by Jeremy-Joseph Rosen

There were four white walls to the room, each roughly ten feet by ten feet. Absentmindedly, Scooter attempted to figure out the room’s volume. Then, he remembered that Javier, like all mysterious characters returned from one’s childhood, had given him an assignment.

On the table were four items: a box of matches, a candle, some thumbtacks and a pencil. Before he left the room, Javier had given him instructions.

“Affix the candle to the wall with what I have given you,” Javier had stated “and then I will tell you why the lemons are purple. I know you want to know.”

Sitting on the rumpled bed, Scooter tried to focus his thoughts on the problem at hand. He had to affix a candle to the wall using only a box of matches, some thumbtacks and a pencil. That problem seemed inconsequential. What did seem important was the Register Girl at the K.K.K.

Something about her intrigued Scooter in a way that purple lemons, buttons and even the secret of life itself could not. With a flip of the switch, he turned on the Dictaphone and began to speak:

“I’ll never understand that which I need to understand. I’ll only ever understand that which I am meant to understand.”

For a moment he scratched a private area and began again.

“There is a great mystery to this world and I have been given many clues, but I can never deduce a glimmer of the answer.”

Again he scratched; it was a persistent itch.

“There are many clues, scattered throughout life, and I have found only a few. But then there is her.” (Of course he was referring to the Register Girl at the Kalisotta Koffee Klatch, whose hips were not actually too thin.)

“There was a cornstalk I saw in the sidewalk, and in it I see only her. There was a tree and in it I see only her, and there were purple lemons and in them I see only her.”

For a second he returned to the bed and thought about how Javier led him here, with promises of knowledge. Scooter wasn’t a particularly wild person. No, the wilderness happened about his person as he passed through life.

They left the K.K.K. early in the afternoon and beyond all reason, Scooter had secured Register Girl’s phone number in an ingenious way. With little adieu, they had boarded Javiar’s moped and made their way out to the Warehouse Quarter, where all the warehouses lived and where for no apparent reason 19 pine trees grew in a straight line in the middle of a vacant lot.

“That used to be the Chicken Shack,” said Javier referring to the vacant lot.

“I went there before,” said Scooter holding on tightly. “They had good milkshakes.”

“Those weren’t milkshakes,” Javier said cryptically before turning down Mildred Street and parking near an old Dutch Colonial style warehouse.

When they entered, a butler had come to take their coats, a maid had dusted off a pair of chairs in which they never sat and a kitchen scullion had brought out a pot and teacups from which they never drank.

Pacing about the room, Scooter stared at the items on the table. His interest was not in them, only in Register Girl. It turned out that her name was Mildred Strange. Strange since he was on Mildred Street.

Scooter had long ago learned to ignore these coincidences and not dwell on them. When they are a matter of course in your life, you learn to ignore them. This may have been part of Scooter’s problem. (But we’ve gotten only slightly ahead of ourselves.) Quickly he emptied the match box and used the tacks to attach it to the wall. Then he placed the candle in the box and lit it with the matches. The key to the puzzle was to remember that the box was an item; it wasn’t just the matches in it.

As for the pencil, he didn’t use that. It wasn’t necessary. Quite a few of his brain cells were dedicated to imagining an exciting future for him and Register Girl from the K.K.K. They would have a whirlwind romance, marry in Paris and honeymoon in Kazakhstan. Despite convention, their wedding cake would be chocolate.

With a respectable flourish, for not wearing a cape, Javier entered the room.
“So, you’ve passed the test,” he said, draining the rest of his grape soda. The can fell to the floor with a clatter.

“Tell me what I need to know.”

Scooter stepped forward slightly, his eyes narrowing to slits. He picked up the discarded can and placed it with the leftover items from the puzzle.

“Why, you already know everything you need to know.”

Scooter remembered that, by gum, he did remember everything he needed to know. As he made to leave, Javier halted him.

“There’s no great secret to this world, Scooter,” Javier began. “The truth is that everything you’ve searched for, all the information you’ve tried to hunt down, already exists in your head. You just need to learn how to remember it. You need to learn how to sort out the discrepancies in your personal story and unlock that borscht for brains you have.”

Scooter looked at him not quite dumbly by way of answer.

“The great secret is knowing how to do that.” Javier stepped over and knocked the grape soda can back on the ground. “But, you were never meant to know. The one who knows is the one you seek.”

“The Register Girl from the K.K.K.?”

“Exactly. God speed, Scooter.”

And Javier, with little to no flourish, left forever. Scooter never saw him again. Picking up the calculator, Scooter punched a few buttons. It turned out that the room had roughly 1000 cubic feet, or even more roughly 305 cubic meters. That was enough for Scooter and, lighting his pipe, he left to go meet Mildred, the Register Girl from the K.K.K.

Later that night, they went bowling.

Javier recognized Scooter right away. A brilliant smile, like none Scooter had ever seen on him, crossed Javier’s face. A cigarette dangled from his mouth and his jacket collar was turned up.

“Scooter,” exclaimed Javier.

Some strange force overcame them and they embraced. There was plenty of smiling to go around. Some hearty pats on the back and then a long look at each other. Scooter was curious about Javier.

He asked, “Where have you been?”

Javier laughed.

“Let’s go grab some coffee.”

So Scooter piled into Javier’s car and they were off. The drive was long and curiously quiet. Javier asked Scooter if there was a good shop they could go to and before he could think about the answer, Kalisotta Koffee Klatch was the place that spilled from his mouth.

Scooter got nervous as they approached the KKK. Between small talk, Javier noticed this and finally spoke up.

“What’s got you so quiet?”

Laughing, Scooter recounted all of the stories involving Register Girl, stories of drool and inarticulate ramblings. How beautiful her jaw was, how strange her nose looked, how he’d overheard her complaining about her breasts being lumpy once, how he thought her hips were a little too thin, but he didn’t care. They had a great humorous row over the whole thing.

“Have you thought of, I don’t know, asking her name? Maybe speaking to her from time to time?”

“I usually don’t think when I’m around her,” responded Scooter. A bit of drool emerged at the corner of his mouth.

They pulled up to the KKK, parked and got out. At this point Scooter tripped and fell to the pavement, scraping his knees and ripping a hole in his trousers. Javier rushed to help him up, but Scooter waved him off. A vulture flew by.

They entered the KKK to a few stares, but most people didn’t notice Scooter’s ruined pants and roughened palms. As they approached the counter, Register Girl noticed Scooter. A smile bigger than the one that crossed Javier’s face earlier in the day grew on her face. Scooter’s brain went into safe mode. That is, it simply didn’t work all that well. This Javier noticed.

Javier asked for two coffees and Register Girl went off to make them. As she returned, Javier nudged Scooter.

“Say hello, stupid.”

“Uh…”

“Two fifty, guys.”

As his long-lost acquaintance was tongue-tied, Javier forked over the cash. He grabbed Scooter’s elbow and guided him to a table in the window.

Outside several workmen were playing a game of craps next to a row of unwashed cars. For a moment Scooter watched them, then his eyes went back to Javier, who was idly swirling a spoon through his cup of coffee. Looking up at the counter, Scooter began to doubt himself on the thinness of the girl’s hips. Maybe they weren’t too thin after all.

“Good weather for it.” Javier said under a coy half-smile.

Scooter slurped his coffee down loudly and thought about it for a second, eventually realizing that he wasn’t exactly sure what Javier’s comment about the weather had meant.
There was no question that Javier knew a lot of things, he even knew the reason why Scooter’s childhood toy wagon had been blue instead of red.

“Good weather for what?” Scooter asked.

Back at the counter the girl from the K.K.K. smiled and Scooter’s eyes met hers for just half a moment.

“You’ll know when it happens.”

by Jeremy-Joseph Rosen

And there in a flash was Javier. Not the Javier he had known. No trowel-wielding child was he. In the three seconds during which Scooter saw Javier flash by, he knew exactly who the man in the bright red Yugo was. Older, more withdraw than he had been as a child, but it was Javier.

The car was parked in a lot adjoining the station Scooter’s express train had just shot through. In an instant Scooter came to life. The train would be making a stop at the next station down and he would get off, grab a train going the other direction and find Javier.
Since he had burned down the corn stalk, no one had seen him. There one day, not there that same day. While he may have disappeared, Javier’s influence lasted considerably longer.

One year after discovering the growing palm tree in the South grove, Scooter had noticed another odd thing. He had passed by it once or twice, but this time he really noticed. The experimental lemon bush. The lemons had changed to limes!

Scooter often forgot his experiments and this usually led to someinteresting results. For a while he had raised and trained guinea pigs. These little creatures formed a militaristic society, marched in rank and file and one day destroyed their pen, escaping into the bright afternoon Sun.

Scooter eventually used them as farm labour, which they excelled at and for which they were remarkably well-compensated. The palm grove flourished. David now employed their descendants in his hotel chain. A famous series of ads proclaimed Hotell Hotels as “the only chain serviced by intelligent guinea pigs.”

You might not think this a selling point, but it was at first so ridiculous that people flocked to the hotels and the guinea pigs were so charming that they rarely frightened anyone. They even unionized and had some success affecting the politics of several states and the most recent presidential election.

Like the guinea pigs, Scooter could not put a finger on what had happened to the lemon bush for some months. This was because he had no time for curiosity as it was an important part of the palm growing cycle. He scheduled time later to come back and reëxamine the issue.

When he did, he was even more surprised. The limes were now lemons again, but purple. It was a crazy thing to do, but Scooter ate one, or at least part of one. They were the sourest thing he’d ever tasted. His sister eventually started a side-business selling purple, super sour lemonade. Noted arboretologist Lothair Bourbonk purchased some purple lemons from her and grew them in his Kalisotta Regional Agricultural Center, to his financial gain.

After tasting the purple lemons, examining the foliage of the plant and taking ground samples for study, Scooter still couldn’t figure it out. He went back to the bush one day to take a look at its roots and there discovered a small electrical box sitting under the bush.It was attached to the root system, had no visible external power source, no manufacturing stamp, no instructions and very few buttons. In fact, there was but one button located more or less squarely on a side panel. Rashly Scooter pushed the button.

Nothing happened. Rashly, Scooter pushed the button again. Still nothing happened, or at least nothing Scooter could see. Later he did see. The growing palm tree which Javier planted had grown significantly and taken on anodd reddish hue. Scooter was never ableto figure out how the box worked and one day it vanished, just as Javier had, on the very same day.

So here Scooter was, itching to get off the train, almost pushing himself against the train doors and the train seemed to be taking too long to get anywhere (much like some stories I’ve read). The train came to a halt and out the door went Scooter.

He ran to a set of stairs, up the stairs, through a covered walkway traversing the tracks and down another set of stairs to the platform for trains bound in the other direction. There he waited at most two minutes. The train arrived and he jumpily got on and waited by the doors.

In no time he was at Javier’s station and exiting the train.