On my restless nights, I usually read well into the late hours to keep a tight grasp on sanity. But, for the past week, I have only one thing on my mind, that strange message that was written on the underside of my father’s chessboard.
Now that I have my notebook back, I can finally finish the message.
Chapter 4: The Message
We enter the dorm and Steve leaves us to go to his room down the hall to do whatever he does with his little amount of spare time, while Kim and I play a few games of chess to kill the clock before dinner.
Steve has been a mystery to me. Can’t seem to figure him out. He always says he has to go and handle something when we are hanging out, and then he disappears for a few hours and then shows up again like nothing is wrong. There’s not much to do in this place, so I have no clue what he could be up to.
Our room consists of two beds on rusty metal coiled frames, with mattresses that are hard around the edges and soft and saggy in the center, like overly buttered toast, a closet that we share, some shelves above each of our beds, and a lockbox at the foot of each bed. The wooden floor stays cold no matter how warm it is outside, and the floorboards are warped and wavy, like desert sand. The walls used to be white, but are now speckled with mold and mildew and coated with a light film of dust that gives it an earthy hue. The ceiling leaks even when it’s not raining, and there are countless spiders that continuously find their way into the corners of the room, no matter how many times I kill them. When I get close enough to them, they usually run into the cracks in the wall, like gangsters that know the jig is up.
Kim has gotten better in chess throughout the years. After the first time teaching him, he picked it up pretty fast, and now it takes me between ten and fifteen moves to beat him instead of my usual single-digit move victories. My father introduced me to the game as soon as I was able to walk. He’d always say your weakest piece is just as important as your strongest piece, so no piece is more important than the other.
Dinner is here and we all meet up downstairs in the cafeteria.
“Meatloaf. You were right, D,” says Steve. My attention turns to Kim, and the look of disappointment and disgust on his face doesn’t surprise me. Meatloaf Mondays are always a drag. That’s what this place does to you—plants seeds of anguish in your stomach that grow and bloom into flowers of despair that show on your face.
Hearing stories from each of the guys about the first day at Shady Oaks, it seems we all share the privilege of having Mrs. Biel as our math teacher.
“That woman is the devil,” Steve says.
“Yeah, the damned devil,” says Kim, using his favorite curse word.
We all seem to have made the same observation about the staff at Shady Oaks. Mrs. Biel is enemy number one.
“All right, back to your rooms,” Joppy says, twirling his nightstick. “I know you have lessons, and if you don’t, I can find something productive for you to do.”
Joppy is the head of security at the Rose. Why an orphanage needs armed guards in the first place I’ll never know. The pleasure of his cheap aftershave graced my nose the first day I got here at Rosy Oaks Boys Home. That gourd-bellied, sweaty redneck trounced his way into the head director’s office, smelling like whatever he had just eaten mixed with that cheap aftershave. He opened his country bumpkin mouth, speaking out of the corner of his lips while holding a toothpick on the other side that had been gnawed on for hours. Always filthy looking, with his stringy, thinning hair and brown whiskers that make him look like a rodent. He began explaining how he runs things on the property and to not get out of line or there will be consequences.
The head director is an old and frail lady named Sister Shiften. She had a fire inside of her that burned to torment children. A wrinkly face, spindly brown hair, and a pronounced pointy nose with a mole on it so large that it probably had a soul of its own. Her nun outfit hung off of that frail frame like a napkin over a metal hanger and made her ten pounds heavier than what she was. Every word that she said creeped me out as she stroked her large pinkish-red jewel on her bracelet as if it were a pet. The sight of that woman would have scared any other child at the age that I was when I first saw her, but for some reason I was calm. Her face and Joppy’s smell were a bad combination along with the meatloaf dinner I had that night. Something I’ll never forget.
Kim and I head back to the room and we leave Steve to his mystery ways. Steve is one sneaky guy, and he can obtain things that are hard to come by somehow. His lust for money and thrill of the crime wake him up every morning. I guess his tragic past gave him the gall to do what he does. I could probably use him to obtain some new reading material or a few other items that are considered contraband.
Kim usually falls asleep pretty fast. I’ve never seen someone sleep so peacefully. He snores like a baby, always curled up and lying on his side with his back turned to me, clutching his leather envelope charm. Those tragedies in his past make him appreciate a peaceful night without keeping one eye open all of the time. His trust in me may also give him that comfort of resting as well. Me, on the other hand, my peaceful nights have been few and far between.
Soon as the lights are out, that clamp begins to tighten on my head and keeps me up at night. Combine the clamp with a high sense of paranoia, and it leads to insomnia. Every bump, creek, and thump has me thinking something is out to get me. Maybe it’s the nightmares that I have been having recently. Those nightmares even haunt me while I’m awake. I first got them a few months after my surgery, and they’ve grown more and more frequent every year to the point that damned near every time I close my eyes I see that wretched face: a dark figure with eyes of fire like two open furnace kilns who chases me in a dark tunnel, and my legs always feel like I’m running in mud. The figure never speaks, but laughs while chasing me, a laugh that’s just a sinister chuckle, as if I’m a puppet and he’s making me dance merely for his amusement. Just as the figure extends its hand to grab me, I wake up in a cold sweat, panting, still hearing him laugh that horrible laugh. Two restless hours of sleep is what I’ve averaged for the past few months from my fear of going to sleep and having the dream that feels so real.
For years, most of the time when I dreamed it was mostly nightmares that overshadowed my true dream of making the pain stop. The symbols that have been foreign to me for so long are finally a guiding light to the darkness that I bathe with each day. Those symbols are something I would have never known my father created. But it seems that he had something intricate that he was hiding up his sleeve.
I’ve always thought my father was a simple man, but he was very knowledgeable and often dove into books of theory, history, theology, and science. A blue-collar laborer who read such books was as rare as a rose growing in stone. He’d always talk to me about what he’d read and would ask me questions he knew I wouldn’t be able to answer, and then he would elaborate on the topic. The one thing he’d never let me forget is that my mother loved me very much and that I was the most special boy in the world.
My chess games with him were life lessons. Every few moves he’d tell me a parable of life and how the pieces translate into reality. He was a very smart man, who was slighted in life and never reached his full potential.
His wife, my mother, died while giving birth to me. Most of the time I felt like I was the culprit for taking her life. The blank memories still stomp on my heart when I try to put together how her voice sounded, or how she looked when she was mad, or if she snorted when she laughed. A few years after I was born, my dad turned to the bottle to quiet the voices in his head. Cognac became his wife and malt liquor his mistress. In between seeing both of them he took nicotine out on dates. After he’d pick me up from school, we would take the daily trip to the corner liquor store to pick up his ladies. Sometimes I’d ask him to buy me a chocolate bar that he said only old folks liked, but I liked it.
“Hey Red, another chocolate bar today?” the shopkeep used to say. He called me Red because of my brown-tinged hair.
; We’d leave the store and drive the few blocks down to our cozy home. My father would sing old tunes playing on the radio and would open up a fresh pack and spark up one of his dates. He’d take drags in between singing the songs, blowing the smoke out of the window. I would hear the clang of the ladies in the brown bag in the back seat as the bumpy road tossed them to and fro.
The night wastes away as I try to decipher the codes and symbols.
Reading into the messages that I had been working on the night before, I find that the encryption has a key to the entire code, and it has been right under my nose. The photos that I have underneath my pillow, the symbols on the back, are an ambigram, an ambigram to crack the code. The symbols look like a combination of cartouche and geometric shapes, something that you would dig up in a lost city or an ancient civilization. They are grouped together in these geometric shapes that when interlocked in the right pattern give me numbers of zero to nine. More of the same geometric shapes grouped together further the numbers past nine.
I reach under my pillow and carefully look at the back of the photos. I combine the pictures with the symbols from the chessboard that I have so far. It seems to be a code that gives me a key to the symbols written on the bottom of each chess piece. My father was a genius, I think while I piece the puzzle.
When I arrange the chess pieces in different patterns on the board by looking at the sequences that were drawn on the back of the chess board, the symbol on the bottom of the pieces along with the number of the square on the board tells me what letter it is. Since I’ve memorized the board numbers and the symbol that represents each chess piece, it only takes me a few hours to figure out what they are. A few letters become words, and words become sentences, and then the sentences became a message.
The first message reads: “Obtain the book.” The second message says: “The truth is buried in the ashes.”
What does all of this mean?
Both messages are paired with addresses of places that are not too far from here—a library and a cemetery.
Is the cemetery the location for the gravesite of my mother?
It took me months to get to this point in figuring out the sequences of the code. Left to right? Up and down? It was very puzzling, and it makes me wonder what was going through my father’s head when he did this and what was the point in making me figure it out. But, that doesn’t matter now. The code has been broken, and it gives me my first message. Why my father would want me to know this, why her remains rest 100 miles away from where we used to live yet only five miles from me now, and why he has strategically hidden the location escapes me. But I know I must bring closure to one of the pains in my life.
The sun breaks through the window and awakens me in the morning, with my notes crumpled under my face as I slept. Kim is still sound asleep as I look over to his bed. The clock reads a quarter after six, fifteen minutes before it’s time to get up anyway, with Joppy knocking on the doors with his nightstick. Plenty of time for me to hide my studies in my lockbox.
“Hey, Kim,” I say as I shake him. “Time to get up, buddy.”
Sometimes we like to get early starts to avoid the restroom traffic, even though the roaches always beat us there first. The cafeteria is best early in the morning as well. The food, even though not so great, is hot and fresh. Steve tries to meet us there most days, but he is always looking to get into other things besides getting an earlier meal.
Steve eventually catches up to us waiting outside for the bus near the grove.
“Here, I got something for you,” Steve says as he hands us a few ripe apples.
“Where did you get these?” asks Kim.
“I have my ways,” he says as my chariot of sanity arrives.
School went relatively smooth, no hiccups at all. Maybe it was because my mind was being distracted from what I had learned the night before so I was numb to everything around me. Even the meal at the Rose we’re having this evening was semi-decent—steak stew and wheat bread.
But then, just as I lay my head down that night, the headaches return and remind me of who’s boss. My fear of what would happen when I close my eyes proceeds after the headaches. That laugh . . . that dream . . .
God help me.
Chapter 5: Nightmares of Freedom
I awaken in the middle of the night by the odd feeling of being suffocated.
That dream again.
My pillow is soaked in sweat. My eyes stare at the dark ceiling, unable to focus, and my body is frozen, like each of my joints is clasped with metal rods.
Panicking and panting like a dog in hundred-degree heat, I quickly sit up and throw the blankets off of my body after my paralysis breaks. Delirious for a moment, smashing my eyelids together and squeezing them tightly closed a few times, I rub my eyes frantically to clear up the blurred vision. Losing my bearings for a moment, I forget where I am, and then, as my vision returns, I glance across the room. I see Kim is still sound asleep, undisturbed from the ten-second violent episode that transpired just feet away from him.
Gently climbing out of bed, I head to the restroom. While walking down the hall, the boards creaking beneath my feet are deafening, amplified by the dead silence of night. I tiptoe past the guard box posted at the end of the hall near the stairs, preparing myself to be yelled at. To my surprise, the guard’s asleep and must have been that way for a while. His feet are up on his cluttered desk, hands folded on his chest, head back and mouth open with a light snore, and a miniature television with a screen full of snow is watching him.
Entering the restroom, not caring about the baby roaches on the sink, I start the faucet that pumps only cold water, cup my hands underneath the running water and splash it on my face and the back of my neck. I take a few sips. The thumping of my heart slows from its rib-cracking pace to a gentle beat, and I calm down for the moment. Looking in the mirror, I see my eyes are bloodshot and the pupils dilated. The thought of my situation sinks in, like a man on death row. I will never leave this place with my sanity, with my life, even. I’ve heard of kids taking their own lives or being placed in a nut house or going to prison soon after they leave here. How am I any different? The last of my family died five years ago. No letters on Christmas, no turkey on Thanksgiving, no cake on birthdays. Just roaches, rats, and the cold.
I feel warmth creeping from my knuckles down to my fingertips. I glance down at my hand over the sink. I’m shaking, veins bulging underneath my skin. I watch the warmth drip down and splash onto the dirty porcelain and see the drain run red. I felt nothing, no pain at all, and I don’t remember what happened. But now I’m looking at a kaleidoscope image of myself in the cracked mirror, vice and virtue split apart in different directions. Hastily I clean up the mess and pull small, shimmering shards of glass out of my knuckles with my fingernails.
Back in the room, my will to sleep has been lost for the night. I pull out a book that I stole from the mediocre school library. I attempt to read the night away, turning the pages gently, trying not to agitate the lacerations on my hand. To see I use the light from the rooftop security lamp that’s right outside of my window.
After a few pages of reading, I roll over and put my hands behind my head and stare at the crusty ceiling, thinking about how things will be when this crazy plan is done. Out of the corner of my eye, a flash outside of my window takes my mind off of my imagination and there are what seem to be headlights piercing through the oaks. Then, through the pitch-black darkness of the oaks, a squad car appears and pulls up to the front of the Rose. I see an officer and two boys get out and walk into the administration building. New kids at this time of night? Must have been an emergency add, like me. Something must have happened tonight, something that left a few more kids without parents, something traumatizing.
I can hear talking down the hall as the footsteps of three people echo underneath my door.
“Here’s your hotel suite,” a familiar voice says. “You two take care of it, and I’ll see to it that I take care of you.” Joppy
? Why is Joppy here this time of night? “Chow starts at six thirty sharp. Now, you get some rest and be ready for school in the morning. You have work to do.” Then I hear the door slam and Joppy walking off, whistling.
I continue reading into the night and studying my father’s notes. Before I know it, dawn rears its ugly head, and it’s time to get ready for school.
That morning I can see the new boys up close for the first time as we wait for the bus. They seem to be normal, but I use the term loosely, because normal here always has a story behind it. Two shaggy-haired, dirty-blond boys with stubble on their faces. Looked to be between fourteen and sixteen years old, and they must be related. One is shorter than the other by a chunk of inches, yet both look robust and have Homo erectus brow ridges across their foreheads. They just stand there, not saying anything to anyone, just like me when I first got here.
We get to school, and, as I get off of the bus, I can faintly hear music playing from a house down the road.
“Kim, do you hear that?” I ask.
“Hear what?” he says.
“Steve?” I say.
“Beats me,” Steve shrugs.
Maybe it’s the months of sleep deprivation that’s causing me to hallucinate.
We part ways as we head to our first-period classes. I notice that there is a new face in my history class. Another blond-haired kid but different than the other two I saw earlier this morning at the Rose.
My time in class now pretty much bores me. I play stupid so I won’t strike up conspiracies of me cheating on tests; I keep my marks at a C average. My brain yearns for higher knowledge, and this place limits my appetite for more information.
The lunchtime bell sounds, and not soon enough. After getting my food, I sit at the table with my buddies. Steve has gotten his hands on some candy bars. If you get caught with anything but what the Shady Oaks or the Rose supplies you with, then it is considered to be a path toward the devil, which will earn you a day in the pit.
Chess Players: Atlantis and the Mockingbird Page 4
