Einstein’s Riddle 20xx
Einstein wrote a riddle that only 2% of the population could solve, by his math. This should be even easier. No trick questions, just trickiness:
Five dwellings sit west to east at the outermost fringe of the city. Each Home is unique amongst its neighbors, and each owner has a source of Income, an unshakeable Vice, and a Philosophy they extol or have been influenced by. Each lives in their own coordinate of Love. Answer the final question using the clues available. Write things down. Use Excel on the computer at work and make yourself a table.
The person in the center house lives, for now, off the paltry offerings of Disability. Works through all their problems spiritual and physical in the couch area, strategizing forays into the kitchen. The circumstances are clearly temporary. Any day now this back will heal itself and the world out there is full of money for those who know how to get it.
The Bokononist, a devotee of Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, is happily married to a man plunked into her duprass by a funny God. He came into her life to facilitate her chaos. In fact, or de facto. At night, they often lay on the floor and press their bare feet together. He doesn't believe, and she knows this, but he does find it fun. And in this universe, that itself is a kind of faith.
The neighbor who believes that all should grow infinitely, a proud EGOist, lives in a McMansion purchased in large part via catalog. Once, the home was a proud beacon on a hill. Now the scrub-brush has seeped in, the siding has grown a fan-shaped stain of mold from a maladjusted sprinkler head, and the cobwebby upper windows remain reliably unlit.
The multi-story Igloo defies sun and dust, keeps perfect, computer-controlled temperatures in its rooms and halls. To the west of this, an Apartment was airlifted from whatever downtown high-rise it was wrenched from. Propped here crumbly-walled on stilts, exited out the bottom as in tree forts. The owner of the Igloo watched it dangle from a long tether behind a helicopter. A bug-eyed maniac waving it down and bricks falling from the compromised walls like grains of sand.
The Absurdist is a Garbage Collector. Riding through the city clung to the back of a garbage truck, dumping barrels of trash into its chomping maw and then returning a week later for the very same barrels topped-off with the nearly-same trash. Mopping up brow-sweat with a sleeve, coming home to scrub themselves and the stink staying with their skin so deep there's hardly a point.
The dude who lives in the Apartment, his own from the wild days down in the city, earns money Delivering Pizza in a car full of painful memories. He's too broke to get something else. He listens over and over to the CD stuck in the dash player for years now, bitching to himself about poor tips and yeahyeahyeahing his way through the next drop-off because of it. There had been a vague end-game to this gig, but he's forgotten it in these long desert drives.
One of the homes was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and its stark linearity cantilevers over a fish pond fed by illogical pipework the plumber cannot understand or explain. Whirring tubular fettucine, its switch best left in the off position. The insomniac owner watches Television through the night in pulses of channel-change every blink of the eye until sunshine is born on the floor in a precise constellation and begins its crawl up the wall.
The American Dreamer lives in the first house. It is gospel within the walls that hard work can conjure anything. Almost anything. And yet the beautiful idyll view they moved here for, a creek and its oasis, has given way to flat desert and a trickle of gross black effluvia making reptile noises below the window.
The Widow's neighbor smokes too much Weed. A great deal of it, anyway. Sometimes they sit plain as day out there trying to pass it off as a cigarette. The Widow has nowhere to go on nights off and sometimes will watch the dark figure sit totally still save the slow floating metronome of the ember from mouth to arm-rest. She thought of going out to ask for a puff, though it's been decades since her party-girl days. Someone to talk to, if nothing else.
True totals would be six to eight hours of Television a day, mostly at night, but also for awhile in the mornings getting ready. The Good Morning show in orange colors and pleasant smiles. Plus what is broadcast while fixing a quick dinner or stepping into the bathroom or glancing out the window at the doings of the street. The set is never really off. Right next door, the young man has a Live-In Girlfriend. Certain nights she can hear them making love. Eerie sounding like birds outside when you've stayed all the way up. It used to be she was talking when that happened. Now it's the Late Late Late Show or whatever's after it, and the screams of a nostalgic pleasure from across the narrow yard.
Among the homes, one neighbor pays land-taxes and food-bills with donations gleaned from being an Internet Personality. Four times a week they broadcast a webshow powered, as everything in their life, by a steady stream of off-label Adderall. The little pills keep them teeth-grinding and excitable and lost in tedium, because tedium was all there was, and only through tyranny of will could all that nervous jittering be turned into something. Though if the audience is laughing at them, or with them, is yet unclear. The-emails split somewhere between disgusting and sweet. The only thing ever really talked about on the show is the beautiful inevitability of everything. And The ugliness of cities. The charming ignorance of the people who run the world. They take call-ins about travel plans and religious awakenings and healthy recipes.
The only smoker of Cigarettes lives by the code of the Hedonist. But all the excess has winnowed down to these cheap, lethal bastards, one after the other. There was booze and girls and many times blow and money certainly blown on temporary pleasures and if the world weren't so weirdly wrought, one could live like that forever. Life can seem too long gone through with these rules. He blows smoke at the ceiling, out the window, like a tracer dye for how badly he's affected the world. Every Cigarette is a mistake, and so smoking puts one in the mind of errors and missteps and blindnesses ten to forty times a day.
The American Dreamer feels often that their every effort has been foiled. But bad luck is not a personal indictment. Or it is, maybe, and there's not much can be done. Luck always the trickiest variable in having a family and a bit of secure money. Most recently the interference takes the form of an Airstream parked in the gravel lot next door. A dingy chrome slug on bricks and the tires sun-damaged to peeling and the thing intended to be there for a long time with no truck adequate in sight. It collects flies, she's certain. She can smell every little thing they do over there.
The person next door sells Real Estate. That's all the Weed smoker knows about them, really. And it seems a spitable job, shuffling paper around and clicking a mouse and taking ten percent whether five minutes of work or five hundred thousand. The value all abstract, and speculative. Nothing certain about any of it and the Weed smoker wonders if that uncertainty bleeds through into what the Real Estate agent buys with it. Does it all seem a bit transparent? Are things missing some days and they are not sure if they ever had it or it was a dream. Weed is expensive. But it is what it claims. There is nothing to be uncertain about. A fixed entity staked out in a gelatinous universe.
Among these neighbors lives a degenerate Gambler who has not spoken to his Estranged Wife in four years. The last time on a glaring morning after he drained their joint account for the third time and stumbled in bloodied and starving. She tried for years to help him, but her compassion unit broke and she finally saw some knothole of true bastardry she could climb through guilt-free. And he's glad, for her, that she left. That there is maybe time left for her to get what she needs and if he stays out of touch her life can be as beautiful as he imagines.
So, which of these neighbors would write “Broken-Hearted” in their last empty slot? Rejection after long intimacy, their ego fractured, the whirring parts that let them love stripped useless by bearing down too hard, just once. Bonus points for deciphering the whole slate, west to east.