He hated the damn thing. It was unsolvable. He had begun to wonder if the woman, Helen High and Mighty, had sabotaged it somehow to get back at him for his puzzle snobbery. The colors on the surface were just plastic stickers. She could have easily peeled and reglued a couple of them in the wrong place. Probably drunk when she did it. Hadn’t she said something about being in recovery? His stomach told him that it was now at least a few minutes after six. His dinner should be there, waiting on him. Edgar set the cube down and headed downstairs to the front door. He paused in the living room and fixed one of his charts—one corner had come loose from the wall and drooped over like a dog’s ear. He assessed all of the charts for a moment. They had not changed much in the last several weeks. It wasn’t that he had lost interest, he didn’t think. It was that his mind seemed to be growing cloudy, almost befuddled. The Rubik’s Cube was case in point. If he couldn’t figure out a little brainteaser that schoolchildren—schoolchildren, for God’s sake—could solve in a matter of seconds, then how was he going to wrap his mind around chaos theory?
