Years after her son had grown and met with success, she still fled implacably through the halls of her complex. Never halting, she raced down path after path, all perfectly straight and cleared of contents long ago. Her course was demarcated by smooth glossy walls and marvelously round corners, and her aim was as dark as the floor was black. She meant to leave her husband. She meant to find something new.

But nothing was ever new in her world. The rules that constrained her existence were too narrow, the number of objects too few. By the end of her first week alive she had seen everything there was to see under the sun. Except that there was no sun.

She was desperate.

There was no other husband for her. Her husband and her son were the only ones of her kind in all the world. There was no one else she could find no matter how far she traveled. No one to make him jealous if that were her desire. No one to find her and give her a better life. There was no one anywhere but him. And still she fled, endlessly.

Her husband had been the first. She had been made for him, in his likeness. She was his Eve. She could not remember a time before him, and she had never had any name but his. She was more than his Eve, she was his twin, her habits exactly like his, her physical characteristics and abilities nearly identical. She feared him and loathed him fiercely and wondered how she could do so while not hating herself. In fact she wasn’t sure she did not, but she refused to stop for long enough to decide. The danger was that she would let herself be swayed into turning back. That would not happen: she would rather run forever.

The walls turned from coral orange to ocean blue. Later, they were bold crimson, dark blue, and then salmon pink. None of this was new. All these changes had happened before. They had happened so many times and with such regularity that they could no longer be considered changes. She barely noted the change of color as she sped past.

Nothing new under the sun. Nothing to snag her or get in her way. Likewise, nothing to run for. She knew that if there was nothing to run for, there would be nothing to stop her will from weakening. Eventually she would run out of hatred. Eventually she would forget the pain that drove her forward. Eventually she would turn back and undergo it all again--and again and again--and nothing would be new ever again, not even her feelings or her flight.

If there was nothing for her, then she was doomed.

It was pain of a different and much more crucial sort. Nothing could escape this pain. It was not to be driven away by action; it was the fear that no action would ever take root. It was the specter of endless eternity always repeating itself, and the possibility that it was to contain nothing but suffering.

She turned toward the only other place she knew, though it was full of pain, and that was the home of her son. She had not thought to go there for many years, for the stage of her son’s success had also provided the seed from which her own sorrows had taken root. It was a place of dangers, the only dangers she knew of aside from that of turning back, but it also had been the scene of her first great clash with her husband. But her feud with her husband was not so young as that; it was the kind of achingly deep rift that amassed quietly through the course of a marriage, a rift whose greatest dimension was time. Her grievances against her husband were not vivid or violent, but subtle, and this was the worst of it, because she knew that without care her anger might be forgotten. Her husband had never wounded her or raped her, never confined her against her will or destroyed her possessions--but he had treated her, from the first to the last, as a possession of his own, as if she were a treasure made for his fulfillment alone, as if the fact that she mirrored him in body meant that her soul was his. He never paid any acknowledgment to any interest she expressed. He showed no patience for any thought of hers that did not express his own. He ignored her entirely when it suited him, and indeed she would have ignored him in turn but for those moments when he took a penetrating interest in her, and it was in these moments that she felt the impression, many times dulled, of their bygone love as if it were a spotlight, and she a prisoner. He forced her in these moments to accompany him on whatever pursuit was his latest fancy, whether it was tending to his collection of the gems of their world, teaching their son to rove and explore, or going to frivolous lengths to taunt the specters that had forever haunted their family. It had been in the course of this last activity that she had first opposed him, for these specters were the very dangers of her son’s homeland, and she had spent years fleeing from them herself, and her gut still trembled with great fear at the thought of going back where they lurked, and yet he had bidden her to--merely for the entertainment of it. It had been the first time that she had not done as he ordered her, and it was the first time that she fully realized how much his will degraded her, and how much a mere thing of his she was, and that possibly his professed love for her did not amount to love for him in return. It was on the stage of their son’s success that she had begun to hate her husband. So it was there that she turned when she fled from him, despite the fears and painful memories--for she did not want to forget the foundation of her hatred.

Her son lived in a home much like the one she used to have. Its rooms were larger but its walls were simpler and more childlike, and the bounty found within was richer than that which she had known. Her son’s home provided him with drums, kites, toy locomotives, balloons--the things of his most primeval dreams, and these kept him young. But it also was where the ghosts lived, if one could say they lived at all, for with the passage of fame from her husband to herself, and from herself to her son, the ghosts each time followed closely. She lived, when she had the strength of heart to feel her own emotions, in fear that her child would die, and that having died once he would die again, and again, and that he would vanish at last entirely; and as if the loss of her son would not be terrible enough, she feared that afterward the responsibility of evading the ghosts’ chill touch would fall once more upon herself. But at most moments this train of thought was out of her mind, for her husband had no such fears and rarely let his wife harbor any complete thought that he did not himself share. He was not present when his wife entered the complex; nor was his inebriating influence present in her mind, and so she experienced all of these fears in full as she returned to the home of her son.

She did not see the ghosts directly, nor did she detect them with any targeted sense. But she could feel their general presence like a stench of despair from the past. They had been the chief focus and dread of her life for many years and the sensation of their proximity was not easily forgotten. She didn’t know if she would still have the reflexes to avoid them should they appear.

Her son would be near them, though. She knew they dogged him like the single-minded spirits they were, and he would not have had the opportunity to put much distance between them and himself. Even more bafflingly, he was young and seemed to love the fact of their presence, if only because he had confidence in his own speed and enjoyed the challenge of dodging their pursuit. So she followed the corridors where the stench lay thickest and longed to have a sight of her son before the horror of his homestead overwhelmed her heart.

She had just risen from one level to the next when she saw the empty spaces that were left where he had recently passed, and his rapidly changing location was made clear to her through her finer senses, and so was that of the ghosts. Here in this colorful bed of gems, where life was inconceivably still being lived in the metaphorical spotlight, the aroma of the ghosts was rich and putrid in its blend of clashing personalities. There were four: the bold and unwavering one whose presence and speed were strongest, as was his danger; the tricky one who seemed always a step or two ahead, ready to corner his prey from around the next bend; the strange one who seemed out of place with time and flanked only the shadow of his quarry; and the chaotic one with the brass to obliviously tread her own course. She had remembered the feel of the ghosts collectively; and these particular impressions she remembered too, but the memories were tattered and these sensations struck her freshly, filling in the holes. Already her nerves were heightened and she began to experience emotional regression.

The patterns of cleared halls came to make more sense as she explored further. She knew no logic to her conclusion, but the more she wandered through his playground the better she recalled the ways of flight and pursuit, and the better she knew which way her child had gone. She trailed him like one of the creatures they spurned, only more wisely, and she made good ground. At last she managed to turn a corner before him, and she found him there.

"Mom," he said, his high voice catching. It took all his will not to spin around right there, as he was accustomed to doing upon the sight of something animate.

"Junior," she breathed. She came alongside him and they moved as one for the space of several curves. They both knew with the same shrewdness where the ghosts were; they knew that there would be times for conversation and times for flight, and that this was a time for flight. Verily, the tricky one came into sight at the head of the corridor, and if they had not both foreseen his approach and made for a side passage, they might not have escaped. The mother was shocked by how little the ghost called Pinky had changed over the years. She had not internalized the fact that ghosts do not age.

"What are you doing here?" asked her son once they had made some distance and had time to breathe.

"I’m on the run from your father," she confessed. "I had to see you."

"Aw, Mom," was his only reply. He was keeping down his emotions just as she was, but only to save energy and not be caught. They turned a corner and took to a long empty corridor.

"What’s wrong with Dad? Why would he chase you?"

"He’s not. That’s not what matters. What matters is that I have to stay away. No matter what!"

"What do you mean?" repeated her increasingly shaken son. "Why did you come here?"

"I couldn’t stay with him any longer," she moaned. "And I--I don’t know why I came to you, Junior. You’re doing so well, and I’m so proud of you, but I can’t explain it to you. It’s too hard to explain, and you’re so young--"

"Well thanks a lot!" he cried. His agenda left him little time for frustrating conversations. He turned away at the next opportunity, though it would have been safe to stay his course. His mother followed him.

"I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to come here and distract you! Please, let me stay with you! I’ve been so lonely--that’s why I came. Junior!"

"I can’t believe it," said the youngster. He kept to his course of evasion, staying in the unoccupied paths, where progress was quicker. Once he glanced back at his mother. "Why don’t you go back to Dad? What has he done that’s so bad? You can’t stay with me! You’ll slow me down!" It was fear and not independence that stirred his heart. He knew that the longer he took to collect his gems, the more of them would be corrupted by stray toys left unharvested. The more corrupted gems there were, the more dangerous his task would become, for the corrupted ones took much longer to pick up. And he did not want to put his mother at risk.

"Please," she pled. "I need you! I miss you. I love you. Don’t leave me alone."

"I don’t know--I wish I could keep you company, Mom--but I’m working!" called the confused son. I don’t see how you can keep up." By this time his voice was torn with what would have been tears of frustration had he time to shed them.

"Wait," she called after him feebly, knowing even so that he was right. Yet he came back to her reluctantly and looked at her face as they fled. She was changed strangely--he could see it. Instead of struggling for words that were beyond his ken, he gave her a desperate kiss, still on the move. Then, pained, he zoomed away.

She turned along another path and wondered whether she should have followed him, if there was anything she could have done. Her escape from the oncoming red ghost was narrow and she barely made it to safer quarters unharmed. It was hard for her to leave the labyrinth. Her first few moments after leaving the home of her son were among the most conflicted she had ever suffered.

It was not long afterward that she stopped running.

The halls were empty. She was loitering in the purged dark corridors beneath the scene of action where her son performed his heroic deeds. He had dodged through these very corridors not long ago; it would not be long before he had reached a place far above them. This level was nothing but a languid basement emptied of value, destined to fall farther and farther out of notice until it would be identified, if at all, only by a large number and a vague effort of imagination. She remained there only because she did not choose to be anywhere else. She had stopped running not because she no longer feared that her husband would pursue her, but because she knew of no other place to run.

In darkness and amid obscure green walls Ms. Pac-Man lay.

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