The Answer to the Riddle Is Me

by David Stuart MacLean

  “Do you need anything, Dave? Like soda or candy or magazines or books or cigarettes?”

  It was too long of a list from a man I didn’t know. I said, “Cigarettes.”

  “Cool, man. I’ll be back. You just get better. Take it easy. I don’t know what they’re telling you, but you’re going to be fine. Get that poison out of your system. That’s important.” He grabbed the IV bag and tried to read the label. “I don’t know what poison they’re pumping into you now, but that other stuff will be gone soon.” Jim Henson reached into a bag slung around his neck. “I brought you some of my poems. The ones I was telling you about. The cycle? You know, maybe you could look at them.”

  He slid the sheath of papers under my arm.

  I woke up crying. The room was dark. I lit a cigarette and watched the little red dot float toward my mouth, glow brighter, then float away. When I turned my head it felt like my brain took a few seconds to catch up. I crushed the butt out on the bed frame, little flecks of red falling to the floor, and lit another one. I smoked until dawn.

  I often woke up in the middle of conversations with Amol. I could hear Amol’s father’s voice, and sometimes, when he had his lamp on at night, I could make out his silhouette through the privacy screen, but I never saw the man. It was a room with four beds, but two were empty. I had the one by the window.

  “We’re going to America. Right, Mr. David? You’re taking me to America?”

  “Sure. I guess.” He seemed like a good kid, and America was such a big place. How hard could it be to get to America?

  “Amol, I need you. Please come here.”

  His father spoke only English in the room.

  Jim Henson—I was too embarrassed to ask his real name since he seemed to know me so well—was sitting by my bed and chain-smoking with me. His dirty kurta was stretched tight over his stomach.

  “Dave, I went through this, man. You get to this point where you just feel like everything goes awry, and it’s like you realize that the rest of the world is crazy, and that’s when they lock you up. It’s like they have this sensor that gets set off when you realize how full of it everything is, and they come and get you and lock you up until you start thinking they’re important again.”

  Three birds flew up and sat on the ledge. Their wings, brushing against the windows, made clicking noises.

  Jim Henson tapped his cigarette out and then lit another. “But guys like us know better. Guys like us know how to fake it. Let ’em think we believe their nonsense. Let us take what we learn here, and take it out there.” He held his hands like he was holding a brick and moved them from left to right. “That’s when and how the world gets changed. It’s the only way it’s ever been changed.”

  Jim Henson examined the tip of his newly lit cigarette. “Guys like us.”

  It was night. Time was a roulette wheel. Any moment could be any moment. Close my eyes. Instant time travel. Right now it was pitch black. There was a fluorescent light from a building next door, casting everything in that grainy green light. As I smoked, I noticed bruises on each of my wrists, purple stripes three inches wide. I slid off the bed and moved as close to the window as my IV would allow, and marveled over these bruises. I wanted to stick a lit cigarette into them.

  Amol stood by the window, naming things.

  “There is an oxcart. There is a vendor. There is a car. There is a girl. There is a man.” He turned and smiled at me. It was nice to have a friend.

  His father called out from his bed. “That is fine, Amol. But what are these people doing?”

  “The girl is holding hands with a woman. The man is drinking tea. The ox is eating the refuse.”

  “Trash, Amol,” his father said. “Americans say trash.”

  Jim Henson came back often. There were always at least three packs of cigarettes on the table and fresh piles of poetry. Amol started running cigarettes to his father.

  “Ask Mr. David if I could have two cigarettes.”

  I would have one of the cigarettes lit by the time Amol cleared the curtain. Matches weren’t allowed on his side. We’d gotten in trouble before. In our room, I was the one with match privileges.

  Amol’s father had a visitor. They spoke briefly. I heard the crinkle of newspaper more than their conversation. The man looked over at me as he left. He was well dressed. Gold spectacles worn low on his nose. Starched shirt tucked tightly into his pressed slacks. He came over and shook my hand, beaming.

  “And how are you finding our country here, sir?”

  “It’s great.”

  “Have you seen the Taj Mahal yet?”

  “I’m not sure if I have.”

  “It’s wonderful. Go during a full moon. I think it’s more expensive for foreigners, but surely worth it. Truly spectacular.”

  Did he not notice my hospital gown, did he not see the bruises on my wrists from the straps, the IV dangling from my bedside that was topping off my brain with chemical solution?

  “Are you a Christian, sir?”

  “Sure, I guess.” I felt a twinge at this mention of religion but didn’t know what to attribute it to.

  The man jingled change in his pocket as he spoke. “It is during these difficult times that our Lord shows himself in his true glory.” He leaned in conspiratorially but didn’t lower his voice. “Be glad you’re Christian, son. These damned Hindus were born to suffer.”

  I didn’t dream at night. The olanzapine made sure that I experienced nothing in my brain that didn’t come through my eyes and ears and nose. It was hard to think, much less dream. Consciousness was on or off. When it was on, I was groggy and confused. When it was off, I drifted in a place as unremarkable and viscous as wood glue.

  At any moment, they were going to haul in Christina. I had figured that they’d thought that my mind was too brittle to handle the awful things I had done. When I finally got better, they’d reveal my catalog of crimes and convict me. All the drugs I’d done, the nurse I’d punched, the apartment I’d forgotten to keep up. I had found a way to be worried about getting better. My present state was perpetual anxiety, and the idea of progressing past it promised more anxiety. At the end of the tunnel would be a different kind of darkness. Christina’d be brought in, arms linked together behind her, and everything would be revealed to me. I just had to get well enough to handle my guilt.

  “I see a man in a dirty red shirt peeling a green banana and then proceeding to eat the green banana in a quick manner.”

  Amol’s English had progressed. It’d be metaphor and simile next.

  I was eating. The nurses laughed about curd rice and how much I loved it. I got extra portions of it, along with mango pickle. I shoveled it in. I wasn’t sure if everyone used their hands in India or if they didn’t want me to have a knife and fork.

  “Amol,” I said around my fingers. “Soon you’re gonna tell me what they’re thinking.”

  He came and sat on the edge of my bed, swinging his legs, bouncing them off the bed frame.

  “What’s it like not to have your memory? Is it fun?”

  “It’s not fun.” I put the plate on the side table. “It’s awful.”

  “You don’t know anything at all about yourself? You could be a murderer and not know it.”

  “Do I look like a murderer?”

  “Or you could be a famous man who came to India to give money to young boys so that they could complete their studies at the best schools.”

  “If only I could find a deserving young boy.”

  “Or you’re a cricket superstar. The fastest bowler ever seen.”

  “I don’t think they play a lot of cricket in America.” I pulled a cigarette out and tapped it against the table.

  “Have you always smoked?”

  I shrugged and lit it.

  “Amol,” his father called from behind the curtain. “Please ask Mr. David for two cigarettes.”

  “Shouldn’t I be talking to someone?” I asked the doctor.

  “You want to talk?”


  “Not really, but shouldn’t I be talking about this to someone?”

  “We’re not that kind of hospital.” After making a few ticks with his pen, he closed a folder on his clipboard. “You are on the appropriate medications.”

  “Shouldn’t I be talking to someone about something?” I lit a cigarette and then noticed that I already had one going. “You know, about the stuff I’ve done?”

  “You’ve done nothing. It’s not that kind of problem. You had an allergic reaction to a medication you were taking. An unpleasant side effect.”

  “Allergic reaction? I thought I was on drugs.”

  “You were not taking drugs; instead you were taking a drug. Nothing illegal.”

  “Am I crazy?”

  “Not any longer.” The doctor squeezed my shoulder. He was a big one for that gesture. “You will be fine. Your memory will return, and all of this will fade.”

  Panic rose in my throat. “I’m going to forget all of this?”

  “This confusion is what will fade.” He closed his notebook. “We can stop having this conversation every few hours.”

  A woman was in my room. She was white, in her early fifties, had a sensible helmet of perfect curls, and wore an elaborately beaded kurta. She and Jim Henson were talking amiably. Their conversation was intimate. They were friends. She noticed that I was watching them.

  “David, I wanted you to know that I placed a call to the embassy in Chennai. Your parents are on their way. Fulbright representatives will meet them in Mumbai, and then they’ll catch a connecting flight here. They should be here by tomorrow.” She spoke loudly, as if I were a little deaf.

  “Where are they staying?” Jim Henson asked.

  “The Taj,” the woman said.

  “Nice.”

  The two of them exchanged a look that wordlessly expressed their opinion about the kind of people who stayed at the Taj.

  “The phone call was eighty-seven rupees. I took the money for it out of your wallet, all right? You only had a hundred, so I’ll owe you, okay?”

  I nodded my head. I reached to check my pocket, but I was in a hospital gown.

  A nurse brought me a plate of curd rice. The plate was metal and had sections for several different portions, but each section just held curd rice.

  “I brought extra for you.”

  On the other side of the privacy curtain, I could hear another nurse scraping a utensil against a metal plate and urging my roommate to eat. He’d been tied down again.

  I dug into the pile of milky sweet rice. The taste of it counteracted the bitter weight of the medications.

  “I put some pickle there for you. It is a little spicy only.”

  I mixed the orange hunk of okra into my next bite. It was sour but cut against the sweetness. I beamed at the nurse. She had made my favorite meal even better than before.

  She straightened my pillow and took my empty plate from me, holding it against her hip. She smiled. “Maybe soon, Mr. David, you will want some masala dosa, maybe?”

  The nurse on the other side of the curtain started laughing.

  I woke up to a cigarette burning between my fingers. I woke up to Amol’s fingers touching my hair. I woke up to the sound of monkeys fighting on the tiny ledge outside my window. I woke up to an incredibly dark-skinned man calling me “Hero.” I woke up to Jim Henson advising me against electroshock. I woke up hunched over newsprint, forgetting the obvious connection that had been there just a second before. I woke up to a tiny Indian woman in glasses telling me that my mother loved me very much. I woke up to a Spanish woman telling me that Chekhov was her very first love. I woke up to Mr. DeSilva’s cool hand on my head and him introducing me to his wife, who stood behind him and watched me with her arms crossed. I woke up and asked strangers about Christina. I was worried about her. No one had any information on her at all. They acted like she didn’t exist. I faded in and out of my life like I was channel surfing, but there were only two channels: the wood-glue nothingness that I kept slipping into and the continuing mysteries of who I could possibly be.

  PART 2

  “How can I tell,” said the man, “that the past isn’t a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?”

  —Douglas Adams,

  The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

  The birds returned. It was morning. They were pigeons, and the sun made their iridescent neck feathers flicker from blue to pink to purple as they fought over a foil bag. I’d had another big serving of curd rice for breakfast. The nurse stayed to watch me eat it and complimented me on how well I managed eating with my hands. She wiped my mouth and cleared my plate. I had a brief moment of sadness when she left the room. People were always leaving.

  I looked at my IV bag and wondered if it was putting fluids into my body or if it was taking them out. Was the clear bag attached by tube to my wrist pulling the badness from me and, if so, was it consequently full of my insanity?

  I wasn’t sure how long I’d been in the hospital. Time stretched and condensed in ways that I couldn’t measure or predict. I could have been there overnight, or I could have just as easily never been anywhere other than that room in my entire existence. I reached over for my cigarettes on the small side table, and my parents walked in.

  Some motor in my brain spun and sparked a blue arc of electricity between two exiled neurons, and pow: recognition. It was like a day spent sorting through your attic compressed into one millisecond. They were my parents. They looked like hell.

  We made a little tent over the bed with our bodies and wept. I smelled the humid travel smell of them. I was instantly nostalgic for the moment when they walked in. There was a light in that moment, a shaft of pure promise. We let go of the hug, and I was confused again. I wasn’t sure if we’d done this a hundred times before. Were they always visiting me in places like this?

  My mom said she was sorry. I said that I was sorry. My dad pushed his glasses up in what I instantly knew was a famous way of his when he squinted back tears. It was wonderful to recognize the particular way my father cried.

  Dr. Chandra was with them.

  My mom sat on the edge of my bed and smoothed my hair as the doctor talked quietly with my dad. She pushed her thumb into the space between my eyebrows, and I recognized that gesture, too. It was something she’d done my whole life, wordlessly telling me not to worry so much. I still didn’t have my memory, but I now had an outline of myself, like a tin form waiting for batter.

  My eyes hurt. My parents being in the room with me was doing things to my brain. I was groggy with all of the medications. It was as if my emotions were smothered in layers of saran wrap, but I could feel the rightness of them: these people fit in my life, and I fit in theirs. They were a big piece to a puzzle. My mom hugged me again, careful of the IV.

  “We’re going to get you home,” she said, touching my forehead, my cheeks, the sides of my neck.

  The white woman in the beaded kurta came in almost immediately. She acted like she’d just been stopping by and was surprised at her good luck at finding Mom and Dad there.

  She shook both of their hands and introduced herself as Dr. Pat. She had a wiry thinness about her, and her veins stood out on the backs of her hands, thick as pencils, almost as if they were trying to jump clear of her body. She hugged my mom and used plural pronouns about my recovery: “We’re all doing much better now.” She talked with my dad and the doctor in the corner while my mom reached down into a bag and pulled out a shoebox. For some reason, I resented Dr. Pat’s presence. I didn’t need her anymore. My parents were here.

  “Betsy sent these along,” my mom said.

  Inside the box were two dozen cookies wrapped in wax paper. I munched one. Cranberries, chocolate, and walnuts, a universe of taste away from curd rice. At the bottom of the box, insufficiently shielded by the wax paper, was a manila envelope spotted with cookie grease. I shook out the contents of the envelope.

  T
here were dozens of photographs, all of them with me somewhere in them. If each photograph represents one sixty-fourth of a second, I held maybe two seconds of my life there in my hands in that hospital bed. Not much in the scheme of things, but at that moment it was everything.

  There was a picture of me, my blond hair sticking up in a thousand directions. I had an empty industrial-sized black garbage can in each hand, and my mouth was wide open in a howl. There was a picture of me, legs crossed, in a suit jacket and a kilt. There was a black-and-white picture of me caught in the middle of a pirouette on the hood of a Toyota station wagon. There was a picture of me hugging a black-haired woman with an amazing nose and a gorgeous gap between her teeth. There was a picture of me in a tux with a Frisbee tucked under my arm.

  I held up a picture and asked my mom what I was doing with my face like that: my eyes bugged out, my mouth screwed up.

  “That’s just something you do, David.”

  Amol came over from his dad’s side of the room and introduced himself to my mother and then to my father. He shook their hands and said to each that it was very nice to have made their acquaintance.

  “I’m helping him with his English,” I said to Mom. “He wants to come to America someday and visit us.”

  Amol turned to my mother. “David tells me that you are working with education. I am very interested in education. David has also said that you might be able to help me with coming to America?”

  My mom’s kind face fell apart for a millisecond as she tried to figure out what promises I had made to this kid. Recovering a bit, she chatted amiably about the process a person would go through in order to study in America as a university student, but she added that she thought it unwise for a young person to be away from his own family during his formative years.