Beautiful Days

by Joyce Carol Oates

  As Oliver interacts with the video game the mother loses herself in an exhibit of eerily incandescent, shimmering flowers of diverse varieties and colors. These too are fractal-mandalas. Peering into them is like peering into the soul.

  From all sides, Ravel’s Bolero. Ever faster, ever louder, musical notes turning frantically upon themselves like snakes in a cluster.

  7.

  “It’s OK, Mom. I can go alone.”

  “Oliver, no. I don’t think so.”

  The Sierpinski Triangle Labyrinth, located on the mezzanine floor of the Museum, takes up the entire floor.

  The child cannot think of anything more disappointing than to have journeyed to the Fractal Museum only to be forced to undertake the Labyrinth, the Museum’s major interactive exhibit, about which he has been reading online for weeks, in the company of his timorous and uninformed mother. No!

  And yet there is a warning posted above the entrance: Children Under Twelve Must Be Accompanied by Adults into the Labyrinth.

  Though Oliver is hardly a small child the mother intends to enter the Labyrinth firmly gripping the boy’s hand. It isn’t likely that he would run ahead of her, or become lost, for after all the Labyrinth is finite—(no larger than the mezzanine floor, you can see)—still the mother is reluctant to let the child push ahead and leave her behind. She is still somewhat dazed by the effect of the mandalas and rose windows in the preceding exhibit and feels reluctant to leave them so soon.

  Amanda has not been a religious person and has not (consciously) felt the need for spiritual solace. A great hunger is opening in her, in the region of her heart, that will never be filled.

  And yet—she is obliged to use the women’s restroom. This is not so spiritual.

  Instructing the child to please wait for her in the corridor. Or use the (men’s) restroom himself, which is just across the hall, and wait for her. And then they will proceed—together—to the Sierpinski Triangle Labyrinth just a few feet away.

  The child agrees. Seems to agree. OK, Mom.

  Standing very still, deceptively. With an expression of utter innocence.

  On surveillance cameras it will be recorded: the mother addressing the child, the child seemingly docile, a lanky-limbed boy of about ten?—with ginger-colored hair, in a dark red, or maroon, shirt buttoned to his throat, jeans, sneakers.

  Mother disappears into women’s restroom. Child waits obediently for two seconds before edging away into the entrance to the Labyrinth.

  (Not that Oliver was a rebellious child. Rather, Oliver was oblivious of the fact that while he was he was a child.)

  In the Sierpinski Triangle Labyrinth each individual who enters is designated a pilgrim, overtly; covertly, from the perspective of the program that governs the Labyrinth, each individual is a subject.

  There is (allegedly) a direct path that leads from the entrance of the Labyrinth to the exit, at which there is posted EXIT: NO RE-ENTRY. If you make the right choices each time you are confronted with a choice (that is, a fork in the path) you will exit the Labyrinth after a breathless forty-fifty minutes.

  Has anyone ever exited the Labyrinth in this relatively short period of time? Legend is, no one has (yet). Thus, each pilgrim imagines himself potentially ranked #1 in the Labyrinth competition; the child Oliver is, or was, no exception.

  Like human intestines that might measure, if stretched out, more than twenty-five feet, yet are condensed into a much smaller abdominal space, the devious path of the Sierspinski Triangle Labyrinth is far longer than one would guess; calculating the numerous (fractal) turns, each of which involves an equilateral triangle replicating the larger equilateral triangle that constitutes the outermost limits of the Labyrinth, and factoring in the time-fractal as well, the Labyrinth is many miles long, perhaps as many as one thousand. Examined minutely, however, the Labyrinth might be said to be infinite, for each smaller triangle in the path might be deconstructed into its parts, to infinity.

  The pilgrim/subject makes his way into the Labyrinth, confronted with forks in the path at intervals of only a few seconds; he must choose to go right, or left, for he cannot go backward; having made his choice, he will be confronted with another fork within a few seconds, and must choose to go right, or left; and so on. As soon as he has entered the Labyrinth the pilgrim/subject is moving through time as well as space, and this movement into both time and space is irrevocable—though it is not likely that the pilgrim/subject realizes it, as none of us do.

  Having calculated a route beforehand, Oliver has a plan to take the left fork of the path, then the right, and again the left, and the right, in a pattern of strict alternation, in this way (he deduces, plausibly) he will always be hewing to the center, and will not be drawn off into peripheral, fractal branches that may culminate in dead ends. Oliver is very bright and quick and has a near-photographic memory and so tells himself—I can’t become lost.

  It has been Oliver’s aim—his dream—to complete the Labyrinth in record time, or at least to tie with the previous #1 pilgrim whose likeness he has seen posted on the Museum’s website: a seventeen-year-old boy from Manhattan’s Fieldstone School who intends to major in cosmology at MIT.

  And so, the bold child enters the Labyrinth without a backward glance. At once the atmosphere is altered—he finds himself almost weightless, disoriented. Surprised too to see that the maze-walls are not solid as he’d anticipated, but rather translucent, or giving an impression of translucence, opening onto sunlit areas, fields of poppies, Shasta daisies, wild rose that seem to stretch for miles. There are high-scudding clouds. Fleecy, filmy cirrocumulus clouds in a cobalt-blue sky. Cries of birds, or perhaps they are human cries—a young family at the beach, laughing together. All is vivid and then fleeting, fading. Forks in the path come rapidly—more rapidly than Oliver has expected—but each fork seems to lead into an identical space so that it is possible to forget one’s strategy and make a blunder, “choosing” randomly, with the assumption that left and right are interchangeable; and since the pilgrim can’t reverse his course he has no idea if left and right are in fact interchangeable, or in fact very different—as radically opposed as life and death.

  Once a choice has been made it is irrevocable, for a powerful momentum draws the pilgrim forward, as a mist of amnesia trails in his wake.

  Soon then, the child has entered an industrial landscape. Factories in ruins, dripping water. The sky is leaden, sinking. All color has vanished. Suddenly he is in dark rank water to his ankles. (Is the water real, or is the water virtual? In the Sierpinski Triangle there is no clear distinction between the two states.) A strong chemical odor makes his nostrils pinch for the water is poisoned. It is the reeking landscape of the Russian film Stalker—Oliver’s favorite film since he’d first seen it at the age of ten.

  How many times Oliver has seen Stalker! He has been mesmerized by the long dreamlike excursion into the Zone in which all wishes are fulfilled including those wishes we do not know we have. Recalling how a black dog suddenly emerges from the contaminated water, to befriend one of the pilgrims . . .

  There is no doubt that Oliver must continue forward, ever deeper into the Zone. Dank dripping water, a tightening in his chest. No friendly German shepherd appears (yet). Oliver has no time to wonder how so abruptly he has stepped out of the comfort of the Fractal Museum with its clean restrooms and brightly lit café buzzing with customers and the planetarium show—Our Fractal Universe—which he might now be seeing safely with his mother, except the line of mothers and children was too long, and the lure of the notorious Sierpinski Triangle Labyrinth irresistible. For weeks Oliver has planned how, if he follows his plan unfailingly, he will exit the maze in “record time”—his name and likeness posted on the Fractal Museum’s website for all to see.

  For the father to see. For kids at school to see.

  Yet Oliver has a strong feeling that he should turn back. Even if it is against the rules—perhaps the program that drives the Labyrinth will make an exception for him
. (He is a special child, isn’t he? The fuss his parents have made over him.) He has made a mistake to push ahead into the exhibit without his mother—they will make an exception, for he is just a child. He has deceived his naïvely trusting mother.

  She will be upset. She will be angry. Her eyes will smart with tears. Her lower lip will tremble. Oliver how could you! You must have known that I would be looking for you, I would be sick with worry over you . . .

  Hesitating on the path, uncertain which fork to take. Now there is not only a right-hand fork and a left-hand fork but a middle-fork. Three!

  Oliver had not known that some of the choices would involve three forks in the path. He is confused, uncertain. How deeply has he penetrated the Zone? Will there be a way out?

  Always there is the promise, if you are an American child and your parents love you, there will be a way out.

  Even if you have rejected your parents there is a way out.

  The polluted air is difficult to breathe, the child’s chest begins to tighten. Airways in his lungs begin to tighten. He begins to choke, wheeze. He is panicked suddenly. It is a violent asthmatic attack of a kind he has not had in years. In another few seconds his eyesight will blotch and blacken and he will sink to the floor gasping for breath, unconscious . . .

  Oliver darling! Here.

  He feels the mother’s hand on his shoulder. He feels the mother’s panting breath on his cheek. The mother has brought Oliver’s rescue inhaler in her handbag. Of course, the precious rescue inhaler, the almost-forgotten inhaler, the despised inhaler that will save the child’s life.

  I’ve got you, darling, you are all right. Your mother has you now, just breathe . . .

  8.

  At the entrance to the Sierpinski Triangle Labyrinth the warning cannot be clearer: Children Under Twelve Must Be Accompanied by Adults into the Labyrinth.

  Yet, when the mother emerges from the women’s room to glance about inquisitively the child is nowhere in sight.

  Oliver has entered the Labyrinth by himself—has he? The mother is exasperated with the son but not (yet) upset.

  Noting the time: 12:29 P.M.

  Reluctant to enter the Labyrinth, for the mother knows that it is the most challenging of the Fractal Museum exhibits, indeed an “ingeniously” difficult maze, the mother looks prudently about to see if, in fact, Oliver might be somewhere else. Perhaps he has wandered into another exhibit, around a corner. Into the men’s restroom? With mounting anxiety she waits outside the restroom. In case Oliver is inside. Oh, she hopes so! If he appears, she will not scold him. Oliver! Thank God.

  Though she is not by nature an anxious mother. Minutes pass, Oliver does not appear. Other boys emerge from the restroom, one of them closely, uncannily resembling Oliver, the boy who’d worn the dark green Newtown Day hoodie, coming to join the mother waiting for him outside the Labyrinth; but Oliver is not among them. Finally the mother asks a Museum guard if he will please go inside the restroom to see if her son Oliver is in there—eleven years old, “small for his age,” gingery-red hair, wire-rimmed glasses, dark red shirt, jeans, sneakers. The Museum guard is willing to oblige but returns from the restroom without Oliver.

  Is she sure he hasn’t entered the Labyrinth?—the guard asks.

  The mother confesses that she doesn’t know. She’d asked the son to wait for her, but . . .

  At 12:36 P.M. the mother again approaches the guard: should she enter the Labyrinth to search for the child?—or should she assume that he will emerge at the exit, when he completes the maze?

  The Museum guard is a skim-milk-skinned individual of no discernible age with an affable smile, Museum uniform and badge. He does not appear to be armed except with a device that might (the mother thinks) be a Taser. He assures the mother that the maze is a “challenge” but it is “finite”—“It is guaranteed to come to an end.” He recommends that she wait for her son at the exit, which she can access by taking the stairs or elevator to the first floor, walking to the rear of the Museum, then taking the stairs or elevator back up to the mezzanine. She will encounter pilgrims leaving the maze there, and possibly someone among them will have seen her son.

  This, the mother does with some misgivings for it seems not a good idea to leave the Labyrinth entrance in case Oliver shows up there after all. Bitterly she regrets not having insisted that the child carry a cell phone so that she can contact him easily but Oliver (who does not want to be contacted easily by his mother) is interested only in the damned iPad.

  At the Labyrinth exit the mother waits. Surely, Oliver will emerge from the maze soon!

  Each person who appears at the Labyrinth exit—many of them boys Oliver’s age, or older—looks familiar to her, for a brief moment. Her heart is suffused with hope even when she has seen a face clearly and knows that the person cannot be Oliver: the child out of all the universe who is precious to her as her very life, perhaps more precious, for he is her child, and the promise is—Our children must outlive us, and remember us, else we cease to exist utterly.

  An older, white-haired gentleman exits the Labyrinth appearing distracted, distraught. It is unusual to see an individual of such an age in the Labyrinth. The mother tries to speak to him, to ask if he might have seen Oliver inside the maze, but the white-haired man seems reluctant to meet her eye, and hurries unsteadily away.

  The mother tries to reason with herself: it is (probably) foolish to worry about Oliver—the Labyrinth is only a Museum exhibit, a maze for children to navigate, nothing like a Ferris wheel or roller coaster; a child is obviously not in danger of his life in the maze, nor is it likely that a child could become lost. She knows this, certainly.

  Strangely, it is only 12:29 P.M.—how is this possible? Amanda could swear it would have to be an hour later, at least. She is becoming increasingly anxious.

  At the Labyrinth exit is a sign in emergency-red letters: EXIT ONLY DO NOT ENTER. Amanda hesitates, wondering if she should try to enter; or, should she return to the entrance, and try to make her way through the maze, to find Oliver? Reaches out her hand to the doorway—her hand is confronted by a very slight resistance in the air. (Is this real? Imagined? She feels a sensation like a mild, warning shock.) A Museum guard approaches her to inform her politely but firmly that visitors are not allowed into the maze at the exit; if they wish to enter they must return to the entrance.

  She stammers that her son is somewhere inside the maze, she’s afraid that he is lost, that something may have happened to him—“Please? Please help us.”

  On his walkie-talkie the guard summons an aggressively friendly woman in a Museum uniform (jacket, pleated skirt), badge identifying her as M.W. Pritt, who assures the mother that of course it is natural to be worried, for some children get “mired” in the Labyrinth and take longer to complete it than others, and it is natural—understandable!—for a mother to worry. But there is (after all) only one way out of the Labyrinth, even if the Labyrinth turns upon itself, in mimicry of a fractal universe, in ever-tighter “pathways” within ever-smaller triangles, and even if, as all visitors to the Museum are clearly informed, in fact it is printed out distinctly (if in a very small font!) on the reverse side of all Museum tickets, that the Sierpinski Triangle Labyrinth is also a maze in time.

  What does that mean, the mother asks—“A maze in time?”

  “It means that the maze is ingeniously imagined as a maze in space and in time.”

  “In time . . .”

  “The pilgrim who undertakes the Labyrinth is moving through space but also, inevitably, through time.”

  “But—why is that different from what we are doing, just standing here? Aren’t we moving through time?”

  “Of course. It is not possible not to move through time. But time is a kind of spectrum, and there are different rates at which one moves. The Labyrinth experiments with ‘time’—at least, that is what the inventor claims. Very few of us, on the staff, have actually gone inside our interactive exhibits.”

  “You’ve
never gone into the Labyrinth? Why—why not?”

  “But why would we?”—the woman regards the mother with a quizzical smile. “We are here to ‘manage’—not to be entertained.”

  Seeing that the mother is looking distressed and confused M.W. Pritt repeats again that the Labyrinth is finite, and if the child is still in the Labyrinth he will be found.

  The mother asks what does she mean by if?

  If. If the child is still in the Labyrinth, or if the child ever entered the Labyrinth.

  The mother asks if there are security cameras inside the Labyrinth and is told that there are not, for reasons of privacy, as there are not cameras in restrooms; though there are security cameras in the Museum generally, in the exhibit rooms and corridors.

  “But—I don’t understand. ‘Reasons of privacy’—what does that mean? In the maze?”

  “Ma’am, I am just relating Museum policy to you. I did not set the policy!”

  M.W. Pritt escorts the mother downstairs and into the security office where she is allowed to observe a wall of TV screens. On each screen humanoid figures are moving at a distance, blurred and indistinct, with only intermittent colors, as if seen undersea. It is very difficult to distinguish faces. In fact—are there faces? A preponderance of children, young adolescents, some adults, a white-haired older man drifting about like sea anemones in an invisible current. When the videotape from the Labyrinth entrance is rewound and replayed the mother stares so intensely she almost cannot see—“Wait! Is that Oliver?—is that me? Or, maybe not . . .”

  A mother and a boy, obviously her son, yearning to slip away from the mother, listening to her anxious prattling with an air of barely restrained impatience; a young boy, not yet an adolescent, in what appears to be a jacket or a hoodie, standing very still.

  The mother enters a women’s restroom, and vanishes from the TV screen; the son remains for a beat, two beats, before turning away decisively and entering the Labyrinth.

  Last glimpse of the son, a defiant little figure, entering the Labyrinth without so much as a backward glance.