The 5-D Maze at Exit 251
Some road trips give the feel of moving fast and going far, of regularly glancing out the window and being in an entirely new place. Other road trips feel like sitting in one place for hours at a time. Joshua and Meghan were having the second kind of road trip. The environment outside their crammed sedan never changed all that much, one empty desert vista replacing another imperceptibly with only the occassional slight bend in the highway or roadsign to indicate they were making any progress at all.
Inside the car, the air was cool and conditioned, they had a bountiful supply of snacks and drinks, and they were listening to every album from Over Duress and discussing which songs they hoped would be played at the concert tonight.
“What's that billboard up ahead?” Meghan asked. “If it's someplace to pee, we should stop.”
“We're in the middle of nowhere, anywhere is a place to pee,” Joshua said.
“If you and I were the only two people left on earth, I would still pee in a toilet,” Meghan said.
“Knowing you, you'd probably close the door too,” Joshua said.
“I absolutely would. What's that sign say... 'The 5-D Maze at Exit 251'. What do you suppose a 5-D maze is?”
“I'm not even sure how a 3-D maze would work,” Joshua said.
“Sure you do. Like a corn maze or a haybale maze,” Meghan said.
“Those are still 2-D mazes though. You're not able to go up or down in the maze,” Joshua said.
“It's made of 3-D objects, it's a 3-D maze. A 2-D maze would just be on paper,” Meghan said.
“Not true. You could take a maze from a piece of paper, a 2-D maze, and build the exact same maze with walls or corn or whatever. The maze, in the abstract, is still 2-D even if it's rendered in three dimensional materials,” Joshua said.
“That's the dorkiest thing you've said today, and you're the guy who just told me 'Pineapple Waltz' is a better song than 'Parakeet,'” Meghan said.
“Hey, 'Peachfuzz' is an underrated classic that will one day be regarded as one of Over Duress's greatest works,” Joshua said.
“Either you're being completely serious right now or you're have a psychotic break while driving, and I don't know which frightens me more,” Meghan said.
“Look, there it is, coming up on the right. The 5-D Maze at... an empty stretch of road. Want to stop and pee?” Joshua said.
“Keep driving. A roadside maze is not the sort of place that will have clean toilets.”
Fifteen minutes down the road they found a gas station which Meghan decided was the sort of place that would have clean toilets, or else by that point the cleanliness didn't matter so much. While he waited for her Joshua asked the cashier where Exit 251 was.
“Exit 251? I'm not sure about that. Where you kids headed?”
“Oh, nowhere,” Joshua said. “I just didn't see it is all.”
Back on the highway, by the time the final notes of “Peachfuzz Waltz” were dying down, a familiar billboard came into view.
“We're going the wrong way,” Meghan said.
“No way.”
“We are, look at the sign,” Meghan said.
“It must have been the sign that says we missed the maze and should turn around,” Joshua said.
“It wasn't, I swear,” Meghan said.
Joshua slowed the car as the maze appeared on the right. It was a large, square structure with high wooden walls and in each corner a tower with a plastic cone-shaped roof, one each in red, blue, green, and yellow.
“What are you doing?” Meghan asked.
“It's a sign,” Joshua said.
“No, we just passed the sign,” Meghan said.
“I mean it's a sign we should stop,” Joshua said.
“Absolutely not. We have to get to the concert,” Meghan said.
“We have plenty of time to get to the concert,” Joshua said. “We're on a road trip, it's a time to be spontaneous and fun.”
“Cause nothing say's 'I'm spontaneous and fun' like announcing that you are spontaneous and fun. Come on, I don't want to miss the concert because we got lost in a maze.”
“I just want to check it out. Real quick, I promise,” Joshua said.
They pulled off the highway and parked in the sand in front of the maze. In the center of the front wall of the maze was an opening, and just in front of that was a ticket booth. Beside the maze was a used car lot with a big sign saying “Used Cars at Exit 251”. There were no other buildings to be seen in any direction. Joshua went up to the ticket booth and saw that there was nobody there.
“Come on, Joshua, nobody's here,” Meghan said.
“You don't know that,” Joshua said.
“There's no cars here,” Meghan said.
“Maybe they're in the used car lot, with all the other cars. So they don't get lonely,” Joshua said.
“Come on, I miss the air conditioning already, it's deadly out here,” Meghan said.
“Let's just peek our heads in. If somebody wants money we can pay for tickets on our way out,” Joshua said.
“Hey, somebody's coming over from the car lot,” Meghan said.
A man dressed in a shirt and tie had left the car lot office and was headed in their direction. He looked like he missed his air conditioning more than Meghan. It was an awkward distance to walk, too far to call out a greeting, and so they had to stand there waiting, watching him walk towards them.
“This is awkward now. Let's just go,” Meghan said.
“We can't leave, we already made him leave his office,” Joshua said.
The man in the tie didn't say anything to them until he stepped into the ticket booth. His bald head was glistening with sweat in the sunlight.
“Welcome to the 5-D Maze at Exit 251. How many tickets today?”
“Um. Two. There's two of us,” Joshua said.
“Two tickets to the maze. Twenty dollars,” the man said.
“Do people ever get lost in there?” Meghan asked.
“It's a maze,” the man said. He pocketed Joshua's twenty and handed over two tickets.
“Right, it's just we have to get to this concert... you know what, never mind, you don't care,” Meghan said.
“Yeah,” the salesman said.
“Hey, where exactly is Exit 251?” Joshua asked.
“It's just a thing,” the man said.
“Sure. And is there, like, something to find in the maze or something like that?” Joshua asked.
“It's just a maze,” the salesman said.
“Sure,” Joshua said.
“Okay?” the salesman asked.
“Okay.” And the salesman walked back in the direction of the car lot office. Joshua and Meghan stepped into the maze. Immediately inside they had the option of turning left or right. On the wall directly in front of them was a sign reading “Fun Fact #6: Did you know? The word 'Maize' means corn. So a cornmaze is also a maize maze!”
“Amazing,” said Joshua, like every man who entered the maze.
“Fun fact? More like thrilling fact,” Meghan said.
“What do you think, left or right?” Joshua asked.
“Up to you babe, this is your adventure.”
They wandered deeper into the maze, Joshua trying to navigate them towards the center.
“So is there another exit?” Meghan asked. “Or do we just wander around for a bit and then leave the way we came in?”
“I wish the guy had given us more information,” Joshua said.
“I know. He did not give two shits. But here's the thing, if there is nothing to do here but wander around and read the Fun Facts, then have we done the maze yet? Should we just head back to the exit?” Meghan said.
“Well I'm working on a theory,” Joshua said.
“Oh no.”
“So you know you can go left or right at the entrance? I think if you follow it through one way you'll come back the other way, like it's just a big convoluted loop. Think about it, if you were designing a maze, you wouldn't make it so that if people took the wrong turn right at the start they'd have to backtrack past the entrance, would you? Half the people would just leave.”
“Fine, I just don't want to miss the openers,” Meghan said.
The deeper they went into the maze, the less Meghan wanted to be there. Their 'fun and spontaneous' diversion had become a significant time commitment. As irritated as she was, Meghan bit her tongue and refused to hector Joshua until they came to Fun Fact #23 “Did you know? According to Greek legend, Jason, of Argonaut fame, used a ball of string to find his way through the maze at Minos to fight the minotaur!”
“We're in double digit fun facts now,” Meghan said. “I don't think we're getting any closer to the end, can we just leave now?”
“What do you think we're trying to do? I've been trying to find the way back for an hour,” Joshua said.
“You don't know how to get back?” Meghan said.
“No. Look, for a while we were trying to get to the center of the maze, and that was easy. But now we're here, every time we try to leave the center it sort of seems like all paths lead back to the center,” Joshua said.
“How can you tell if we're in the center?” Meghan asked.
“Look up. You can see the four towers at the four corners of the maze,” Joshua said.
“That's funny. I didn't think we could see those from inside before,” Meghan said.
“Probably depends on the angle. We might have been too close before. But right now, you can see they're all about the same distance away, that's how we know we're in the center. But it seems like any way we go we just end up back in the center,” Joshua said.
“So we're lost? We really are lost in a maze?” Meghan asked.
“Yeah. I'm sorry, Meghan.”
“Do you have your phone?”
“In the car. But who would we even call?” Joshua said.
“I swear to God, if I have to tell everyone we missed the concert because you got us trapped in a literal tourist trap, I will die of embarassment,” Meghan said.
“Me too,” Joshua said.
“No, I will die of embarassment, and you will die of being murdered and no one will ever find your body because I'm going to leave it in this stupid maze.”
“I'm sorry. I'm really sorry.”
They kept going. They walked until their feet hurt, until they were thirsty, and hungry. They walked until they stopped caring that they were missing the concert because all they wanted to do was go home. And then at another intersection that looked like a thousand other turns they had seen that day, Joshua stopped.
“Meghan, look. The Fun Fact.”
“I do not care about the Fun Facts,” Meghan said.
“Just look at it,” Joshua said.
It was the same colorful sign with the same jolly font as all the others. “Fun Fact #433: Did you know? It takes weeks to die of starvation, but only days to die of dehydration!”
“What the fuck? What the fuck is that?” Meghan said.
“Something's not right. With this maze,” Joshua said.
“You got that right,” Meghan said.
“No, I mean, none of this is possible. Think about it. How big is this maze actually? We saw the whole thing from the outside, it's a big square that's maybe, what, forty or fifty yards a side? If that?”
“Yeah.”
“So a typical walking pace is three or four miles an hour, right? How many hours have we been in here? How many miles have we gone in this little space?” Joshua said.
“We've been walking in circles,” Meghan said.
“We haven't. Have you been paying attention to the Fun Facts?”
“Oh God, who gives a shit about the Fun Facts?”
“I do. Because they're one of the few markers we have to help us navigate. Do you know how many times we've seen the same one?” Joshua said.
“I don't know,” Meghan said.
“Not once. Not a single time have I seen the same number repeated or the same fact,” Joshua said.
“That's impossible. Maybe somebody's changing the signs, maybe the maze is changing, or...”
“Let's look. These signs are screwed into the wood. There'd be no way to change the signs out without leaving marks, you'd be tearing up the screw hole if you kept scewing and unscrewing,” Joshua said.
“Then what is it? What is happening to us?” Meghan asked.
“I think it's something that can't really be explained. And there's something else too. I've been trying, I think for hours now, to get us out of the center of the maze, right? And I can't do that. No matter where we go, we're always in the center of the maze. We're always equidistant from the four towers, look.”
Meghan looked up at the towers and let out a small cry.
“What is it? What's wrong?” Joshua asked.
“The towers, look at them, they're so high,” Meghan said.
“What do you mean?' Joshua asked.
“The last time I looked at them I could barely see them over the walls of the maze. Now look, they're so much higher,” Meghan said.
“You're right. I guess I didn't even notice because I've been watching them all day,” Joshua said.
“Joshua, look. Look at the sun,” Meghan said.
“You're right. It looks...”
“Bigger. Joshua, why does the sun look bigger?”
The two of them looked into each other's eyes, as if to communicate the things they were too ashamed or afraid to speak out loud. They each saw in the other a confirmation that the fears which had been growing in each of them, fears too strange to name and too absurd to contemplate, were shared fears. They had each of them spent hours resisting the thought that they had gotten lost in the maze, too embarassed to admit it to themselves or to each other, and then each of them had spent hours unwilling to let go of the illusion that that was all that had happened, that nothing worse or more bizarre than being lost in a maze was going on. And as long as the other was pretending that nothing too out of the ordinary was happening, then each of them could go on pretending to themselves. But now they saw that each of them knew, and neither of them could continue to pretend.
“We're going to be all right,” Joshua said. “We're going to make it out of here.”
“How?”
“We'll find a way. We just have to keep our heads,” Joseph said. He stuck a hand up in the sky and closed one eye to squint at it.
“What are you doing?” Meghan asked.
“The sun is fully blocked by these three fingers,” Joseph said.
“So?”
“So, if the sun really is bigger than usual, or if there's some sort of optical illusion that makes it seem that way, we'll want to be able to keep an eye on that. We need to measure it.”
So they kept walking, walking on sore feet and hungry bellies
“Fun Fact #1,489: Did you know? The event horizon of a black hole is a theoretical surface beyond which even light cannot escape from a black hole!”
“How long do you think we've been in here?” Joshua asked.
“Long enough that I don't even care about the concert – and I've never not cared about an Over Duress concert – I just want to get out of here and go home,” Meghan said.
“But how long has it been? Are you starving? I feel like I haven't eaten in a day,” Joshua said.
“My feet are killing me,” Meghan said.
“Mine too. Better or worse than when we hiked Mt. Pallas?”
“Worse,” Meghan said. “Much worse.”
“And that was all day uphill,” Joshua said.
“We were doing that for fun, though. This just sucks,” Meghan said.
“This more than just sucks. Something unnatural is happening,” Joshua said.
“Fun Fact #28,707: Did you know? M.C. Escher was an artist whose works played with perspective and distortion!”
At every Fun Fact, Joshua stopped to check on the size of the sun and the moon. They now appeared to be larger than his hand splayed with his arm outstretched. The towers in the four corners of the maze were so high they almost met in the middle of the sky. Even the outermost walls of the maze could be seen, running in a long curve between the towers, dipping in the middle, then rising up at either end to meet the towers.
“Fun Fact #89,664: Did you know? String theorists believe that the universe is made up of eleven dimensions, but some of them are very, very small and curled up inside the main four!”
An 'X' had been carved into the wall above the fun fact. It was done crudely, perhaps with a pocketknife.
“Do you know what this means?” Meghan said. “There's somebody else in this maze. Someone else is in here with us. Hello? Hellooo?” She screamed it out as loudly as she could. They waited in vain for an answer.
“Even if they're miles away by now, there was someone here,” Joshua said. “And maybe they found something, maybe they figured it out.”
“Figured what out?” Meghan asked.
“A maze is a puzzle, it's meant to be solved. There has to be a way out of here, we just have to figure it out. Come on,” Joshua said.
His energy returned and he began to walk faster. This was something to go on, a clue of sorts, or at least some kind of information that wasn't a Fun Fact. At each turning from that point they found an X marking the way that the markmaker had gone.
“I just wish whoever it was had left arrows instead of exes. That way we would know which direction they had gone,” Joshua said.
“Which way would we go? The same way or the opposite way?” Meghan asked.
“That's a good question.”
They followed the marks to Fun Fact #128,945, then Fun Fact #439,261. “Did you know? Albert Einstein proved that space and time are actually something called spacetime; he also proved spacetime can bend!”
Above the Fun Fact were words carved into the wooden wall. “NUMBERS GO UP”.
“Yes, numbers go up. That's how numbers work,” Meghan said.
“Yeah. He's right though. The numbers keep going up,” Joshua said. “And not linearly, either.We were in single digits, then tens, hundreds, thousands, and on up. I don't think we've seen a single sign that hasn't fit that pattern, and this whole time we've just been going deeper into the maze. So that means in order to find our way out of the maze we just need to find smaller numbers. Meghan, this is it, this is how we get out of the maze.”
“So we need to be following the marks the other way.”
“Exactly. Follow me.”
He took off, full of energy again, so excited by his discovery that for a time he was able to ignore hunger and exhaustion.
“Joshua, wait a minute.”
“Don't you see? It's a strategy. We just need to find a way to make our own marks. We pick a Fun Fact, and systematically try out every possible path outwards from that point. If we find a higher number, we go back to our starting point and try again until we find a lower numbered Fun Fact. Then we start again from there.”
“Wait.”
“It's a system, a strategy. Better than that, it's an algorithm, and if we apply it rigorously we'll be able to always find a lower numbered sign and --”
“Godammit, Joshua, wait.”
He turned around and saw that she was standing still at a T-intersection
“What's the matter?” he asked.
“Wait here a minute. I'll be right back,” she said.
“What do you mean? Don't go anywhere without me, you could get lost,” he said.
“I'll just be right around the corner. For just a minute,” she said.
“Are you taking a dump?”
“Yes. Just wait for me, please,” she said.
He began hurrying towards her.
“Just go right here. This is no time to be shy, there's nothing to be ashamed of,” he said.
“There is. Because shitting on the ground in a maze like an animal is something I would never, ever do unless I was scared and freaked out and didn't think we could ever get out of here alive. I just can't hold it anymore. I can't keep pretending to myself that we're just going to find the exit.”
She stepped around the corner. Joshua ran up to the corner and stopped.
“Meghan?”
“I'm right here, just give me some privacy, for God's sake.”
So he stood there, just around the corner, waiting, for what felt like five minutes.
“You doing okay?” he asked.
“I'm fine. Just give me a minute, okay?”
His heart was beating fast. Something about not being able to see her in this maze, in this place that didn't seem to be any real place, was terrifying. But at least he could hear her voice. She was right around the corner, right there, he could reach around and touch her if he needed.
He counted to sixty, then poked his head around the corner and saw an empty stretch of maze, just like every other corridor they'd walked down in the countless and uncountable hours they'd been in that maze.
“Babe where'd you go?”
“I'm right here, just give me a minute.” Her voice sounded close by. He hurried down the corridor until he came to an intersection, and he looked down both ways. There was nothing to be seen.
“Babe?” he called out. His voice was shaky.
“Joshua, where did you go? I thought you were waiting for me.” Her voice sounded far away.
“Stay where you are, I'm going to come find you,” he called out.
“Why did you leave me?”
He turned around and headed back to the corner, the corner he'd seen her step around, the T-intersection where she'd decided she couldn't hold it any longer. He looked both ways, but it didn't look familiar anymore.
“Where did you go?” he called out.
“I didn't go anywhere,” she shouted. She sounded far away. She sounded like she was about to cry.
“You stay right where you're at,” he called. “I'm going to follow your voice okay? Marco.”
He followed the sound of her “Polo” down one branch of the T-intersection. But the further he went, the further away she sounded, until he decided that he must be going the wrong way. He turned around and began running and Marco-Poloing in the other direction. Her voice growing ever more distant with every repetition of the call.
And he stopped at a Fun Fact. There shouldn't be one here. They'd just come down that way and hadn't seen it. He couldn't have gotten that turned around. There was no way.
“Meghan, can you hear me?” he called out.
“What did you say?”
“I said 'can you hear me?'”
“You're so far away? Baby, where did you go?”
“Meghan listen. We're diverging. It doesn't matter which way we go, we can only get further apart.”
“That doesn't make any sense,” she shouted.
“None of this does.”
There was quiet then. He thought that if he strained he could hear the sound of sobbing, but it was so distant that he couldn't tell if that was real or imagination.
He slumped down in the shade of the wall. The sun had, after many, many hours, sunk down enough that he was now in the shade. Looking up, the four towers in the corners of the maze, with their colorful pointed roofs. The points seemed stretched and elongated, to the point that they were almost touching in the middle of the sky. He studied those tower roofs, until he couldn't quite tell if he was seeing them from below or from the side or from above.
“We should get some rest,” he called out. “Try to sleep.”
He was afraid to sleep. He didn't want Meghan to wake up in the night and call out to him and not hear him answer. It was bad enough that he couldn't hold her, he didn't want her to be so alone that she couldn't hear his voice. But they needed to sleep. They'd been walking for an uncountable amount of time that felt like more than a day. If they slept for twelve hours, he wondered if it would be night when they awoke. He wondered how many sleeps it would be until dawn.
“Are we going to die here?” Meghan called out.
Joshua looked up at the Fun Fact on the wall before him. He wanted to move away from it, but he couldn't stand to move a single step further from Meghan.
“Fun Fact # 1,328,460: Did you know? In a dry enough environment, natural mummification can preserve bodies for thousands of years!”
“Yes. Yes, my love. We're going to die here.”
Above the Fun Fact were the words, carved with a knife, THE NUMBERS ALWAYS GO UP.
He wanted to say something more to Meghan but his throat was dry, and he didn't know what to say. So he fell silent. And then he heard her voice, so distant that he wouldn't have been able to make out the words if they hadn't been from his favorite song.
“Whenever we go out you always make me smile
Drinking your juices and eating your flesh”
“Is that Pinapple Waltz?” Joshua called out.
“You hate that song,” he called out, and she sang a little louder.