Lisa, A Chess Novel

by Jesse Kraai

  Igor continued, “I have called to brothers, living and dead. I say: ‘Inside me, brothers, beast chew light and meaning. Is catfish. You know him? Help me!’ These men embrace me. We kiss, is Russian way. You understand. They say: ‘We have shed blood together, Igor. You are my brother. Together, we look out into meaninglessness. Is nothing else. We are men, strong enough for admit senselessness of the life, of our battles. Blood of slain our purpose.’

  “I stand with them, Lisa. Every day we look into the nothingness. Is summit of strength and man. Now I must travel back. No place else for go.

  “But each time I begin walking, friends call to me: Of course you have bourgeois pain, everyone have. But you big Russian man, you have place for put. Small man no place have for hide. You already know! Personal not truth. Not path of man. Journal for woman and faggot!”

  *

  The next day, Lisa crawled through the trapdoor like a four-legged animal to again find Igor behind the table with his journal, no set. She clapped her hands like a madman, sending the dust she had picked up into a cloud about her. Then she announced: “Listen, Igor, I don’t know why you think I can help. I don’t have a secret. I don’t even keep a journal anymore.”

  “Not truth,” Igor replied. “Lisa find who she want for be, make big think in journal. Like salmon, you think about same currents that fathers swam, for whole life. Then you jump from anti-intellectual stream of big forget. You make escape with woman secret.”

  Igor’s demand pained Lisa. But she thought of Arun, and how his generous spirit had risen up to meet Igor’s need for mathematical beauty. “Pretend that life is chess,” Lisa said. “You are in control, you are responsible for your own moves. Try to find clear truths.” Offering this exhausted Lisa, and she cherished Arun even more. Her master began to write in his Walgreens notebook. And she was left alone.

  “Umm,” Lisa said after about a minute of listening to Igor earnestly scratch his Cyrillic thoughts onto the lined paper of his notebook. “What am I supposed to do?”

  “You know already.”

  “Damn.” Lisa had spent her day in the drowsy half-light of Project Darkness. She had begun by trying to do one of the Kasparyan problems Igor had made her. But they were hard. And she started skipping from one to another, trying to find an easy one. That’s how she fell asleep.

  When the school’s final bell rang, Lisa woke to a really nice drool that connected her lip to a viscous puddle. It was her best ever, hard as a stalactite. This artistic creation was the acknowledged goal of Lisa’s fellow inmates, for it meant that the black wool of sleep had readied them for the mayhem of midnight.

  “Igor,” Lisa softly said. “Would you show me your answer to the problem?”

  “Nyet.”

  “Whaddaya mean? I just helped you.”

  “Russian tradition say you must sit ’til solve. Must face pain. Difficult moment make strong, able to make long think. Beauty on other side of pain.”

  Igor’s wooden board was leaning against the concrete wall. Lisa unsheathed it from its black plastic bag and put it on the table between them. From underneath his chair she grabbed the purple felt bag that held the pieces. A yellow stitch embroidered upon it read: “Crown Royal. Canadian Whiskey.” From her inner board Lisa recalled the position. She set the pieces up and then adjusted each to its most precise center, like someone who lights candles on an altar before praying.

  Lisa moved in the catacombs below Paris, where tunnels continue to burrow for thousands and thousands of miles long after anyone remembers where they were going. All the colors of a black eye blew in from the sewers. In some tunnels, she saw the dried bones of millions whose struggles had nothing to do with her own. In others she found vagabonds and artists who had put up temporary camps. But most of the tunnels just looked the same. The thick air gripped her inability to tell one tunnel from another, and the bones pointed to her death. There was no way out.

  The problem withered Lisa for two hours. Her mouth was dry, and she thought she now finally understood what real hunger was. Igor said it was time to go. Lisa forced herself to give up; she would put the problem away, as if into a drawer of a desk.

  But the problem stuck around. Like a raccoon scampering about in the attic of an old house, it made unceasing little noises. A tireless animal, the critter kept trying the same thing over and over again, banging his head at the end of the same variation. Lisa commanded: Dude, will you stop? You’ve been there before. Go to sleep. But he would not stop. And he would sometimes misplace the pieces when he restarted the position.

  That night, Lisa dropped two of Jan’s Sleepitoffs. That was her only hope of smothering the anxiety of the problem. And her physical body did achieve something like rest. But the gathered energy of daytime sleep on a laminated school desk—that her Project Darkness cohort was now spending on the self-mutilating joy of every drug they could hurt themselves with—that power wouldn’t let Lisa go. Her soul left her body and dropped into the mathematical world. Millions of positions sped through her with furious necessity. The pieces didn’t talk in the human language. Knights did not ask their fellow men how they might best serve them, nor did they think about their own private aspirations (as they did in the analysis sessions with Igor). They spoke in pure shape and movement, and sounded like the march of speed metal chords. Lisa had never been to this overwhelming world before. But she thought she recognized it. She called it the real world, and the truth.

  Then Lisa suddenly woke. She had seen the final position, the idea. She hurried to unpack her chess journal; she needed to write the answer: “1. Rd1 Kh2 2. Rd2 Kg1 3. Rd1 Bf1 4. Pg5! Ph6xPg5 5. Pg4 Pa3 6. Kg3 Pb2 (6. Pa2 Ra1) 7. Rb1! Pa2 8. Rxb2 Pa1 (Q) 9. Rg2! Kh1 10. Rh2 Kg1 11. Rg2 Bxg2 Stalemate! Gimme a real problem you fucking little bitch!!”

  Lisa unfolded her plastic set and quickly assembled the final position in between her cot and the wall. The sublime beauty of the problem cut through the choppy crud of her life like a drop of lemony dishwashing soap in an oily pan. She would never have to deal with any of that muck, ever again. She had solved a problem from the special math room of UC Berkeley. She felt the cold sweat as her body cooled. Her muscles were sore from writhing. The bed was wet. This was the beauty and the strength on the other side of pain.

  Lisa looked up at her poster of Tal. He was the only decoration that could fit on her new narrow walls. A few straggling tufts of unkempt hair were pulled over his gaunt baldness. A satyr smile leapt out of the dying man, out from behind thin stumps of black cigarette teeth. Lisa called it his warlock smile. That smile would easily overcome whatever judgments people might have about his broken crust of a body.

  To honor her hero, Lisa ripped a piece of paper from her chess journal, and wrote out her favorite Tal quote in her best calligraphy. She had never really understood the words before, though she had desperately wanted to. Now she felt like she had earned them: “In my games I sometimes found a combination intuitively, simply feeling that it must be there. But I am not able to translate this thought process into normal human language.” This thought she pasted to the lower right hand corner of her poster.

  Through the wall, Lisa could hear Spanish being softly spoken. She heard the steamy percolations of a coffee maker and the popping explosions of a frying pan. Though it was completely dark and silent outside, her neighbors were beginning their day.

  *

  There wasn’t much for Lisa to do when she ditched class. The Oaks Card Club was just a couple blocks away, and she went there a couple times. Igor said that Grandmaster Walter Browne worked there. All day he would sit at a Texas Hold ’Em table and beat n00bs who didn’t have a basic understanding of statistics. The place was full of men whose lives had become so meaningless that they played games of chance. But Lisa never found Walter. Tattooed bouncers whose big bellies lurched toward Lisa’s face shooed her out the door. They said she should be in school.

  Everybody said she should be in school. They said it in the same commanding tone that Mr
. Reese used to invoke his damning prophecy: If she didn’t pass her classes she wouldn’t graduate. And if she didn’t graduate she would be homeless. And that always made Lisa think about the sad lady in front of the Berkeley Public Library who always had the same line: Miisterr, can you spare some change??

  So Lisa wrote her apology. The administration said that she had to promise to never interrupt the class again. They needed to hear, in Lisa’s own words, why it was not OK to interrupt. That was the only way she could get out of Project Darkness. In that letter, Lisa wrote about a vision she thought they wanted to hear. She talked about her friend Saheli, about the heavy backpack, and about who she wanted to be.

  And they let Lisa back into Mr. Reese’s class. It was the morning after she had solved the problem from the special UC Berkeley math room. She felt fresh, ready to face anything. I’m gonna do the right thing; I’m gonna be good, Lisa thought, as she sat herself in the front row and shut her trap.

  Lisa soon found herself lost and powerless. The class had moved on to something about sines and cosines. Lisa wanted to participate. She wanted Mr. Reese to see the same kind of genius in her that the chess world saw. So she raised her hand and readily offered her most precious jewel: “Mr. Reese, can I demonstrate the Pythagorean theorem for the class?” The class gave a collective moan: Why do you have to show off, fat chess bitch? We have our classwork, the test and a maximum number of absences. You’re just making everything more difficult.

  Mr. Reese let Lisa come to the board. Maybe he had once suffered through a speech in the school gymnasium on Student Initiative. As Lisa approached the board, Mr. Reese explained that what Lisa meant with her “Pythagorean thing” was the ninety-degree theorem.

  Lisa started drawing her squares on the triangle. For the infidels, Lisa was ready to measure everything out with a stick, because they would never be able to see the pure shapes in their minds. “Hey, we doin’ triangles here fatty!” someone shouted. Lisa felt the unpleasantness of her squaring upon the kids behind her. They were becoming a mob: This is not some game. The class has to get to the end of the section before Winter Break. But Lisa persisted; she would show her cohort this beautiful truth. Then came: “Órale, you so fat I can’t even see the board.” Lisa didn’t remember much after that. And she found herself in Project Darkness once again, writing, “Fuck them, fuck them, fuck them . . .”

  Lisa held her photocopies of the Kasparyan problems in front of her. She began with the first, and resolved that she would do nothing until she solved it. Through hardship, on a laminated desk in Project Darkness, with moldy boogers that stuck to its underside like gum wads, Kasparyan let Lisa into his world. He took her to the waterways underneath the city that everyone takes for granted. He showed her how to make bricks with her bare hands. He showed her the strength of a sewer arch. And he showed her how to find the underground peepholes into the seemingly private lives of others.

  *

  That afternoon, Lisa tumbled through the trapdoor, clapped her hands free of the dust, and hurried to set up the final position of the problem on Igor’s set. She found the scuffed scrap of paper that still read “white to play and draw.” On it, Lisa wrote the answer and added: “Hi Quinn, Thank you for the problem! J L.L.S.”

  The players sat across from each other, together with the accomplished simplicity of the problem.

  “Who Quinn?” Igor asked.

  “Remember the math problem addressed to Q.E.D.? Well, I’m pretty sure it’s the same guy who set up the chess problem. There’s really no other person with those initials at UC Berkeley. I found him on Facebook! Quinn Ernest Deveaux, but he hasn’t responded to my friend request yet.”

  Igor laughed so hard his cheeks became rosy. He looked like his old Santa-face picture hanging at the Mechanics, from when he was a drunk. “Q.E.D. fancy way for say solution,” he said. “Stand for quod erat demonstrandum.”

  In a solemn tone he then continued, “We give thanks. Composer is Alexey Alexeevich Seleznyev. After you suffer, I find in book Энциклопедия Шахматных Окончаний. Was member of pre-revolutionary players, with Bogolyubov and Alekhine. They imprisoned by German when First World War come to their tournament. Like me and my friends, they never make it back home. In this time, of wander, Alexey create problem.”

  Lisa didn’t know when the wars were or why they were fought. She imagined war would happen if someone held the doors of the Oaks Card Club open for too long. An infinite stream of men who didn’t care anymore would pour out into the streets. How they would kill each other didn’t seem to matter much. They would do it with whatever they found.

  “We do have friends, Lisa. Maybe we never meet. We pass on street, without knowing. Most gone like Alexey; we cannot say ‘Thank you,’ only possible share with him. Maybe we also make a beauty, somebody understand, someday.”

  With Igor, Lisa stared into the geometry. They fell into themselves, passed the traffic signals of language, and settled into an opaque stillness. There was no insight or revelation to be found there, only a numbing quiet that might occasionally tingle up the spine of the bustling world. From that stretching timelessness, Igor slowly arose and said:

  “My life and chess become silly American ballgame, round and round bases. Is clear: No escape from circle except death. This loop make think that no opportunities are, always same. Only possible say: hit ball harder, run in stupid circle faster. I have made look into this meaninglessness. Once I even sit in stand, to watch stupid man run in stupid circle. Everybody cheer him; he same, like us. They yell, Go, stupidman, go!”

  Lisa’s hands were now on the wooden pieces, screwing them into their most precise centers. And her eyes held the board. Igor was supposed to be different, not part of all the lies around her. And now she wasn’t sure if she could trust him. He told everyone to analyze their own games, and he didn’t even look at his own.

  “Each move chance for choose new world,” Igor continued. “Deep well show seed sprout before happen, show mountain slow slide to ocean. Deep well reflect us, show multivariable calculus of soul. But I lose this, and run in circle like stupidman.”

  Lisa could tell that this was where she was supposed to say something about the journal. And she really did want to show him grandma Lena’s path. But she didn’t know it herself. All she knew was that Igor wouldn’t be able to bullshit her over the board; because chess was pure. “Alright,” she said. “Let’s start with your last game from Fresno.”

  Igor laughed at Lisa, and made a little gesture with his hand that suggested: Well, everything is meaningless then, because I’m talking to an idiot.

  “That’s the game we need to study,” Lisa said.

  “You not understand. Game insignificant. Was formality. Enrico old friend. Easy peace allow both player share first place. Is better wait, ’til play new game. I not remember moves to this game.”

  But Lisa did remember, and she played out the first couple moves from that game to prove it. “It’s your most recent game,” she said. Igor laughed uncomfortably, and found himself forced to humor the pieces.

  “You not understand,” he sighed. “Back in old times, last round draw for first place would be arranged. Opponent come to hotel door.

  He say, ‘Igor Vasilyevich?’

  ‘Da,’ I say.

  ‘Are you a fighter?’ he ask.

  ‘Nyet,’ I say. ‘Come in, we make big drink.’

  This how you make tournament, Lisa.” But then, as if he hadn’t said anything much at all, Lisa directed her master’s attention to the board, and began asking him about his opening decisions.

  “Look,” he said. “These are numbers of final round: Three thousand for win, 2122.56 for draw and 45.42 for loss. This money is then followed by 1099-misc form. That take more. Lisa, I must win big Church’s Fried Chicken Grand Prix. Mr. Church must give Igor nice five-thousand-dollar prize if he win all the little tournament in one year.”

  Lisa knew that Church’s Fried Chicken hadn�
�t been the sponsor of the grand prix since forever. But she tried to imagine the cheap vodka Igor would have to buy if he lost his last round game. The plastic bottle had a screeching eagle on it; eventually that bird would make him blind. He would be kicked by other homeless people in the Greyhound station. Igor would clutch at the feathers of the eagle, hoping it would take him to the next town, to win Mr. Church’s prize.

  Lisa forced Igor to watch the moves he had forgotten. “You’re building fortresses,” Lisa said of her teacher’s opening, “trying to protect yourself. Get some health insurance. Put an alarm on your house. Drive an SUV. This chess disgusts me, Igor. When are we gonna fight? When are we gonna prove ourselves? Knight f3? You know that’s a bourgeois move! It’s not who we are.”

  As the game progressed, Enrico’s play seemed like a barrel of cheap fireworks rolling down Igor’s sacred hall. Enrico didn’t give a damn about Russia, he wanted to scorch the ancient tapestries that had hung for ages on the walls of Lisa’s chess tradition. Enrico didn’t respect the positional knowledge of her pieces! Like wounded children, they demanded punishment and vengeance, but they used the word justice. “Open him,” Lisa repeatedly yelled.

  But Igor did not open Enrico; instead he stepped back, as if saying, Shhh, quiet now, great beast. You are young and want to kill. I retreat for a little bit, show many dangers in world: guns, rivers to cross, steel. You see, yes? But Enrico did not want to hear Igor’s paternalistic shit, and he continued to assault the idols of the Russian Church.

  On day five of their analysis, Lisa looked up and shouted, “What The Fuck, Igor?! E6, e6! MAKE FOR PENETRATZ!”

  For days, Igor had tried to explain his decision to offer Enrico a draw in a better position like this:

  Syracuse is folly: The motley forces there will join together when we attack; our supply lines are fragile, and the Spartans will be emboldened by our adventure. But worst of all, the Egesteans, our supposed allies, have misrepresented how much treasure we will find in the temples if we are victorious.