The Answer to the Riddle Is Me

by David Stuart MacLean

  The best restaurant for green chiles in town is out of town. You drive down an old road that used to be the main route between Las Cruces and El Paso. It takes a while, but right when you think you’re lost, you end up at Chopes.

  Chopes is two buildings: one is the bar, and one is the restaurant. Both are tiny and loud. The front parking lot is stacked with motorcycles, and the insides of the buildings are filled with black leather–clad giants. The bar serves quart bottles of beer that look proportional in the fists of the giants. A typical wait for a table on a Friday night is well over an hour, so you find yourself perched on one of the impossibly high stools at the bar, and you can end up so drunk that you can’t imagine why you ever wanted to eat in the first place. But the phone is always ringing in the bar, and it’s always the restaurant with another open table; your name gets called, and you head over across the gravel parking lot. Outside, it’s colder than you expected, and the first chilly draft of air lets you know how drunk you really are. When you start to talk, you realize that you’re still taking into account the bar noise, and you find yourself yelling at your friend until you catch yourself, and you both bust up over how the night is spinning predictably out of control. You zip your sweatshirt a little snugger when you feel yourself being sized up by the giants smoking astride their machines. There’s a giddy slickness that comes over you when you realize that you might end up in a bar brawl with bikers. You want to push one of those metal monsters over just to hear its headlights pop in the gravel, just to have one of those giants punch you right in the face.

  The restaurant’s screen door bangs behind you, and there’s a line of people in a thin yellow hallway. Your enthusiasm for the meal is coming back and teaming up with your drunkenness; it makes you loud again, but this stops quick with a look from the tiny woman at the front. She’s old and stern, and she’ll only seat you if you shape up. You leave the hallway and realize that the restaurant is somebody’s house. The kitchen is in the back and looks like your kitchen, cramped and prone to smokiness. There are tables in what used to be the living room, tables in what used to be the dining room, and a long row of tables shoved together for your party’s benefit in what used to be a den, the whole place done in wood laminate paneling. The restaurant is staffed exclusively with tiny, disapproving women.

  What you order matters very little. Every plate that emerges from that little kitchen is a uniform beige. Plates of beige, the entire beige rainbow. You order another quart of Tecate and dive in to the chips. Someone at your table is bound to put his hand to his mouth and claim that the salsa is too spicy for him, maybe even indelicately spit out the chip into his paper napkin. The beer comes; the food comes; people eat half their plates before they realize their orders are switched. Ha ha ha.

  You argue about the check. Everyone is short. Everyone is cheating and forgetting to add a tip. Somebody is sulking about how they shouldn’t have to pay since their food was half-eaten by someone else. The scowling women shush you.

  You’re outside in the night air. You want to throw a rock at a parked motorcycle. You want to run down the center of the empty street. You want to wrestle. Why doesn’t anyone else want to wrestle?

  Now you’re driving, the road slaloming between giant lurking dark figures of pecan trees. Their outstretched arms press into the side of the road, reaching for you. You’re drunk, but you have the window down, and you asked your buddy to drive in front of you so you can steady yourself with his brake lights. You watch them like subtitles. The cold air stabs clarity into your eyes, your blinking eyes; you keep blinking your eyes.

  The dog is whining when you get home. You’re an awful dog owner. You apologize to her as she pisses in the front yard. You tell her you know that she’d be happier somewhere else, that you don’t deserve her; you shove your face into her fur and apologize. You smoke a cigarette and decide to walk to the bar in Mesilla. It’s not that far, and you can get there before last call. The cars on the highway drive too damn fast, and they honk at you walking on the shoulder, the Doppler effect of their horns and tires ricocheting into the valley. You pass the gas station and decide to buy cigarettes there instead of at the bar because it’ll be cheaper. In the gas station the fluorescent lights belong to another planet. You buy two packs of cigarettes, and the person behind the counter is amused with you, the way you fumble with your wallet, the way you press the pen into the receipt too hard and tear it as you sign more debt to your name. At the bar you don’t see anyone you know and the music is awful and there are all these women in burgundy bridesmaid dresses and you order a double rum and Coke for some reason and it’s last call and you can’t get the bartender’s attention and you leave without paying because they were playing awful Jimmy Buffet Parrothead music and that’s what they deserve and the clerk’s look from the gas station has stuck with you and the dog’s whining has stuck with you and every passing honking car horn has stuck with you. You try and talk yourself into some tears. Crying will knock all of this out of you; you feel like an emotional catharsis on the shoulder of the dark highway will make the world feel real again, will stop everything from feeling as distant, plastic, and prepackaged. Break this awful feeling like a fever. But no tears come. That hollow feeling is there instead, the one that makes you want to tackle light posts, jump through plate glass windows, lean into the road and get clipped by a Jeep Wagoneer, cause some disruption in the world, end up on a gurney, get strapped down in the back of an ambulance, let someone else monitor your fluids and check your vitals, let there be phone calls on your behalf and meetings with a quorum of the concerned who claim that they were unaware that it had gotten this far out of hand, that you had gotten this far out of hand, that you obviously need the clear road as defined by the handling of professional caring others. Because all of these decisions, these decisions of cigarette brands and combination plates and quart beers and driving drunk, it’s too much for you. The warm womb of a hospital room, the sharp scrape of a plastic spoon hitting the bottom of a plastic bowl as someone feeds you curd rice, let you be born again again, hit the button and be reset again again. You got it wrong this time.

  You get home safely. You’re not lucky enough to get into an accident. There is nothing in the fridge and the bookshelf is full of things you haven’t read and you’re too exhausted to not turn on the TV and the dog licks your hand apologetically. You’re not going crazy. You watch for it all the time. But you’re not. You’re drunk and not going crazy, and continuing on in the world of the sane is harder than you thought.

  You don’t want to want to die.

  Alan Moore wrote a story about Superman called “For the Man Who Has Everything.” It’s Superman’s birthday, and Batman and Wonder Woman have come to his Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic to give him their gifts. They find him standing catatonic in his trophy room, a box and wrapping paper at his feet and a strange bit of plant life lodged in his chest, its vines encasing his bulletproof torso.

  Superman is an immigrant, one of the last surviving members of a doomed planet. He’s the rare superhero who has two secret identities, one nestled inside the other. He’s Clark Kent, Kansas farm boy turned Metropolis reporter, and he’s also Kal-El, born on the now dead planet Krypton. In addition, he is also Superman. He is three different people, constantly moving between costumes.

  Birthdays for Superman are bittersweet occasions. If his home planet hadn’t been destroyed, he’d be an ordinary, nonsuperpowered citizen of Krypton, just Kal-El. In order for him to be Superman, he had to be sent some million miles away from his family.

  Superman has friends, but most of them wear masks. Clark Kent has friends, but he has to hide his real abilities from them. He has three identities, and none of them seem to be who he truly is. He’s the most famous man in the world, yet he chooses to spend his birthday in his Fortress of Solitude, an ice and steel structure he built for himself in the frozen wasteland of the Arctic.

  Now one of the gifts that he has opened was a trap, and a parasitic
organism has attached itself to him. Batman and Wonder Woman can’t remove it without killing Superman.

  Suddenly, the enemy reveals himself. He’s the standard thuggish oversized alien would-be world conqueror that Superman has dedicated his life to fighting. His name is Mongol. He knows he could never beat Superman in a fistfight, so he developed a trap using an alien plant. What the plant does is feed on the dreams of its victims. It induces a coma in its host, giving him visions of his greatest desire in order to keep him placated. While Superman is out of the way, catatonic with hallucinations, Mongol can finally conquer Earth.

  In Superman’s hallucination, he’s Kal-El, living on a Krypton that never exploded. Kal-El comes home one night after working late at the lab. The lights are off in his high-rise apartment, which overlooks the gorgeous Kryptonian skyline. Kal-El calls out greetings first, and then apologies to his wife, to his children, for being so late. All of them go unanswered. Then, just as the edge of malice starts to set in, the lights all pop on at once, and—surprise! Everyone is gathered in the living room, cheering Kal-El a happy birthday. Kal-El makes the rounds of the room, hugging coworkers and family members, pausing to kiss his wife. The party ends, and everyone leaves. Right before they make love, Kal-El’s wife makes a comment about how he’s been so distracted recently.

  As Superman hallucinates, Mongol starts to fight Batman and Wonder Woman. Batman is no match for the fisticuffs, so he ducks out and tries to figure out how to detach the plant from Superman. Wonder Woman gives her best. She and the villain trade incredible blows, which send each of them careening through the metal walls of Superman’s fortress.

  In Superman’s mind, Kal-El takes his son through the streets of Krypton. His son is curious and quick, peppering him with questions. Kal-El is still troubled. None of this seems right to him. His wife. His son. They are all he could have ever wished for, which makes them suspect.

  That day he has taken his son to the crater left behind when the city of Kandor mysteriously vanished. Kal-El brought his son here to teach him a lesson about loss. Here was a city gone, all of its secrets forever kept, which meant that they weren’t secrets anymore, just absences. A crater is an absence you can see. A fog rolls in. Kal-El turns to his son and tells him that he loves him, but that he knows that he’s not real, that none of this is real. The son starts crying. He begs his father not to say such things.

  Superman tells his son that he’s a hallucination.

  The plant releases his grip on Superman’s chest, and Batman places the plant back in the box. Released from his stupor, Superman beats Mongol, then places the plant on Mongol’s chest, imprisoning him forever in his own personal fantasy.

  Superman had to redestroy his home world in order to come back to reality. He had to turn his back on the loving wife he never had. He had to leave his son crying at the edge of a crater in order to return to himself. He had everything he wanted in his hallucination, but in the name of reality, he had to reexperience all the pain of his orphaned, marooned life on an alien planet. Even a comic book character has the sense to recognize the validity of the real over the imagined.

  I tell you this because there was something lovely and horrid in my hallucinations. The emotions stirred within them were real, even if the images weren’t. I was denied access first to my loved ones, then to the upper ranks of the angels, and finally to transcendent knowledge—ultimately rejected by God himself. I saw the breathtaking depth of a world in four dimensions. These things never existed outside of my skull, and I felt hollowed out by them. I knew better, and it didn’t matter.

  My hallucinations left me feeling like the inside of my soul had been flapped out for the world to see; the shame I’d carried through my life had bubbled out and been exposed to the air, and now it wouldn’t recede. I felt like my veins were on the outside of my body.

  Halloween came, and I covered my face and arms with chalk dust and blue body paint, wrapped the rest of me with aluminum foil and saran wrap, and duct-taped a digital clock to my chest: I was a cryogenically frozen man. The party was in the backyard of one of the guys in the program. He was dressed as John McEnroe, in tiny white shorts, a tight white polo, an Afro wig, a headband, and a prosthetic cock that extended out of his shorts by ten inches. He greeted every guest by grabbing his racket and dropping down into the ready stance, the cock swinging wildly between his legs.

  There was a bishop, a naughty librarian brandishing a whip, a Marilyn Monroe, a woman in a pink wig who’d made a bustier out of duct tape, a woman in a disco-era catsuit, and a very pregnant woman who’d made herself up to be Tony Soprano. Anne came in a dress onto which she’d stitched a dozen plastic lizards.

  Clark, the poet from Kansas who was half of the incredibly good-looking couple I’d met at the beginning of the year, came to the party by himself. He said his beautiful wife, Tanya, wasn’t feeling well. She had been absent from several parties recently. When I got there at nine, he was shotgunning cans of Coors Light and weaving around with a bottle of Jim Beam.

  There was dancing. Magnetic Fields, Jay-Z, Neutral Milk Hotel, OutKast, Kanye West, the Shins. As I danced, my costume peeled off me. I had left my car at someone else’s house, so I borrowed a shirt from well-hung McEnroe and sat down for a while to cool off. A woman came up and sat next to me. She had showed up with her husband and was wearing a pair of cat ears she’d probably picked up at a gas station. I’d met her husband earlier in the year. He was short and had incredibly thick skin, like a pumpkin, that advertised every nick and scratch he’d ever received. I never heard him voice an opinion everyone didn’t already agree with.

  His wife and I started talking. She was drunk and immediately started pulling cigarettes out of my pack without asking and divulging intimate secrets. Within five minutes, she’d told me that she’d cheated on her husband while they were engaged and that it was a testament to how great a guy he was that he married her anyway. I remembered something that Geeta had said and told her that monogamy was the appendix of modern culture, primed to burst. I was a little drunk, too.

  “You don’t respect women,” she said.

  “What?”

  “It’s something I noticed about you when we first met two years ago. We were at a dance, and you were dancing with Jenn, and you dropped her.” She took a drag off the cigarette she had bummed from me and continued, “Instead of helping her up, you turned your back and kept dancing.”

  “I was probably drunk,” I said. I had no memory of the event, so I couldn’t refute it. Jenn was the woman whose house I awoke at after my anniversary night of panic attacks and drunkenness. She didn’t seem to hold a grudge.

  Cat Ears blew smoke out in a thick rope and shook her head. “And then when this stuff with Anne happened, it wasn’t a surprise to me since I knew that you had issues with women.”

  “I don’t respect women?”

  “Take my husband. He and his brothers treat their mother like a queen. She doesn’t have to lift a finger when they’re around.”

  “You have no idea what happened between me and Anne,” I snapped at her. I was swimming in the borrowed shirt, and the saran wrap on my legs was starting to itch. How the hell was I going to get home?

  “I saw you drop her and keep dancing. That told me everything I needed to know.” And with that she pulled out three cigarettes, tucked them into her shirt pocket, and threw the empty pack at me.

  One morning as I sat outside watching Sally chase after the tufts of cotton that blew off the field behind the house, a truck full of men with survey equipment showed up in the empty lot across from me. They marked lines in the dirt. They drove rebar into the ground at specific points and then strung twine between these points. Just like that I was separated from the mountains by the outline of a fence.

  The birds found the fence quickly and snatched the leftovers of the workers’ lunches, perching on the taut twine while the men set about digging trenches and erecting wooden forms.

  The next day a cement mixer sh
owed up, and the men used hoes and rakes to coax the gray slop into the forms, then smoothed the top of the forms with flat pieces of wood. By the end of the week the wooden forms had been broken away, and the new walls of the fence were painted pink to look like adobe. It was five feet tall and obscured my view of the foothills.

  At night, I’d grab a Tecate from the fridge and walk Sally through the newly asserted compound. Within a week, a cul-de-sac had been marked, then graded, then paved. Driveways to nothing started showing up. Then one night when I came home and put the leash on Sally for our walk, we found giant yellow machines sitting curled up, hulking, and quiet next to giant holes, as if they had nothing to do with them. Each driveway had an adjacent hole. The new fence now looked like it had been built so that these new holes could be protected. I threw my empty can down into one of them. Sally peed on one of the machines.

  The world was moving so quickly. I felt like I’d never be able to catch up.

  Anne stopped talking to me. According to mutual friends, she was now on a new regimen, swimming laps every single day. To see her on campus would be to see the damp outline of her suit wetting through her outfits. She also carried around an enormous mug with a crinkled straw poking out that she was forever sipping from. Friends said she wasn’t eating, but she was drinking over two gallons of water a day.

  I received two packages in the early days of November. One was a knit scarf from Ariel, my ex from years back. The note with it said that she hoped I was doing well and that I could call her if I wanted. The other was a beat-to-hell copy of The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar by Roald Dahl and a long handwritten letter from a woman acknowledging her part in the problematic relationship that we had had. She wanted me to know that she valued the time we had before things went bad. The book, she said, was hers from her childhood. It had always been her favorite, I reminded her of parts of it, and she thought I should have it.