'Stay Calm, Stay Discreet', by Robert Slentz-Kesler

This piece was originally published in The Brussels Review.

Saturday June 12, 1982
Steven Burkholder, age 14
Town of Paxton in Northern Virginia

“There’s a movie I want you to watch,” Bill Burkholder said to his son as he pressed buttons on the TV and VCR.
“I’d rather ride my bike,” said Steven. “Can’t I go outside?”
“Yes yes, later. But this is good,” said Bill. “Ach, why the hell isn’t it working?”
“The switch-box, Dad.”
“The what?”
“Here.”
Steven reached behind the TV and slid the lever on the small connector.
“Oh. Is that for that video game machine of yours?”
“Atari, Dad,” said Steven. “It’s called Atari.”
“Okay, yes, that,” said Bill.
The TV screen flickered to life.
“Okay, here we go.”
So instead of playing basketball or riding his bike on this Saturday afternoon, Steven sat on the living room couch as his father slid the VHS tape into the machine, pressed the play button, and then walked out and closed the door. It was an old black-and-white movie called The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and was loaded with alcoholism and gravitas and long sequences of people wandering through rain and brooding in the dark, and then it ended with the good guys getting shot and killed. Two hours later when the film was finally over, Bill returned, plopped onto a chair, and crossed one leg over the other.
“So, what did you think?”
“Well, kind of a downer,” said Steven. “I didn’t always understand what they were talking about, but Richard Burton’s got a great accent.”
“Yeah, he’s good.”
“Do the East Germans really shoot people who try to get over the wall to the West?”
“I’m afraid so, yes.”
“Killing people to keep them in?” said Steven.
“Yes.”
“What a bunch of barbarians.”
“Well, they just have different ideas about government and citizenship.”
“Bullshit, they’re barbarians,” said Steven.
His father chuckled.
“Yes. Yes, I suppose they are.”
He gazed at the bookshelves for a while and then back at his son.
“Have you heard of The Big Game?”
“Yeah, the Super Bowl,” said Steven.
“Well, no, not that. It’s about my work for the State Department.”
“Oh, you’re gonna tell me it’s not really the State Department.”
Bill chuckled again and shook his head.
“They tell us to wait until the kids are fourteen, but I think that’s too late.”
“So, CIA?”
“Yes,” said Bill.
“Ah.” Steven nodded slowly. “And I have to keep it hush-hush?”
“Oh yes.”
“Wow, okay,” said Steven. “I mean, okay, but what if I accidentally tell someone?”
“You won’t ever do that.”
Bill re-crossed his legs and flicked a piece of lint off his pants.
Steven pointed at his dad. “So you’re a spy? You’re an agent?”
“Not an agent, no. An agent is something else.”
“Do you have any guns?”
“I can tell you more another time,” said Bill. “For now, just keep it all discreet. Discretion is the name of the game.”
Steven thought back to their years living in Belgium and West Germany. This explained a lot: Bill Burkholder’s long weekends away with no explanation, the phone ringing at all hours of the night, and the time his father came home with a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. Steven had always known never to ask direct questions about these strange habits, as if a skill like discretion had seeped into his consciousness via osmosis.
“Is this why you’re always telling me how to avoid getting kidnapped?”
“Yes.”
“Huh. Well, I’m pretty sure someone almost got me in Düsseldorf all those years ago.”
“What?”
So Steven told him the tale of being outside on a cold December day at age four, of leaving their apartment on Lakronstrasse and rounding the corner onto Sonnbornstrasse. He’d sensed someone behind him on the sidewalk and then turned and saw a man walking in his direction, and he knew in that moment that he was the target. He’d considered sprinting away but then found himself turning 180 degrees to face the man. He’d marched directly toward him and started loudly singing “Eine Muh, eine Mäh,” his favorite German Christmas song. Steven’s singing was so powerful and so sudden that the man had jumped and halted, then scurried across the street and disappeared.
Bill’s eyes were wide.
“Why in God’s name didn’t you say anything back then?”
“I don’t know, I felt bad. I thought it was my fault and I would get in trouble.”
Steven fiddled with his fingers on his lap.
“And then when the guy walked away, I turned and ran farther down the street instead of going home. I thought I could run to your office on Friedrich-Ebert-Strasse, but of course that was too far. So I just went back to the apartment.”
“You remember the street name of my office?”
“Yeah.”
“That was ten years ago, and you were only four years old!”
Bill stood up and paced around the living room. He stopped and looked at his son.
“Do you remember the street number?”
“Yeah, seventeen.”
“My God.”
Bill stared sideways out the living room window for a moment, then back at Steven.
“How did you know to walk back toward him? I never told you to do that.”
“I don’t know, I just reacted. It felt like the right thing to do.”
“Were there other people around?”
“Yeah, a lady walking a brown dog and two kids throwing a ball. The kids started dancing and singing along with me, which really freaked the guy out.”
“Huh,” said Bill. “How about that.”
“Anyway,” said Steven, “can I go back outside now?”
“Yes.” Bill nodded. “Yes, of course. Off you go.”
Steven bolted out of the house and jumped onto his Mongoose BMX bike, imagining that perhaps he could just ride and ride and be a kid and forget the weight his father had just dumped on him. He’d suspected his dad was involved in secret government work, but now that he actually knew the truth he would have to be careful never to say a word to anyone, never to slip up. He pedaled down Cornwall Street past Mrs. Fraser working in her garden, and then he saw Bobby Aldridge sitting on the front porch with his mom, and Steven wanted to yell out, “Hey Bobby, guess what I just found out,” but of course he couldn’t do that, he could never say it out loud to anyone. He waved at Bobby and biked on down the road. Aha, there, he had just exercised discretion, a skill he would now need to practice every day for the rest of his life. But Steven didn’t want that burden, he hadn’t asked for it, he just wanted to be a kid and play Atari video games and go to the movies downtown and ride his bike.
After a quick turn onto Ayr Street and then West Market Street, Steven found himself on the sidewalk in front of his friend Chess’s house. Chess was at the top of the asphalt driveway wearing his familiar red Stanford T-shirt, bouncing a basketball and shooting hoops by himself. Charles “Chess” Klein was often alone and had trouble making friends in school, a situation not helped by his announcement back in the sixth grade that when the time came, he would be attending Stanford University and finally getting out of “this Godforsaken shit-hole town.” Longtime residents of Paxton did not appreciate the sentiment—some of the FFA boys had warned him that he’d better watch his own shit-hole or it was going to be severely beaten one of these days. But Chess was undeterred, and from middle school onward he could be seen in a Stanford shirt at least twice a week. Steven biked up to the top of the driveway and played basketball with Chess for a short while before they both went inside to play Combat on the Atari 2600 until suppertime.
So it went with that summer of 1982. The town of Paxton in those days had a population of about 10,000 and nothing engaging to offer fourteen-year-old boys in the way of leisure activities. Steven and Chess made it their own by biking and playing basketball outside each day and then escaping the heat by spending hours inside with the video-game console. The routine was briefly interrupted in early July when Blade Runner reached the Tally Ho theater downtown. Chess was so enraptured that he dragged Steven to the cinema for multiple viewings—by the end of its run they had seen the movie four times. After that brief peak of excitement, they settled back down into the sameness of the season, and by mid August the two of them and every other kid in Paxton had had enough of the heat and the monotony and looked forward to the end of summer. Anticipating the transition from middle to high school did bring a fleeting swell of enthusiasm, but once freshman year began it took only a few days for the mundane routine to return and swaddle them all in their hometown’s familiar sheath of numbness. A genuine spike of drama and adventure would arrive later that autumn when Chess landed in the middle of a sexual relationship with Jennifer Campbell that nearly caused him serious injury.
On a cool, gray October morning at Rockland County High School on Dry Mill Road, Mr. Gordon’s third-period World History class was ending with students slamming books and scuffing chairs. Steven leaned forward and tapped Chess on the shoulder.
“Hey, good presentation.”
Chess was picking up papers from his desk.
“Thanks. I’m just glad it’s over.”
“Mine’s tomorrow, I’m not looking forward to it.”
“Eh, you’ll do fine.”
“You don’t hear ‘vanquish’ very often,” said Steven.
“What?”
“You used the word ‘vanquish’ in your talk.”
“Uh, okay.”
Chess walked to the classroom door and out into the hallway of streaming students. Steven followed him.
“Cool word, that’s all,” said Steven.
“Yeah, okay,” said Chess. “I mean, it’s a word, I don’t know if I’d call it cool.”
“And the phrase ‘epigraphic evidence’ was interesting too.”
Chess stopped walking and faced him.
“So what?”
“So I just noticed that Jennifer used some of the same words and phrases in her presentation. Kinda weird. If Mr. Gordon ever notices—”
“Shut up.”
Chess glanced right and left down the hallway.
“Come here.”
He walked away and gestured with his head for Steven to follow.
They stopped at Chess’s locker. He opened it and handed Steven a sheet of paper.
“Tomorrow’s World History homework, all done, every answer perfect. Take it home and make slight changes when you rewrite it. And for God’s sake, just shut up.”
Steven read through the first answer.
“Wow. Okay. How long have you—”
“Don’t ask,” said Chess.
He slammed his locker door and rushed off without noticing the photograph that had slid off the top shelf and fluttered to the floor. Steven picked it up.
“Chess, hey, this fell out!”
But Chess had disappeared into the surging flow of students. Steven tucked the photo into his green Trapper Keeper and went about his day. Later at home, he took the picture out and looked more closely. What the hell? It was a room he didn’t recognize, and a diagonal back/side view of a nude female with long hair who was toned and fit and very clearly Jennifer Campbell, on her way to the door of what looked like a small bathroom. How was this possible? First the presentation similarities and now this. Steven couldn’t imagine how Chess’s area of contact would overlap at all with a person like Jennifer—she was a soccer player, a champion track hurdler, an involved thespian, a high academic performer, and there were some alarming rumors that she was a sex addict, rumors seemingly confirmed by the unnerving way her varsity football-star boyfriend Leonard “Lump” McGrath kept tabs on her via a network of fellow athletes who regularly reported back to him on her whereabouts.
The next day at school, Steven gingerly handed Chess the photograph.
“This fell out of your locker yesterday.”
Chess took the photo.
“Oh my God, uh—”
He looked wide-eyed at Steven.
“You cannot have that here at school. Take it home and leave it there.”
“Yeah,” said Chess. “Okay.”
He gulped and went pale and stared at the photo with his mouth hanging slightly open.
“Hey!” said Steven. “Snap out of it, c’mon. Just take the damn thing home.”
“Right.”
The next day, Steven found another sheet of World History homework answers in his own locker, folded and slipped through the vent slot of the door. And so it went every day thereafter: apparently Jennifer stayed two days ahead of every due date and did all the work, handed the answers to Chess, who then deposited a copy for Steven. After a few weeks when the operation was running smoothly and the two of them were hunched silently over sandwiches in the school lunchroom one day, Chess gave Steven the full background of the situation.
He swore that Jennifer had been the instigator, that he had not asked for any of this. They were next-door neighbors on West Market Street, each with a huge house and a sprawling yard and rows of high boxwood hedges. Jennifer had shown up at Chess’s front door one day with a piece of misdelivered mail and made multiple comments about how much she liked his Stanford T-shirts and how she would love to see him wear those more often, and then eventually the waves and greetings from her driveway became more flirty and sing-songy. Chess was confused and did his best to ignore it all because he’d wanted nothing to do with her and the risk posed by her maniacal troglodyte of a boyfriend.
In the end it took Jennifer only two weeks to recruit Chess, first by promising to provide him with answers to every World History assignment throughout the year and then finally by cornering him in the upstairs room of the carriage house at the back of his property one cloudy Thursday evening. She had seated him on the couch, slid her track shorts down to her ankles and stepped out of them, straddled him, then grabbed the sides of his head and held intense eye contact until they were done. That first time, she stayed in place and repeated. And after a short break she repeated yet again. Chess was exhausted and exhilarated and depleted and no longer gave a damn about homework and would have gladly continued regardless.
And they did continue throughout their freshman year, even as Jennifer maintained her relationship with Lump McGrath. The proximity of Chess and Jennifer as neighbors made logistics very straightforward: every school evening after practice, Lump would deliver Jennifer home in his pickup truck and watch her until she entered the house, then later after dinner she would sneak through her backyard and meet Chess on the fully-furnished second floor of the carriage house. Jennifer had said that the danger involved was every bit as addictive as the sex. They never met anywhere else, they never so much as glanced at each other at school, the risk was too great. Lump McGrath would have shredded him to pieces if the secret ever got out.
“Cheating” (either sense of that word) never occurred to Steven during those days, and though he felt conflicted about what they were doing, he justified his part in the scheme by convincing himself that he had expanded his area of conscience to accommodate a friend who now felt reassured and would stay safe because he knew Steven would keep his mouth shut. But as freshman year progressed through the fall and the winter break and into January, it became clear that Chess wasn’t cut out for this sort of thing. Jennifer must have sensed this as well, because after finishing multiple rounds one evening in the carriage house, she had yanked off Chess’s Stanford T-shirt and taken it home with her “as a memento.” He was genuinely touched by the gesture and hoped it might foreshadow a deeper level of intimacy in the relationship, until Steven explained that she had probably taken the shirt to maintain leverage.
“But she’s got the whole homework situation as leverage,” said Chess.
“Yeah, but Lump wouldn’t care about homework,” said Steven. “The T-shirt is for the Lump part of it.”
“Oh my God.”
Steven instantly regretted pointing this out. Chess’s anxiety was getting worse. He wasn’t sleeping well and spent much of his time at school twitching and looking over his shoulder, which made Steven fear he was no longer being careful when turning in Jennifer’s homework as his own.
“I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know, we should stop,” said Chess. “All of it, we should just stop. This was a bad idea.”
“It’ll be fine. Just stay calm and stay discreet,” said Steven. “Discretion is the name of the game.”
Then Lump McGrath found the photo.
Someone had taped it to the front of his hall locker. Witnesses reported that he had slowly approached the picture, squinted down at it, and then turned around and glanced up, at which point everyone in the hallway around him looked away and started talking among themselves. His legion of fellow football players fanned out over the next two days and interrogated a handful of unlucky boys suspected by Lump for no good reason. Their tactics resulted in bruised necks, black eyes, and at least one concussion. According to Jennfer, Lump also demanded answers directly from her after school as they sat in his pickup truck in the parking lot. Who had taken the picture? What room was that? He could tell it wasn’t her own house. But Jennifer wouldn’t budge, she claimed she couldn’t remember, that maybe it was one of her girlfriends in the photography club, no big deal. 
“Bullshit!”
Lump banged his fist on the dashboard. His chin was quivering.
Jennifer reached over to touch his face, but he swatted her hand away.
“Am I just supposed to ignore this?” said Lump. “Photography club, come on.”
Jennifer sighed.
“We always said that being exclusive wasn’t part—”
“No, no, you said that. I’ve never been okay with that.”
Jennifer faced front.
“Jesus.”
“Tell me who it is!”
Jennifer stared silently out the window with her arms folded.
Lump wiped his eyes and told her to get out of the truck, that he never wanted to see her again and she could damn well walk home from now on and he didn’t need her and he would find the son of a bitch on his own.
Chess was now in full panic mode. Steven told him to chill out and tried at least to get him to stop drawing attention to himself by wandering around school muttering “time to die, time to die.” He reminded Chess that Lump had never seen the inside of the carriage house and had no idea who took the picture. This didn’t help. Chess told Jennifer they had to stop, but she pointed out that Lump had broken up with her, so it was fine. And anyway, she said, Lump just needed focus. He would be graduating in one week and had made no plans for his future.
The next morning, Mr. Gordon held Jennifer and Chess after class and told them their homework assignments lately had been nearly identical to each other, and that couldn’t be a coincidence.
“I have Xerox copies right here.” He tapped the manila folder on his desk.
“What?” said Chess. “No. That’s— How can, there’s no way—” he gulped and looked over at Jennifer.
“Mr. Gordon,” she said. “How can you think that? I get an A on every test.”
“Yeah,” said Chess, “me too.”
The teacher stared at Jennifer, then at Chess. He rolled backwards in his desk chair.
“I’ll be sharing these with Principal Hartman tomorrow morning, we’ll see what he thinks. You two can go now.”
Chess raced directly to Steven’s house after school and recounted the whole scene. This was it, it was all over. He was going to be pummeled by Lump the barbarian, and now because of Mr. Gordon his chances of being admitted to Stanford would be ruined. He shrieked at Steven for telling him discretion would be enough to keep everyone safe. And look, just look now. Steven discerned that this would not be a good time to point out how indiscreet it was for Chess to turn in homework so similar to Jennifer’s, and he also refrained from highlighting his own strategy of inserting one or two incorrect answers on each assignment before submitting it—earning a B in World History was worth the risk mitigation. Chess ranted and yelled and waved his hands around and then left as abruptly as he’d arrived. He phoned later that evening to tell Steven that Jennifer had left his Stanford shirt on the front-door mat with a note that said “You are the sweetest guy I’ve ever met. But you were right, we should stop.” Steven braced for more invective, but Chess sighed and said that after all maybe this was for the best.
And he did have a point: discretion only went so far. It was time to get to work.
Steven started with the homework problem. He’d noticed that on most days when Mr. Gordon’s coffee habit necessitated a dash to the staff bathroom during class, Benny Rakovich would hoist open one of the classroom windows to the smoking court outside and hand his friend Gene Johnson a cigarette. Late that night, Steven biked over to the school with a flashlight and found the window unlatched. He climbed in, and after snooping around the teacher’s desk for a few minutes found the file in the top desk drawer. Original assignments were always returned to students, and now Steven had what he hoped were Mr. Gordon’s only photocopies. He straightened the desk and carefully closed the window on his way back out.
All the while, he kept thinking about Jennifer’s comment to Chess, that Lump had not thought ahead to life after high school, that he had no focus, no plans for the future. So Steven pretended to be Lump and called every military recruiting office in town to provide his contact information and to let them know he was considering a career in the armed forces.
  “Yes sir, Leonard McGrath, 31 Mosby Street, 777-5894.”
And remembering his father’s advice that keeping records and saving information was always a good idea because you never knew when it might come in handy, Steven made sure to record each conversation onto a cassette tape using a telephone receiver suction-cup microphone he’d bought at Radio Shack. While he was on the phone with the Marine Corps recruiter, his memory flashed back to a Rockland County Raiders football game where Lump’s dad had worn one of those black baseball hats with military unit details embroidered in yellow.
“Very interested, yes sir. My father served with the 3rd Marine Division at Da Nang Air Base.”
Word got around quickly that the recruiters were relentless and gave Lump no rest. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines—they all monopolized his time and would not let go. The process moved swiftly. He enlisted in the Marine Corps and left for boot camp three days after graduating from Rockland County High School with the class of 1983.
The long school year ended, lockers and hallways emptied out, final report cards were mailed home, and the school building closed up. Later in June on a warm afternoon, Chess stormed through Steven’s front door waving his World History report card in the air.
“I got an A,” he said. “How did I get an A? Why did we never hear anything again from Mr. Gordon about the homework? Something’s wrong, very wrong.”
“Shh,” said Steven. “My mom’s in the kitchen.”
They headed to the living room. Steven sat down on the couch while Chess stood shaking the piece of paper.
“I don’t get it,” he said.
“Maybe he realized he didn’t have a case after all,” said Steven. “Or maybe Principal Hartman didn’t agree with him.”
“Well how about this: what if Jennifer went to see Mr. Gordon and took care of things, you know, in her own way?”
“Oh, gross,” said Steven. “I don’t think she would do that. Would she? No, hell no. Anyway, it’s over. We’ve got our grades.”
Chess flopped down on the other end of the couch.
“Maybe you’re right. But still, it’s just weird.”
“This whole year was weird, for sure.”
“And now Jennifer’s moved away.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, there was a big truck in her driveway yesterday. She smiled and waved, but she didn’t come over and say good-bye.”
Chess shook his head.
“Oh man, sorry.”
“No, it’s cool,” said Chess. “I’m relieved. My dad said they’re moving to Oregon.”
Steven was about to suggest that it was time for some video games, but then Chess turned to face him.
“Oh, and sorry I yelled at you that day. I was losing it.”
“It’s okay,” said Steven. “But yeah, you were totally losing it.”
“I thought what you said about discretion was BS, but you were right—all this crap somehow resolved itself.”
Steven considered telling him the truth about how all the crap had actually resolved, but he decided to leave it alone. They had survived and made it to the end of a turbulent school year. No more homework, no more management of logistics for secret schemes, and no more drama—though Steven did have to resist rolling his eyes on several occasions when Chess would stare into space whispering Jennifer’s name and murmuring “all those moments will be lost in time.” Here in this moment, Chess was relaxed, almost serene, so there was no reason to agitate him by talking about the file of homework photocopies and the phone cassette tape in the box upstairs in Steven’s bedroom closet. His father was right: unless you’re specifically asked about something, it’s best to keep it to yourself.
Chess stared at Steven.
“When were you going to tell me?”
Steven sat upright. Shit.
“Tell you what?”
“I can’t believe you would keep this from me,” said Chess.
What the hell? Steven’s mouth hung open.
Chess pointed at the coffee table.
“When did you get the Atari 5200?”
Steven looked down at his new video game console.
“Oh, right! Uh, last week.”
“Cool! A new 5200!”
“Along with this.” Steven held up a game cartridge.
“Ooooo, Wizard of Wor! Does it have the two-player version?”
“Yep.”
“Does it have the radar display?”
“Yep.”
“Coooool!” said Chess. “Alright, let’s go.”
They each grabbed a joystick, Steven clicked the cartridge into the console, and thus began the long summer of 1983. Steven’s eyes were on the screen and his thumb was jamming the fire button on the controller, but his mind drifted and reviewed the past year, with its drama and close calls and strategizing and organizing and the constant discretion required to keep it all covert. He wondered if his dad’s job was similarly stressful and if he ever got a break from it. Well, here in this moment, for this summer, Steven was determined to take a break, to leave it all behind, to spend time in mindless fun and leisure, to waste hours and hours with the Atari 5200, to concentrate on shooting burwors and garwors and worluks and forget about the constant need for secrecy and precaution and discretion.
“Man, I wish I had your skills,” said Chess.
“What?”
Chess’s thumb was hammering the fire button.
“You’re gonna kick my ass like you always do in Joust.”
“Oh yeah,” said Steven, cranking the joystick. “Yeah, I am.”

Robert Slentz-Kesler is a librarian whose fiction has appeared in Litro Magazine, the Blotter, the Rappahannock Review, the Font, All About Jazz, Dark Yonder, and the Brussels Review. He lives and writes in Durham, North Carolina. See more of his work at https://robertslentzkesler.com.

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