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Stacy Leslie is a graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing program at Antioch University. She is currently an Atlanta-based Professor of English, “teaching Literature and Composition to legions of disinterested students.” Her work has appeared in The GSU Review, The Oklahoma Review, and The Year of the Blue Jay, an anthology of fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction. As is becoming something of a pattern, she was awarded second place in both the GSU Review’s Annual Fiction Contest (2007), and the Lewis B. Owens Essay Prize for the best student academic work on the writing of John Steinbeck. She can be reached at slesliewrites@yahoo.com.

 

 

Labyrinth

Stacy Leslie

Elliot wakes cold. That’s how he knows that something is very wrong. Waking up cold just doesn’t happen. Mia hates the cold, and Elliot bought flannel sheets and a real down comforter and Mia was never cold in his bed again. When Mia noticed, she smiled at Elliot – crooked mouth and sleep-soft eyes – and Elliot never really felt the cold again.

Until now.

Cold, alone – on a hard surface in a tiny alcove off a hallway to nowhere, and no Mia.

#

They met in school, he was a student; she a professor. Neither felt constrained by the cliché. They walked together on the campus; no one said a word.

“Do you think they care?” Mia asked, letting her hand brush against his.

“Do you give a fuck if they do?” Elliot put his hand around her wrist – it was the closest to holding hands he ever did. “What are they going to do, fire you? Is that the worst thing they have? That’s the arsenal? That’s the tactical nuclear weapon?”

“I guess so,” she said. “When you say it that way…”

“So we go somewhere else – what will they do? Put it on your permanent record?”

“The permanent record is a myth," she said, offhand. "They can deny me tenure, though."

“Is that that thing that gets you prime real estate in the basement of the science building? Is that that thing that thing that makes you teach one hundred level classes until you die?”

“It’s exactly that,” she said. 

#

It doesn't feel like the hospital. The hospital was always warm, even under the bright florescent lights that looked like they should have been blue and cold. This place, though - it's cold. The cold is worse than Buffalo in winter. It’s the kind that’s bone-deep, and each inhalation pulls a grinding ache further into Elliot’s body. He wonders where all the warmth has gone.

He eases himself off the table and lets his feet touch the floor, bracing his hands on his thighs to find the leverage to stand. He looks down and then stops to huff out a surprised breath. His hands are smooth and perfect – the knuckles skinned while working on his crappy car three days ago are gone. There's no reason here – no reason for him to be unmarked. He thinks it must be a dream of some kind.

A quick brush of fingers to his wrists finds the absence of the evidence of the ill-conceived suicide attempt at seventeen. He hadn’t known – ‘up the road, not across the street’. A touch under his plain white shirt fails to find the twisted crag of scar tissue from not quite making it over a barbed wire fence when he was twelve and screwing around in the field. If this is a dream, it's the freakiest one he's ever had.

The floor is chilly under his bare feet, and the white shirt and matching pants are thin. He’s got to find Mia: she'll know the answer.

Elliot walks down the hallway of white walls and white floors; the light comes from nowhere special and the sound of his footsteps doesn’t echo. This isn’t Mia’s apartment, warm and musty, redolent of paper and Chinese food. It's not his shared house with a tiny bedroom and kitchen privileges and three roommates he never sees.

It’s not the city, teeming with ozone smells and tension. He tries to remember how he got here, but it’s as if his life started ten minutes ago, coming awake in the alcove. He didn't ask to be born here, and it makes him angry to be trapped in this place where nothing makes sense.

He takes more steps and begins to remember specific instances in the past – three years old and falling out of a tree; the first day of sixth grade, realizing he was one of the cool kids by virtue of his unnatural height, and that meant he could beat up on the other kids, take their lunch money; locker room roughhousing and his date for the Prom. He remembers Mia – remembers their kisses; the way Mia’s mouth had covered his own, question and answer wrapped together in heat and wetness and softness. He remembers falling down onto Mia’s bed, in Mia’s arms – remembers the way he’d surrendered – easily, gratefully. Mia’s hands, Mia’s mouth, Mia’s tongue – in him and on him; Mia’s gasps and moans and quiet words, his own given in return.

#

Mia’s hot mouth and quicksilver tongue had traced his contours, mapped his flesh, and brought every part of him to life.

“I’m sorry. I’m stupid. I didn’t know. I didn’t know it could be this way for me, for us. I didn't know how to get this,” he said, feeling truly stupid, sideswiped by the reality of her. He really hadn't known what to expect. The entirety of his experience with love and sex added up to maybe a weekend and she was showing him the possibilities of a lifetime.

“So now you do. Now you know what you can have.” Her voice slurred as she bit his shoulder. Her mouth on him made him shake, the clench in his belly made him want her.

“Now I know." He said. "I can have you. I won’t forget.” It's more than a promise – it's a vow.

#

So that’s what he’s doing – not forgetting. He’ll find Mia and Mia will solve all the mysteries of the universe with the fine bones of her wrist under his hand and Elliot won’t be alone and cold anymore.

And so he walks on.

The corridor has a subtle curve, Elliot feels as though his path is winding back on itself, but he can’t be sure. It doesn’t really matter – he’ll keep walking either way. There’s nothing else to do, only the endless expanse of wall and floor and ceiling. The exercise warms him, and the quiet slap-slap of his bare feet on the floor is a tiny respite in the oppressive silence.

Elliot’s not used to silence anymore. His head hums and buzzes with activity, and he’s always got Mia’s voice. Always – always isn’t that long, really. He keeps coming back to that first kiss and just a little further back, to what he was before her – young and stupid and mean, his anger always at the fore. He can pinpoint the moment when he changed. He’ll always know it, always feel it inside – the moment that his world shifted on its axis and he opened his eyes to the possibilities that stood in front of him with sultry eyes and fingers that itched to touch – the moment Elliot figured it out and then felt like a moron for missing it for so long.

#

Mia’s voice. It had been so uncharacteristically uncertain. She'd stayed back a little, holding her body still; she was never still – vibrating like the atoms that made her up, always moving.

He stood just outside the door to her apartment, feelings warring – want and fear and bewilderment; there was relief there, too and the thrum of exhilaration that came from walking the line; from choosing something forbidden.

“I don’t know,” he said, balancing on the threshold. “I’m not sure I can do this.” Inside, the apartment looked warm and inviting, so different from the grimy hallway. But she was inside and he wasn't. The threshold was like a demarcation separating the two of them. Crossing it meant a new world, one where he slept with last semester's biology professor and where she broke the taboo and slept with her student.

At his unsure response, Mia gave him a small smile. Then she said, “I see.” The small, disappointed sound of it cut through him, and he had to say something, do something to get the light back in Mia’s eyes, the arbitrary concepts of right and wrong flying out the window like an anvil in a cartoon. First the anvil, then the piano. What had doing the right thing ever gotten him anyway, and who was he to judge? She was waiting, hands still on the doorframe, eyes downcast – waiting for him to decide which side of the door he belonged on.

"I don't know if I can do it," he said again, knowing the fear was in his voice, moving across the threshold for her to take.

“I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” she said, her shoulders tightening a little, then relaxing. When she looked up, her eyes were shuttered, and Elliot knew that there would be no second chance. “Maybe you won't figure it out today.”

“Maybe I will,” he said, and it came out fast and quiet, like a sudden exhale. Just that –and a small, scared smile. That was all he had to offer, but Mia’s return smile was worth it – the fear and incipient regret in her eyes slipping away. And, when Elliot would have reached for her, Mia’s hand was there, Mia moving faster than Elliot thought possible to take his hand, pull him gently inside and close the door.

“I didn’t expect you to want this – to want me. I didn’t think you’d let me have you this way." Elliot put his hands on her shoulders and peered down at her, confused. "Why didn’t you tell me?"

She laughed then. "Tell you what?" she said, her eyes glittering. "Tell you that I wanted you? Tell you to come here?"

"You could have told me anything," he said. "Why did you wait so long? We could have been doing this for so long.” His voice was hoarse, rough from cigarette smoke. His mind whirling with possibilities. You can sleep with professors? Have them? That it's real; that it's one of those things that are available in the world, like apples and money and books and water?

"You were my student," she said. "The semester is over."

“The new one started today.”

She gave him a piercing look and her eyes drifted closed. She leaned forward and took Elliot’s face between her long, dry fingers and kissed him like he was beautiful and precious and he'd never been kissed like that.

He let Mia kiss him against the door for a long time, kissed back, even – without a clue as to what he was doing or why, but also without any driving need to make it stop. He didn’t know what to do with his hands, so he finally let them settle lightly on Mia’s hips. That must have been correct, because Mia made a soft noise and moved closer, pressing Elliot’s back against the scarred wood.

It felt weird to be held there so effortlessly by someone smaller than him, but something inside Elliot liked it, wanted it, craved it with some sort of unholy glee – Mia’s long body and heat and her soft lips pinning him down more efficiently than weight or breadth. It made him want to throw his head back and expose the vulnerable expanse of his throat.

He doesn’t remember much after that, only that Mia somehow got them into the bedroom and to her bed. Elliot’s memory has holes in it; some parts of it are crystal clear, others shrouded in gauze.

He let Mia strip him, listened to the gasps and murmurs as his body was uncovered little by little, felt the tips of Mia’s fingers trace his neck and collarbones, the length of his bicep, the angle of his hipbone. Elliot fell back onto the bed – a glorious combination of firm mattress and soft pillows that cradled his body.

And then Mia was there – the strange touches that were gentle even though her fingertips were rough. Elliot pulled her down and this time, he tilted his head back to give Mia his throat, he parted his legs to let Mia in between. And Elliot, who was almost always on top, almost always the leader, the instigator, let Mia touch him and kiss him and pull her dress over her head – nothing underneath. He let her climb over him and onto him and move him and make him and show him that sex didn't have to be fumbling and embarrassing. That it could end with both of them in a spent and sticky ball, gasping and moaning and laughing.

#

The hallway curves again, and Elliot’s starting to get a feel for it. It feels like he’s doubling back on himself, going over and over the same ground. He’s not tired, he’s not hungry or thirsty, he doesn’t have to pee. He just walks. Two thoughts in his head – ‘keep moving’ and ‘find Mia.’ He somehow has faith that, if he just keeps going, Mia will be there. It seems inevitable, and that’s enough for Elliot. He just wants to be warm again, just wants to be back where he belongs.

He wants to know this place. He wants to know why he's here. Not knowing is making him angry, and he doesn't want to be. He does things when he's angry; things he's not proud of; things that are bad. He feels broken sometimes, like there are two. The good version gets to have Mia, gets to laugh and play with her. The good in him makes her love him.

But she's different. She loves the bad parts, too. She loves the bits he's let bleed through – what she thinks is the worst. It's not even close. The bad part wants to lash out and say things to her, do things to her. So far he's managed to hold it in. He wonders if that's why he's here. If he's supposed to learn something or begin or end something.

He's getting angrier, and it's not good. He wonders if blood will run in this place. He'd like to stain all this whiteness.

He’s like a shark, endlessly swimming – he’ll die if he stops.

#

Elliot had never been afraid of death. Through falls and recklessness and pills and the sharpness of an Xacto knife against the thin skin of his wrist, exactly along the existing lines – across the street, not up the road. He's learned his lesson; if he'd meant it he would have done it right.

“Are you sure your birth certificate doesn’t have an expiration date on it?” Sitting by his bed in the hospital, Mia’s voice cracked on the joke. Elliot was restrained, less than a suicide watch, more than a simple injury. They had the padded cuffs above his elbows; there were thick bandages on his wrists.

She'd come home to find him gone. A nosy bitch as always, she'd tracked him down. He was in a classroom. The room where she'd taught him. Class dismissed because it was three in the morning and he'd made good inroads on a gallon of Mr. Boston's and the sandwich bag of pills.

He told her to go and she ignored him, watching him like the scientist she was, waiting for him to break. And when he lashed out at her, she listened quietly. When he tried to hit her, she'd easily sidestepped the clumsy blow. She sat down a few feet away from him and listened to the words, the badness, come falling out of him, most of it directed toward her.

Elliot had wanted to keep Mia away and Mia, typically, had come to find him anyway. She asked questions; following her beloved scientific method. He felt like a specimen on a slide, or maybe two, the good and the bad side by side. She looked at him with her head tilted and asked him which one would win. He thought that she’d record it like the box scores, pencil and card.

He tried to be good. To her; for her. She shouldn't see him when he's bad. When he did and said things that pushed people away. But she stood and wouldn't be pushed and he both loved and hated her for it. He broke away then and went to the last place she'd look. He went home. Where she'd go when she'd exhausted all the other places and come back, defeated.

He locked himself away and stuffed himself between the toilet and the wall. The knife felt cool against his skin. The bite of the blade was a line of pleasure before it turned to pain and he vomited up the vodka and felt the blood run warm and thick. The second wrist didn't feel as good.

He heard her open the front door, then. She wasn't predictable. She'd only been behind him by twenty minutes or so. She kicked down the bathroom door and pulled him to his feet, her long fingers against his forearm, because his wrist was a bloody mess. Blood and bile, sweat and saliva, she pulled him up and slapped him.

He pushed her then, and she slid in a pool of something. She would have fallen, except that she slapped her hand to the wall, her dry palm sliding and catching against the uneven plaster and stopping her. She'd pushed back. There was a bruise on his calf where he hit the toilet, a sore spot on the back of his head from the opposite wall.

While he was stunned, she wrapped his wrists with hand towels and wiped his face with a cloth, not bothering to be gentle. She'd gotten him to the ER just as he recovered from the blow to the head, the whirlwind of her, come to pull him out of the wreck of her bathroom. Two orderlies held him back when he lunged for her, and all he got was a few strands of hair and a sharp pinch at the back of his arm that led him down to darkness.

Elliot remembered the height of it, the point where he was in perfect balance, the two parts of him tilting like two warriors on a rocky peak, each trying to push the other into the abyss. But balance implies harmony, and there was none of that. It was pure suffering laced with terrible exultation. He cried out for Mia, for the safety he found in slim arms and soft body, and the other half cried out also. But that half’s cries were not for safety, but for pain and release; lines of blood and edges of skin. Both wanted Mia; the dark half – not with the heat and passion, not the way Elliot (the best in him) wanted Mia, the way Elliot had Mia.

“It’s like school – it's like life,” he said. “There’s always someone under you and always someone on top. Best of both worlds.” He strained at the cuffs, but he didn’t know why. He didn't want to get up or leave and the restraints held the bad in check.

That part of him wanted to own, to destroy, to see Mia bleeding and broken like him, and Elliot had managed to push that need away in the shaky moments just before the change gave the monster the extra strength it needed to push the man over the precipice to fall away to the jagged rocks below. The monster had the knife – the man was open-handed.

#

“No, no expiration date. I checked.” And he would have, too, if he hadn’t know his mother had the certificate, safe in a folder with his passport and savings bonds.

Scratchy voice and sweaty body and his head still felt like it was full of wet paper, but the man was in charge, the monster sent away, and the small bits that remained consigned to the depths of his heart, pushed down, buried.

Mia held his cuffed and chained arm like it was normal, like she’d take Elliot any way he could get him, like she would have let the dark have her, just to be close to the light. It was humbling and horrifying and beautiful in the same fucked-up way that they were, together.

Elliot closed his eyes and opened them to white walls and the cold.

#

Elliot keeps walking. The switchbacks seem more pronounced now, like he’s getting closer to the center, closer to his goal. He feels as though he should hold his hands with the palms facing downward, letting things out – cleansing his mind and body along the path.

The path curves a bit more and suddenly he’s there, at the end, in an open, circular space. Mia turns toward him with a welcoming smile and Elliot’s arms open. He holds her, feeling the cold. Her body is cold, her face, her hands. Not dead, though, not in a morgue or underwater, just cold, and he can make that better. He can make her warm.

In the hospital, she's climbed onto the bed with him, warm against his chest. She's made him real again She brought him out of the dream or the vision or whatever the path he's walked has been. He can't put his arms around her, but she stays with him.

He closes his eyes in the warmth, and sees the white room. He knows that he has to go back the way he's come, but she'll stay. She'll walk with him and they'll keep each other warm. He realizes that the path he's been walking is a labyrinth. It’s not a maze, with different ways to get to the goal; it’s a labyrinth, with a single, circular path.

They walk out together with their palms held up to receive its gifts.

 

 

The Chickasaw Plum  -  Volume V - Number 10 - October 2008

 

 

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