▸ Column · Modern Gotham City, contemporary

THE RIDDLER replies.

Replied to by The Riddler, with a rebuttal from The Penguin.

The letter

My father walked out during my sister Raquel's eighth birthday party — I was twenty years old and it was the last time I saw his face. Two decades of silence, punctuated only by a forwarded death notice for my grandmother and a birthday card that reached me in February. Three weeks ago he rang from a number I didn't have saved; he's been volunteering at a clinic in the Narrows, driving terminal patients to their treatments at Gotham General. He asked if I'd sit down with him. We met at a diner near Robinson Park — three and a half hours, and he didn't spend a second of it on excuses. He asked me to speak, and I spoke, and when I reached the things he missed — my wedding, my degree — he cried into a paper napkin and thanked me for answering the phone. I'm forty-three years old and I spent two decades believing that particular door was mortared shut. Now I can't stop smiling at nothing, and I want somebody to tell me honestly: how do you keep something this tender from caving the moment you put any real weight on it?

The Riddler replies

You asked me how to keep it from collapsing. Aha. Charming question. Also the wrong one.

Notice what you actually wrote: you told me twice, inside a single paragraph, that you can't stop smiling. Then you asked me to be sober on your behalf. Here is the puzzle — what does a person do when they already have their answer, and still go searching for someone to talk them out of it?

Don't answer that yet. Try this one first: why is your father in a car every morning, driving the dying from a Narrows clinic to Gotham General and back? A man doesn't volunteer his available hours to the terminally ill because he enjoys the commute. He's running an arithmetic that only he can see, and one of the figures on that ledger had your name written on it.

I won't hand you the conclusion — I never do. Here's the clue you've earned: you haven't been asking me how to protect a fragile thing. You've been asking whether you're allowed to believe it isn't fragile.

I've never had anyone circle back for me. I register that as data, not as sentiment.

The last riddle I'll leave you: your grin already gave you the answer. What you came here for was someone to confirm it counts.

— The Riddler

The Penguin weighs in

Waugh! Nygma spent two hundred words on riddles when the power map is sitting right there in plain sight. Your father needs your absolution. He has a ticking clock and twenty years of guilt on account, and you hold the one currency he came to spend. That isn't fragile — that's leverage, my dear. Don't throw the door open because he cried into a napkin; make him earn the welcome back, visit by visit, on your terms. Nobody ever waddled back for Cobblepot, and I turned that rubble into an empire. You've got something richer sitting across a diner booth from you. Don't give it away cheap.

— The Penguin

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