We couldn’t find the labyrinth, which was maddening because I’d been there before and was convinced we were in the right place. Much of what I’d remembered seemed to have been drained or extracted from the scene. There was no more outrageous, biblical sea foam that had once claimed so much of the beach. The dozens of painstakingly stacked cairns previous wanderers had constructed for those after them had been disassembled or washed away. Most disconcerting was the total disappearance of the large, stony labyrinth at cliff’s edge when I had walked its spiraled corridors myself only a few years before. I had understood the labyrinth to be a beloved local landmark—one I had promised my brother on this very hike—but it wasn’t there anymore or we were in the wrong place. It was while I was trying to understand this rip in my reality that we saw him.
Lurking above a narrow flight of sand-flooded stairs, a disheveled man was hunched and in a state of agitation while seemingly guarding passage to Land’s End, whose lofty name imbued everything with extra meaning and a dusting of myth. He kept attempting to speak to passersby but whole schools of hikers frantically veered away from this man with a sun worn face and highlights in his hair and a rumpled Star Wars t-shirt. With mazes on my mind and the way the hikers reacted to his presence, he appeared to me as a kind of modern Minotaur in the vast, unpredictable labyrinth of public space.
“It’s like two strangers can’t talk to each other anymore,” he said to us.
I often wonder about this, what we owe to the others around us. When we didn’t flee like the others, he added plaintively, “Can I ask you something?”
The permission to ask a question was a form of humility that I couldn’t help feeling moved by. I decided to offer us up, symbolically, to prove strangers could still talk to one another. And to prove also, I suspect, that I was more benevolent or empathetic or kind than those who’d scurried away. I’m someone who likes to talk to strangers. Those encounters feel like they represent something of human nature and the wide shadowy sea of those we haven’t met and may never meet, each encounter incrementally opening or closing us to the next one, even to “people” more generally and who they are or might be. I hope to be someone who stays open but social transactions with people we don’t know can be tricky, often fraught.
I nodded at the disheveled man and it started. He inquired esoterically if I knew a ranger—I didn’t—and he explained that in this staircase below us, a single step was missing. While that might not seem overly significant, he said, it was actually quite dangerous and people could get hurt. He was hoping a ranger could get someone’s attention to rebuild the missing step.
His line of inquiry felt a little like theater to my cynical ear, particularly when he said he set out to save a life every day, perhaps playing the role of steward to inspire a tip for a form of public guardianship mostly lost, but he didn’t ask for anything, at least not directly, and as he continued his soliloquy he never once took a breath so there was simply no way for us to extricate ourselves without being rude. He wanted to divulge things, rambling on with obscure purpose, meandering to the time he’d been thirsty and some teenagers wouldn’t give him two dollars for something to drink, letting him know that even if they saw him keeled over, right then and there, they wouldn’t call the police, they’d let him die. That didn’t seem like the opportune moment to vacate the conversation, and thus it went on, one-sidedly, with us offering the tribute of our attention and hopefully some dosage of human acknowledgement, until finally after several more minutes I had reached my limit, and I told him it was time to finish our hike. I thought that would do it but it didn’t.
“Can I show you?” he asked.
After a moment of confusion, I realized he was talking about the missing step and so we strayed further into his private labyrinth with me a step below him. I panicked when it occurred to me that the staircase really was steep and who knew what this man might do—he could have touched me with a fingertip and I would have lost my balance, broken bones, even died at the bottom of the staircase, it would have been so easy. But all he did was apologize for his smell now that we were closer and then we reached the lower end of the staircase and one step was in fact missing and it did seem dangerous.
For the first time I took him seriously and heard him differently when he said, “I’m just trying to do one small thing at a time.” Even more so later when I found out that the labyrinth I’d once walked through at Land’s End was gone because a vandal had removed the stones in the dead of night, in effect demolishing it, and actually earlier generations of the labyrinth had been destroyed too, small stone by small stone hurled into the sea until there was nothing left but a faint tracing, a cruel scraping away of a whole community’s mandala. That pointless desecration of a public good struck me as the opposite, in a sense, of this guardian’s quest to rebuild the missing step.
I stood above him, contemplating the staircase and samaritanship when he asked if I knew a safe way to get home, though he didn’t say where home was. I froze. On some level I knew he wasn’t really talking about geography, that he was talking about his situation or his stuckness and was asking for help out of the maze.
“We’re not from here,” I heard myself say. “We’re just visiting.”
Jason Schwartzman is the author of No One You Know: Strangers and the Stories We Tell (Outpost19, May 2021). His writing has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Narratively, Gothamist, Hobart, BULL, River Teeth, X-R-A-Y, and other places. You can find him on Twitter @jdschwartzman and more of his writing at jdschwartzman.com. Jason lives in Berkeley.
Featured Artwork:
Pollination
Andrea Damic (Sydney, Australia) is an amateur photographer and author of poetry and prose. She’s especially proud of having her visual art published on the covers of Door Is A Jar Literary Magazine and Rat’s Ass Review, as well as online Fusion Art and Light Space & Time Gallery exhibitions, and multiple other journals such as Rejection Letters, Arkana, Welter, The Piker Press, Spillwords etc. Her literary art appears in The Ekphrastic Review, Roi Fainéant Press, The Dribble Drabble Review, Five on the Fifth, Your Impossible Voice, 50 Give or Take Anthologies and elsewhere. You can find her on damicandrea.wordpress.com.