by Sasha Chapin
If none of this leads to checkmate, the endgame is reached—the slow grappling of the few pieces still standing. Mostly, the endgame revolves around carefully escorting pawns up the board, since the pawn, upon attaining the square opposite its starting position, becomes a queen, the most powerful piece, an event that usually provokes the sullen handshake that traditionally caps off a game. Endgames are the province of the most scrupulous players—they’re often superficially boring, but those who understand their subtleties can swindle those who don’t. They’re stones that, when squeezed hard enough, often actually do produce blood.
This was the saga playing out every afternoon between members of the Pawnishers—an after-school pack of sweaty teenage boys, giggling about their triumphs, ignoring the warm weather outside. And although my addiction didn’t then reach the paralyzing extremity that it eventually would, it did interfere with my non-chess affairs. For example, I was ejected from class by my history teacher for playing chess with myself during a lecture about the emergence of AIDS. She admonished me that I was “wasting my fucking life.” And she was correct. That year was a defining moment. The grades I earned would permit or deny access to the universities I applied to. But all of that seemed vague next to a nice checkmating attack. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t care about the future, but more that I cared about chess much more. And I was in paradise. The camaraderie among the Pawnishers was my daily comfort, and the intricacies of the game were my religion.
Even more importantly, I was finally better than my big brother at something. This had never happened before. When I was little, Sam was simply a better person in every way. He was taller, and he was cuter. During our very young years, he was one of my primary bullies, and continued my social torture after I got home from school. During our later teenage years, he became less vicious (he’s now perhaps my closest friend), but he was still obviously my superior: the smartest one in a smart family, a fact that I denied vociferously because I knew it was true. But chess is an acquired skill—a reasonably smart person who’d studied the game, like me, could beat a genius who hadn’t done any of the homework, like him. Our rivalry began one night at home, when he interrupted me while I was studying a chess book, playing out positions on a little board in front of the TV. He told me that chess was a silly game. I said, “All right, beat me, then.”
Five games later, he was enraged and perplexed. During every game, he made utterly transparent threats, which I easily parried, before checkmating him in ways he hadn’t seen coming. He was useless, and shocked by his own uselessness. I had never, ever outshone him in such a casual fashion, or in any fashion at all. My satisfaction was so great that I often let the games go on much longer than they could have. I would get a winning position, then let him wallow in his misery for a dozen moves or so. Then I’d jump my pieces in and destroy him.
Sadly, this state of affairs didn’t persist for long. My brother’s brain is one of those beautiful logical brains that methodically devours all of what it’s exposed to—you can almost feel it whirring when my brother speaks. Meanwhile, I have a lazy, wandering mind. I fritter away hours on long trains of thought, then leave the stove on, nearly burning down my building and killing everyone. Accordingly, Sam brought a meticulousness to the study of chess that I couldn’t muster. After he embraced chess for a week, we were almost equals—I could generally beat him, but not easily. A week later, every game was a struggle, where even achieving a survivable position required absolute vigilance. Soon, my brother could effortlessly victimize me with his intellect. Our games were so one-sided that they were boring from a chess perspective. It was only fun for him because he liked watching me suffer.
It became hard to take chess, or myself, seriously at all. I went to school and waited all day to play with the Pawnishers, and then played in a state of melancholy, knowing how limited my skills were. That dreary state persisted until early evening, when I’d go home and my grinning brother would confront me, asking me whether I’d like to play for a little while. Confronted by these circumstances, I gave up chess. Unhappily, I returned to occupying myself with sluttiness and getting high, and feeling that I was essentially deficient.
Although I took a few brief stabs at chess when I was bored, that was basically the end of my career. Chess, apparently, was just one of those things I liked when I was a kid, like cartoons, or Sartre, or weed, things I discarded when I went to university and started attempting adulthood. By the time I met Courtney, it was even further behind me, because I had generally figured out how to like what cool people liked. They liked cocktails, and complaining about modernity, and taking flattering but not too flattering pictures of each other. They certainly didn’t like chess, so by the time I left for Thailand, it no longer had anything to do with who I was.
Until I ended up in Kathmandu, with the French Defense before me on the board, by no contrivance I was aware of.
It was a cool, sunny afternoon. The city’s ornate architecture was punctuated by piles of rubble generated by the two recent earthquakes. The crowd around the board was enclosed on all sides by the rush of pedestrian traffic. Tenjing smiled at me as we rattled off a few canonical opening moves we’d both seen many times before. He was an assertive player. I was remembering how the pieces moved. But within a few minutes, that old chess feeling was returning—the dizzy pleasure of the potential maneuvers multiplying before you, transforming an idle board of sixty-four black-and-white squares into a tumultuous arena of mental conflict.
Then, he beat me in twenty moves. (Twenty moves is a very short game, forty is a medium one, a hundred is cause for weeping.) Another game rapidly went the same way. The spectators became very pleasant, smiling as they observed me forking over my little wrinkled bills, patting me on the back encouragingly as Tenjing took all my pieces.
Badly played chess is kind of like badly played life. Real problems are dealt with poorly or not at all, while much effort is expended on avoiding imaginary danger. Rather than dealing with the reality of the situation, you act as if you were playing the game you wish you were. Then you collide with the boundaries between the actual and the hypothetical.
At first, that’s how I was performing. And, weirdly, I found myself caring about this. I was emotionally involved. My teenage self, the one to whom this game was life, was surprisingly close to the surface. That self felt quite foolish, especially when Tenjing began chatting with the crowd, evidently needing little concentration to wipe me off the board. This was not the dramatically correct version of this scene, in which the mysterious foreigner stuns the people of Kathmandu with his preternatural skill. But about four games in, some long-resting regions in my brain lit up. Somehow I recalled some of my favorite ways of playing the Poisoned Pawn Variation of the Winawer French Defense.
You might say that it’s a murder–suicide kind of chess opening. The player with the black pieces starts by generously giving a few delicious pawns to his opponent’s hungry queen. This is a strange thing to do, because an extra pawn often decides the game if neither king gets checkmated in the initial stages. However, pawns can also get in the way of an attack—they keep your position secure, but they lock your pieces in as well. They’re your trusty, dumb infantry, who gleefully stagger forward until they hit an obstacle and sit on it immovably. By giving some away, you erase the architecture of the board, allowing your forces to gallop all over. Rather than creating conditions under which the game might well be a draw, you pull out a knife and declare that somebody’s going to die.
A procession of new emotions took over my opponent’s face. The easy grace of a winner became the intrigue of a slight challenge, which then became the sangfroid of true competition. Our pieces weaved around the board as we carefully anticipated each other’s threats. The noise in the street—the chuckle of a motorbike motor, the skittering of rickshaw wheels off hard stone, the trilingual mercantile patter—became as nothing. But, finally, Tenjing beat me very suddenly with a subtle tactic I had not foreseen. After a
few moves that seemed nonsensical, my queen was trapped on the edge of the board, where it was easily rounded up.
Without a word, I rose and slunk away, crossing through a bustling market to Ratna Park, a frantic bus depot from which I took a terrifyingly fast trip to an objectively more important event. I had a meeting with a Nepali intellectual with a voice as soft as cool milk, who spoke with quavering eloquence, summarizing centuries of history with carefully turned sentences. With the assured evenness of someone accustomed to sorrow, he told me about the struggle of his marginalized ethnic group, which had been exploited by the ruling class of the country. He was impressive, and important, and I felt that I had become slightly more impressive and important for being in his presence, in a faraway land, mining information that could lessen humankind’s suffering if I paraphrased it well enough.
And I was surprised to find that I essentially didn’t give a fuck about impressiveness, or importance, or any of it at all. As I sat there on his patio, drinking tea brought to us by his wife, I realized that all I really wanted to do was go back to the square and eloquently marginalize Tenjing’s pieces. After I dutifully completed the interview, carefully concealing my lack of interest, I went back to my hotel room and lay awake, smoking in bed, thinking about the game’s final position. Occasionally, I took my rumination out onto the veranda, from which I saw the total dark of the street broken by the dangling of flashlights. There I was, above the soil of a country torn apart by seismic activity, below the skyward plunge of perfect mountains, on the night before setting out for the southern wetlands, where police were having a fun time shooting at protestors. Human chaos with absolute consequence was being revealed before me.
But my head was stuck in a game that had no nationality—a game that might as well have taken place in a Starbucks in Idaho. The following days were no different. When I and a few other reporters were speeding through a mist-blanketed marsh on an auto-rickshaw, the involuted vegetation reminded me of chess. During an interview with a kid who was shot through the wrist, I had to stifle the desire to ask him whether he was a chess player. And when I drank sweet hot tea in the evening rain near the Indian border, my mistaken moves were on my mind.
They were still there when I got back to Bangkok. I knew how badly I’d played, and I wanted to prove to myself that I could do better. Back at the apartment, I dropped my bag, pulled out my computer, and went to Chess.com to play a few online games. That became my night, which became my weekend.
Other tasks were accomplished, occasionally. Grudgingly, I completed the Nepal piece. It didn’t turn out very well. Nothing else turned out very well. I could barely walk down the street to get my nightly meal of noodles at the corner noodle stand, because every important game of chess history is available for review on sites like Chessgames.com, and I was invariably staring at one of them on my phone when I was wandering the streets. This was the cause of a few near-death experiences, and more than a couple of collisions with other pedestrians.
I didn’t care. I had simply forgotten how to care about anything else.
3
ONE NIGHT IN BANGKOK
My headlong descent into an Internet chess wormhole did terrible things to my personality. This is because Internet chess is a fertile breeding ground for hatred. When you’re playing someone who isn’t visible, known to you only by their nickname—SchellingFord or ButtSex69—your competitive instincts are unmitigated by the basic civilizing effect of the presence of a living person before you.
During one game, which had arrived at a complicated position, I spent ten minutes thinking about what moves I could make—which is not unusual. But my opponent typed, “You are slow delivery.”
“Yes,” I agreed.
“Play move.”
“Don’t feel like it.”
“What cup size your mother?”
By the way, I should take a break from this riveting dialogue to mention that “a complicated position” is a configuration of the pieces in which it’s hard to figure out whether a given move will create instant victory, instant death, or nothing at all. Along with the names of the openings, chess has a whole set of conventional phrases, which are fashioned from the linguistic habits of the great players of history. For example, you don’t say “a great position”—you say “a pleasant position.” Why? Because some Russian guy said it a long time ago, and now it’s what you say, unless you want to sound uncivilized. It’s like you would say you’re having a “dirty martini” instead of a “salty martini.”
But on the Internet, the patter is a little different. When somebody asks you what cup size your mother is, you say, “Fuck you.”
“How your mother do it?”
I ignored his continuous abuse until right before the end of the game, when I offered the gracious message, “You lose.”
“Come in hell for cock suck,” he responded.
My life was a constant alternation between triumph and ignominy, all delivered through the glow of my MacBook. The ratio of wins to losses was the determinant of my whole emotional spectrum. After a few back-to-back wins, I started thinking life was as sweet and easy as a gummy worm. But a long stretch of losses would infuse me with a feral anger. On those occasions, I went outside on the deck so I could scream at all the birds lining the trees behind the apartment. These particular birds, which favored my neighborhood above all others, emitted a high whoop that sounded like the digitally distorted coo of a delighted child. Their cries were the punctuation of the early hours. They were chatty, too—when I called out to them, they shrieked right back. Slowly, while conversing with unseen animals, I recollected the chess knowledge I had lost in the previous decade.
At some point I became alarmed that I wasn’t actively seeking human company. It wasn’t exactly that I was getting lonelier. It’s that I was disturbed by how little my loneliness was affecting me now that I was playing chess. This wasn’t how I was supposed to be. It didn’t measure up to the contemporary self-image I had painstakingly developed in Toronto. There was an ideal personality I was supposed to be striving for: that of a witty and urbane writer-type who would fling consequential phrases from his well-compensated fingers before going out in the evening to quip his way through intimate gatherings and win over strangers with lustrous anecdotes. But none of that was happening at all. In Bangkok, a bright and gritty city, totally free to be whomever I wanted, I was becoming a chess nerd.
So, I downloaded Tinder, in an attempt to prove to myself that I still possessed worldly desires. Resultantly, I met up with a cute girl named Sundae on a lantern-lit patio. She was charming and smart and full of contagious optimism, sure that both of our lives would be forever involved in a state of continuous improvement and joy. She laughed many times a minute as she excitedly talked in paragraphs. After dinner, she led me between bars playing horrible music that I moved to as if I knew how. We drank sour drinks that discomforted my organs. Before the end of the night, we were dancing pretty close. She kissed me and said she already missed me and then she hopped in a taxi. In the moment, she was exciting. But later that week, when she sent me a very felicitous text, I was deep in a chess game. I actually can’t remember whether I responded at all, but if I did, my message probably wasn’t compelling. Two days later, she texted me again, at 1a.m., telling me that she had just redecorated her bedroom and now only needed someone who could admire it. But I didn’t respond immediately, because I was deep in a chess game. I decided that maybe I’d text her back after the game was over. Or maybe after two. Or maybe I’d prefer to stay up all night, in the company of invisible opposition, rather than lie in the very visible arms of an attractive woman.
And as I pondered these options, it occurred to me that most of the behaviors displayed in my post-adolescent life—that whole urbane writer thing—could, by any diligent mind, be seen as the construction of a sexually marketable persona. Very consciously, I navigated away from being lonely and introverted, assuming that if I wrote some things that people liked, and p
ut together an outfit or two, women would find me at least marginally interesting. This turned out to be a reasonable strategy, which I’d actually recommend to young men who like fiddling with synonyms. And yet, in that moment, I chose my laptop over Sundae. I didn’t respond to her message, and she wisely didn’t message me again.
My only contacts with non-chess reality were Elena and Sally, who provided me with a somewhat functional social life—sometimes I had rambling discussions about journalistic ethics with Sally, who ended up living in an apartment down the street, or went jogging through the smelly streets with Elena, dodging tuk-tuks and tourists and rat-infested trash piles. Sometimes they took me to parties and I even managed to make some halting conversation in between thoughts of the French Defense. But when Elena took a two-week vacation in Cambodia, and Sally got busy, life got dark. Hygiene became optional, then nonexistent. Lacking any responsibility, I went to sleep at 6 a.m. every night, watching the gelid early morning crawl across my filthy feet. Seventy per cent of my diet was salty snacks in shiny bags. It got to a point where I realized that I was walking quickly around my apartment because I was fleeing my own smell.
Despite all my efforts, my virtuosity was not immediately forthcoming. In fact, I was barely making any improvement whatsoever. Partially, this is because I have a brain defect that makes chess difficult. Good chess play relies on visualization—picturing how the game will proceed once a few pieces are swapped around. Expert players are capable of playing blindfolded, following the game entirely through interior illustration. Some close their eyes when a game gets chaotic, preferring the mutability of their interior sketchpad over the intrusive object permanence that characterizes open-eyed life. Top-level elite players, in an outlandish example of cognitive specialization, often play multiple blindfolded games at once, painting many strategic mental pictures in parallel. Uzbek-American grandmaster Timur Gareyev, who isn’t nearly the best player in the world with his eyes open, but who is weirdly good at blindfold chess, can play more than forty unsighted games at once.
