The Solver of Problems

I took a moment to dream about winter, before the sun set and the solace sank in. She hadn’t even been gone that long. Just a single, solitary season. But already her absence was inescapable. I felt it in the way the birds flew, no longer avoiding the clearing on Fifty-First where she left me.

I felt it too in my bones. She left me with those as well.

She didn’t leave until May—no friend of flowers. But I still associate her most with autumn, the season for ghouls and ghosts and pumpkin plots. The Season of the Witch. We met, of course, on Halloween, when I caught her stealing shadows from unwary children.

“They’ll never miss them,” she said, but I made her return them anyway. It took us until dawn, and I bought her pancakes to show we were square. Sitting across the table from me at Perkins, she slathered her breakfast in honey and butter.

“Syrup,” she said, “is for Canadians.”

I was smitten and hoped it didn’t show.

The next day at work was the worst. November First is an endless parade of Goths claiming their souls have been vexed by one of the Unknowables.

“You’re not cursed. You’re just hungover,” I explain to them ad nauseum, and close up early.

She was waiting for me when I left, just out of sight as I bolted and warded the door to my office. The sign on the window says “E.F. Gaius, Esq. Solver of Problems.” My business model relies heavily on word-of-mouth advertising.

“You should know,” she said (I tried not to look too eager as I turned around), “that I nicked your Fifth Charm as you paid for the pancakes.”

She gazed at me from the shadows to prove she could. Her body stayed out of sight. There was just a pair of wide green eyes and a mischievous grin where a person should be.

“Keep it,” I said. “The Fifth never frightened me.”

This wasn’t strictly true.

“Agreed,” she said. “Then, I’ll take you out to pay for it.”

She led us to an Irish bar where we toasted unpopular saints. Her current name was Kaylee and this was her third spin on the Wheel of Fortune. She lost to a wolf the first time and met a man overly fond of flames the second. Now, she was gambling for true immortality, the real ageless deal. I told her I didn’t go in for fairy tales about reaching into wells or fiddling with demons.

“Everyone who chases eternal youth dies unpleasantly,” I said. “You’d be better off wrestling an Unknowable. At least then, the outcome would be uncertain by definition.”

She said she had a plan.

I said everyone who ever gambled for immortality said they had a plan.

She said she had a better plan.

I said everyone since the first gambler said they had a better plan.

She said, “Yes, but I have Google.”

I Googled “how to become immortal” on my phone and laughed at the results.

“Not the search engine, you fool. The metadata.”

That got my attention.

She wouldn’t tell me her plan (“It would spoil my feminine mystique.”), but she agreed to see me again.

In the dark and dusty basement dive where we met for our third date, I told her about my current client, a lonely baron who had misplaced his castle.

“Will you plead with the Second to return the castle?”
“Actually, I’ve decided to get him a dog.”

“A dog?”
“He hid the castle from himself. He’s lonely. Regular walks in the park should do the trick.”

I asked after her quest for immortality and she kissed me into silence.

We went back to my place. She was always evasive about her address. Either she moved every week or her apartment was up the hill, down the hill, west of the sun, and east of the moon all at once.

I found it once, of course. Finding things that don’t want to be found is an essential function for a professional solver of problems. I brought a dozen muffins and a single wreath. “For the First,” I said, “you can never be too careful.”

“You’re sweet,” she said, “but you can’t come in.”

Over one delectable shoulder, I saw three monitors and a dozen towers. The room was a cobweb of wires and fans. A tank of coolant in the corner may have been home to something living. Or pickling.

We ate the muffins in the park with a bottle of chardonnay. She asked me how things went with the Baron. In response, I pointed to a bespectacled man with a corgi on a leash. He was enmeshed in conversation with the owner of an enthusiastic mutt. The mutt favored the fluffier end of its ancestry, but its owner was well groomed.

“You really are a solver of problems,” she said.

“Mondays through Fridays,” I replied, “but today, I’m hoping to cause one.”

“For your Baron and his chiseled paramour?”

“For you.”

“For me? Pourquoi?”

“Careful now. That kind of casual French is suspiciously Canadian.”

“Touché… is what I might say if I had any relation to our more polite sisters to the North.”

I looked hard at her left shoulder. It was just as delectable as the one on the right.

“Okay,” she said, “I’ll bite. Why are you seeking to cause me problems?”

“I want to make you fall in love with me,” I said, “and I place great faith in the romantic potential of carefully orchestrated aggravation.”

“I’ll carefully orchestrate your aggravation!” she replied. Her tone was quippy, but alas, her words were true.

Two months later, we celebrated the solstice with bonfires and hot toddies. She made shapes with the steam of her breath in the frigid air as we gave thanks to whichever of the Unknowables taught humans how to party. Wispy grey hares and foxes flew from her lips as she recited the traditional invocations: “We give thanks to whomever for whatever. We hope for more of the same. We expect it not.” 

There, beneath the solstice moon, I asked her about her past journeys along the Wheel. I don’t usually go in for such adolescent courtship rituals, but she confessed her love to me the day before and it stirred a wave of sentimentality within me. Asking your lover about their past journeys on the darkest day of the year may be sappier than a Hallmark card on St. Valentine’s Day, but it is also an established way to acknowledge that they are your lover.

So, I asked what she had valued, if she had loved, if she had been loved, and if she had always known she would return.

“You only get three questions,” she reminded me.

“I thought that rule only applied to seventh graders.”

“It’s practically holy writ,” she grinned.

“The first three, then,” I said. This was a mistake.

“The first time, I valued warmth. The second time, I prized frigidity. My journeys would have lasted longer had these priorities been inverted,” she said. “The first time, I loved a brook that babbled the secrets of the forest spirits. The second time, I was loved by a man I loathed. This is the first time I have loved and been loved.”

I wanted to lift her off her feet and steal her back to the warm bed inside, but she was entitled to questions of her own.

“You must tell me how many spins you’ve taken for free,” she said. “It’s only fair, since I let you know about mine on our first date.”

“Second date,” I said.

“What are you calling our first date?”

“When we ate pancakes at Perkins.”

She took a minute to assess this revision—a disconcertingly long, silent minute—as if she were recalibrating our whole relationship.

“As you say. Now, tell me about your previous spins.”

“In truth, I cannot say how often I’ve played Fortune’s Fool. I returned several times before we had words for all the numbers. And by the time I could begin counting, it didn’t feel like there was any point in starting. The tally would never be accurate, so let the Unknowables keep their own ledgers, I say.”

“If you had to guess?” There was a peculiar look on her face, a mixture of wonder and terror. Her features faded into the shadows again, as they did sometimes when she was absorbed in a task, leaving only her wide eyes and trembling lips fully visible.

“Hundreds of times,” I confessed. “Too many to remember,” I lied.

She closed her eyes. Only her gaping mouth was still apparent beneath the starry sky. I knew she was processing what I said, evaluating me in a whole new spectrum.

“Amazing,” she said at last, fluttering her eyes open in a manner fairy queens would envy. “I have so many questions. How do you pay the toll? Why not rest a spell in the other place?”

“Such questions are for the equinox,” I reminded her.

“Of course,” she said, disappointed but already scheming. Her face was glowing in the moonlight again and the flush in her cheeks told me that was the last time I would ever deny her. “My questions, then, are these: What did you do? Who did you meet? And … did you always know you would return?”

“You stole that last one from me,” I protested.

She shrugged (oh those shoulders!), “It’s a good question.”

“The first time, I solved a problem. It was the first time anyone solved a problem and I was celebrated for it. Every time since then, I’ve solved different problems.” Like a junkie scrambling to relive that first high.

“I’ve mostly met people with problems, like our Baron of The Missing Castle. I met a strong woman who wanted the wolves to leave her tribe alone. I met a crooked man who wanted to own things he could not see or feel. And I met a beautiful creature who wanted to live forever, despite all the warnings and the tales.

Each and every time I fall off the Wheel, I know I’ll soon return because there’s always another problem waiting for me. Something the politicians and the ombudsmen will ignore. Something the scientists and engineers will dismiss. Something your neighbors would shake their heads at.”

A year after it began, five months after it ended. I pulled my jacket tight against the wind blowing off the lake and wondered if she picked me on purpose.

The thought didn’t track, of course. She had barely begun developing her algorithm when we met. She wouldn’t know what she needed—a lover, a mark, a sacrificial lamb—until months later. When it was too late for me. When it was too late for us.

But it was hard to shake the idea because, if she had been looking for a mark, I would have been perfect. Much too perfect.

In February, we celebrated an early thaw by renting a room near some famous waterfalls. We wore bath robes softer than most clouds and drank champagne like delicate fireworks. I told her about my latest client, the one whose fee paid for the posh resort with its jetted tub and eye-straining TV.

“She was a Maiden Fair,” I said, “being trolled by a dragon on Twitter.”

“How fair?” she asked.

“Middling at best,” I replied. “I believe the designation was inherited. Her bank account certainly was.”

“So, did you slay the dragon with your Holy Avenger?”

“Actually, I traced his IP address and placed a geas on his server. If he tries to @ her again, he’ll turn into a newt.”

“Aren’t you worried he’ll just take a burner phone down the block?”

I shrugged. “That requires stepping away from his hoard.”

“Why are you trying to keep me out of the office?” I asked over caviar and chenin blanc. A world-class violinist played a hauntingly gorgeous tune at the next table over. I tried to wrap my mind around the fact that a restaurant in the age of Spotify was paying someone so talented to wander the floor and play beautiful music for investment bankers and their much younger companions. I failed.

I knew I shouldn’t be able to afford the place. A single season earlier, I was missing rent payments like a hibernating bear misses sunrises. The Baron was a nice change of pace from the hexed cheaters and befuddled Chosen Ones whose unsightly blemishes and nauseously trite questions put food on my plate most years. The Maiden Fair was a stroke of good fortune for a long-standing local business with close ties to the community (most of those ties were unwelcome, but they were ties nonetheless).

But this latest client was a bridge too far. Literally. They lived two tolls over on the worst interstate around.

When they first called, I cited a retaining fee designed to send their business elsewhere and they asked for my Venmo handle without haggling. I spent two hours in traffic each day imagining what it would be like to have an office with an above ground window. I spent the rest of the day helping a doddering druid repot their favorite gardenias. They were convinced a malicious sprite was hiding somewhere among a Rubiaceae’s roots. It was unclear if the sprite in question had designs on them or the flowers, but it didn’t seem to matter. And so, I spent 70 hours in one week repotting one thousand two hundred and fourteen gardenias.

It’s astonishing how many problems can be solved by offering lonely people some company.

“I’m testing the algorithm,” she replied. “The distance it places between you and your office is coincidental.”

The algorithm, she explained, was getting closer and closer to giving people their hearts’ desires. She watched me prepare to object and looked relieved when I didn’t.

Of course. Of course, she didn’t create an algorithm specifically tailored to find the key to immortality. There wouldn’t be enough data points to produce a meaningful pattern.

But…

But if there was a universal key to satiating a heart’s desire—any heart’s desire—then there was key to her heart’s desire. Immortality.

Immortality. Not me.

A simple question about my commute opened the flood gates, and information about the algorithm poured forth from her lips. Her achievement was truly astonishing. Monumental. And it must have been, not just difficult, but agonizing to remain silent about it for the last six months. She spoke of it with a gleam in her eye that left me dizzy. She spoke of it with such reverence it was easy to forget the code she had written was a means to an end, not an end in itself. She spoke of it in a way I knew deep, deep down she would never speak of me.

And all I wanted was to keep listening, for forever and a day.

The algorithm, I discovered, was remarkably boring, despite the sensuous enthusiasm with which she described it. It culled data from the billions of internet users struggling to realize their dreams, separated the searches focused on realizing those dreams from the searches focused on things like buying cat food and checking the weather, and analyzed the differences between searches that produced the desired results (as determined, predominantly, by searchers no longer searching) and those that did not (as determined, predominantly, by searchers continuing to struggle with their enormous unhappiness).

That was it, just collecting and sorting.

Sifting search criteria into columns A and B and looking for common denominators, like a quest to find two identical needles in a trash heap full of non-standard needles.

Except, it worked.

“The magic,” she explained, “is in the numbers. Billions of people cast their wildest fantasies into the endless void of the search engine. And the search engine’s been learning from their behavior. Everyone knows this. Autocompletes. Targeted marketing. And did you means?”

Her impish smile left no doubt she knew something everyone didn’t know.

“The search engine’s been learning,” she repeated, “but people still think it’s being taught. The Silicon Valley boys think they’re teaching it to sell us more khakis because that’s the only use for it they can see. But really, they’re just teaching it to tell us how it’s selling khakis after it learned to sell khakis from a billion boring queries about pants. And now, I’m going to teach it to tell me how it grants wishes.”

In the olden days, any sufficiently deep well may have been a magic portal, so why not close your eyes and reach as deep into one as you can? You might get stung by a scorpion. You might lose a finger to a beast. Or you might feel the cool, smooth surface of a silver coin. And what couldn’t you do with that coin you recovered from a magic well?

Today, we point flashlights into each new well and shush away the scorpions and the beasts with loud noises and strong words. We’ve pointed flashlights into the deepest trenches in the ocean. We’ve pointed flashlights at craters on the moon.

It’s getting awfully hard to find wells deep enough for magic portals.

The last time I saw her she asked to meet on the corner where I first caught her stealing shadows. Fifty-First and Glendale.

“I kept one of the shadows,” she said. “I needed somewhere to hide, somewhere even you couldn’t find me. I’ve been your only shadow for months now.”

“Why are you telling me?” I asked, taking my shadow back.

“I have to go, and I don’t want you to think I’m just hiding.”

She looked so solid beneath the early Summer sun. It couldn’t have been clearer she was never meant for mornings. She would always be the daughter of Autumn evenings. Forever and ever.

“So, you taught the algorithm to tell you how it grants wishes?”

“You must have known I would, or you never would have gone out with me that third time.”         

We both knew she was lying about the second part.

“And there’s more to it than nudging people into my office?” I asked.

“I genuinely hoped that would be enough,” she said, “but immortality isn’t a missing castle.”

“Why does it have to be immortality?”

“Have you ever been burned alive?”

“No,” I admitted. In all those past spins on the Wheel, the pointer that ticked out my fate never landed on that particular tile.

“If you had, you wouldn’t ask.”

She turned to find a shadow, or maybe just to look away from me.

“Wait,” I said with a sob in my throat, “at least—at least tell me what it cost.”

I didn’t really want to know the cost. I have no intention of living forever. But I’m a solver of problems. I’ve solved problems so ancient no one alive knows they were ever problems. And I had to know the solution to this one. The one.

She answered over her shoulder as she faded into the shade of an oak tree, “It cost what the poets have always known it cost. I just had to break my heart into pieces and scatter them among the stars.”