by Sasha Chapin
“Um, ‘float like a butterfly, sting like a bee?’”
“No, he said everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.”
“So how do I deal with that?”
“You mean, like, how do you retain your plan when you get punched in the face?”
“Yeah.”
“Get punched in the face more.”
ST. LOUIS IS GREAT IF YOU‘RE AN ALCOHOLIC
It was the day before my birthday and a few days before I left St. Louis. The thought of spending my birthday alone in my room, eating Domino’s Pizza, was awful. I wondered what else I could do.
“Is there anything good in this city at all?” I asked Finegold.
“There’s more bars per square foot than in any other city in America, so it’s good if you’re an alcoholic,” Finegold said.
“I’m not an alcoholic.”
“Well, then you’re out of luck.”
On my birthday, I went to the petting zoo and hung out with some goats. I suppose I could’ve asked Finegold if he wanted to get a beer with me, but I felt unworthy of his company. Despite his lessons, I was still playing badly. Slightly better, but still badly. I knew better why I was losing, but I was still losing. He told me that this was normal.
“I can tell you everything I know,” he said, “but absorbing it can take years. Chess is hard. Like, let’s take a simple part of being a grandmaster. To be a grandmaster, you have to spend a lot of time thinking about what your opponents want to do, rather than just focusing on your own plans. Saying that to you is easy, but it’s hard to do, because just thinking about yourself is kind of the human instinct. Being good at chess is pretty counterintuitive. A lot of the time, you’re fighting your basic tendencies.”
“That sounds hard.”
“It’s actually easy. It’s just impossible.”
Despite his reassurance, I still felt a little ashamed. Meanwhile, the goats were tranquil. They were accustomed to being touched. I gave one a hug, and it looked at me without obvious emotion and trotted away.
THE SECRET OF CHESS
After the petting zoo, I went to see the arch. On the east side of the city, there’s this big arch, which is the most famous thing in town. The city calls it the Gateway Arch, which doesn’t make any sense, because it’s not a gateway—it doesn’t permit or restrict passage. It simply frames warm air. One cool thing about it, though, is that you can go up inside it, and gaze out over a polluted river at East St. Louis, which is generally considered one of the worst parts of the United States.
“One, please,” I said to the ticket attendant.
“It’s closed today,” she said.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay.”
I was twenty-nine years old. I walked back towards the metro station, through the deserted streets beyond, between beautiful art deco skyscrapers, and I thought about what Finegold had said at the end of our first lesson. After we’d gone through a few of my games, he had nonchalantly asked me whether I’d like to know the secret of chess.
“Um, sure,” I said.
“Okay, I’ll tell you. But you’re not going to believe me,” he said. “And maybe you never will.”
This was correct. I had no idea what to make of the secret of chess. And I definitely didn’t believe it. Only later, much later, when I was walking on a beach in California, did his words really strike me with their full force.
8
I’D HATE TO BE GOD RIGHT NOW, BECAUSE HE SEES EVERYTHING
There are certain things I know to be true but that I can’t fully believe. One of them is that failure is good for you—that it is, in fact, a necessary part of learning anything new—that, often, success comes out of a long series of mishaps that eventually lead to one moment of excellence. Believe me: I’m very acquainted with how progress rarely feels like climbing a mountain, and more often feels like getting stuck in a series of differently shaped sinkholes. But I still don’t believe it, or at least don’t welcome it. I want to be successful only, and I’d like that to happen immediately.
However, when I returned from St. Louis and started playing online chess again, it was clear that I hadn’t taken a vast leap forward. I didn’t become amazing at chess. I became a little better. My rate of improvement, thanks to Finegold’s lessons, went from slight to modest. As the weeks fell away, I continued my slow grind, waged indoors, against online opponents, as a perfectly sweet Toronto July did its thing up and down the avenues.
It had been a year and a half since that first tournament game in Bangkok. The glacial sprawl of it all enraged me. And it enraged Katherine, too. We’d moved in together, to a pretty apartment that was just big enough that we could pretend it was big enough for two. In these close quarters, she discovered that dating a chess obsessive was one thing, but living with one was quite another. Often, long after we’d said goodnight, unable to sleep or contain myself, I’d creep out to the living room to play a few blitz games. Hours later, apoplectic, I’d return to bed as quietly as I could, which wasn’t so quietly, so I often woke her up, and she’d then lie awake herself as I slept, wondering whether I was worth the price of admission.
I didn’t want to languish in this life. I wished there was some way to speed things up a bit—some way to sell my soul to chess itself—some great and costly hero’s errand I could embark on, with epiphany as its reward. But there was no obvious altar on which to offer myself. I didn’t know how I could contact the goddess of chess.
There actually is a goddess of chess. Her name is Caïssa. She was first described by the poet Hieronymus Vida at the end of the poem “Scacchia Ludus,” which depicts a game between Apollo and Mercury. After Mercury wins, he seduces a nymph named Scacchis, and is so taken by her charms that he names the game after her. Later, she’s renamed Caïssa in a different poem, by Sir William Jones, in which Mars invents the game of chess as a way to get her to hang out with him, which seems a little inefficient. From that point on, Caïssa came to represent the divine intelligence at the center of chess, who only permits the game to continue through her grace.
Many players have felt Caïssa’s influence. Garry Kasparov would say things like “Caïssa was kind to me that day” after playing a masterful game. This was believable in Kasparov’s mouth, because he played like a zealot: like a man hypnotized by a higher force, compelled to superhuman heights of precision and aggression by invisible cords binding his being. He used every bit of energy he had, and at the board, he exuded a barely contained combination of rage and desire, as if he were an intemperate bull forced to sit and have brunch.
I’ve never played like Kasparov, obviously. But I know what it’s like when Caïssa is with me—when I’m studying well, when I’m playing well, when the game doesn’t seem like a byzantine chore. It’s a state of joyful clarity, where the possibilities of the board hang together like teeth in a smile. When Caïssa is on your side, she takes you by the hand and leads you through the many twisting backroads of her kingdom, whispering secret knowledge in your ear, and it all seems so obvious, like a memory you hadn’t remembered that you’d forgotten. But that didn’t happen to me very often. Her presence was inconstant. And somehow I felt, as the summer drawled away, that I had to summon her to my side—perhaps with prayer, or fasting, or pilgrimage. Yeah, pilgrimage. Pilgrimage is a cool idea.
“Fuck it,” I thought, one day, “I’m going to go play a tournament in India.”
India, I figured, was where I would find Caïssa, if anywhere, given that India was where chess was born, probably in the seventh century or so. It evolved there from a popular and disreputable dice game, Ashtāpada, the domain of desperate drunks and gamblers, a game that the Buddha condemned specifically for its addictive properties. Somehow, either a lone genius or a group of intelligent gamers realized that the game’s board was the ideal setting for an imaginary conflict. The game they invented was quite similar to modern chess, but less exciting—the pieces didn’t move
as far across the board in a single move, which made the overall game much slower. Still, though, it was exciting enough that it outlived Ashtāpada. It engulfed the entirety of Europe and the Middle East in a few hundred years, eventually mutating into the modern game as players all over figured out how to make it more dynamic.
Historians are unclear about which province of India generated this devastating moment of invention. So I wasn’t initially clear on which part of India I should go to. After some hemming and hawing over the near-term Indian tournament schedule, and entertaining all sorts of gimcrack ideas about why I should visit this place or that place, I decided on Hyderabad. It was the most central of the cities in which a major tournament was taking place, and therefore, I assumed, the safest bet if I wanted to get somewhere close to the point at which all of chess began. (I did not examine the logic of the assumption closely.)
Also, conveniently, Katherine had always wanted to go to India. So we decided that I’d fly out to Hyderabad alone, win every one of my games, and meet up with her in New Delhi afterwards and do some heavy-duty classic romance, in compensation for the frustrations of living with me. I’d return ready for the tournament in Los Angeles, where I’d finally take down some 2000-rated nitwit and thereafter meet every moment of conscious existence with equanimity and grace.
* * *
I arrived after twenty-four hours of air travel, during which I solved puzzles as the clouds meandered below me. I stumbled out of the airport and found myself in an outrageous humidity that made me feel as if I were submerged in the intestines of an invisible whale. I paid far too much money for a taxi. It was immediately clear that I had done so when my driver burst into overjoyed laughter when I accepted the price he quoted me.
It seems to me that the way Indian traffic works, based on my experiences in Hyderabad and a couple of other major cities, is that everyone almost dies, all the time. Everyone with a vehicle flirts with their mortality extensively. All the cars slide around the road in patterns that barely accord with prediction, gobbling up vanishing slices of partly existing space. Between them, puttering motorcycles slalom and scissor in and out, piled with up to four passengers, none wearing helmets, all looking unconcerned. Everyone honks constantly, seemingly merely to say, “I exist.”
Hyderabad is the center of India’s emerging tech industry, which is to say that it’s in a state of constant explosion. It roars with a sense of harsh aliveness. Crumbling old arcades are abutted by hastily constructed offices, swarmed by phone kiosks and fruit stands. The skeleton of a half-constructed metro line stretches above perilously tiny sidewalks lined with trash, and roads that are always overflowing. People are everywhere. It’s maybe not the most superficially pleasant place, but the extremity is appreciably extreme. I was having trouble fitting all of the new reality into my reality holes. Time felt slow and squishy, and my few legible thoughts crawled slowly out from under the weight of a jewel-toned blur of sensation.
My hotel was organized around a square full of rebar and muck, encircled by mosquito-filled cells equipped with rock-hard beds and air conditioning units that wheezed without effect. I was shown to my particular box, and I sat down and beheld the smeary walls. A few mosquitos expressed their curiosity about my body, so I slaughtered them without mercy. I looked at myself in the mirror for a long time, in a state of vague wakefulness, until I got hungry, whereupon I slipped away for a quick dinner at a dosa stand down the street. The owner, having established that I was from Canada, wondered aloud why I bothered to come to Hyderabad, since he spent his life wanting to do the opposite. He asked me if I could bring him back in my suitcase. I said I’d consider it.
Back at the hotel room, I applied mosquito repellant cream to my whole body, fell asleep, and woke up covered in mosquito bites. I’m allergic to mosquitos, so when I get bit, my skin produces a mass of tumorous size. I had woken lumpy. Before the first round, there was time for breakfast at the hotel restaurant, a small, dim, greasy room above the lobby where I scratched my tumors as two employees stood nearby, attending to my needs and staring at me. The breakfast of starchy puffs with sauce was delicious, enough so that I overlooked the fact that it was lukewarm, and thus probably not freshly made, and thus teeming with micro-organisms.
This would prove a terrible mistake. Naively, I wasn’t overly concerned about diseases, because I’d purchased every vaccine available. I got the Japanese encephalitis vaccine, because, while chess is always hard, it’s even harder when you catch an infection that makes your brain swell up and disintegrate. I also opted for the typhoid vaccine, because I didn’t want to cough up clouds of blood during a highly technical rook endgame, and the E. coli vaccine, because vomiting on the board is generally considered distasteful. But I hadn’t fully understood the degree to which Indian cities are hazardous to those who have grown up in a less lively microbial environment. It turns out that if you’re not vigilant, you can easily pick up three contagions from a single meal.
Out on the street, I hailed a taxi, and as soon as we got off the major streets, Hyderabad instantly became beautiful. The murderous, spidering traffic spilled out on leafy lanes where cows grazed beside shacks painted in riotously alternating colors. But the ride jolted my stomach, which was already skeptical about what I had done. As I insistently handled myself all over, my cab rolled into the parking lot of St. Joseph’s Public School, a lovely, gigantic concrete palace made ornate by railings painted baby blue.
Exiting the car, I looked at the time, and my fragile temperament shattered as I realized I’d be late for my first game. But as I crossed the long stretch of dusty earth bordering the school grounds, it became apparent that the tournament mysteriously hadn’t started yet. About two hundred people were chatting and lazing about at the edges of the expansive courtyard, looking out at the hot air from plastic tables under awnings. As I stood there, comprehending little, an older man wearing a floppy hat approached me.
“Are you Canadian?” he said.
“Um, yeah,” I said.
“I can tell by the way you walk,” he said.
“Um, how do I walk?”
“Canadian style.”
“I guess I can’t argue with that.”
“I’m Gopal.”
“Sasha.”
He explained that he lived in Canada half the year, and then got me up to date on all of his family gossip in a languorous manner. He didn’t seem at all concerned that the tournament had officially begun.
“When’s the tournament starting?” I asked.
“Nine o’clock,” he said.
“But it’s 9:45.”
“I know.”
“I don’t understand.”
“This is Indian time.”
“What does that mean?”
“There is no such thing as ‘on time’ here.”
“So, like, everything starts late?”
“Or early, or not at all.”
“What you’re telling me is that time is irrelevant.”
“That is essentially the case, yes.”
The game didn’t start for another hour, leaving me to wander around the grounds, thirsty and confused and alone, as Gopal tended to his nephews. Except I wasn’t really alone, because I had already made a whole bunch of friends. I had underestimated the novelty value of being a white guy playing a chess tournament in a non-touristy part of India. Everyone was astonished that I was there. They stared at me as I paced back and forth around the sprawling compound. All eyes clung to me at all times. A few of the bolder young boys got up from their perches and started following me around. That encouraged some more boys to follow, and I soon had a little prepubescent entourage going.
“What is your good name?” asked one.
“Sasha.”
“Where are you from?”
“Canada.”
“America?”
“Canada.”
“America.”
“If you say so.”
I then had this exact conversation with
every one of them, while the others listened. They were all equally entertained every time. They started calling me “Canada,” and started saying, “Hi Canada, where are you from?” I tried to lose them, but they followed relentlessly. And when they grew tired of rediscovering my first name and my country of origin—which took a while—they began pelting me with questions of such menacing banality that it felt like a Harold Pinter play. “Why are you putting on mosquito repellant?” they asked. “Why are you wearing clothing?” “Do you like playing chess?” Some of them followed me into the bathroom, although not into the stall I chose, so I hung out in the stall for a bit, until I decided that the smell was worse than the kids, by a small margin. When I passed their parents, they gave me a look that said they were both apologetic that I was dealing with their children, and happy that I was dealing with their children.
There was no peace anywhere. When I retreated to the skittles room—the area of the building where chessboards are set up for casual play and analysis—my presence electrified the assembled kibitzers, who came up to me one after the other and pleasantly asked me what my name was, and whether I was from America. Then, after I conducted that conversation with each of them in turn, they stood there, smiling at me, as I studied.
After the passage of this eternal hour, the first game’s beginning was announced by the shouting of a few of the tournament officials. The middle-of-the-road players, of which I was one, gathered in a draughty assembly room, at rickety tables set with old chess sets equipped with mismatched pieces. Our scoresheets, rather than being made from the yellow copy-paper I was used to, were held together by sheets of old-fashioned blue carbon, which immediately stained our fingers. My opponent and I shook hands, mutually smearing each other with pigment.
