Where Questions Go To Die

Ms. Hansen

Ms. Hansen. Hmm, how shall I describe Ms. Hansen? Well firstly, she has failed to impress me. The first time I met her, I thought, she’s beautiful, wears the most tailored of suits, is so sophisticated. Very oddly, I now run into her all the time, in the most unexpected of places, and have come to find her quite vapid and annoying. “Mr. Frank, what is it about me that you find interesting? Do you want to get to know me better? I want to hear your thoughts on me,” is the usual line of interrogation I am subjected to, and although she doesn’t technically talk about herself, her is all I am asked to talk about, by her.

Most unlike my favourite, Dr. Murakami, who is like my ‘patient’—he tells me his problems, and I solve them for him. He also asks a lot of questions—“Are there aliens out there? What happens after we ‘die’? Is consciousness separable from biological functions?” These are easier questions than Ms. Hansen’s.

Anyway, tonight is not about Dr. Murakami. I only brought him up because I am dreading her questions as she comes to visit me. Our usual meeting spot (when she’s not busy apprehending me at the library, or the park, or the men’s bathroom) is the café by the lakeside, but today we are meeting at my home. Not because this is more intimate, but because I couldn’t be bothered to step outside in the cold today. I’ve made dinner, but it is only for me.

She arrives, dressed in a dark gray wool coat and a tattered dark brown cloche hat, absorbing the bright Boston December snow and the full moon, like a Black Hole arresting any light around it. She promptly takes them off, slowly walks over to my oak dining table, and sits down opposite me as I enjoy my pasta. I do not want to get coaxed into providing my opinion of her, so I begin the questioning instead, “Ms. Hansen, tell me the least advertised thing about yourself.”

For the first time, it seems Ms. Hansen takes a minute to ponder, not to think about the answer, but whether to tell me. She stares off deep into a housefly that has joined us, as it lightly pecks away at my leftover sauce, as if to ask it for advice. I raise my hand to swat it away, and she wakes with a start— “Mr. Frank, I’m a telepath. I can read your mind, your dead brother’s mind, whoever you know, and whoever you don’t.”

Oh really? What am I—

“Thinking right now?” Ms. Hansen interrupts, indulging me. “You were thinking of the window until I interrupted you, Mr. Frank. You are a bit surprised now because you never liked me from the start. I’m your last resort if there’s no one better that comes along…”

But before I can recover from the shock of discovering the first hint of some depth to her character, she brings us right back up to the surface the next minute:

“Mr. Frank, why did you ask to see me tonight?”

Alright, Ms. Hansen. I’m going to answer your question. I invite her to read my mind.

Ms. Hansen protests! She doesn’t like my answer, it seems. Well, it’s not up to her now, is it? As I chew towards the last remaining strand of noodle, Ms. Hansen obliges me and gets up. I suspect we’ve lost our uninvited guest, the fly. We walk silently through the hardwood hallway, towards the living room with the large open window facing the back of the house. She walks towards the window, glancing into the empty sky, but stops short and turns to me.

“Mr. Frank!” she exclaims with surprise. “Do you even know my first name? You never asked, all this while!”

“It’s, um…Mary, alright?” I stumble to mutter, slightly surprised myself.

Mary rolls her eyes, sighs, steps on the window sill, and jumps off.

I am not completely crestfallen at this ending because my bag is still filled with Dr. Murakami, McAvoy, and Ms. Abebe. After a month of trying to decipher her, I’ve found nothing.

…

Dr. Murakami

Dr. Murakami thinks he’s my patient (and I’ve led him to believe so) because I solve his problems and present him with answers to every question he can think of. He’s come over for a chat today in my garden, and he’s feeling particularly creative. I like to have a little milk tea in the afternoon (for the bones), and so I must also need two biscuits (for the soul).

“Frank, what if I could read people’s memories?” he announces, reclining back on my rocking chair, as if to signal the start of a great grandfather’s tale. “I could specifically read the engram cells of the hippocampus for a particular memory, then, as a detective, read the defendant’s mind, and verify if he’s the murderer or not? That would be brilliant. Expensive, yes, because there’d be only one of me. There’s no drug that can do that yet, so I’d have to be hired. Shared by the world’s most high-profile cases, and the pro-bonos.”

Dr. Murakami is indeed a neuroscientist, and then go and add a detective label on top of that? So he could go around doling out justice to the world, and then what?

“Well, there’d be mafias trying to stop me for sure, drug cartels trying to kidnap and use my brain for their crimes, and I’ll be one step ahead of them every time. One time, I’d be really tempted to help out a bad guy for my own vested interest, but in the end, my conscience will get the better of me, and I will live on as the savior.” Dr. Murakami is imaginative, but he’s no science fiction writer. His premise is good, but it’s the same old hero-and-villain derivative drivel. It may seem like I give up too easily, but in the past three months, I’ve met with him weekly, and each week he has given me a new problem—a new ‘scenario’—and the next day, he can’t follow through with it, turning it into something else. Last week, he came up with a really creative idea: the visible spectrum of colours was now invisible to the eye, while the ultraviolet, infrared, and gamma-rays became visible, and our vision vastly improved as if we were a Hubble telescope. We could no longer enjoy a sunset but could enjoy a Black Hole forming just a thousand light-years away. Dr. Murakami giveth, and he taketh. The idea was intriguing. But the entire scenario was so emotionless, impersonal (was it because he couldn’t make emotions ‘visible’?) that it read more like an outsider experiencing someone else’s drug-fueled hallucination. In fact, I’m coming to realize, Dr. Murakami is nothing but a bag of empty promises—his premises lift up your expectations on a coconut tree and then leave you hanging there without a ladder and with five seconds to come down.

“Is there more to this neuro-detective?” I nudge.

“Oh, I don’t know…” he trails off. I trail off, too…to the other mind-reader that I tossed out of my window last night, Mary. No one’s ever sharply asked me to call them by their first name, especially not when they were about to jump off a window. That was quite bold. But there was nothing more I could do or use. She was so blank a canvas, I couldn’t imagine where to start drawing from—should I paint a gothic, raven-haired complex book-shop owner? Or a blonde, creative, tortured artist? Or a mysterious, quick-witted, insightful young woman?

But what about Dr. Murakami? I am extremely patient with him; he has had good ideas, and I have kept him around for months, hoping something will borne eventually, but he is like a phantom in a very expensive Gieves & Hawkes suit. I take Dr. Murakami to the window. He doesn’t ask me his first name, and he jumps out. Tired, I close my eyes.

I wish I had Mary’s telepathy. I would walk around the market, café, university, gathering these little tidbits of experiences, events—why, even—perspectives. After all, an experience, an awakening, even a dream, is a waste if it doesn’t become fodder for a writer’s next book. Perhaps I took a hasty decision with Mary—but thankfully, she only jumped out of a first-floor window.

I still have McAvoy and Ms. Abebe.

….

McAvoy

“Hello, sir!” McAvoy greets me at the steps of the university. A slender, well-dressed young man with polished hair, he carries himself as if he just stepped out of a sixties’ black-and-white television box. As a graduate student in nuclear physics, he is building a muon detector that he and his team have taken to the pyramids of Giza to investigate their contents. What his professor and colleagues (and funding agency) don’t know, is that he’s put up a ‘nuclear physics’ front to secretly get close enough to the pyramids to look elsewhere—according to McAvoy, the pyramids are a distraction, so people ponder what’s inside, and no one bats an eyelid outside—where the ‘real’ treasure is. I like to liken myself to a diary where many a troubled soul confide in me their secrets, horrors, troubles, and double lives. Dr. Murakami’s secrets are safe with me, but what about McAvoy’s?

Today, he’s going to tell me how he’s gotten to know of the ‘real’ treasure.

“Well, thanks for coming to see me, sir, that’s real nice of you,” McAvoy seems very pleasant, very promising, “Of course, there are these chambers inside, which, this semester, I’m doing a paper on, because the muon imaging is quite perfected now…but when they let you roam out there with your heavy detector equipment, the guards don’t really have a clue what you’re doing, and you can sell them any story—I usually tell them I need to set up the detector at various places, so they don’t look too carefully at what I’m really pointing at. You bring up Chernobyl, and they happily maintain their distance. So, anyway, I look underground with my detector, about half a kilometer from the pyramid base—and lo and behold! There’s an intricate maze of limestone down there, and there’s lots of hidden ornaments, I think. Just like my great-grandfather had predicted. 

“He was an Egyptologist who had been part of the team that discovered the bust of Nefertiti in 1912. When he returned from his journeys, he would act strange, and have these recurring nightmares where he’d see a group of weird-looking people who he’d never met before but claimed to have known him. He wrote about them in a brown diary and died from pneumonia soon afterward. Then their house caught fire, and my grandfather collected only a box of things that survived the fire, including the charred book, later passing them on to my father, and eventually to me. Two years ago, my professor casually mentioned infrared photography to me while we were waiting on another experiment in his laboratory, and he specifically said one could use it to recover writing from burnt paper. My mind immediately shot to my great-grandfather’s book. The very next day I stole it from my father’s attic, and guess what, sir—you’ll never guess! I was able to read some of his entries! It was no coincidence, I thought, that I just happened to have this equipment, and I just happened to chance upon this technique from a casual conversation—no, this was a sign. That I should continue his work.”

This has been the most interesting idea I’ve had to date, and I wanted to gather all the details. Like a tabloid reporter hungry for salacious gossip, I nudge ahead, asking if his grandfather had predicted anything else.

“Yes! Grandpa’s book doesn’t just talk about some little ornaments, he mentions more hidden objects, but even with IR, I couldn’t recover the whole diary. So, I’ve no clue where to even start looking for the other items—”

But Mary might. She can read dead people’s minds. This is the second time she’s interrupted my thoughts; I quickly change the subject.

“McAvoy, are you afraid of what your discoveries could cost you? What can befall you?”

“All of the time,” he says, clutching his heavy binder of notes. “My father doesn’t know what I know. I think he’d make me stop.”

McAvoy misunderstood me—he was afraid of getting caught, not of any curse. I realized here that Mr. McAvoy was on a mission; he was possessed, possibly cursed, and blithely unaware.

“He won’t find out, neither will the guards. I’ll make sure of it,” I reassure McAvoy. A blush of gratefulness sweeps his cheeks, and I ask, “Have you thought of what you’ll do with your findings if you do ever find this treasure?”

McAvoy freezes immediately, like a mummy in Antarctica.

“What I mean is, why do you keep this endeavor a secret? Why not let your colleagues help you out? I’m sure you’d get more funding if you just told them what you found…”

“Uh…umm…” McAvoy sweats, fumbles, and incoherently mumbles, crumpling into a ball of dust, falling completely silent. Did the curse cut off his tongue? Am I cursed now that I know his secret? As I lay there contemplating what his answers could have been, a twitch from him distracts my thoughts and alerts me that he might be having a seizure of some sort. I think it’s for the best.

McAvoy had this possessed sense of duty—but he has no clue why he’s doing it nor to what end—like a lifeless robot with a vengeance to calculate long numbers. He cannot help me, but perhaps Mary can? It bothers me a little that promising-McAvoy is like a dull parrot, but what bothers me more is why my subconscious brings up Mary so often.

Yes, McAvoy’s secrets are safe with me, too.

My bag is getting quite lighter.

…

Ms. Abebe

I’ve arrived at the last one: Ms. Abebe. I hope she’s like McAvoy, but with intent. Unlike the others, I’m meeting her for the first time. I had only once before talked to her, albeit fleetingly, when she was a lowly pick-pocket. Now, she’s an entertainer. She’s nothing like Mary—and you’ll see in a minute why I brought her up—she’s sharp, quick-witted, smart, and interesting—but like Mary, she’s also a telepath.

“Can you read dead people’s minds?” I asked, obviously.

“What! Of course not!” Ms. Abebe guffawed, bewildered that I’d ask her such an illogical question (Did I ask this question because of McAvoy’s story or because of Mary?). Ms. Abebe seemed offended. “Why, that’s quite a ridiculous thought, Frank, dead people don’t have minds to think with.”

I thoroughly disapprove of Ms. Abebe’s condescending and compartmentalizing attitude. No, she just won’t do, I accept, almost immediately, almost incentivized. She’s not the last one; I still have Mary (it was only the first-floor window).

Sending Ms. Abebe for the second-floor window (the highest one in my house), I dash to the back of the house, searching for a trace of Mary.

She’s still standing beneath the window, wearing what she had worn underneath her cosmic dark gray coat that is still inside the house. She’s wearing a bright yellow fuzzy sweater that melts into a teal blue long skirt, shiny blonde hair that complements her checkered white gloves, a silk green scarf running through, and freshly-shone black boots. I want to apologize to her—tell her what a thoughtless, shallow, impatient, superficial man I am, but all I can get out is—

“Mary, how can you read dead people’s minds?”

Like the true telepath that she is— “Did someone tell you it’s not logical?”

“So, it’s logical to be able to read one’s mind but not a dead one’s? How does one decide where to draw the line?”

“One decides where to draw the line depending on whether you want to write fantasy or magic realism, Mr. Frank.”

It seems like today we are focusing on me, not her, for a (welcome) change. But the change is more related to a shift in my perspective than her depth that I was so miserably failing to see. Finally confronting me, she reports: “You’re not a good writer of mystery, or sci-fi, or fantasy, Mr. Frank,” The supposedly vapid one has gotten to know me quite well, even before I got to know her—even before I invented her. “Mr. Murakami, Mr. McAvoy, and Ms. Abebe—you threw them out of your bag of imagination, not because they were bad characters, but because you offered them no growth. You thought I was superficial because you were superficial. But I know you, Mr. Frank—you are capable of greater depths.”

“Give me another chance to write you,” I beg of her.

Mary gives me the most heartwarming smile I’ve ever felt. “I choose you to be my writer, Mr. Frank. Don’t let me down. Tell me, who am I?”

…

“Do you know where questions go to die, Mr. Frank?”

“In the writer’s imagination, where they are reincarnated as stories.”

Spring 2022