After several hours pushing his cart about the nation’s capital, Elliot relaxed on his subway trip back to the Garfield Street house. Confidently equipped with his napkin map, he browsed through a DC Herald that he had kept from the last of his deliveries and wasn’t surprised to find articles on local politics and entertainment. Paging through, Elliot glanced at an article on a band named Mob Rule that was scheduled to perform at the Atlantis Building. He was pleased to find a brief column on chess, similar to the one he’d glanced at that morning in the Garfield Street kitchen. Next to the article was a picture of a chessboard, an arrangement of a few black and white chess pieces, and the simple instructions, White mates in two moves. The challenge was to discover the one move that would evolve into a definite checkmate against black. He dog-eared the top corner of the page and made a mental note to come back later. Although not much of a chess player, he did enjoy puzzles.
Then he spotted a page of Personals ads near the back of the paper. Most were straightforward two or three line descriptions of physical and personal attributes. A few were offbeat short stories like this:
Me: SWF coming out of the Dupont Circle coffee shop with a bag of bagels last Sunday. You: SWM in his 20’s, medium length blonde hair, in front of the store reading a book I knew. We chatted about the author’s ideals, the future of mankind, our personal responsibility to our community, who we are as citizens and neighbors and human beings at the dawn of the 21st century, what we might become in the next 300, 500, or 1000 years. No, the outlook isn’t very encouraging at first glance, but if we survive, if we prosper, if we start pushing in the same direction, the possibilities are enormous, the ramifications are glorious, yes, and the journey could be miraculous…
Reading on, there were one or two looking for a non-smoking SWM around his age that intrigued him. But none confessed any interest in a man with no career, no direction, and no idea what he had been doing with his life so far or what he was likely to do with the rest of it.
Women were the greatest of life’s puzzles and Elliot hadn’t a clue about the opposite sex. Whether it was his upbringing, the public education system, or a simple roll of the genetic dice to blame, women were as foreign and unfamiliar to him as aliens from another planet. In the movies, a man and a woman tended towards a moment of understanding, a knowledge of exactly who they each were and what they were doing. Their individual intentions, wants, and desires became the same intention, want, and desire, as the two random bodies in space came into slow orbit with each other. But Elliot didn’t feel a gravitational pull gently leading him toward knowledge and confidence of what he needed to do next. Romance was a puzzle that compounded itself the more he thought about it. So he turned the page back to the chess column and studied what he could understand: White mates in two moves.
Engrossed in his thoughts, Elliot almost missed his stop. He followed Benny’s directions back to the house. From Connecticut Avenue, he followed an old cobblestone alley running behind the houses on Garfield Street. On each side of the alley were rows of old flat-roofed two-car garages, some of which had modern aluminum roll-up doors installed. Other garages still had their original double wooden doors that sagged in desperate need of repair. Elliot counted the fourth garage on the left, the one without any doors at all. Anyone coming to the back door of the house had to pass through the garage because it spanned the entire width of the narrow back yard.
As per Benny’s directions, Elliot quickly found the coffee can with the hidden key among the dark collection of tools, boxes, broken appliances, ropes, pulleys, and innumerable things that could have been pulled from a trash heap in the expectation of simple repairs one of these days. He was dead tired from delivering newspapers and could probably fall asleep in an instant if given the chance.
Climbing several cracked concrete steps up to the level of the back yard, Elliot found Maggie looking very chipper and rosy, humming and hoeing in her garden with a big smile on her face. Her garden wasn’t much more than some brown wilted flowers and what may have intended to be vegetables or herbs of some kind next to a rusty dilapidated metal shed. Maggie was as happy as could be, wearing a red and white checkered blouse and a wide straw hat. The old dog was dozing lazily on the stoop in the sun, and began a friendly tail wag as Elliot walked up the few steps from the rear alley to the level of the yard.
Nervously braced for another outburst, he was pleasantly surprised when she noticed him and greeted him merrily. “Oh, hi!” she said as she put down her hoe and wiped her hands on her blue jeans. “I’m Maggie,” as she turned to him with outstretched hand. “And you must be Elliot. Welcome to our home. Benny told me to expect you.”
Pleasantly impressed with Maggie’s apparent sanity, Elliot shook hands, returned her smile, but thought better than to remind her that they had already met that morning.
Maggie turned in a circle taking a deep breath with her arms outstretched and her face to the sky and said, “My! What a beautiful day! It’s just scrumptious! I love this time of year in Washington! Summers are usually hot and humid, but it just makes the first hint of autumn that much more delicious!”
Despite his weariness, an inbred sense of courtesy prompted him to say, “Looks like you’re doing some gardening. Would you like some help?”
Maggie turned to him with a look so bright and sincere, she could have been a long-lost aunt. She touched his arm, “Aren’t you sweet to offer! I’m just finishing up. Let me put these things away and I’ll get you settled inside. You must be exhausted!”
Elliot helped Maggie put the garden tools away on a wide set of shelves between the steps to the back door and the rusty shed butted up against the house. Maggie gestured toward the far side of the yard and said apologetically, “You’ll have to excuse the condition of the garage. Benny has been promising to clean it out for years. His junk is scattered everywhere.”
“That reminds me,” said Elliot. “I have to put the spare key back.”
Maggie took his arm and said, “You just keep that key for yourself while you’re here.”
“Actually, Benny said he’d make me a spare.”
Maggie smiled knowingly. “When he does, then he can put it back in the can. You’ll find out soon enough that Benny’s promises are often worth less than the breath it takes to make them.”
Stepping through the kitchen door, Maggie set her floppy hat on the kitchen table and got Elliot a glass of water from the sink.
“Thanks,” he said, gulping it down thirstily.
Maggie said, “We’ll have to sit down and chat later. But today is the day I bake bread and I need a few things from the corner grocery. Would you like to come?”
“That would be nice,” Elliot said. “But I told Benny I’d do something for him this afternoon.”
Maggie looked at him suspiciously. “I thought you were here to write a travel guide.”
Elliot finished his drink and answered, “That too. Benny asked me to look around for a box of old DC Heralds, and then I need to get started on my work. Can you point me to the basement?”
“You don’t need to trouble yourself with that. You’ve got your own business to tend to.”
“It’s not a problem. I’m happy to lend a hand.”
Maggie sighed and opened the basement door off the dining room. “Okay. But don’t spend all your time on Benny’s schemes. He has a way of sucking people into his affairs. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” She started down and pulled a string to a single bare bulb that lit the wooden steps to the cool, dark basement.
Elliot half expected to see bats hanging from ceiling rafters of the silent cavernous room. He felt claustrophobic surrounded by every manner of item that might be found in an abandoned basement or haunted house; boxes, furniture, building supplies, ancient steamer trunks, lamps and shades, more boxes, one of those old mannequins women used to make dresses with. The floor to ceiling was nearly filled except for a six-foot square landing at the bottom of the stairs and a narrow dusty path leading to the rear of the basement that looked like it hadn’t been tread upon for years. Everything was covered with gray-brown dust thick enough to write his name in if he so-desired.
An old straw broom, sticky with cobwebs stood in a corner. Maggie wiped it with a rag she had brought for the purpose and swept as she said, “I don’t hardly ever come down here anymore, but when I do, I don’t want to track upstairs.” Putting the broom aside when done, she looked at Elliot with an I-told-you-so grin and asked as if she already knew the answer, “Where did Benny tell you to start looking?”
Elliot stammered, “Uh, he didn’t exactly say.”
“What a surprise!” she exclaimed sarcastically. “But seriously, Elliot, you’re going to have to be careful and protect yourself from Benny’s distractions. I could tell you some stories …” Just then, the phone rang and Maggie excused herself to run up the stairs. “You can start looking around if you want. But I don’t recommend it.”
Elliot let out a breath slowly as he turned around stupefied that a place could exist even more jumbled than the DC Herald office. It didn’t look like anything had been moved in years. There was no evidence whatsoever of any recent addition to this mausoleum that might contain Benny’s lost materials. He could hear Maggie upstairs talking on the phone in rather harsh tones. Leaning toward the stairs to eavesdrop, he heard Maggie say, “I’m not going to ask him – you ask him!” A half-second. “Forget about it – I’m not going to do it!” Half a second. “No! No, no, no! I won’t do it. I’ll call him upstairs and you can…” Half a second. “Don’t give me that. And don’t hang up on me. Benny? Benny?”
Hearing the phone slam upstairs, Elliot took two steps down the dusty path to pretend he wasn’t listening. Maggie slowly came halfway down the stairs and said, “Benny called to ask you to also keep an eye out for any empty boxes.”
thermodynamics of ideas 