Free Don't Get Too Comfortable by David Rakoff Page A

Frida Kahlo painting . . .” He trails off. The very air itself is embarrassed to carry the sound of his diplomacy.
    It's a tight fit for all the teams on the corner of Bowery and Hester. We jostle up against one another benignly, like apples in a bathtub. A young man spies the message slipped between the metal grates of a shuttered jewelry store and hurriedly whispers to his teammates. But once a clue is found, it's essentially impossible to keep it from the other teams. All forty of us pick up on it within a matter of seconds. “Free Mumia Jamal Zealots” it reads.
    “To the Tombs!” I cry, ready to lead the charge to the jail connected to the courthouse. My teammates indulge me by walking down there. It's a short stroll and it buys them some time away from the eyes of the other teams to come up with the true solution. They are very gentle with me as they try to get me to see beyond the obvious and look at things a little more obliquely, the meaning behind the meaning. That's the difference, say, between overt directions and a puzzle. “Yes, yes,” I say, waving them off, picking up the pace. “We'd better get to the jail before the others.”
    They flash one another concerned looks, like the March sisters in
Little Women,
and I am Beth, the youngest, chattering brightly at Christmas about the piano recital I shall give that spring when it is clear to everyone else that I will surely be dead before they even run out of eggnog. I am a goner as far as being of any use in concerned, and still they sweetly make me feel as if I had some part in figuring out that it is the phrase's initials—F, M, J, Z and the subways they represent—that lead us to the Delancey Street subway station, the only hub of those four trains.
    A TASK HAS to be just challenging enough to be engaging. A complicated model of Chartres cathedral might be rigorous and fun to try and put together, but not if the instructions suddenly switch over into Norwegian without warning. I am finding all this far too difficult, and batting zero is starting to wear me down. By 11:30, I am the walking illustration of Why Johnny Can't Read: I am frustrated and angry and no longer interested in even trying. I am the physical, as well as the intellectual, deadweight of the White Team, sitting on the subway stairs as the rest of them find and solve the clue. I am the sullen fourteen-year-old child none of my teammates knew they had or wanted. I dawdle behind as we climb the steps back above ground and over to a disused pissoir on the traffic median of a Lower East Side boulevard.
    I shine my flashlight through the barred window of the small pavilion. The beam glances off the tiled, graffitied walls and old urinals, coming to rest on the floor where I see two photographs of the Artist Formerly Known As and the Queen of England. (How did the puzzlemaster even get in there, I wonder? The doors to the toilet are bricked shut.) The mere fact of finally getting a clue right shoots through me like an ampoule of adrenaline. I am suddenly energized and awake as we race over to the intersection of Prince and Elizabeth. But my good mood burns off like morning fog as we stand around for an hour near a restaurant called Peasant. (
Darling, have you been? Their gruel? Simply too delicious. We ate our entire meal languishing in their adorable little debtor's prison in the basement, and then the children died of rickets! Divine!
)
    None of the teams has any idea. The most avid puzzlers among us are stumped. We walk up and down the sidewalk, pressing our faces through the iron bars of the fence of the tombstone manufacturer, scanning for the umpteenth time the wheat-pasted broadside of Jerry Garcia stuck to the mailbox. Sleepiness and a congenital simplemindedness have me using my already flimsy powers of deduction on analyzing garbage. I study a drippy soda can for messages like it was the Rosetta stone.
    Eventually, a collective “uncle” is declared, and someone calls in to