Snakes and Ladders and the Destinies of Unborn Universes: Chapter 13
A Novel
If you’re joining us just now, follow the snake’s tail to the Prologue or climb a ladder to the Table of Contents.
Chapter 13: The Locus Amoenus
Evan and Niyati made their way through the hedge maze of the locus amoenus—that lovely and sanctified place that Niyati claimed was Hell. The light overhead was sometimes the first glimmers of dawn but often deepened into the onset of a lavender twilight.
Both of them were clad in late-Victorian costumes that seemed to have drawn their colors from the environment they moved through. The fireflies and unborn universes danced around the hedges.
Evan stood on a prominence and looked back in the direction whence they’d come. He was pouting. Niyati was about to round a corner but went back to join him. Together they looked at the mass of gray snakes writhing in the purple clouds just over the horizon. It was almost Lovecraftian the way the snakes contracted and coiled into a grotesque knot that resembled Evan’s dreaming brain, which he realized it was.
Underneath the brain stood the residue of Shiva Hall, which they had lately emerged from. The manor house was vanishing as the mist rolled slowly toward it. Gone were the windows. The chimneys were eroding. The steps leading down from the porch to the lawn had become a smooth ramp. The sound of creaking timbers echoed about the hedge maze.
Evan looked at Niyati. “I don’t like the way I was back there. I would never have talked to Marcus like that or made fun of Levi and called him evil for being the way he is. . . I’m not that bad. And I really wanted to know Gordon’s story, but he never seemed to want to talk about the stuff he’d been through, so I thought it would be rude to pry.”
Niyati touched his shoulder. “Now that we’re no longer there, I can explain. We were still in the haunted amusement park. You strayed into the Tent of Magic Mirrors—but these mirrors are warped and cracked. They reflect and magnify the uglier aspects of one’s character.”
“I knew that wasn’t the real me! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I was not allowed to.”
“My parents raised me better than that. That guy was jerk!—I mean all three of those guys.”
“Evan, I know those incarnations weren’t the real you. To be honest, I didn’t like them either. And your swearing was off the charts! But you have to understand that the mirrors latch onto the vices, faults and foibles—the cruelty, the egotism, the arrogance—that lie dormant in your psyche. You’re very good at keeping these things in check. But sometimes they bubble up in ways you aren’t aware of—and even when you’re aware of them, you’re prone to justify your behavior. And you have been known to show a cavalier disregard for other people’s feelings.”
“I don’t understand why ‘the powers that be’ who are running this dream didn’t just tell me this in the first place instead of putting me through all that. It’s not fair.”
“Evan, I’m going to be honest with you. You’re not a very good student. It’s not that you’re dumb like you pretend to be. It’s that you’re stubborn and impatient: the moment you find out that you’re about to be instructed, you shut down, tune out and start thinking about inconsequentialities. The only way ‘the powers that be’ (as you call them) could convince you of the urgency of attending to these flawed mirrors in your mind was to force you to see them in the flawed mirrors of the tent.”
The manor house was no longer there. Evan turned away from the scene and walked through a trellis arch. Niyati pursued.
“What’s the point of all this?!” Evan exclaimed. “I’m just going to forget this dream when I wake up!”
“The memories you’re forming now will remain in your subconscious; and it’s your subconscious that guides your behavior in your waking state.”
“Are you really Niyati?”
What followed was a pause of the species called pregnant.
“Yes and no,” Niyati said. “It’s complicated.”
They came to a fork in the maze.
“Where to?” Niyati asked.
“Why don’t you decide. You already know where we’re going.”
“It’s not my dream.”
“Well apparently it’s not my dream either since my path has already been chosen for me.”
Niyati remained silent.
“Fine,” he said. “We’ll go to the right since left means sinister. . . See, I’m learning.”
They followed the meandering trend of the maze until they came to a place where a bearded old man sat on a marble bench near an opening into an enclosure.
“Who’s that guy?” Evan asked.
“Aristotle.”
“The emperor?”
“Philosopher.”
“I knew he was Roman.”
“Greek,” Niyati said, massaging her cheeks.
Evan went to the man. He looked like he was chiseled from marble but he was breathing. Sighing actually.
“Why’s he in Hell?”
“He’s been dethroned from his position as the Master of Those Who Know. But since his contributions to science and learning are still recognized as monumental, he sits here as a mute marble monument to his own accomplishments.”
“Oh,” Evan said and walked through the gap in the hedges.
Niyati rolled her eyes and followed.
Inside the enclosure stood a hill clad in the mellow light of a perpetual dawn. Along the hillside, and on top of it, were groups and communities of philosophers and scientists. They stood, they sat, they walked—and all the while they debated the insoluble mysteries of the universe (which is to say the universe they were currently in). There were chalkboards with mathematical diagrams.
The men and the women argued heatedly about these abstruse matters but in a spirit of mutual regard and respectful collegiality. No one scholar held sway over another because no sooner had a theory been propounded than its paradoxes and incompleteness were found out. And every single on of the undead scientists, philosophers and mathematicians (of every race, creed and time) was inexplicably dressed like an Edwardian house guest.
“What is this place?” Evan asked.
“This is Limbo,” Niyati replied, eyes brightening. “Not a bad place to spend eternity.”
“I can’t imagine a worse torture than doing math problems forever.”
“They’re not tortured in Limbo. They’re only here because their desire to figure out the rules of the game became so all-consuming that it defined who they were. And no matter how vociferously they declared themselves to be atheists, no matter how adamantly they protested that the numinous and divine were irrelevant to their calculations, their arguments in the end always turned theological.”
“Hmm,” Evan said, yawning.
Niyati closed her eyes and recited those lines from Paradise Lost that summarized the condition of the scholars on the hill:
Others apart sat on a hill retired, in thoughts more elevate, and reason high of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate— Fixed Fate, Free Will, Foreknowledge Absolute, and found no end in wandering mazes lost.
When she opened her eyes Evan was gone. He had walked away because old poems bored him (except dirty limericks). Niyati grinned. She couldn’t help but to love him.
He’d found a secret path at the base of the hill which led into the bracken. He waved for Niyati to join him. Together they passed over the brambles and twigs, which did not cling to their garments since they stood on holy ground.
Soon they were back in the hedge maze and it was getting dark. An electric lamp post flickered on. That was when Evan noticed that the walls of the maze were lined with old mirrors.
“Oh no,” he groaned. “Are we still in the Tent of Magic Mirrors?”
“No,” Niyati said. “The mirrors inside the tent are cracked and distorted. These are flawless—but they are magical.”
They walked between ever-shifting reflections of themselves, some of which studied Niyati and Evan as they passed. Sometimes the scenes in the mirrors were worlds that had ceased to be or had not yet been born. Some of the mirrors turned out to be oil paintings depicting realistic scenes of magic mirrors hanging in a hedge maze in a misty lavender twilight. And some of the mirrors reflected these oil paintings—or reflected paintings of Niyati and Evan looking curiously into magic mirrors.
They turned a corner and Evan saw Madame Blavatsky sitting on a bench. It was so close to evening that it was almost the break of day.
Evan whispered to Niyati: “I think we’re in trouble. She keeps trying to steal my dream.”
“It’s not that simple,” Niyati said. “Madame Blavatsky is indeed the most notorious dreamcatcher on the Astral Plane. But she only steals those dreams that she thinks will cause distress to the sleeper once awake.”
“But she’s been after me ever since this dream began.”
“It is not she who has been following you: Madame Blavatsky’s astral form has been hijacked by the demon Manat.”
“You mean the little girl with the creepy eyes who was playing Old Maid in the haunted house?”
“The same,” Niyati said. “Manat is using Madame Blavatsky against her will, because she does not have the great Theosophist’s abilities. When Manat learned you had found a special unborn universe in Sydney, she took over the Madame Blavatsky’s astral form and has been pursuing you ever since. But Madame Blavatsky is a very kind soul. Not wicked at all.”
Evan looked at the shade on the bench, who seemed utterly disconsolate and ashamed by the way things were playing out.
“If she’s so good, why is she in Hell?” Evan asked.
“She’s not here for her sake. But for yours.”
“How so?”
“We presume to understand the motivations of our enemies. We go through our lives citing ‘proof’ of their villainy. But what we don’t realize is that, sometimes the people we thought were our greatest adversaries, were on our side and rooting for us all along.”
Niyati touched Evan’s arm. Then she skirted the edge of a burbling fountain where the water emerged from the mouths of three snakes entwined around a chiseled ladder. She turned a corner and continued along the path.
Evan looked at Madame Blavatsky but could not bring himself to trust her. He was afraid that, once she was back in control of her astral form, she would try to steal the dream he was currently in, thinking that the memory of it would distress him. I never want to forget this dream, he thought.
They came to a dead end. There was a full-length mirror standing on the grass. In the mirror an indigo storm moved over a purple marshland.
“Well,” Evan said, “I guess we have to go back.”
Niyati scratched her chin. “I think we’re supposed to go through.”
Evan put his hand through the glass. It felt humid and warm. He stepped through, turned around, and extended his hand back into the cool air of the maze. Niyati took his hand and joined him on the other side. A peel of thunder met their ears from the left where the storm was approaching.
They turned to the right and saw that the sun had not yet set in the east. They stood on the muddy bank of the Savannah River. A grove of weeping willows extended to the water’s edge. Some of the trees rose out of the river itself. The fireflies and unborn universes moved in the rising vapor. And a mournful fiddle played on the opposite bank. The frogs and crickets seemed unperturbed by the thunder to the west.
Levi stood near the tree-line.
“Evan!” he said.
“Hey, buddy!” Evan waved.
Levi smiled but remained where he stood.
“I’m gonna prove to you,” Evan told Niyati, “that the Tent of Magic Mirrors got it all wrong when it pegged me as uncaring.”
Evan went to Levi and put his hand on his roommate’s shoulder. Levi smiled but didn’t seem to notice the gesture. Niyati maintained a respectful distance.
“Levi, I’m sorry for the way I was. I’m not gonna let you down again. When I get back to UCLA it’s gonna be different between us.”
“You can’t change what’s already happened,” Niyati said. “Levi is dead in this universe. We are in the Grove of the Suicides.”
“Evan,” Levi said but he looked at the ground because his feet and legs had become the roots of a tree.
“Oh, buddy!” Evan moaned. “I’m so sorry you felt so sad and alone at the end. And I’m so sorry that I never knew what you were going through.”
Evan turned to Niyati, pleadingly. “Why isn’t he responding?”
“Because in this universe,” Niyati said, “the punishment for those who took their own lives is that they will never hear the apologies or prayers of those who abandoned them when they needed them most.”
Levi’s skin became tree bark and his arms stretched out into the limbs of a weeping willow. Evan sobbed and repeated his friend’s name. Niyati drew Evan toward another mirror standing under the Spanish moss that led back into the hedge maze.
Before stepping through, Evan turned one last time to say goodbye. But he could no longer see Levi for the profusion of angelic wings that overspread the willows and veiled in white pinions that misty Georgia shore.
As someone who has walked a hedge maze and labyrinth or two in my day, getting lost in this beautiful Hell and Limbo filled with mazes and mirrors is an intriguing--possibly panic-inducing--thought. And that final image is just sublime.