The Last Letter Synopsis: A chance detour leads a writer to the uncharted town of Sole, where he investigates the

story of a crippled ten-year-old boy who disappeared after receiving three letters from a stranger named Gilgamesh.

It was a great stroke of serendipity that during my yearly cross-country trip I experienced a lapse in my navigation and made a wrong turn on one of the many ponderous bifurcating roads that perforate the Midwest. At the time I was concocting my second novel a mystery but it was not panning out as smoothly as I planned; the absolute vigor with which I had pursued my first book was now replaced with creative parsimony. You see, my thoughts were elsewhere. My godfathers uncle died and mother insisted that my wife and I make a detour along our planned route, in order to arrive at the funeral in time. The cadaver, Charles, I knew well; my father used to take mother and me to his colonial house biannually. But Charles never appealed to me for reasons that are too petty to mention. Needless to say, my vexation was the fault of hundreds of compromised miles, not the passing of a tedious, senile old man. So it was indeed serendipity when a simple navigational fluke landed me in the quiet town of Sole, the town coincidentally mentioned two and a half decades ago by the late Charles. One of my quips with Charles was his noxious habit of sitting me down and reciting dull stories of mysterious towns that were too far away from civilization to be even remotely normal, towns where cryptic affairs of the occult seemed to occur at the drop of a preachers hat. But I was a cynic by the age of nine, and Charles translucent stories left me listless to the point of dejection. Naturally, I forgot most of them as soon as they ended. But my contextual mind brought the repressed story back from the crypt; just as the town had, seemingly, out of the blue, materialized before my tired eyes, so had Charles story about the invalid orphan boy of Sole who disappeared after a stranger had sent him three allegorical letters in three months. The story went something like this: a crippled boy (crippled by unknown circumstances) loses his mother to pneumonia and is sent across the state to live in the lonely town of Sole with his aunt, a stern, taciturn woman who situates the ten year old boy, along with his wheelchair, in the second-floor

bedroom of her two-story home. Several months pass by. The boy never leaves the house and his only entertainment is his aunts books and magazines, very few in number and dull in subject. Then, one grey day, the boy receives a letter from Mexico with the postmarked name Gilgamesh. In the letter are instructions. They tell the boy that in the coming three months, he will receive three more letters from Gilgamesh. Each will contain a terse allegorical tale with an open ending. The boy will have to fill in that ending. He will have one week to do so, and once that week is complete, he will have to send it to Gilgamesh in Mexico. When he completes all three, and if Gilgamesh judges the endings to be satisfactory, the boy will receive a very large sum of money, a car with a private driver and the ability to drive anywhere he wants in the country at no expense, with the driver acting as servant and guardian. At the end of the third month, the boy disappears. The aunt dies shortly after. I recite it so lucidly because the story was repeated to me by one of the towns two dozen remaining inhabitants. The man was tall, slim and in his forties. He had approached our car when it halted before the towns entrance and kindly showed us where we were on the map (Sole was uncharted); afterwards, I politely asked him if he knew the story of the invalid boy. Upon completing his synopsis, he informed me that although the story may be slightly apocryphal, in large part it is far from fictitious; events along this nature did indeed occur many years ago in Sole. The man then outstretched a slender hand and pointed to a decrepit two-story house not too far ahead. Apparently, the boys aunt left the house to the town. He asked me if I wanted to see the letters themselves. This is where the serendipity I have mentioned before truly reached its crux, to the horror of my wife, who was not particularly fond of mother and desperately wanted to avoid being late, lest the old woman fall into her downward spiral of lectures that could inevitably last the entire funeral. But I was not about to leave behind such a paragon of twisted

fate. (I also found it indignant to desecrate Charles memory by allowing an opportunity such as this one which he himself helped me recognize to let slip through my fingers.) I concocted a fib for mother: our car was mired in a ditch somewhere; a tire was blown; we had to walk for half a day to reach the nearest gas station to get to a pay phone; unfortunately, we would miss the funeral. The slender man pointed us to the towns only phone and I recited the story to mother. My wife furrowed her brow, hearing mothers nasal voice erupt in varicose lecture over the phones speaker. Before I got a chance to get an appeasing word in, my wife ripped the phone out of my hands, blew into the receiver and muttered something about bad reception, and promptly hung up. As it was getting late, the tall man offered us his guest room for the night, for which I subsequently offered to pay. He refused at first, but eventually agreed (somewhat reluctantly) to a decent sum; I told him I was working on a mystery novel and it would be more than fair if I paid my dues to the town, since Id be getting something out of my stay as well. Despite my exhaustion, I had a sleepless night and only managed to get four hours of rest. But I awoke strangely reinvigorated, and after a community breakfast, the kind man showed us up to the second floor of the boys house. (My wife almost fell through the stairs due to a dilapidated step on the staircase.) The boys room was sadly dreary, with nothing really more thrilling than a peeling globe and a stack of gardening magazines. The man extracted three letters and an opened envelope out of a bureau shelf; the introductory letter and three other envelopes were missing. My immediate conjecture was that the boy might have written the letters himself hence the missing initial letter. But the man quieted my impulsive priori by showing me a sample of the boys handwriting. Gilgameshs sloppy script was a strict dichotomy to the boys careful print; the man also indicated the authentic Mexican stamps on the lone envelope before

going off to work and leaving me and my wife alone in the boys room. We sat down on the rough bed and I gave the second and third letters to my wife while I scrutinized the first. I finished roughly five minutes later, underwhelmed; the tale was poorly written and unedited, the subject trite and unfulfilling. The boy, according to the first letter, was to place himself in the role of a starving tribe leader, in desperate need to feed the hungry mouths of his emaciated children, as well as provide something for his people. The neighboring tribe leader, who is a longtime ally and personal friend, is equipped with just enough tribe rations for the winter. The boy could murder his neighboring tribesman, take the rations and feed his family, but suffer guilt as well as make a fierce, proximal enemy out of the other tribe. He could murder the entire tribe, feel even deeper guilt, but keep his tribe safe and fed. Or, the boy could write his own ending. A brief postscript at the end of the letter reminded the boy that he must provide a detailed, personal explanation to accompany his choice. I looked over to my wife. To my astonishment, she was not only engrossed in the third letter, but her face was frozen in consternation, some seemingly deplorable realization washing over her countenance. She finished the tale and handed me the letter. Once I was finished reading, the pieces seemed to fall into place. (The second tale was another throwaway, and not worth mentioning here at all, except that it had to do with a judge and an innocent ruffian.) The last allegorical, open-ended tale went like this: the boy was to place himself in the abhorred position of a poor and dejected drunkard father. One night, while his wife is away at her sisters, the father gets very depressed and drinks himself to delirium. His son, missing his mother dearly, risks coming downstairs to where his father is sprawled haphazardly on a chair, reeking of bourbon, to ask when she is coming home. The father, angered by this small disturbance, gets up and takes a mallet and beats the boy on the legs till the screaming

youth passes out. The father awakes the next day, his wife still at her sisters, to the harrowing truth: the boys legs are paralyzed. Deeply ashamed, the father flees, leaving most of his life savings on the kitchen counter. He works incessantly, occupying all waking hours with backbreaking labor and diligent study, in order to expunge the memory of the beating. He grows wealthy, and in two years time he retires and has enough money to last him for a lifetime. The last letter, unlike the other two, had no postscript and no suggested endings. It simply asked what the boy would do in the fathers place. Although purely hypothetical, my conjecture at the time seemed to be more than logical: Gilgamesh was the boys dishonored father, willing to forfeit his fortune as long as the boy showed the slightest bit of virtue, devising the allegorical tales to not only test the boys mettle, but make him feel like he deserved the fortune. My wife and I transcribed the letters, and the tall man, later that day, gave me Gilgameshs envelope as a parting gift. We thanked him and his family, and after a rapacious community gala we went back to the car. Deep, starlit night was blanketing the somber sky, and my continuous yawning and glassy eyes prompted me to stop at a motel for the night, where I instantly fell asleep and dreamed of Gilgameshs Mexican palace. In the next six months, I systematically produced around two hundred solid typewritten pages for my novel. Unfortunately, by that time, my inspiration petered out, and I was again grasping at straws. I could have easily ruminated a plausible ending, but a small, obsessive twinge prodded at me whenever I would draft a fabricated conclusion. I needed to know more about Gilgamesh, and I was more that curious to find out what had happened to the boy himself. My only option, if I was to complete my novel and fulfill my gripping curiosity, was to travel to Mexico, to the address written in lackadaisical script at the corner of Gilgameshs oblong envelope. My wife refused to go, pointing out the address was near the precarious

Mexican border; they would shoot the two idiot gringos on sight, were her exact words. But I would have none of it. I stubbornly assured her I was going with or without her. After a week of vexatious arguments that very nearly ended in divorce, she yielded to my lone departure. Why she did so is not important. The return address on Gilgameshs envelope and somehow a part of me expected something as dismal as this turned out to be a convenience store. You can imagine how close I was to neurasthenia; wildly cocking my head around the block, triple-checking the address, questioning locals in broken Spanish. But this was it; Gilgameshs palace was a mere convenience store. Had it not been for the week of grating contention with my wife, I would have either a) drank a deadly amount of alcohol at the nearest cantina (which happened to be across the street), or b) turned back, dejected, and finished the novel with one of my many posited lackluster endings. But I did not almost lose my marriage only to become a sorry drunkard or come up with some tacky cessation to my otherwise solid mystery novel. I entered the store and went up to the young cashier, a tawny girl of about seventeen, and asked her where the manager was. She pointed to the back, at a closet-sized storage room where a short, oily man was carefully inspecting cans of food. Hopeless, I scuttled over to the manager and showed him the return address on the envelope. And here, my friends, is where fortuitous luck struck once again, where Tyche smiled and granted the poor author a veritable break. Gilgamesh had lived here, in a small room at the back of the store (now a large industrial freezer), when the manager was just a boy and his father had managed the place. (The manager and I communicated by paper; I was equipped with a Spanish-English dictionary and him with

patience.) The managers father, a benevolent man, accepted the poor sop for a nominal monthly fee. The only time the manager ever saw Gilgamesh come out was when he went across the street to the cantina, or the few times he sent out or received mail. Gilgamesh (the manager never found out his name) died of a heart attack. There was a bottle of tequila in his right hand when they found him. The manager assured me Gilgamesh was never wealthy. No veritable answers surfaced after Mexico. Although I left without a concrete, wellrounded and at least semi-factual conclusion, I had enough raw, somber data to craft a decent ending for my book. In place of what had truly happened with Gilgamesh and the boy, I offer the conclusion to my mystery novel: the character based on Gilgamesh turns out to be a destitute drunkard, not the heartbroken, wealthy social climber he implicitly made himself out to be the letters are simply a ploy for the boy to answer the final allegorical tale; it is the only way the father can know if his crippled ten year old son ever forgave him, without having to directly face the boy. Hence, the father is a coward, a drunkard and a liar. The boy never answers the final letter and manages to somehow escape the house in Sole, despite his handicap. Soon, he is declared missing. The boys aunt dies of pneumonia. The last to die is his father, a tequila bottle in his left hand, his right hand clenched in hopeless anticipation of his sons final letter.