theMystery.doc

by Matt McIntosh

  “When’s trash day?” I’d asked.

  “Tomorrow,” Gladys’d said.

  “Darn. I wish it was today.”

  Charles dropped me off beneath the hospital awning. I wished him luck under the motel and told him to keep in touch. I said I would like to give him my phone number but I don’t know what it is. He said he already had it from the service order. That was good. I asked him to look on it and tell me my last name. I had a pretty good idea that the first name I was supposed to be using was Daniel, but I didn’t know the last. He told me and I thanked him and he wished me luck as well. Then he drove away and the serpent, as the sunlight bounced off the side of the van as it made its turn around to head back to the highway, the serpent winked at me.

  The woman at reception called up to Vel’s floor, and before long a nurse came down to speak with me. I said I was a relative of Vel’s and that I wanted to see her. She was happy that someone had come because apparently no other members of Vel’s family had been to see her. She said it would take a little while to get Vel ready because she was taking a nap, but that when Vel was ready she would come back and escort me up. I said that was fine and took a seat and read magazines.

  About a half hour later she returned and took me up. She smiled as the elevator rose and made small talk. She asked me what I did for a living and I told her I was a writer. This pleased her and she asked if I had been published. For some reason I told her I had written a book called The Tempest.

  “Like the Shakespeare play!” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “That was my favorite one. In college I played the daughter of the wizard, Prospero,” she said. “What was my name?” She started scratching her head. The elevator kept going up. “How embarrassing.” She started to blush. “It’s right there on the tip of my—” She shook her head, turning red. “It’s terrible. I can’t remember the name of my own character.”

  “How weird.”

  “I remember I walked out and said— Oh, brother, what was the line?”

  The doors opened. We stepped off.

  Vel was waiting in a small room with a couch, a chair, and a loveseat. She was on the couch. The nurse entered and said, “Vel, here’s your grandson, Daniel, coming for a visit. Do you remember him?”

  Vel looked up at me with squinty eyes.

  “I know him but he’s not my grandson.”

  I smiled at the nurse and shrugged. She squeezed my arm reassuringly.

  “Well you might not remember he’s your grandson, but he is. Now, will you be OK if I leave you two alone for a few minutes?” the nurse asked.

  Vel nodded.

  The nurse squeezed me again and left.

  Vel was old. She was hunched over so when she looked at you she looked up, her eyeballs halfway hidden up in the sockets. She had stubble on her face. She had a mean scowling face. She was wearing a pink sweat suit. It looked ridiculous. I sat down in the chair across from her.

  “How’s it going?” I said.

  She grunted.

  “They have you on medication?”

  She nodded.

  “How long have you been here?”

  She smacked her lips. The pills were probably drying her mouth out.

  “Who knows? Two weeks. Maybe more. Maybe less.”

  “Feeling better?”

  She didn’t say anything, just stared up at me across a square coffee table.

  I found myself hunching over too. And looking up at her with my eyes rolled upward, staring back at her that way.

  “Seen Gerald?” she said.

  “Your husband?”

  “Who else would he be?”

  “No. Haven’t seen him.”

  “They say he went to a home before I came here. They said I was talking him to death. You know what I think?”

  “What?”

  “I think he didn’t like what I was saying! About his mother and her father! And how he got her all dressed up when he took her to the fair! Dressed up like a wife! I saw the photograph! I can read between the lines!”

  “Interesting.”

  “Do you think Gerald didn’t like me talking about it?”

  “Beats me. I’ve never met Gerald.”

  “’Course you met Gerald. You two used to talk all the time. He gave you the birdhouse.”

  “That’s right. I did meet Gerald. I used to talk to Gerald. He gave me the birdhouse.”

  “He’s gonna die there in that home.”

  “Is he sick?”

  “His stomach’s twisted up and only I know how to cook for him. He’s not supposed to eat peanuts. That didn’t stop him from stealing them from the squirrels. I used to put them out for the squirrels and I’d find him out there rooting through the dish. Then he’d moan all night long! It hurts! It hurts!”

  “Do you have any other family?”

  “You know I do. Three daughters and a son. Winnie’s the middle one. She went missing about twenty years back. Hedda knows what happened to her. See, Hedda was aaaaalllllways jealous of Winnie. Winnie was the pretty one. We called her Winsome. Hedda was the last to see her. Hedda was the easy one. She was always dating married men. Lotti is a lesbian. I never told you that. Gerald wouldn’t let me. We had to say she’s single. At sixty years old? Ha! Then there’s Stu. He stole Aunt Sarah’s car. You know that blue car he drives? That was supposed to go to me. He was never supposed to have that car. But he took it! How’s the book?” she said.

  “What book?”

  “What book? The book you claim you’ve been writing all this time, Mr. Author! The enormous book!”

  “Did I talk to you about it?”

  “’Course you did! You said it was an enormous book and that it had started small but had gotten so big you divided it into two and then two again so now it was four big books and that you had to organize it and then you would publish it. Don’t tell me you divided it again!”

  “Good question.”

  “I always thought you were lying though. Gerald thought you really were writing a book. I said if he doesn’t talk about it it’s because he’s hiding something and if he’s hiding something it’s probably because there is no book. You probably just sit in that house all day reading girlie magazines.”

  “Interesting. So what do you know about the mystery?”

  “Well I know that’s what it’s called!” she barked. “At least that’s what you told Gerald it was called. I said, Gerald, he’s just giving you a line. There is no The Mystery! There’s no book! He’s in that little house playing with his willy as soon as his wife drives off to work!” She thrust out her arm as if to suggest she were pushing me away. “Why’d you come here anyway? Aren’t you the one who called them to take me away?”

  “I don’t know. But I wouldn’t blame me if I did. Especially after all the talk you’ve been spreading. I’ve heard what you’ve been saying about the tartlets.”

  “Poisoned.”

  “I seriously doubt that.”

  “That wife of yours is no good. I wouldn’t turn my back on her for a second.”

  “Really?” I leaned closer. “Why is that?”

  “She’s married to you.”

  “So?”

  “She works. She’s got a job. She makes the money. Without her you couldn’t pay to put a roof over your head.”

  I could see where she was going with this.

  “And?” I said.

  “And a girl with a body like that doesn’t need to work for a living. She could get a rich man real easy. No reason she should be working to support a poor one.”

  “Love?” I suggested.

  She scoffed. “Ha! I’ve known women like that. Judith Cooley back in Golden Valley was like that. No, that wife of yours she’s a smart
one. Too smart to be doing anything for—p’shaw!—love.”

  “Well, what would she be doing things for then?”

  “There’s something about you,” Vel said, half gravely, half mockingly, “that she’s interested in. And believe me, sonny, it ain’t your looks.”

  “My mind, maybe.”

  “Your mind? Ha! You couldn’t unkink a garden hose! Gerald told me about the time you came to him asking for help when you thought your mower was broken. It was out of gas! What a rube!”

  “OK, so maybe not my mind.”

  “You know, sometimes at night she’d go out back and talk on her phone so you couldn’t hear her. I bet you didn’t know that.”

  “Did she? And who was she talking to?”

  “Hard to say. Whoever it was it was business and the person on the other end was the boss.”

  “Remember any specifics?”

  “I remember they were talking about you.” She stared up at me. I stared up at her. “They were talking about pulling some big trick,” she said.

  “What big trick?”

  “Some big trick.”

  “Care to share any details?”

  “Don’t have any. But it was veeeerrry fishy.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No.”

  “Well if I’m not mistaken you also accused me of stealing your windows and putting them on my house, so I think I’ll take this with a grain of salt.”

  “Take it with whatever you want. I know what I heard.”

  “Olive’s dead,” I said.

  “Who’s Olive?”

  “Who’s Olive? Your cat!”

  “I don’t have a cat.”

  “Yes, you do. You adopted it and its brother or sister from the man down the street.”

  “Oh. Which one is Olive? The orange or the black-and-white?”

  “Orange.”

  “How’d it die?”

  “Good question. Loudly.”

  “That was not a very good cat anyway. That one was going to be Gerald’s for when he comes back. The other was mine. All the orange ever did was eat and sleep and it was too heavy to be a lap cat. It would have crushed poor Gerald’s legs! You know how frail he is. He was never the same after the war. Dysentery. Then all his life he could never put on weight. And they said I wasn’t feeding him! They said I was trying to starve him! I fed him! But all he wanted to eat was peanuts!”

  “Well, it’s been fun,” I said, getting up to leave. “I wish you luck with your current situation and Gerald with his peanut problems.”

  Vel smiled viciously. “Say hello to that pretty wife of yours. And I’d watch yourself if I were you. Nobody’s safe. I know everybody thinks I’m crazy, but I could hear them talking. You just have to know how to hear it. Then it’s there plain as day and you think to yourself: it’s always been there but I was trained not to hear it. That’s how they communicate. Right in the open. But, see, they’ve got you trained. You’ve been trained since you were little to not hear it. I know she was talking to them. Maybe you don’t want to believe it, but that’s the way things are. She was put with you, you didn’t just meet her. You didn’t win her. They put her there. To keep an eye on you. I heard what she was saying. She was giving a report.”

  2070707 210421TheCastle.wav

  A room, almost perfectly square, the bedroom of a little house. Two windows, a bed below one. A [W]oman, in her early thirties, lying on top of the sheet. The end of a hot drowsy day in July. On the window above the bed the curtain is drawn. Through the other, the curtain is open revealing a small fenced back yard, and the trunk of a large pine tree. One imagines its great boughs sheltering the scene. Above the bed a ceiling fan goes around and around. Sleepy, the woman wears a thin cotton shift, spaghetti straps, orange and yellow with a “sunset in the tropics” motif. Evening is turning into night. She yawns and stretches. Warmth, contentment, and drowsiness pervade the scene. One could imagine the bed is an inflatable mattress drifting lazily in a swimming pool, or a rowboat floating peacefully on a lake. She lies dreamily watching the blurry circle made by the blades of the ceiling fan. Footsteps, and then a [M]an appears from a separate room, wearing nothing but a pair of loose black shorts. He carries a small handheld recording device. He takes his place on the bed beside the woman, his head close to hers on the pillow. Then he presses a button on the recorder, and places it between them.

  W: Are you ready?

  M: Yeah. Action.

  W: OK. The Bubbleator. So, Seattle’s World’s Fair, 1962, in the… is it called the Center House? In the Seattle Center?

  M: The big white thing?

  W: The thing where all the food court and—

  M: Uh-huh.

  W: In there was this elevator that took you from what was the main floor down to the bottom floor… and it had a big glass dome—or probably plastic, or whatever. But it was like a—like a glass igloo and it was called the Bubbleator. Well, I recall the Bubbleator because—we would always go there for Christmas… um, and take the Monorail downtown and see the—

  M: Your family?

  W: Yeah. And see the windows and displays and Santa and all that, but they would also decorate out the Seattle Center, and one year they—well, one year that I can recall—I have a memory of riding it. But anyway, um, I asked my mom about the Bubbleator, because, you know, she and her brother went to the World’s Fair and she said—you know my uncle Paul and how sensible he is and everything—well, he gets on the Bubbleator at the World’s Fair and there’s a man in a spacesuit. Because the whole World’s Fair was Space Themed, and the man said: We’re going into the Fyuuuu-tuuuure! And Paul was like, No-o-o-o-o-o-o-o! Let me off of here! [laughing] Like, like believed it and didn’t want to go!

  M: He did not want to go to the future! [laughing]

  W: Did not want to go! And like, wanted off the Bubbleator! [laughing] But anyway, I just think—you were talking about the dome and one of the ways I think of the dome is it’s just like the escape pod, the Bubbleator—Come on, we’re going to the future. So… that’s not very deep but, I just wondered if you knew anything—if you had known of the Bubbleator.

  M: I don’t think I know about the Bubbleator.

  W: I’m sure you can look it up on the web and find out much detail about the Bubbleator.

  M: It was just an elevator?

  W: Just an elevator! It was—I’m sure it went to like another floor where they had exhibits about the future. But, a spacesuited elevator operator terrified one of my uncles………… But… The Castle, that’s a neat thing—that’s a neat part to think about—that’s a neat part to be working on.

  M: Yeah.

  W: Very contained.

  M: Yeah………………

  W: So is the uh, when you’ve got ‌ describing the cube—is the cube… a possible castle also?

  M: Yep.

  W: Yeah, neat… Yeah, cool. Oh man, that’s so cool. Is McLeash’s Roundhouse and all of that stuff—but of course that could occur at any point in the book!

  M: Yeah. [sound of an airplane flying over the house]

  W: Sweat lodge. I can just think of so many castly things.

  M: Yeah.

  W: That’s so cool!

  M: Well the whole—the entire four books is its own castle—like you enter the castle—

  W: Right!

  M: at the very beginning when

  W: Right.

  M: when uh the door opens and the maiden much more beautiful than any other comes out—

  W: Right.

  M: and appears to Quixote.

  W: Oh, man, I can’t wait to read it, it’s just so beautiful—it’s gonna blow my mind and I’m so excited. It’s so gorgeous…

  M: You’ll know that you’re in th
e castle. I don’t know who else is gonna know that they’re in the castle, you know what I mean? But everything’s there, everything is there.

  W: Cool…

  M: All you need is there to understand.

  W: Cool…

  M: It’s just whether or not you will understand—but that’s not my problem.

  W: [laughs] Yeah.

  M: What else?…

  W: It’s just neat……… The……… cas-tle…

  M: Yeah….. And there’s a long section, and it’s the fair, you know?

  W: [laughing]

  M: No one else is ever going to see this shit but me! This section—like that’s—you’re at the fair—it’s the fair. [laughs] It’s like,

  Mr. McIntosh, will you please, uh, explain exactly how you’re at the fair?

  Well, you’re at the fair, just look. Can’t you see? Can’t you hear? Can’t you smell?

  W: Cool.

  M: And uh—

  W: Cool.

  M:

  In Book 3, sir, now I think I heard you say before that you’re at the castle? Where is the castle?

  Well, you’re in the castle.

  W: You’re in the castle, dumb-dumb.

  M: Not to mention that on page there’s two words on the page and it says, The Castle……….

  W: That’s so cool… That is so cool……….

  M: It… It almost feels like… You know we were talking the other day about Plato and the Ideas.

  W: Yes.

  M: And the Forms are out there and every Idea we have has a corresponding Form out, off in the ether somewhere in heaven. It feels like writing … the Ideas that I—the way that I see it—and I see things in shapes, and I see the castle, and I see the fair, and I see all this stuff—it feels like I’m creating Forms and putting them out there, in heaven; and here we have the Book which is full of the Ideas, but I create the Forms through the Ideas—you know what I mean?

  W: Well, like you said before, the book is the map, you know?