The Raisin
Brant
Monday, October 1, 1973. Evening. Marshall retires to his bedroom after a long day. He is still turning Sophie over in his mind — analyzing and re-analyzing everything that happened. He changes out of his clothes and gets into his California king sized bed. He closes his eyes and sighs. A beat. His eyes snap open and he sits up. “The raisin!” he says to himself aloud. He jumps out of bed and calls Archie’s house on their secure line.
Rob
Archie shouldn't be able to hear the secure phone in his study all the way up in his bedroom, especially after he's been asleep for an hour, but somehow he always does. He gets up, groggily walks down the stairs in his pajamas, steps on something sharp on the main floor landing. It's the candlestick from Clue: Monday is Family Game Night (continuity, baby!). He goes into the study and answers the phone on the eighth or ninth ring. "Yes?"
Brant
“Arch! Sorry to be bother you at home but I figured it out! The thing with the raisin!”
Rob
"The raisin … ? Oh, the raisin in the cake." Takes this in stride.
Brant
"Yes! OK! So, recall: you, or maybe it was Mitch, whatever — you were pressing me about why I didn't think Jocasta and I could just delve into Sophie's mind and draw the truth out of her. Right? Remember? I was explaining why I didn't think it would work and I compared the mind to a cake — a layered cake, you know? Where the layers have been taken apart and reconstituted and then new frosting has been slapped on? And how hard it would be get at the truth in such a situation. Doable, you know. Definitely doable. I could do it. But it would take a long time and it might wreck her. Anyway! Then, later, I proposed that we do nothing and see if this whole conundrum with her could be solved just by Mitch doing his, you know, his whole Mitch thing. A coincidence, or something. He said it didn't work that way but then Jocasta bit into the cake and found the raisin!"
"The raisin. Inside the cake! Do you get it?"
Rob
Archie thinks about a feature on cocaine he read in Parade magazine. "I do remember … and look, I don't think we ought to muck around in Sophie's mind, I'm not sure why I said that … but I'm afraid I'm not following you, Marshall."
Brant
Archie can hear Marshall roll his eyes on the other end of the line. "The raisin was a Mitch thing! A coincidence with meaning! I was talking about how the truth of the Librarian's situation is buried under layers in her mind — and then Jocasta found the raisin! The raisin is symbolic! It is the core beneath all the layers, the little piece of Sophie that she managed to hide even from Granite Peak's head-crackers. I think the raisin is telling us that she did it. She accomplished what she set out to do: the part of her that motivated this whole thing is still there amid all the messed up layers of her mind!"
Rob
"I thought maybe it was just what we deserved for getting a store-bought cake," Archie says, like there's something sort of sad and sordid about that. "Do you think it's meaningful that Jocasta found the raisin?"
Brant
"Possibly. I hadn't gotten that far. This only just occurred to me." A pause. "Something is up with that girl, in any event. I think she took the thing with Agrigenics, uh, especially hard."
Rob
"That was a bad business," Archie says, sincerely but a little abstractly: he's already compartmentalizing that. "I hope you're right about Sophie. Signs and portents, who are we to say? I guess we keep an eye — on both girls — for a while, then make the call about whether to read Sophie in on everything."
Brant
“Yes, yes agreed.”
A pause.
“Goodnight, Arch.”