THE RIDDLE, ODIN V ~ Silver Options

[Psyche]

THE RIDDLE

Marcela felt downbeat. She was driving in a careless mood, the headlights drilling for midnight oil. Last week she’d threatened a teacher, even tried to slap her. The incident had made her a cult heroine of sorts but also terminated her student life, as well as her prospects of a secure, if not brilliant career. Her name had been struck off God’s ledgers, so to speak. She’d have to migrate: follow the sun or the birds, whatever.

The road here was a cavern, an endless tunnel of trees whose branches vaulted over the black surface underpinning existence. Someone saw to it, at least, that they wouldn’t sink into hell or oblivion, which everyone richly deserved, anyhow. Marcela in particular, she acknowledged to herself vaguely, still in the alcoholic haze of her hour-less afternoon. Marcela hadn’t a clue who’d paid for her upbringing and college, yet all the same she felt a sense of guilt.

Too sudden for her to slow down, an apparition -a ghost of a running man whom the headlights turned into an overexposure- moved into Marcela’s retina for a nanosecond. The car bumped and shook. She felt the strength leaving her leg muscles as she applied the brakes. The vehicle rolled to a stop on dark grass under the trees.

“A... dog. Big one”, whispered Marcela, shaken. Lies had come easily to her lately, for no reason she knew of. Cristina, her companion, had been jerked forward from a dozing position, seat belt securing her to the indigo leather. Cristina rubbed her eyes and straightened up, trying to will things to a halt, because they really happened fast in Marcela’s life -too fast.

“If it’s only a dog, Marcela, get the hell out of here! Move!”
“No, I’ll go see.”
“No point. Forget it!”
“The party can wait”, said Marcela, in a stubborn daze.

She took a torch with her and waded into the liquid darkness. She turned around as she walked in a trance and saw Cristina’s head mummified against the luminous background conjured up by the headlights. She forced herself to stop shivering. She was supposed to be thinking to some purpose. The switchblade in her pocket felt as sinister as sin itself. Marcela focused her torch on the broken heap on the road and stumbled back to the car, breathing heavily.

Half an hour later they arrived at the party. It was in a disused mansion that leaned sideways over a dilapidated park. Stale rooms were lighted up and music stormed from the windows. Somebody’s birthday too, never mind whose; neither of them really cared.

“It was a dog, all right”, Marcela had told Cristina, who was prepared to go to any length to keep up the pretense. What the heck, this was going to be the last fling of the year, wasn’t it? Marcela parked the car, but when they got down she walked straight through the crowded house to the untidy park.

The party was a knockout. A bunch of girls in Lycra miniskirts and bright, skinny tops pushed Cristina around the floor, swaying to a strident U2, hip hopping to Eminem or making crude, laughing gestures. There seemed to be fewer males around, which didn’t surprise her. They were a disappearing species; she’d accepted that long ago. Cristina poured a purplish drink hastily down her throat, then another one... and joined the psychedelic, mostly female throng, pushing Marcela out of her mind.

Glitzy Chinese lanterns mocked Marcela in the garden. She felt the stiff night breeze and wandered back to slump on a sofa, having helped herself to the only sort of drink offered, which was indeed purple. Would anyone care to listen to a report on head wounds and exposed fractures? A hit-and-run case? Her own death wish?

A youth with hardbody muscles popping out of his brief, orange vest plunked himself at her side, inhaling sharply at a cigarette. He passed it to Marcela, but she fell asleep after the first heady puff, her body resting on starry cushions. She dreamt she was a murderess inside a paperback crime novel that erupted with fat, scarlet ants. Coke bugs, probably -she’d guessed the drinks were laced with something. Reality and fantasy were fused in a succession of nightmares. Nothing made any sense at all.

Next thing, she was being awakened by what appeared to be a butler. A butler? Did people still have butlers? wondered Marcela, fuzzily. Her head felt like a giant turbine, whirring erratically.

“What’ll we do about the radiator grill?” asked the butler man, in a surprisingly kind voice.
“The what?”
“The radiator! The thing’s full of blood, that’s what!”
“Oh…well, sure. OK, clean it!” said Marcela, dissembling casually, or so she hoped.

The gentle butler looked like somebody she had known long ago. Never mind, thought Marcela. She rose and ambled into the park. It was awfully early. Not even the birds sang. Perhaps they had been banished from this planet, more luck to them! Marcela crouched and peed behind a tree. She dug into her pocket and found one last cigarette. She puffed at it and waited for the sensation to spread into every corner of her body. Marcela knew it wasn’t going to do her any good, but she’d left off rehab after a couple of tries. She was too depressed and nobody came to fetch her back to the Rehab Center. The place was overflowing with desperate cases and the Social Workers seemed indifferent or stressed out.

She saw the beefy youth smiling at her and remembered him now. Once, when they’d been almost kids, they’d put a kitten in the oven and threatened to roast it. They hadn’t, of course, but well might have, Marcela thought. Now she gazed at him sourly and marveled at how a rickety kid like he had managed to sprout such fantastic biceps.

“Let’s go swimming!” she suddenly laughed, and threw off her clothes, keeping only her black tanga on. Inside its brief triangle, she’d clasped the closed switchblade against her skin. Her thin frame cut through the greenness quietly. She swam underwater like a stingray and then spouted like a sperm whale. At least, those were the sensations she felt, powerful yet uncertain, ever changing.

The guy hollered and swam over, his great brown body splashing up and down in the rather slimy green water. “I don’t need that! Not him!” thought Marcela wildly. Was she going mad? She crawled out and lay down on the grass, her back towards her childhood buddy. To Marcela, sex was like a faraway pinkish cloud, a meaningless blob of energy on the reduced horizon of her alienated self. She fell asleep again with the rising sun on her face; she slept all through the day.


Evening came on garish, like mismanaged make-up. It sounded warnings: rare insect calls, bats, storm clouds. Shadows plunged from heaven into the foliage. All light converged westward. The unlikely butler whispered that the police had come and gone while Marcela had been “sleeping”. They’d asked a few questions, as men of law do, and then left. Nothing much.

The butler mumbled something about Marcela’s father. She didn’t answer him. Perhaps her father had looked like the butler? Perhaps the butler was her father. Yes, she really was going mad! Her father was dead.

Oh, what the hell. So what if a suicidal wretch had been done to death by her speeding car? This was, precisely, the lofty purpose of cars: to bring over-population down a notch. Marcela strode off into the trees. Everybody else was implacably insane, not she!

She found a greenhouse commanding a view of the sunset over a lake. The glass had become encrusted with the dirt of ages. Suddenly, without warning, she saw her father’s face, as sharp as she’d visualized it on that blazing morning, long ago, when she’d learned about the fatality.

Her father had gotten drunk in town and climbed over a railing on to the dark highway, during his trek home. Perhaps he’d mistaken the strong railing for the farm gate. The family lived on a farm that had an old, wooden gate with iron bars at the entrance. Marcela used to perch for ages on the swinging wooden frame, waiting for her father… waiting to steady him, hold his arm, get him safely home the last 100 yards. Sometimes he vomited before reaching the bathroom.

But that crucial evening she was dead beat and wandered home sadly, leaving the latch undone. She’d never grasped the fuzzy logic of her mother’s wrath. Latched gate! Unlatched gate! What the hell difference did it make? So sometimes you messed up, OK?

Now, as swiftly as her father’s ghost had come to her, it vanished without so much as a commanding order or some earthshaking revelation. Hamlet, at least, had been given a mission to complete. Marcela reflected peevishly on the unfairness of it all. Perhaps machismo reigned even in visions. Any sort of redemption would’ve been welcome, even if it were to imply madness and treachery, or perhaps incest.

Tragic heroines were supposed to be immortalized in great literature, but she could only bring to mind Antigone, whom she’d read at school. Damn fool woman, anyway, making such a fuss when she could have married the heir to the throne. The rest of the main female characters Marcela had heard about were always wicked, like Medea and Lady Macbeth. Juliet didn’t count in Marcela’s mind, since she’d only seen her in a movie; fancy going to such extremes of agony over that baby-faced Di Caprio! On the other hand, tragic heroes, including the dithering kind, or perhaps those especially, were majority.

But nobody in their right mind would write about her, not even herself, not Marcela! She’d been only seven at the time of the accident. Her mother had taken to alcohol, the farm auctioned, her sisters wandered off to squalid destinations, drugs, casual sex, pregnancies.

Only Marcela had miraculously reached college. Of course, nobody had logged-in her emotionally charged achievements in some sort of registry, or however that was supposed to be done. A few of her friends went to therapists who took reams of notes that they never revealed to them. Marcela wouldn’t have allowed that, she’d have asked politely to see the notebooks where her life was being scribbled, or else snatched them away if necessary. But instead she’d gone it alone. Nobody had ever cared. And now Marcela couldn’t care anymore. Love was not something she understood, love was like a foreign word, an unattainable mystery, rich with meaning for some people but not for her. Worst of all, she didn’t even love herself.

The untamed greenery looked like the robes of outlandish monks, while the souls of dead communicants seemed to offer up chalices and wafers. The air was stagnant. Marcela lay down on the ground. She didn’t mind the hum of organic life about her. She became the leader of ants, a million millions of them in assorted degrees of ferocity. Before the night was out, she would become an ant herself. Nobody would miss her now, nobody ever had, anyway.

The schizoid effect of that last cigarette was overpowering, added to whatever the purple drinks had been spiced with. The coke bugs were in command, absolutely. She began toying with her switchblade. With its cool tip she entered a riddle on the soft skin of her forearm. A little blood attached itself to the writing. Marcela laughed out loud. Riddles! The key to power and glory! She felt totally lucid now. Sphinx-like, she inscribed another riddle on her skin, and another and another, until myriad droplets had emerged. Soon they became a river of blood. She could think of so many blood-riddles, in fact, that when the search party found her body at last, red as the crawling coke bugs in her mind, only the “butler” would fathom the cause of her labyrinthine death.

Marcela’s real father broke down and cried, Marcela, forgive me...my poor, darling daughter!

A crunched sheet of paper fell out of his coat pocket. Cristina, standing behind him, picked it up and flattened it out on the edge of the nearby pool. On it was written:

Dear Marcela: Your Mom made me promise not to tell you, but her mind was not right, drowned in alcohol, it was. So I’ve decided to break my promise. It was not your father who died on the highway when you were seven. That man was already a broken-down old drunkard, pitiful and sick. Your Mom didn’t love him, she just did her best for him; he was her husband and she was a good woman, she was. She and I had been lovers for years. I was married, but childless. You were my first and last-born. I cared for you, I paid your way through college. You saw me around, didn’t you? I used to drop by with the signed papers, the bills, the receipts. The money for your clothes, most of which your mother spent on alcohol...

The car. Everything. I took care of everything. I even came to this party, Marcela, because I’d found out about the trouble you’d gotten yourself into. People talk and I wanted to help you, fast. I wanted to tell you that I was your father; I wanted to give you the love you never got, a new life.

I love you, Marcela, I love you so much.... but I never told you. Please try to forgive me. Your Mom and I had plans, but then the accident, and then your mother’s retreat into alcoholism... I did my best to stop her, but I think she already drank before we met, she was so unhappy with that man, that man whom you thought was your father.

That’s all I have to say. I hope we can meet and have a talk, soon.

Love from your real Dad, Fred Nolan.

Cristina sat for a long time staring into the green waters of the pool. Her mind was going over the incident on the highway, the “dog” Marcela had apparently hit. That was it! That was the answer to Marcela’s tragic riddle. Inside, deep down in her heart, Marcela had always known the truth about her parents. Somehow, somewhere, Fate had decreed that the vast universe would even out things, though Marcela would not be conscious of it. Perhaps another little girl, in some distant farm, had just lost a drunken father, last night on the open highway, and was being blamed for leaving a gate open or shut. Zany, but possible.

Cristina crumpled up the paper and threw it into the pool, her eyes brimming with tears. She recalled Marcela’s infatuation with tragic heroines in literature. She’d never stop talking about them, one way or another. Cristina walked slowly up to the greenhouse, where her friend’s body was being covered with a blanket. People explained that there would be an inquest. Nothing was to be touched.

Cristina knelt by the slight bundle on the ground. She gently lifted the blanket and whispered into Marcela’s ear: “You were the greatest heroine of them all in this bungled world.”

By Psyche.

Copyright: Sylvia Maclagan, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2006. All rights reserved as an unpublished work.

[Cleo_Serapis]

Thank you for your entry into Odin's Opposition, Sylvia!

Perhaps you’ll rise up, drink from the Well of Wisdom and be crowned the ‘bringer of victory’?

Best of luck in the battle!

~Mosaic Musings Staff

[Cleo_Serapis]

Congratulations Sylvia on your Silver placement!

You have risen up, drank from the Well of Wisdom and have been crowned the ‘bringer of victory’!

Well done!

[Psyche]

Thank you so much, Cleo, for your congratulations, and to everybody who had something to do with the two Silver Awards. I'm so pleased, quite speechless...haha...

Hugs to all,
Syl ***