Imady Catfishing Caitlyn

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-940178-64-6
Verlag: Villa Magna Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 249 Seiten

Caitlyn is an intelligent young woman who just finished her Ph.D. in Middle Eastern history at Yale University. She has a voracious appetite for knowledge, women, and challenges. Not particularly looking for a job, she prefers to do post-doctoral studies, which the university rejects. She receives a cryptic message offering astounding cash rewards for solving obscure puzzles in her area of expertise. One wrong answer, and she's out of the game. Intrigued, Caitlyn searches for the answers and journeys from Jerusalem, Tibet, and the Middle East as she followsthe clues found in historical archives. Together with her best friend Benji, shealso travels to London and Turkey. Caitlyn soon faces her traumatic past, and the game suddenly becomes a quest to know who is behind the intriguing game and why.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Imady, Omar

Leseproben

II Welcome to The Game Dr. O’Keefe, you have been selected by a panel of twelve of the world’s greatest minds in your field to participate in a unique and exclusive scholarly experience. If you choose to accept this invitation, you accept to abide by the following rules: Accepting this invitation requires your agreement to complete confidentiality. You are not permitted to discuss The Game with anyone and under no circumstances must you attempt to contact members of the panel. On Wednesday at noon, you will be sent a question. This question will be set by one of the panel members. The questioner will remain anonymous. The answer to the question will be found in the literature of your field, historic and contemporary. You will be given full access to all electronic book, journal, and manuscript databases at the leading institutions across the globe. You will have two weeks to answer this question correctly. A correct answer will result in a payment to you, and the immediate dismissal of the panel member who posted the question, who will then be replaced by another qualified candidate. Failure to answer or answering incorrectly will result in your automatic dismissal from The Game without reward. * The challenge was not so much how to fill the thirty hours and forty-three minutes remaining until noon on Wednesday when the game would begin, but how to forget she was even counting down to begin with. It is a truth universally acknowledged that those who immerse themselves in academia require a regular dose of trash TV. The exposure to the benign, the bizarre, the ostentatious, and the outrageous does something to offset the seriousness of scholarly study and serves as a kind of salve to the ferocity of overthinking undertaken by the obsessed academic on a daily basis. Caitlyn’s escape came in the form of a rather rotund celebrity chef with hair so bleached his own DNA had likely been rewritten to peroxide blonde and a neck only discernible from his chin by a blunt-edged goatee. Guy Fieri owned upwards of seventy restaurants across the US and had practically become the face of the Food Network, dragging in male viewers who could not resist his series of rowdy, meat-filled, beer-swigging, pint-chugging, grill-stoking shows exploring the ‘burbs of America’s ‘flavor towns’. It was with a degree of morbid curiosity that Caitlyn discovered that one of Guy’s own restaurants lay just off the I-95 en route to her father’s. It was an hour’s drive. The perfect distraction. The wooden ceiling beams and warm lighting were supposed to give the place a comfortable feel, though how comfortable one could really feel in a three-hundred-seater setup was not entirely clear. But Caitlyn was not there for the ambience. She was there for four things. Trash Can Nachos, Smothered Dragon Chili Crock, Garlic Fries, and a bottle of root beer. It was in a place like this that one could order three appetizers and a drink without raising the eyebrows of the waiting staff. And it was a place like this that did not keep you waiting long for your specific combination of meat, carbs, and cheese. In order to fully enjoy them, these dishes needed to be eaten simultaneously. Otherwise, the fries would go cold, the sauce would congeal, the nachos would wilt, and the melted cheese would harden into a greasy, rubbery film. And no one wanted warm root beer. The waiter pulled off the can casing from around the stack of nachos, leaving behind a teetering tower of corn chips, pulled pork, beans, at least two types of cheese, jalapeño slices, bright pink pickled onion, and pico de gallo, or what most Americans knew simply as ‘salsa’. The chili came in a small earthenware pot, a crock, coated with a layer of bubbling cheese with a yellow corn cake protruding from its center, the vehicle for the reddy-brown medley of meat beneath. The fries were a thing to be admired. It took skill to revamp such a staple classic. To take the humble fried potato, the smell of which alone is enough to kick start the salivary response of most Americans, and take them to a height of even greater moreishness. But Guy had done it. The only thing fries were missing, it turned out, was garlic. That and Donkey Sauce, a blend of mayonnaise, mustard, Worcestershire sauce, salt, pepper, and more garlic. Caitlyn suspended her calculations of how far she would need to run tomorrow in order to burn off the thousands of calories she was about to eat. She tuned out, too, from her therapist’s running internal commentary on her obsession with self-inflicted over-indulgences in pleasure and pain, which she pontificated was probably one of Caitlyn’s many ways of numbing herself to deeper feelings. Caitlyn focused instead on tearing apart the hunk of corn bread which she dunked eagerly into the sauce. * Running requires a beat, a rhythm that both sets the momentum and distracts the runner, particularly towards the final stretch, from the initially nagging, then shouting, then screaming pains that beseeched them to stop half-an-hour prior. Caitlyn ran six miles. She knew if she stopped, she’d think, and if she thought she’d never stop thinking and would never start running again. She listened to the pounding of her feet along the tarmac. She listened to the breaths the impact forced out of her lungs. She synchronized them to the tempo of the music that thundered through her headphones which muffled the outside world to a manageable drone. She focused on nothing but the road ahead of her, the route she had memorized from countless circuits, which today she would run twice. The home stretch was always the hardest. The desire to give up kicked in around five minutes from the front door. It wouldn’t hurt to walk the rest. Sure, it wouldn’t hurt, but the high would be shorter, the rush of blood upon arrival slower, her furious heartbeat slightly fainter, and she’d hate herself. Caitlyn had never walked her route. And she was not about to start today, of all days, Wednesday, even though her lungs felt like they were filling with scalding cement, bolts of high voltage were running between her temples and her knees threatened to buckle with every step. She hadn’t felt like this since high school, not since winning the cross-country tournament and throwing up a sour stream of bile at the finish line and collapsing in a trembling mess. Caitlyn did not throw up when she reached the door of her studio flat, but she was a trembling mess. Her knees wobbled as she instructed them to take her the final few steps to her door, her feet screamed to high heaven when she forced off her sneakers and felt the blood rush into her heels. Her sweat had cooled and adhered her t-shirt to her back and her hair to her forehead. She stumbled into the shower fully clothed, pulled down the lever as far as it could go, sank to the floor and stayed there until precisely 11:45 a.m. * What links the Father of the Kitten, the Man from Ecbatana, and the Son of the Traveler? No sooner had Caitlyn opened the page than the clock at the bottom started its countdown. For a moment, she was mesmerized by the ease with which the seconds slipped away, in the same manner that one might ponder the sudden and shocking beauty of fire as the burning building around them roars with flames. She blinked, restoring the world to its sense of urgency. The temptation was to jump, to latch onto a word and dive into constructing an answer. But before any attempt to answer, Caitlyn had learned, one must always deconstruct the question. Answers so often lay in what was not said, how things were said, or in the very structure of the phrasing. So often, the most articulate of students were tripped up by their own haste to demonstrate their knowledge of a subject without actually honing in on what was being requested, writing tangentially related tomes on broad topics when all that was being requested was a date, offering retellings of historical episodes when what the questioner actually wanted was an opinion. At the very least, if the answer lay not within the question, there may well be clues. This question appeared, on the surface, straightforward, almost disappointingly so. It certainly did not seem to be asking for an opinion, rather a strand that linked three separate phenomena. Three men, to be exact: the Father of the Kitten, the Man from Ecbatana, and the Son of the Traveler. This was the first brick in the construction of her answer. Three men, all linked somehow. The next challenge was to identify who these men were. Caitlyn grabbed her notebook and a pen from the pot on her desk and scribbled the names down in her rough scrawl. So often, she’d found, the act of writing things out brought her fresh insights, as though the channeling of words from screen to page forced her brain to process them, deconstruct and reconstruct them in new ways. The Father of the Kitten and the Son of the Traveler... As she wrote them out, Caitlyn realized she knew these formulas. Each was a typical Arabic kunya, a teknonym, whereby individuals were referred to either by the names of their parents or their...