One Big Damn Puzzler

by John Harding

  In desperation William called Sheena. OK, it hadn’t worked out before with her, but maybe he should give it another chance. At least with Sheena there wasn’t the constant need for subterfuge. He could be his normal odd OCD self.

  She sounded pleased to hear from him and agreed to meet for a drink. She greeted him with a big smile and an affectionate hug. Her long golden hair shone and William felt suddenly hopeful. He was eager to tell her there were good reasons they should try again: he was more tolerant these days and he had moved to a two-bathroomed apartment.

  He was about to say all this and had just cleared his throat in a portentous way when he realized Sheena was almost unaware of him. She was too busy polishing a fingermark from her wine glass to remember he was there. At once he knew it was no use. Although Sheena would tolerate his disorder more than most people, every moment he was with her he would see his own obsessiveness reflected back by her.

  She finished cleaning the glass and looked up and smiled. ‘You know, William, the self-help weekend really helped me. It was the beginning of me learning not to be ashamed of my OCD. Now finally I got this great boyfriend. I told him everything and he’s real cool about it. Plus he’s real messy and he hates it? He loves that I’m always cleaning . . .’

  So now William felt alone in the busiest city in the world, isolated by his OCD, although not for much longer, at this precise moment. If you walk with your eyes on the ground in the New York rush hour it’s only a matter of time before you collide with another commuter and that’s what happened now.

  There was a big OOOMPFFF of escaping air – as though someone had punctured a truck tyre – from both William’s body and that of his collidee.

  ‘Hey, watch it, you big—’ began a shrill voice. And then, ‘Gwanga?’

  William’s old island name brought his eyes up from the sidewalk with a jolt. He found himself looking at a small man in a business suit who seemed to have a toilet brush instead of a head. But a familiar toilet brush, one that he knew. Then he realized he was looking at Sandy Beach and that the latter had had his appalling ginger hair cut into that extended crew cut often known as a brush cut and favoured by senior American military personnel and other psychopaths.

  ‘Sandy. I – I’m sorry, I was miles away. I didn’t recognize you at first.’

  ‘Well, it has been nearly five years, I guess.’

  ‘Gwanga. You called me gwanga.’

  ‘Did I? I thought I said Wanker.’

  ‘No, it was definitely gwanga. Believe me, I’d notice something like that. No-one’s ever called me that except . . . on the island.’ William desperately wanted to escape from Beach. He was even prepared to jettison his sidewalk-crack sequencing in favour of a quick getaway, but the tenuous thread connecting him to the island, and so, of course, to Lucy, through Beach, demanded that he cling to it.

  ‘Well, maybe you’re right,’ said Beach. ‘I was just back there, last week. That little guy, one who looks like a rat? He was talking about you. I guess that’s why I called you gwanga.’

  William didn’t want to escape from Beach any more. He hurriedly consulted his watch. ‘Listen, I don’t have to be anywhere just yet. Do you have time for a coffee?’

  Beach ostentatiously consulted his own wrist, which was weighed down by a heavy duty Rolex. ‘Well, I’m not sure. I have a meeting in the Towers at eight thirty.’

  ‘It’s on me,’ said William, recalling Beach’s legendary meanness.

  Beach beamed at him. ‘Well, I guess I can manage it.’

  In a nearby deli William had an espresso while Beach nursed a supersize cappuccino in a beaker as big as his toilet-brush head. He shook so much chocolate powder over it he turned the milky foam top from white to brown. William sat waiting patiently for news of the only woman he’d ever believed he might have loved while Beach tipped up his cup and slurped out of it for a good minute. When he finally lowered it his mouth was so obscured by cappuccino foam that he looked like a toilet brush with chocolate collagen lip implants.

  ‘What were you doing on the island?’ asked William.

  ‘I was arranging payment of the final tranche of the compensation deal,’ said Beach.

  ‘It all worked out OK?’ asked William, who’d been taken off the case immediately the deal had been struck. For the past five years he’d been working on compensation cases for injured mineworkers. It was about as far from a tropical island as he could get.

  ‘Oh, sure,’ replied Beach, spooning more foam into his mouth via a wooden spatula intended for stirring and so inadequate for the task that more of the stuff ended up on the table than reached his lips. ‘A couple of other compensation claims came in from other places soon afterwards that made my deal look cheap. I even got promoted.’

  ‘That’s great,’ said William. ‘But actually, what I meant was, did it all work out OK for the islanders?’

  Beach gave a little chuckle that sprayed foam across the table. ‘Yeah. It enabled them to achieve a million-year evolutionary leap in a couple of months. One minute they’re headhunters, the next they have McDonald’s.’

  William assumed this was a joke. ‘Actually,’ said Beach, ‘it’s probably a good thing we gave them the money. They have modern technology to improve their lives. They’ve embraced the things America can offer. And it hasn’t cost Uncle Sam a penny.’

  ‘How do you figure that?’ William was trying to appear nonchalant by allowing Beach to spout off, but he couldn’t help looking furtively at the massive chronometer on Beach’s wrist. The time was 8.05. Beach would soon have to be leaving for his meeting. And William would have to go with him; he was due at a meeting in the same building before nine.

  ‘Well, all the stuff they buy comes from the US. What goes around comes around. The dollars are all finding their way back to us.’

  William couldn’t help thinking it sounded a bit like the theory of the circulation of yams he’d constructed for the natives in the old days. Except that the natives could always grow more yams. Where would they get more dollars?

  ‘And . . . uh . . . how is everyone there?’ he asked, examining the black sludge in the bottom of his espresso cup as though that were of more interest than any reply Sandy Beach could possibly give.

  ‘Oh, much the same. The old guy—’

  ‘Managua?’

  ‘Yeah, Managua, was just as crotchety as ever, and the rest of them look mostly, well, prosperous, and of course the money’s brought changes . . .’

  William cleared his throat. ‘There was an Englishwoman there. I don’t think you met her. I suppose she’s long gone?’ You’d have thought he was looking for the answer in the sludge.

  ‘You mean the one you made the old fug-a-fug with? You certainly kept that quiet when we were there together. But I heard all about it this time. Not that I blame you. She’s a babe, considering she’s so small, and all.’

  ‘Then she’s still there?’

  ‘Yup, she’s still there. Must be crazy. Who’d want to live in a place like that? Shit! Is that the time? I gotta go.’ He rose and picked up his briefcase. ‘Cute kid though.’

  ‘Kid?’ said William. ‘What do you mean? What kid?’

  ‘The little girl.’ Beach stared at him. ‘You didn’t know. You didn’t know?’

  ‘Lucy has a child? How – how old is it? I mean she.’

  ‘She,’ said Beach. ‘It’s a girl. About five years old.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘Very pale skin. Blue eyes. Blonde hair. Work it out.’

  ‘B-but—’

  ‘William, I don’t have time for this now. I have a meeting about a hospital we bombed by mistake. Actually we didn’t bomb it by mistake, we meant to flatten it, we just thought it was something else. You want to walk to the Towers with me?’

  William rose. Lucy had a child. A five-year-old child. ‘Yes, I’m coming,’ he said. He left some money on the table and followed Beach out. They started walking. Beach was rabbiting on about the case he was working on. William couldn’t take i
t in, it was just noise, along with the traffic and the distant sound of aircraft. Suddenly he stopped. ‘Actually, Sandy, I’ve just remembered something I have to do. I, uh, I’ll meet up with you some other time.’

  ‘Oh, OK. Well, you know where to find me. Give me a call. It would be great to catch up on old times.’ He looked William in the eye, his attempt at a smile strangely amplified by the foam on his lips. ‘You know, you were the best friend I ever had in my whole life.’

  And without warning he leaned forward, flung an arm around William, and clutched him stiffly. He held him like that for half a minute. Then he released him, turned quickly away, strode off and was soon swallowed up by the rush-hour crowd. William watched him out of sight, strangely touched by this unexpected effusion from his childhood nemesis. No matter how long you lived, it seemed, there was no accounting for human nature. Then he remembered what he had to do and lifted an arm to hail a passing cab.

  The cab driver was some kind of Eastern European, Ukrainian, William guessed from the miniature Dynamo Kiev soccer shirt hanging from his rear-view mirror and the balalaika music emanating from his cassette deck, and he didn’t speak any English. William had to direct him street by street to his apartment. He gestured to the cassette deck and asked the man to turn it off. The man smiled and nodded vigorously as if he thought William was admiring the music. He reached out a hairy hand and turned up the volume. The music was all jangling foreign folksiness and it tangled up William’s brain. He was almost relieved when a few minutes later an aircraft screamed so low overhead that it drowned out the noise.

  The further they went, the nearer they got to William’s apartment, the emptier the streets became. It was more like early Sunday morning, when nobody is about, than rush hour. It had the feel of one of those days when everyone is inside watching a big football or basketball game on TV.

  Outside his apartment building William had some trouble convincing the Ukrainian to stay. When he tried to get out of the cab without paying, asking the man to wait for ten minutes, the driver opened the glove compartment on his dash and pulled out a pistol. William thought this might be a signal he should pay the man off and look for another cab, but the street was empty and he didn’t want to waste a minute more than he had to. A few minutes lost now could cost him hours, maybe even a day or two, later. Finally he paid the fare then showed the driver more dollars, pointed to his watch and held up ten fingers and the guy seemed to get the idea. Once again William wondered how people with no English made a living driving taxi cabs around a city they didn’t know.

  In his apartment he grabbed a bag and tossed a few clothes into it. He tried to think what he would need on the island, what he’d wished he’d had before, and threw in the Complete Shakespeare that he’d taken to reading every night, maybe because it reminded him of Managua. He also tried to remember to leave out all the things that wouldn’t be any use once their batteries ran out – his cell phone, his laptop, his electric shaver. As he went through his desktop he came across a pocket calculator and dropped that in the case. You had to think of these things when you didn’t have yams.

  He had his hand on the doorknob, ready to leave, when he caught sight of something on the coffee table. His half-finished letter to Lucy. He’d written to her every month since he left the island the first time, every month without fail, and he’d never gotten a reply. At first his letters had been careful and guarded. They had rehearsed again his arguments for the need to compensate the islanders; they had been full of irritation that Lucy couldn’t see things his way. After a while it occurred to him that the unlikelihood of the letters ever reaching their destination might not be the only reason for the lack of any response. So he resolved to steer clear of contentious issues and stick to the personal, mentioning their disagreement only as the subject of regret that anything should have come between them after such a promising start.

  Still silence. Most people would have given up, but not someone with an obsessive personality. William carried on writing even though he was pretty well convinced no-one was reading what he wrote. He always had in his mind Lucy as his reader, as the person he was addressing, but he no longer believed she read a single one of his words. This set him free and he began to write purely for himself. He began to open up, to tell the Lucy who wasn’t reading his words, about his life. He told her about his dad. He told her about Sandy Beach. Around about the third year he felt he knew her well enough to confess his OCD. Until now he’d never told another soul, other than health professionals or fellow sufferers or Jean who was both. He told her how he had carried around the burden of it nearly all his life. How having this secret self had kept him at one remove from the rest of the world as if he’d been a serial killer. He gave descriptions at once humorous and personal of his various rituals, the difficulty of concealing them from others and the guilt that it induced. He even told her about the check linoleum floor, the toilet bowl and the bath and apologized for the secret ritual fondling of her breasts.

  ‘It’s painful to tell you all this,’ he wrote, ‘but in a way, it brings me comfort too. Just like that first time we were together. Ouch!’

  William went back and picked up the half-finished letter. He’d be on the island long before any postal system could get it there. He’d deliver this one himself.

  He was just stepping into the elevator when one of his neighbours, a white-haired old lady who had never before spoken to him but was in the habit of merely giving him an austere nod by way of acknowledgement, came out of her apartment.

  ‘Isn’t it just terrible?’ she said. ‘Why would they do a thing like that? Why would anybody?’

  ‘Why indeed?’ said William, pushing his case into the elevator and stepping in after it. He shot the old lady a friendly smile as he hit the button for the ground floor. ‘Some people!’ he said, rolling his eyes heavenwards and giving a little shrug. ‘The things they get up to!’

  As the elevator doors closed the last thing he saw through the narrowing gap was the old lady staring at him with an appalled expression.

  Back outside, William stood by the cab, spread his arms and attempted to mime an aircraft for the driver, who at first looked bemused and then increasingly fearful until at last his hand started to move towards the glove compartment again. Fortunately, at that moment, William heard the loud roar of an engine and pointed at the distant sky where there was another low-flying jet.

  ‘Ah, aeroporto!’ said the Ukrainian and started the engine. Jumping into the cab, William thought how lucky that the plane happened to be going over just at that moment. God only knew how he’d have gotten through to the Ukrainian otherwise.

  At the airport, of course, all was chaos and confusion and William learned that there was no plane he could catch that day, or indeed any planes flying anywhere over the United States, other than military aircraft, and naturally he found out the reason why. In the cab back to his apartment he sat on the back seat, the swirling folk dances blasting from the speakers only adding to his confusion while the Ukrainian driver, still oblivious to the news, whistled cheerfully along. William found himself thinking selfishly that if only he’d run into Sandy Beach yesterday, he’d have now been safely on his way. From that thought his mind jumped to the image of Sandy Beach clinging to him, an act so untypical of the little runt who’d all but ruined his childhood that you might have thought he had some premonition of what was to come. Of course William was twitching away in the back of the cab to an extent that was life-threatening. He was doing the eye thing, the teeth thing and tapping his hands alternately on the bag that he clutched to his chest like a child’s security blanket. The reason it was life-threatening was because he could see the Ukrainian driver watching him in his rear-view mirror rather than the road ahead and that the man was driving with one hand permanently on the glove compartment rather than the steering wheel. The reports William had been given at the airport had been confused. The death toll was horrendous. Fifty thousand people, someone had said although so
meone else had told him they’d gotten people out of the building. He wondered if his eye movements could make Sandy Beach one of the survivors. It was like saying Hail Marys. How many would he have to do for Beach’s earthly salvation?

  When he stepped out of the elevator on his floor he almost bumped into the old lady he’d met while leaving. Her remarks came back to him and suddenly made sense. She didn’t speak but turned on her heel to head along the corridor away from him. He reached out a hand, ‘Listen—’ he began.

  She spun back to face him. ‘Listen to you!’ she snapped. ‘I should listen to you, oh yes! Go on, make another joke about it, why don’t you? You sick bastard.’

  The crude word sounded so odd in her refined accent that it took William’s breath away. Before he could think of any response she strode off down the corridor and a moment later he heard a door slam.

  In his apartment he switched on the TV and sank into an armchair in front of it. He hardly moved for the rest of the day as he watched the full horror unfold. Along with most of the rest of the world he saw the second aircraft hitting the building over and over again. At each replay, a small and diminishing part of him hoped that this time something would intervene to prevent the collision. At the same time he experienced an overwhelming guilt, an OCD sense of responsibility for what had happened, a feeling that he could somehow have prevented it. At one level, of course, he knew this was ridiculous. What connection did he have with the event or its participants? What could he have done? Been nicer to the Asian man who owned his local convenience store, perhaps, a man he wasn’t even certain was a Muslim? The only possible culpability on his part was that he hadn’t done enough to ward off unspecified disaster, he had neglected his various rituals and failed to find new ones that might have helped. As if to compensate for this now his body, as he sat and watched the TV, was a blinking, shaking, clenching and unclenching, teeth-grinding mess. Anyone walking in would have assumed he was having an epileptic fit.