Her Maze is L

Elle didn’t know how long she’d been wandering the maze. Months, days, or moments, the answer made little difference to her. She enjoyed puzzles.

As mazes went, this one was particularly divine. Grass grew wild under Elle’s bare feet, the occasional stalk reaching up to tickle her rheumatic right knee. A gentle breeze, woven with the scent of fresh lilacs and almonds, soared through the sunlit sky. The wind stirred long-lost memories of childhood, of playing in the Midwestern hills before…before…

The pictures fuzzed in Elle’s mind. No matter. She had a puzzle to solve.

Instead of walls, rows of trees in full bloom lined the perimeter of the maze. Noble elms with their tall, arching branches sat alongside gray hackberries and fragrant basswoods. Elle knew their names and the subtle hues of their summer leaves, but she couldn’t recall seeing such a varied grove before. She would have remembered if she had.

Beyond the trees lay empty plains that sloped in gallant waves toward the horizon. If Elle squinted, she could make out images beyond the branches. Scenes on film rolled and stopped and stuttered in blurry repetition, waiting to be deciphered. Another puzzle.

Her slow steps took her around the next bend in the maze. A man in a white lab coat waited there, hands clasped in front of him, holding a strip of cardboard. Though his mouth moved, he made no sound. Elle stopped in front of him, trying to read his lips, but the shapes slipped from her mind as soon as they entered.

“Pardon?” she asked.

As the man continued speaking, he proffered the cardboard to Elle, who took it. Written on the strip was a simple, enticing, exhilarating phrase:

Her maze is L.

“Mmm,” Elle said. “More puzzles.” She nodded her thanks to the man and carried on.

The air bore a comfortable silence as she walked. No chirping birds or scurrying squirrels disturbed her, which was just fine, as she wanted to concentrate. She could enjoy her walk and unravel this mystery at the same time.

Elle wore a simple white blouse and jean shorts, her outfit of choice for lounging around the house in her twilight years. Isaac had always said that her post-retirement fashion sense was…

Who was Isaac? Part of the puzzle, perhaps.

She considered the factors involved. She was wearing comfortable clothes and walking by familiar trees. The sun rested at its zenith, refusing to budge as the hours passed. Phantom men in white coats handed her nonsense messages.

The solution was simple. She was dying, or already dead.

“That can’t be all,” Elle murmured. “Too obvious.”

The air in front of her fizzed and sparked, sending a tiny electrical shock into Elle’s fingertips as she reached for the disturbance. Something tall, dark, and indistinct emerged from the empty space. Elle waited patiently as it resolved into the figure of a enormous man with Davidic physique and black, plasticky skin. A flat, glossy surface, like a mirror at midnight, sat on his chiseled neck several feet above Elle's head.

She chuckled. “You’re a strange one.”

The plastic man – for Elle decided she would refer to him as such – cocked his rectangular head and spoke. “DRAW ROSY TROPES, SUE.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Elle said, rolling her eyes. “I can only handle so many hysterics at once.”

The man did not respond. How he had spoken at all Elle could not say, as he had no mouth.

“Are you Isaac?” she asked.

No answer. Elle stamped one foot – octogenarians were allowed a bit of melodrama, after all – and continued down the grassy corridor.

“Come on, then,” she called without looking back. “I could use the company.”

The plastic man followed, treading silently behind her. He was easily two heads taller than Elle, and despite his muscular form he carried himself as would a shy child, with soft steps and swinging arms.

“PRESS TOWARD YOURS,” he said. A crackling sound came from within his flat head. “E-E-E-E-E.”

“Absolute gibberish,” Elle said, delighted. “This is quite a juicy puzzle, don’t you think?”

They walked the maze in silence, traversing rigid lines and right angles more precise than any Elle had seen before. Beyond the tree line, fuzzy scenes played on a loop, reminding Elle of that old camcorder her sister had bought to film the kids. Martha…no, Marcia…whatever her name was, she had worn out the battery and the kids’ patience within a month.

Something dark and ethereal flashed between the trees, disappearing behind the low branches of an old hackberry.

“Ah,” Elle whispered. “The villain approaches.”

Every good story needed a villain. Every good puzzle needed a complication.

She turned to her companion. “If this is in my head,” she told him, “I’m better at this than I thought.”

Elle understood her own lapses in logic. On her wedding day, she had set the church on fire because someone had replaced the calla-lily bouquets with bunches of writhing tentacles. She’d been dreaming, of course, and the wedding had been three weeks away, but the impulse had felt so right.

This could be a dream, but her senses felt so alive that she doubted it. The fogginess lived on the outside, staining the sunlight and blurring the horizon. Within the maze, she was herself.

“Any ideas, my confounding friend?” she asked.

“A ROWDY SUPERSTORE,” the man said. “S-S-S-S-S.”

“That’s very helpful, thank you.”

The shadow followed them from the fringes, popping its head out from the trees every few moments. Once it reached for her, a mocha-brown hand emerging from the folds of its impossible black cloak. There was no danger, as it could not breach the boundary of the trees.

“It appears that we have time,” Elle said, “and I would quite like to use it. I haven’t talked my head off to a stranger in some days, and I miss it. Would that be alright?”

“EYES STOP SWORDS. ARUR-ARUR-ARUR.”

“Where to begin?” Elle stroked her chin with weathered fingers. “Ah, yes. This place feels like my personal Eden. An infinite garden to explore, filled with joy and all manner of good things. I rather enjoy this simile because, like Adam and Eve, an evil deed cast me from my childhood haven. In my case, it was the sin of contracting polio.”

“WORSE, PROUD STRAYS. E-E-E-E-E.”

“Why, that was almost a response! Yes, I suppose I took pride in my freedom. Half a dreary year spent bedridden changed that. I despised my past happiness because I had lost it. But the blessing came in the interim, because I discovered something more magical than nature.”

She stopped walking. Coming alongside her, the man looked down with eyeless placidity.

“Puzzles,” Elle said, offering a mischievous grin. She resumed her course, taking two right turns in quick succession. This maze was getting repetitive. “My mother told me riddles. I solved them. She bought me a book of logic puzzles. I finished it in three hours.”

A haze of sound emanated from the shadow in the trees, washing over Elle and the plastic man. Soft-spoken words, fleeting and insubstantial, brushed Elle’s ears before dancing away with the breeze. She glanced at the shadow, and it froze mid-dash between two elms.

“I’ll figure you out later,” she told the shadow. It stared after her as she rounded the next bend.

“READY SWOOPS TRUE,” the man said. “SRS-SRS-SRS.” His monotone, mechanical voice was exactly what Elle would expect from a robot in one of those old films.

“Ready swoops true,” she echoed. “An anagram, perhaps? It could be…dour, sweaty poser?” She sniffed at her blouse, then shot the man a narrow-eyed glare. “I’m not sweaty.”

The man said nothing. As they walked, Elle studied his stride. It had become firm, resolute, yet gentle as the summer-morning tides of Lake Wawasee.

“I recognize you,” she said. “You’re not real, but I recognize you.”

They carried on in silence, Elle breathing in the crisp aroma of the trees, the man looking blankly toward the next turn in the maze.

“Of course I’m not trying to find a way out,” Elle said. “I know you’re thinking it. But that was my secret all along. That’s how I built my career. I didn’t solve puzzles, I savored them.”

The shadow kept pace as Elle and her companion took another double turn, this one to the left.

“That’s how I figured out the Dorabella Cipher,” she explained, assuming the man’s keen interest in her story. “They said I couldn’t do it. They being everyone. I did it anyway, and it was delightful.”

If the plastic man had eyebrows, Elle was sure he would have raised them.

“Go on, be impressed,” she said. “I was thirty-three when I unraveled the first Beale Cipher. People stopped doubting me after that. I became the world’s premier enigmatologist – do you know what that is?”

“ROSE WORE RUSTY PADS.”

Elle waited for the string of nonsense letters to follow, but none came.

“So inconsistent,” she muttered. “So like a man.” Then, louder: “I do love that name. Rose. I would have named my daughter that, if I’d had one.”

The shadow spoke again, a staticky mess that sounded vaguely like Elle.

“But I didn’t,” she whispered. She stopped in the middle of the path, next to a patch of wildflowers sprouting from an oak stump. Who would leave a stump like that in an otherwise pristine maze?

Sensing her sadness, the plastic man knelt to pick one of the flowers. He held it in front of his mirror-like face. As Elle watched, the fragile petals twisted and grew together, forming a robust amber-colored bulb.

“A yellow rose,” she said, plucking the stem from the man’s hand. “Sweet. But unnecessary. Loneliness was my choice and my comfort. I always had my puzzles. Then I met…”

Elle looked up. Clouds rushed through the sky at blinding speeds, roiling past each other in random clumps. For just a moment, several clouds coalesced into a gorgeous, calligraphic letter. An I.

“Isaac.” The voice was not Elle’s, nor was it that of the plastic man. From the trees, the shadow peered around a trunk, dark fingers gripping the bark in desperation. Elle imagined those fingers entwined in her own, and for a blissful moment something like a memory blossomed behind her eyes.

The plastic man regarded them both with impassive stoicism. Feeling a sudden need for comfort, Elle gripped the man’s hand. It was cool, rigid to the touch, his fingers stale yet solid in her own.

“I was nearly sixty when I met him,” she said. “A friend of a friend. I had never loved before, and I’ll never love again, because he was the thing I’d been searching for my whole life.”

Anticipating the plastic man’s response, she glared at him, releasing his hand. “Not romance. Not companionship. I never made time for those things, and I don’t regret it.” Then she looked back to the shadow, with its head angled in something like curiosity. Perhaps longing. “Isaac thought I was funny. Of all things, funny.”

Elle took three hesitant steps down the grassy path. The shadow mirrored her, creeping through the trees against the flurrying backdrop that played above distant pastures. She realized that, if she wanted, she could walk through the gaps and into that verdant landscape at any time. Only the shadow could stop her.

“People called me brilliant,” she said. “Savant. Genius. But Isaac…he called me Ellie. Such a simple idea, adding one letter to change the meaning of the pattern. Simple and wonderful.”

The plastic man squeezed her hand, sending a shock of warmth up her arm. “SORRY,” he said. “ASSURED WOE. TP-TP-TP-TP.”

“Tip?” Elle asked. “Tup?” Then it hit her. “Tee-pee. Two letters. Extraneous details.”

She could have sworn that the plastic man nodded, though his head remained precisely, mechanically still.

“Rose wore rusty pads,” Elle said. “Worse, proud strays…but with an extra E. You’re speaking in patterns.” She held up the cardboard scrap, nearly forgotten in her other hand, that the white-coated man had given her. Her maze is L.

“A different pattern, then,” she mused. Then she gazed into where the plastic man’s eyes should have been, taking in the smooth surface of his face, an empty black screen. “One more. Please.”

In her grip, the man’s hand buzzed. “YOUR WORDS ARE STEPS,” he said.

A solitary tear snaked down Elle’s cheek. “And my memories are dust,” she whispered. “But my dreams are gardens filled with trees in bloom and all good things.”

No letters followed the man’s phrase, but none were needed. Elle had deciphered the pattern.

“An anagram,” she said. “Reset your password.”

She reached for the man’s face with both hands, and he bent down to oblige, his titanic form descending to her level. Her fingers danced over the glass, tapping her name and then the password that would unlock access to her phone. Those who knew her would expect something complex, a delicious cipher to satisfy her intellect. They would be wrong.

IsaaclovesEllie.

“The one puzzle I could never solve,” she murmured, wiping away her tear as the plastic man’s body buzzed once more.

Then her world burst into fantastical color, images rising like a million joyful suns around the perimeter of the maze. Though her memory was frail and fleeting, she recognized them all.

An intimate wedding ceremony at a small country church.

A red velvet cake decorated with a Fibonacci spiral.

A sunset over the French Riviera.

The wrinkled, smiling face of the man she adored.

Elle had thought he was gone. But as the plastic man faded, dissolving into dust that floated away with the breeze, she turned her gaze to the shadow in the trees. Emboldened by the colors in the sky, it stepped into the maze, its vague outline resolving into something – someone – more tangible.

“Isaac,” Elle said, taking his hands. He looked the same as ever, wearing that crinkly white dress shirt he’d owned for thirty years, lips curled in a smile under a thin gray mustache. Isaac didn’t speak, but his presence held enough expressions of love to last Elle the rest of her life.

The cardboard scrap lay discarded on the ground, but Elle had solved that too.

“Her maze is L,” she said. “Elle, my name. I am my own maze. But this, too, is an anagram.”

The doctor’s voice resounded in the distance.

“I should have known,” Elle whispered, staring into the face of her beloved. “Are you here with me now? Sitting by my bedside, perhaps, pleading with me to remember you?”

Tears welled in Isaac’s eyes.

“My love, I only remember you,” Elle said. “You are all I want to know in this moment.”

The trees parted behind Isaac, revealing the expansive, eternal hills beyond. The images in the sky vanished. The pictures from Elle's phone were safe in her memory once more.

“Thank you for loving me,” she whispered, leaning into Isaac’s shoulder. “It is the most wonderful thing I know.”

The sun dipped low, toward the horizon. Soothing reds and blazing oranges danced among the clouds. As dusk approached, the sun came to a ponderous stop. It waited for her.

“I think…” Elle swallowed. “I think it may be time for me to leave.”

She could not say whether the pathway through the trees was a beckoning invitation or a mandatory next step. But she knew for certain that her time in the maze was over.

Isaac hugged her, and his arms felt like home. Closing her eyes, Elle enjoyed the sensation of timeworn hands pressed against her back. And there she stayed until she could wait no longer.

“On to the next puzzle,” she said, pulling away. She would not cry, not now, not when Isaac needed her to be strong. “I’ll see you again one day.”

Attempting a smile, Isaac nodded.

Standing on her toes, Elle kissed her husband on the lips. “Goodbye, my love.” She stepped through the wall of hackberries and elms, crossing the threshold into that glorious sunset.