Into The Labyrinth (Yellow Walkman Zen)

FICTION | MARCH FEATURE I

This is a continuation of Into The Labyrinth from last month's fiction feature but it can be read as a stand alone piece. If you'd like to read last month's story first, click here.

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I’d spat out fire and the fire had run ahead of me and formed a trail. The trail had led me into a new, undiscovered part of the labyrinth. 

My few possessions were stored in my small black backpack before quitting camp: a red Swiss Army knife, a yellow solar-powered sports Walkman, some chalk to mark my path and make sure I didn’t get turned about, and a small tan notebook to record my haiku.

I didn't have any audio tapes, but would occasionally pick up voice or music with the Walkman’s built-in radio that helped ease the loneliness of labyrinth life. That night I’d managed to tune into a distorted transmission of Edith Piaf, The Little Sparrow, singing La Vie en Rose. 

Dutifully following the flames through the night I saw the trail vanish in the distance and then pick up mid-air and ascend into the sky. This was naturally puzzling to me. Then, just before dawn, there was a loud boom overhead. The sky suddenly cracked like a large bass drum. A thunderstorm accompanied by heavy rain. The fire trail flickered and as I rushed to follow where it led before it dies out but in no time at all it was washed away by the lashings of rain.

With first light, any hope that the fire would lead me to an exit was extinguished and. myheart sank. A great mountain peak reared up in the distance. The mountain’s position suggested that it was at the center of the labyrinth and it was there that the trail of fire had been leading me. 

Crouched down in a huddle, leaning against the wall, I waited for the storm to pass. The rain played drums on the hood of my raincoat and regret at having left my familiar region washed over me. I knew all the tricks in the old part of the maze, what was I thinking heading out into the unknown on a march that was leading me up a mountain?

Tears blended with rain, sending tiny cascades of hopeless misery over my cheekbones and to the labyrinth floor. I resolved that I’d hold my ground until the rain let up and then try to find my way back to my old camp. It would be no easy feat as the storm would have washed away my chalk navigation markings but I filled with despair and had no wish to carry on with what now seemed like a futile mission.

The rain let up before midday and the sun peeked through grey clouds and lifted my mood. I reasoned that if I couldn’t escape then at least, like Dante, ascending the mountain was a possibility. With altitude would come perspective and perhaps the hope of sighting an exit that I could plot a course towards. Little steps, small victories would lead to escape. It had to. 

After some time the narrow turns of the labyrinth opened out onto a wide landscape of flat stone. No labyrinth walls in sight but it was only an oasis, an illusion. Bitter experience had taught me that in some places the maze overlaps with dreamscapes and mythological environments. Places that make you forget the walls of your prison and think that the oasis is the only reality you have ever known. This one was occupied by a very strange building. 

A skyscraper-high obelisk, with one entrance and blind to light, lacking a single window. The facade was brown granite, shiny and polished. 

The first two-thirds of the building, viewed from the ground, was a pure rectangle like a child’s building block. The rectangle in the upper portion was split, divided into about a dozen smaller rectangular towers that reminded me of the "stairs" of the Giant's Causeway, a coastal rock formation in Ireland where basalt columns jut out of the sea.

This structure was either a modernist cathedral or a multi-story corporate headquarters building. The administrative center of a religious organization?The entrance was framed by a thick border of shining obsidian and the interior was unlit, the space beyond the entrance completely dark, like the blackness of space if all the stars in the galaxy were eaten up. The noon sun hit the obsidian and the dazzling reflection hit me right in the eyes. 

Blink. Squint. Darkness. I blinked again, still nothing. After a moment my eyes adjusted to the low light. Was I inside the building? Just like that I was standing in a narrow corridor. The walls to either side of me were made from the same colored stone that I’d see on the building’s exterior. The entrance was the mouth of some giant predator that had somehow sucked me in.

There were no sconces holding candles or electric lights, the walls themselves were luminescent. The passage continued straight for about twenty feet then a sudden change of angle, a pattern that repeated itself so that I had the sense of gradually moving in a sharp angled spiral, towards the heart of the building. Finally, I emerged into a massive room with a high domed ceiling. An enclosed square circulation desk sat in the center, surrounded by long white benches and beyond them, hundreds of shelves set at angles to one another to create a hexagonal pattern. 

The shelves held countless thousands of audio tapes, and between each of the shelves was a carousel full of videotapes. The building was a library, an audio visual library to be precise. It was very busy and its patrons were shadows. Transparent ghosts wandered around selecting tapes, sitting at consoles watching videos, listening to music with headphones on. I couldn’t hear what they were listening to but I could hear the whirl of wheels pulling magnetic tape over the metal head to create sound and image. They walked right past me without acknowledging my existence. I could make out flashes of features, perhaps the faces of who they had once been—shining eyes, smiles, frowns, that would be there one moment, like a ripple in a pond, and then gone the next. 

Another strange adventure in the labyrinth and not the fearful trap that I had suspected. I loved analog music and video and the library looked comprehensive. In a place like this, that was neither real nor unreal, I’d bet they had a copy of every tape recording ever made.  

“Excuse me? Can you tell me where I am?” I asked one of the shadows as it passed. I saw some features that might have belonged to an old man. 

“This is the analog library of the Scandinavian Love goddess," he replied in a whisper.

An unexpected answer for sure. The Scandinavians had a goddess of love? Which Scandinavians? The Norwegians? The Swedes? There was the Viking goddess Freyja who was a cross between the Greek gods Diana and Aphrodite—war and love bound up in a single devastating package.

“I have to go. You may not be able to tell but I'm old and those wheels don’t spin by themselves. I have to get back to my songs.” 

“Do you have to listen to music?” I asked.

“The turning of the wheels, the feeding of the tape nourishes us, it extends our lives. It is the miracle of analog playback.”

A shadow existence, slowly fading away didn’t seem like a miracle but what’s hell for one man is heaven for another and who was to say it wasn’t going to suit me either?

“You had better hurry up and get a library card. If you listen to a tape without borrowing it then the magic doesn’t work. Go fast to the circulation desk.”

The old man wandered off and then I realized that when he said “our”, he was including me. I could see through my arm and other parts of my body were slowly turning into the same shadow forms I saw around me. 

Following the old man’s advice, I went to the center of the room seeking a bell to summon the librarian but the moment I placed my hands on the counter someone appeared out of nowhere. I looked up to see that I was only inches away from the chest of a tall, muscular woman. She must have been seven feet tall with sharp cheekbones, platinum blonde hair pulled back into a tight bun and penetrating ice-blue eyes. She wore a long blue dress with square spiral patterns woven into it. Everything about her radiated power and if she was beautiful, and she was, it was only as an extension of that power. 

“Why are you here?” she asked. 

“Hello. I need a library card.” 

“This library is not for everyone. How did you get here?” The librarian sounded just like Bjork, the Icelandic musician. Elfin high with a husky depth at the same time. 

“How did you get here?" I asked. “Are you Scandinavian?”

“Yes, I am.”

“This is a long way from Scandinavia.”

“You answer questions with questions,” she said. 

“What is your name?”       

Her icy countenance melted and she gave a little smile.

“My name is…”

She spoke but the sounds that came out of her mouth were a kind of buzzing harmonic that contained no syllables I’d ever heard. 

“Here, let me write it for you," she said. Picking up a black fountain pen, the tall woman wrote on a blank sheet of paper in tiny, squashed-up letters that looked like a series of squashed spider bodies. 

The spidery letters suddenly took on a life of their own and skittered forwards like little insects, right into the tips of the fingers of my right hand. I pulled it away quickly and shook it to try and dislodge them but they had blended with the shadow form of my body. I could see them sitting below the back of my hand, moving about. 

The librarian seized my hand and turned it about, palm up. In the center of my palm lay a flat obsidian disc. 

“That is your library card. You are now a member,” she said. “You have no time to lose, you must start listening at once. Listening is your life now.”

I staggered off in the direction of the audio tapes. I could feel myself fading, I grabbed a stack of tapes off a shelf and looked for an empty place at the benches where I could start listening. 

"Pst, over here. Hey, over here.”

There was a small hole in the wall behind one of the shelves, the size of a clenched fist. Through it I could make out the head of a pigeon. 

“Listen, the librarian isn’t a goddess she’s a crow spirit,” the pigeon said quietly. He spoke Japanese but I could understand him perfectly. 

“What’s your name then?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you if you can escape. I won’t speak my name near the crow witch. Crows eat pigeons you know.”

“And why help me?”

“I tell everyone who gets trapped in here, you’re all baby pigeons to her, but no one ever listens.”

“How do I escape?”

“There is a compass hidden in there that’ll not only get you out of this place but also help you on your journey to the mountain. You did the right thing in joining the library. Once you were drawn into this place it was the only thing you could do, and now you can borrow any tape you want but be careful. Once you start borrowing tapes, your shadow will become mixed with the crow spirit’s magic and you’ll forget why you are here. Make sure the first tape you borrow is the compass.”

“This compass is one of the tapes? There must be millions of them.”

“And even when you find the right tape the librarian won’t want to let you borrow it, but you must find a way. It’s not enough to find it, she has to knowingly let you borrow it if you want your body back and a ticket out of here.”

“I can do it.”

“Good for you. Now get going and remember, going on means going far, going far means returning.” A flap of wings and Mr. Pigeon took his own advice and disappeared. 

I don’t know how long I searched through the tapes. Every now and then I peeked through the small hole in the wall. Sometimes it was dark, other times daytime, the only way to mark the passage of time was the gradual degeneration of my shadow body. I was running out of time. 

Back at the circulation desk, the self-style Scandinavian Love Goddess was watching me carefully. The square spirals of the librarian’s dress, the same pattern of the corridors I found after being pulled inside. It made me think of one of my favorite albums. Vangelis’ 1977 electronic music album, Spiral. 

The album art featured a giant golden headphone jack in the clouds, flying like a dragon with a spiral cable running behind it. And there was something written on the cover in small letters. 

Going on means going far, going far means returning. I remembered. It was a quote from Lao Tzu’s Tao Teh Ching. The pigeon spirit had given me a clue. I snatched up Spiral and was about to head for the desk when I recalled the pigeon’s words: the librarian won’t want to let you borrow it.

I grabbed Architecture and Morality by Orchestral Manoeuvres In the Dark and replaced the tape inside with Spiral.

“I’d like to borrow this please.”

Now that I was up at the desk again I saw that the blue dress was actually composed of hundreds of fine feathers, like there were great wings folded about her body.

“Hold out your card.”

I opened my hand and showed her the stone. She placed one hand over the stone and another over the tape. 

“There, it’s done,” she said. “You belong here now. Forever."

I took the tape out of its cover and slipped it into my yellow Sports Walkman and pressed the play button. 

Electronic spirals, just like the title of the album promised. Moving and returning beats like a tide, pulling me back and forth like sculptor’s clay. With each round of spiral beats my body regained its solidity until, finally, the black letter insects fell from my fingers to the library floor. I crushed them beneath my shoe before they could escape.

The crow spirit’s eyes opened wide with shock. 

Her blue dress exploded out into two great wings and the body below was a skeletal shadow. Her scream shattered the bodies of all the shadows in the library like they were made of glass. I ran. Out of the library, into the spiral corridors, the beating of great wings behind me. She cut through the air, I could feel something sharp at the back of my neck. 

“You can’t have it! It’s mine!”

Did she mean the Vangelis tape?

Just as I remembered that I had no idea how to get out of her lair, because I’d had no idea how I got in, I was surrounded by bright light. Outside again, on flat stone, the sun still directly above me as it had been when I first went it. And no building either. The great obelisk library temple was gone as if it had never been. Vangelis’ music was still humming through my headphones and as I listened, the entire landscape around me melted away like wax and I was back in the labyrinth, but not as it was. Now the path ahead was straight, running all the way towards the mountain. No bends, no twists, straight, clear and easy. 

The flapping of wings. For a moment I thought it was a great raven, but when I turned around it was a pigeon. The bird paused in mid-air and the air around him flickered as if someone had pressed the pause button on a VHS video. A golden beam shot out of the dove and hit the ground and instantly, a man stood before me. A Japanese man in his 70s but fit and healthy. He wore a plain black T-shirt, blue jeans, and gold Nike sneakers.

“Thank you,” I said.

“You’d better watch out for her,” the pigeon-man said. “She’ll want revenge.”

“What else can I do but keep going?”

“That’s right. Keep going. If you’re lucky you’ll turn into a pigeon like me and you can fly wherever you want.”

“You said you’d tell me your name?”

“Hip Man Rōshi.” 

“Hip isn’t a Japanese word is it? You mean hip like a hip bone?” I asked. 

He raised an eyebrow which said, “we both know what kind of hip it is,” but Hip Man Rōshi was far too cool to say it. He let his eyebrow do the talking.

“You’d better get going. The road won’t stay straight for long. The tape is the compass but only for a short time. The power will transfer to something else before long and you’ll have to find it again.”

Before I could ask any more questions, his clothes transformed, becoming like the flapping black robes of a Shinto priest, and then the pigeon was in the sky, flying off, straight down the long narrow way towards the mountain. 

My shadow stretched out before me, long and straight like an arrow. As I went the sound of the tape began to warp. The tape was wearing thin. 

How many before me had played it? However many, I was the last. As the fidelity dropped away and Vangelis’ music became twisted, so too the road ahead bucked and pulled back into its former, confounding state. 

I wasn’t discouraged. Hope filled my steps. I didn’t know why Hip Man Rōshi had come to help me but for the first time in a long time I didn’t feel alone. 

“Going on means going far, going far means returning.” 

I pulled my notebook out and wrote a haiku to mark the occasion:

Bent walls straighten out,

pigeon spirit, spiral sound-

yellow Walkman Zen.

Hip Man Rōshi with gold sneakers. It's purely coincidental that he resembles great Japanese writer Haruki Murakami.