Lisa, A Chess Novel

by Jesse Kraai

  Two and a half hours into the game, Lisa’s face involuntarily met Igor’s. He was at a distance where he could see Lisa’s face, but not the board, as if he didn’t want to get too close to her execution. Lisa was held underneath a thick and muddy water. Her head slammed against unknown slabs, and her intestines were cut open by unseen metallic poles. And even when she occasionally did come to the surface of the water, desperately groping for something to hold on to, she could not see that it was the debris of her own fallen rebar structure that she was impaling herself against.

  Like an old domesticated pet who hides under the stairs to experience the lonely bestiality of death, Lisa stumbled away from the board in solitude. She didn’t want to talk to Igor. She didn’t want to talk to anybody.

  *

  Igor encouraged Lisa to seek out the midnight social gathering that takes place on the final night of every chess tournament. There she might find comfort in some blitz chess and have a few laughs. Igor said that it is in such meetings that Russian chess talents are initiated into the superhuman drinking rituals of their elders. “Is like night before battle,” he said. “Time for say truth. Tell friend you love him.” But Lisa’s bedside queen would not allow it. She pointed out, correctly, that if Lisa did well the next day she might still earn a prize. And so she must sleep.

  But Lisa couldn’t sleep. Igor put away the board and turned out the lights, but the moves continued in her mind. Positions from her game against Zarra grabbed her and demanded to be played out. She whispered “damn” and “fuck.” She twisted in the sheets, tossing the blanket on and off her. She went in the bathroom and mindlessly flipped the light switch. She forced all of this noisy despair onto her coach, as if he could do something about it, as if he was responsible.

  Then she remembered what Igor had said about the cold water in the bay. “It reboot, like computer.” Lisa got underneath the shower and she begged its coldest waters to numb her mind, to make her forget. Then she put on her headphones and listened to “RV 424; II Largo.” Ofra Harnoy’s cello called forth the boxwood pieces: “Speak!” But Ofra couldn’t do it. Asa’s blue lake was false. Like the sandaled student at the music school, Lisa felt the constant of death appear in her equations. It had always been there. All paths led to it. And there was no consolation for this sorrow.

  *

  The alarm clock sounded and Lisa saw Igor examining the games of her next opponent, Sang Lee, in the half light of a curtained morning. He said it was his obligation to drag Lisa down to the breakfast buffet. Stoned, Lisa stared into the depths of the loud TV man as her sugarpuffs resignedly disassembled themselves and sought each other’s company in a silty pile at the bottom of her bowl. Lisa wasn’t able to understand what the TV man was saying—she only knew that he was angry. She couldn’t play. It wasn’t simply that she had lost her physical and emotional reserves in a night of torment. She had yet to medicate her loss.

  Igor dragged Lisa away from the unhelpful breakfast buffet. Lisa thought he was going to give her some kind of heavy speech about being a fighter and all, and before he even said anything she took the very firm stance that she would not play. She would drop out of the tournament. She would not play.

  Igor listened to her, then said, “I understand play not possible. Listen for truth: next opponent, Sang Lee, always play same opening move. Now, you have white pieces, and only have for make couple moves. I show. Move fifteen you stand little better. Ruth also like this position. She send us email. Sang feel like hunted lion. Running away, she will not see that hunter not ready for blood. That when you offer draw. If she not accept, then you can resign.”

  Lisa was so surprised that Igor wasn’t going to make her be a fighter that she overlooked how he was teaching her to draw, to compromise, like he had done in his final round in Lubbock. But right then, fifteen thoughtless moves didn’t seem like all that much to Lisa. She would make them for Igor, and for Ruth.

  Round five happened as Igor foresaw. His robotic ritual was accomplished. She now had a full six hours to rest before round six. Lisa slept. And she won round six; but not with the free and breezy confidence of some shining orb. Lisa only had the sad determination that gets out of bed and follows the worn paths of existence.

  Sang also won her final round, and so she and Lisa shared second and third place, behind Zarra. The adults applauded her and gave her another trophy. Some of the girls chanted, “Wrangler! Wrangler!” But she felt dirty. This draw thing that Igor had done to her, it was a degrading pantomime of her deepest spiritual experience. Her hands had then moved mechanically over her final-round opponent. She cut her and watched her bleed. She was becoming a butcher, like Igor had, staring into her opponent’s inner life with cold eyes, detaching it from its intentions. And, for the first time, she had a sense of what vodka might be about.

  EMERY HIGH

  The flimsy orange flap of the children’s chair cried out as Igor settled into it. His massive legs twined into a yogic ball underneath the chaturanga of its four silvery legs. Relentless silence arose as he straightened his back and gripped Lisa with his chess eyes.

  There was no board between them. Lisa stared down, into the cartoon characters that ran through the soiled carpet of the Berkeley Public Library’s children’s room. Igor had said that you have to do something wrong before your opponent can punish you. She didn’t know what she had done to bring the hardship of the last two weeks upon herself. But she knew that she had to close down her summer’s hopes, like empty churches in a city that has lost its religion.

  Jan said it was only right that she, Lisa and Ted wound up in Emeryville, trapped between Berkeley, Oakland and the shore of the Bay. She told Lisa that an ancient Indian civilization had once lived there. She said that the tribe would keep the remains of everything that had given them life. What they had eaten, what passed through them, the bodies of their pets and loved ones—all of this they piled in a heap. And they worshipped this heap, for it contained their past and was the fertilizer of their future.

  By the time the white people came, the heap was immeasurably long and reached sixty feet high in some places. The white people named it a shellmound, because—since shells don’t compost easily—that’s what they saw the most of. Then the white people got rid of the mound and its people. Japanese workers came in big ships. Warehouses and factories arose. Asphalt squished everything underneath its coarse pavement. Black workers filled the empty space left by the Japanese who had to go to jail during some war. A few cherry trees remember. Then the condominiums went up, where Lisa now lived. In the last fifteen years, several big stores like IKEA had moved in, on top of the shellmound. That was the store Jan blamed for putting her out of business.

  Lisa’s new room was a narrow rectangle that was originally intended as a closet. There was only space for a cot. Lisa’s new trophy from the Polgar tournament had to be put into a black plastic bag, then “storage,” along with her trophy from the Northern California Girls Championship.

  Jan said she didn’t have the energy to shop and cook, so Lisa was allowed to eat Ted’s takeout food. For lunch, Lisa bit into the white meat of the breaded spicy chicken. For dinner, her teeth slid through the soft vesicles of his fried pork dumplings. She ate more and more, following Ted out into the wild oblivion of his culinary adventure. Breakfast was always the same: Golden Grahams with some raspberry jam from Trader Joe’s.

  Scabbery came to Lisa’s face. Bacteria gnawed on her, just beneath the surface. As they multiplied they created an overwhelming pressure. And they would gratify Lisa with a wonderfully messy explosion on the mirror of the little bathroom that she shared with Jan and Ted. They helped distract Lisa from her main regret, that she was again failing school. She had not wanted to. She wanted to be like her new friends, Saheli, Christine Chen and Sang Lee. Those girls didn’t have the overflowing flab that again came to her belly and made her drowsy.

  Like when Lisa assumed that Igor knew all the subtleties of a game she had just played, she now
assumed that the serene master who sat before her could see through the misery of her last two weeks. They had not studied in that time. It was a Russian thing. Allow the bruises from the tournament time to heal. Let the exhausted nerves become sensitive again. Give the muscles space to grow back bigger and stronger.

  Underneath Igor’s chess eyes, Lisa felt compelled to come to what she saw as the most prominent feature of the position, what her coach often called the “first question,” and said, “The kids at my new school call me a closet Asian. They all think I’m supposed to be some kinda math whiz or somethin’. But I’m already failing that class. Mr. Reese gets up at the chalkboard and shows us some monkey task, and then he says we gotta do his stupid problems; the same thing over and over. He cuts points from you if you start talking, and tells us we won’t graduate if we don’t do his problems. If we don’t graduate we won’t get a job. If we don’t get a job we’ll be homeless.”

  Lisa looked up into her teacher’s silence. This was a man who had slept outside, on the street. The weakies said that people had spit on him, and that he had eaten other people’s leftovers. He could laugh at Mr. Reese’s cruel threat of homelessness.

  When she was with Igor everything seemed so clear. She didn’t have to tell him how cheap her life had become after the bankruptcy, or how she had snuck back into her old house for one final night—none of that mattered. Wealth. When she was with Igor it was so obvious: it didn’t matter how much money you had or what your clothes looked like; wealth was the beauty you found and created—in every instant of your short life.

  Igor leaned into Lisa’s face. Slowly and clearly he whispered that he had seen the calculus arise within Book X of Euclid’s Elements. He had witnessed the elegance of Kepler’s third law. He had felt the power of the theoretical prediction of the bend in space/time before it had been measured. And now he saw a deforming wound beginning to bind Lisa, like a young sapling whose trunk will continue to display its early misdirection hundreds of years later.

  “Lisa, we go outside,” Igor said. “I wish for call my friend Arun. He big mathemathiker. Also chessplayer, big talent as child. For truth, I wish long time for call. I need him for tell the beauty of the mathematíque.”

  Outside, Lisa shouted, “Igor, you don’t understand! I don’t need beauty. I need Mr. Reese to give me an A. It’s like a chess rating. It’s the only way I can come to Saheli’s level.”

  But Igor wasn’t really listening to her. He was on the phone arranging their meeting. And he again took Lisa on a march. But this time, when they reached the entrance to the UC Berkeley campus, Lisa firmly refused. The old stone buildings covered in vines, the dark redwood groves—to all of that Jan had sacrificed 35,000 dollars a year. That’s how much her old school, Mens Conscia Recti, had cost. Ted let Lisa know that little fact after the bankruptcy; Lisa was also to blame for their disaster. She had never done what the teachers at Mens had told her. And now she had completely failed Jan’s hopes. To the university’s upward sloping lawn that reminded Lisa of the mansion that wasn’t hers, Lisa balled her fist and yelled, “Fuck you!”

  As if she were a disobedient child, Igor grabbed her wrist and yanked her over the threshold. He said the mathematician was expecting them. The Russian ogre forced her to raise her eyes when they arrived at the math building. Everyone had dark skin, like Saheli, Christine and Sang—except they were all men. With smooth discipline they flowed in and out of the immense square block.

  Cables, tubes and wires followed the warren-like corridors of Arun’s building. Black grime glued scattered scabs of linoleum to the concrete floor. Igor found Arun at the end of an unlit hallway. His office was a cold rectangle, like the closet Lisa now lived in. A slight but fit Chinese man sat at the end of the room. He and Arun looked like inmates of a low-security prison cell. But they were not inmates, they were colleagues. Igor said that thousands of mathematicians across the world were industriously fighting for a desk in this very room.

  Everyone told Lisa that she couldn’t play chess for a living because you couldn’t make any money with it. The men at the tournaments said she should study math. They said she was good at it, because she was a chessplayer. They made her imagine the warm air of the South Bay. There was a swimming pool and iced tea. Life was easy and everyone was happy. But these mathematicians didn’t look rich.

  Igor and Lisa walked with Arun, out into the dry fade of Berkeley fall. Arun remembered every move of every game that he had played with Igor. At various small tournaments across Indiana, where Arun had grown up, Igor crushed Arun twenty-three times. There were drop kicks, head butts, strangle holds and something to do with a crane.

  But Igor couldn’t remember any of those battles. He interrupted Arun’s autistic recollection. And, like a foreign monk who travels to a distant abbey and asks to see their most beautiful illuminated manuscript, Igor asked Arun for mathematical beauty.

  But Arun didn’t understand Igor’s question. “What do you mean by beauty?” he said.

  Igor started poking around Arun’s math. Big mistake. Like a million kernels of grain suddenly tumbling out of a silo, Igor and Lisa were quickly covered over by a subfield of number theory. In the same way Lisa assumed Igor knew her games, Arun assumed that Igor and Lisa knew his subject. But they were drowning after only a few sentences.

  A sad silence followed. Igor knew some math, he was probably even a 2100, but he couldn’t understand whatever special math Arun was talking about. Lisa tried to imagine Arun beholding an incredibly delicate flower. He and a number of men around the world had crafted its precise leaves, pistil and stem. Only they understood its secrets. Only they could see it. They would push deeper into that flower’s truths, and then maybe create a new one.

  Arun was like the crazy lady on the train platform, waiting for someone to recognize her special language and the deeper truth it pointed to. At least in chess, Lisa thought, we have a common language. Everyone can play—after you’re initiated.

  Lisa hadn’t thought about crazy people all summer. She saw them all the time, at Turk and Market, in the halls of her new school, and there were always one or two of them at the weekend tournaments she went to. But she had stopped thinking about them. She didn’t really even hear them anymore. But in listening to Arun, Lisa suddenly saw what chess was to Jan: inarticulate crazy talk. To her, Lisa was the wild woman on the train platform.

  Channeling Jan’s view of math, Lisa said, “So I guess you’re real good at solving problems, calculating.” Were Arun a real native Brahmin like Saheli, he could have done the head woggle, instead of just being awkward and silent. But he had been born in the States, like Lisa. She continued, “You know, doing math in your head, building bridges.”

  Arun laughed. “I’ve never built any bridges. That would most certainly be a bad idea, and calculating stuff, well, that’s not real math, at least that’s what my dad would say.”

  “What’s real math then?” Lisa asked.

  “Well,” Arun said, “you try to prove new things, like I’m trying to count the number of permutations of integers which are inherently sequence-free.”

  Lisa’s mind desperately tried to climb up onto the strange words, but she slid right back down. Saheli would know where the footholds were. They were probably written in Old Indian. “What is that good for?” she complained. “How can you use that?”

  “You can’t, at least not usually,” Arun said.

  Lisa flogged Arun with her math anxiety. “Well, why do we have to learn it then, what’s the point?”

  Arun answered Lisa calmly. “You don’t have to learn it. I’ve never used math in my daily life, not any kind of advanced math anyway. I guess we do it for the same reasons we play chess. There’s just something about it, I don’t know. And maybe it is a little like a conspiracy that people have to take it in school, when they don’t really need it. Mathematicians like me have always wanted to just do math, the way you want to play chess. So we convinced universities and rich people, a lon
g long time ago, that kids needed to learn math in order to think logically. That might be a lie, I don’t know, but we needed teaching jobs. And then people started being able to use some of the math we did in the sciences. And, well, we’ve had some jobs ever since. But they don’t really like us, or understand what we do. They always want us to do something useful. But we just want to do math.”

  Arun had a lazy eye which seemed to wander far away from Igor and Lisa, lost in its own investigation. Igor remained disappointed, upset that his solemn question had not found an earnest answer. For her coach, Lisa demanded, “Listen, Arun, we need to know why math is beautiful. How is it like chess?”

  Arun’s body crumpled a little under the question. It was too abstract. But the man sank into himself and sought something to offer his friends. In that silence, Lisa felt Arun’s generous spirit trying to lift her up out of the shortsighted selfishness of her entrenched battlefield.

  “In math and chess we study interrelationships,” Arun finally said. “We find truths. The rest of the world asks us for our truths; they want their everyday lives to have mathematical precision. But we can’t put our world into their language. That’s why your question is so hard.” Arun paused for a time, then said, “Let’s look for beauty in an example. What are you studying at school?”

  All the time, all anyone ever wanted to know about was her damn math class, as if that’s who she was. Some people, like Igor and Saheli, encouraged her to believe that something as beautiful as chess could somehow be found there. Others, like Jan and Mr. Reese, wanted her to pass through it and somehow find money, respectability and adulthood on the other side. Ashamed of her failure, Lisa whispered, “Do you know the ninety-degree triangle theorem?”

  Arun said, “No, what’s that?”

  Lisa persecuted the man’s ignorance: “How can you not know that? I thought you were a professor?”