For the first time, I did not greet the youths and guide them to the center, because it was not something Asterion would have done. We were waiting in the middle of the labyrinth. Our breathing was steady. Our bodies felt light as air. We had thoughts of Ariadne and our childhood, hiding in the servants’ rooms and running through the long halls, up and down the stairs. In our mind’s eye, we saw rich fields of golden wheat and seas of green grass. It seemed to be the height of summer, when you could almost hear all the living things growing and ripening in the good warmth of the sun. In the azure sea, each wavelet rose like the back of a horse at an easy gallop and subsided in perfect sympathy with its brothers.

After a time, footsteps approached.

I heard the whistling of a tune that became bolder as it came closer—it was music, it echoed and came closer.

The boys entered the chamber. The passageway behind them remained in shadow. Our eyes took them in and Asterion was the first to notice something queer.

One youth, who was whistling the song, taller and more heavily built than the others, strode forward. We saw his handsome, human face. His dark eyes steady.

How unusual, thought I, wrinkling my brow. How unusual, thought Asterion, wrinkling his brow.

Ariadne would laugh, we thought, because she loves surprises.

We’ve dreamt of that tune, we thought, feeling something inside us catch ablaze.

The beautiful youth advanced. A roaring white noise entered our bull-ears.

The thought, my name means star, came to us.

Time rippled toward us, bearing down.

We saw our old tapestry unfurl before us.

The whistling stopped, and there was a brief after-sound.

The last thing we saw before the world disappeared was the blinding dazzle of a blade and a small ball of fine thread, its delicate tail leading away from us.

Exactly Like You

Exactly Like You

The words he uttered were no longer understandable, apparently, although they seemed clear enough to him.

—Franz Kafka, Die Verwandlung / The Metamorphosis

You’ve had yourself stolen, haven’t you?

There is someone who looks exactly like you, isn’t there?

—Kim So-un, “The Disowned Student,” The Story Bag: A Collection of Korean Folktales

It is now known that a fetus dreams.

Infants make memories, memories not accessible to the older mind, but perhaps to other systems of the body, older systems than our frontal lobe and other parts of our brain that developed later in our evolution.

Dreams occur during REM sleep, which, according to Dr. Charles P. Pollak, director of the Center for Sleep Medicine at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell hospital, is “an evolutionarily old type of sleep that occurs at all life stages, including infancy, and even before infancy, in fetal life.”3