Puzzling

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PUZZLING

“Where is it!?” she pleaded.

“I’ll never tell,” I replied, in the most mysterioso voice I could conjure up. I sat on my hands and pulled my lips in tight, indicating how little was likely to slip by them.

Rachel gave a mock cry of despair and went back to lifting up books, checking under tables, pulling thumbtacked essays off the corkboard and shaking them to see if anything fell out. I smiled as I watched her frenzy.

For Rachel’s 18th birthday I had designed a treasure hunt consisting of 18 clues hidden throughout the school – behind paintings, in books, under stairwells. All places that had some significance from our time at Central High. The gift at the end was fairly insignificant: a poster of France to remind her of her semester abroad. It was the hunt itself that was the main present, one that would keep her entertained for the week or two it took her to find all the clues, and one that would bring back good memories from four years of being friends.

And one that would torture her a little bit too, of course. Part of the fun of making a treasure hunt is pitching it just right so that your victim has to really stretch in order to get the answers. That way they feel more joy in accomplishment when they succeed.

“It is in this room, right?” she asked a minute later, as she stood with one foot on a chair, set on top of a table, next to a high bookshelf.

I shrugged innocently as if I had no idea. But, seeing her shoulders collapse and her brows furrow, I relented and nodded my head. She narrowed her eyes at me, and then stepped up onto the chair and peered over the top of the bookshelf.

“Blecch! Nothing up here but dust. And an old sock! How the hell did that…?”

She stopped talking and looked off into the distance, her eyes blurring slightly and her mouth open. Then she inhaled sharply and let out a sneeze that was strong enough to blow a poof of dust off the shelf. Though not the sock. She sneezed three more times, and then quickly scrambled down off the chair and off the table and then sneezed twice more.

I grabbed up a box of tissues and handed them to her.

“You know you’re endangering my life,” she said, between blows of her nose, “I have asthma.” Blow. “If I died it would be all your fault!”

“Do you think they’d put that on the death certificate? ‘Cause of death: treasure hunt’?”

She laughed and took another tissue. She blew the decades-old dust from her nose, then dumped the soggy tissues in a green-grey metal bucket, one of the standard issue trash cans in our school.

“How about a small hint?” she said, taking a hit off of her asthma inhaler and stowing it back in her backpack.

“Okay, go back and read the clue…”

She picked up a small slip of creased paper that was lying on one of the long study tables, and read:

“After school we hung out here

When the weather wasn’t kind.

You should read this with an open heart

And with the purest mind.”

She put the slip down carefully, leaned back against the table with her arms crossed, raised one eyebrow, and stared at me.

“Okay, okay, so it’s not the clearest clue. But you got that it’s the after school study room, and that ‘read’ refers to a book (and I’ll tell you that it’s not on the bookshelf you were looking at). So what about the rest of it?”

“Heart and mind…”

She turned slowly in the middle of the room, studying each item in turn: chairs, posters, stacks of books, knee-high piles of papers, a big globe of the Earth and a smaller, transparent one of the moon with all the craters identified, the teacher’s desk with coffee cups and more papers, and some pens and pencils in a lopsided ceramic pot; clearly a present from a son or daughter, maybe a niece or nephew. She kept repeating under her breath “heart and mind…”

I tensed as her circling brought her view closer and closer to the correct spot: A small bookshelf, sitting in the far corner, on top of which sat a huge reference dictionary, and on whose shelves were thick textbooks that no one ever read. She slowed her circling, and then paused, like a cat deciding whether to pounce on the bit of string you’re dangling hopefully in front of it. She crept slowly toward the waist-high shelves, avoiding chairs without ever taking her eyes off the books. As she got closer she sped up and then with a triumphant yell she pulled Essentials of Human Anatomy and Physiology off of the bottom shelf.

I laughed with pleasure as she slammed it down on the closest table and started flipping through the pages. I was having a blast watching her go through the steps. Watching the hunt unfold exactly as I had planned it in my mind.

I love to see people solve my treasure hunts. I love it when they’re befuddled and perplexed, and want to strangle me. I love watching them piece together my logic, and seeing which things come easily and which stump them. And I love it when they finally get the answer and their eyes light up, and they grin like Cheshire cats.

And I love to solve puzzles, too. I was over the moon when Rachel followed my lead and made me a puzzle for my birthday that year. I made another one for her the next year, and we traded back and forth, birthday after birthday.

They were all long-distance puzzles, because we never lived in the same city again. We started off at the same college, but a boyfriend in New York and a new interest in movie making meant that she transferred to NYU after the first semester. And we didn’t always keep in touch, our lives as busy as they were. But the puzzles were a thin thread of contact.

Through exams, papers, graduation, and travel to foreign countries we were constant. One year she mailed my birthday puzzle to me in Scotland, a huge foamcore jigsaw puzzle that, when put together, formed a maze I had to solve, with letters distributed throughout; if I traversed the letters in the right order they spelled a secret word, which was the answer. It drove me crazy, gluing all those pieces together, but it also helped ease the gloominess of those long winter nights.

When she got married I thought that that might be the end, but her husband, instead of an enemy, became an accomplice. One year I posed a very simple puzzle to her with a solution that spelled out “I am in the closet.” She yanked open every closet in the apartment, looking for her present, or possibly her next clue. She certainly didn’t expect to find me, crouching among her shoes, ready to surprise her. And was she ever surprised! It took about an hour until the shock wore off enough that she was actually happy to see me.

Back and forth across the continents and across the years, sometimes the puzzles were a few weeks (or months) late, but they always came eventually.

And then, one year, she never finished solving my puzzle to her. Her first baby was born, and the time it took to care for him – combined with her lack of brainpower from never sleeping through the night – meant that puzzles were way down on her list of priorities.

Our contact diminished to short emails and Christmas cards. And then the second baby was born, and I didn’t hear from her for years. I filled some of that hole by making puzzles for other people – all of which were appreciated – but they were all single events. No back-and-forth exchange. No building from one year to the next, trying to top each other, seeing how fine we could make that line between torture and exultation.

No one has made a puzzle for me since.

Recently Rachel and I got back in touch. Her kids are in school now, so she’s got some more free time and more brain space. And we’ve had good conversations. But she claims that she’s still not gotten back her old sharp brain, and she still has more to do than time in which to do it. So there will be no puzzles yet.

I will wait. Perhaps someday we will pick up the thread again. For now I look back fondly on that first puzzle, where it all began. The image of her flipping through the pages of that outdated anatomy book until she got to the center, where, between a color plate of a heart and one of a brain, was a tiny slip of paper with the next clue that would propel her onward, out the door, onto the next step.

Andrea Blumberg