The Mussorgsky Riddle

by Darin Kennedy

  éjà vu. When you’re a psychic, it’s all but cliché.

  For what already feels like the hundredth time, I offer the dreamscape versions of Sterling and Bolger my standard greeting. “I am the Lady Scheherazade. And you are?”

  “A bit presumptuous, wouldn’t you say, inquiring that of us?” Dream-Bolger raises an eyebrow at me. “After all, you are standing in our home.”

  “Our home, is it?” Dream-Sterling crosses his arms and scowls. “Brilliant.” His gaze slips down to the half-drawn dagger at my side. “You may put away your weapon. You won’t be needing it here.”

  “Do not let her divide us,” Dream-Bolger whispers as he returns his gaze to me. “I know of you, Lady Scheherazade. Would you care to tell us what you’re doing here, or should the two of us continue on to the drawing room and wait upon you to regale us with one of your lies?”

  “Wait, Schmuÿle,” Dream-Sterling says. “I know of this Scheherazade as well. From the others along the wooden way. The musician spoke highly of her.”

  “Modesto?” I ask. “You know Modesto?”

  “A most ironic name, don’t you think? I’ve never met a prouder man in my existence.” His eyes shift in the direction of the man he calls Schmuÿle. “Present company excluded, of course.”

  Schmuÿle laughs. “As if you’re the model of humility. Hang another piece of famous art on the wall and they’re going to turn this place into a museum.” He glances in the direction of the hall. “Which, considering what waits outside our door, is more than a bit ironic itself.”

  “So.” A twinge of fear grips my heart, followed by cold certainty. “This is the Exhibition.” I glance at Schmuÿle before turning my attention back on the spitting image of the man who in a very different place asked me to dinner an hour ago. “If he’s Schmuÿle, then you must be―”

  He leans forward in a formal bow. “Samuel Goldenberg, at your service.”

  “How predictable.” Schmuÿle looks away. “As always, a pushover for a pretty set of eyes.”

  Goldenberg smiles wickedly. “I see you noticed them as well.”

  “I assure you, gentlemen, I am far more than just a pretty set of eyes.”

  Schmuÿle laughs again. “There’s fire in this one, Samuel.”

  “Behave yourself, Schmuÿle.” Goldenberg shows me back into the drawing room with the bizarre monkey wallpaper and the three walls lined with books. “Lady Scheherazade, please make yourself comfortable. Despite the intrusion, I would speak with you.”

  “Very well.” I take a seat on the high-back chair, while Goldenberg and Schmuÿle sit on opposite ends of the couch across the ornately carved coffee table at the center of the room. “And what would you like to discuss?”

  He thinks for a moment. “You may start with your presence in my home, though I am far more fascinated by your involvement in the Exhibition and your many rumored interactions with she who waits at the end of the hall.”

  “You mean Baba―”

  Schmuÿle’s finger shoots to his lips. “Do not speak her name here. This is one of the few pictures she has yet to enter, and if Samuel and I agree on anything, it is that we would like to keep it that way.”

  “Though your presence here threatens our long held peace with the witch,” Goldenberg adds, “your boldness intrigues me. Tell me, Lady Scheherazade, how it is you came to be here?”

  Careful, Mira. “I hail from a place far away and come here with a purpose. The boy from the French garden. He is a captive here in the Exhibition. I have come to free him, if I can.”

  “The boy?” Schmuÿle shoots a glance at Goldenberg. “He is walled up in the castle and if Modesto knows what’s best, he’s hidden him in the Catacombs below.”

  Goldenberg’s hand goes to his forehead, his eyes drifting closed. “For such a self-proclaimed skeptic, you’re certainly quite free with your tongue today.”

  “She’s been there, Samuel. The Lady has seen the castle, walked its stony hallways. She all but took the boy there herself. It would be insulting to act as if she knew nothing.”

  Goldenberg fastens his gaze on me, his eyes piercing through to my very soul. “And what business of yours is it what happens to the boy?”

  “His mother sent me. Isn’t that enough?”

  The two Jews share a knowing glance.

  “What?” I rise from the chair. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  Schmuÿle is the first to break. “She may well have sent you for her son, but I question the necessity or even the wisdom of such salvation.” His face turns up in a sarcastic smile. “Have you considered that perhaps the boy is safest exactly where he is?”

  My own ire continues to rise. “Where I come from, Anthony cannot speak or move, make his own decisions, and can barely wipe his own nose. He is totally dependent on the goodwill of others. Would you wish to live that way?”

  “And his previous existence?” Schmuÿle’s glare now surpasses Goldenberg’s. “Beset with bullies. Misunderstood by everyone. You want him to suffer that life again?”

  Goldenberg raises a finger. “She does have a point my friend. All life is a gift, Schmuÿle, and not something to be wasted.”

  “A gift, you say?” Schmuÿle draws himself up straight, his eyes afire with passion. “Life is no gift. It’s an odious, pointless job. A job that occupies your every breath until you take your last. A job that not a single one of us applies for, but rather is thrust upon each of us, quite literally, by two people who don’t have the wherewithal to find something to do besides fornicate.”

  I recoil at the force of Schmuÿle’s words. “You can’t be serious.”

  He silences me with a glance. “You spend your first year at the teat of your tormentor, dependent on her for your every need from mouth to anus. Then, once you are old enough to fend for yourself, it’s danger after danger as the universe conspires to end the pain of your existence. But do you acquiesce to the inevitable? Of course not. You charge ahead, stay healthy, learn your multiplication tables, study the scribbling of numbers and letters so you can spend your life writing checks to pay for this bucking stallion you never asked to ride.”

  “That’s enough, Schmuÿle,” Goldenberg says.

  “Enough? I’ve barely started.” He pulls a flask from inside his tattered coat and takes a drag before turning back to me. His high-pitched voice grates at my mind, shattering my concentration even as I strain to take in his every word. “Eventually, you leave behind the perpetrators of your existence and move out into the world. That’s where the real cruelty begins. The entire universe pairs off, starting the cycle again, and either you perpetrate the same crime against some poor unattached soul, or all the world stares, wondering what’s wrong with you that you are so alone.”

  In the decade and a half since I first came into my tenuous partnership with my particular set of gifts, I’ve usually found the ability to read the emotions of others a boon. Manifesting as aromas from my experience or the other person’s, this true sixth sense has helped me navigate many an untenable situation. Here in Anthony’s Exhibition, other than in the Tuileries garden where a lifetime of a troubled boy’s emotions swarmed over me like a hive of angry ants, that ability hasn’t even come into play, leaving me in many ways deaf to a symphony that in the real world fills my every waking minute.

  As the tidal wave of Schmuÿle’s pain, anger, and utter despondency threatens to drown me in vitriol, I pray for the deafness to return. The knowledge that the man I’m speaking with is merely another aspect of Anthony Faircloth breaks my heart even as the emotional onslaught pummels me with near physical force.

  “You’re a failure if you don’t find someone to love.” Schmuÿle’s eyes flare with a cold gleam. “Someone who loves you back. People try to help, insisting you’ll find love when you least expect it. When you stop looking. When the time is right. That there is someone out there for everyone. The truth? They don’t have the first idea. Then, if you don’t sign up to produce your own 2.2 kids to follow y
ou in the same shit job, you’re a double failure. And God forbid you get sick of the shitstorm of your life, realize you’re in a losing situation, and try to leave the game early.”

  “Stop it.” Racked with agony, I raise my hands before me in surrender. “Please…”

  Schmuÿle drives on as if I haven’t said a word. “Pull that and the world calls you depressed, bipolar, or psychotic and shoves pills down your throat. Remember, no matter what, you’ve got to be happy. Happy, happy, happy. Stay alive as long as you can. Be healthy. Exercise. Eat right. Find love. But for God’s sake, no matter what, be happy.” Schmuÿle hawks a wad of spit into the rich carpet at his feet. “Truth? I think most would rather just stay in the fucking ether than have to put up with this shit of an existence.”

  The psychic agony wafting off Schmuÿle doubles me over, ripping through me like I’ve swallowed a cup of tacks. Anthony’s great potential has been evident from the start, but to affect me like this from so many miles away is beyond anything I’ve ever imagined. With power like this, his talent clearly outstrips mine, but it’s more than that. More than any of my other visits to his mind, this particular encounter is more visceral and far more personal.

  “Now, now, old friend.” Goldenberg’s silky baritone finally comes back into play. “Your life hasn’t been all that bad and I would know. I’ve listened to your every complaint for years.” He turns to me, his every word and emotion soothing the racking pain at my core. “Never shuts up, this one. The glass isn’t just half empty with him. Those few swallows of wine have been stolen, and he wants them back.”

  “Will you never tire of that old jibe?” Schmuÿle leers at me from half-closed eyes.

  “Birth and death, my friend. Can’t stop either one. As for the in-between, that’s up to each one of us every day of our lives.”

  “Rather gauche, making such a statement considering our current circumstances. Eternal optimism must seem so simple when the whole damn world follows your every notion.”

  Goldenberg shoots from his end of the rich leather couch and motions to the room around us. “You speak as if all this was handed to me. Like I haven’t worked for every inch of this carpet, every stick of furniture, every piece of art. How dare you accept my hospitality for all these many years and then ridicule me as if it’s not deserved, and in front of a guest, no less?”

  Schmuÿle grins. “Just demonstrating there’s anger in you as well, Samuel.”

  “I’ve worked and worked to get to this point, and now that I’ve finally arrived, you should be grateful I continue to tolerate the sour taste you bring to my life.”

  “Arrived? You’ve arrived?” Schmuÿle throws his head back and laughs. “No one ever arrives, not until the big arrival that awaits us all. Each and every person gets up each day and repeats the same list of humdrum tasks we did the day before. Brush the gunk from your teeth. Cleanse yourself so you don’t offend others with your stink. Force hunks of the dead down your gullet so you may continue to live. You have achieved many things, my friend, but achievements are nothing but mountains along each person’s road they either scale or find a way to skirt.” He glares at me. “Tell me, Lady Scheherazade, in your experience, are the downhill runs ever worth the climb?”

  I raise an eyebrow. “My mother always said for every climb, there’s a summit.”

  Schmuÿle’s mouth turns down in a spiteful grimace. “And I would argue for every summit, there’s a climb. The view from the mountaintop is always too brief, and the climb longer and longer with each hill.”

  I gasp at the familiarity of Schmuÿle’s answer. “But those were my words, from so long ago. I still remember the hurt in Mom’s eyes. How could you possibly know that?”

  In a flash, everything is clear. Why everything feels so different. Why Schmuÿle’s words hurt me so. Why the characters in Anthony’s mind sound more grown up and real than they ever have in the past.

  Why he’s imagining two people he’s never met.

  Anthony’s mind may be the canvas, but it would seem at least in part, I’m supplying the paint here.

  “Mr. Goldenberg, Mr. Schmuÿle. All this arguing. It’s for my benefit, isn’t it?”

  The two of them share a knowing glance and begin to speak as one, the words flowing from one mouth to the other and back again as if they share a mind but only one can speak at a time.

  “We are not the only ones in this room who split an identity.” The vacillation between Goldenberg’s deep baritone and Schmuÿle’s squeaking tones jars on my ears. “Mira-Scheherazade, what do you know of chaos theory?”

  I start at the mention of my true name. “Not much more than what Jeff Goldblum’s character went around spouting in Jurassic Park.”

  “Oh, it’s so much more than that,” they say in unison, before returning to the back and forth singsong of their opposite tones. “One tenet states that even under otherwise identical conditions, merely changing the set of parameters by which a system is evaluated can drastically alter the outcome.”

  “All right.” Nice to know there’s some Anthony inside these two as well. “That makes sense, I suppose.”

  “A thorough understanding of this concept points to a simple truth.”

  “And that would be?”

  “The closer you attempt to measure a thing, the more likely it is the simple act of measurement will change the result.”

  “I don’t follow you.” But I do. I just can’t bear to hear it.

  “Yes, you do.” Goldenberg and Schmuÿle rise from the couch and stand on either side of me. “Do you truly believe you are here in this place? Talking to two strange men? Sitting on a velvet-seated chair in a nineteenth century drawing room?”

  “No. I―”

  “Where are you? Right now, where do you think you are?”

  “In Anthony’s mind, I suppose. Trying to―”

  “Anthony’s ‘mind’ is merely a hundred billion neurons, each fighting for supremacy, trapped inside three pounds of pink tofu. Do you really believe you reside there?”

  “No.”

  “Then where are you, Mira?” they ask in unison. “Where are you right now?”

  I cast my mind back. “In a tub. I’m resting in a tub in my hotel.”

  “Precisely. This place isn’t real. You’re not in Anthony’s mind, but his mind influences yours just as yours does his.”

  “The closer you attempt to measure something…” The truth dawns on me.

  “Not only has the measured been changed,” they say, “but the measurer as well.”

  “The pair of you. You’re not Anthony. You’re… me.”

  “At least in part, Mira. Your thought before, about Anthony providing the canvas but not the paint, was more accurate than you know.” As one, they fall back on the couch and in unison say, “It would seem you’ve visited the Exhibition so often you’ve become one of the exhibits.”

  y entire body convulses as I wake, my jerking limbs sending a good portion of the now tepid bathwater onto the tiled floor. After a few choice words I don’t use around my mother, I clamber out of the tub, turn on the shower, and spend the next twenty minutes doing my level best to boil the skin from my bones. As the chill from the water leaves my body, another works its way up my back as the words of Goldenberg and Schmuÿle echo through my head.

  “It would seem you’ve visited the Exhibition so often you’ve become one of the exhibits.”

  Dammit, they’re right. More than anyone, I understand the risks of doing what I do. Still, who would dream the kid would be able to draw me into his crazy mindscape from halfway across the city? An unbidden image of a framed picture of Scheherazade hanging in Anthony’s Exhibition fills my mind’s eye.

  I turn the water even hotter.

  An hour later, I’m sprawled out on the bed in my favorite set of pajamas drowning my troubles in a pint of Rocky Road from room service. Staring through bleary eyes at the flat screen on the wall, I flip from station to station, skipping past Headline News and t
he rest of the 24-hour news channels as quickly as my thumb can punch the button.

  One more missing persons story might just put me over the edge.

  My thumb dances atop the send button of my phone. I have to talk to somebody about what’s happened and I can’t think of anyone else to call, though I dread the hint of condescension and even more, the “I told you so” in his tone. He warned me about the risks of proceeding with Anthony, and though we’ve made serious progress in the last few days, the events of this evening may prove him right.

  I press the button. The phone rings six times before going to voicemail.

  “Hello. This is Dr. Thomas Archer at Metrolina Counseling. If this is a medical emergency, please hang up and dial 9-1-1. If you have reached this number after hours, please hang up and call our answering service at 704-555-2112. Otherwise, leave a message and I will get back to you at my earliest convenience.”

  “Hello, Thomas…” As with every other trip through the Exhibition, my voice comes out like sandpaper over wool. “I mean, Dr. Archer. It’s Mira. Something’s happened and I need to talk to someone. Well, not someone. I need to talk to you. Call me when you have a chance.”

  I press the end button before I say anything more stupid than I already have.

  How does Thomas do it? Day in, day out. Nothing but listening to one person’s problems after another. Last thing he needs in the middle of the night is a message from me all freaked out.

  A little late for that.

  I rest the phone on the nightstand and go to the window. Sliding it open as wide as it will go, I breathe in a lungful of cool evening air and crane my neck to get a view of my favorite building from the Charlotte skyline. Like something out of a different century, the gothic skyscraper looms like a glass-covered casket jutting out of the center of the city. Lit up for the evening, its upper stories alternate between reflected radiance and fleeting shadow.