You don’t have to live like this, he told them, many times over. You’ve been in this country for years. I’m a born citizen. There are amnesties and lawyers. You’re smart; you shouldn’t have to clean washrooms and warehouses, or deliver junk food, or work in the back of greasy spoons. You’re not too old to learn better English, get yourselves some education. You need to save money and buy a house, before it’s too late for you. There’s no future for you, living like kids.
Needling them like this was, among other things, his way of getting back at them for all the questions they wouldn’t answer about their past.
His parents never took his advice. Sometimes, at night, through the door of his bedroom, he heard them talking in Farsi, which they wouldn’t speak in front of him. It usually meant the same thing: they’d be moving on again, looking for another rental trailer, or short-let apartment, or cash-only job in some northern mining camp, where questions weren’t asked, and where housing was part of the deal.
It was in one of these bush camps, he later told Alice, that he’d decided to become an engineer – a civil engineer, someone who moved about all the time, from project to project, but always belonged wherever they were. Someone who built bridges across rivers, bringing new roads to mine camps and oil wells. Solid on the ground, a man who could buy a house for his parents, and maybe someday build a home for himself.
His dad reckoned Michael wasn’t good enough at mathematics to get into engineering. His mother thought he would make a good teacher, or maybe a nurse. So when Michael rebelled he became an A student, and scraped into engineering at UBC.
When Alice was a little girl there was always a chess game on the go in the corner of the living room, on a cheap-looking set made of cardboard and plastic.
Alice didn’t know the rules of chess, but she noticed that sometimes the pieces were all lined up along opposite ends of the board, and then they would start creeping towards each other, one at a time, over a period of weeks, shifting around the board or retiring to the side of it, like the sin bin in hockey, until one day they would all be back on their start lines, and the battle would begin again.
She never saw her parents go near the chessboard in the living room; they played their own games at the kitchen table, on a magnetised travel set, drinking red wine.
Who was playing this mysterious game? Alice could have asked her parents, but she liked to think that they hadn’t noticed the board in the living room, or that they had forgotten about it, or that maybe they couldn’t even see it: maybe this game had ghosts for players, or, even better, maybe its pieces had lives of their own, had picked their own fights and were making their own moves. She decided she’d say nothing to anyone, not even to her big sister, Brigid. She would study the problem until she had solved it or it went away.
One day, she was home sick from kindergarten when the mailman came. She sat at the kitchen table, wrapped in her favourite blanket, and watched her father sort through the letters. Among the bills and junk mail was a small, square white envelope, with a British stamp.
There you are, her father said, looking happy.
He opened the envelope. It contained a white card with a few symbols scrawled on it. He pulled a face, then put it in his shirt pocket.
Uh oh, he said to himself. Uh oh.
Alice followed him through to the living room, dragging her blanket across the floor. He stood, looking down at the phantom chessboard, pulling a face. Oh, Alice thought, disappointed. So he can see it too.
Her father moved one of the pieces.
You can’t do that!
He looked round at her, puzzled.
What do you mean?
That’s not your game! Put it back like it was!
He did.
It is my game, though. It’s mine, and your mother’s.
You play chess in the kitchen. And Sophia’s not here.
He pulled the armchair over to the chessboard.
Come sit in my lap.
Reluctantly, she crossed the floor to join him. She knew that by doing so she would lose something precious. He was about to explain the mystery to her. She’d rather have kept things as they were.
You see here, all these white pieces? Your mom and I are white. The black pieces are a friend of ours, one of our old gang. He’s doing research at Cambridge, in England. He’s just told us his next move.
Her father took the card out of his pocket.
See? It’s written here – P to QB6.
He moved one of the black pieces, the same one as before.
Pawn to Queen’s Bishop Six. Unless your mom can think of something amazing, I think he’s going to beat us in the next four moves.
How will you tell him your move, if he’s in England?
We’ll mail it to him, like he mails his to us. They call it correspondence chess, because you play it by snail mail, one move at a time. It’s the most dangerous game in the world.
No it’s not.
She tried to wriggle away from him. He knew that she didn’t like to be teased. It made her feel hard, and cold, and lonely, and it made her want to hide away. He laughed and kissed her hair.
It’s true. More people die playing this game than any other. Even boxing or hockey. Can you guess why?
He had set her a problem. He knew that she loved a puzzle. She thought for a while.
Is it because the games take so long?
I knew that you’d get it. The longer the game, the greater the chance you’ll get sick or have an accident before it’s over.
So why not send the moves by email? That would be quicker.
He didn’t answer for a while, and, though she couldn’t see his face, she knew before he spoke that he wouldn’t be telling her all of the truth.
We like it like this. It’s an old-fashioned way to let our friend know we’re here for him. We know that he likes that, to know that we’re here.
The game is a message?
Sort of, yeah. But it’s also a chess game. And he always wins.
He patted her shoulder.
Get off of me. I’ll make us some lunch.
Alice squirmed away from him. Her blanket, dragging behind her, brushed across the little table and pulled the chessboard to the floor. The pieces scattered everywhere, across the wooden floor, under the couch and the armchair, on to the Afghan rug in the middle of the room. She clapped her hands to her mouth, unable to speak.
He put an arm around her, squeezed her.
Don’t worry. I can put them all back where they should be. I keep the game in my head.
She wriggled free of him. It would be hard for her father to reach the pieces under the couch. That was one of her secret places; she liked to lie very still there, to watch the rectangle of light that was the rest of the universe, to try to figure it out without being seen.
She slid on her belly and collected the stray pieces.
Here, she said, handing the white ones to her father. These are yours.
He held out his other hand.
I’ll need the black ones too.
I’ll put them back for your friend, she said.
He watched her replacing the black pieces on the chessboard, each one on the correct square, where the game had left it. When she was finished she looked at him.
Your turn.
He started replacing the white pieces.
Sweetie, he said, it’s time we taught you how to play chess.
Michael had to spend one last summer alone in Grande Prairie before starting college. He got a job as a pizza delivery driver. It kept him out of the empty apartment at night.
At the end of that last summer, when the lease on the apartment expired, Michael had to move on again. This time, he would be the one to decide where he went. The choice can’t have been easy. He’d been accepted by the University of British Columbia’s Fac
ulty of Engineering, but why bother with that now? It would cost a lot of money that he didn’t have, and he knew he’d struggle with the coursework. Plus, his parents wouldn’t be needing that house anymore, would they? Then again, he may have felt that they were watching him. He may have still wanted to prove them both wrong. Love is a difficult habit to break.
Michael packed a suitcase with clothes, and filled a plastic box with computer gear. The rest of the stuff in the apartment – his parents’ clothes, the kitchen stuff, a TV, some books written in Farsi, which Michael couldn’t read – went to a thrift store. The apartment was furnished. His parents lived light.
Still unsure where he would go next, Michael came back from the thrift store to make one final tour of the empty rooms, hoping that something or someone would say goodbye to him, or offer advice. This was where he’d last seen his parents. There was something new there, something that hadn’t been there that morning when he cleared the place out: a sports bag, sitting in the middle of the floor in his parents’ bedroom. It contained a large amount of currency in midsize denominations – used, non-sequential bills.
His parents had never had money or friends. He didn’t know where this money had come from, but he knew a sign when he saw one. He put the bag in the trunk of his car. He reckoned it might be enough to keep him going all the way through college. You could count that as a blessing. On the other hand, without the money to bind him to the promise that he’d made to himself, and his parents, though they hadn’t asked him, to be an engineer, to live a solid life and buy someone or other a house, he might have escaped from this story, if escape is ever really a thing.
Michael left the apartment just as the three of them had found it, two years before: the keys hidden in the fuse box, the front door on the latch.
Alice asked Michael to move into her house two months after they met. They were young and good-looking and healthy, and they were both really nice people – there was never any doubt about that. Before that, he’d been staying with three other male students he’d found on Craigslist, sharing a dump of an apartment, way out in Burnaby – a long commute and a horrible rent. Alice reckoned that if it didn’t work out she could just kick him out again. That’s what she wrote in an email to her big sister Brigid, a final year student of English at McGill, in Montreal. An arrangement made freely could be easily ended. Even the cleverest people believe stupid things.
By then, they had fallen in love with each other, in the way that young people do, the first time they have their own place to themselves. Not much thinking was required. Those first few months they stayed at home a lot. And when their class schedules kept them apart – she would specialise in computers, he was aiming for civil –
Alice sometimes sent him photographs of herself, taken at home after he’d left. He had to sit at the back of the class so that no one could see over his shoulder. Later, when he was by himself, he would repay her in writing, by email or text – as we said, he never used social media. He wrote pretty well, considering: he knew to keep it simple and short, and avoid similes, euphemisms and anatomical detail. Alice read, reread and saved his messages for later, waiting for him to come home. But Michael would leave it a day or two and then delete her photos. Or he thought he did: nothing can ever be truly deleted.
It isn’t clear to us why he got rid of her photographs. She didn’t ask him to, and he doesn’t seem to have been prudish. He was, according to the emails that Alice sent her sister, well worth sleeping with, and had earned the intimacy implicit in the photos. Maybe he worried about privacy. He never said.
But Michael would later regret deleting those photographs. We know this because he tried to recover them, and left fingerprints on the servers on which they’d been stored. But those caches had long since been cleared, at least as far as someone like Michael was concerned. If he wanted to see her again, he’d have to make do with his memory, dreams, imagination – analogue tools for seeing our loved ones after we’ve lost them, if not before.
The full name on Alice’s birth certificate was Lydia Alice Field. Lydia was a nod by her parents to the punk-art performer Lydia Lunch. Alice was just a name that they liked. Her mother’s surname, listed on the birth certificate, was Kennedy. Sophia Kennedy came from old stock in western Canada, being a descendant of the
Saskatchewan-born polar explorer Captain William Kennedy, whose mother was Cree, his father from Orkney. A paternal great-
grandfather, Moshé Feld, had fled the Ukrainian pogroms in a round-about direction, crossing Siberia by rail, track and steam-boat, working his passage from Vladivostok to Vancouver. He thought that B.C. was heaven, and he stopped running when he got there; he never went further east than the mountains. Alice never met him, but hoarded this story as personal lore.
At the age of four, Lydia Alice Field read Lewis Carroll for the first time, and decided that she wanted to go by her second given name instead. Her parents went along with this. They figured that any child who could read a book like that at such a young age had the right to be heard. And, as it turned out, the name Alice really suited her. She would spend her life hunting down rabbit holes.
The full name on Michael’s Manitoba birth certificate was Mike Daniel Atarian. Most likely, his immigrant parents had wanted him to fit in, so they gave him what they thought were generic Canadian names. In fact, the first name written on the registration form was originally Jack, but this was immediately crossed off and replaced with Mike. The second given name on the form, Daniel, was left as it was. Maybe the clerk made a little joke to warn them:
Jack Daniel? You sure you want to call him that? Why not Crown Royal?
Five years later, when Michael started kindergarten in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, the school secretary seems to have assumed that his name had been shortened, because she wrote Michael in the register instead of Mike. His parents never bothered to correct her. They weren’t the sort of people to make a fuss. And so the name stuck in his permanent record.
His father’s name, Samvel Atarian, as written on Michael’s birth registration, contains the common Armenian and Farsi suffix -ian or -yan, which translates as ‘son of’. This suffix can be found in many Christian, Muslim and Jewish names from Persia and its region, so it doesn’t tell you much about Michael’s father. Likewise, his mother’s name on the form, Nadia Jalil, would be unremarkable anywhere in the Muslim and Arabic worlds, and, even so, not all of those who go by the names Nadia or Jalil are Muslims or Arabs. Michael wasn’t raised in any religion. His parents never told him who they were before they came to Canada. And the names on his birth certificate were fake.
*
Alice had a sticker on her laptop that said This Machine Kills Fascists. She worked in her old bedroom, which she used as an office, the bed covered with books and other debris. There were posters on the walls for The New Pornographers and The Fall, and photographs of the writers William Gibson, who lived in Kitsilano, and Philip K. Dick, who had attempted to die there. One wall was lined with Ikea tables loaded with monitors and drives and printers and servers, tangled in wires like strangler figs. There was also a chess set with plastic pieces and a folding board, the sort you’d give a child as a stocking stuffer. This board was a mystery to Michael. Its pieces moved around by their own free will, it seemed to him, but never when he was watching. He never saw Alice go near it. And she never asked him to play her. She must have guessed that he wasn’t that good.
Michael was now in a different stream to Alice at college, having barely scraped through his first-year exams. She was in software, he was in civil. But as their second year of college went on, Alice spent less time on campus, more time in her room on her own private business. She had side projects, freelance gigs, invisible friends. Her interests had a lot to do with climate change, and encryption, and the detection of fake news and online malefactors. She was in contact with hacktivists, data campaigners, human rights advocates. They came to her for help.
&nbs
p; One day, bringing Alice a coffee, he noticed a new screen saver on her favourite laptop. It showed the winking face of Campbell Fess, billionaire founder and CEO of the tech conglomerate Inscape Technologies, materialising from behind a dissolving Guy Fawkes mask. Fess had commissioned this GIF for his social media profiles. Michael wasn’t on social media, but he recognised it anyway. That meme had been everywhere lately.
You hate Campbell Fess, he said to Alice. Why do you want his face as your screen saver?
She closed the lid on her laptop, swivelled to face him.
Because Fess acts like that GIF is a joke, like he’s one of us, but it’s exactly the opposite. He’s saying, You can operate all you like, but people like me always know what you’re doing. His face only appears on my screen when I stop working. It tells me it’s time to get back in the fight.
What fight is that, Alice?
Against people like Fess. They use their money and tech to sell people lies about race and guns and God and the environment, so they can control them. And they sell them the biggest lie of all, which is that nothing is real or true, so nothing really matters, that things have to be this way, and there’s nothing we can do. This planet is our lifeboat, and Fess and his pals are in it with the rest of us, but they’re hacking it to pieces and flogging each other the bits. They’re selling out their own children. They’ve gotten so selfish, their own genes can’t keep up with them.
Alice became embarrassed by her own sermons if they went on too long. Michael probably thought it was his job to say something to stop her. But he didn’t have any real politics of his own. So he teased her instead.
Will you still feel like that when your first start-up goes public?
He must have been joking. She told herself that. She knew about jokes. But he must have known how serious she was about the things that she cared about. He should have known; he was one of them. But his parents had taught him to trust nobody and nothing. And Alice didn’t know why, then. Michael had said to her, more than once, that we can only rely on ourselves in this life, but she had written that off as some Alberta bullshit.
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