Conundrum (2 page)

I found Raff sitting on the edge of his neatly made bed in what could have passed for a rundown Motel 6 room, albeit without windows. The nurse at the entrance station had pointed me down a
n echoing
hallway
,
where I marched to the end, trying not to glance at the other patients populating the ward. But they sure noticed me. Eyes locked so tightly, my breath squeezed from my ribcage.
“
I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas
.
 
.
 
.
”

Raff’s face was pasty and lined. Bits of skin flaked across his forehead and his hands trembled in his lap,
as if
he had palsy. He looked fifty, not thirty-three. I awkwardly waited for him to stand and embrace me, but he only sat there and lifted his face, his slippered feet dangling slightly off the side of the high bed, making him look even more lost and little. He forced a smile, but I could see in that simple gesture how much it cost him.

“Hey, welcome to the Hotel California. You can check out anytime you like
.
 
.
 
.
”

“But you can never leave.” I grinned like a gawky high school girl trying to make conversation with the cute boy at the lockers. “Well,” I said, taking in the pukey green walls and drab furniture. “Not five-star accommodations, but
.
 
.
 
.
” I shrugged. My brother, swimming in wealth, who traveled first class and ordered only the most expensive wines—the cost of one bottle more than Jeremy brought home in a week. I wondered if Kendra had visited yet. If she would.

“For twelve hundred a day, they could
at least
give us better food. If you aren’t sure you want to die before you check in, the green Jell-O and powdered mashed potatoes remove all doubt.” A chuckle escaped his chapped lips
,
but it was empty of joy. I could tell he shaved, but with the taboo on razors in this place, I guessed he used an electric shaver. I caught him looking longingly at my purse.

“Sorry,” I said. “They went through it at the nurse’s station. Took my gun, switchblade, and my bottle of prescription pills.” Raff’s eyes
radiated
hung
e
r and disappoint
ment
.

He stood and walked over to the doorway and looked toward a lounge area. “I tried to scrounge some plastic bags out of the trash. They’re thorough here. Years of experience. Hard to suffocate on a Baggie or a candy bar wrapper. Ever try it?”

A few patients sat in front of a TV mounted on the wall, looking fairly drugged. But maybe that’s how everyone looked when they watched the soaps for endless hours a day.

“All the windows have bars. No bathtubs. No stoppers in the sinks. You don’t even get plastic knives with dinner. They cut up your food.”

I pictured green Jell-O in little cubes
. T
ough, overcooked, and unidentifiable meat in small bite-size squares. Twelve hundred a day.

Raff continued.
“This is like going through your second childhood—in case you missed your first. Except this one’s more warped, like something out of Kakfa.”
He shifted into a dramatic voice.
“ ‘
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic vermin.’ You know, most translators used the word
insect
, but the German word implies an unclean animal.
Fitting for this place, wouldn’t you say? One day you’re a normal human being, the next
.
 
.
 
.
vermin.” His voice sounded hoarse, his throat dry.

“Will they let me bring in Chinese?” I shook the image of Raff as a giant cockroach out of my head.

“And take a chance you’d laced it with arsenic, to speed me on my merry way?
D
eprive them of their joy in handing me my plastic tray full of slop three times a day
? Not gonna happen.
” Raff started shuffling down the hallway and I followed. “Let me give you the five-cent tour.” His voice carried and bounced off the scrubbed and shiny walls. No one noticed.

As Raff ambled, he pointed out the drug station where they handed
him
a paper cup of water and
his
meds three times a day. He named the patients we passed, who loitered around or sat with pained expressions on their faces. Pain filled every space of this place, thick and contagious.

“That’s Gladys,” he said, nodding at an older woman in a shabby housedress. “She’s been here for years. Slicing wrists her forte. Whereas Josh over there”
—
I looked over at a young guy, nearly emaciated, flipping a deck of cards in his hand
—
“loves pills. Any shape, any color. The more the merrier. Pops M&Ms just to keep in practice.”

My mind wandered as Raff droned on,
evidently
growing
pleased with his crass humor. And perhaps glad to have a riveted audience giving him undivided attention. Here, he would be listened to. Not like in the real world, where his antics for help fell unnoticed. Or, rather, were squelched in embarrassment. When you made tons of money, had a beautiful wife and three adorable kids
—
when you were the envy of your community and coworkers
—
you had no right to behave badly. Stop whining, chin up, take Prozac, and pretend your pain isn’t ravaging your soul. Millions of Americans suffered from depression—and they took pills and were fine, just fine. Except for the ones that did manage to off themselves. But
,
that’s not polite conversation in upscale circles. Designer drugs, yes. Suicidal mania, no.

My heart literally wrenched in pain. Like someone had grabbed it and squeezed hard, forcing tears out my eyes. “Hey,” I said, when we had returned to his room. I sat in the only seat—a stained, heavily upholstered armchair that looked like the ones adorning those old downtown hotel lobbies. Something from a bygone era. “Remember those conundrums you used to tell?”

His eyes brightened. “Yeah, all of them. That was a while back. Let’s see. You remember the guy who takes the elevator down from his apartment to the first floor? By the time the doors open, he knows his wife is dead.”

Oh, that one. Something about a wife hooked up to an iron lung and the power going out. I threw one out that came to mind. “What about the one where the guy gets ready for bed, turns out the light, and in the morning hears something on the radio—then kills himself?”

I immediately cringed. Should I have been talking about people committing suicide?

Raff smiled. “Yeah, the lighthouse keeper. An ocean liner crashes because he turned out the wrong light.” He grunted. “Come to think of it, most of those conundrums are about death.”

That cheery thought actually seemed to lighten his mood. His brain started spinning in familiar fashion. My brilliant brother—who had named every plastic dinosaur and army man—even his houseplants and the rocks he collected from Glass Beach. Boxes and albums full of coins and stamps with not a one missing, even if it meant spending six month’s allowance to get that rare mint coin. His an ordered mind and an even more ordered world. Everything accounted for, nothing missing, no
unsolved
puzzles. That
,
as far back as I could remember.

Raff expounded a litany.
“There’s the one about the guy lying facedown in the desert with an unopened package. The guy hanging dead in an empty locked room, next to a puddle of water. The guy found drowned in the ocean with a drinking straw clutched in his hand.”

They all came
barging
back into my head: the parachute, the block of ice, the third man who couldn’t fit into the lifeboat and drew the short straw.

There was always a simple answer, once you figured it out.

Raff stopped talking and tears filled his eyes. The moment hung in the silence, like a sheet flapping on a clothesline
in a vast, empty field
. He had run out of steam. I couldn’t begin to imagine the effort it took him to present a normal face to the rest of the world.
“
There will be time to prepare a face to meet the face that you meet
.
 
.
 
.
”

He collapsed on the bed and lay prone, staring at the ceiling.

“All I want to do is die, Lis. And all I keep thinking is how Kevin and Ashley and Brittany will hate me for leaving them—just as I hated Dad for doing this to me.”

My breath caught in my throat.
His words were filled with venom. Our father
had
died of leukemia at thirty-three, leaving behind three small children and a bereaved wife. My brother hated him for copping out on life—the coward! We
had
heard the story throughout our lives: how Dad suffered from depression. How he had
later
found his real father, a shlub who had abandoned him during the Great Depression. How this shock made him feel unworthy and dirty. He had bad blood, and so gave himself a blood disease—leukemia. So the fairy tale
went
. Raff was eight when our dad died. I was only four and didn’t remember him at all.

But Raff remembered. He remembered everything. I cursed his perfect memory.

“I know this sounds stupid and irrational, but I can’t help it. I can’t outlive my father. How can I do this to my children, cause them this pain—” Raff moaned with agony. Tears filled his eyes and spilled onto his cheeks, as if oozing out of his very being.

How could I help him? How could anyone help him? Manic depression was not something you could cure with reason. Raff knew he had a great life, that he was supposed to be happy. No one would willingly inflict bereavement on their own children. No doubt, the guilt over his impending appointment with death was almost as debilitating as the pain.

“The doctors will find you the right meds. Something will work
.
 
.
 
.
” I knew I shouldn’t have said that.
“
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter; I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, and I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, and, in short, I was afraid
.
 
.
 
.
”

Raff rumbled in fury. “The drugs take weeks to kick in, if they work at all. If they don’t, you start all over and you wait. Do you have a clue what this pain is like? How every damn second is a knife in your heart? You have no idea!”

No, I didn’t. I clamped my mouth shut. I had to believe in our age of miracle medicine that a drug was out there, one that would give Raff some semblance of a normal life. If he could hang on that long.

But would that
solve
everything?
Erase t
he anger and resentment?
Wash away t
he disappointment and feelings of abandonment he’d carried like an albatross around his neck his whole life?

My mind flashed to that conundrum—where the guy in the restaurant ordered albatross. The truth set him free. Was there a truth to be found out there to solve the most perplexing conundrum of all?

The one that went like this:

A man, with a happy marriage and three wonderful children, a great job as a mathematician and physicist for an aerospace company, decides one day he does not want to keep living. He wills himself to die and develops leukemia. Nine months later, he is dead.

I suddenly understood Raff’s lifetime obsession with categorizing everything neatly in its place. All to make up for the one glaring element that didn’t fit in anywhere—our father’s inexplicable death.

Was that all there was to the puzzle?
Or was there more?

I sucked in a breath. In all my thirty years of life I
had
never stopped to ask that question. That was the pat answer we were given and so we believed it. Our mother’s words played like a broken record in my head
:
“You’re too young to understand. When you grow up, it’ll make sense.”

But I’d grown up and it didn’t make sense.

For the first time in my life, that explanation rang false. Could I write my father’s death off as simple manic depression, an illness that obviously ran in the family? A death wish born from a chemical imbalance in the brain?

But
really—
could people
will
themselves into developing leukemia? I knew practically nothing about the disease other than it had to do with blood and bone marrow and white cells. That it wasn’t contagious or genetic, so we kids didn’t need to worry we’d get it. New
A
ge
philosophy
and holistic medicine might claim you could contract a disease psychosomatically. And I understood that—to a point. You could make yourself sick from stress. But give yourself cancer? My mother always spoke as if it were established medical fact. Want to die? Give yourself the corresponding disease. Feel unworthy as a woman? Give yourself breast cancer. And so the line of reasoning went.