by Tad Crawford
“All set.”
Pecheur surveyed my arrangement and nodded.
“I’ll be back in a little while.”
“Take your time,” he answered.
I left him watching the game and walked down the steps on the far side of the small promontory. Horse-drawn carriages moved tourists slowly along the road that loops through the park. I crossed it and saw the carousel ahead. A handful of children rode up and down atop the brightly colored horses that cantered with the turning platform. Veering away, I followed the road a little distance until I came to a long, straight promenade shaded by a canopy of large trees. I walked at a leisurely pace and enjoyed the familiar statues of great explorers, authors, and composers. At the end I passed a band shell, crossed another road, and went down a long flight of steps. I sat on the stone rim of the wide fountain whose waters cascaded down over two basins from the statue of an angel with wings outspread. Ever since we’d begun our walks, with the thaws of March, I’d been coming here. The water in the large basin had a strange turbulence that I studied but couldn’t explain. Looking at the angel, I felt an expectation, like a memory I couldn’t quite bring to mind. Her outstretched arm seemed to point me in a direction. I felt restless and eager to move on.
After twenty minutes or so, I rose and started up a grassy embankment. This had become my unvarying route. It led me to a path that followed the border of a small lake. I headed away from the water, up a small hill, and wandered among the trees. I came to a cliff of stone and scrutinized it again. I could see cracks and small crevices but nothing more. I wanted to enter in somewhere, but I didn’t know where. I had an uncanny feeling that an entrance might appear anywhere, even in the trunk of a tree. I sat on a flat stone and waited, but nothing came to mind, nothing shifted in my surroundings. At last I stood up and walked slowly back to where I had left Pecheur.
I recognized the man sitting opposite Pecheur at the stone table. Short, with curly white hair around a balding pate, he had been born in Germany near the end of the world war. The chess players came from everywhere—Russia, Israel, Tunisia, Argentina. Occasionally a Japanese man stopped by to play a few games. Pecheur would bow to him and the man would bow in return. Every day tourists flocked to the patio as if to a shrine, framing the chess players in the screens of their digital cameras.
Even though I understood only the rudiments of the game, I could see that Pecheur controlled the board and had hemmed in his opponent’s king. On the clock, black digits fluttered past, marking the seconds. As soon as his opponent moved, Pecheur followed suit and built an advantage on his clock. When the game’s end neared, his opponent simply studied the board as his remaining seconds vanished.
“A fine game, maestro,” he said, offering his hand to Pecheur.
A conversation about the merits of the game ensued, after which Pecheur stood up. I gathered the pieces and returned them to the backpack.
“Tomorrow?” the German asked.
“Yes, tomorrow,” Pecheur replied.
“For the delight of revenge … ”
We retraced our steps but didn’t leave the park where we’d entered. Instead we followed a path that descended steeply to a small lake where model sailboats glided with the winds. We sat on a bench to watch the boaters with their remote controls move the rudders and triangular sails. The breeze raised small ripples over the oval surface of the lake. Everywhere we looked the trees showed off the bright greens of their new leaves.
“It surprises me that anyone plays chess anymore,” I said.
Pecheur raised his thick white brows. “Why?”
“Because computers can play chess as well as the best humans. Soon the computers will be better.”
“You see it as a competition?”
“Isn’t it?” I asked. “Everyone wants to win.”
“That’s true, yet it isn’t everything.”
“What do you like about it?”
“The movements of the pieces have a beauty that can only be realized in play with an opponent. There is both conflict and cooperation.”
“Like in war?” I asked.
“Except that chess pieces don’t suffer. As for computers, they may win games, but do they enjoy playing? I care if I win or lose, but I care more about the choreography of the pieces. If I have that satisfaction, why should I worry what a computer can do?”
He looked out to the boats gliding on the lake. After a while he shook his head as if to ward off a disturbing thought. I waited for him to speak to me, but instead he returned to the topic of chess.
“Do you know about the early chess automatons?”
“No.”
“In the 1700s and 1800s several chess-playing machines were invented.”
“But how could machines play chess?” I asked. “There were no computers then.”
“The inventors of that time combined an interest in engineering with a curiosity about the process of thought. They built intricate machines—a mechanical ballerina might dance or a trumpeter play a march. In trying to mimic human activities, including speech, these inventors devised mechanical versions of the body. This led to breakthroughs in a number of fields. The machines were called automatons, and the chess-playing ones usually involved a human figure sitting behind a large box. The most famous was a European creation called the Turk—a figure dressed exotically to suggest that he was not part of the day-to-day world. In front of the Turk, on the top of the box, was a chessboard. The Turk’s mechanical arm could lift and move his own pieces or capture and remove an opponent’s.”
“But it couldn’t have been real.”
Pecheur smiled.
“The public couldn’t decide,” he went on. “Before each match, a sequence of doors would be opened to reveal the inside of the box. This proved, to some at least, that a person wasn’t concealed inside. One of the scientists, whose work would be a precursor to computing, said he believed the machine could think. Others reasoned that automatons could only repeat themselves, not think. They believed a child or tiny adult must be hidden inside, or that the pieces could be moved remotely by magnetism.
“But they looked inside the box.”
“They argued that a person could move to different compartments as the various doors were opened. There might be false walls, to make the viewers think they had seen everything the box contained.”
“If chess players had hidden inside, wouldn’t one of them have given the secret away?”
“You would think so,” Pecheur agreed.
“Was it real or fake?”
“You have to decide,” he answered.
“But … ”
“Of course, the automatons raised another question.”
“Which is?”
“A more personal question about … the capacity for change. The miracle of the Turk was that he didn’t simply repeat a selection of moves. People even wondered—perhaps without precisely knowing their own thoughts—if they were as adaptable as he.”
“But the Turk was probably a fraud,” I said.
Pecheur smiled at this.
“Anyway,” I went on, “people are always changing.”
“If they can think new thoughts.”
“You mean the Turk was thinking?”
“What if the Turk decided he wouldn’t play chess anymore—that he wanted to learn to play the piano or fall in love?”
“Wasn’t he made of metal and wood?”
Pecheur waved a hand, more to ward off my comment than to agree with me. “That’s undeniable,” he said, and I felt I had been a bit tiresome.
He returned to watching the boats. The day had a captivating beauty built of dazzling surfaces—sunlight on ripples of water, hulls moving beneath white sails, green-leafed branches tumbling in breezes.
“Aren’t they lovely?” he said after a while. “The sails are like wings.”
I nodded in agreement.
“I’d like your help with something.”
“What is it?” I asked.
<
br /> I wanted to do whatever I could. He paid me a generous salary, more than I had earned at my marketing job. And he asked for very little. He encouraged me to read whatever I found of interest in his library. I liked to cook for him and to keep him company, but my tasks were few.
“I’m going to visit my daughter in Rome.”
“Oh?”
He had mentioned his daughter from time to time, and I had seen her in some of the photographs around the apartment. Her name was Frontier, which I found strange.
“Yes, we keep in touch by phone and e-mail, but I haven’t seen her in several years.”
I realized that he would be leaving me in charge of the shop and building.
“Is there anything you want me to do while you’re away?”
“No, nothing special. I’m not quite sure when I’ll leave. In a way, much as I want to see her, I don’t really want to go.”
“Why?”
“I’m going to talk to her about what will happen after my death.”
“But—” I started to protest.
Pecheur interrupted me. “Does that upset you?”
“Yes,” I admitted.
“You’re young and find death hard to discuss. She’s different. After all, she’s an obstetrician. And there can’t be birth without death. To someone like me, whose friends are almost all gone, it’s not such a difficult subject. I find myself less and less inclined to regret or grieve. Death at the end of a full life—what’s tragic in that?”
“Then why don’t you want to go to Rome?”
“It’s not a pleasant topic, hashing over what’s to happen after I’m gone. I do wonder what will happen to what I’ve created, what I own. The plans, the experiments, the models, and everything else. But I console myself with the fact that I enjoyed creating them. I created them for myself, I realize, as much as to better the world. For the person I was at the moment of making them but also for the person I would become later. I made myself the audience for my creations. It’s easier that way.”
“In that case, why worry about it? Anyway, you look healthy to me.”
“That’s the time to make your plans. After that … ” He opened his hands and smiled. “It is tempting to do nothing at all, but that would be too easy. Even if the choices are hard, I want to make them as best I can. So I have an estate plan that I review and change from time to time. It includes a will, trusts, power of attorney, a health care proxy to make sure I’m not kept alive if I have no chance of recovery.”
I owned nothing and rarely contemplated my own death, so I had little grasp of what shaped his decisions.
“If you’re willing, I’d like you to play a role in administering the estate.”
“I don’t know if I’d be a good choice,” I admitted. “What would it involve?”
He explained that it would be necessary to gather the property in the estate and distribute it as he had provided in the legal documents.
“Do you want to think it over?” he asked.
“No,” I answered. “If you think I can do it, I’m happy to.”
“You’ll have professionals to help you—lawyers, accountants, whatever you need.”
“Good.” I felt relieved. “Frontier is your only child, right?”
“Yes.”
“Won’t you give everything to her?”
“She may not want a great deal of what I have.”
“Does she have so much?”
“It may be important to her to have very little, even of what was mine. I want the choice to be hers.”
“Why did you name her Frontier?” I had been wanting to ask him this. “I’ve never heard of anyone with that name.”
“There must be others. When she was born, my wife and I felt it was the right name.”
“How did you think of it?”
“We were on a frontier, always close to the boundary. We thought constantly about the frontier, because it seemed to be about more than geography. To us, at that time, the frontier was about possibility. If we could cross the boundary, we would make discoveries that would hold great meaning for us.”
“Why couldn’t you simply cross it?”
“There were forces that resisted our freedom of movement. We conceived our baby on the frontier, and she was born in the same place. So we named her Frontier.”
“Where did this happen?” I asked, uncertain that I really understood.
He shrugged as if it had no importance, but I waited for his answer.
“After a while,” he said, responding to an inner prompting rather than my question, “the past gathers a kind of authority. It feels futile to struggle with the way things have worked out, the decisions that were made. I have to remind myself that it wasn’t always this way. That it can be changed. Even if only in how we understand what happened.”
I waited for him to say more, to amplify and explain what he meant. He looked out at the sails moving on the lake.
“I did a curious thing once,” he said. “A long time ago.”
“What was that?”
“It was a small, maybe foolish, gesture.”
“Yes?”
“When my wife died, I had to decide what to put on the marker for her grave. I was happy to say ‘Beloved Wife and Mother’ and add her name and the date of her birth. But I couldn’t bring myself to include the date of her death. Every time I visit her grave, I think I should add when she died. But I haven’t and I probably never will. When I’m gone, that’s one of the things I want you to do.”
18
“He’s ready!”
I didn’t open my eyes. If I lay still in the bed, the excited voice might vanish and never disturb me again.
“He’s ready!” she repeated with the same exuberance. “You have to get ready too.”
Reluctantly I opened my eyes and saw her white uniform.
“Where am I?” I asked.
“The night ferry.”
“This looks like a hospital room,” I said. I had no recollection of making plans to travel.
“Yes, you’re in the infirmary.”
I touched myself through the hospital gown. My nipples felt painful and I could sense nothing below my waist. I reached down and touched my legs for reassurance. Between them my fingers found a plastic tube. I followed it until I realized it was a catheter.
“Why am I here?”
“You must be joking.” She forced a quick smile. “Hurry.”
“I’m not joking,” I replied. “Why—”
“For a miracle!”
I didn’t understand, so I tried a different question.
“What do you mean by ‘hurry’? Hurry to do what?”
“To be ready.”
“For what?”
“What you have to do.”
“Which is?”
The nurse looked at me with reproach.
“Don’t be silly. I’ll go get him. Just let me do a quick check first.”
She bent over me and pulled down the front of my blue gown. Quickly she squeezed the left side of my chest, then the right. Nodding with approval, she pulled the gown up to my shoulders again.
“I’m so excited for you,” she said.
I wanted to protest, but she was out the door before I could speak. What did she mean by ready? I looked at my bed. Why had the safety bars been raised on each side? The top of the bed was elevated as if I might want to watch the dark screen of the television that hung from the ceiling. The curtain had been drawn three-quarters of the way around me, but I could still see a side table set to swing over my lap and a locker that might contain my clothing.
I heard the crying of a baby in the hallway. Wouldn’t they have a separate maternity ward for babies? Maybe not in an infirmary. More likely a visitor had brought her baby with her. That would explain the wailing that came closer and closer to my room.
“Here he is!”
The nurse returned with a tiny, screeching bundle cradled in her arms. She came to the side of my bed to hand it
to me. I glimpsed a pink, wrinkled face and tossed up my hands to ward it away.
“Take your son,” she said.
“What do you mean? He’s not my son. He can’t be.”
She looked at me with disbelief.
“Where’s his mother?” I demanded, not caring about her response. “Give him to his mother.”
“This child has no one but you,” she said.
“You’re mistaken,” I answered angrily.
“I never believed what they said until this moment—you are a dreadful man.” She looked ready to cry, and the squalling of the little creature had become incessant. “Unfortunately for this child, you are his only parent. His life depends on you.”
“No no no, you can’t intimidate me with nonsense.” I wasn’t going to let her burden me. “If I were the father, I would remember his mother. And I simply don’t.”
“Then why are you here?” Her face had turned red and she rocked the small bundle back and forth.
“I haven’t any idea,” I replied, “and I don’t have to know. There’s no need for me to prove anything.”
“Isn’t it odd,” she asked, “to be lying in an infirmary and not know why?”
“What you’re saying is impossible. That’s what matters.”
“There’s one other little fact,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“This baby is hungry.”
“Then feed him! He’s making a racket.”
“Quite.”
“So?”
“The chart says he’s to be breast-fed.”
“Where is his mother?” I demanded with exasperation. “How many times do I have to ask you that?”
“You are his only parent,” she said loudly. “How many times do I have to tell you that?”
