Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

He dreamed of playing Rusayev so often that he sometimes confused mistakes he’d actually made with mistakes he’d invented in his sleep. Winter came. Two months into the match, Rusayev won again.

And then, finally, just when almost everyone else had stopped paying attention, Aleksandr won a game. Fourteen more draws followed. And when the audience — and cerebral individuals the world over — cracked their necks and rubbed their eyes and turned back to the tournament, they found different men at play.

Aleksandr’s incipient defeat had made him more stubborn-looking. When he looked at himself in the mirror, he saw that he’d adopted the half-awake gaze of a nocturnal animal. He burrowed himself further and further into the game, and everything else took on a filmy, aquatic feel. The incidentals of his life — the transport to and from the building, his state-provided meals, the cold nights in the hotel with Dmitry — came to seem utterly artificial, shadows cast by the Platonic reality of the game. Outside the tournament, he grew inarticulate, withdrawn, bleary-eyed. He gave deeply unsatisfying answers to journalists who wanted to know about his strategy. He had no insights to share, no history he felt warranted reporting, although he sometimes told them small anecdotes about his sisters on the island. More than one TASS profile remarked that in spite of being a brilliant chess mind and all, Aleksandr seemed more than a little dumb.

Inside, though, he stayed vigorous, alert to Rusayev’s every twitch and eyelid flutter. He saw columns and rows of the board in every street; he started categorizing his own movements in algebraic notation. D3, he moved straight ahead to the lunch buffet of pork and borscht and Pepsi-Cola, timid and humble as a pawn. Qe7, he sailed stately, imperious, across the stage to his chair, his eyes locked on his target, his gaze lethal with power and surety. Nc4, he twisted — rearing, equine — out of the path of a passing government vehicle in the street.

Rusayev was not doing as well. He’d lost five kilos over the course of the tournament; he wheezed into his handkerchief and ate almost nothing at meals. His skin had taken on a sagging, redundant quality; he looked increasingly like an old elephant on a ritualized journey to death. There were moments while making a move when he lurched alarmingly far forward, and the already still audience grew stiller as they waited, waited, for him to collapse. Although he never did, there were some who commented that peasants — in other, wilder, less modern times than these — would be inclined to attribute his transformation to sorcery, and to regard Aleksandr with more than a little dark suspicion. This was the future, however, and nobody thought those things anymore.

The newspapers began to mutter about Aleksandr, since they loved a good mutter. Aleksandr was the youngest man to compete at this level since Mikhail Tal, they muttered. He’s almost as young as that autistic American teenager, they muttered. He will not win, of course he will not win, it’s a travesty to suggest that he might. But still, it was muttered, he might. He might.

Then Aleksandr won the forty-seventh game. Then he won the forty-eighth. Rusayev was two games ahead, but the momentum of the tournament had shifted. Aleksandr sat up straighter. He slept better at night. Rusayev coughed into the sleeve of his shirt and glowered at Aleksandr with watery, red-rimmed eyes. Early on the morning of the forty-ninth game, Aleksandr received a phone call.

It was five in the morning, and Dmitry answered the phone. He listened for a moment and then handed it to Aleksandr. “It’s Petr Pavlovich,” he said.

“Of course it is,” said Aleksandr, taking it. It was warm for February, which meant it was very cold, and Aleksandr didn’t turn on a light or get out of bed. Outside, he could hear melting snow sluicing through the gutters. “What?” he said into the receiver.

Petr Pavlovich sniffed. “Not very friendly in the mornings, are you?”

“What do you want?”

“Need some more sleep, do you?”

“What is it?”

“Don’t worry, you can go back to bed. They’ve suspended the tournament.”

“What?” He sat up, feeling the oddly humid frigidity of the hotel air clamp down on his shoulders and torso. It was its own fucking ecosystem, this hotel room.

“FIDE has decided to suspend the tournament. For now. Until the irregularities can be resolved.”

“Irregularities? What irregularities?”

Dmitry turned on the light and stared, his eyes crusty with sleep, his expression abjectly interested.

Petr Pavlovich sneezed. “Just certain aberrations.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Don’t agitate yourself.”

“You mean that I’m winning now?”

“I certainly do not mean that. And you’re not exactly winning.”

“I was never supposed to beat Rusayev, was I?”

“Oh, God, you’re tiresome.”

“Why now, then?”

“Have you taken a look at Rusayev? The man’s ill.”

“He’s not ill,” said Aleksandr. He kicked at the edge of Dmitry’s bed, sending Dmitry scuttling toward the wall. “He’s just old. He’s just decrepit. He’s just exhausted because he’s starting to lose, and losing is exhausting. I should know. I’ve been losing for five months. You didn’t seem too concerned about that.”

“You’re being childish.”

“You’re being corrupt. I’ve given him forty-eight free chess lessons.”

“This has been going on for half a year. It’s an embarrassment.”

“An embarrassment to whom?”

“To everyone. Not least of all yourself. We had higher hopes for you, Aleksandr.”

“No, you didn’t. Obviously, you didn’t.”

“There’s a press conference tomorrow,” said Petr Pavlovich. “There will be an announcement that the match will end without decision. It’s become a test of physical endurance.”

“It hasn’t.”

“There will be a press conference tomorrow. You’ll attend.”

Across the room, Dmitry was pulling up the curtains, revealing a sour, underwhelming dawn.

“I won’t,” said Aleksandr.

At this, Pavlovich laughed. “Aleksandr, you forget that I know you. I know you better than anyone does, probably, at this point.” He sneezed again. “You will attend. You will. Of course you will.”

The day of the press conference, Aleksandr woke up early. Across the room, Dmitry was still sleeping, mouth half open, hands curled into fists like a newborn, and Aleksandr found himself staring, wondering what the rest of Dmitry’s life had been like. It made him squirm to think that Dmitry had made similar compromises, endured similar challenges, only to sit next to Aleksandr at a table and worry over his stress levels. At least Aleksandr had sold his own soul, assuming he had one, for something a bit more glamorous.

Dmitry opened his eyes and sat bolt upright. “What are you doing?”

Aleksandr took a step back. “We need to get ready.”

Then again, here they were: stuck in the same hotel room, breathing the same stale air, watching the same dull programming night after night, chewing over the same chess moves — and at least, at the end of it all, Dmitry had a fiancée, another life, to return to.

Dmitry blinked.

“The press conference,” said Aleksandr.

“You need me there?”

Aleksandr didn’t like admitting that he needed Dmitry anywhere, and he wasn’t about to say so out loud now.

“It’s protocol,” said Aleksandr. Dmitry had a worshipful regard for protocol.