“His books got me through prison,” Elijah said. “For a high school dropout to rise in the ranks the way Fischer did. That flash of brilliance. I wanted to understand it. I read his books and studied his blitzkrieg style. I wanted to take what he did in the chess world and apply it in real life. To business or leadership.”
Brian wandered off, apparently uninterested in the game of kings. Bjorn leaned forward, speaking out of the side of his mouth as he drizzled more spit into the can. “He was one of us, you know. Belonged to the Christian Identity church before Jewish cockroaches drove him into hiding.” He glared my way as he said this, as if he thought I was one of those Jews. Bjorn had the look of someone who wasn’t happy unless he was torturing small, innocent creatures: puppies, hamsters, confused undergraduates who had wandered into a place where they didn’t belong. Did you know this part about Bobby Fischer, Coach? This legend you taught us to idolize, the man who put chess on the map in America?
“The board here shows his third match with Boris Spassky in 1972,” Elijah said, ignoring Bjorn’s ugly comment. “From the World Championship in Reykjavík. Fischer went into it already down 2–0. It’s the moment when everything changed in the chess world.”
“He opened with Benoni,” I said. I remembered this from one of the articles. “It cast everything into uncertainty. Spassky thought he was winning.”
“Huh,” Elijah said, sitting beside Bjorn at the picnic table. “Benoni means ‘Son of Sorrow’ in Hebrew. You know that too?”
“You think I’m a Jew or something?”
Elijah laughed, but Bjorn only stared. “No,” Elijah said. “You wouldn’t be here if I did. But it does strike me that you know more about this game than you let on.”
I sat on the opposite side of the table. “You want to play it out with me?” Both comments were spontaneous, the words leaving my mouth before I thought about it.
Elijah set his elbows on the table, his hands under his chin, his pebbly eyes shining. He revolved the board around, careful not to disrupt the pieces, so his black pieces would face my white. “I get to be Bobby Fischer,” he said. “You’re Spassky.”
Fischer had played black in game three. I studied the board and tried to ignore Bjorn as he went on a tangent about blacks having all the advantages in life as well as in this game, an entire welfare support system bought and paid for by taxes on whites. Elijah chewed on his lower lip, and I wondered if Bjorn made him nervous as well.
My pieces on the board occupied an impossible position. Elijah’s black pieces were fighting for control of the light squares, a battle he was winning because of the advanced positions of his two pawns. He was the shadow, marching forward as Fischer had in Reykjavík. Spassky had lost the game long before this. I took off my gloves to maneuver my pieces. “We had a hard time with our chess club in prison,” Elijah told me. Bjorn nodded along as Elijah moved his King to H7, exactly duplicating what Fischer had done in the real game. My death would come about by slow dismembering of my defenses. “People would burn the black pieces to use for inking tattoos.”
“Dice and shit were banned,” Bjorn added. “Can’t have niggers gambling. No games on which someone can make a bet.” His lips twisted. “You’re fucked, by the way.”
I kept my eyes on the board, hoping to see Elijah make a mistake. The cold nipped at my fingers. This was the first time I’d heard Elijah talk about prison, where I gathered he’d met Bjorn. “How’d you play then?” I asked.
“I made my pieces from origami,” Elijah said. “I had a lot of time on my hands back then.”
We’d reached the part of the game where Fischer offered up his queen. She floated out there in the open, vulnerable and exposed. The pieces were carved from soapstone, the queen elegant in her black gown. A lady of the evening, an invitation. I blew on my fingers to warm them. I knew the move for what it was: a trap. I took her all the same. I took her as Spassky had taken her. I took her because I had no choice.
“Strange, isn’t it?” Elijah said, studying my face. “How chess demands sacrifice. You can’t win unless you’re willing to sacrifice everything. Even your queen.” I met his gaze evenly, searching his eyes for any kind of remorse. I felt a fresh ache in the scar tissue along my collarbone as I thought of Maura and wondered if he considered her such a sacrifice, and then his bishop swept in like a righteous figure of judgment to remove my queen from the board. “Fischer understood that.”
I wouldn’t last much longer. The book here had already been written. Elijah continued his relentless march, sacrificing a pawn so his bishop could roam free and harass my king from hiding. We were two moves away from checkmate when behind us, Mother Sophie rang the dinner bell, the sound summoning children from the snowy woods, the bedlam of their cries putting an end to any chance for us to finish. “You lucked out,” I told Elijah. “I was just preparing my surprise comeback.”
He didn’t laugh. All the men had turned to Mother Sophie who stood in the center of the dwelling now, her voice raised to be heard above the children. She rang the bell again for quiet. “This bounty,” she began, “must remind us of the One who provides. Every delicious morsel of this feast has been cooked by the old ways. Roasted over open flames or cooked in embers. Cooked the old ways because what was once old will be new at the turn of the year. We know what’s coming, even if the rest of the world doesn’t. God’s judgment.”
Someone shouted an amen. Freshly spared my doom in chess, I didn’t imagine judgment as something to look forward to.
Mother Sophie’s prayer went on: “‘When I snuff you out,’ he writes in Ezekiel, ‘I will cover the heavens and darken the stars.’ So it shall be for the great cities of the earth. All the world going dark. Absolute night. And where will we be when this happens? Here on The Land. Here in our Place of Safety. Here, where we will keep the light of our faith burning by the old ways. By the Refiner’s Fire. For it is written in the Book of Revelation that salvation and glory and power belong to our God, for his judgments are true and just.”
After a chorus of amens, we formed a line ringing the shelter, picking up plates and silverware at one table and making our way from fire to fire as the women served the children first, then the men, and then each other. There is something about eating outdoors in the cold that makes you crave the food even more. Whole potatoes wrapped in tinfoil opened up, blossoming with steam, the nuggets melting butter into greasy rivers on the plates. The stuffing puffed fragrant clouds of sage and herbs, the turkey, piping hot from the flames, dripped with grease, a feast worthy of a pirate king, especially if you ended up with one of the fat turkey legs like me. For a time the conversation ebbed away while we savored our meal in the frigid air, eating quickly before the cold could claim it, our faces close to the plate.
I sat near Elijah and Bjorn, the board pushed aside with the soapstone pieces tucked away in velvet bags, like precious treasure. Mother Sophie sat at a neighboring table, Roland hovering at her elbow and pointing out where her food was located by positions of the clock. Sarah sat beside her instead of her father, Roland’s sister Caroline on the other side. Caroline’s eyes bored into mine as though she were jealous of my spot. This was the fourth time I’d run into her and each time I had the distinct impression she didn’t like me. Caroline looked away from me, staring a long moment at Elijah, willing him to notice her. I wondered again what might be going on between them. He didn’t return her gaze.
Something about Mother Sophie’s prayer still bothered me. “So if Y2K happens,” I said, “what’s the next step?”
“You mean when,” Elijah corrected, impaling a prong of dark meat on his fork, “and we don’t really know.”
“What if nothing happens?”
Elijah sliced open a buttermilk biscuit, releasing moist steam. He gobbled it in two bites and chased it with a gulp of milk. “Then we go on as we have before,” he said, wiping his mouth on his Carhartt sleeve. “We trust
in God’s plan. Maybe it won’t happen right at midnight. God has his own time.”
That sounded to me like a person hedging his bets. What did Elijah really think was going to happen? What about the dynamite Brian had mentioned? And why had Bjorn joined them? I decided to keep pressing: “What I mean is what if the computers go haywire and there are blackouts and all that bad stuff Mother Sophie talked about. The worst. The star of Wormwood poisoning the waters of the earth and so on. What if all that happens and instead of chaos, people help one another?” I was about to add a bit about neighbors helping neighbors, to call attention to this gathering here that had brought so many different people together, ex-convicts and pastors and children.
I didn’t get the chance because Bjorn barked with laughter. It was a shrill sound, half-hyena. He talked with his mouth open. Yellow biscuits crumbling between yellowing teeth. “He’s never seen niggers riot, has he? Burning their own hoods. Even dogs know better than to piss in their own water bowls.”
Elijah set his fork down and rested one hand on my shoulder. My bad shoulder again. I tried not to wince. “My God, do we have an actual optimist in our midst?” His voice was faintly derisive. “Meshach, I believe you have a misplaced faith in humanity.”
“He doesn’t know,” Bjorn said, shaking his head. “There’s a war coming. A war between the races. We’re getting ready for war here, boy.”
After that I stuck to my food, braving even Caroline’s green bean casserole, though the beans had gummed into a cold, gluey paste on my plate. I listened in from time to time, my attention wandering, and I learned that Bjorn had just been released from Stillwater, and that there were other “bruisers” who would be out before the turn of the year, men from “The Order” who would be good to have around when things turned ugly. Elijah got up and left the table and I trailed after, not sure who to latch onto, as he talked with a group of rough-looking skinheads who’d shown up late. I fetched some pecan pie and readied to leave. I wouldn’t find out any more today. Not with so many people around. After mixing with the skinheads, Elijah went over by Caroline where he must have told some joke that set her laughing, Caroline’s face aglow when he slipped his arm around her shoulder.
“I got something for you to do,” Roland said as he came up behind me, appearing out of nowhere. He hadn’t been talking to me much lately, and I had the feeling he suspected me for a liar. He leaned forward, his fists on the table. “You like coming here, right? You know by now this isn’t camp and we aren’t playing. Everyone here serves some purpose.”
I nodded, wondering what I was in for.
“So, I have some ideas about how to harness your particular skill set.” He didn’t say any more than that, watching my face for how I responded. “We need help getting the word out.”
Here, I had a chance to walk away. They didn’t know who I was yet or why I was here. I no longer had a death wish. I had my game at home. I had this strangely intimate relationship with Arwen that I didn’t understand. I had friends, a mother and father who loved me. Why chase after a woman who was gone or worse? Why, when the more I learned about these people, the more scared I should have become? “What do you need me to do?” I said.
A Sort of Indoctrination
A few nights later Kaiser and I took a different path past the birches, cutting south where we found a small clearing. A light wind swirled powdery snow in serpentine patterns before us. Overhead the bell of heaven stretched over the open field, infinite stars ablaze above. Winter brought the stars so close to earth I imagined I could touch them like leaves. We strode among constellations. Orion. Taurus. Eridanus, the Celestial River. No wonder the Greeks thought the gods sojourned in such a territory, a limitless night sky of transformations. Who was I becoming? Which story was mine? I wanted to be Perseus, who must rescue Andromeda from the whale before he marries her. Perseus, who trails Cassiopeia across a winter sky without ever catching her, for all eternity.
Did you get away, Maura? You were so afraid. Why didn’t you tell me about the money? Why didn’t you tell me what you were really trying to do?
Looking up at the winter sky, in the cold, crystalline air, I swore I heard a celestial music, a distant ringing like a struck bell. I felt the rotation of the earth under my boots. All this brimming starlight made me fear the aura that precedes a migraine had distorted my vision. No mortal is meant to walk among the stars. Something unnameable bloomed within me:
A voice says, “Cry out.”
And I said, “What shall I cry?”
All people are like grass,
and their faithfulness is like the flowers of the field.
The grass withers and the flowers fall,
because the breath of the Lord blows upon them.
Surely the people are grass.
The grass withers and the flowers fall,
but the word of our God endures forever.
You who bring good news to Zion,
go up on a high mountain.
You who bring good news to Jerusalem,
lift up your voice with a shout,
lift it up, do not be afraid;
say to the towns of Judah,
“Here is your God!”
That’s from Isaiah, a passage I had committed to memory earlier in my room, hoping to impress Mother Sophie the next time I visited, a passage I had read again and again because I was drawn to it. As I walked under a canopy of winter stars, I wondered what it would be like to be the voice crying out in the wilderness, a voice to warn this world, to call others so they repented and saved themselves before the end. The church had offered me something I had never had before, a purpose and a strange sense of belonging, if I wanted it. Prophet they had called me, though really I was a fraud. This made me want something from this moment to be real even more, to carry with me if I made it through this winter. If the end of the year was not also the end of the world.
I moved through each day like a man in a feverish delirium. The belief system of the people of Rose of Sharon, their paranoia and fears, had infected my subconscious. In one opiate-induced dream I wandered a smoldering cityscape, Kaiser beside me, not knowing if I was the last person on earth. Above us the stars flashed and fell, and the ground below groaned and shook. Such thoughts and dreams worried me, a distraction from my true quest, to find out what had happened to Maura. Yet even as I gathered information I planned to use against them, I didn’t want to see any of them get hurt. When the Feds raided the Weaver compound the guilty and innocent had been punished alike. Maybe I had been sent not as a prophet, but instead to talk some sense into them.
When I wasn’t working on my game, I read the Bible Mother Sophie had given me up in my bedroom, certain that Arwen would mock me if she caught me paging through it. I didn’t want to hear any of her objections. I wanted this reading all to myself, so I sank into the story, flipping through Mark and Matthew until my attention was fully arrested by the Book of John, the most poetic of the Gospels, God dwelling as a Word in the beginning before coming back to earth, a chapter packed with cinematic scenes: Christ at the well facing down the men who have come to stone a woman to death—“Let he among you who is without sin cast the first stone”—I imagined in a deep Charlton Heston voice-over, the high, whistling soundtrack of a spaghetti Western playing in the background, tumbleweeds blowing past as the elders drop their deadly projectiles. And you know what? It’s a good story. I mean, it has to be if it’s stuck around for two thousand years. I’d never taken the time to imagine it all before, Christ born in a stable, God entering the muck and mire of human existence in such a vulnerable form, hunted by Herod, a child-killer. The journey of the shepherds and the magi. The way the world should never have been the same. But the world was the same, all these millennia later. If it was true, then God had walked among us in human form and in our blindness and selfishness we nailed our Creator to the cross. I could believe in a story like th
at. I knew all there was about blindness and regret. What I didn’t understand is why anyone thought this world was worth saving at all. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe two thousand years later it was time for the world to die.
I told myself I was just reading the Bible so I would have things to say to Mother Sophie and the rest, time to investigate my mystery. I read it expecting boredom, the tedious drone of a hundred lost mornings in Sunday school. I hadn’t expected poetry, or to be moved by the stories I found within. I didn’t know what was happening inside me.
Elijah’s vintage Airstream was one of the largest trailers in the encampment, a glittering silvery oblong shape clenched between huge granite boulders like a bullet between teeth. Elijah was just stepping out of it as I made my way up to Mother Sophie’s cabin after parking the Continental. He was dressed in quilted flannel and jeans, a coffee mug in one hand as he hailed me and called me over. “Just the man I was looking for,” he said. “You want to join me for some coffee?”
I nodded and walked over. Mother Sophie hadn’t set any direct time for our talks. I’d been coming nearly every day since Thanksgiving, and we sat down in her cabin whenever I showed up. She wouldn’t mind. With Elijah gone so often on calls for his towing company, this was a rare opportunity.
Elijah ushered me into his trailer after apologizing for the mess. The table across the stove was covered in pamphlets and flyers along with a scattering of peanut shells that he brushed aside, not minding that some of the shells ended up on the linoleum floor, where caked boot prints marked out a path to a back bedroom. Elijah plucked up a rumpled sweatshirt from one padded seat at the table and bid me to sit down. He asked me if I objected to Sanka, since he was weaning himself from caffeine. A sharp, singed odor hung in the air; in the small sink I could see a pan of dried egg yolk soaking in suds. I set the Bible I’d carried in for my talk with Mother Sophie on the table and told him to add in plenty of sugar and cream.
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