The Puzzle

The first draft of another story for my writing group.

The Puzzle

He was in his study working on the puzzle, as usual, when the end came. If he had been paying attention to anything else, looked up from his table or abandoned, just for a brief moment, the intense concentration that totally absorbed his mind, then he might have seen it coming, or done something, anything to prevent it. But perhaps not, perhaps it was simply an inevitably, part of the complex pattern of the puzzle that he would now have to take into account in his work. Either way, there is nothing to be done now, afterwards; the work must continue, somehow, though it seemed impossible - for he is so close now, he is sure, so close to solution, resolution, peace.

In fixed determination he stares down at his work. In some random part of his mind it registers that he had not yet had any food today, but the thought is soon brushed aside by the sheer weight and gravity of the puzzle before his eyes. The room is overflowing with it; parts of it lay on the floor or taped to the wall, or laid out with care and precision on the table before him. The puzzle is overwhelming; it is enormous, a thick framework of images and words and symbols dancing together in a chaotic tumble of paper and ink and magic marker to a rhythm only he can hear or understand. Newspaper clippings with various sentences underlined in blue pen, photographs captioned neatly and with great detail, scribbled notes on torn pieces of paper, magazine advertisements, coupons, press releases, historical documents, contracts, pages torn from various books--these are the pieces of the puzzle, and as he is always looking for more there are more pieces now then there had ever been. The boxes stacked neatly in the corner are filled with hundreds more. It is a momentous undertaking that has dominated his life for over six months.

He isn’t sure when the idea for the puzzle came. He just knows that as long as he can remember he has felt that there was something he was missing, some vital piece of information, perhaps even obvious in its way, that he had failed to see or understand. He often feels like everybody else knows something important that they aren’t telling him. He wonders if its all a big joke; that they watch him feel his way feebly through life handicapped, crippled without the whole truth while they all snicker behind his back. He is fairly sure that this feeling is paranoid and baseless, but he is also fairly sure that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. There is a smile that everybody, it seemed, could use but him - a smile that communicated a kind conspiratorial condescension, an “I know something you don’t know” smile of the sort the planners of a surprise party give their unknowing friend on his birthday, or like the person who knows you’re going to be fired gives you just before your boss calls you into your office. At every memorable or vital moment of his life, the smile was present on the face of a friend or stranger, mocking him as if in pity that he still had no idea what was really going on. He had first seen it on the face of his father, many years ago, after his goldfish had died. His father had said that things like that just happen, but then he had smiled that sad, knowing smile which told his young son in a moment of intuition that he was hiding something. After that, the smile was present at birthdays, at injuries, at joy and sorrow and at every point of transition in his life. The memories of the smile were now written out clearly on pieces of scrap paper occupying central positions in the puzzle on the table before him, every single one – even when he had met her, the one he loved, had shared his life with. The waiter in the expensive restaurant had smiled the smile at him the moment he realized that he was love with this woman across the table. Love too, then, is a part of what he does not understand.

And he has to know. He can no longer bear the feeling of being lost, floundering half-blind through the choices life brought him, seeing the smile on every face. The answers are out there, he knows, out in the crowded mess of a world that surrounds him. That world, that reality, that mess: that is the puzzle, and he is going to solve it from his little study in his little house. For the whole premise of the puzzle is that the answers he is looking for can be found buried out there, like the image in one of those magic eye posters. At first glance, there is nothing but a chaotic clatter of color and shape set to no particular order, like a Pollack painting, erratic, whimsical yet bearing the same inexplicable sense of meaning hidden, somewhere, for those who knew how to look for it. Then suddenly, a shift of the eyes, a change in focus, the brain switching gears and cutting to a new camera angle, and there is a train, or a dolphin, or a ball floating before your eyes; a three-dimensional, definite, clear, and communicable image. One day, he thought, the puzzle would yield the answers in a similar fashion. One day he would put the right piece in the right place and look at it like he'd never done before and suddenly, POP, he would see it – the truth, the meaning, in all its glory and radiant absoluteness.

The work progressed slowly at first. He would cut out a news article or scribble down something he saw or heard and then put them in a little file folder so he could refer to them later. She had even helped him at first, pointing out things that she thought he might be interested in, indulging him in his private eccentricities with great love and patience. Slowly, however, his collection began to dominate his thoughts as he began to feel more and more convinced that there was something vital there to find. The last half of a year he had held it above all else, above food, above sleep, above her. She began to slip away, gradually, as the puzzle took her place in his heart. She was loving, she was patient, but she was not a fool.

“I’m leaving,” she had said from the doorway of the study, where he did not look up to see her. He had merely muttered a distracted goodbye as he stared intently at a picture of a man crying and tried to fathom its elusive meaning.

“I’m leaving” she had repeated, “and I’m not coming back.”

It took a few moments for her voice to penetrate the cloud around his brain, several moments more for him to interpret the sounds into words, the words into sentences, the sentences into one fearful meaning. He had looked at her then, staring inquisitively into her sad brown eyes and, waiting just a moment for the silence in the room to wash over them, asked only this: “Why?”

“You’re good with mysteries,” she said, smiling sadly, “I’m sure you’ll figure it out.” And then she was gone.

He stared at the doorway where she had stood, his blood cold in terrified shock. Her smile, as she left, was familiar and cruel and burned into his mind with painful clarity. He had seen it on the face of a hundred men and women he had met, but never on hers, not until this, the loneliest of moments. It had haunted him in dreams and nightmares, in good times and bad; it had signaled the beginning of his love, and now it signaled the end. It was fitting then, he thought wryly, that he should be in the study working on the puzzle, as usual, when that end came. He had quickly torn a piece of paper from a battered notebook and transcribed this latest experience with the smile, his hand shaking. It is a monumental clue, perhaps, the smile, her absence, the pain that was collecting into a knot in the pit of his stomach, the clue that could finally set him on the path to enlightenment.

So the work had gone on. This most recent of tragedies would be explained, along with everything else, once he unlocked the mystery of the pieces before him. And yet it is more difficult, somehow. His concentration, once unwavering and impenetrable, often falters for a moment, and many times he looks up towards the door of his room at a noise he believes he heard signifying her return. He tries in vain to push her from his mind, but her face keeps floating up on the pictures and postcards and papers that he shuffles and reshuffles before him.

He had always known a pit in his stomach, the feeling of loss and incompleteness, but it was stronger today. It threatened to drag down his determination to solve the puzzle, to move, to live. There was a sense of pointlessness so complete now that he began, slowly but with increasing fervor, the validity of the puzzle. Could he really find the answers, and, more terrifying still, were there really any to find? What was it, anyway, this thing he held in his hands? The secrets of the meaning of life, his whole life's struggle resolved, defined, annotated? Or was it just paper and ink and fantasies, and everything that really mattered had walked out of that room and never came back?

No, he cannot believe that. Not after so many years of certainty, not after everything he had given to come this far. The darkness clung around him, hung from him like a heavy chains, pulling him down to despair, but he knew he must press onward. There may be no future for him now, nothing bright for him without her, but he must know. It is the only way to redeem himself.

With this in his mind, he looks at the puzzle again, and then it happens. The light in the room shifts, and he cocks his head slowly to one side. There is something there, something slowly unraveling into sense, forming into ideas and words. It seems to bleed from the puzzle, slowly at first, and then suddenly in a rush. He pushes pieces aside, replaces them with new ones, highlights words, circles parts of photographs. He is not certain where this path is leading him, but he knows, somehow, he knows it will lead him to the end. His heat beats thunderously in his chest, his hands shake, and just before the last piece is put into place, just at the threshold of solution, he lets out a cry of terror and closes his eyes tightly.

He is afraid to see. He is so close, all it would take now is to open his eyes, but his eyes won’t open. His stomach is twisted into knots worthy of a boy scout, his mouth dry and his head pounding. If he looks, it is all over. The finality terrifies him. The possibility that it was all in his head, that there is nothing to be seen, scares him more. And there is another possibility that suddenly occurs to him, one he has never paused to consider before. Perhaps he does not want to know what the puzzle hides, what the answers behind the smile revealed. He would not be the first to decide the truth is too terrible to face, too all-encompassing, too true. His ignorance could be a blessing, and he'd never know until he lost it forever if it was any worse than the alternative.

This is the moment, he knows, when the search ends. When he opens his eyes, he will either see the hidden meaning long since lost, or hidden, or misinterpreted, however terrible or enlightening, redeeming or damning - or he would see only a crowded table in the lonely house of a lonely man and portents of an empty life. Before him lies either the hand of God revealed, the purpose and the reason - or a god he himself created, an altar to an idol on which so much that was precious had been sacrificed. There can be no turning back, for he cannot close his eyes forever, as much as he might try, as much as he might cling to the darkness and hide. The end has come.

With a deep breath, with tears falling down his cheeks like rain, he opens his eyes slowly, cautiously, and blinks into the light of the puzzle.

“Ah,” he whispers.