An Allegory.

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

The Happy Ending Problem

“Party!”

Within the bowls of indulgence the acids are held by a lining so thick: reverberating base. In this place there is no weekday gravity, no natural light, just perception and delight strung through bodies in the vacuum. The dance, the peristalsis prance. Keep it all moving downstream. Beats and rhymes for the sponge-soaked minds of the college. So that they might unwind: open themselves completely.

Teresa’s mother would have her believe that astral ‘manipulators’ hide behind the scenes of places like bars, and clubs, and casinos, playing on people’s frayed emotions for energetic sustenance.

“Why do you think liquor is referred to as spirits?” Susan had asked this of her daughter one time. “Drugs, they open you up.”

“Exactly.” Her daughter would always retort in the spirit of escapism. Teresa is quite sure her strings are not connected to the wet whims of carnal desire unless she wants them to be, and sometimes she does.

“Two more shots of tequila!”

Earlier in the day it had come to the attention of Teresa and her friends that a second year physics student named Meredith Kabah had solved the Happy Ending problem, a famous geometry puzzle. Teresa has only met her once, randomly (walking to a class), and none of her friends know this girl, or the puzzle for that matter. Different degrees, but one lucid, seemingly universal message had emerged by six o’clock: ladies night out. In fact, Teresa and her entourage soon discovered that most of the college was using Meredith’s success as a reason to party, and why not?

“To happy endings!”

Teresa taps martini glasses with her friend Kylene. They slam back the contents. The bartender gives a knowing nod, bobbing his head to the music.

Kylene is a relatively new friend. Part of the original assembly at the start of the night, the two girls are now presumably the only ones still partying, but definitely the only two which had stumbled off the beaten path and into the fraternal labyrinth they find themselves in, yelling over the impact of the relentless base drum. It is the so called ‘Cellar’ room, deep underground the fabled Phi Delta Kappa House. Her friend, a chemistry major, reaches into her purse and takes out something very small and shiny. “This is for you,” she says to Teresa, handing over a small piece of folded tinfoil.

“What’s this?”

“It’s...yours. These things decide themselves. Take it.”

“What, now?”

Kylene laughs at his, motioning around with her hands to the music and people.

“What will happen?”

“It’s like a...game with your own mind.”

“Where did you get this?”

“I made it myself.”

Teresa nods, thinking this over. Kylene is some sort of chemistry protegé from what her friends describe. Her friend is actually a year younger; strange, how she feels like the older sister right now. Teresa knows what is in her hand, but her mom’s stories had always kept her somewhat at bay from that which sheds the veil.

Kylene continues on. “It was easy enough. I thought: why not? Call it a hunch....call it the martinis!” With this she dances off into the shifting curtain of limbs and torsos. Her friends say that Kylene parties way too much, and way too hard, and is in danger of losing her scholarship, but it seems to Teresa she is going to be fine.

It also seems that she is gone.

Dancing grows foreign quickly, and the crowd seems to simply expel her towards the exit like a chemical reaction. Teresa is content enough with this. The gift has been found and it’s time to leave, apparently. Amidst this process she looks down at her hand, unclenching it to make sure the small tinfoil package is still in her possession.

Clearing the threshold of The Cellar Teresa spots two males that look to be upper-years within Phi Delta Kappa are leaning against the wall near the exit, one of them waving a near-full beer, shouting into it like a glass microphone: “...she doesn’t deserve that genetic cocktail mix of intelligence she has. No ambition, no....anything. Just some no one. It’s not fair. It should have been me.”

“Let’s not get carried away.”

“Well definitely not her!” He shouts this, seemingly as loud as he can, which doesn’t end up being that loud over the party noise. “I can’t believe she solved that equation. No one has ever completed that theorem.” With this he throws the beer against the opposite wall and simply starts cursing uncontrollably. “How did she do it?” he yells the question furiously at Teresa as she approaches.

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