl named Dorothy did in a field of poppies. I didn't know who she was, why I knew about her. Maybe she would know why I was here, where "here" was.

I stood, checking for pain or weakness in my limbs. No, they were fine. My head felt... I didn't have the right word. Maybe "echoing?" But I was physically well. I was not hungry. Had I eaten recently? I didn't know, aside from the tang in my mouth.

Wasn't tang a sort of fish?

I held a stalk of the plant. My hand fit around its circumference. Plants could sting, I knew. This one did not. Was it food? It hardly mattered. I did not intend to be here long. The stalks were evenly spaced and went on as far as I could see; that much was evident when I stepped a little to my left. This was cultivated land. Weeded and cared for. That didn't assure me that someone with answers would be here soon, but it was more information I might use to orient myself.

I chose a direction -- without any guidepost in the distance, it didn't matter which -- and walked. As far as I could see in front of me were only stalks, reaching just over my head. I looked behind me, to my left and right, finding the same. This field was vast, and I did not know where I was going, so I continued as I started. I would have to get somewhere if I walked enough.

I walked some thousand steps until my leg, pushed between some stalks, seized up, the muscles hard. I tumbled then, falling back. It took minutes of massaging my calf and thigh until the pain vanished.

I was not eager for another attempt. I looked to the ground to see if anything had stung me but saw only dirt and the stalks.

I searched the exact location of my fall. The earth was soft, moist. There had been rain here, or someone had come to water. I noticed no means of irrigation, so it must have been rain. No one would chance farming on this scale without a good irrigation system. Knowing this, realizing that I had the knowledge, made me feel fuzzy again. Was I a farmer? Was this my field? I considered my hands, bereft of callouses, soft and free of scars, the hands of someone who did not need to toil.

I could see my footsteps. As I approached the site of my fall, I recognized a return of the muscular discomfort I mistook for fatigue. When I receded, so too did the discomfort. I did not understand why this was so, but some part of me did not wish to go this way. I stepped to my left, and the feeling persisted. I stepped back, and it receded once more. I began to understand my boundaries.

I yanked one of the stalks from the ground and threw it through the boundary. It sailed with no impediment, which did not surprise me. It was a fence meant only to contain me.

I followed the edge of my fatigue, knocking down stalks with my left arm as I went to make clear the line beyond which I could not go. I stumbled once over a fallen stem, and my right arm flailed outward to keep me balanced. I could not bend it for the better part of half an hour; it felt bee-stung and tender the whole time. Then, all at once, I regained supple government.

Supple government. That was not my phrase. I had borrowed it from a different time and place, a different person. Maybe Dorothy? Was this a clue?

What would happen if I ran at the boundary? Would I go completely paralyzed, alone in the stalks until someone found me or I died of exposure? Or was the line of demarcation thin? Would I be well again once I stumbled a few more feet? I did not have the courage or despair enough yet to attempt it. Once my arm felt as usual, I resumed my task of knocking over the stalks, having lost only a little time. I was no closer to a solution, but observations accreted around me, the nacre only a speck but growing in irritation.

When the sun was high overhead, and my stomach growled, I felt a terrible lethargy overtake me. I bent stalks into a triangle that the ground beneath for shade. I fashioned a mat of the leaves so that my clothing -- thick pants and a gray t-shirt -- might not become further soiled. I slept heavily within seconds, barely meaning to do more than doze.

The sun was lower in the sky when I opened my eyes next, but the day was no cooler for it. I would have to see about a meal if I were to continue my search. I sniffed one of the stalks, the scent sweet and earthy but also bitter. I had no confidence this would be safe to eat, even if it might be food when processed. Not poison, no, but not ready for consumption. Unripe food could still cause illness, and I needed to keep my wits, such as they were.

I returned to my broken path, readying myself for my labor, when I realized I was no longer hungry. My mind conjured torture of decadent chocolate and fried fish, of beverages made of fruit and ice. I did not have the searching emptiness. Sleep alone could only make hunger worse. I knew that, as I slept, something had fed me.

I considered my bladder and bowels, but they were empty. I had the sensation that my body was no longer my own. I looked to the sky. In my mind, I heard the word "drone" before it grew bleary and distant. I felt complicit in the betrayal, setting out the same shelter where I had been discovered. For all the obscurity forced upon me by the limitless stalks, I felt as good as naked. Someone had seen me, had forestalled my physical needs, had filled and emptied me, but had left me here. This unspoken someone wanted me here and had a hand in setting the boundaries. I considered their motive, but nothing coalesced.

I knew things now that I had not before, but I did not understand what they meant. There was meaning enough in continuing to establish the boundaries. I would get no answers standing still.

They were watching me now, whoever "they" were. I had some importance to them. I don't know why they would feed me in my sleep, would vacate my waste. I would not begrudge the appearance of palatable food, though I admit that I would have found it suspect. Would I fall asleep again this evening when I again felt hunger? Would they put me to sleep, or was there something in me that did this? If it was the latter, is it something I could remove? I had no tool, no time or skill, so it was a hanging question without an answer.

Around this time in my contemplation, I found the first of my corners. Its discovery numbed me. I had come to rely upon the certainty of straight lines leading me somewhere by their omission. I convulsed on the ground, unable to breathe. I could not account for the time spent in mortal terror, if it was long in fact or only in my panicked mind.

Then it was over. I was fine.

Across the field, far in the distance, I saw a figure down a row. I shouted to them. Startled, they cried back, but I could not say at this distance whether their words were in a language I recognized. I understood by their frantic waving that they -- I could not discern a gender either by shape or sound -- were in the same predicament. They were frightened that I might not yet understand my situation. I gestured like a mime trapped in an invisible box, and they relaxed on my behalf.

I thought to yell out my name on the off chance they could hear it. I opened my mouth but had nothing to shout. I could not recall my name. The deeper I dug into my mind for this fact that ought to have been at natural as breathing, the emptier I felt. Without a name, who could I be? Without a name, how could I escape?

There was no time to puzzle over pity. When freed of this maze, I had to hope that this amnesia would abate, though how could I know about girls named Dorothy and words like "amnesia," but not what I called myself?

With a few more motions, we agreed to a plan of trying to reach one another. If I could go straight, I would be to them in a matter of minutes, but directness was not a possibility here. We both wandered an angularly twisting path through our invisible mazes. Every half hour, judging by the sun's distance from the horizon, we waved to one another, assuring the other that we had not given up.

We came no closer to one another. If anything, we grew only farther apart, but that was all we could do. Were we in two different mazes near one another that never intersected? I saw them collapse seconds before I fell unconscious, waking some time later. A moment after I stood, I saw their head pop up, turning to face me. They shrugged apologetically, an "it's not a good system, but what else can we do?" before they resumed the work of navigating. They had been attempting this longer. The interruptions for biological functions were no longer a surprise to them. Though we were farther apart than we'd been, I called out again to try to reestablish the excitement of the initial sighting. They could no longer hear me or pretended not to for reasons I couldn't imagine.

I no longer had discrete days because I could not trust my sleeping meant that only eight hours had passed. Maybe it was minutes. Maybe longer. Whenever I felt tired beyond a threshold, I would collapse harmlessly to the ground and wake refreshed.

Given the interruptions, I could not say when we became close enough to see one another. It was not suitable for a polite conversation, but I saw nothing polite about our situation. She had close-cropped red hair and skin too pale and unburnt to have been slogging through this field. This, too, bothered me, evidence of further impossibility. Whatever fed and evacuated us preserved us down to our skin.

"What color are my eyes?" she shouted.

I leaned forward, almost to the static of barrier. She was bordering on too far, but my eyesight was excellent. She opened them wide to give the largest contrast between sclera and pupil. (I knew the word "sclera." This meant something.)

"Brown. Why?"

"I didn't know. I pulled out some of my hair, and I can see my hands, but there was no way to see my eyes. It seemed important to know. Yours are brown as well."

I could not say this was not important, at least in a psychological sense. Asking this implied she was as empty of autobiographical details as I was, but I still had to ask, "What's your name?" This was only flavored as a question and told me that she, too, had a block that made hazy her recollections.

"That is a good question," she said, meaning that she was through with asking herself the same. "You don't know your name either, do you?"

I admitted that I didn't.

"You must be careful what you say, how you think. Otherwise..." She clutched her head so convincingly in agony that I didn't know whether she had in that moment a forbidden thought, and the warning became a reality.

She had been here for six days. Counting them seemed important when everything else was too strange to process, cataloging the dawns and dusks, such as they were. For her additional days of tenure, she knew little more than I had figured out. I wondered but did not ask if she had been here longer than she said and lacked the capacity to remember. The same could be said of me, and I couldn't stand to hear it. My only evidence that this trial was new was the memory of untrodden earth when I woke first. Who would do this, though? What was the meaning of any of this? For something this elaborate, there had to be a greater meaning. If that were the case, there had to be a solution and an escape from it. Whoever designed this couldn't be clever enough to have deduced every factor, all our behaviors.

"Even if you could think of a solution," she said, as though she knew what I was thinking, "you couldn't say it to me. You might not even be able to think it. They -- whoever they are -- are listening to everything."

"Then why are they letting us speak right now?"

She frowned as though this were the first that she thought of this, then frowned deeper, wondering if this thought would be painful. "I can only assume this is something they allow us to do, or they want us to do."

She looked then with suspicion upon me.

"I don't know how to convince you that I am as much a victim of this as you are," I said.

Her look remained hard for a moment longer, then softened in resignation. "That will have to do, then. Even if you were an evil mastermind, it isn't as though you would tell me. It doesn't hurt my head to suspect you, and you would have to imagine it would if you wanted to keep me from thinking it. Do you still want to try to find one another?"

"I could use the company."

It was another day at least before our paths seemed to cross. Before me, I saw my footprints ending abruptly, the imprint of my body as I fell, the stalks I had knocked to give myself continuity. Everything else was identical to the rest of the field that I could see.

I had somehow returned from where I came, losing the progress. My blood surged at knowing I had wasted days only to come back to a place I had been. I could see her down the row a hundred feet away, walking my way tentatively.

Before me was a barrier, one that had near to paralyzed me in my hubris.

She came close, within five feet. She looked younger than she had any right to be here, in her mid to late twenties.

"We can't go forward."

She raised her hand, which I wanted to push away. It glided through the barrier as though it were no more than air to her. She did not hesitate or flinch from doing this, as though she knew it would not hurt her.

"We don't have the same boundaries," she said simply, though this conclusion was among the most profound I had discovered here. This was information in desperate need of reconciliation.

She came through the boundary, standing before me. She was younger than I thought and thin, though in good health. Her pallid skin didn't show even a freckle of sun damage.

She wrapped her arms around me, pulling me into a tight embrace from which neither of us wanted to recede. It was the intimacy borne of desperation, the feeling that we had never in our lives known the company of another person and lacked guarantees that we might again.

She smelled of the earth and the wind, smells I knew well by now, but her chemistry transformed these into something warm.

As we could not return from where she had come -- she had already been there, and I could not go -- we followed the paths I had not until it became clear. We had a twenty-foot square where we were permitted to walk together. She found paths I could not touch. I found the same for her.

The cruelty of this was poignant. They, whoever they were, could have stopped us from coming together, but they let this happen so they could tear us apart.

We waited there together, knowing what would happen once we fell asleep. We had until that moment, until whatever was in us decided we had been conscious too long. Would lethargy or hunger precipitate it this time?

We held one another against this moment, talking as much as we could, though the breadth of our conversation was, by necessity, brief. What was there to say between two amnesiacs in some inexplicable manner of trap?

She shared what wisdom she had gleaned, having been aware of her lot longer than I had. Though she had no evidence beyond intuition, she felt that we were being observed.

"Is it in us?" I asked. "Whatever they are using to watch us? Are we spying on ourselves?"

We both winced with the pain those questions produced. The more I tried to hold them, but greater my migraine pulsed until I gave up. I did not have the constitution to fight beyond the blinding pain.

I sought to heave, but there was nothing in my body to expel. In the attempt, all my nausea ceased.

She stroked my hair to soothe me. It was the most pleasurable sensation I could recall.

"We should name each other," she suggested.

I did not have to think long before dubbing her Dorothy. She hesitated only seconds longer in pronouncing me Daedalus. Having a name at once gave me confidence. She offered a small smile in repeating her name to herself as though trying it on in her mouth.

We slept soon. When I woke, Dorothy was gone. I shouted into the field, but I received no reply. I would not find her again. That was the point of this. They wanted us to stop looking for the other and solve our puzzles. This would not satisfy us, but we would have to proceed with resignation. There was nothing else to do. Resisting them would mean only that they would torture us further.

I did not hold out the hope that, in solving this, if this could be solved, I would see her again. I did not know what it was to be attached to another person, as she did not. She was the only person I had ever met, and, as far as I knew, I had lost her forever. Still, I could persist in the foolish hope that, at the solution, she would be there waiting, my only friend in the world.

This may have been another of their tricks, to keep me from satisfaction, to be sure I would now collaborate. This might have been a way to make me persist, not for my sake alone.

She couldn't have known this; of this, I was confident. She would not have played this game, would not have willingly trapped me. I knew her for only an hour, but I trusted her to hate this as much as I did.

I knew the rules well by then. They gave me hope, and they took it away. I understood the consequences of misbehaving. Still, every few hours on my journey and I would shout Dorothy's name upon waking. I never received a reply. I did not hear the voice of another person, if we were not the only two who were trapped here. I couldn't know for sure, but I could tell that no one was close enough to be heard.

I paused then, realizing I could not hear anything but the wind through the field. There were no sounds of animals, no birds chirruping in the sky, not even the buzz of insects. I looked at the sky, uncertain it was the sky. The clouds had depth, and the sun pained me to look at, staining my vision. If this sky was not real, I couldn't distinguish why, but it only brought me more questions.