All the Wrong Moves

by Sasha Chapin

  “But I’m here, and I’m going to play,” I said, to someone who was seemingly in charge.

  “We do not know whether you will play,” he said.

  “Yes, but I’m going to play.”

  “How do we know?”

  “I, well, I can stay here until the game begins, and then I’ll start playing, which means I’m playing the game.”

  The man shrugged, and the conversation continued in that circuitous vein for another few minutes, until I gave up. I could’ve pursued the matter with the chief organizer, but, truthfully, I was thankful about being ejected, so I left. I did not say goodbye to the boys. Thus, Colgate disappeared. That was the end of my grand sacrifice to Caïssa, which had been grander than I had intended.

  Back at the hotel, I thought I might spend the rest of the day analyzing my games with the help of my computer. Computer analysis is one of the defining features of the modern game, since, at this point in history, a strong chess engine is much stronger than any human player, and thus the highest authority on how you actually played. We’ve come a long way since 1997, when it took a giant mainframe computer, IBM’s Deep Blue, to beat Garry Kasparov, then the best player in the world. Now, my phone could beat Magnus Carlsen. This development has also affected the way people watch professional chess: usually, during a high-stakes tournament, commentators have a chess engine running, which spits out analysis as the game goes on. The ramifications of this are weird: during a world championship match, the only people who don’t know the best possible moves are the players themselves.

  It’s not always possible to absorb the lessons of a computer. All a computer can do is tell you what moves you should’ve played—it can’t tell you, on a human level, how to think in a way that would lead you to make such moves. Nevertheless, I wanted to at least try to understand my dismal performance, so I could maybe derive some modest value from my week in Hyderabad.

  But when I withdrew the scoresheets from my backpack, I discovered that this task was impossible. After they had rubbed against each other in the zippered back pocket for a few days, their blue carbon linings had shed, completely obscuring the recorded moves. My week in Hyderabad had become an indistinct blue haze, from which I could extract nothing.

  I rubbed the scoresheets a little between my fingers, to see if the moves were still intact under the top layer of pigment, but they were not. All I got was ink on my hands. I went to the bathroom so I could wash it off.

  At some point in there, I looked myself in the eyes. I was greenish, tired, and covered with a grimy residue of boomtown pollution commingled with sweat. My features, overlarge and expressing displeasure, were like cheap decorations on sheet cake. How would the rest of this go? I wondered. Like, the rest of my life? Probably like this, because this was it. How cute. Running from one distraction to another. Finding any defined life unbefitting of a never-ending sense of grandiosity. Neglecting a good woman in favor of a form of comfortable self-imprisonment. Just like a few girlfriends prior, whom you’d abandoned so you could experience mental episodes in peace. This is how you are. You know all this stuff. And now you’re spending all of your time learning it all over again. Super, super cute. Welcome to Hyderabad. It’s hot here. The vegetation, though scattered, is pretty, and the people are nice, and they all want to get to know you, although the water pressure leaves something to be desired.

  The sputtering stream of water was terribly cold. As it took the ink from my hands, it ran royal blue, and then aqua, and then it was finally clear again as the remnants of the tournament disappeared.

  9

  DREAMS DIE IN CALIFORNIA

  What did you do with Katherine in India, after you met up in Delhi at dawn, at a cheap hotel whose entrance was partially blocked by a pack of sleeping dogs you crept gingerly around?

  From a castle wall in a desert, we looked down on a city all painted blue. We emerged from slums where kids played cricket in tiny squares, and walked hand in hand along a river of sewage. Monsoon rain drove us down a mountain, through tea trees like giant vermilion sponges. The country’s constant provision of novel irritations brought us closer, making up for my absence, at least in part. Also, I got sick some more.

  Were you two okay, after that?

  Relationships are always uncertain. But the prognosis was positive.

  And why did you still play the Los Angeles Open a month later, after all that you experienced in Hyderabad?

  I’d said I would, a year prior. It was mostly a matter of inertia and pride, the great movers of human activity. And, of course, I craved the particular way a pawn’s crowning bulb felt as I played d4 on turn one. Maybe enough to get me through one more tournament.

  Were you sure that you really would quit chess this time?

  I mean, of course not, I’m not dead yet, and all of my closest convictions have turned out to be revisable, such that I’m constantly turning to the person I was two years ago and thinking, “What a dolt, what a polenta-brained bozo.” But it seemed like a good time to stop playing chess. I had wasted enough of my life. I wanted to start frittering it away on something else.

  Was it really a waste?

  Not completely, I suppose. Without a little friction, life is just lunch. Admittedly, some of it was certainly fruitless. It would be foolish to think I’d ever again benefit from knowing how to pronounce the last name of Russian grandmaster Ian Nepomniachtchi. (Roughly, “Nuh-pom-nuh-she.”)

  After chess, what do you see yourself doing?

  Something warm and humdrum, like marriage, and the production of mewling children, and the attainment of a job-like job, and the purchasing of Christmas ornaments, which will shine on through the years as I slowly become, with age, less differentiated from the mass of other human beings, as everyone does.

  Why?

  I guess I’m fundamentally lonely, and I want to do what other people do, and have them approve of my behavior, and touch me or smile at me at the appropriate times. Basically, I’m dimly aware of the fact that I’m going to die, and I’d like a little tenderness before that happens.

  But isn’t chess a noble human endeavor, as you’ve said?

  Yes, I do believe it. But that’s not the only way of looking at my chess habit. It’s true that it’s a profound game, but profound things can, in practice, serve shallow ends. In a sense, being an amateur chess player is a terribly shallow thing. It’s a long spelunk in a netherworld where there is no ultimate consequence, no permanent loss. For every humiliating game you lose, there is always another, as if your pieces were born again, fully intact, emerging from a remarkably fertile womb. In a single game of chess, unlike in the course of some other human endeavors, you can’t make decisions that last as long as you live. It’s not like, for example, a hypothetical marriage with Katherine, in which permanent bliss would be available, if I behaved correctly, if I didn’t somehow recklessly extinguish our thriving two-person civilization. You can’t start that kind of game over again, and you can’t turn to a computer to find out what went wrong, or what went right. It’s a learn-as-you-play kind of thing, despite the fact that you’re playing for keeps. In this sense, chess was an escape.

  When did you realize you should stop playing?

  There was no one moment. Moments of realization are generally seductive lies concocted by unscrupulous memoirists. Typically, the process of epiphany is not instant—your mind doesn’t just crack open. You usually realize something long after you’ve suspected that it might be true, after it’s been lurking there for a long time, in the form of an uncomfortable thought that might have been droning in the background for weeks or years, like the purr of a detuned oboe. What we call “realization” is often the death of a self-serving rationale after it’s been strangled by reality for a long time.

  There was no one moment?

  Well, I did feel pretty silly when I was on the toilet in Hyderabad. There’s definitely something humbling about squatting over a hole in a distant nation, with your loved ones far away,
and your lagoon-like thighs hanging before you, and the mosquitos hovering around you, waiting for the right moment to pump you full of malaria, while a young boy outside is thwarting your plans, wondering why you were stupid enough to cross the globe just so he could trounce your inadequate handling of the London System.

  So you don’t think people should play chess?

  No, I just don’t think I, myself, should play chess. Empirically, chess has a ruinous effect on me. To others, I would cautiously recommend the game of chess. Just like I would cautiously recommend any temporarily pleasurable experience that might encase you completely, eclipsing all of your other concerns, leaving you useless to the general kludgy grinding of civilization, to the mealy pleasantness of everyday acquaintance.

  Like drugs and stuff?

  Yeah, like that.

  Why did you see Los Angeles as a fitting setting for your last few games?

  Los Angeles is where dreams die. All day, the waiters realize that they’ll never be actors, and the actors realize that they’ll never be famous, and the famous slowly dry out, under the nearly narcotic sun that falls on all the facades of the hot, sprawling city, clustered together in bright clumps like dirty candy.

  What did you smell like in California, as you approached the hotel where the tournament was taking place?

  Like pipe tobacco, amorous livestock, and a damp old forest.

  Why?

  I was wearing a perfume custom-made by Courtney, who skillfully interpreted my incredibly vague direction that she should make me a “chess-related” scent.

  Courtney started a perfume company?

  Yeah, a very successful one. And a lot of other things happened, too, while I was chasing my stupid hobby.

  Like what?

  The year was coming to a close too soon, as it always did, leaving everyone struggling with the question of how to interpret the fact that they hadn’t done everything they could have. My mother went to some new fitness classes. My father got his flute repaired, and continued to almost never play it. My brother got a great new job. In other rooms, farther away, munitions were developed, embryos were tinkered with, and, lower down, magma tangoed around under the earth. Slowly, the universe was expanding, closer than ever to becoming a muddied gray soup of indistinct atoms, which would remain there for however long forever is. People I knew were more or less getting along.

  And why were you wearing custom perfume?

  So I might distract my opponents, setting them at ease with a sweet smell, lulling them into a happy complacency, a state something like the intoxication you experience at the crest of your evening’s second champagne cocktail—a warm slushiness accompanied by a slightness of thought.

  Did it work?

  I’ll never know, although I’d like to think so, because I paid a handsome sum for my perfume, enough that I don’t feel like disclosing it to you. But it’s so hard to tell, from the inside of a life, whether we can control our fate, or whether consciousness is merely the ability to observe ourselves obeying our irrevocable course, as if we were all self-aware pinballs. But I did smell pretty good, I think.

  Did the famously sunny weather put you in a good mood?

  Actually, on the first day of the tournament, the day was uncharacteristically cool and dim. Pelleted clouds thronged the sky, like Styrofoam peanuts seen from a compound eye. And though I tried not to interpret that as some sort of signal from the universe, I couldn’t stop myself, because I was possessed of what I would call a toxically expansive mood, in which my mind constantly drifted rearward into an extravagant engagement with every available sensory stimulus. When I arrived in the hotel lobby, the ugly carpet outside the playing hall seemed to vibrate, to cry out to me. Its celery-colored whorls seemed like a call for help. How I was supposed to help the carpet, I don’t know. And, as I cast my tremulous face around the room, all of the players, however paunchy or haggard, blazed forth brightly, as if they were characters from myth, whose passing moods permanently altered history.

  Why did you feel this way, even though you wanted to quit chess?

  Animals can miss their cages. Chess had given my life a shape, and now I would be shapeless, at least temporarily, until I found another identity to stamp onto my experience, another temporary lodestar to guide my consciousness through all those bleak moments of blankness, such as when you arrive in front of a vending machine and suddenly discern a strange pit within yourself while deciding between sugared or sugarless soda.

  Did you think you would find a similar passion again?

  Frankly, I was doubtful. I wasn’t sure that anything would totalize me as much as chess did. My assumption was that I’d live a life, thereafter, containing less totalizing passion. I was planning on having leaner, more manageable emotions, and occasionally craving the intensity I’d left behind. This happens to former addicts of all kinds, and they survive, so I probably could too, I guess. In a way, it happens to everyone, with age—the volume of experience gets turned down.

  How did the tournament organizers react when you announced your intention to play against 2000-rated players, after you strolled down the broad hallway off the lobby, past children playing blitz on the carpet, and all the rumpled older men reviewing opening theory on their laptops?

  With a long spell of laughter, followed by a verification of my seriousness, followed by furrowed brows and an expression of concern. They thought I was making a fool of myself, and wanted to protect me. While it’s common practice for aspiring young players to play up a bracket, in order to challenge higher-rated players, I was playing up two brackets, a sure recipe for a swift punishment.

  Did you feel like you were making a fool of yourself?

  No more so than usual. Chess is hard. Sometimes you lose. I would see what I could do.

  How did you prepare for the first game?

  By listening, in an unpopulated room off the main hallway, to Psy’s masterpiece, “Gangnam Style,” whose video contained dancers doing a fun horsey dance, which I performed gently there, on my own.

  Shouldn’t you have been studying chess?

  In a way, I was.

  How?

  By resigning myself to the fact that I was as good as I would ever be. The only thing that could help me now was a mood of happy equanimity. Also, by dancing, I was getting some mild exercise, a preparatory step recommended by a lot of great players.

  Were you worried about anyone seeing you dancing?

  Actually, I was hoping that someone would. If word got around, among my competitors, that I was merrily hopping in circles, it might play into the psychological strategy that I had specially designed for the circumstances of the tournament.

  What were the circumstances, and what was the strategy?

  Given that my opponents were much higher-rated than I was, drawing a game with me would hurt their ranking quite a bit. And in a way, that made a game with me a fearful task. Every move that didn’t result in an immediate win would make them a little anxious. So they had to play with a thoroughgoing vigor, mustering absolutely all of their brainpower. And they would hope that I’d play like most lower-rated players do when faced with a stronger opponent—that I would wriggle and shriek, with obvious fear, before their superior skill, and, in my delirious state, make bizarre moves, hoping that they would miss an obvious trick. But that wasn’t what I was going to do. Rather than trembling before them, I would simply attempt not to lose all of my pieces, as Finegold said, which would forbid them from scoring an easy victory. And, while they stared at the board, vengeful and consumed, I would stroll around the room, or twiddle my thumbs, or just sit there and smile at them. In this, the moment of my greatest challenge, I would attempt to approach the board with seeming indifference, and play as boring as possible, with no clear plans other than blunting my opponents’ plans, attempting the transformation of their eagerness into a confused rage. I wanted to make them feel like they were having a verbal debate about an extremely important issue with a banana muffin.

/>   While you waited for your opponent, who showed up fifteen minutes late, what did you observe, as you looked around the room?

  I saw the lower-rated players quaking, and the higher-rated players doing nothing. Finegold once told me that when you’re at a tournament you can actually tell who the high-rated players are just by looking around. And it’s true: it simply requires a modest facility with body language. Strong players are the ones who look relatively untroubled. While they do feel a hint of fear, much like well-weathered soldiers, they’re familiar with fear, and, out of necessity, have developed a negotiatory relationship with it. At this particular tournament, I observed Tatev Abrahamyan, one of the top-ranked players of the tournament, studying her cuticles. Meanwhile, the weaker players were barely concealing cardiac overdrive, white-knuckling their chairs, and generally looking like good candidates for psychiatric intervention.

  Who was your first opponent?

  Ronaldo Sevilla, a stocky middle-aged man with big, soft hands, whose combination of a gentle, untroubled face and an incoherent fashion sense gave him the air of someone who had enough familial affection in his life that he was long past caring about the opinion of strangers. He was, by all appearances, that most beautiful species of human: the quirky dad. He was rated about 1960, which, I decided, was close enough to 2000 that a victory over him, if it appeared, would comprise a fairly satisfying finale to my chess career, although not quite the numerical triumph that I’d been hoping for.