Buried Treasure: part two
I’m back with the second installment of “Buried Treasure,” a piece of fiction I’m publishing serially with new installments out each Friday for the next few weeks. If you haven’t read the beginning of the story, you should start here.
Part Two
I could see myself as a rogue atom in a chemical equation, making something ignite.
Biting my lip, I murmured, “I copied all the graffiti on all the desks in Swem. It was an independent study.”
Jimmy raised his eyebrows. “You did that for school?”
“I wrote an epic poem called, ‘The Slut Goddess Meets Profane Frat Boys and Talks about Poe.’ ” Now I was getting nostalgic for that dumb graffiti project. I remembered filling a notebook with all the stuff people had written on those desks in the last fifty years or so. I liked just holding that notebook when I was done, flipping through the pages to see that I’d almost filled it up.
Jimmy T. looked thoughtful. “I wonder if there’s a way for me to get out of my next CS project by pulling something like that.”
I was explaining that my professor had only let me do it because he was checked out when Wilson yelled, “Guys! Be serious.” He was sitting at attention on the edge of his bunk, a manic gleam in his eyes, his fists clenched in his lap. Wilson was skinny and several inches shorter than Jimmy T., but I had the feeling he could take on both of us right now. “Do you know something about the fucking treasure, Ruthie?”
“Yes!” I yelled back. “At least that hippie dude thought it had to do with a treasure.”
“Can you please try to make sense?” Wilson spoke at normal volume now but extra slowly. He enunciated every word.
I smiled. I was glowing with sense. “There’s a desk on the third floor. Or at least there was two years ago. It’s covered with some kind of code, something mathematical. At the top of the numbers there was writing. A message, maybe? Or maybe it was random? I don’t know if I would have paid attention to that particular desk, but I had a class with this odd guy, really eccentric type, you know? … Anyway, he’d been in school for years and years, switching majors, failing classes here and there, he was this epic soul because he was such a pure intellectual and he cared about everything. Shakespeare. Keats. Elvis. Tetris. Everything. One day after class we were talking and told me about his latest obsession. He’d heard that there was some puzzle at William and Mary, with clues hidden around campus, like a scavenger hunt or something. According to this legend, one of the pieces of the code was on a desk in Swem. … So anyway, I showed him my notes and he got kind of crazy about it and talked about it all semester. But neither of us had a head for math. We didn’t get anywhere with it. So he finally gave it up to write a long novel modeled on Gravity’s Rainbow.”
“Ruthie, do you know where this desk is?” Jimmy asked.
I couldn’t help laughing at the idea of searching for buried treasure. “You really want to be a pirate?”
Jimmy bristled. “It sure would beat going to my Operating Systems class.”
“What’s the treasure anyway?” I wanted to know.
“It’s not money or gold,” Wilson said. “It’s supposed to be better than that, better than drugs, better than porn. But nobody knows.”
Jimmy was tapping his fingers rhythmically on his desk and smiling at me. It was the same smile he’d given me when he asked me out to Taco Bell the first time, like he was inviting me along for a wild ride. Now I asked him what he was thinking.
“You’re very pretty.”
“Besides that.”
“That we can do this. The first thing we need is the code on the desk,” Jimmy said.
I shook my head. “That desk might not be there anymore, with all the work they’re doing on Swem. But I saved all my notebooks.”
“Are they in your room?” Wilson asked, his voice squeaking with excitement.
I shook my head again. “They’re at my parents’ house.”
Jimmy threw an arm around my shoulder and said, “I smell a road trip in our future.”
The boys started talking about what kind of code it might be, and how long ago someone would have written it, and mentioning all sorts of ways they could go about cracking it. Reading about codebreaking was a hobby of theirs I had never before understood.
At first I ignored them and pulled out the homework from my class on post-modernist lit, but I couldn’t concentrate on Thomas Pynchon. I kept glancing up at my boyfriend, who had finally shut off his video game and was engaged in a ferocious debate with Wilson about whether this code was from the 1940s or the 1960s. After a while, Jimmy T. came to sit next to me, and a while later he lay down with his head on my lap. I stroked his hair.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the Thomas Jefferson treasure. It was like someone or something was reaching out from the past, and I could almost feel them, or hear their voice alongside my own voice as I said, “I’m in.”
Jimmy laughed. “Of course you are, Ruthie.”
That afternoon, as the sun set outside and the sky went from white to smoky yellow because of the clouds in the sky and the streetlamps reflected off the snow, our quest began. I scrawled a quick letter of apology to the dean. This quest was much more exciting than rejecting people on paper towels. Jimmy, Wilson, and I didn’t eat ramen that night, deciding that we needed nourishment if we were going to be real pirates. So we ate the last of my oranges – preventing scurvy was important after all – and treated ourselves by adding frozen meatballs to our traditional spaghetti sauce. As I twirled a bunch of spaghetti around my fork, I caught Jimmy T.’s eyes and tried to give him my best daring smile. He laughed – his sharp, surprising laugh – and kissed my forehead.
#
Later that night I returned to my dorm room to find my roommate Charlotte at her desk, doing homework and humming along to the opera music she insisted on listening to, with its incessant arias reaching for heaven. I told her about the quest, which she laughed off as being ridiculous. But I was able to convince her to take a walk so we could check out the statue.
I wanted to see the words on the statue for myself, even if the numbers wouldn’t make any sense. Charlotte rolled her eyes, but said she was dying for a break from studying. We bundled up to walk through the woods from our building to the older part of campus.
“ ‘The woods were lovely, dark, and deep, but I had promises to keep. And miles to go before I sleep,’ ” I chanted as we entered the forest path.
Charlotte groaned. She was tired of this poem.
“ ‘And miles to go before I sleep,” I finished. “It really is a lot like the poem tonight. So quiet.”
“But we’re not in a poem. And it’s freezing in the real world. And this treasure can’t be real. I think the new guy is addling your brains.”
I rolled my eyes.
Instead of heading toward the university center, we turned off the trail and cut through the trees to the gate at the end of the Sunken Gardens, which is really just a big field that was sunk a few feet below the surrounding grounds, good for throwing Frisbees in nice weather, or laying out in the sun. No flowers or gardens whatsoever. I could still see the igloo Jimmy T. and I had built, among the rest of the lopsided snow sculptures.
That statue was between T-Hall and Washington Hall. As our footprints mixed with the million other footprints in the snow, as we walked between these imposing, centuries-old, brick buildings, the sort of buildings that scream “college” and “gentleman’s education” at you, I tried to convince Charlotte of the enduring mystery of the recent past of William and Mary. “Everybody knows about Thomas Jefferson and the colonial era and the old, old stuff at the college. The Wren building burning down three times, you hear about that. But do you have any idea what it was like here fifty years ago, or twenty years ago?”
Charlotte glanced at me and raised a brow. “So you and Jimmy T. don’t think old Thomas J. wrote the treasure hunt message?”
I stuck my tongue out at her. “Of course not … Ooh, there he is.” It was a life-sized statue made of bronze, showing Jefferson with his head turned and looking off into the distance. Like he’d noticed something interesting. Currently there was a huge snowball on top of his head, which must have been placed there by a student, so he looked like he was wearing a bowling ball.
I ran up to the statue. Charlotte followed more slowly, pulling a cigarette out of her jacket pocket and lighting it. I scraped snow off the back of the statue. At first I was afraid that the message was gone, but then I found it in tiny script on Jefferson’s waistcoat. A sentence followed by a string of numbers.
“If you seek an adventure, come on ours,” Charlotte read.
“Jimmy was right.” My hands were tingling beneath my thick, wool gloves. I ran my gloved fingers over the clue, marveling at the beauty of the numbers. It didn’t matter that I didn’t understand the meaning of these numbers yet. They were gorgeous, and I felt like the world was opening up to me.
I was awake. I was alive. And I was young.