Drunken Puddles
By Artemis Adamantopoulou
Everyone who grew up in our town had heard of her. The smartest woman alive. She would stand in the middle of your dizzying mind’s vines eating away at its loneliness. We only ever saw her on the telly on Saturday evenings. We’d sit cross legged on my linoleum living room floor with a bowl of reheated popcorn on our lap, entranced by this figure, haloed by the TV glow, answering all sorts of questions about all sorts of things. These were never things of political importance, never things of particular philosophical grandeur, but always those ornate facts on numbers of species under extinction, names of every Catholic pope, the number of hearts in an octopus – the gold dust we sprinkle into small talk.
Her voice would always transmit weirdly through the static of the telly. The stinging metallic timbre on her ‘s’ and ‘t’ sounded like screeches from a kettle. Her approach to responding questions was always the same. She would pause for a couple of seconds during which she would fixate her gaze in the groove between the interviewer’s eyebrows. The interviewer would always scratch that area soon after. She would always respond in ways only the interviewer and few in the crowd could understand. They would look at her starstruck, as if she just unlocked some deep truth in their mind.
She was the youngest of 5, but by the time she turned 17 she had found herself alone caring for a now widowed and very ill father. When he passed, she inherited the shabby two-storey condo they had overlooking the rough part of the high street. That is when she started working as a bank clerk. The bank manager would tell his wife how ridiculously robotic she was, almost doll-like. And it was perhaps his lack of conviction in her which led to his obsession with asking her questions, trivial or otherwise – as if to test her. Soon, as things usually happen in the amorphous biome that is a quaint town with too much time and too little to do, she became a celebrity, the child prodigy, a folkloric deity.
Around Christmas that year, she appeared on various national game shows. People from all over the country would stop by to take photos of the long neglected two-storey condo. The local bakery which sold her two loaves of dark sourdough every week saw its clientele rise by the day. She remained a phantom however, seldom spotted in town.
For me- she was an all-encompassing god: something completely unattainable, and ever wondrous. We barely even knew what she looked like, her face, with an unremarkable pasty complexion, seemed to change depending on who she was around. She’d wear these larger-than life hats with silk scarves wrapping her up like a gift. We knew very little about her, and those who would solicit facts, only knew her in a transactional capacity: the butcher knew she liked the fatty pork cutlets, and didn’t mind if they were a couple of days old; the florist said she’d come in and only buy the white roses with thorny stems; and sometimes- on the occasional Friday, Stan claims he’d deliver two large margherita pizzas with anchovies to her house. We knew very little about the woman who seemed to know everything. But every Saturday we’d tune in. Every Saturday, I felt like I had the chance to know her better. And on one Saturday, while talking in great length about fungi, almost as if amazed by her own answer, I saw her crack the faintest smile. She seemed amused by how similar they were to humans- how they breathed in oxygen and let out carbon dioxide, and how unlike plants they survived off other living organisms rather than photosynthesis. And so, on that Saturday, in the middle of September, I set out to the nearby forest, guided purely by the irrational conviction that I would find her there.
Nothing could have ever prepared me for the grounding reality of meeting her. Among high weeds, her gaze was fixated on the ground, she giggled to herself in an atonal sputter that sounded like water spitting out of a rusty tap. She was jumping around, with her sage green silk scarf caressing
the grass tips. I stood in disbelief, fists clenched, watching ed this child shatter all of my dreams, breaking all my sacred Saturdays and grinding them into mud. ‘What is she?’ I thought to myself. I let out a soft cry and she turned around, startled, with her mouth slightly ajar revealing a long line of round, yellowy teeth.
‘You’re the woman on the telly, aren’t you?’, she nodded and gestured with her hands for me to come closer. I couldn’t move. ‘I see you like the mushrooms’ I continued, pointing at the patch of spotty orange mushrooms between us, she nodded again.
‘You know, I’ve always wanted to meet you, I watch you on the telly every Saturday and I really think you’re grand. Cassie at school always talks about you, and we keep dreaming about how we want to be like you when we grow up’, she stared at me, blankly, I remember wondering if she was even listening. ‘Well anyways, I don’t want to bother you much longer, I was just hoping you could tell me something about yourself. It can be as small or insignificant as you want. I just keep wondering what you could possibly be thinking, and I am at a complete loss’.
There was a protracted pause, and I thought of leaving, but just as I was about to count myself down to start walking again, I heard her whisper ‘you really want to know what I’m thinking?’. ‘Well, just what you’re thinking right now for example’, I said, staring at my feet. ‘I guess I’m thinking that no one’s ever asked me what I’m thinking’.
‘Surely that’s not true, surely everyone is lining up to ask you about what you think of climate change, geopolitics, heck even the union strike!’
‘You’d be surprised how many people prefer to only hear you tell them what they want to hear’. Her ‘t’ and ‘s’ wrung in my ears like they did on the telly.
‘Not true!’
‘Trust me, I am all that I am because people want you to say what they want to hear’. Then she approached me, taking fumbled strides, knees lifting high above the weeds like a ventriloquist puppet with her arms orbiting round her sides. As she approached me her face began to change. I remember the fear I felt when I began to see my own reflection on her cheeks, her gaze fixated between my eyebrows, ‘you want me to tell you about my plans to change the world, you want me to tell you how if you study hard at school you might finally leave this town, and maybe if you’re good enough, I can take you with me on my big adventure around the world, is that not what you want me to tell you?’.
I stared at her in complete wander, took several steps back and began furiously rubbing my face. ‘How did you do that?’ I shouted. ‘How did you read my mind like that?’
‘I was born with it, the ability to tell people what they want to hear, to give the answers to questions they already know the answers to. You’ll be surprised how far this gets you in this world’.
‘But it’s all worthless then! Why do you do it?’
‘Survival mainly, I want to live here, alone, and I want to be able to afford it. But also, because I enjoy making people happy.’
‘In a petty way’ she continued ‘our thoughts are like grapes. They sit and mature and ferment in our minds and we slurp them all day long, and then, drunk on our ageing thoughts and own self importance, nothing gives us greater pleasure than when someone sees you swimming in your drunken pool of ideas and decides to lower themselves in to join you’. ‘So, what, you’re some kind of philanthropist then? That means you’re barely a person.’ ‘Sometimes it doesn’t really matter. All we care about is the moment. And in that moment drinking in company is better than drinking alone.’
She believed she was doing good in this world, and the morsels of admiration I had left for her were desperate to believe her. I approached her shyly and asked her to teach me. I don’t remember much of what happened after that. The more I mirrored, the more I forgot, the more I stopped seeing myself: a hollowed-out shadow of the self I was. All I have now is this memory of
her, how I saw her, how I loved her. I grip onto those fragments, embers of my life, promises of who I could have been.
I continue to tell people exactly what they want to hear, and the world continues to dwindle into a helpless cycle of drunken despair. I have not left this town still. TV gameshow viewership has dropped. I find myself with a gaping wound in my mind. One that I desperately fill with others’ thoughts. My own seem to have atrophied.
I regret it all now.
