The Questioner

ACT I

The trouble with being fired from Yale for asking too many questions is that nobody else seems to think it is trouble at all.

Edmund Whitmore stood in the rain outside Dean Harrington's office on the New Haven green and watched the water run down the collar of his coat, thinking that this was perhaps the most honest thing that had happened to him all semester. Water did not pretend to be anything other than water. It fell where it fell and soaked what it soaked and asked no permission of the ground.

His satchel contained exactly three things: a copy of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (dog-eared, margins full of questions that Dean Harrington would never read), a photograph of his mother (dead five years, smiling in a way that suggested she knew something Edmund was still searching for), and a train ticket to Paris that he had bought on a whim three weeks ago and never used.

The rain did not improve as he walked back to his room. It never did, not in Connecticut in April, not in any season for that matter, because the sky above New Haven seemed to have been painted by a artist who specialized exclusively in shades of grey.

'You should have stuck to the syllabus,' Harrington had said, and Edmund had said, 'Sir, the syllabus assumes that knowledge is something you can catalogue. But what if knowledge is something you can only reach by asking the wrong questions?'

The wrong questions. That was the phrase Harrington had used. The wrong questions, delivered with the weary patience of a man who had spent thirty years trying to teach philosophy to students who wanted to major in business and minor in existentialism.

Edmund unlocked his door and stepped into a room that smelled of old books and older regrets. He set his satchel on the desk, took off his wet coat, and looked at his reflection in the mirror above the washbasin. Thirty-two years old. Dark hair that refused to be tamed. Eyes that looked perpetually surprised, as if he had just remembered something important and could not quite recall what it was.

'Wrong questions,' he said to the mirror. And the mirror, being a mirror, said nothing back.

But something else did.

From the street below came the sound of music. Not the organized music of the campus chapel or the formal concerts at Woolsey Hall, but something looser, looser still—a ragtime piano played by hands that did not care about technique, only feeling. Edmund went to the window and looked down.

A group of people had gathered on the sidewalk outside his building. Five of them, dressed in colours that seemed almost illegal against the grey backdrop of New Haven spring. One played the piano on an upturned crate. Another stood on a barrel and gestured with her arms. A third held a trumpet that he did not play so much as wield, like a weapon or a prayer.

They were performing a silent play. Edmund could tell that much, because the people around them were laughing and clapping and someone was dropping coins into an open hat. But the play itself was unlike anything he had seen.

The woman on the barrel wore a red heart painted on her blouse. She acted out the role of a society hostess with a precision that was almost painful—every gesture, every smile, every tilted head spoke of a woman who had spent her entire life performing a role that had been written for her by someone else.

The man with the diamond painted on his waistcoat played a banker. He counted imaginary money with his fingers, nodded at imaginary clients, shook hands that were not there. His performance was so accurate that Edmund felt a chill, because he recognized the man. He had seen that exact manner of counting in Dean Harrington's office, in the dean's father's office, in every office building between here and Wall Street.

The club player was a teacher. The spade player was a soldier. And the fifth—the fifth was no one in particular. A person in a plain grey coat who stood slightly apart from the others, watching, listening, occasionally tilting their head in a way that suggested they were hearing something the others could not hear.

The Jester. Edmund did not know how he knew, but he knew.

ACT II

He went down to the street before the performance ended. The crowd was dispersing, the coins had been collected by the trumpet player (who smiled at Edmund with teeth that seemed too white for the grime of the New Haven sidewalk), and the five performers were packing up their crate-piano and barrel-stage.

'Bravo,' Edmund said, because it was the only word that seemed appropriate.

The red heart turned to him. Her name, she told him, was Beatrice. She was twenty-eight and had been a society hostess for six years before she decided that hosting was not hosting so much as performing, and performing was not so different from the stage, and the stage was not so different from life, and life was—

'Life is a play where nobody gave you the script,' Beatrice said. 'We're just figuring it out as we go.'

The diamond was Reginald, a former bank clerk who had quit after realizing that he spent more time counting other people's money than his own. The club was Miriam, a schoolteacher who had resigned because she could no longer pretend that memorizing dates and names was the same as understanding anything. The spade was Captain James, a veteran of the Spanish-American War who had come home to find that nobody wanted to talk about war, only about stock prices and social standings.

And the fifth was Silas, who did not seem to have a specific role at all. He was perhaps forty, perhaps fifty, with eyes that were older than either age suggested. He did not introduce himself with a花色. He introduced himself with a question.

'Professor, was it? Professor Whitmore?'

Edmund stared at him. 'How do you know who I am?'

Silas smiled. 'I know a lot of things. The question is whether knowing is the same as understanding. That's what I want to talk to you about, if you have time. And if you're willing to listen to someone who doesn't have a title.'

Edmund should have said no. He had been fired three days ago, his Paris ticket was gathering dust in his satchel, and his coat was still damp from the rain. He had no reason to talk to strangers on a sidewalk.

But Silas had asked a question, and Edmund had not eaten a proper meal in two days, and the rain was starting again.

'Give me five minutes,' Edmund said. 'Then I'll buy you all a drink.'

They drank at a saloon on College Street. Edmund learned that the troupe called themselves the Suits, though they refused to explain why. He learned that they had been performing on street corners for two years, moving from city to city, playing silent dramas about the roles people played in public and the people they became in private.

'Why five of you?' Edmund asked.

'Four suits,' Beatrice said. 'Red heart, diamond, club, spade. We're the four suits of a deck of cards. And then there's Silas.'

'Silas is the joker,' Captain James said. 'The one card that doesn't belong to any suit. The one person who sees the whole game instead of just his own hand.'

Silas shook his head. 'I'm not the joker. I'm what's underneath all the cards. The paper they're printed on. The hand that deals them. Call me what you want, but don't call me special. Everyone's a joker until they decide to be just one card.'

Edmund drank his whiskey and thought about this. He thought about Harrington's wrong questions. He thought about his mother's photograph, smiling that knowing smile. He thought about the fifty-two years of his life in which he had tried to be a professor, a scholar, a man of letters, and wondered how much of that had been Silas and how much had been just another card.

'Come with us,' Silas said. Not a request. An invitation. 'We're heading to Paris in the morning. There's a crowd there that needs to hear what we have to say. Not with words. With questions.'

'What questions?'

'The ones that matter. The ones that keep you awake at night. The ones that make you wonder if the life you're living is yours or someone else's.'

Edmund looked at his whiskey. He looked at the rain against the saloon window. He looked at his train ticket, still in his satchel, still unused.

'I'll need to pack,' he said.

ACT III

Paris in May was not like New Haven in April. Paris was colour where New Haven was grey. Paris was noise where New Haven was silence. Paris was a city that had never pretended to be anything other than what it was: a place where people came to be someone they had not been before.

The Suits performed in the Place du Tertre, under the shadow of the Sacre-Coeur, where painters sold postcards and tourists bought souvenirs and life moved at a speed that Edmund had never experienced in the controlled environment of a university campus.

They performed every day. Sometimes twice. Sometimes three times. Edmund watched from the edges of the crowd, notebook in hand, writing down not the performance but the reactions—the way a banker stopped in his tracks when the diamond player counted imaginary money, the way a schoolteacher wiped her eyes when the club player mimicked the gesture of grading papers, the way a soldier stood perfectly still while the spade player saluted a ghost.

And Silas—Silas performed the role that Edmund had come to think of as the Jester. Not a court jester with bells and motley, but something older, simpler: a person who asked questions that nobody else wanted to ask.

In one performance, Silas played a man standing in a market, watching people buy and sell and haggle and pretend. He approached a woman selling flowers and asked, in gestures so simple they were almost childlike: Why do you sell these? Who bought them before? Do you know the names of the people who buy them? Do you ever wonder what would happen if you just gave them away?

The woman in the crowd who had been selling flowers in real life the day before came to the performance that afternoon. She did not buy anything. She stood at the back of the circle and watched Silas ask her questions without speaking them, and she cried, and she did not stop crying until the performance was over.

Afterwards, she came to him. 'You asked me something,' she said in accented English. 'I don't know what. But I felt it. Like a needle in my chest, poking at something I had forgotten was there.'

'What did you forget?' Edmund asked.

'I used to ask questions,' she said. 'Before I had children. Before I learned that questions were inconvenient. Before I became a wife and a mother and a seller of flowers and nothing else. I forgot that I used to wonder why the sky was blue and why people were cruel and why life felt so heavy sometimes.'

Edmund wrote this down in his notebook. Not the words—those he could not have reproduced even if he tried. He wrote down the feeling. The feeling of a question, released from captivity after years of imprisonment, stretching its wings and testing the air.

The turning point came on a Thursday evening, in a small wine bar off the Rue des Abbesses. Edmund was standing on a chair—because standing on chairs in wine bars was something you did in Paris, not in New Haven, and Edmund was learning to do things in Paris—and he was speaking to a room full of strangers about something he had never spoken about before.

He called it the Jester. Not Silas, not the fifth member of the Suits, but the idea of the Jester: the part of every human being that asks 'why' before it learns that 'why' is inconvenient, that 'why' is impolite, that 'why' is the one word that turns adults into children and children into philosophers.

'Every person you meet is a playing card,' Edmund said. 'Red heart, diamond, club, spade. A role, a function, a identity carved out by society and reinforced by habit. But underneath every card, there is a joker. A person who remembers what it was like before they learned their role. Before they learned to stop asking questions. Before they learned that the world is easier to navigate if you pretend to know the answers.'

He looked at Silas, standing in the corner, smiling that terrible knowing smile.

'The joker is not special,' Edmund said. 'The joker is everyone. The joker is you. The joker is the part of you that wonders why you wake up every morning and do the same things and see the same people and go to the same places and wonder, just for a second, if this is all there is.'

The room was silent. Not the silence of boredom or confusion, but the silence of people who had just heard something they had been waiting to hear their entire lives.

'Go home tonight,' Edmund said. 'Look in the mirror. Look at the person staring back at you. And ask them: who are you when nobody is watching? What would you do if you weren't a husband or a wife or a worker or a parent or a citizen? What would you do if you were just a person, asking questions, wondering why?'

Nobody moved for a long time. Then someone clapped. Then another. Then the whole room was clapping, and Edmund stepped down from the chair, and Silas was there, and Silas said, 'You did it.'

'Did what?'

'You became the joker.'

ACT IV

Edmund Whitmore never returned to Yale. He sent a letter to Dean Harrington, which read simply: 'You were right. I asked too many questions. But I have learned that the only wrong question is the one you are afraid to ask.'

He traveled with the Suits for two years. They went to London, to Berlin, to Rome, to Amsterdam, to cities Edmund had only read about. They performed in squares and markets and wine bars and street corners. They asked questions that made people stop and think and cry and laugh and question the lives they had built.

Beatrice became a theatre director in London. Reginald opened a small bank that only lent money to people who could not get loans anywhere else. Miriam started a school that taught children to ask questions instead of memorize answers. Captain James wrote a memoir that nobody published and everyone who read it kept in a drawer.

And Silas—Silas disappeared one morning in Amsterdam, leaving behind only a note that read: 'The joker doesn't stay. The joker deals the cards and then goes back into the deck, waiting for someone to draw them again.'

Edmund never saw him again. But sometimes, in crowds, in markets, in wine bars, he would catch a glimpse of someone—a person in a plain grey coat, tilting their head, asking a question with their eyes—and he would smile, and he would remember.

Years later, an old man sitting on a bench in Central Park would tell a young reporter: 'Philosophy is not a subject you study. It is a question you carry. And the person who carries it best is not the one with the most answers, but the one with the most courage to keep asking.'

The reporter asked him his name.

The old man smiled. 'Call me the joker,' he said. 'It's the only title that fits.'