Window Watching

Marshall cheered his son on as he left the dugout and ambled up to the plate dragging his bat behind him. The pitcher was a heavyset kid who looked like he developed at twice the rate of the other kids on the team. He had sandy hair, freckles and a smirk that intimated Marshall’s son hadn’t a chance. When he threw his first strike he seemed to be looking right at Marshall, like, After I’m done with your son, you’re next.
“Asshole,” Marshall muttered. One of the other parents near him gave him a sidelong glance and he wondered if the pitcher was her kid. He stood and clapped his hands. “Keep that bat up!” The kid turned to his father behind the metal fence and gave him a look like he wanted to get out of there. He wore his inhaler on a string around his neck and the batting cap he had on was three sizes too big for him. “Hit the goddamn ball!” Marshall hollered at him. The woman next to Marshall gave him another look but he ignored it. “That’s okay,” he yelled as the kid chopped down at the air with the bat, missing the pitch by a good three seconds. Marshall sat down feeling a little lightheaded. He held his head in his hands and only heard the third strike. He watched his kid head back to the dugout between his fingers and grimaced a little as the other boys threw crumpled up paper cones at him.
By the next inning Ellie had brought back a couple of Styrofoam cups filled with a little boxed wine she had procured from the trunk of her car. They drank the wine and watched their son stay clear of the ball in the outfield. Ellie mentioned that maybe they had better let the boy just stick with chess. Marshall muttered something about the importance of athleticism and she dropped it. Ellie watched her husband pensively. Marshall looked restless and on the verge of something big. She felt wherever he went these last two weeks the earth seemed to shake with him, like at any moment the ground would give way below him or hell would come crawling up after him. She wanted to say something to him but didn’t. She refilled their cups instead.
After the game the little league coach went around collecting the mitts and baseballs with a red wheelbarrow. His name was Less, or Lester–Marshall couldn’t remember. His wife had encouraged Marshall to talk to Less one day after a game. He told Less he was the kid’s dad and they shook hands. For a while Lester just smiled at him with his hands on his hips, nodding his head. Marshall had thought he was a little off.
Marshall sent Ellie off for another refill. When she returned they sat on the bleachers watching the parents meet with one another and pat their children on the asses. Marshall told her the whole institution of little league baseball is perverse. After a while the little league coach came up and offered his hand to him. Marshall, taken aback, spilled wine on his jeans going for Lester’s hand. Less said, “My condolences.” Marshall resigned himself to letting the wine spread across his denim. It looked like a Rorshach inkblot. He said, “Condolences?”
“Your father–Ellie told me.”
Marshall looked over at Ellie. She looked away from him. “Ah,” he said, “thanks.”
Less looked down at Marshall’s jeans. “You know I’m not judging Marshall…but this is a thing for the kids. I don’t think they allow alcohol out here.”
Ellie turned. “He’s grieving,” she said suddenly, and began rubbing his back.
Less nodded and tapped Marshall’s leg. Marshall watched his kid push the little red wheelbarrow around in circles in the outfield.

He didn’t play baseball when he was a kid. Most of his childhood was spent working with his father in construction. His father seemed to use him as a selling point. When they followed up on leads together his dad would have him knock on the door. He would introduce Marshall as “the boy.” What always amazed Marshall was the curtness people had then but didn’t have anymore. They seemed to talk in monosyllables. If his dad made a sale the men on the porch would shake hands and his dad would have Marshall shake hands too. These old veterans pressed hard, as if testing him, like they would somehow be able to tell the quality of his father’s work by Marshall’s handshake.
The work itself was relatively easy, but monotonous; gather up scrap metal, put it in a pile; gather up siding, put it in a pile. Whatever his feelings on putting vinyl siding on a house were, Marshall had since looked at the material as an obstacle separating him from his youth. It embodied work, and the greatest extent to which his father would level with him. His entire relationship with the man could be summed up with putting siding in one pile, the scrap metal in the other.
One day when Marshall was fifteen and could drive, his older brother sent him back to a completed job to pick up a wheelbarrow they had left there. When he pulled up to the house he noticed his father’s truck in the driveway with the wheelbarrow already in it. He saw movement through the window and caught his father walking inside the house shirtless and holding a glass of scotch in his hand. When his father saw the kid outside he froze. There was a moment where the two of them watched each other, standing there like asteroids orbiting another world. Marshall could see his name spelled out on his father’s lips. All at once something took hold of him and carried him away with it. Before he knew it he was racing down the cracked streets of these nowhere neighborhoods putting distance between himself and the man in that house. He kept working for his father and they never talked about it. But he felt himself grow a little older after that.

Marshall was crouched down over the home plate with Lester’s hands wrapped around his shoulders and neck. He caught himself in the tail end of a loud wail and he could feel the tears rolling down his already soaked cheeks. Men were standing all around him. Some of them he recognized as fathers of the boys on the baseball team. Others looked like joggers that were passing by when they noticed a man having a blowout on home plate. Ellie was with some of the other women. She had her hand cupped over her mouth. She was crying. One of the men that had gathered around was talking to Marshall’s son just ten yards away. Marshall could just barely hear the man saying, “Your daddy’s okay…he’s just sad right now,” over the soft hum of Lester’s voice–“Let it out Marshall, let it out.” Marshall wanted to get up and hug the boy but he stumbled forward and Less caught him. “That’s okay,” Less hollered, “We’re just going to hang here as long as we need to!”
Marshall wiped the tears off his face but couldn’t for the life of him remember how he got to the plate from the bleachers, or why there was more wine on his clothes, or why his wife and son looked worried. Worried. He remembered Ellie saying something like that to him earlier. He remembered it clearly now. He had a bottle of scotch in his lap and he was watching television when she came home and said that she was worried about him. He had told her, “Let’s see how you do when your dad dies.”
He hadn’t had that much to drink. That wasn’t what did it, he thought. It could have been the heat. It could have been the mental image he had held in his head of his father’s last breath all week, his eyes swollen shut so pumped full of the shit they give you in hospitals. He rubbed his forehead and looked around him. The fat kid pitcher was smiling at him and Marshall had an urge to grab the kid by his feet and hurl him over the fence while his mother watched.
“I’m okay,” he managed to get out. Less kept his hands on his shoulders like at any moment Marshall would take off raising hell. At first Marshall thought they were all looking at him like he was drunk but now he realized it was something different. They seemed to feel sorry for him. He could hear Ellie telling one of the mothers he didn’t have that much to drink. He was grateful to her for that. “I’ll be okay,” he said again. He shook Lester’s hands off his shoulders and walked as straight as possible to where his son was talking to one of the other dads. “I’ll take it from here,” Marshall smiled. The man stood up slowly and looked at Marshall completely amazed.
“Marshall, why don’t I take him home? And you can ride with me?” Ellie said in a panic, running up to them.
Marshall turned and looked at her and the remaining people that hadn’t already wondered off, bored. “I’m fine,” he said. “It was just the heat.” And he really did look better, save the red stains and sand all over his clothes. He thought for a moment. “Shows over!” he laughed, waving everyone off. Less tried approaching him but Marshall put his hand out like he’d better stop. “Come on son,” he said to the boy.
Marshall grabbed the boy by the arm and smiled at everyone one last time. While walking towards the car he heard a few of the onlookers say to Ellie, “You’re gonna let him drive?” And he heard her say she didn’t know what else to do. He heard Less murmur that he should stop him. And he heard one of the other men say, “Not unless you’re bringing a bat with you.”

On the ride home Marshall tried getting whatever information he could from his son. He said, “Do you remember daddy stumbling over to the home plate?” But the kid either didn’t see it or didn’t want to talk about it because he said nothing. Marshall dropped it and for a while they drove in silence.
He watched the rows of familiar houses drift by him as he drove. The neighborhoods looked the same as they had when he was a kid: old trucks on cinderblocks, children’s toys littering the lawns, houses covered in vinyl siding, and American flags hanging from the porches like testimonies to a time when people gave a shit. The histories of these old neighborhoods aren’t old enough to mean anything; their use fading with the dwindling numbers of the Vietnam generation. Marshall drove to work everyday thinking this, and thinking that none of it meant anything to him.
He opened the glove box and grabbed the flask that lay on a pile of old receipts. He polished off what was left of it and stopped by the liquor store on his way home. He spent twenty minutes in there comparing Glenlivet to Glenfiddich before he remembered the kid was still sitting in the car. He looked out of the window of the store with both the bottles in his hands and saw his kid was starring at him from the passenger seat. For a moment the two just watched each other like that before the kid looked away and Marshall paid and left.
The two said nothing on the ride home. Marshall looked his son over. He seemed to be looking out at something ahead of him–beyond the street, beyond the rows and rows of crackerjack houses that seemed to cover every inch of space left. His expression was fixed, as if he were contemplating something bigger than what his age and soft little body would allow. Marshall thought that for a moment the boy looked like an adult.

The Umbrella Massacre

I remember Paul Gibson. We had worked together for two years, most of our time spent in a break room that was once a broom closet. There was this florescent light overhead that would twitch and zap and occasionally go out for a few moments. That didn’t bother Paul. He’d go on talking, and when it came on again he’d be there in front of me with his eyes fixed on mine, his moving pale-grey lips seeming detached from his still body. He’d tell me, “There’s nothing more intriguing than identity and the lengths to which people will go to hold onto it.” I had a vague notion of what he was talking about, but what always stayed with me was the direct, monotonous tone in which he said these things, like there was a person in there and what I was looking at was a mask silhouetted by the dancing shadows of an ill-green light fixture beyond repair. He never seemed to move, either. I’d be the first to leave the room and the last to enter it. He’d be sitting perfectly still with his hands clasped in the dark, or under the strobing light, sort of waiting for me to come in there and engage him. He was my boss, incidentally.
The last time I saw him was six o’ clock at the end of a work week. Everyone had gone home save he and I. We had been talking in the break room for a while and I was certain I had just left him in there with the light out. I had stopped by my desk for a moment and followed the tacky grey carpet to the restroom and opened it. That’s where I found him. He was sitting on a chair next to the toilet reading a copy of In Flight Magazine entirely naked save his argyles and Sperry’s. I held close to the doorframe entirely stunned when he looked up and noticed me. All at once he stood and put his free hand out in the air for me to shake. I stared at him for the longest five seconds of my life. Then he left, like reality came bearing down on him and he really was naked in the restroom with the In Flight Magazine trying to shake my hand. He bundled his clothes and got out of there and I never saw him again. Soon there was a new manager and the light in the break room got fixed.

I stood in the restroom stall at the airport bent over the toilet feeling sick. I was going to New York City to see my brother. His girlfriend had died and he needed me there with him. My sister and I had talked over the phone about his “situation,” as she put it. She said he looked unstable and excitable, and if I didn’t go to New York, there’s no telling. I was hesitant but I promised her I’d go anyway. My brother and I were always close but at some point our friendship had deteriorated to an occasional phone call and flight here and there when something big happened. There was an understanding one of us would be there for the other if anything went wrong. Here it was wrong and I knew why I should be there but not exactly how. His girlfriend would be dead in a coffin and I would stand next to him and hold him by the shoulder. I’d have a drink with him later and listen to him talk with wet eyes while I nodded my head. Outside of that would be a mystery.
They had been cooking dinner together. They needed pepper for the roast beef and Lysol because they had quit smoking and their neighbors had been having a party and it was practically coming in through the walls. She had gone to the store and was hit by a cab on her way back to the apartment. There was a wind storm that night. The news station had later said eight people were killed by cab drivers. The anchorman had said they were driving flustered.
I left the stall and straightened my tie in the mirror. My sister had told me to wear a blue tie because every other color says too much and pinstripes say too little, so I wore that one. I splashed cold water on my face and headed towards my terminal.
My sister had bought my ticket. She had told me over the phone that she wanted to fly me first class. This sort of thing was unusual for her so I declined, but she insisted. I argued with her a little more but she wouldn’t have it, and anyway she knew I would like the idea of flying first class to NYC. I had told her once, “People just need to be told it’s first-class. They’ll pay hundreds more to call it that, even if the conditions were somehow even worse. If first class were in the luggage compartment you’d still see people crouched in there. I’d crouch in there if I could afford it.” She recalled over the phone that I said that to her. Later I remembered it was Paul Gibson who had actually said that to me. I had somehow forgotten that. Before our time together in the restroom he had said, “Society is a network of pedestrians imitating mannequins and not the other way around.” He told me he went to airports dressed in a suit and tie and walked around hurriedly. He didn’t know why he did it, he just did it. He enjoyed experimenting with identity. He enjoyed sitting first class on a plane reading the In Flight Magazine.

I was delayed over NYC. I had forgotten about the wind. It was the same wind that killed my brother’s girlfriend with the pepper and Lysol. JFK had been alternating between accepting flights and redirecting traffic all month. “Fifty miles per hour,” the pilot told us. The turbulence was excruciating. We had to land in Philadelphia.
Next to me was an older woman who was hyperventilating. I tried calming her down a little. I told her, “You’re more likely to get killed by a coconut falling from a tree than die on a plane,” but I couldn’t remember if that was for planes or sharks. She told me it was sharks. “You’re more likely to die by coconut than by shark,” she managed to get out. I watched her for a moment. She reminded me of a speckled trout my brother and I had caught off a dock in Baffin Bay when we were kids. It was our first and last time fishing. After half an hour of struggling with it we finally managed to haul it onto the dock. We sat there cross legged, the fish between us, too frightened to look at it. I remembered this sensation that it was watching me, struggling to breathe, its eyes going white.
The pilot asked us to increase the airflow in the cabin by adjusting the air ducts above our heads. He said it would help reduce the amount of ice on the wings. When the woman next to me heard that she began wheezing and clutching out at the air in front of her as if she could contain it all in her hands and fill her lungs. I tried helping, “Turbulence is just when the wings stop working–we cut a pocket of warm and cold air and for a brief moment the plane isn’t actually flying.” She closed her eyes and grasped the sides of her seat tightly. She didn’t talk to me anymore after that.
I watched the light on the wing outside my window blink in the freezing cold night air, and remembered that dysfunctional florescent light in the office break room. I remembered two months ago I was sitting in that room when a coworker came in and began talking about how Paul Gibson’s strange behavior was evidence for his eventual meltdown. When I asked her what she meant by that she said, “You don’t know?” I knew what she was going to say before she said it. Paul killed himself. She told me he died running his car in his garage. It was carbon monoxide poisoning. I didn’t know what to say, but after a while I told her about our conversations. She called them warning signs. I remembered sitting there at the table across from where he used to sit for three hours recalling all the dialogue we had shared. When I left the office that evening it was nine o’ clock. I had tried remembering what warning signs Paul Gibson was giving me. It wasn’t as if there was some gradual change. He was the same the whole two years I knew him.

The airline issued cab rides going from Philadelphia to New York. The trip took three hours, and by the time I got to Brooklyn it was late, but my brother had waited up for me anyway. I understood exactly what my sister meant. He looked excitable and unstable. He told me just us two would be the only familiar faces at the funeral. He said he didn’t know anyone from her family.
We walked from the lower east side to Prospect Park at two in the morning. The wind was picking up hard and the rain was coming down in billowing torrents. Everywhere we went there were umbrellas. They would be broken, ripped in half, bent, hanging from trees, or stuck in garbage cans. I hollered over the sound of rolling bottles and rustling trees, “You can’t use an umbrella in a wind storm, it’s like using a screwdriver on a nail!” but my brother wasn’t paying any attention. He just kept saying he had sent her out for Lysol and pepper for the roast beef. He kept yelling that. I had this image of a woman exploding on the wet and windy streets of Brooklyn in a rainbow of pepper and Lysol, and the bright lights of a taxi with a foreign cabbie driving flustered. He asked me if this was all there is to it. I told him it wasn’t. I told him there’s a whole lot more to it.
We kept walking around like that. I was still feeling sick. It was a pain I couldn’t place. It felt like there was something expanding in my stomach, something that had been growing ever since I had talked to my sister over the phone about coming out here. I thought I needed sleep, but looking at my brother now I decided a drink would be better. He was crying and I held him by the shoulder. “I sent her out for Lysol!” he yelled again. I held onto him and got us across the street where I spotted a candlelit near-empty bar. The wind had gotten worse since we left the apartment and I needed to get him inside. Umbrellas were kicking up in the air and skating past us. I thought, if the wind gets any worse the umbrellas could be dangerous. We stayed close to the building and shifted alongside the wall to the door and went in.
I wanted to buy him a drink and tell him something lighthearted, but all I could think of was something Paul Gibson once said to me; “There’s something adulterous about New York City. It’s a city of cheating spouses.” I told him that and smiled at him. I pointed to the few people in the bar talking over the sound of a rattling piano and stand up bass. We watched them for a moment. There was a couple talking and laughing with one another. The man stood up and ordered a drink at the bar while his date stayed where she was apparently checking the text messages on her phone. My brother looked away and I couldn’t help but think he saw something in her that reminded him of his girlfriend. I thought, there are few women who would die that way, and the woman at that table looked like one of them. I imagined her hurrying down the street with that shopping bag, chased down by the lights of a taxi cab. I watched my brother for a moment and tried to think of something more to say.
I tried clearing my head, but all I could think about was the image of an emaciated naked man searching for my hand like it was a lifesaver stretching between him and an endless ocean. My brother had gone completely quiet, and that worried me. He had this way of going white, and leaving you without ever getting up from his seat when things were too big to get a hold on. He was doing that now, and the only thing I could think to do was keep my hands on his shoulders and encourage him to talk.
The bar closed and we were out on the street again looking for shelter from the wind. What I predicted about the umbrellas came true; they were practically flying through the air now like darts without direction. We spotted a subway terminal and I thought, the safest thing to do would be to hide down there for a while until it was time for us to begin the three-train journey to the funeral, which was only in a few hours anyway. So that’s what we did. We sat on the dirty cement steps leading down to the poorly lit urban dungeon. My brother told me he could sit there forever watching the howling drunks of four a.m. push carts down the stairs. I looked him over. He was off talking about the Lysol and pepper, and the flustered cab driver that hit his girlfriend, and he was off being white as a sheet and giving me looks like at any moment he’d jump into the next train and I’d never see him again.
We had a few hours to kill so I thought I would get us both something to eat. I had seen a twenty-four-hour corner store near the subway station that had a neon sign on the window that read, Hot Sandwiches on the way over. If I was going to somehow get us both to the funeral without sleep, and after several drinks, in this storm, we at the very least needed full stomachs. I asked my brother if he was OK with me leaving for a few minutes to get him some food. He nodded his head silently, but as I began to climb the stairs he said from behind me, “Thanks.” When I turned to look at him he had his head down and his back to me. I stood there for a moment not knowing what to say. “It’s fine,” was all I could think of. I went up the stairs and outside into the pouring rain and blowing wind. The streets felt empty and deserted. The city looked as if it would come down in the storm. The clouds would eventually part and there would be nothing left save these empty streets.
When I got halfway to the store I got that expanding feeling in my stomach again and thought of my brother sitting there alone on the subway steps. I couldn’t believe I had left him alone in the shape he was in. I paused by a street sign and held onto it, my head bent forward like I was going to vomit. I felt like I was going to collapse right there in the street, and it was all I could do to stand straight and head back to the subway terminal.
He wasn’t on the stairs. I slid my card through the machine and blew through the gate and ran down to where the trains pull up half-expecting to find a train parked there and subway workers frantically hurrying around with walkie-talkies. People would be gathered around a bit of blood covered, tattered clothing holding their hands to their mouths. A train conductor would be shouting hysterically, “He just came out of nowhere.”
I didn’t find him there. There was only a drunk with a cart filled with broken umbrellas muttering to himself. I felt a little embarrassed. I walked back up the stairs and found a restroom there and went in. There wasn’t anyone by the urinals but when I looked under the stall I saw my brother’s soaking wet dress shoes. The pants weren’t down around the ankles, and I knew he was just sitting in there fully clothed. I banged on the door and he unhatched the lock. He was sitting on the toilet with his head in his hands. I stood there for a moment trying to think of something to say.
I grabbed one of his hands and put it into mine and shook it. He just looked up at me confused with his hand oscillating in mine. He said, “What is this?”

When we arrived at the funeral the wind had gone but it was still raining. My brother and I were completely soaked and covered with an unidentifiable black grease from wandering around the subway terminal for three hours. We stood on the outskirts and watched them lower the casket while the family threw roses on it. I noticed out of all the people there, only a few of them had umbrellas, the rest were just standing in the rain trying to look as if it didn’t bother them, but I could tell it really did. I could tell that was something they were really thinking about. I pointed it out to my brother, “Look! They’re all getting soaked!” He followed the direction of my finger as I pointed to each person without an umbrella. We laughed a little but stopped when the preacher gave us a look like we had better quit it.
Soon the rain started coming down harder and the mourners looked ever more conscious of this fact. With each blowing torrent and crack of thunder we broke out into more laughter. People started shaking their heads at us. One man had his fist out in front of him and two others were holding him back. He kept saying, “God damn it,” while shaking his head. Others were joining in now and I held onto my brother like it was really time to cut it out. Then all at once a broken umbrella skated past us, and when my brother saw it he just let go. There was a sound coming from him I had never heard before. It was guttural, and it was coming from this place buried deep inside of him. He wasn’t crying; it was laughter. I watched him laugh. I had never seen anyone laugh so hard.

See The Monster

“I want you to recount the events of that evening. You must be totally honest with me.”
Morgan watched the man sitting across from him. It was just the two of them in a white room with a large one-way window.
He sat the file down on the stainless steel table and positioned his arms so that the file was somehow guarded from the gentleman opposite him.
“You have everything there in front of you. What is it you want to know?” The man watched Morgan intently, and smiled a little as Morgan, clad in a white lab coat, swung the file open and flipped through an entire catalogue of criminal case history and psychiatric assessments, each piece of evidence signed with notes by a Dr. Paulson.
Morgan looked at a photo. It was of a woman, faded and deceased. Her eyes looked as if they were searching for something in the white flash of a policeman’s camera. She had bruises on her face and thick red lines around her neck. There was blood on the wall behind her. He wondered if all crime scenes look this way. He hesitated, “Why did you do it?”
The man watched Morgan’s emotional reaction to the photo and nodded his head in a way that suggested he somehow anticipated it. He said nothing.
Morgan turned to another photo. It was a man. He lay bent and prostrated in the street with his arm twisted behind him. The abrasions on his head had earlier suggested he was thrown from the building behind him. There was something sticking out of his chest. Morgan looked closer. It was a cue stick, halved and bloodied. The photo was still, unmoving, and yet it intimated a sort of linear severity so obviously removed from the confines of paper and light. This thought seemed to jump out at Morgan. There is a story before and after, all entirely suggestible so long as one looks close enough.
“Which night? Both nights? There were many nights.” The man spoke with ease. He sat with his hands clasped together on the table.
Morgan smiled. “I’ve always wanted to say, ‘Tell me about the events of that evening...’”
“You did good.” The man smiled. “Now which evening exactly?”
Morgan slid a photo over to the man and tapped it. The photo was of an elderly woman. Her head was stuck in the glass shelves of what appeared to be her china cabinet. She wore a nightgown, and there was a broken cup of tea that lay in a puddle at her feet. The photo intimated a quick forward movement, as if she were walking to the cabinet when all at once she were thrown in with enough force the glass exploded over her head and jarred the loose skin of her throat. Her glasses hung from her neck, weighted with the calcified blood from the woman’s own body. She had a look of surprise on her face, as if her last thought was, Why? After eighty-two years.
The man looked down at the photo without touching it. “I watched her from my building across the alleyway. I watched her for weeks. I loved her, really. Everything she did somehow illuminated her disposition; she was an elderly woman of domestic qualities, widowed in New York. She sipped tea. She wore glasses on a golden chain around her neck.” The man looked up at Morgan and pointed to the glasses. The man smiled. “She was entirely herself. There were no complications in her life. She was an idea...and I enjoyed that immensely.”
Morgan looked the man in the eyes, and at the photo he was pointing at. He felt a sort of cold panic wash over him. The man’s eyes were detached, as if he were only memorizing something he had already invested his thoughts and emotions in. “When did you...” Morgan hesitated. “When did you go over there?”
“Why don’t you tell me that?”
Morgan said, “On October the twenty-first, 1991.”
The man nodded his head. He was incredibly still, and had this sterile cleanliness to him, as if his mind were as much trimmed and groomed as his outstretched hands and polite smile.
“Tell me what happened.”
“I knew from watching her, she kept her door unlocked, not because I had seen her lock it, but because she was very simply the sort of person that would not lock her door. She was self-involved. Entirely...”
Morgan interrupted, “Herself...”
“Yes. This kind of person is so very removed from the reality of the world around them, the outside thought of an intruder wanting anything to do with them would be an absurdity.”
“So you went to her building...”
“I climbed the stairs of her building and found her door. I knew from watching her building from my own, the floor plans were very large. I also knew she would be sitting at the table by the window going over her Reader’s Digest at that hour. So I walked in and had a look around.”
“She didn’t hear you?”
“No.”
“And you, had a look around?”
“Yes.”
“When did you...”
“I was sitting in her bedroom, on her bed, looking at pictures. I heard her walk into the dining room. I could smell the tea. The whole atmosphere was...domestic. I enjoyed that.” The man looked down at the photo and pointed to it. “I approached her from behind, here. I thought she would see me through the reflection of the glass. She didn’t. I simply pushed her in.”
“Simply?”
“Very simply, yes.”
Morgan slid the photo over to him and looked at it for a moment. He felt it had a sort of heaviness to it, that, once added to the bulging case-file, could not be lifted and carried away. Instead, it would somehow fall through the floor, through our world. The only place for it was a black depth completely removed from society. It belonged in blackness, or the white of their room. It was like a diver’s tank –lighter in the water, heavier outside. All at once he felt a sort of anger he hadn’t felt in a while. “Why? Why kill her? Or any of these people?!”
The man studied Morgan for a moment in silence. “She was beautiful. Her routine was beautiful. Her days all amounted to the same thing, the passing of life. And she passed her life to the precise timing of a stopwatch. There were no complications, no confusion as to whom she was. She could have never imagined a killer in her house. Suddenly I’m there, and suddenly she was no longer.”
Morgan, entranced with the subtle neatness of the man’s speech, unthinkingly slid the photos closer to him, so that they nearly fell off the table and into his lap. “What about these ones?” he asked, his voice cracking a little.
The man smiled. “Those ones too.”
“You killed them because they were, ideas?”
“In a nutshell, yes.”
“Were they taken by surprise?”
“All of them. I followed this man over the course of a week or so. He was a powerful drunk. We played a game of billiards. The game was not yet finished when he relieved himself in the bathroom and I, all at once, rushed him. I broke the cue stick over his head and plunged it into his bulging belly, and saw that a fall from a window was most fitting for him. Powerful men should fall out of windows with cue sticks lodged inside them. Always.”
“Then you just walked out of the restroom and finished your drink?”
“Yes. It was a half-empty dive and I knew I didn’t have to leave until someone visited the restroom.”
“The woman?”
The man adopted a solemn expression, and watched Morgan adjust himself in the loose fitting, long white coat. “She lived in that motel room. She was hiding out from this husband of hers. She was the battered woman: lonely, trusting, pale and fidgety. I sat on her bed for three hours before I finally threw her against the wall and knocked her out. I strangled her to death, and she never saw my face. She died like the others; completely unaware of what was happening, and so completely convinced of her own safety. She lacked the mind to defend herself.”
“But you said she was battered, so she had to have had some idea of...” Morgan paused, and more to himself, said, “Pain.”
“Her demon was her husband. Her own self-involvement denoted a belief the world was hers alone save the memory of his intrusions. He was her pain. Not me...well, for a while anyway.”
“You enjoy that element of surprise.”
“Yes. Completely.”
Morgan fell silent for a while. He looked at the photographs. He felt his heart skip a beat. He felt a connection with what the man was saying to him.
“Are we done?” The man asked.
Morgan hesitated and for a while just looked at the black window in the little white room. “Yes, we’re done.”
The two stood up and Morgan took off the long white coat and handed it to the man. The man put it on and along with it, a name badge with his picture on it. It read, Dr. Paulson.
“How did it feel?”
Morgan looked down at his case-file and back up at the doctor. He felt he had trouble breathing and had to steady himself before answering. “It felt like I was looking at a monster.”
Dr. Paulson paused for a moment and nodded his head. “That’s good, Morgan. You have to see the monster before you can defeat it.”
Morgan couldn’t look at the case-file any longer and closed it. He slowly walked towards the door, and Dr. Paulson pressed a button on the side of the table so that it opened. Behind it were two orderlies.
“Thank you Morgan. You did very well today.” Dr. Paulson watched Morgan leave with the orderlies and nodded at the black window to indicate the session was over.

The Chess Player

It was the great defense of 1985, perfectly orchestrated on a rainy morning in Montpellier. The photograph was taken at the precise moment Seirawan hid his king safely on h2, effectively ruining any chance Mikhail had of gaining counter play by attacking. The game would prove a maddening ritual of pawn manipulation entirely hopeless for Mikhail Tal. It was said he had expected a win from that game. Instead he’d move to an eventual draw against Jan Timman, sealing his tournament defeat. Seirawan was that push that sent Tal careening off course, captured in this black and white photograph indefinitely.
Morton studied the photograph meditatively, and for a long while he sat shuffling pieces around on the board in front of him to match the notation below the picture. He sipped his coffee and buttoned his jacket higher around his neck. He had never gotten used to the cold bite of Russian winters. They put the tables by the door. When it opens the snow blows in and stings his already red hands. They dry and crack, and he has to lick his fingers to turn the pages. He thinks maybe he’s too sick for the public. He enjoys this thought. Sick men playing chess in cold Russia, sipping coffee and disappearing into the perfect neatness of a classic photograph–there’s warmth in that the winters can’t touch.
“There it is, isn’t it? Such modern play for the year.”
Morton turned and met the face of the husky Russian voice behind him. The man looked on Morton’s book nostalgically, his hands loosely hanging on the rims of his balloon-like smoking jacket’s shallow pockets.
Morton looked down at the board and back up at the man. He hesitated, “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Russian.”
The man smiled. “Of course,” he said in perfect English. He gestured to the board and chair the way old men do in cafes, in this climate. “May I?” Although he was already pulling out a chair for himself and taking a seat. He then held two large knuckles out in front of him and said nothing. Morton sipped his coffee and absent-mindedly pointed to the man’s right hand. It concealed a white pawn.
“What are you doing in St. Petersburg?” The man asked the question while standing the pieces on the board, not looking up at Morton. Morton had no reply, and only watched as his opponent shuffled around in his massive coat. He had a sort of shrewdness to him, although he was not very thin. Thin men are shrewd, large men are greedy. And he wasn’t greedy, he was clever.
The stranger looked up and noticed Morton studying him. He smiled. “I’m sorry, I did not mean to sound so...meddlesome… I meant only to make for conversation.”
He looked Morton’s age, and like Morton he had those sparse and yet undeniable reminders of the way things fade and die, and grow white, as did the seldom stalks of hair on his loose chin. He thought, why does something grow when it is dead?
Morton laughed a little. “I’m a tourist here.”
The man nodded. “An American?”
“Yes.”
“That book you are reading,” he said after a while, “I have read it more times than I can count on these fingers of mine.” He held up nine stubby fingers and laughed like all Russians laugh.
Morton wondered where the missing index finger on his opponent’s left hand had gone, and if it should ever inhibit his time in speed chess.
“Ah...” The man stood up a little and bent over the table. “I almost forgot.” He made a rather illustrious bow. “Roman Nikolaevich.”
“Morton Christensen.”
“A Danish name!”
Morton nodded politely and made his first move. They played the Budapest Gambit. It wasn’t entirely interesting but at least safe, Morton imagined, maybe even resulting in a shorter game. This was favorable. Morton had grown a man of few friends, and he tended to avoid these pleasant encounters with just about everyone. Though however brief the nod of a street vendor in passing, it filled him with a sort of deep self-loathing. He could afford this sentiment at his age. He could afford to have no obligations to anyone.
It was just the two of them and the shop owner, who now went around the shop sweeping and dusting mantles. He paid little attention to the chess players. The shop was in lower Nevsky tucked away in a not too busy neighborhood. Morton enjoyed the quiet. And his plan as usual was to leave the cafe before the early morning traffic. It would be these young business types, these self-assured types. They would file through the swinging door talking on little cellular phones. They were so completely obvious to Morton. Russia could not have business people, it could not have professionals. It is a land without that necessary material all fast moving societies have; anonymity.
Roman brought out his knight and Morton did too in a ritualistic attempt to control the middle-board.
There was silence for a while. Both players made their moves swiftly. They were playing a very classical and elegant game, and they surprised each other; it’s not often that excellent chess players should cross paths at random in little cafes tucked away in quiet neighborhoods. The players realized this thought completely.
“You know I have met Mikhail Tal,” Roman broke the silence, making a move and pausing. “In my line of work it was custom to meet the chess players. Chess has always played such an integral role in government. And a chess player is...expected to play this role. We say…” Roman paused, and very comically he drew in a breath and puffed his chest out. “‘Look what we’ve produced here!’ Huh?” He studied the board and hesitated with a pawn in his hand before sweeping a piece off the board and setting it down amongst the other captured soldiers. They stood lined up there, defeated. Morton couldn’t help but notice the felt was torn on the bottoms of two pieces, and he wondered about calling the fragility of his set out to Roman but thought better of it.
“Think of what a chess player is comprised of, shall we? Intelligence, creativity...and he must always be a step ahead of his opponent! And when he is not? What happens? Huh?” Roman held two open hands near his shoulders and looked around quickly with bulging eyes. “…The game is lost!” he said finally. He smiled and lowered his voice. “In some way Russian chess is a failure for this very reason: It is Russian chess. When chess and politics are one iron fist...” Roman formed a fist out of his left hand with some difficulty. “...chess cannot evolve! Take this book.” He gestured to the book that now worked as a coaster for his half empty cup of tea. “The Syrian-American beats Mikhail Tal the great, Why? Seirawan played a modern game. Russia is slow and heavy handed in its methods, and this is the sort of game Tal played–one of the finest players of our time–he played a heavy handed game, a Soviet game!” This last line he whispered for reasons unknown to Morton.
Morton lost control of the middle and castled king-side. He wondered for a moment if a long castle would have been more appropriate as he had already advanced the pawn at h1. “Russians are the best chess players in the world…” he said after a while, a little distracted by the thought Roman could castle offensively, giving him a better position down the middle file.
“A certain kind of Russian.”
Morton sat back in his chair and wondered about the meaning of this statement.
“Incidentally, there has been an experiment. This experiment is what happens when you let a player think for himself. Do you know the outcome? We got Kasparov and you got Fischer!” Mr. Nikolaevich laughed until it drove him to a fit of coughing. “…It was a departure from our dear Botvinnik...surely!” With this last line Roman could hardly control himself–the image of the aggressive chess players in comparison with the rigorously uptight Mikhail Botvinnik was priceless.
Morton gave him some time to catch his breath before advancing his knight into a fork position, threatening a pawn and bishop. Roman sobered up for a moment and examined his options while Morton studied him a little more. He looked in his late sixties. His mannerisms were broad and sweeping. When he wasn’t talking his mouth was enveloped in this way that looked as if it would swallow itself, as if he were unabashedly unsatisfied with silence. And yet his mouth betrayed his gaze, which was remarkably concentrated, and lucid, somehow.
“Do you travel often, Christensen?”
“No.”
“Interested in our art, I presume?” Nikolaevich laughed sardonically.
He slammed his pieces down on the board with each move. His moves were authoritative and violent, betraying the character he had let on to Morton. Morton had played with this type of chess player before (They are common in Russia.) Moves were meant to be made with assurance. There was an air of battle to it. “Check.”
Morton studied the board. He had only one option.
“Check.”
He blocked check with a pawn and Roman advanced his king beside it. Morton knew the game was an irrevocable draw and allowed Roman some time to find it so that the game’s closure was mutually decided.
They shook hands.
“Fascinating...” Roman shook his head and watched the sparse, unmoving pieces on the board. He seemed to process the workings of their game in his head, and as he did this, he produced two small balls, yellow and blue, from his jacket pocket. He then rolled the balls around in his right hand and smiled at Morton, looking him directly in the eyes.
He’s senile, flashed through Morton’s mind.
Roman reached over the board with his free hand and slid Morton’s book over to him and opened it to only a few pages past the photograph of Seirawan and Tal. He studied the page and the board and nodded his head for a moment in silence.
He showed Morton what he was looking at. Morton followed the finger that was gently tapping the page. The finger was halved and grizzled, and Morton winced a little as he took the book into his own hands. It was the notation of a game played between Mikhail Tal and Jan Timman during the 1985 Montpelier Candidate’s Tournament. The game was a draw.
Although Morton was no master, he was indeed a very fine player, and his grasp on the algebraic notations, particularly the Staunton (the primary notation in Morton’s book) was unbridled. It didn’t take long for Morton to understand the Russian’s fascination. The game they had just played was an exact mirror of the game in the picture.
Morton reread the notation. “Impossible...” he said aloud.
Roman Nikolaevich smiled and leaned forward a little. “Not impossible!”
Morton shook his head. “You knew! And you manipulated the game so that it would follow...”
“Now that is impossible!” Roman laughed. “It takes two to play! How could I have known which moves you would make? Additionally, I did not realize the significance of our game until the very end!”
“A coincidence...”
“Not just a coincidence; a mathematical anomaly beyond cal-cu-la-tion.” Roman tapped the syllables of this last word in the air above his head. It seemed to Morton he enjoyed saying it, as it was here his otherwise flawless English accent slipped and loosened that strong, guttural Russian bellow, like the sound a child makes when imitating the deep voice of an adult.
“Good players play good games, there’s only so many.”
“But a game in your book?”
Morton thought aloud. “How could we have played their game?”
Roman Nikolaevich put the balls away and steeped his tea. He put the tea bag on the table and Morton watched the steam rise from it and the water pool around it.
“Not impossible…” Roman meditated.
There was a burning light in their café, and it allowed the shadows of the objects on their table to grow with the rising sun. The book, the tea, the coffee cup, the chess pieces with their tall dark counterparts–like an other worldly game–, were all so imminently the objects of a Russian morning it gave the impression of a theatre set imitating the subtle nuances of real life. Roman, too, seemed to be entranced in the flawless beauty of their gathering, and even more so in the mystery of their game.
“Well…” Morton broke the silence. He got up slowly from the table and held a hand out to Roman–a gesture that seemed to take him by surprise.
“No.” Roman didn’t stand or take Morton’s hand, but only shook his head quickly with his arms crossed. “We must play another!”
“I’m afraid…”
Roman latched onto Morton’s arm before he could finish. The gesture was not at all violent, but Morton could see he was possessed by some notion much larger than chess.
“What is it you want with me?” Morton asked laughing.
Roman began setting the pieces back up. “Another!” He said again.
Morton hesitated and after some deliberation he sat down heavily in his chair. He played PK4.


Halfway through their second game Roman lost the look of desperation he had put on briefly as if playing a part for Morton, and after lighting a cigar and coolly blowing the smoke into the air he broke into a sort of reverie. His monologue began all at once. He had a way of moving in quick bursts as he talked, and pausing like a hummingbird in mid-flight when he didn’t. He spoke of the coincidence of their first game, and slowly he drifted to the topic of coincidence alone, or, “The millions of events that seem to come together all at once, as if hurled down from heaven,” as he put it. Roman had over sixty years of practice with conversation, and he was one of those rare men who could bring out unrelated trivialities from the void, pair them all together, and say he had never thought of it that way, as if it was all his listener’s idea–but then of course that his listener is wrong, although surely onto something. Like this he moved to the subject of his own life. Morton, having not said a word, all the while wondering how he would approach his exit soon after the game, only watched Roman with a curious smile around his lips. He seemed to move mechanically, a note Roman took down while talking incessantly.
“…I’ve made more arrests than I can count.” Here Roman stopped, finally, and watched Morton as if expecting something.
“And what was your line of work?” Morton put in halfheartedly.
“I was a KGB intelligence officer.”
Morton paused with a pawn in his hand and looked on Roman intently. “KGB?”
Roman laughed. “A conversationalist now are we?” He castled his king. “The stories I could tell you, Morton Christensen.”
“And you talk at liberty about this past of yours?”
Roman hesitated. “Just between friends, OK? We are friends, Morton?”
Morton castled.
“I don’t know what possesses me, Morton, but I want to tell you a story.” Roman slid the tea bag off the table and again began steeping his half empty cup with it–his tea had now gone completely cold. He concentrated on Morton completely as he did this to a point where Morton had to avert his eyes. He studied the board for a little while and looked up–although it was Roman’s move–and when he again saw Roman was not yet done fixing on him, he diverted his attention.
“Our chess game was perfect, Morton. And I want to tell you a story about this kind of perfection. It happens occasionally…” Roman looked down at the board dejectedly. “I am very old now, Morton. Or maybe not quite that old…” He glanced quickly at Morton, “Perhaps we are close in age, you and I? What’s that? Fifty-eight you say? Yes, of course,” he nodded and gave Morton a mysterious look. “That age seems correct.” He leaned back from the board. “I’m at that point where you take a step and...” he gestured in such a way as to look as if he were spilling something, “...there’s no predicting anything…” Roman went quiet for a moment and began again, apparently remembering his original thought. “I’m sure you’re familiar with the KGB?
“Well, now, I’m sure you are. Everyone has some idea of the dealings of our secret service. The story I’m about to tell you, Morton, is entirely true…”
Roman hadn’t made a move for a little while now, and Morton, being of little patience, could only sit and eye the torn felt of his pieces, and feel a sort of panic come over him. He dubs them “attacks,” but they are little more than movements of mistrust and forebodings of lost time working through his system as if culminating to some volcanic burst of insanity, and they pass, namely because he was never given to meltdowns, and would have no idea where to begin. He is one of those people that swallow incessantly, and only spectate as the body is consumed by a living rigor mortis. It consumes him now, and if Roman hadn’t been preoccupied with the flowery subtleties of a neighborly monologue, he’d see Morton is on the verge of falling completely apart.
“…It was 1978, I believe. I was a secret service agent for our Russian government. I was assigned a case, a certain Lev Ivanov...a Russian-American drug dealer...” Roman sputtered the words out with complete abandonment while Morton looked on in a state of paralysis. Roman seemed inwardly to enjoy torturing Morton in this way. “We had been following this Ivanov for three years, and during that time he had embarked on campaigns of magnificent proportions. You have no concept of the KGB Christensen, but allow me to tell you of its brilliant functionality: Nothing, no object, no living thing, absolutely nothing in Russia escaped our watchful eye. We were everywhere. And we knew Lev, we knew him completely, and we watched him with such detail, such attention...well…that was our game.”
Roman was fixed on Morton, and so absolutely engaged in the necessity of this conversation, it seemed, momentarily to Morton, the inevitability of its conclusion was certain. He listened to Nikolaevich completely now, and as Roman went on, Morton fell deeper into this paralysis of thought and body.
Roman leaned forward so that his head nearly met Morton’s as he spoke.
“...Ivanov had a brother, and the two of them had worked out a series of vast purchases throughout Moscow and Leningrad. Although this brother, this certain Alexei, was not…the pest his older brother was, the two were inseparable, and we watched them, Christensen, with great detail.” Roman leaned back in his seat and, seeing that he had Morton’s attention, adopted a more relaxed tone.
Roman made a move and watched Morton distractedly study the board and make his.
“They had passports. There were very many, and everywhere they went a red flag went up. They had passed checkpoints all over the country. We had agents in Irkutsk, Minsk, and some of the furthest regions in Siberia who kept a close eye on them. Of course, they were not top priority. If I could be honest here, more than anything our government was interested in espionage, and it was here we paid the closest attention, but drug dealing, moreover American drug dealing, was certainly a reprehensible offense.
“You must understand the KGB, Christensen. It is like a bear that waits in hibernation. One thinks it is asleep, but stir a leaf, break a twig, lift a rock, and his eye will open. That eye will follow you everywhere.” Roman changed his face so that it appeared he was sleeping, and opened one eye as he talked.
“Once we are alerted to a...presence, in that very instant, we know our man better than he knows himself.” Roman made a move. “So now, where was I? Ah, the coincidence! My division had hardly taken an interest in Lev Ivanov. The man was a ghost and a vagrant and could be dealt with, should he surface and demand the attention of those institutions around him, by the local police. It wasn’t until a certain heroin purchase made here in Moscow with the help of our mafia that we began to look at Ivanov more closely. What was so strange about him, Christensen, was his arrogance. With all his passports, which incidentally could at this time be purchased easily in Moscow, he simply had taken no other precautions. It was as if he wanted to be found. You see, drug dealing was a constant affair, and I don’t have to alert you to the idea that our KGB and mafia were essentially the same thing, but...” Roman paused. “It was something about Ivanov’s openness that caught our attention. We had to ask ourselves, ‘If a man such as this, an American, wants our...’” Roman paused and laughed to himself a little, “‘Wants our heat,’ right? Is that how it is said, the heat?” Morton nodded silently. “We asked ourselves, ‘Why?’ It was here we thought, ‘C.I.A.’ An agent. Thus Lev Ivanov had our attention completely.”
Roman pulled another cigar out of his jacket pocket and bit the end off. The other, half smoked cigar, lay burning at the end of the table. He lit up and puffed the smoke slowly and quietly, so that the air around the two chess players was stagnant and hazy, and the world around them–the shop, and the window where one could see people beginning their hurried morning routine–disappeared. There were only the two of them now, in this thick haze of smoke and hushed discussion.
“I should tell you that, after all, Ivanov was no agent. I knew this, and more than anything I knew he was only stupid and arrogant, and had this notion the KGB would lose interest in him. He was half correct. I was left with the case after further investigation proved he was what he appeared to be: a swindler and a drug dealer. KGB had bigger cases. I don’t need to tell you of our…operations,” he smiled. “So it was just me–a young officer eager to leave this case and head on to espionage divisions–and a network of unlimited, and yet, coveted resources to shake up this Ivanov and his rogue brother, who, at this very moment, had taken an apartment in Moscow. These brothers, according to our sources, were very close. And other than the occasional purchase Lev would make on his own after much chiding from Alexei, they were every hour of the day together...”
Save the attention Morton showed the game he hadn’t moved a muscle. Now, as if stricken by his inability to shake Roman from his solitary morning, or a notion entirely different, Morton struck the chess board with his fist so that several pieces overturned. It was here that culminating volcano inside of him seemed to boil over, although he himself had little presentiment he would strike the board. Roman, apparently less surprised than Morton himself, paused and watched Morton closely. One again he put on that same sardonic smile on his face, as if, Morton thought, he were trying to seduce Morton into an emotional reaction.
With an expression of anguish surprising for Morton, he whispered in a tone denoting total honesty and panic, “What is it you want with me?”
Here Roman laughed and sat back in his chair. “Just a story between friends, Morton, a story between friends. I thought you’d appreciate it…because of our chess game...well now I see I have overstayed my welcome?”
Morton watched Roman, and for a brief moment neither of them spoke.
“Please, allow me to finish my story. I see by your expression you are beginning to come around. I believe the ending will interest you the most, Christensen.”
Morton, feverish with anxiety, clasped his hands together and looked down at the chessboard. The game was now unplayable, and he watched the queen as it rolled back and forth on its side.
“I have spent many years studying this day. Not because it was of special interest to my institution, but because the...circumstances of its closure struck me completely. I have since put the pieces together, and what I’ve constructed, I believe, is the truth of what happened.” Roman looked at the board and steadied the queen with his hand. He leaned forward and fixed his eyes on a shaking Morton Christensen. “On August the 21st.1981, Alexei Ivanov; fluent in Russian; a man of few attachments; a man involved in dealings reaching far over his head, received word from a close ally, a certain Ivan Volkovsky, that his brother, Lev Ivanov, had been taken by the KGB and killed that morning. Immediately after hearing this news, Alexei climbed the stairs to the top of his building and met the day. He looked out over a busy Moscow. He paused there for a moment and let the gravity of his older brother’s death sink in. He looked down at the little street below him, said goodbye to this world, and jumped seven stories.” Roman leaned back in his seat.
“The truth about that morning…what Alexei did not know, was that the information he had received was incorrect. It is true that we had taken Lev in for questioning–it was not my call, and we had been making certain bureaucratic changes I won’t be mentioning now that affected our position on drug dealing. So he was taken, but after spending some time with him we learned he and Alexei were not working alone, and were instead involved in something much larger than the both of them. And this attracted our attention, and through our...methods...he told us everything we needed to know. We had names, we had kingpins, and we had leads that connected other cases. We knew he was telling the truth. So we let him go with the understanding we would contact him soon and he would be required to do what we asked of him. But word travels fast in the underworld, and it was already out that Lev was taken. This kind of ‘informant’ tactic is rarely used...it was understandable that Ivan was under the impression Lev was already dead, which, in any other circumstance, I can assure you Morton, would be certain.
“So, here is poor Alexei in mid-flight, and, wouldn’t you believe it? Here is his brother, very much alive, heading home as instructed by our organization. This is where our anomaly, our…chess game,” he laughed, “settles in. At the precise moment Lev Ivanov approaches the building his poor younger brother is hurling through the air above him. Alexei strikes his brother and kills him instantly. Alexei lives, his brother does not. Amazing, isn’t it? I imagine in all the world there are few stories like it. But it exists! I can testify to it completely. Our analysts who later studied the scene, gave this account: ‘When the jumper hit Lev, he did it in such a way as to break Lev’s neck instantly with his chest, thus, on immediate impact, he must have broken several ribs. The blood trails show the jumper had crawled into an alley, and moved this way, on his arms, dragging his broken legs, for thirty-five feet. The trails end rather abruptly, and show he was taken away in a car shortly after.’ Do you want to know how we knew it was Alexei that jumped?” Roman smiled at Morton and waited for his response, but Morton did not respond, and only sat heavily in his chair with a sort of darkness looming over him. Roman, only encouraged by Morton’s obstinacy, carried on more excitedly. “The blood, Morton! The blood had pooled by Lev’s broken neck! And here are handprints all over his sleeping head! The evidence shows the jumper had spent time with Lev holding his head in his hands and, indicative by the dried salt on Lev’s face, weeping!
“No one had seen the incident, so we had no witnesses. But we were certain any other jumper would have cried out for help. Alexei, on the other hand, under the impression he was a target, could not. Only he would have crawled away like that, in such pain and agony. And only he would have been taken away by car–by the very same Ivan Volkovsky who provoked the jump in the very first place! Ironic?
“They must have hidden away with what money Alexei had already saved. He would have had to procure some doctor, and by sheer luck, work himself to health over the course of many years. He has since acquired new passports...and some…minor illegal work. He is still watched, of course, but since I had the case, it had been my business, and I never allowed an arrest. He is no longer a threat...he is a broken man...his ribs and his legs might have since healed with some difficulty...but his soul left him with the crack of his brother’s neck. He lives his life in solitude, entirely beaten by the shock of his role in his brother’s departure from this world. If he is a criminal, it is only because there is no other justice in his life. His life is entirely injustice. You might wonder, why doesn’t he kill himself? The answer to this question is yet another question, why? He must ask himself this every waking moment. You see, he cannot kill himself. He lives in a state of constant shock and disbelief, so completely stricken by the gravity of his injustice. His life is a shadow of that very moment; the very sound of his brother’s breaking neck.”
Roman paused and looked down at the chessboard meditatively. “Can you imagine, Christensen, the weight of such a thing? The perfection of their encounter? It is just like our game; that rare moment where the event mirrors a mathematical improbability. As if, if his life or this game were to begin again, it would take millions of turns until it took that turn, and acquire that shape.” Roman shook his head, “He must live his life searching for some pattern in everything, or the missing piece that gives his life some degree of significance.” He picked a pawn up off the board and studied it. “He is like a chess player, playing the same game again and again. He is playing fate. He has played our game, and he spends the rest of his life wishing he could somehow reset the pieces and begin differently. But he cannot! The game began the second he entered this world and ended the moment he realized it was his brother that broke his fall. It was inevitability. And the outcome will always be the same.”
Roman began setting the pieces up on the board while smiling at Morton. “Shall we play another? I can assure you our game will have a very different outcome.”
Morton said nothing, and rather morosely, he watched Roman’s giant hands stand the pieces on the board. It would be their third game–their second had ended in an incompletion, meaning it was a draw.
Their game was slow moving, and neither player said a word. It was mechanic, and the two played as if consumed with some idea, both entirely removed from the outcome. In the middle-game Roman had Morton running, and everywhere he went he encountered a wall or a trap, and with each solution the algorithms formed still more problems until, much like their first game, it became a game of pawns. Both players marched and sealed territory for their pieces. The final pawns were taken and the board was left empty, save two solemn kings.
The two players studied the board.
“Don’t worry, we won’t have to go looking through your book for this game,” Roman laughed.
Morton, no longer with his hands and his mind busy moving pieces and studying possible moves, was left with his hands clasped tightly around his book. He did not take his eyes off the board, and Roman did not take his eyes off his opponent. The two said nothing for a while, and only sat like this, in silence and suspension, until the shop owner dropped a dish somewhere in the kitchen, causing a loud crack.
All at once Morton jumped up from the table. Roman stood up too, and his jacket opened slightly enough for Morton to see the Tokarev pistol holstered below his left shoulder. Morton went for the gun and Roman caught his arm. Morton reached with his other arm and Roman grabbed this too, so that the two of them stood with Roman holding both of Morton’s hands to the table. Morton did not struggle, and Roman made no move to let go of Morton’s arm and reach for his gun himself. The chess players only stood like this, momentarily studying each other. Morton looked to Roman entirely defeated, and in his eyes was a sort of wisdom, as though Morton were so completely used to being helpless in this way he could have imagined for himself no other outcome.
Roman said in Russian, I’m so sorry Alexei.
Alexei Ivanov turned his head away from Roman, and Roman loosened his grip. The two opponents stood there for a moment when all at once Alexei turned and hastily walked out of the cafe. He dragged his leg as he walked.
Roman Nikolaevich stood there smoking after Alexei had already gone. He bent down and picked the chess book up off the ground and opened it to the photograph of Seirawan and Tal. He stood the pieces on the board, and for a long while he followed the game to Tal’s eventual resignation in silence. He had four pawns to Yasser’s seven. Tal had no choice but to resign, this much was clear to Roman. Where it is unclear in other areas of life, the conclusion in chess is imminent and unavoidable, and there is a pattern, physical proof, that one can follow from the beginning to the end. It was right there in front of him in black and white notation–a language of history free of interpretation. And yet, as he neared the end of the game, he couldn’t help but hope the outcome would somehow turn out differently for Tal.