The Answer to the Riddle Is Me

by David Stuart MacLean

  Someone was knocking at the door. Calling my name. I didn’t recognize her voice. How did she know my name? Was she angry with me for not remembering? For ruining everything by not remembering? The party, the pile of fruit on the island, all the guests, everyone I love, all there for me, and I screwed it up.

  There were voices.

  The voices were real and coming from a spot just behind my ear, making me twist my head left and right trying to spot whoever was talking. The voices started out giving me hints as to the line I was supposed to say, the one that would trigger all of my loved ones to spring out from their hiding spots and gather me in their arms, cheering. As time went on, though, the voices got nasty. They began mocking me for not knowing the line, for being such an incompetent little turd that I’d gone and forgotten.

  “Isn’t that just like you,” they cackled.

  I wanted to find the voices. I flipped the mattress over, knocked over the footstool. The light stayed off, though, and I flopped around in my piss-damp khakis as the terror sizzled through me.

  It was at this moment that the door opened and two men I had never seen before walked in and snapped on the overhead light. One was caramel colored and had a TV-news-anchor- worthy pile of silver hair. The other was shorter and darker, with a floppy black Peter Tork bowl cut and a thick mustache.

  Stunned at their sudden appearance, I stared up at them from the upended mattress stained with the Sprite and my piss and said, “This isn’t going well at all.”

  The short one began talking. “I am Mr. DeSilva, and this is my friend Sampson. We are friends of your mother. We’ve been told that you have some bad drugs in your system. We need you to stop taking them.”

  “I am so sorry about that,” I said, wide-eyed and glazed.

  Mr. DeSilva helped me up, and Sampson flipped the mattress over and quickly made it, laying a towel over the wet part. The men then helped me lie back down.

  “We need you to calm yourself, David. Do not be upset with this turn of events. You are safe. Jesus loves you.”

  And with that Mr. DeSilva and Sampson knelt beside me and prayed over me.

  “Oh Lord, Jesus Christ, our savior, thank you for all of our blessings that you have given unto us. Dear Lord, Jesus Christ, watch over this boy here. Take the devil from this boy, Lord. This boy is a good boy. He needs your help, Jesus. Take the devil from him. Draw the devil from this boy, Lord.”

  Now that the devil was involved, my hallucinations took a turn for the biblical. Now it wasn’t some future version of me and my relationships that were at stake, but my soul, for all of eternity.

  “Place your mouth on this boy and suck the devil out of him, Lord.”

  I was in a conference room with floor-to-ceiling windows, caught in a perpetual sunset. We were up so high that you looked down and all you saw were the tops of clouds. The exterior was an ungodly swash of color.

  It was a meeting. There were angels, there were demons, there was an argument concerning the status of my soul and whether or not it was allowable for it to pass into the next level of existence. A man with a mane of lime-green iridescent feathers asked if I was prepared to recite the loyalty oath that would permit me access to the next level of experience.

  I stammered. The man with the mane leaned back in his chair and exhaled. This was going to take way longer than anyone had expected.

  Sampson leaned forward from his chair and told me that it was all right, that Jesus loved me, that everything was going to be okay. His hair was lovely beyond words, a stack of shimmering silver. This was a room of gods. Just on the other side of the doors were wonders that would blind me if I weren’t properly prepared. There was family and friends and the adulation of the universe. I just needed to recite the lines that I was supposed to have memorized.

  One of the council members, black with a Hula-Hoop of black hair and gold-rimmed glasses, left, walking right out the door. I was failing. The entire council was disappointed in me. Everyone was tired. This was all taking too damned long. Even Sampson was telling me to calm down. He told me that if I didn’t calm down they’d have to move me somewhere else.

  I cried and cried.

  I snapped awake. Sampson was holding both of my feet down. His polo shirt had wet patches under the armpits. My arms were flailing, reaching for the edges of the bed, grabbing at the coolness of the linoleum floor. I was aware and seizing and ashamed and out of my mind, all at the same time. Sampson continued to mutter prayers at me but now through gritted teeth. Mr. DeSilva was gone. The tiny room was full of a sound that I realized was my own screaming.

  Music started. It was like the voices, perfectly present and absent at the same time. I felt swaddled in the melody but couldn’t find a speaker anywhere. It was a harrumphing collapse of a melody, all ooompa doompa downbeat. It swallowed everything in the room, making it dance to its rhythm. All other sounds became a part of the song spinning wild in my head. I recognized it. It was the theme song of a mid-1980s kids’ show called The Great Space Coaster, and its premise was that a magical car came down from the heavens each day and scooped up three teenagers and flew them through a rainbow, a black hole, and a massive fish skeleton to arrive at an asteroid deep in space where there was a gorilla and a massive pasty rainbow man, and they taught the kids lessons about sharing and honesty. The lyrics promised a magical ride to the other side where only rainbows hide.

  “It’s the Great Space Coaster. Get on board. On the Great Space Coaster. We’ll explore.”

  That patch of the song kept revolving again and again through my brain. I was out of my hallucinations, but this song sat between me and the world. So when Mr. DeSilva came into the room, he did so with accompaniment. It was that music that kept me from hearing what he said to me when he leaned down close and squeezed my shoulder. It was that music that the two men in green scrubs danced into the room to. And as they lifted me onto the gurney and strapped me down, it was all choreographed to “the greatspacecoastergetonboardonthegreatspace coasterwe’llexplore.”

  I was hoisted down the flight of stairs, through Mrs. Lee’s ice cube living room, and into a waiting ambulance outside. The coffee mug blossoms of her otherwise anonymous house bobbed in the wind as I was spirited away.

  With the theme song for The Great Space Coaster still rattling about in my head, I was wheeled into a green room and besieged by a pack of women. Their hands were all over me, pushing my legs and arms down. One woman had a needle, and she kept sticking me with it. I flinched every time so she couldn’t dose me with whatever poison she had. Why couldn’t they just leave me alone? She kept stabbing me again and again. I forced myself up and swung a wild punch. It connected with the jaw of a thin nurse. She fell down. The tremor of the punch traveled up my arm and sat in my chest like an anchor. I screamed, “No one touches me!” Finally they found the four-point restraints and cinched them down. Hard. A burly nurse came up and, dispensing with all bedside manner, pinned me down and jammed a syringe into a vein.

  This drug immediately severed any connection between my brain and my body, and my brain set sail on its worst voyage yet. It was as if someone had scraped all the toxic mess off the inside of my soul, all my personal asbestos and idiosyncratic carcinogens—my doubts, my fears, my failures and insecurities—everything that had caked up inside my neurology, and then force-fed it all back to me until I gagged.

  God showed up.

  He took my bicep in his hand, and I was thrust wholly into the cosmos. We flew through space together, God and I. But it wasn’t giant stars and asteroid belts; it was mostly blackness. Making wide parabolas of exploration, God showed me all of the nothingness of his creation. I couldn’t feel movement, but nothing really changes in space. Pricks of light maybe, but very far away. There was a wide hollowness. I hovered in a vast blank nothingness. I was simultaneously scared and at peace. The quiet was deafening.

  God showed me Earth, a dumb globe hanging in all the blackness. He then showed it to me in four dimensions. It was u
nbelievably beautiful. The fourth dimension, God told me, is Love. I saw the world and felt the joy of loving it all, atoms to Alps. Everything was suffused with twinkling idiosyncrasy. It was pure ecstasy to see like this. God told me that it was simple; I could stay with him and see like this for the rest of eternity if I just told him the quatrain he asked me to remember before I was born.

  God waited for an answer.

  I didn’t have one.

  He was disappointed in me.

  He reached over and flipped on the light. We were in a wide hangar. Corrugated walls, vaulted ceiling, concrete floor—cold on my bare feet. I looked at God, sitting in a director’s chair. He was Jim Henson, and that made so much sense to me that my eyes bulged with the truth. Of course God would be Jim Henson. He was fatter than I remembered, but the beard, the eyes—God’s gorgeous playful eyes—it was Jim Henson in a nightgown.

  “I make it all from here,” he said.

  One of the wide hangar doors rolled open, and I could see asphalt and palm trees.

  “Hollywood?”

  “No,” Jim Henson said, making a sour face. “Burbank.”

  I was lucid. Something snapped, and I was lucid and in a green room with a yellowing white cotton privacy screen. A man in a white coat sat at the edge of my bed. He was writing something on a chart, but his pen wasn’t cooperating. He scribbled it in the margins trying to loosen the ink.

  I knew who I was.

  I felt washed with it.

  I knew that this wasn’t normal, but I didn’t panic. I knew that I’d be okay. It was like being slipped back into a warm overcoat, smelling your own smell, absorbing your own radiated heat. I was calm. I was tied down, cloth and leather straps on wrists and ankles, but I was calm. My tongue was dry and big in my mouth. On the small wooden table next to me was a small plastic pitcher and cup, both red.

  I said to the doctor, “Thank God I took all that acid in college, or I’d really be screwed.”

  He looked at me with professional kindness.

  Something snapped. A bit of tinsel crinkle and a shimmer, and I was gone again. Swimming in infinity.

  Strapped down, I wrestled with the riddle God had given me, the quatrain he’d asked me to recite, the one that was the secret passcode into the fourth dimension. I had the first bit. I knew the first line. God had tipped his hand on that one. I was on my way to my family/place among the angels/eternal consciousness, but something was stopping me from completing it.

  “If you can’t understand that the universe was created by Jim Henson in a studio in Burbank . . .” It was an “if, then” construction. I’d figured out half of it. I said it again. Then again. It sounded right. I was giddy with my progress. Not long before, my soul had been dangling over the precipice. Now I knew half of the riddle of the universe. I just needed the second part.

  There were shapes. Blurry shapes hung over me. I was no longer in the hollowed-out universe. I was no longer in a cosmic aerie. I was in a bed, thrashing out a problem, and the shapes were cheering me on. One was dark with glinting eyes. He called me “Hero.” He had an Indian accent.

  I was in India. India was part of the answer. The most Indian thing I could think of wasn’t Gandhi or blue gods or the Ganges. It was masala dosa, the wide, thin rolled-up pancakes of southern India.

  “Fuck masala dosa,” I said to myself and laughed. God is Jim Henson. Jim Henson was funny. The riddle was gonna be funny. “Fuck masala dosa,” I said again and laughed. Then I said it again.

  “If you can’t understand that the universe was created by Jim Henson in a studio in Burbank, then fuck masala dosa, you’ve got . . .”

  I was two-thirds of the way there.

  Fuck masala dosa.

  After two days of hallucinating, the olanzapine and lorazepam had finally mellowed me enough to be unstrapped. The nurses brought me things to keep me occupied: newspapers, pens. Convinced that I was still failing a cosmic soul pop quiz, I crouched over the newspapers, believing that the answer was hidden somewhere in them. I was failing a test of my soul, but I was no longer punching people because of it. I circled words and drew complicated diagrams of sentences I found encoded in the disparate articles. The flat newsprint was overlaid with my fevered brain’s belief that there was more being communicated. And what was being communicated was essential to me for my soul’s progress to eternity. I just needed to work harder to figure it out.

  I scratched and scribbled, making connections, trying to conjure spiritual luminosity out of the Hyderabad newspaper, the Deccan Chronicle. My biggest problem was that my pen would punch through the newsprint, dragging a rip into the page. When this happened, I’d start crying.

  I shared a room with another person. I’d see his shadow cast onto the privacy screen between us at night sometimes, but I never saw him. His son came over to see me all the time. His name was Amol. He was ten and eager to practice his English.

  The room, about ten by twenty feet, was painted the same color green as the scrubs the nurses wore, just dustier. The ceiling was black, with spiderwebs in the corners. These spiderwebs moved when I wasn’t looking. I’d catch them creeping closer to me out of my peripheral vision. Sometimes the spiderwebs disappeared entirely and the corners were clean and clear. They were sneaky that way. The floor was tiled, but seemingly tiled by five workmen working from different plans. There was no pattern to the floor. Colors, shapes, sizes, all shoved together. When I wasn’t staring at the newspapers, I was staring at these tiles. The answer could be anywhere. The world was a sentence that I needed to read in order to graduate to the next level of experience. But nothing was making sense.

  I shouted a lot.

  I kept waiting for the door to open and for the police to appear. I was waiting to be held accountable for all the things I couldn’t remember. I had done such horrible things to people, hurt them, made them cry, abused all of their hard work with my violent disregard. If only I could put together the answer to the riddle Jim Henson had asked me, then I’d be free. I’d keep all the evil away, even the awful stuff that I had done, if I could only finish the riddle.

  My room became a revolving door of visitors. Patients from other wards came to visit me. I felt so guilty that I refused no one. Anyone who asked was given the cigarettes that kept showing up on the tiny table next to my bed. Strange men in hospital gowns sat on my bed and practiced their conversational English. I was going to rebuild my life by being good. Nurses lingered at my bedside, gave me heaping plates full of curd rice, and teased me by asking if I wanted some masala dosa. One nurse told me that I was the most entertaining psychotic that they’d ever had.

  I’d black out and then snap back awake in no discernible pattern. I’d wake up walking, wake up in the middle of a conversation—the other person looking at me expecting me to finish a sentence I didn’t remember starting.

  There were moments when everything was clear. I was in a mental institution. In India. This was weird, but I was safe. Everything was going to be all right. I had doctors who squeezed my shoulders and called me Mr. David. There was progress. The worst was over. Then there’d be a sparkle in my periphery, and I’d black out.

  I wasn’t sure where I’d woken up this time, but there was water in a plastic cup on a table next to my bed and a small brown boy peeking around a privacy curtain at me.

  The boy was biting the curtain, and he was rocking back and forth.

  “Amol,” a man’s voice behind the curtain said. “Don’t bother the American.”

  I had an IV coming out of my arm, and I was wearing a hospital gown.

  I woke up, and the sun had shifted on the wall and the plastic cup was gone. A man who looked like Jim Henson, but fatter, was sitting in the chair beside me. He was a white man, midfifties, in a kurta soiled around the armpits, and he was smoking.

  “At least you’re not tied down anymore,” he said.

  I woke up again, but maybe that’s wrong. I never remembered going to sleep, so maybe I wasn’t waking up during all
of this. Maybe it was just flashes of lucidity. My blood felt heavy with all of the medications coursing through me. When I woke up in the middle of conversations, I’d apologize to whomever I was talking to. I was always apologizing. I’d done so many terrible things.

  I spent five minutes moving my jaw. The man behind the privacy curtain was snoring. I pushed my tongue around my teeth. They tasted funny. The plastic cup was back. Directly across from me was a door with a glass window embedded with wire hatching. I could see people through the window, moving back and forth. Women looked in and stared at me until I noticed them, and then they disappeared.

  A doctor came in. He saw that I was watching the window.

  “Don’t mind the nurses,” he said. “You gave them a fright.”

  “What am I doing here?” I asked.

  “Recuperating,” he answered.

  “My teeth taste like paste.”

  “Can you tell me about these things that you have written?” He knelt by a pile of newspapers and picked one up. For a moment, I thought I was a journalist. On the papers, between and over the printed words, were scribbles and diagrams. They covered five pages of the paper. Blue pen and black pen. The newspapers were soft from being overhandled.

  “I did this?”

  “You’ll be fine. I was just curious.” He dropped the paper onto the chair. “You are under the care of Woodlands Neuropsychiatric Centre.”

  “I am in India.”

  “You have had quite a time here, it seems.”

  I woke up, and Jim Henson was back. He hovered over me, putting the back of his hand against my forehead.