The Enigmatologist (2 page)

“Heavy drinking.”

“That’s great advice.”

“Look, some people can do it, some can’t. Got it? John,
you’re a good kid, a little sensitive, but a good kid. Something this business
needs. Why don’t you backup the photos you took in case we need to send them to
her attorney? Take the rest of the day off, think about it.”

By the time John had backed up the files, Rooftop had
listened to the voicemail. He was on the phone, swinging his stubby arms
around. He got like that when he was excited, usually about a client. John put
on his coat and stood at the doorway, waiting for Rooftop to look at him so he
could say goodbye.

“John, come here,” Rooftop whispered, putting his hand
over the phone’s mouthpiece. “I got a big job for us. Pays a thousand dollars a
day, plus expenses. You want to go out of town? All expenses paid?”

“Sure, I guess,” John said, shrugging his shoulders.

“Great, hold on,” Rooftop took his hand off the phone.
“Rex, I’m putting you on speakerphone. Got it?” He pushed the speakerphone
button. “Rex, you’re on with John Abernathy.”

“Hello, John,” a confident voice said. “I’m Rex Grant, the
editor-in-chief for
The National Enquirer
. We’d like to hire you and
Rooftop.”

“I’m a little old for a paper route,” John said, “and Roof
hasn’t been on a bike since the sixties.”

“Don’t worry,” Rex said, almost laughing, “we already have
people for that. I want to hire you to investigate a photograph, see if it’s
legit. A few weeks ago a woman contacted us saying she had photographic
evidence that Elvis was alive. We talked to her on the phone and looked at the
photo. I’ve seen a lot of Elvis photos, but this picture’s different. It’s
arguably the best documentation of an Elvis sighting to come across our desks.
A once-in-a-lifetime find.”

“Why are you calling us?” John asked. “Don’t you have
reporters for this sort of thing?”

“Normally, yes. Especially for Elvis sightings. Shortly
after Elvis’s death, we offered a reward for anyone who could prove he was
alive.”

“That sounds like responsible journalism.”

“Yeah, it was great. We were inundated with phone calls and
letters from people saying they’d seen Elvis. Some were obviously a waste of
time, but a few seemed credible. So, we hired investigators from different
parts of the country to authenticate them. Rooftop was one of the people we
hired. Unfortunately, none of them panned out, I’m sure he’ll tell you about
that, but this photo, it’s the real deal.”

“Yeah, but…” The window blinds were tilted, one side
higher than the other. John tugged the cord, but they wouldn’t align. “Why
don’t you just publish it?”

“There’s…there’s a really good chance that there’s, well,
something more to this story.”

The only time anyone ever called them was when something
had gone terribly wrong with another person.

“You sent someone down there already, didn’t you?” John
asked on a hunch.

“Yeah, we…”

“Rex,” Rooftop said, “you need to be straight with us if
you want our help. Got it?”

Rex sighed. “When the photo came in, I thought we should
send someone to investigate, but we don’t have the budget we had in the
eighties, so I decided to send an intern. The kid…the kid never checked in. We
called his cell phone, the motel where he was staying. Nothing. A few days ago,
the New Mexico State Police found his body in the desert just south of Truth or
Consequences. He’d been shot. He was…he was just a kid. His parents keep
calling, asking if we’ve heard anything. The police don’t have any leads. He was
only eighteen. Just a kid.”

“What the hell, Rex?” Rooftop said. “You want us to risk
our lives for a photo of Elvis? No. This is not what we do. We do not risk our
lives for photos of Elvis. We don’t risk our lives for anything. Got it?”

The kid. He probably went to a prestigious school like
John, majoring in journalism, interning at the tabloid, getting coffee for
people who Photoshop celebrities’ heads onto obese bodies. Like John, the kid
had waited for his big break. But when it came, a chance to travel to New
Mexico, do some investigative journalism, his art school dream, it got him
killed.

“I’ll do it,” John said, his voice hushed.

“This is why we have police. This is why…Wait. What?”
Rooftop glared at John, his bald head turning scarlet.

“I’ll do it. I’ll go down there.”

“Like hell you will! Rex, I’m putting you on hold. Got
it?” Rooftop hit the hold button, rubbed his hand on his bald head. “Jesus
Christ, John. What would your dad say?”

“My dad hasn’t been around for…” John did the math for an
equation he’d performed every day since age five, “eighteen years, so he can’t
say much.”

“He wouldn’t want you doing something dangerous.”

“This job is already dangerous. Last night, that Neilson
guy, if he’d seen me, he probably would’ve pulled a gun on me if he had one.
Besides, someone needs to do this.”

“This is not what we do.”

“Since I’ve been working for you,” John said, throwing his
coat on the chair where Mrs. Neilson had sat, “all I’ve done is help people get
divorced.”

“This is why we have the police.”

“I need to do this.”

“This is not what we do. We take photographs. That’s it.
Got it?”

“That kid, he was me, doing a job he hated until something
better came along.”

“That’s everybody!”

“And he got killed for what? a photo? When he could have
been…” John thought about the unfinished puzzle that awaited him. “I need to do
this.”

“
Goddamnit
, John.”

“That kid was me,” John said, pointing to the computer
where he constructed his puzzles when Rooftop was out of the office.

“This is not what we do.” Rooftop looked out the window,
toward a mountain range half-forested by black and needle-bare trees, victims
of a parasitic relationship with rice-sized insects.

“Don’t worry. The minute I find anything, I’ll call the
police.” John pressed the hold button. “Alright, Rex, I’m in.”

“Great. We’ll e-mail you everything, a digital copy of the
photograph and the photographer’s address.”

“And our usual retainer, five thousand dollars,” John
said. Rooftop grinned, then quickly scowled, his anger at John being only
temporarily satiated by the money.

“Of course,” Rex said.

“Alright, I’ll head out as soon as I get everything. Where
am I going?”

“A little town in New Mexico called Las Vegas.”

That
night, John sat at the kitchen table in his apartment sipping a PBR Tall Boy,
looking at the Elvis picture. He had reprinted it several times and uploaded it
to his phone. Something wasn’t right about the picture, something that struck
John as odd, bothered him, made him feel uneasy. Whoever had taken it didn’t
know how to use a camera and hadn’t focused the lens, leaving the image
blurred, just an impression of the moment. And John’s eyes glazed over trying
to make out the details, the big hair, a bloated belly. He couldn’t tell if it
really was Elvis or just some guy with the misfortune of having a pompadour,
but through the haze of magnification and an unfocused lens, a man stood on a
deck, legs shoulder width apart. One arm in the air, slightly blurred in
captured motion.

“Is he waving?”

John spent the next several hours researching Elvis
conspiracies. As expected, the internet proved to be a reliable resource for
contradictory and unbelievable information. There were conspiracy theories
connecting Elvis to organized crime, Richard Nixon, the DEA, theories about
extraterrestrials being present at Elvis’s birth, Elvis helping Michael Jackson
fake his death, Elvis and Michael Jackson living in Ecuador with new identities
courtesy of the Illuminati. Having studied puzzles, their logical design and
rules, John saw the loose connections forming these beliefs. He also recognized
the places where those connections frayed and split from reality.
The
National Enquirer
had a reputation for attracting believers of all ilk,
people who accepted modern myths like boy bands praying to the Loch Ness
Monster, Bigfoot having a
Dallas
Cowboys
themed
mancave
, or Elvis being alive.
John flipped the photo several times, deciding not to get caught in someone’s
fantasy.

He let the photo fall through his fingers. It landed on
the table, mingling with a thick copy of
Merriam-Webster’s Colligate
Dictionary
,
Walker’s Rhyming Dictionary
, a copy of
Word Squares
.
The books were some of the tools John used to build his crosswords, although
since graduation, they’d sat on the table, stacked and stockpiled.

The screen of John’s laptop glowed. He sighed when the
empty crossword puzzle grid appeared. The computer program he used,
Crossword
Compiler
, had suggested several filler words, erne,
Ursa
,
olio, all crossword clichés. And he’d deleted them.

Written along the top was his theme, ‘Moving Day’. That’s
all John had been able to write since graduating from The Boulder School of
Esoteric Art and Impractical Design. A theme. No words. No clues.

John had discovered puzzles the way most young boys do, by
reading the funnies. They were the graphics-less boxes beneath
Family Circus
.
He wasn’t interested in
Bil
Keane’s pudgy children
and their labyrinthine routes home, or the inner demons making them break or
steal. To John, their idealized family was a farce and could never exist
outside of the printed world. He was drawn to the jumbled letters needing
arrangement, the empty spaces needing words.

Puzzles gave him the order, logic, and stability he was
missing. His father had just disappeared, leaving him and his mother with
unanswered questions. But puzzles always had an answer. He just had to figure
them out.

As a child, John had spent his spare time studying and
solving puzzles, filling in boxes in every newspaper he found, buying puzzle
books at gas stations and truck stops when they traveled, trying to finish the
book before they reached the landmark or national monument or highway oddity
that comprised their summer vacations.

And when it came time for him to go to college, choose a
major, he only wanted to do one thing, become an
enigmatologist
,
someone who designed puzzles. While in college, he experienced the excitement
of immersion, the thrill of being completely absorbed in his education.
However, since graduation, he’d only been able to stare at the screen and
question why his creativity and passion were absent, whether he had traded them
in for an overpriced degree or they’d been burned away by years of study. And in
his darker moments, when he’d lie in bed half-drunk on cheap beer, staring at
the ceiling, questioning his choices and how they’d shaped the flow of his
life, he wondered if designing puzzles was something he was supposed to do, and
if not, maybe it was time to do something else. But he never shared this doubt.
He just kept working.

He put his fingers on the keys and tapped them like
someone pretending to type on a television show, hoping movement would spur
thought. When nothing came, John leaned back and put his hands in his hair.
Grunting in frustration, he closed the file, asked himself why the imaginative
spirit he possessed in college had abandoned him, only to be replaced by
uncertainties.

* * * *

The
next morning, John packed for the trip. It didn’t take long. He threw three
days worth of vintage sci-fi and comic book t-shirts, plaid shirts, mismatched
socks, and zip-up hoodies next to his tooth brush and razor in an old hardcover
suitcase he’d bought at a garage sale.

John cradled the gun in his hands. Rooftop had insisted
that he take it, reminding John of the hours they spent at the shooting range
when John was younger, then the Oreo Cookie Blizzards they’d have afterward.
John was still reluctant to take the gun with him, but knew it would make Rooftop
feel better knowing he had it. John sighed, and put it in his suitcase.

“You have everything you need?” Kristen Abernathy, John’s
mom, asked, sticking her head into his room. Her brown hair was starting to
turn gray, and she had pulled it into a ponytail.

“Mom, knock first. I could’ve been, I don’t know, doing
something.” He moved quickly and closed the suitcase so she couldn’t see the
gun sitting on his rocket ship patterned boxer shorts.

“Sorry. I’m still getting used to you being back. I packed
a cooler with some sandwiches.” She crossed her arms over her blue and faded
Denver Broncos sweatshirt. She smiled, her face compressing like a concertina,
folksy but dignified.

“Thanks. Oh, hey…” John pulled some cash out of his
pocket. “Here, this is for you, for rent.”

“No, no, no. This is your money. You save it for
something.” She tried pushing the money away, but John grabbed her hand and
forced the cash into it.

“This is why I moved back, to help you out.”

“When you said that, I thought you meant laundry or
cleaning,” she said, looking at the clothes on the floor.

“To help you pay down some bills. Eventually get you outta
here, into a nicer place.”

“John, I don’t need a nicer place. I just need you to be
happy.”

“Then take the money.”

Kristen folded the bills and put them in her wallet, next
to a family photo. In the photo, John is three. He is sitting on her lap and
makes a face at the camera. John’s dad has seen it and is trying not to laugh,
while Kristen is smiling like a proud wife and mother, unaware of the
transformations in her husband and son. Kristen loved the photograph. Every
time she saw it she sighed.

“You were so little,” she said. “You missed out on so much
with him not being here.” Her eyes swelled like overstuffed grocery bags ready
to break.

“Fuck him.”

“John!” She looked up from the photo, her eyes wide and
wet. Since adolescence, John had expressed his animosity for his father daily.
After eighteen years, Kristen was used to it, but it still disturbed her.

“I was five, Mom. You know how much that messes with a
kid’s head? I thought he left ‘cause I broke that stupid
Cape Canaveral
glass he got at Burger King.”

“He got that because it’s your favorite show.”

“I cried for weeks, swearing I’d be good if he came home.”

“If you’d only known him…”

“I know he didn’t come home from work. I know the police
stopped looking for him when they found his car at his job, his wallet and
credit cards still in the glove box. Christ…”

“John. Language,” Kristen said, faking shock.

“You asked Rooftop to look for him and even he gave up
after a while. When does Roof ever give up on anything?”

“He loved you so much. I saw it on his face every time he
held you.”

“Well, that must have changed.”

“Something else must have happened. He wouldn’t leave us.”

“That’s what happened. For whatever reason, he left us.
And you did the best you could. No, you did a great job. Because of you, we
didn’t need him.” A flap of t-shirt was sticking out of the suitcase and John
stuffed it inside. “Still don’t.”

John despised his mother’s infatuation with his father,
her forgiving him for leaving and ruining their lives. He wished she could see
his father for what he was, the type of person John was hired to photograph.

“Mom, I
gotta
go,” John said,
tired of always having the same conversation. He grabbed the suitcase off the
bed and kissed her on the cheek as he left.

The suitcase sat in the trunk of his ’98 Saturn sedan, the
cooler filled with sandwiches in the back. John put the gun under the driver’s
seat. He flipped through the radio until he found a song that wasn’t sung by
teenagers with expensive haircuts. He backed out of their assigned parking
space, started to leave the parking lot of the apartment complex, the six
buildings conforming to the beige and yellow look of the outlet mall and
surrounding sub-divisions, and headed for Las Vegas, New Mexico.