Robert Wilson - The Divide

“I don’t know yet.” He shrugged out of his jacket. “You want a game?”

“Won’t that be distracting?”

“No.”

“All right, then.”

They played twice. The first game was a rout. Susan’s mind wasn’t focused on the board—she was cold, and frightened by what the manager at the Goodtime had said—and John pried out her castled king with a bishop sacrifice; checkmate came quickly.

She took the second game more seriously. She played a King’s Indian defense and pondered each move scrupulously. By playing a combination of aggressive and defensive moves she was able to keep him at arm’s length. Her interest deepened. She saw a chance to open up his king—a knight fork that would force a pawn move; she would lose the knight, but it would leave her bishop and her queen in a single, powerful diagonal aimed at his broken pawn ranks. Was there a flaw in this reasoning? Well, probably … but Susan couldn’t find it. She shrugged and advanced the knight.

John captured it with his pawn.

Susan hunched down over the board. If she brought the bishop down—and then the queen, while his knight was still pinned—

John said, “Look.”

She raised her head.

A man had just come through the door. A short man in a heavy coat, shivering. He bought a doughnut and coffee at the counter, turned and spotted John.

Recognition flashed between them. The man muttered and turned toward the door.

Susan whispered, “Who is he?”

“His name is Tony Morriseau,” John said, “and we need to talk to him.”

She stood up with John and cast a last glance at the chessboard.

She was a move away from checkmate. He hadn’t noticed.

Chess, John had told her, was mainly a memory trick. The difference between a chess master and a “civilian” player was that the master had stored a vast internal library of potential positions and was able to recognize them as they developed on the board. That, plus a certain finely honed ability to concentrate attention, made all the difference.

John was not technically a master because he had not played in enough tournaments to acquire a significant rating. His chess playing had been an amusement. (“An experiment,” he once called it.) He had played, at least in those days, to relish his easy superiority over his competitors. It was a cruel, private entertainment. Or so he claimed. But Susan remembered what he had said when they first met, across this table, when she asked why he went on playing when it was obvious that he would win: “ One hopes,” he had said.

Hopes for an equal, she thought. Hopes for recognition, for understanding. Hopes for a touch, for a contact, miraculously, across that divide.

What matters, Susan thought, is that he had never really abandoned that hope. Even now, deep in this killing winter. It was alive inside him.

She took a last look at the chessboard, then followed him toward the door.

John followed Tony Morriseau out into the cold afternoon.

A bank of snowclouds had rolled in from the west; the sunlight was fading into winter dusk. Strange how vivid all this seemed. It was true, what he had told Susan: since childhood he had lived in a world of Platonic abstraction. Schema and essence, the word behind the shadow. It was Benjamin who had inhabited the universe of surfaces and colors.

But that was changing. He felt it now, and he felt it accelerating. He stepped into the biting winter air in a shower of snow crystals, and he was stunned by the immediacy of it all. Was this how Susan experienced things? All sense and no cogitans —this playground of perception? Made it hard to think.

He was deluged by dusk and snowdunes, by the amber glow of the streetlights so cold and melancholy they seemed to burn into his sight. The knife of the wind. The hiss of his breath.

How meaningful it all seemed: a new and ancient language …

“John?”

Susan’s voice was crystalline and intimate. He turned to look at her. She was beautiful. She was frowning. “Are you all right?”

He shook his head. Maybe he wasn’t. He started to say, “I—” But the word itself hovered in the air, a pure and absurd syllable. It had no antecedent. He was as hollow as the sky.

Please, not now, he thought.

“Just a little dizzy,” he said.

“He turned the comer south of here,” Susan said.

John hurried after the retreating figure of Tony Morriseau, forcing recollection on himself. Tony Morriseau who had sold him the Corvette …

Tony Morriseau the drug dealer, who might know something about Amelie.

Amelie whom he must find, because he had assigned himself this task. For Benjamin, it was the repayment of a debt. For John … say, an experiment with an idea. An idea about lineage. An idea about descent.

Tony was too proud to run and John caught up with him in the blank whiteness of a parking lot, the streetlights splaying out weird shadows all around them. Tony whirled and said, “Fuck off!”

“We need to talk,” John said. He heard Susan behind him now: her cold breath and the squeal of her boob against the snow.

“We don’t have anything to talk about,” Tony said.

“About Roch. About Amelie.”

“I don’t know anything about them.”

But Tony was lying. John heard it in the angle of his words, brittle phonemes like tiny shards of ice. Tony knew Roch and Amelie from their street days: John remembered Amelie talking about it. “Tell the truth,” John said.

“Go fuck yourself,” Tony said.

But John possessed the key to Tony’s soul. Tony was a small, pale, undefended thing under his shell of skin and it was not difficult to trick him out. He had done it before. “You talked to Roch.”

Tony looked suddenly doubtful. “Yes …”

“What did he want?”

But now Tony frowned and canted his head. “Why should I tell you?”

And John was startled.

“Because—” he began.

But the words weren’t there.

They had always been there before.

“Asshole,” Tony said.

Susan stepped forward. She looked small and delicate in the snow. “Please,” she said.

Tony shifted to look at her.

“Amelie’s in trouble,” Susan went on. “If you know Roch, you know the kind of trouble I mean. All we want is to find her.”

“What are you, her social worker?”

“Her friend.”

“I talked to Roch,” Tony said, “but not about Amelie.”

“He bought something from you?”

“Not from me. A guy I know. What he wanted, I don’t have. All right? That’s it, that’s all I have to say.”

John collected himself. “Did he tell you where he was going?”

Tony regarded him with instant contempt; he began to speak, then hesitated. John was connecting, but only sporadically. “No,” Tony said. “Except—he mentioned something about ‘the warehouse.’ He said he was ‘going to sleep in the fucking warehouse tonight.’ That was last week. I don’t know what it means.” Tony frowned massively. “Just get the hell away from me, all right? I would really appreciate that.”

He turned and was gone across the parking lot toward the lights on Yonge Street.

John was suddenly dizzy. Susan put a steadying arm around him.

“John? Can you make it back to the hotel?”

He felt her warm presence against the cold dark and decided he could.

Susan wrapped her arm around John’s waist and helped him through the hotel lobby, ignoring the hostile stare of the desk clerk; maneuvered him up the elevator and through the door of the room. He was cooperative but loose-jointed; his body radiated a feverish heat.