Conundrum

Conundrum

A novel by C. S. Lakin

Copyright 2011 C. S. Lakin

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This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons living or dead, or actual events, locales, or organizations is entirely coincidental.

Books by C. S. Lakin

Contemporary Suspense/Mystery

Someone to Blame

Innocent Little Crimes

A Thin Film of Lies

Intended for Harm

Fantasy

The Gates of Heaven Series
:

The Wolf of Tebron

The Map across Time

The Land of Darkness

The Unraveling of Wentwater

The Crystal Scepter (2013)

The Tower of Sand (2013)

The Seventh Gate of Heaven (2014)

Sci-Fi

Time Sniffers

To my mother

If only
. . .

Chapter 1

June 1986

The conundrum
went
like this:

A man walks into a nondescript restaurant tucked away in an alley. It’s taken him years to find such a place, and his agitation is palpable. He orders albatross—broiled. With trembling hands, he picks up his fork and knife and slices off a piece of the seared white flesh.
J
uices drip onto his plate as he brings the morsel to his mouth. The aroma nauseates him as he squeezes his eyes shut and bites down.

The man’s weathered face relaxes. He sighs, sets the knife and fork down on the starched linen tablecloth, and places a hand over his heart, as if to calm its beating.

He smiles at the waiter, who bows politely and attends to the other diners. Relief washes in absolution. He raises his eyes to heaven and whispers, but no one hears him.

“Thank God, I’m free.”

Of all the wacky conundrums Raff piled on us over the years, that was the hardest—if I discount
ed
the convoluted
tale
of the surgeon who performed a highly skilled operation, yet was supposed to be missing an arm. It took Neal and me three days of battering Raff with desperate
yes-or-no
questions to arrive at the answer. I remembered him gloating, sporting that
sixties’
Beatles haircut so popular back then, his black straggly bangs falling into his brooding pubescent eyes. He never
relinquished
hints
—
even when we begged out of frustration
. E
ven when we
beat
him with pillows and punched his arm
s
as hard as we could. Raff loved to wield his secret knowledge over us measly peons of his intellectual kingdom, a king with the power to wave his scepter and send dissenters to the gallows of humiliation—something he often did.

And the answer was so simple, as most of those conundrums were.

A group of
starving
shipwrecked soldiers during World War II resorted to cannibalism before an unexpected rescue. But to alleviate guilt, one group ate human flesh
, and
the other, albatross—the only meat they could find on their deserted island. No one knew which they were served; thus, they could assuage their consciences, live in blissful ignorance. But the man in our conundrum had spent his life in anguish, needing to know. Until that question was answered, he would have no peace. He somehow had to find a way to taste albatross before he died. The truth—so late in coming—set him free.

I wondered—as I tromped up the fourth flight of stairs—what would have happened if he had taken that bite and didn’t recognize the albatross, recoiling in the realization he had eaten various body parts of his friends? Would he still have felt free? The gist of the conundrum implied no, but that fabricated story begged the question: does freedom lie in the absolving of guilt
. . .
or in the liberating wings of truth?

Was discovering truth what really set him free?

That’s what I needed to know, random musings as I marched up the stairwell of Hillcrest Hospital and Mental Health Clinic on the drab, foggy morning of June sixteenth.

The sixth floor. It could have been worse.

One time I
’d
had a podiatrist appointment in the city and forgot to ask. Already out of breath from finding a parking spot seven long blocks away, my heart berated me when I checked in at the lobby reception desk and learned my doctor’s office was situated on the seventeenth floor. I nearly turned and headed back out the beckoning glass revolving doors—my right foot coaxing me with unrelenting pain. No way was I going to make it up seventeen flights of stairs in my Hop
a
long Cassidy gait.

I allowed myself only a token glance at the elevator doors. How smoothly they opened, their shushing sound so inviting. But I knew their deceptive appearance wouldn’t fool my gut. I’d be clawing the slick metal walls of the elevator by the third floor—it didn’t matter how big and roomy the space. I asked the receptionist to let my doctor know I’d be late, then found the stairs and hoofed it to her lofty office that boasted a sweeping view of the Golden Gate Bridge half buried in a shroud of fog. I
had
arrived sweaty and disheveled, with my foot on fire. I never made that mistake again.

I stopped at the landing
of
the
hospital’s
fifth floor and caught my breath. Nausea racked my body
,
and a wave of dizziness made me grab the railing. I consciously slowed my breathing and clamped down on all the fears battering the door to my heart, insistent on breaking in and trampling me down. Why, in the midst of my own maelstrom, did Raff have to do this? I had neither the time nor the energy to face him and his demons, when my own were a clamoring mob at the edges of my sanity.

I couldn’t get that T. S
.
Eliot poem out of my head.
Prufrock
.
Raff used to recite it, among hundreds of others. When he wasn’t rattling off pi to the hundredth digit—just because he could. Or Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat,”—in French, no less. I still can recall the first few lines from, what, sixth grade?
“Hibou et Minou allèrent à la mer, dans une barque peinte en jaune-canari
.
 
.
 
.
”
That was during his French phase in junior high school, when he thought the girls would find him hopelessly attractive, fashioned after some nineteenth
-
century Don Juan,
with a swath of hair falling into his mooning eyes,
spouting poetry from the Romantic era.

Neal and I never thought to ask why. Why in the world memorize everything under the sun?

So, as I pounded one step after another, the phrases tumbled into my brain effortlessly.
“
And indeed there will be time to wonder,
‘
Do I dare?
’
and
‘
Do I dare?
’
Time to turn back and descend the stair
.
 
.
 
.
with a bald spot in the middle of my hair
.
 
.
 
.
”

The poem lent itself to a nice cadence as I arrived, finally, to the sixth floor stairwell door
,
a bit out of breath from my recitation
.

“
Do I dare disturb the universe? In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
”

Now was the moment of decision.
Like I had a choice?
N
o one else in our family dared talk Raff out of his slouch toward destruction. I snorted as I pushed the heavy metal door open to a shiny bright corridor with glossy linoleum floors
—
so spotlessly clean I saw my scowling face looking up at me in all clarity. What made me think I could help him,
when
a half dozen doctors and psychiatrists couldn’t?

“
Streets that follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent. To lead you to an overwhelming question
.
 
.
 
.
Oh, do not ask,
‘
What is it?
’
Let us go and make our visit.
”

That was all the prompting I needed.

Raff had checked himself into this facility two days ago amid protests from both his wife and therapist. “They tell me it’s all in my head,” he said from a pay phone near his office, before he drove toward North Beach that morning. “You think? Styron calls it a brainstorm. Of course it’s in my friggin’ head! Like suicidal depression rages in your big toe?” All I could think of while he ranted in his manic passion was
:
C
ould he make it to the hospital without smashing his beautiful lipstick orange Ferrari 412? Kendra would throw a hissy fit over that.

He didn’t want visitors, but tough, he would see me. I’d play the only role I was good at in this family—caretaker and nurturer. What a joke, I thought, with my life unraveling like a sweater thread caught in a blender
.

My mother told me in her typical cryptic manner not to indulge Raff in his misery. That he was only having a temporary breakdown; give him a few days and he’d be back home with his wife and kids, making loads of money at the bank so he could keep up the payments on his palatial estate in Tiburon. Keep it all hush-hush, no one needed to know. Give him forty-eight hours, a drug cocktail, and this too shall pass.

I could just see my mother restraining her seething with a tight smile. “Get a grip, Raff,” she probably said.
For the children’s sake.
More like for her sake. Nothing like a little drama to put a crimp in her schedule. I mean, those jaunts from Marin into the city to the hospital were such inconveniences.

But forgive my embellishing. I thought nothing of the kind that day. My whole mind wrapped around only Raff and his pain. Ungrounded, unprovoked, and entirely unacceptable pain.

I heard how he fell apart at work the week before. Kendra had to come get him, between dropping the twins off at ballet and picking up Kevin from baseball practice. Raff had locked himself in his office and was trying to crawl out the transom window of his ninth-story office, yearning for the ledge and oblivion below. Good thing he was a hefty six foot two and the window was a bit too narrow for his bulk. Good thing Raff had a problem with broken glass—the way I had a problem with balloons. I couldn’t even stand in the same room
at birthday parties
with a
clown twist
ing
those skinny balloons into wiener dogs and rubber crowns without going into simulated cardiac arrest. Besides, I imagined those glass panes in Raff’s fancy banking center were shatterproof, and possibly even bulletproof. He hadn’t gotten very far by the time security had
hacksawed through
the dead bolt and pried him away from the window, where he collapsed in a weepy mess into a guard’s arms.

So my mother
had
told me—although Kendra would have denied it. In the thirteen years they’d been married, I’d never seen
my brother’s wife
lift more than an eyebrow in ire. Not an elevated pitch in tone, not a single curse word under her breath. She could win the award for stalwart and unruffled under adversity. What adversity? You couldn’t tell me living with my brother was a walk in the park. Or did Raff only dump his histrionics on his blood relatives? Well, he knew how to keep up appearances too.