Tactics of Conquest

by Barry N. Malzberg

  “Wouldn’t it be interesting?” I remember having said to Louis in one or another of the tenements of our youth when we were growing up together, going the Marshall Chess Club route together, discovering and sharing our growing proficiency in chess, our hostility momentarily abated in this sense of shared wonder. (There was actually a period of several years in our youth when we were what might be called “best friends”; prodigies enjoying the attention we were getting at about the same time, for the same reasons. It was only a little later that Louis’ megalomania asserted itself to destroy our relationship, even though, up until the very end of it, I reacted to his loutishness with disbelief and tried to rescue what I thought of as a sentimental tie. None of this, therefore, is my fault. He deserves everything that is coming to him.) “Wouldn’t it be interesting if someday we could play chess for the fate of the entire world?”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Louis said. Even then he had a highly literal mind and refused to speculate, refused to investigate alleys and byways of implication which, for me, are the veritable spices of life. “It’s only a game, a silly trivial game.”

  “No, it isn’t. It’s war. It’s life.”

  “That’s what they tell you in the books. That’s what the so-called experts say because they like to build themselves up and give their readers the feeling that they’re big, important men. Actually, it’s a very trivial pastime, and everyone who’s ever played chess knows that I’m telling you the truth. It has nothing to do with life at all. Most good chess players, masters and such, are snivelling, maladjusted wrecks, and the only thing they can do at all is to play chess well. If they didn’t have that they’d go crazy.”

  “Nevertheless,” I said, letting these disgusting allegations go by, “even if what you’re saying is true—and I don’t believe a word of it, not for a second—what would it be like to play chess with the whole world riding on the outcome? That would be exciting.”

  “Why not the whole universe? Why stop at the world?”

  “Don’t make a fool of me,” I said, irritated. “Come on, Louis, admit it: The prospect tantalizes you.”

  “Nothing tantalizes me because anything would be even worse than what we’ve got now.”

  “I don’t understand you, Louis. But think now, I everybody watching us, knowing that we held their fate in our hands. The tension, the suspense, as if their very lives were under our control (which of course they would be). Louis, if we were playing for the fate of the world, or—all right, even the universe—then we’d be in command.”

  “It would be one hell of a universe if they had to play chess to decide its fate.”

  “Not necessarily. It could be fun.”

  “No, it wouldn’t,” Ye said, rolling on a clear spot in the Canarsie junkyard to lean on an elbow, looking out toward a blanket of clouds which came across our vision suddenly. “What kind of a universe would it be now if you had to play chess to decide how it was turning out?”

  “You’re not looking at this the right way. Come on, Louis, admit the truth. Does chess make any less sense than God?”

  Louis thought about this for a while as we looked at the clouds. Queens, Knights, Bishops, Rooks, Pawns swam across our field of vision along with certain other pieces known only in fairy chess: the Dragon, the Caretaker, the Drowned Giant. I regarded them with speculative interest, fairy chess being a game for which I have great contempt though a, lot of grandmasters like it. Feeling myself momentarily suspended in a kind of perfect peace, I was in accord with the elements, which one rarely is in this world or out of it, the junkyards of Canarsie possessing a kind of vague bucolic charm. In the air was the smell of fish and frogs, and an errant flight of birds stalked the clouds and then disappeared. “Probably not,” Louis agreed after a while, “when you come to think of it, it doesn’t.”

  “Right, Louis.” I had come in second in the Marshall Juniors the week before, a stunning show of strength—Louis ill, absent—and I felt that I had moved far ahead of him already in the annals of Caissa. “It’s a beautiful, logical, perfectly shaped game with a beginning, a middle and an end. Now, you can’t say that about God. It isn’t the same.”

  “You’re not such a hot chess player, David. You have a lot of weaknesses.”

  “I’m still better than you, and you haven’t answered the question.”

  “Question?” Louis said. “I didn’t know there was a question, I didn’t know that there was anything before us.” He turned toward me then, his eyes suddenly limpid and open and looking at me. As I felt myself being drawn into his intensely empty, bleakly staring eyes, I realized that there was no one in all of the world who knew that we were here at this moment: not my father (who was, of course, struggling with accounts receivable at some miserable warehouse in the Red Hook district), not Louis’ mother, a waitress who in her; widowhood struggled through existence in an Atlantic Avenue hamburger and steak restaurant’ (many were the times that Louis and I had thought about getting his mother and my father together, but it had never worked out; these two dismal adults had once gone to a movie together and had returned separately hours later, refusing comment), not anyone in the Marshall Chess Club; just Louis and myself lying side by side on the blind and irrevocable flats of Brooklyn. Something passed between us at that moment. There must! have been a transaction of some sort, some calculation too intimate and dreadful to bear articulation. As I moved toward him, the true ominousness of the situation assaulted me. Louis and I were on the verge of buggery.

  Well, why not? Why not? I ask. Even some thirty-five years later I am still unable to see the unreasonableness of this feat. We were young, vigorous, twin prodigies, celibates both, unaccustomed to and uninterested in the company of women: What could have held us back? I felt the faint thrust of bone against me and realized that Louis’ finger was prodding my thin and palpitating adolescent wrist; in the next moment I had vaulted over him, heaving my body at cross-angles to him.

  “God makes less sense than chess does,” I murmured to him, my lips against his cheek. He murmured back, “It’s preposterous, it’s unreal,” and then we were intertwined, the two of us lashed and lashing at one another against the dry mud of Brooklyn. My pants were detached; it was Louis who was the aggressor, not I (as in my dreams); it was Louis who forced himself against me and with a series of grunts and groans I felt myself being turned. I looked then into a few pebbles buried at some peculiar angle in the Brooklyn mud while a feeling of awful pressure began in my anus; it was Louis, forcing entrance. And then he was heaving over me, enormous, awful, one bloodshot eye peering into mine. “This is completely wrong, you know,” he said in a flat, precise, cultured voice. “We have no business doing this.”

  I was quite beyond speech at this time but it was possible, even at the perilous angle of conjoinment we had selected, for me to nod agreement. “That’s right,” I said, “that’s quite right, we have no business doing this, it’s ridiculous.” And at that moment he slid fully into me, some discovered moistness enabling the full wedging and pressure, and then I felt Louis, the second best junior player in the Marshall Chess Club (I will admit this), beginning to heave and buck, forcing dangerous entrance. “We could be arrested,” he said, “this is quite wrong, uh, uh, uh,” his uhs conveying far more sense to me than any of his protestations. I spread my knees, forcing life into my limbs, and felt him sliding smoothly up all of the ranges and terrain until he touched something within me whose very existence I would not have known even five minutes before. Whole waves of feeling erupted and then I fell beneath him as he climaxed with a few brief and honest strokes.

  Sodomy is a sin. The Bible is quite explicit on this and there has never been an internationally ranked grandmaster who showed any tendency whatsoever toward homosexuality. These thoughts occurred to me only through a vast gauze of indifference; it did not, truly, seem to matter. And in any event, no one would ever know that it had happened.

  “We shouldn’t have done that,” Louis said.


  “All right.”

  “That was wrong. We were just having a discussion and then I lost control of myself. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  “All right,” I said again. “Neither did I.”

  “We’re never going to do anything like that again. You led me into it.”

  “No, I didn’t,” I said. I clawed my hands down around my ankles, found my pants, began to draw them slowly upward through layers and layers of mud.

  “Your fault. You did it,” he said.

  “Say that again and I’ll kill you,” I said. My angle of vision was focused upon a 1947 Pontiac, a, coupe with enormous mud-guards which for some reason fascinated me. I found that I could literally dive into those fenders, merge with the gunmetal grey of the ruined car. “It was all your fault anyway.”

  “We’ll never tell anyone about this,” Louis said. “It will be our secret. Are you going to tell anyone about it?”

  “No,” I said, “no, I am never going to tell any-one about it.” That is a promise which I kept for thirty-five years and a fraction, breaking it at only this crucial point of the account for reasons which are obvious and need little explication at this point. By his betrayal, by his lying about the nature of our match, he broke that pact made in a junkyard thirty-five years ago, and thus is entitled to no further consideration. This is a perfectly reasonable point of view.

  “Even the best chess player in the world,” Louis pointed out sometime during that discussion, “still lives within the confines of sixty-four squares, which is hardly the world, don’t you think?”

  “It is the world.”

  “Then God help the world,” he said: The liar, the felon, the fool, the doppelganger, the traitor, the pederast, the buggerer, the assailant, the fool, the fool, the fool.

  At the board, all is the same. It is a chastened and impassive Louis who confronts me over the squares; chin cupped in hand in the well-known tournament position, his knuckles running ceaselessly over the edge of the table. He is cultivating abstraction again, a high patience, a tolerance which he hopes will win the hearts of the audience. It is too late. He is already doomed; the Overlord has announced it. I look at him for just a moment as I hitch my chair more deeply into the board and then my next move comes dribbling out of the subconscious like a turd, easing its way through those rectal cavities of the mind; and then, reaching forward, I embark upon the move that will destroy him. And not a moment too soon for he indeed does, not only through selection but through destiny, represent all of the forces of evil in the populated universe.

  INTERREGNUM: Rook Pawn

  In a dream I conceive myself to be Job and now I am in earnest dialogue with the three comforters, this trinity grouped around me in uncomfortable, rigid postures, their nostrils flaring with revulsion. The comforters are dressed like chess-pieces—King, Knight, Rook Pawn—and very foolish they look indeed, since human conformation is not at all similar to the pieces of the Royal Game and they must be sweating heavily under their garb. Nevertheless, they are doing the best that they can, just as I am doing the best that I can, and I do not wish to look askance at them. It is their advice, rather, which I find terrible.

  “This burden is too much,” I reiterate. “I have a good ranking, am probably the fortieth or fiftieth best chess player in the world according to FIDE, even better than that by my own estimation, but how can I take on the obligation of the defense? I tell you, it’s too much.”

  “True,” the King says. He is an elderly chap with hands as transparent as gauze. “It is a very unfair obligation. Still, do the best you can.”

  “I would agree with that,” the Knight says, sweating heavily. “You’re hardly to be blamed as long as you do your best. After all, you were chosen. You were chosen to carry this burden, you didn’t volunteer for it, so how can you feel guilty if you fail?”

  “I never wanted chess to mean that much,” I say in this dream. “Louis was right; essentially it’s a trivial game. It is the very triviality which fascinated me. I never wanted to get into this level of consequence.”

  “But you were selected,” the King says. He taps his staff upon the ground. “Consider it a great honor.”

  “My fields have been destroyed,” I point out, my hands shaking a bit. “My wife has been raped, my children murdered, my cattle destroyed, all of my possessions smashed and still I must suffer. Why?”

  “Stop fantasizing,” says the Rook Pawn, a nasty little fellow. “You’ve never had a wife, you’ve never been married. You have no children, and one thing is sure as hell, you’ve got no fields and cattle. All that you’ve got is yourself and your miserable FIDE ranking. Well, if chess is so important to you, you have no right to complain if they selected you to play for high stakes.” He wipes some snivel from his nose, a nervous, intense little fellow who reminds me, at least in this dream, of an earlier version of myself. “It’s your life and you’re stuck with it.”

  “Besides,” the King points out, “the publicity will do you a great deal of good. Very few players at the fortieth or fiftieth FIDE rank get the kind of coverage you’ve been getting recently. You should be able at the very least to get a biography out of it.”

  “But the universe is going to end!”

  “Not the part of it which you represent,” the King says, “at least according to your pretensions. There should be a very grateful audience for anything of yours after you’ve saved them, you know.”

  “And not only that,” the Knight says, “if you think that you’re in a bad position, think of Louis. He’s even unhappier.”

  “I don’t care about Louis.”

  “I don’t know whether you care about him or not. Nevertheless, think of his position. It isn’t pleasant for him either and he’s not as good a player as you. That’s to be thought of, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I never thought of taking that into account.”

  “Well, you should have,” the Knight says. “That shows your latent selfishness and megalomania. The trouble is that all of you chess players are the same. Onanistic, absolutely. If you thought a little bit about others instead of self, self, self all the time you’d be better. What about all of those poor creatures on whose behalf Louis is playing?”

  “Yes,” the King says, moving his face closer to the Knight’s. Their conjoinment has a strangely pleasing aspect; there is something symmetrical about it. They belong together, King and Knight “Yes, what about those creatures? What you’ve got to do is to look outside yourself, get out in the world a bit, think of the rights of the other fellow. I hope that when all of this is over you’ll have learned a thing or two. If you can learn something from it, if you can derive meaning and go on, I think you’ll find that this may have been the best thing that ever happened to you, am I not right?”

  “Of course you are,” the Knight says, risking a confidential swat on the King’s backside. “You’re absolutely right, old fellow, but I’d expect nothing else from you.”

  “You’re all full of shit,” the Rook Pawn says. He is a diseased, deformed little fellow, with very much the aspect one would expect of the King’s Rook Pawn which, as all masters know, is the weakest piece on the board, worthy only of being sacrificed in order to open up a file, usually a mere obstacle in the way of development, that piece which stands helplessly beside the Bishop in fianchetto, its only function to defend. “You might as well tell him the truth, that is, that all of this is meaningless.” The dream landscape on which we are standing, abandoned sands on all sides of us, a shimmering desert aspect, seems to waver and then begins to take on a brilliant orange hue as he says this. “He’s built it up in his own mind as a reaction-formation against his love for Louis, whom he knows to be the superior player. None of this exists.”

  “Nonsense,” the King says, “get out of here.” He looks pleadingly at the Knight. “Of course,” the Knight says without as much conviction, “you’re misleading him terribly. Why don’t you leave? No one asked for three comfor
ters anyway. Two are more than adequate considering the situation.”

  “I won’t leave,” the Pawn says, “I’m as much entitled to be here as either of you, and if we’re going to do Scripture then it’s clear that three comforters are necessary.” He turns upon me an acned, penetrating adolescent gaze. “You’ve made far more of this than you should have, you know, Actually chess is a very trivial game.”

  “It is not a trivial game.”

  “That isn’t what used to be your point of view,” the Pawn says. “In fact, I can recall you distinctly saying that chess was quite trivial. ‘Meaningless’ and ‘unimportant’ were the words you used to use, I believe.”

  “You’re wrong,” I say. “It was Louis who said that. You’ve got me confused with Louis.”

  “Exactly,” the Knight says and swats the Pawn with his lance. The Pawn’s eyes glaze over. “Why don’t you get the hell out of here?” the Knight says. “You’re really not helping matters at all.”

  The King imperiously folds his arms. Desert breezes sweep over us, peculiarly chilly for a dream in this time of year. “Yes,” he says, “I really think that the Knight is correct. There’s nothing more for you to say and you haven’t even gotten your information correct.”

  “You fools,” the Pawn says weakly. “You don’t understand a thing. You don’t understand a single thing, don’t you know what’s going on here?” I lean forward then, bedazzled by the dialogue but eager, eager to learn, if at all possible, what the Pawn has to impart so that my own understanding of the situation will be widened and deepened.

  “I’m going to tell you,” the Pawn says, “I’m going to tell you the real and true and utter and absolute and total final meaning of this. After you hear it, you’ll never be the same again.” He opens his mouth. In that mouth I see rotting teeth; between those teeth I see little crevices of darkness from which the truth at last will emerge. The King and Knight, against their will, also lean forward: It seems that the comforters, no less than I, could use a little bit of information if only they could find it. So the three of us lean forward toward the ridiculous little Pawn, trying in this dreamlike substance to learn something from him. But even as we do, even as we stiffen into an inquisitorial posture, there is a shattering roll of thunder somewhere in the distance. Jahweh himself, it seems, is attempting some kind of intervention, and then a lightning bolt strikes the ground between the Pawn and myself, the lightning sizzling, inducting little waves of heat and light along its length.