Secret Language (Story Idea/Draft)

It isn’t like you go searching for the messages, or even that your brain is wired to recognize the messages, at least on a conscious level. Most people don’t. They get wrapped in the mundane aspects of whatever they’re doing to see behind it, to find the true meaning in what they are doing, the objects that they are touching, the words that re being spoken.

There is a language, all its own, spoken in a meta-world, where in objects converse with one another, where a pipe isn’t just a pipe.

I discovered this mystery world of messages playing a card game with couple of friends of mine. I say card game, and I suppose in your head you see a deck of cards, 52 of them, with diamonds, clubs, spades, and hearts, white, colored either black or red. Or perhaps an image on them, maybe nude women, if you’re naughty, or a number of Sadam Hussein’s military leaders if you’re sadistic and radically pro-American and a gun nut. Or perhaps there are images of Sadam Hussein’s top brass naked if you are all of these things.

I am none of the things. What I am is a little bit of self-confessed nerd. I enjoy fantasy and science fiction books. I collect comics, keep them in plastic bags and in card board boxes underneath my bed, and only pull them out to flip through them, never to actually open them, as if once hermetically sealed, they are doomed to a crypt-like existence, like they are dead. I play trading cards games that are expandable, addictively getting you to purchase booster pack after booster pack, until as it says in the Pokemon commercial, I “caught them all.”

That was what I was playing when I first saw the message. Charles Guffman is with me, one of my friends, a tall lanky kid with dark red hair, almost brown, and dark freckles which covers his face like one splattered with a good dose of paint, who wears thick glasses because his parents can’t afford to get him nice ones or perhaps don’t know any better. (I think his dad is a computer engineer underling at one of the tech companies that settled in the area.)

The thing about Charles is that, as smart as he is, he always has a stupid look on his face, with his mouth slightly open so that you can see his teeth underneath also slightly separated. He has this way of looking at you almost as if he is not really looking at you but a few inches in front of you. The whole facial structure, the eyes, the mouth, the relaxed forehead, it all gives him the appearance of complete confusion. Sometimes I wonder if he is actually living in a different world in his head, that true Charles Guffman has constructed an interior bomb shelter, letting the physical body run on its own, coming out occasionally when needed, but never spending too long in the fresh air for fear that the whole thing could go up in flames any minute.

I often wondered how Charles might do in a fight. I secretly suspected that due to his height and the size of his hands, he harbored the fighting skills of a prized pugilist, a real murderer, not afraid to mix it up with anyone who got in his path. There were times when our little group were pelted during lunch with food, bits of fries, and sometimes sloppy, wet vegetables. Usually, we just took it, afraid of doing or saying anything, because what would our parents say if we got into a fight, because that is what they taught us, that if you kept your head down and ignored the problem, it wasn’t there. They taught us that because their parents taught them that, and their parents taught their parents that, in a long history of victimization extending all the way past the days when the immigrants to this country were taken advantage of by the wealthy commercial moguls, and before that when serfs lived on the land on wealthy land owners, and before that when poor downtrodden peasants worked to please their king. It was the heritage of the meek, like a genes passed along, it was engrained into our systems, and so we took it as a part of family tradition.

But I watched Charles during these times, a random fry doused with ketchup hitting his cheek and the side of his nose as he was geeking on about the latest issue of Batman. He would stop his commentary for a minute, not averting his gaze, but just stopping mid-stream his thought, like his exterior self, the ones with the control of the body would stop into the bomb shelter where he kept the intelligent guy, conferring with him, asking him, “Now, is it time? Do I go show these bullies what kind man I am?”

Undoubtedly, the answer was always, “Not yet. Patience. Your time will come. Just not yet. Not yet.” I feared and eagerly anticipated that day.

Ziggy, nee Franklin Botale, was a more excitable guy than the rest of us. He reminded me like a hummingbird because he flitted around the room a lot. Not that he was gay. He wasn’t. But that he had the worst case of attention deficit disorder I had ever seen. Ziggy was short, an attribute which engendered in me a sort of sympathetic sorrow, one that I never expressed on his behalf. He was a hairy guy, with a head of hair which no matter how recently cut and combed always looked thick and disheveled. He also had these sad eyes.

Ziggy wasn’t as smart as either Charles or I. But he wasn’t dumb either which made it okay for him to be in our little group. Ziggy’s dad was military recruiter, and, in my opinion, a real jackass. One time, in my junior year the asshole called me at home and tried to recruit me to join the military. I secretly suspected the fucker beat Ziiggy when I wasn’t around, or that perhaps he favored his step-daughter from his recent marriage with a fat cow of a women.

But through it all, Ziggy seemed to admire his father. I could tell it from the green army jacket he wore, and the military posters advertising the army infantry corps on his wall. Ziggy has spent a stint on the high school wrestling team to get his physical education credit out of the way. He joined up with a pair of twins, friends he met when they all enrolled together on the same day. I knew the twins from a mutual friend of mine, which is how I grew to know Ziggy.

Anyway, we were all in my basement, Charles, Ziggy, and I doing nothing but being bored. I was reading a comic I had which was bent and well-used, one I had read several times before. Charles reading another one. Ziggy was racing from one end of the room to the other, looking for something to keep him entertained longer than two minutes.

“Dudes,” he said. “Let’s do something more than just read comic books. We do that shit all the time.”

Charles looked at me, and I shrugged. “Whatcha wanna do?” Charles asked him.

“I don’t know,” Ziggy said as scanned the items on the shelves. “Mike, dontcha got any fucking games down here? When are you going to get a fucking Nintendo like the rest of us?”

Charles stood up and started scanning the shelves with Ziggy and found among the various different books and knickknacks my collection of Pokemon cards I had collected a few years prior.

“Pokemon! This game is awesome,” he said. …