The paperweight was overt enough: Propped on a metal key ring, to keep it from rolling, was the eight ball from our billard table. The note itself was definitely from my mother; the code was so simplistic that no one else could have invented it. I saw how hard she’d worked to communicate cryptically, clearly with no help.
The note, in large print, read:
WASHINGTON
LUXURY CAR
VIRGIN ISLES
ELVIS LIVES
AS ABOVE, SO BELOW
The Elvis part was simple: my mother’s last name – Velis – was spelled two different ways to show it was from her. As if I needed that helpful clue. The rest was a lot more upsetting. And not because of the code.
Washington was, of course, ‘DC’; Luxury Car was ‘LX’; Virgin Isles was ‘VI.’ Together, in Roman numerals (as they clearly were), their numeric value was:
D = 500
C = 100
L = 50
X = 10
V = 5
I = 1
Tally them up, and it’s ‘666’ – the Number of the Beast from the apocalypse.
I wasn’t worried about that Beast – we had plenty of those protecting us, scattered about the lodge as our animal totems. But for the first time, I was truly worried about my mother.
Why had she used this hackneyed pseudomillennial ruse to grab my attention? What about the paperweight on top – another standard bunkum, ‘Behind the eight ball’ – what on earth did that mean?
And what should one make of that old alchemical drivel, ‘As above, so below’?
Then, of course, I got it. I removed the eight ball and the bit of paper, setting them on the keyboard music stand, and I opened the piano. Before I could set the strut in place, I nearly dropped the lid.
There, inside the hollow body of the instrument, I saw something I thought I would never, ever see again inside my mother’s house as long as she lived.
A chess set.
Not just a chess set – but a chess set with a game set up, a game that had been partially in play. There were pieces here that had been removed from the field of play and were set out upon the keyboard strings at either side – black or white.
The first thing I noticed was that the Black Queen was missing. I glanced over at the billiard table – good heavens, Mother, really! – and saw that the missing queen had been placed in the rack where the eight ball was supposed to be.
It was something like being drawn into a vortex. I began to feel the game in play. Good Lord, how I had missed this. How had I been able to leave it behind me? It was nothing like a drug at all, as people sometimes said. It was an infusion of life.
I forgot the pieces that were off the board or behind the eight ball; I could reconstruct everything from the patterns that were still there. For several long moments, I forgot my missing mother, my aunt Lily lost in Purgatory with her chauffeur, her dog, and her car. I forgot what I’d sacrificed – what my life had become against my will. I forgot everything except the game before me – the game cached away like a dark secret, in the belly of that piano.
But as I reconstructed the moves, the dawn arose through the high glass windows – just as a sobering realization dawned within my mind. I could not stop the horror of this game. How could I stop it, when I had replayed it over and over again in my mind these past ten years?
For I knew this game quite well.
It was the game that had killed my father.
Mozart: Confutatus Maledictum – how would you translate that?
Salieri: ‘Consigned to the flames of woe.’
Mozart: Do you believe in it?
Salieri: What?
Mozart: The fire that never dies, burning you forever.
Salieri: Oh, yes…
– Peter Shaffer, Amadeus
Deep in the pit of the hearth, the fire spilled over the sides of the giant log like liquid heat. I sat on the moss rock fireplace ledge, and I gazed down mindlessly. I was lost in a daze, trying hard not to remember.
But how could I forget?
Ten years. Ten years had passed – ten years during which I’d believed I had managed to repress, to camouflage, to bury a feeling that had nearly buried me, a feeling that emerged in that splinter of a second just before it happened. That frozen fragment of a moment when you still think that you have all of your life, your future, your promise before you, when you can still imagine – how would my friend Key put it? – that ‘the world is your oyster.’ And that it will never snap shut.
But then you see the hand with the gun. Then it happens. Then it’s finished. Then there is no present anymore – only the past and future, only before and after. Only the ‘then,’ and…then what?
This was the thing we never spoke of. This was the thing I never thought about. Now that my mother, Cat, had vanished, now that she’d left that murderous message lodged in the bowels of her favorite piano, I understood her unspoken language, loud and clear: You must think about it.
But here was my question: How do you think of your own small, eleven-year-old self, standing there on those cold, hard marble steps in that cold, hard foreign land? How do you think of yourself, trapped inside the stone walls of a Russian monastery, miles from Moscow and thousands of miles from anyplace or anyone you know? How do you think of your father, killed by a sniper’s bullet? A bullet that may have been intended for you? A bullet that your mother always believed was intended for you?
How do you think of your father, collapsing in a pool of blood – blood that you watch in a kind of horror, as it soaks into and mingles with the dirty Russian snow? How do you think of the body lying on the steps – the body of your father as his life slips away – with his gloved fingers still clinging to your own small, mittened hand?
The truth of the matter was, my father wasn’t the only one who had lost his future and his life that day, ten years ago, on those steps in Russia. The truth was, I had lost mine, too. At the age of eleven, I’d been blindsided by life: Amaurosis Scacchistica – an occupational hazard.
And now, I had to admit what that truth really was: It wasn’t my father’s death or my mother’s fears that had caused me to give up the game. The truth was –
Okay. Reality check!
The truth was, I didn’t need the truth. The truth was, I couldn’t afford this self-examination right now. I tried to squash that instant rush of adrenaline that had always accompanied any glimpse, however brief, into my own past. The truth was: My father was dead and my mother was missing and a chess game that someone had set up inside our piano suggested it all had plenty to do with me.
I knew this lethal game that still lurked there, still ticking away, was more than a gaggle of pawns and pieces. This was the game. The last game. The game that had killed my father.
Whatever the implications of its mysterious appearance here today, this game would always remain etched with acid in my mind. If I’d