HUMAN WRECKAGE
J’accuse!
It all went down like a crucial plot twist in a noir thriller. In the hands of an auteur it would’ve been a scene wrought and fraught with tension and dread.
Netflix Derek and his wife Alex telephoned Ann and me from the end of our driveway. Our good friends live around the corner and have their own bottle of whiskey in our liquor cabinet. Alex is well known in the rackets, a respected opponent on the local tennis circuit. Netflix Derek is a psychologist, sometimes I wonder how that makes me feel.
We’d agreed previously that the exchange would take place at the Crooked 9. A package was on our front porch, on the red cushion of the tete-a-tete. I slipped out of the house to retrieve it and replaced it with one of our own. I went back inside. Following the nervy transaction, we chatted amicably outside from a distance about our respective states of mental health. It was cold. The four of us shivered beneath the shroud of the collapsing leaden sky, heavy metal.
The MacGuffin Alex and Netflix Derek collected was a 500-piece jigsaw of a London Underground route map, the epitome of wayfaring design. Ours was the cover of Abbey Road broken into a thousand pieces. I’d assumed I could get the Beatles back together with my eyes closed: I’ve been looking at the sleeve for 51 years and, besides, Ann and I had walked the walk as recently as last October.
Zebra stripes angled by perspective, John’s suit and the 28IF Volkswagen, all white; flesh tones: three profiles, the tip of John’s beak, three hands and Paul’s bare feet. A puzzle cut for ages fetus and up. As Ann and I laid the pieces out face up on our dining room table I realized to my horror that the iconic image, now enlarged to 27”x20” was grainy – an analogue word for pixilated, too little reproduction information. The dark greens, navy blues, charcoals and blacks were all essentially monochromatic blurs.
I calculated that if Ann and I managed to assemble 25 pieces per day, the entire puzzle would take the two of us… a lot of days. Thankfully, quarantine time isn’t terribly linear. And our task would simplify as we reduced the volume of stray pieces and therefore our completion pace would necessarily increase. We began with the pennant of pale blue sky top centre. From there we worked left and right into the dappled greenery and into the dark shadows to assemble the top edge. We turned the left and right corners and dropped down from the darkness onto the pavement. We then proceeded to fill in the bottom of the frame.
Approximately 179 pieces were now connected but we were missing one border piece under Ringo’s right shoe. I scanned the dining room table. I crawled underneath it to pat the carpet. I felt the seats of the chairs. I checked the empty box. I repeated the process. I repeated the process. I repeated the process. We could have continued, maybe with George’s denim but I was obsessed with this single, seemingly missing piece, as feverish as an Edgar Allan Poe character. How could I not see it amongst some 800 other pieces? It was impossible. It should’ve been shining like a nugget of gold.
I had to get a grip on myself. I opened a can of beer, lit a cigarette and went outside to watch the falling snow. I began to contemplate the character of our alleged friend Netflix Derek the psychologist. Wouldn’t it be just like him to run us like lab rats for one of his insane social experiments? Of course it would: one missing piece to make me crazy. And then his test of my character: would I return his and Alex’s Abbey Road puzzle admitting a piece was missing, apologetic because perhaps Ann and I had lost it, or would I say nothing?
Clever bastard. But little does he know that the London Transport MacGuffin puzzle box he got from us contains only 499 pieces. He’ll know no joy on the Jubilee line.
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