by Jesse Ball
—This is when he won the tournament at Viso.
—Do you think I look at all like him? asked Stan. I would like to look like that.
Loring was looking deeper and deeper into the photograph. Her voice came again, very quiet.
—Viso was a sort of gambit tournament, sponsored by an industrialist. The man, Dubuffet, a napkin-maker, or was it roof tiles, I can’t recall, he fancied himself a skillful player, and had come up with a move in an opening line. No one played it because it was terrible, and he didn’t like that, so what do you think he did? What would you do in that situation?
—Think of another move.
—Well, he liked his move, so he made a big prize fund and set up a tournament in which the players had to alternate taking black and white and playing this same sequence every game. Unfortunately for some of the players, the resulting positions didn’t favor their proclivities. But Ezra enjoyed dubious play in open tournaments. He would play solidly against strong players, but in the opening rounds, he’d often sac unnecessarily. To him it was a joy to see terrific imbalances—he liked nothing better than to have three minor pieces for a queen, if it could be managed. Of course, he would only do such a thing if the pawn structure favored it.
Stan nodded a little uncertainly.
—We have that golden plate upstairs somewhere. Trophies are rather odious, though, and terrible to look at. Especially a golden dish, of all things. Better to just pawn it.
She laughed.
The sound of a crowd came closer suddenly, although it had not been there at all. Suddenly it was there, perhaps ten children and a teacher: a class, out for a walk from the nearby school.
—That is Miss Carnaugh. She is very strict, I hear, said Loring, peering under her hand. Perhaps you will have her as a teacher someday.
—I don’t believe I will go to school, said Stan. I wouldn’t like it.
—Your mother says you will.
The students appeared to be ten or eleven. They were playing some trust game where the students would fall from things and be caught, or get wrapped up in a bag and dragged around and then released.
—I have never understood these games, said Loring. I don’t know why you would want to make children more trusting. That is their principle fault to begin with.
—What do you mean?
Loring shook her head.
And with that, they went back to the house.
The Third Visit, 3
Just then, a man was coming out of the house next door.
—I’m sorry to bother you, he said. But I believe this is yours. It was brought to our house yesterday and my daughter accepted the delivery. Of course, she shouldn’t have; it isn’t ours at all. But she did. In any case, here it is now for you.
He handed a long, flat package to Loring.
—Thank you, she said.
If the man was not a mortician, then it is impossible to say anything about him; he spoke soberly and quietly, dressed somberly, made persistent but nonconfrontational eye contact, and wore bifocals. His hair cut was so vague as to be indescribable. In general, one wouldn’t be wrong to mention that he gave the comforting effect of a tree branch.
—Shall we open the package? asked Stan.
—Inside.
They set the package (which was very light) on the floor of the parlor. A scissors was to hand. But first:
The package was not addressed to Loring. As anyone could see, the exterior was entirely blank. Why the man would have thought that it was destined for Loring was a fact completely unexplainable. They might as well open it, then, to see.
Open it they did. Loring handed the scissors to Stan. The boy proceeded to cut here and there enthusiastically. He soon had one end undone, then the other. He put the scissors down and unfolded the cardboard. Inside was the single wing of a large bird.
—But what can it mean? mused Loring.
—What will you do with it?
—Quite right, Stan. What will we do with it?
—It would be a good prize in a contest.
—A jumping contest, said Loring. For people who fall out of planes and survive.
—Do people survive that? asked Stan.
—From time to time. We can call it the Daedalus prize.
She put it back in the box.
—Stick this in the closet for me, Stan. Thank you.
Query
—Did you ask the man to deliver that wing? asked Stan.
He sat on the floor and stared up at Loring, who sat in the chair. They were in the middle of talking about pawn formations.
—Of course, she said. I thought it would be good for you, once in your life, to open a package and find something that you could never predict. It will change how you open packages from now on. The delivery of the package: that was today’s lesson.
The Third Visit, 4
—Like all swindlers, Ezra loved magicians, most especially those who escaped from bonds: handcuffs, ropes, boxes, etc. And make no mistake, Ezra was a swindler, even though he was a great master. He made terrible moves all the time! It’s just that it was hard for his opponents to see. But a magic show, have you seen such a performance?
They had been talking about Ezra for the past hour, with Stan asking questions of every sort, and Loring answering. The boy had apparently gotten a biography from someone and was reading it with the help of his oldest sister.
—I haven’t ever been to a show, he said, with as much sadness as he could muster.
—Well, in these, the magician, usually a man, is bound so he can’t possibly get out, and then, miraculously, he does. I am going to read to you from an account written by one such magician. He was a very good one, but they locked him up, and while he was in jail he wrote this book. As soon as he was done, he escaped.
—Did he stay escaped?
—He was stabbed in his sleep by the father of a girl he had taken in. He bled to death while trying to crawl out of the building. It was a boarding house with very long hallways. They rarely make buildings with hallways like that anymore. I suppose they are hazardous, at least for people who have been stabbed.
—All right, said Stan, a bit confused.
—Shall we start?
—Yes.
Stan curled up into something like the shape of a rabbit.
Loring opened a small square volume, shaped to look like a toffee box. One side unlocked, and then the flap opened and the pages might be turned. She rustled about in there for a minute or two before finding the passage she wanted.
—When one is dying, it is easy to grow fearful. And can it be called anything else but dying—being handcuffed, sewn into a bag that is then wrapped in chains and thrown into a river? The first minute, there is tremendous urgency. One feels one must struggle to escape, one tries as hard as one can, even in the smallest things: to grip the lock pick between two knuckles, pointing backwards, to use the slightest bit of razor to cut the bag. But in the second minute, and in the third, time stretches out. One feels no urgency at all, just a drifting lethargic sadness. This is the feeling of parting, and it grows on one as the breath slowly fails in the lungs. One begins to believe that one is saying goodbye—but if it happens that one believes too much, then that’s the end. Then the onlookers can dredge the river for a dead man chained up in a sack. But, if one can believe, in the midst of all that sadness, all that leave-taking, that a small thing and another small thing, each carefully, correctly done, will lead to escape…such a person may be called an escape artist, and for him there is always the tiniest bit of hope.
—Are there many of them?
—No, not many, said Loring. Of course, the bad ones don’t get very far.
She laughed.
—No, they don’t get very far at all.
—But are there any around here?
—There was one, a good one, but I don’t think he performs anymore. His theater was in a city nearby here. He was the only act that performed there; all the rest of the time, the theat
er was shut and no one could go in.
—Oh, I should just love to see it!
—It is something.
—What was his name?
—Dardanelle. Theodore Thomas Dardanelle, sometimes known as Menduus. He had one other amazing trick—with a broom, that I have never seen anyone else do. But I won’t ruin it for you. Perhaps one day you’ll see him, or someone else—one of his apprentices, do it. In any case, the time has come for us to play our weekly match. To the board!
Stan sat at the board. Loring sat.
The hands of the clock spun! Pieces fluttered and stood, and gathered at the corners of the table, sullen white and disconsolate black.
Soon, the boy had lost four more games.
—Next week, said Loring, we will talk about blindfold chess.
The doorbell rang.
—And here is your mother.
Stan stood, and crossed the floor. As he passed by the photograph of Ezra, it would not have been hard to suppose that there was some resemblance between the two.
Stop there, thought Loring.
Stan stopped, and stood for a minute.
—Goodbye, he said.
Between Two Sheets of Paper
may be found any number of curious things. And this is the magic of an envelope, to seal away an idea and give it direction; it is sent from one place to another, from one person to another, and either of them, or neither one, may be alive at the time that it is read. Or perhaps one is, and the other is not. That is likely to be the most interesting of the various possible scenarios. Imagine for instance, that I was a general, and I wrote a message and sealed it, asking another general for help. Send troops, I might say. We are hard pressed. Immediately thereafter, we are all killed. I myself am killed in the very tent where I wrote the message, sitting in the very chair where I sat when I wrote the message. It would have been a lovely and most precise tent—of canvas and wood, with a pallet for snatching what rest I could. The flap to the tent would fly open and the colors would be wrong. I would see immediately that the soldiers entering were wearing uniforms terrible to my eyes. Then I would be bayoneted and the trinkets would be stripped from my body by the fierce enemy. My head would be cut off and hung from a cavalryman’s saddle. Some hours later, in some other part of the landscape, the general to whom I wrote, an old friend, would receive the note. He would see my hand, for I would have written to him many times during my life, and he would remember it with fondness. Why, of course, he would say. Even though I have too few men for my own purposes, why, of course, I will send them. But then the news would come that my head has been posted on the gates of this or that city. Can you imagine the sentiment with which he would behold my message, reading it then for a second time?
Yes, Loring was a letter writer, and she had written many letters in her life, both to the living and to the dead, to famous figures, and to, when she herself was famous, obscure jumpers-up. She had cried onto the paper of some, bled onto others in camps and wartime hospitals. She had hidden letters in cans, and buried them, just over enemy lines where they could be reclaimed by partisans, or at the very least, she had imagined doing so. Oh, she was familiar with the letter in a way that we can scarcely know it.
And so I say, that when she sat down to write out her plan in a letter to her deceased husband, about her deceased husband, in his incarnation as a child who was now her living student, it may be understood that she was fully in possession of all the equanimity that might be had in such confusing circumstances. The letter follows.
The Letter, as You May Imagine
was very reasonable. That is, there was a lot of reasoning in it.
e.
It is now certain to me that something has happened. What it is, I do not know. If it is possible to write to you, to speak with you, as I always have done, when you are in some sense my adversary, hiding in plain sight, who can say? I will try it by imagining you, as I always have, as my dearest friend, and thinking that, if you hide, it is only because things that are clouded for me are equally clouded for you.
I want to be sure that what I believe is true.
My plan is as follows:
1. To try to speak through the boy, to you.
2. To try to plumb the boy’s memories, and see if he can recall anything that you or I know or knew.
There is a child’s song about a man in a marsh who is sinking out of sight. Do you remember it? I used to sing it sometimes, even though the tune is dreadful.
The man is sinking slowly out of sight and a woman who is passing sees him. She is too far to save him, but she asks for his hat, and then asks for his shirt, and for his watch and watch chain. The man throws his hat to dry ground and his shirt and his watch and watch chain. But he cannot come himself and he cannot be saved. The woman says something like:
if I’d a length of rope, I’d throw it you,
and drag you out right quick—
but i can’t and so
instead you should
throw me your walking stick…
Then the man says,
if you’d a length of rope, you’d throw it me
and save my life right quick—
but you can’t and so
as i sink i throw
to you my walking stick
Ezra, am I sinking? Or are you?
yours,
l.
PS I remain confused about what it would mean if the boy IS you. Would then the things about him that are unfamiliar to me be things that were true about you, but that changed over time, so that when you met me they had all vanished? In that sense, would I now be discovering the last of you—to find a whole that had always been lost to me?
One day before the Fourth Visit is to happen, a knock comes at the door. It is Stan’s mother, and she is carrying a long metal box full of needles.
—Come in, said Loring. It was to be raining, but apparently it is not.
—It isn’t raining at all, agreed Stan’s mother.
The two stood looking at each other. Finally, Stan’s mother spoke.
—I wondered, could you tell me how Stan is doing? I didn’t want to ask you when he is around. This is the first time he’s really been away from home for any length of time, and certainly the first he’s been with a stranger.
—I’m not really a stranger, said Loring. Not to him.
—No, of course not. Of course not. But I was wondering…
—Yes, well, he is a…
At this point it occurred to Loring that this was her chance to learn things about Stan that he himself did not know, or would not tell. But, which to ask first?
—…he is a shy one. I wonder, do you know, does he get on well with other children?
—Not well at all. They like him well enough, but he won’t bother with them. He would rather sit indoors and read.
—And his father, said Loring. What’s their relationship?
—Good, said Stan’s mother curtly. Do you have any reason to suppose it’s not?
—No, no. No, no, no. I am just trying to think of the boy, to know him better so that I can teach him properly.
Stan’s mother nodded her head slightly, still not entirely reassured.
—Does he have any particular objects he likes to keep around himself?
—Well, a chess set that we bought him, and a whitish colored stick.
—A whitish colored stick?
—Yes.
—How long is it?
—About this long.
—And you say it’s a stick.
—Yes. He put marks in it and he uses it as a ruler, to poke things, and to reach things that are high up. It’s kind of hooked on the end.
—Like a bird talon?
—I don’t know, said Stan’s mother. I don’t know that. Anyway, is he learning or not? How is his chess?
—It is…
There was another knock at the door, very slight, and then another louder, and then a tumult of banging and shouting. The door, which ac
tually had not been properly closed, swung open, spilling three or four boys and a girl or two onto the hall carpet. These were the selfsame ones who had been following Stan’s mother before. Now, here they were again.
—What are you doing? she asked.
—Just waiting for you, they said. We got impatient.
—If you are going to wait, then wait. If you are going to be impatient, there is a glue factory that way. That’s where orphans go, and not to work, either.
They all laughed a hearty laugh together at that.
—We are ready for you to come out, they said, completely disregarding the glue factory scenario.
—If you’ll pardon me, said Stan’s mother to Loring.
She took up an atlas that was leaned against the wall and drove the children out with furious blows. She really was quite strong, you know.
When the children were gone, she came back.
—They are always after me, she said.
—It is true in my experience, said Loring, that they want to be near you. Who can say why.
—We will be over here! came a shout from outside.
A quick look into the distance would have made clear that the children were balanced on several lightpoles. How they had climbed them is unknown. In fact, neither woman looked out the door. Instead, they were concluding their business.
—I will bring him tomorrow.
Loring nodded.
That Evening by the Light of a Candle
Loring sat remembering things. She remembered an orange sail that had often been on certain boats. This sail had gone out of use. It was now no longer to be found. Although once it had been so common that all recognized it by sight, now there was not even a single one in existence. It had been many years since she had last looked out to sea, and found there, darting above the horizon, that particular cloth, angle, texture.
Next she thought of the weather, and how it seemed to be true that everyone felt weather was different during childhood. Of course, it couldn’t be true. She thought of her own childhood, and of the weather then, and discovered that she too felt the weather was different. Although, of course, she thought, I lived in a different place. Most everyone ends up in a different place from the place of their childhood, and so it makes sense that the weather would be different. But then she thought, perhaps that’s not true. Many people stay in the same place.
