by Joonas Huhta
“Menstrual blood...” Konrad said after her, stabbed by the bizarre yet familiar words.
“Menstruation is what all men have always shied away from confronting,” Ruut said.
“Mainly because in religious perspective a menstruating woman is an impure creature,” Konrad added. “Female blood is an age-old taboo. For example, in Islam, a woman on a period still can’t touch the Koran.” Konrad scrambled up, went to the bookshelf and pulled a thin book. “Ovulation was a mystery to science till the verge of Second World War because in human females the ovulation is hidden. Women were thought to be able to conceive at any point of their cycle.” Konrad returned to the sofa with the little book. “It’s good that women don’t experience animal heat, you know why?”
“I’m all ears.”
“The key word is choice. Although we cherry-pick, the freedom of choice omits the compulsion, which keeps men close and the tray of selection wide. That one difference to animals makes us somewhat capable of complex relationships, being friends, and having work colleagues and companions. Women are the privileged gender: they can have sex whenever they want, men only when they can.”
“You think it’s easy to be a woman?”
“I’m aware of women’s historical burden, down to the last sad detail,” Konrad clarified. “But men do most of the physical hard work—and the greater the hazards of a job, the surer the men do it. You don’t see women up building skyscrapers or down in coal mines. Death professions for males, safe jobs for women.”
“What? It’s an art being a woman these days,” Ruut started her frosty response.
“‘All art is quite useless,’ said Oscar Wilde.” Konrad stroked his chin. “Meaning art creates mood; it doesn’t cause action. Women conform to the stereotyped roles too easily. Care is in their instinct, but it’s invisible in global affairs. Women shouldn’t maintain their silence at times of crisis.”
Ruut opened her mouth, but turned away, looking into the distance, finding a reference point. Then she turned to The Wicked Bible on the table. “Either you push a woman upwards or downwards, the aim is the same: dehumanization. How would you live your life when you would be shouldering thousands of years of oppression and prejudice? There’s much more structural violence against women than you can or want to see, and you just need to look up to see the proof: all the highest government, corporate and clergy positions of power are men’s.”
Konrad rubbed his temple. Her gray eyes enraptured; they blinked excessively while listening and opened wide while talking, making his eyes involuntarily water on her behalf. He was confusingly happy he had discovered a new friend to argue with. “Good points.”
“Good points, my ass. What difference does it make if you don’t smell the shit you’re shoveling?” Ruut flashed a wry smile. “What did you want to show me?”
“My favorite book: Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist.”
“Fascinating,” Ruut said. “An overrated piece of fiction is all we need. Turning lead into gold, never succeeding in it.”
“There are stories we should listen and learn from, in the past.”
“From who?”
“Isaac Newton of course.”
Ruut’s brow furrowed. “That boringly unsurprising book has nothing to do with Isaac Newton.”
“The Alchemist, the most prominent figure of the story, is as mysterious a character and as incredibly powerful a practitioner of alchemy as Newton was. They both speak through riddles and cherish personal experience over direct instructions as the most efficient way of learning. The metaphors inside the labyrinth are beyond the shadow of doubt Newton’s words.”
Ruut stuck out her tongue, concentrating. “Wasn’t alchemy considered to be black magic? Why would Newton risk his reputation for such nonsense? If someone actually would have discovered the fabled philosopher’s stone, it would have ruined the gold standard.”
Konrad nodded. “Which is why alchemy was illegalized.”
Ruut crossed her hands. “Fill me in with the metaphors. You can’t wait for talking about your morbid curiosities.”
“The alchemists,” Konrad began, “had no access to the periodic chart. They knew only how basic elements combined and created their terminology, often projecting either human or animal characteristics onto their cocktails. The realm of alchemy is filled with hidden and double meanings. It combines philosophy and poetry. The coded language composed of old metaphors and the best way to look at the metaphors is in the light of riddles.” Konrad guided Ruut’s stare on the first lines of the riddle. “The ‘menstrual blood’ and ‘sordid whore’ are a code riddle. The first means a metallic form of antimony, which is extracted from the latter, the antimony’s ore.”
“Antimony, huh?” Ruut bit her lip. “I know it from my work with bullets. It’s used to harden lead—which is fairly soft—to any level of hardness a shooter wants. But why did antimony interest Newton?”
“In the alchemical school of thought, antimony was the essence of femininity. Think of the standard gender symbols, Mars for a man, Venus for a woman. The arrow pointing upright in man’s symbol is an iron-tipped spear, a manly weapon to wield, and the woman’s symbol has a bronze mirror.”
“Go on.”
“The presence of alchemy is in the symbols,” Konrad stressed. “One of the alchemical symbols for antimony still stands for female today. Speaking of which, the rainbow of the previous riddle included an interesting detail. Some ancient people have believed that if you passed beneath a rainbow and you were a man, you would immediately become a woman. And if you were a woman, you would instantly become a man.”
Ruut took the Bible on her lap. She returned to the page of the commandments. “A sin in two races. Why does he refer to gender so much?”
“You would have to be Newton to answer that question. His mind was like a Rubik’s cube. He seemed to know everything and succeed in everything, but on his deathbed, he confessed he had never once known a woman. He never married or had sex. Died a virgin. The ‘sin in two races’ might have something to do with the fact that especially as a teenager, Newton saw himself a big-time sinner. He kept listing the sins he had committed.”
“Does the labyrinth fit Newton?” Ruut asked.
“I suppose. Symbolic meanings were his specialty. Labyrinths tend to have one possible path, the rest leading into a dead end or back to the starting point. Repeatedly losing the track of direction is a strong comparison to human life and the difficulty of transforming ourselves. We keep trying and reaching, but return into square one. In the Middle Ages, the labyrinths symbolized a path to God, and the journey to salvation was like a pilgrimage.”
“Just a wild card,” Ruut said, “but what if Sir Isaac Newton was a woman?”
Konrad chuckled. “That’s a stretch.”
“You said Newton succeeded in everything. If he were a woman, then against our intuition that every great philosopher or scientist or spiritual teacher is a man, he would have known the hell of womanhood. That would leave only one question open, whether he succeeded discovering the philosopher’s stone.”
“Hold your horses. There is no way Newton was a—”
Ruut took a phone to her hand. “Google... Picture search... Isaac Newton...”
“What are you doing?”
“Verifying my theory.”
“Ridiculous. No one of the scientific community would have taken him seriously.”
Ruut’s eyes were glued to the screen of the phone. “If the master of secrecy can’t keep a secret, he’s no master at all.”
“You don’t understand. In England women legally had no rights at all.” Konrad tried to meet her gaze. “The husband had absolute control over his wife’s personal property.”
“And men also debated whether women had souls,” Ruut replied. “Like it is today, men thought they owned their wives and their bodies. Men have shamed our sexuality as a guilty pleasure. If a woman believes she’s filthy during periods or a whore, men can control women. Cont
rol is most effective when a woman is put to guard herself. Make woman an evil seductress, a closet succubus, and men are free from guilt, remaining morally stronger. So, if I were Newton and a woman, I might have chosen freedom instead of accepting a list of predestinated humiliation. Here are the pictures. See anything unusual?”
Konrad looked at one particular painting made of Newton. The poet William Blake’s stunning painting, Newton, was a much deeper painting than met the eye. Blake portrayed a muscular scientist oblivious to God’s creation by making his wrapped-up thoughts stuck in the circle he draws with his compass. Found at the bottom of the ocean bending over naked to draw a circle on a scroll growing from his head, Newton is quietly downgraded to an alone man living in a bubble, unable to step outside of his circle. The compass is a scientific instrument that clips the wings of imagination, leaving Newton blinded to the beauty of the surrounding world.
Art is the tree of life. Science is the tree of death, Konrad contemplated Blake’s bizarre poem he had related to the painting. He shrugged. Blake was convinced his paintings were divine art instructed and encouraged by Archangels.
You don’t want to debate on angels’ genders...
“Look at the Adam’s apples,” Ruut said, touching her throat.
In the many portraits of Newton, painted by all the leading artists of his time, he wore a fashionable full-bottomed wig of the 17th century. Konrad stroked his own prominent Adam’s apple. “The neck area is covered… and his head’s angled badly in all of them.”
“Coincidence? What if the most famous scientist known through an apple had no Adam’s apple? What if Newton is revealing his greatest secret to us?”
“Impossible.”
“Don’t shoot the messenger yet. The riddle is layered like an onion. Apparently, the pattern is taken from Matthew 7:7, where Jesus says: ‘Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.’
“You think that if we break the code, Newton will reveal his true gender? Even if the historians see him as a misogynist?” Ruut continued.
“Not being interested in chasing girls and wanting desperately to get laid, wouldn’t be a symptom of misogyny, now would it?”
Konrad gave a tight smile. He leaned deeper into the sofa, put his hands on the top his head and let out a deep, weighted sigh. “Nothing is 100 percent accurate in history, not even if the evidence points in one direction…”
Ruut’s phone vibrated in her pocket. She looked at the screen and said, “Jake. Excuse me a sec.”
As she took distance and privacy, Konrad reluctantly pondered the plausibility of her idea, scrunching up his nose in distaste. As an avowed atheist, he had dedicated his life to promoting science and skepticism; he had an eye for superstition and pseudoscience, and he knew the weight of the gauntlet of criticism. The critique made him work even harder, but the meaning of their pursuit got lost at his wrecked reputation. Even though it seemed they were moving in the direction of a grand reveal of Newton’s personal life, it would only hit entertainment news. There was no career springboard.
“Where do the moon and sun shine across?” Ruut said to the phone. “Uh-hum… Right…”—a giggle—“Thank you, dear.”
Konrad cleared his throat.
A slow flush spread across Ruut’s face. “Sorry, I forgot this was our thing. But Jake guessed that the moon and sun shine to a cross, not across.”
Konrad contemplated her repeating blushes. Why did a woman with high self-confidence hesitate like that?
“Unless it’s hidden in plain view. I used to hide candy from Jake and Netta in a coffee machine or vegetable box, and they couldn’t find it even though they’d sweep through the kitchen closets.” Ruut inspected the cover of The Bible. “The cross… Jesus’s cross was made of wood. Knock on wood…” Ruut tapped the cross with her forefinger. Something flashed in her eyes as if she’d seen the future in a clairvoyant’s flawless quartz sphere. “Holy cow!”
In a heartbeat, Ruut grabbed The Bible and rushed into the kitchen, Konrad tagging along.
“What are you doing?”
Ruut opened and slammed the door of the freezer.
“You put it inside?”
She breathed from the top of her lungs. “I found her.”
Konrad probed her enraptured eyes. “Whom?”
“The whore!”
A heavy knock landed on the door.
“Are you expecting somebody?” Ruut asked.
Konrad glanced outside of the window. He ducked.
“My neighbor. Pretty pissed off. I’m not home.”
“What have you done now?”
“Nothing.” Konrad sighed. “I think I just killed his mailbox.”
“Are you a drunk?”
Konrad shook his head. “I don’t drink. I only take a few beers now and then, and then I become someone else. He’s the drinker.”
11
RUUT LEANED BACK against the freezer, protecting it like a guard except for the permanent smile.
“Your neighbor saw me.” Ruut took gum from her pocket, started chewing, waved. “His jaw dropped. Eyes wide. Now he’s leaving.”
Konrad stood, chewed the inside of his cheek, unable to string a single sane sentence. He had walked this path to its end, and the boots of logic were stuck in sucking mud.
I need a cold shower. A vacation. A reboot.
“Konrad,” she said, her voice unable to mask her enthusiasm. “I’m glad you used The Wicked Bible as a tire block last night.”
“Why?”
“Because Newton’s sordid whore has one rare specialty with water—antimony expands on cooling.”
“How do you exactly know all this? I thought lead is all you need in ammunition. Mass is one of the variables in determining kinetic energy. The heavier the bullet, the more energy it has and the more damage it does, right?”
“Lead is dense. It gives it good flight characteristics and good penetration. It’s fairly soft, so it’s easy on the barrels. But depending on the level of hardness the shooter needs, it can be easily hardened with simple alloys. Antimony makes the adjustments possible.”
“There’s antimony in the cross,” Konrad hypothesized.
“There she is,” Ruut said. “There’s a higher purpose for all the puns and riddles. I believe Newton’s imitating the essential feature of God’s design for the world.”
You managed to pick up my curiosity. Damn woman.
Konrad folded his arms. “What are you expecting to find? A new tantric manual?”
She slightly lowered her head. “If so, can I keep it?”
“Sure.” Konrad uttered a laugh. But without warning a sharp memory bombarded his psyche: Oona slowly licking her lips in a sign of lust. Coldness seeped into his bones. He turned toward the window, willed his trembling hands still, stared off into the woods. The memory of her smile whipped past him like a breeze of wind, but that was all. Even the incident was still a black hole if he tried to probe his memory.
“My ex-wife repeatedly warned me about my crusades against religions: ‘Without spirituality, you build rooms that run out of oxygen.’”
Ruut snapped her gum in her mouth. “She sounds smarter than you. Is she an architect?” Before he managed to answer, she offered her phone and asked, “Can I borrow your charger?”
He took the phone and plugged it to a free cord. The screen sprang to life.
“The house,” Ruut said, “it feels healthy. Did your wife build it?”
“I peeled the logs, broke the ground, poured the foundation, raised the frame, and—”
“Liar.”
“Well, I did paint the rooms. Julia did everything when I was at work. She even ran the wires. There’s nothing she can’t fix.”
Ruut buried her smiling face into her palm, her expression stating the obvious: “Men’s hazardous work…”
Her phone rang on the table, only once, but Konrad managed to see the caller’s Facebook picture on the screen. The abnor
mal eye contact of the boy’s cheerless gray eyes. The punch-worthy face.
Gideon.
“My big man,” Ruut said. “Old enough to think he’s independent, but money is always welcome.”
“Where is he?”
“Long story. He lives with his dad, who’s not into discipline as I am. Gideon probably asks for a youth gathering. I’ll tell you about it later.”
“Why do you care about teens so much?”
“Remember my mom? She once reversed her car from a garage to the road and over it to the ditch. As I went to save her, looking at the front of the car aimed at the sky, I thought she probably died of a heart attack. She survived, but she was mad at me.”
“She accused you?”
“No. She swore and blamed teenagers for sabotaging the rear mirrors of her car. That’s why she couldn’t see the road.”
Konrad chuckled.
“Although her eyesight was weakening, no doctor canceled her driving license. She managed to drive off the road into a snow bank twice before I realized that she couldn’t see where the road stopped and snow banks began. She always blamed someone else. I had to steal her keys.”
“You did the right thing.”
“I guess,” Ruut said. “But my mother’s bad behavior forced me to follow her prejudice to its roots. I found fear. And I realized that the only human tragedy in life is unrealized potential. It’s the greatest enemy of the younger generations and to anyone who thinks being right is more important than unity.”
Konrad crossed his arms, contemplated her words. They spent one minute with the freezer humming over silence.
He took a step closer. “Open Sesame?”
Ruut’s eyes crinkled at the corners. “Cross your fingers.”
She took the Bible out of the freezer and set it on the table. She instinctively turned the cross like a door handle.
They stared at the cover.
Then at each other.
Flabbergasted.
