by Jesse Kraai
Lisa thought about Ruth’s title, WIM. She thought about the score of the match—zero-to-three—and how a draw meant that she would have something. She looked at the clock; she now only had five minutes to make the time control at move forty, ten moves away. Ruth’s cat, Alekhine, had a little bell on its neck. Why did it have to tinkle like that? Five minutes to make ten moves. She imagined shaking Ruth’s hand, and being welcomed onto Ruth’s rung of the sisterhood.
Lisa’s clock continued to tick. Her pieces reminded her of the contract. They had fulfilled their end of the bargain. “What?” they asked Lisa. “Do you think you are going to find meaning in the sloppy congratulations of that world?” But Lisa did want a place in that world. Five minutes to make ten moves. She wanted to be Ruth’s friend.
Her pieces decided to continue. But Lisa was divided, and could not retain control. Fish were escaping from her net of variations. Play progressed for a couple moves, then Lisa’s teeth began to chatter, and she began to slobber, as if she were going to have an epileptic fit. Ruth had to stop the game.
Lisa couldn’t remember any of that stuff; that was just the story that Jan had demanded of Ruth. Lisa remembered being woken by Jan on Ruth’s old velvet couch, covered with a crocheted blanket and Alekhine’s orange hairs.
The next day, Saturday, Jan woke Lisa early. She said she couldn’t leave her alone with her chess. She said she was worried, and that helping out at the store would be good for her.
There, at Domestique, Lisa caused a scene. She wasn’t trying to. But she couldn’t stop thinking about the game, about how she was going to finish Ruth off when they resumed. She walked through the store with her arms outstretched, as Igor had taught her. The pain helped her focus; the pain was negating the weakness in her body and whatever it was that had made her even consider breaking the contract she had made with her pieces. It wasn’t like that much stuff fell from the shelves, and nothing really valuable broke. But Stephanie and Britt, Jan’s employees, did begin to follow her.
They must have told Jan, who was working in the inventory room. And Lisa knew she was in for it; Jan hated to be interrupted. She marched Lisa back to the boxes and crates. Why did she have to squeeze her hand so hard, pushing it down below her waist, making her hobble and feel like she was about eight years old?
Surrounded by her wares, Jan yelled, “Stop it, just stop it!” Lisa didn’t say anything. She just stood there like a mute who didn’t understand what Jan was so excited about. “I need you to behave, Lisa. OK? I need you to be decent, OK? Lisa, are you listening to me?” But Lisa didn’t say anything. Jan raised her eyes to the high ceiling of her inventory room and yelled, “Oh God! I wish I had never taken you to chess class! Why did I ever let that disgusting man teach you?” Then she stared at Lisa and shouted, “Say something, damnit!”
As if she were the adult, Lisa calmly said, “Pieces are thinking, please don’t disturb them.”
That evening, Jan scheduled an emergency session with Dr. Frohlich. He would mediate their fight. “You agree to do whatever he says, OK?” Jan demanded.
“Fine. Whatever,” Lisa said. “Pieces don’t give a damn.”
*
“Resume game?” Igor asked. He had sat down next to Lisa amongst the beanbags in the storytelling corner of the children’s floor, saying something about reflection and a well-thought-out move, even if the board of life is never fully disclosed. Lisa rehearsed her map of variations: 36 . . . Nd3! If x then y, if p then q. That’s how the game would continue when it was resumed.
Igor wanted to know things, to lay everything out: the notation to the game, the loss of control, the stopping of the clocks, what her father said about it all.
“Look,” Lisa said, “you don’t need to worry about it, OK? Everything is under control. I made a bargain with Jan.”
“You make bargain?”
“It’s not a big deal, OK? I have to go to Dr. Frohlich. But I can keep playing chess.”
“Who Dr. Frohlich?”
“He’s a psychiatrist, maybe a psychologist. I don’t know. Jan made me talk to him a couple of times before. But I’m not sick, OK?”
“What he say?”
“Oh, Frohlich doesn’t know anything about chess. He gave me the usual questions about when I first started playing chess, what my favorite piece is, you know, that’s the kind of thing they like to ask you. So I talked to him forever and I have to talk to him again.” It was true that Frohlich was among the chessless. But chess wasn’t his favorite subject. He wanted to know why Lisa cut her arms. But she never had an answer that he liked. And if Igor never asked her about her scars, then why did they have to be such a big deal?
“Maybe not so bad,” Igor said. “Sometime non–chessplayer interesting thing say.”
Lisa then added, as if it were an afterthought of the bargain, “And I have to take some pills.”
“What pill?”
From an internal pouch of her unicorn backpack, Lisa brought out a ziploc bag of bright blue pills. “I have to take two a day.” Igor took some out of the bag, and stroked the little beads like a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer fondling the mystery of seeds. Lisa said, “I’ve been taking them since Sunday morning. They don’t really do anything.”
A tiny label on each pill read EQUINOX. Together, Lisa and Igor went to the computer center and read on Wikipedia: “Equinox is designed specifically for children diagnosed on the Asperger spectrum. While there is no cure for Asperger Syndrome, Equinox alleviates some of its symptoms, notably episodes of self-absorbed depression and extreme anxiety. A child on Equinox will not feel highs and lows as strongly as before. This dulling of the emotions has been clinically proven to promote the acculturation process of the child.”
It sounded like the big words Jan and her teachers used when they talked about fixing Lisa’s bad grades. They talked behind her back. Like now, no one had ever told her. But now she knew: She was Aspergers. And they had to fix it. Lisa stared at the active chemical in Equinox on the screen. It looked like a beehive.
Igor knew what the chemical abbreviations meant. He knew how to read the formula like her scoresheet. And he wanted to tell her about some Russian guy named Mendeleev and the wonder of chemistry. He could be such a pest about things like that. But he couldn’t tell her what the drug was doing right now, inside her. He could only point the way back to the beanbags, up on the children’s floor.
Lisa tried to see herself from the outside, like the words did: She was self-absorbed in Jan’s store and anxious in her game with Ruth. True. But those were her best moments! She had striven to a higher view, to purge the uncleanliness from her mind. She had wanted to be pure, like Igor’s boxwood pieces.
The adult world said that her thought was chemical. Recombinant beehives joined hands in predictable patterns and made her think stuff. For people like her, who lived in the Asperger building, the corridors led to patterns of self-absorption and anxiety. But she didn’t know any Asperger kids. And she couldn’t see the building. She couldn’t see the scientists either. They said her thought was bound, and they knew how to bind it.
Lisa hated thinking of the world like that. If it were true then everything would be like the poster of the surface of Mars she had seen: lifeless, scarred and empty. Lisa sat with her teacher for a long while, contemplating that world of dust and rock. Then she asked the oversized man whose long naked legs grew like shoots of thorny blackberry from the crunchy beanbag: “Will the pill stop me from feeling my pieces?”
Igor hovered over his next thought like Lisa had seen him do before a move. To her, that ritual meant that he was assuming a deep moral responsibility for the coming move. “Will dull connection,” he finally said.
“But why?” Lisa asked. “Why would they do that to me?”
Igor looked away, first out the window, then to a group of toddlers falling over one another, laughing. Sweeping this scene before him with a round motion of his arm he said, “In life not possible meaning find. Not like chess
. Life chaos. Drug hope soften this loss. I know this moment.”
“But why won’t they let me play chess? My mom, Frohlich, Equinox. All of them want me to be part of their stupid adult world.” Igor didn’t say anything.
In Igor’s silence, Lisa caught herself thinking like Jan: The flat rectangular cushions on Frohlich’s couch were inelegant. They were covered in a coarse cloth that looked like a yard sale and scratched like bedbugs. Like the thin walls of his office in downtown Orinda, everything about Frohlich was undistinguished. He reminded her of her stepfather, Ted.
Pieces hadn’t really cared. They weren’t paying attention to Frohlich. Pieces were free, uninhibited by their physical surroundings. They hadn’t thought about the tissues that Frohlich had nudged in Lisa’s direction. Maybe she was supposed to have cried. Maybe she was Aspergers because she hadn’t, because she’d been so oblivious to all his n00b questions about her relationship to chess.
“Listen,” Lisa announced. “I know you think I should play the position straight with my mom. That everything should be out in the open, the way it is in chess. But spandex prophylaxis isn’t going to save this position.”
“What you mean? You wish for play position in disguise?”
“I’m not going to take the pills,” Lisa said. “It’s not that hard, other kids do all kinds of stuff with their pills. Adults think they’re so clever. But we are the ones who have to stick Mendeleev in our mouths. I just won’t take the pills. It’s easy to pretend I did.”
“Lisa,” Igor slowly began, “many now say Igor criminal. They say he not father. He cruel. He—once big drunk—feel the right to take away nice drug from another.”
“What are you talking about?” Lisa said. “You’re not doing anything. I’m the one who won’t take the pills!”
Igor told Lisa, “Not for excuse but for explain, I wish for tell you why I push your pieces. I one time play tournament in Grand Manan, is island in Canada. Was nice November night, and I decide to go for swim in Atlantic. It was a pleasure. I come back to hotel and everybody scream. They say: ‘you must be hypothermic! Was goat trail down cliff to water, you could have died! Thorns cut your legs, you bleed!’ Like thousand old lady they jump around me.
“Was always same. My chess comrades are warriors, we go past this world of small expectation. No one understand our trail to water. With other chess fighters we make big laugh at these little mens. They can say nothing to us. Water we find is vodka.
“We travel Greyhound. Each weekend, tournament in different place. Americans are for us like roadside attraction. We say hi, keep going. Maybe see you next year. But tournament bar is same: Alexander Ivanov, Dmitri Gurevich, Sergey Kudrin, Jaan Ehlvest, Alexander Yermolinsky, Alexander Shabalov and good friend Aleksander Wojtkiewicz. These friend know Russian language, language of chess.
“During week, maybe not see each other. Is quiet time of three-dollar vodka. At tournament we drink expensive, time for celebrate and shout. You know saying? ‘One Russian make lonely man. Two make chess game. Three make political conspiracy.’ We become big Russian men.
“Was hard for understand that our chess like fine blade. We must cut many, many weak American mens. Must become like bread knife, always cut. Vodka and fat help Igor and friends become this tool.
“Long time for understand that we sick. Of course, many American tell us before. They say we must count calorie and run treadmill, like scared rabbit. They say vodka bad. We laugh at them.
“Then Aleksander Wojtkiewicz begin for die. No one understand disease, no one help, no health insurance. I like delivery horse: Same way he have rounds around city, I go around country. Cannot stop, always make same. I leave friend. I play in tournaments without him. Because Aleksander not there, I one time share hotel cabinet with American chessplayer, Eric. Whole life he drink Pepsi, not vodka, but is same. He already lose one leg. Middle of night, middle of tournament, he begin his moan. He say diabetes is come to fingers. He cannot feel.
“I still hear this moan. Was like call of friend from other side. Aleksander call me. You understand? Medical man come to room. He can do nothing. Two month later Eric lose arm and Aleksander dead.
“Please understand: fat and vodka like Equinox—stop us from feeling pieces, is big escape.”
Lisa couldn’t understand why Igor was giving such a long speech. She suspected that he was hiding something from her, as if he were holding a cloth over her board while he moved her pieces. Had he made an arrangement with Jan that day he rode his bike over the mountain? Like: He’s allowed to teach her if she loses weight?
It’s shit like this, Lisa thought, that makes the journal so useless. In real life, I can never see all the pieces or who’s moving them; thick fog rolling in on everyone from some far place in the deep Pacific, making Ruth’s clothes brown.
Like Jan: From somewhere on the other side of the wall she is lobbing stones at me. But what does she want? Igor at least knows how to leave that world. I can see his path, going down to the water to be cleansed.
Lisa pushed herself up out of the beanbag, thrust out her arms to her sides, and said, “I can take a lot more pain now.” Igor smiled, and joined her. Together they buzzed around the children’s floor like airplanes, like idiots.
When they sat back down, Igor said: “There is something else need for discuss: You need for call Ruth and resign game.”
“What!?” Lisa screamed. All the kids in the room stopped what they were doing and stared at them. Parents looked over at Igor, as if he might be a child molester.
“Is proper chess culture, Lisa,” Igor said. “Game can never be stopped. Resume not possible.”
“That’s so unfair!” Lisa said. “It’s my game. I played those moves!”
“Chess bigger,” Igor said. “Your game with Ruth not exist only in head. It also game of opponent. The chess not belong to you. Tradition spread and shared all over world. You expected for resign in France and China.”
“Why’d she stop the game then? Because she pitied me? Would she have stopped the game if I were a boy? Why is everyone trying to stop me from playing chess? And what was going on with her draw offer? I was crushing her!”
Igor laughed at Lisa: “She offer draw in lost position? Ho, ho, ho, she give you wet rag to face? Ha, ha, maybe you awake now. Ruth still great fighter. Give everything to struggle. Like night Odysseus cross enemy line to kill men in sleep. She want to crush Lisa so bad she give her big lesson. Ha!”
Igor demanded that she mime the rest of her game. She and Ruth would play the rest of the game out, but only for practice. They had decided that Lisa had already lost the game, and the match too—four games to zero. Her rating would fall off a cliff. Everyone was against her.
THE CITY
Boxwood light smoothed every corner of the long hallway into gentle curves. Only rosewood door handles poked out into the empty quiet. The handles attached to thick doors that led outward, to some trial, and Lisa was asked to open one. She wanted the warm and pure light to fill her. But she didn’t feel worthy, and made her choice in haste.
They entered a narrow antechamber whose carpeted walls muted a distant violin. Igor made them wait there, saying something about music culture, until they heard silence. Lisa complained that she wasn’t ready. Igor said that she wouldn’t be an awkward piece, that she would fit.
Quiet came. And Lisa soon found herself on the balcony of a music hall. A wiry old man was already on the stage behind a dinky piano. He looked like one of Lisa’s teachers, in a button-down shirt with beige slacks and brown dress shoes with brown shoelaces. Lisa remembered her own glasses as the man strained his eyes to see the notes right in front of him. His were so thick they seemed to have become part of his body, like a respirator for his eyes.
Then a young man bounded onto the stage with his great cello. His T-shirt said Bayreuther Osterfestival 2006. Lisa had to laugh when she saw looping leather sandals on top of scratchy black wool socks barely hidden underneath his brown corduroy pan
ts. Jan had taught her that black and brown must never be mixed, and that pants must always cover the ankles—no matter what.
The old man began the song on his dinky piano. His notes were off. Like a miscast chess problem, they were just wrong. And he kept on being wrong. He droned. And—as if there was nothing left to be angry or sad about—his piano never raised or lowered its voice.
Why am I even here? Igor had met Lisa on Post Street, in front of the San Francisco Mechanics Chess Club. That’s where Jan had agreed to let her go, to play in the Tuesday Night Marathon Tournament. But Igor had wanted to take her somewhere else first. He said they would have enough time and that her father would never know. But Lisa knew it was going to be a long march as they turned to walk into the cold summer wind of Market Street.
Blinking lights offered pizza and ice cream. Homeless people crouched in the crevices and doorways of tall buildings. Igor told Lisa some things. But she couldn’t understand anything; the wind took his words and hurled them down the wide boulevard behind them. Finally they came to two great glass doors. Igor entered and gave a woman in a smart black suit some kind of secret hand gesture. But Lisa couldn’t see what it was. And the woman pointed them into the boxwood hallway.
Just then, the young man’s instrument began to sing. His cello rose high, in joy, far above the old man’s river of murky sludge. It could play louder too. And there was a moment when Lisa didn’t really have to hear the dinky piano. The cellist, with his untrimmed beard and long hair, had overcome him. And the song became consonant.
