Our Infinite Sadness

Abyss

Ben stared at his feet, trembling, and treaded carefully among the carpet of sunsplashed phlox blossoms, a bed of flocculent snow. He threaded his way carefully among islands of bright pink fireweed, scarlet columbine and blue-violet heralds of summer, which greeted the sun in mimicry of morning's pale indigo horizon.

He imagined himself picking his way through the prettiest place he had ever seen, among a pride of watchful, ravenous lions that tracked his every step, sharpened their claws on whetstones, dripped honey from their bared incisors. Any moment they might leap from their repose and rip him to pieces from everywhere at once.

He dared not look at her; he kept his eyes resolutely on his own arms and legs, and he first saw the refractory rainbows illuminating his body, as though he stepped tentatively forward beneath the jewel encrusted lens of a kaleidoscope.

The sun filled the meticulously artificial circular space from directly overhead. This small symmetrical meadow and its prismatic dome could not have materialized within the ubiquitous green of the surrounding labyrinth by mere chance. Someone, or some force, had placed it here. Ben suspected Edythe, her own secret garden, but he kept the hunch to himself and studied the refractory prisms that danced upon his forearms.

They reached the epicenter of the beautiful and terrifying meadow, and together they stopped.

Ben had been holding her hand since the tree line, and his fingers were going numb, but he stubbornly refused to let go. He groped and found her other hand. He felt himself still breathing, heard his own heart, thudding in panicked desperation to grab one more breath, each prolongation of his life a small grace on Ariadne's jeweled thread.

Trembling with terror and the imminence of his death, he ever so gradually raised his eyes to the teeth and horns of the Minotaur. She looked up at him amid bleached mariposa lilies and suncupped golden bells, her round mouth open and illuminated from within, setting her teeth and tongue in backlit shadow. The kaleidoscope above them set her skin to dancing, innumerable diamond crystal facets that broke the sun into myriad rainbows, bathing her head and body in a radiant halo.

She had warned him that in the sun she would be conspicuous, but he could not have imagined the magnitude of that truth. He wondered if he should fall to his knees and genuflect, because he knew without a doubt that educated savages since the dawn of civilization had formed their arcane mythologies to explain visitations precisely such as this. Should he give obeisance? Open his hand and offer a blood sacrifice? Gather a bier, place himself upon it, and set himself aflame?

Edythe's otherworldly smile gave reassurance that she had no need of any of that.

"Did we survive?" he wondered aloud.

She looked up at him and ruefully admitted, "I'm not sure. Ben, are you still you?"

He felt himself as he stood, and without ever releasing her hands, took an inventory of himself from head to toe. He provisionally replied, "I think so. But I've changed."

"So have I," she echoed with terror and wonder.

He dared to look up at the sky, and with a strange detachment he wondered, half-convinced and almost whimsically, if she might exploit that millisecond of inattention to leap for his neck. He expected to see in the sky overhead a vaulted ceiling of translucent ovular jewels, but no, he squinted defensively against the bright pure sun and pale cloudless sky.

Edythe gently and carefully extricated her fingers from his, and she stepped away. On some level, ever curious, he wondered about the purpose of her alchemic effect on the sunlight. If Darwin was right, everything conserved in nature had a reason. Why did Edythe break visible light up into thousands of rainbows? It sure wasn't camouflage. As she moved, gazing pensively into the trees, the fiery rainbows shimmered down her arm, and the refraction scattered light in tumultuous spectra, every hue that light could hold, including many for which Ben had no names.