Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

Out the window, Aleksandr watched a car splash mud on the side of a building.

“But it’s not you I care about, tovarish. It’s only your brain. Let’s get that straight.”

Aleksandr, who’d long thought that he and his brain were one and the same, did not know why he found this insulting. “Yes,” he said. “I don’t think I was confused on that point.”

“So you can go back to playing,” said Petr Pavlovich. “That’s the upshot. I hope you’re happy. I hope you’re overjoyed.”

“Thrilled.”

“Good. I’d hope so. Your happiness is just such a radiant thing, you know? It lifts us up and makes us better people. It’s truly a joy to witness. It’s an inspiration to all generations.”

“All right. Enough.”

“The match will resume on Tuesday.”

“Noted.”

“You’re welcome in advance,” said Petr Pavlovich, sniffing sadly. “I’m sure there’s a thank-you card already in the mail.”

The match resumed, and Aleksandr found himself gripped by caustic paranoia. He began to regard Dmitry with grave suspicion. He watched as Dmitry chewed his lips unconsciously or shaved his stupid face (needlessly, always needlessly) or talked inanities into the telephone — to his tedious girlfriend, allegedly, though Aleksandr no longer felt sure that was the case. There were a few openings in which Rusayev responded a little too quickly, a little too cleanly, and Aleksandr began to wonder whether Dmitry had been bribed to pass on his opening moves to Rusayev. As soon as Aleksandr wondered, he was convinced. The theory moved in his head like a mechanical apparatus. The gears shifted; the pulleys pulled.

When Aleksandr went to the Party doctor — to be weighed and assessed and prodded like a piece of prize cattle — he was asked about his stress level, his nightmares, his anxieties, his fears. Aleksandr sat on the edge of his seat and refused to answer. These questions were too pointed; Aleksandr wouldn’t be surprised if this guy, too, was in on it. No matter: he wasn’t a chess prodigy for nothing. Aleksandr swung his knees and spoke brightly about the satisfactions of the game: the consolations to be found in triumph, the wisdom to be found in loss. The doctor’s mouth went flat as a blade. He made a note on his paper.

In the end, the match took fifty-three games — an unending, unthinkable number. The journalists were alternately awed and gleeful and bored and disbelieving. When the final moves were made — when Aleksandr sacrificed his queen to the ready arms of Rusayev’s waiting bishop — the audience leaned forward, intent, breathless. The cameras snapped like offended turtles. Aleksandr cracked his knuckles and shuffled his fingers. He realigned his shoulders. He was the first to see when Rusayev’s gaze started to swim — not with tears but with the blurry confusion of a child who has been asked to explain how he solved a copied math problem. The audience didn’t see, though, so they hunched forward and held still and wondered collectively at the nature of what they were witnessing — insane, suicidal, miraculous? Out into the universe, the taut figures of Aleksandr and Rusayev were cast on beams of light that dodged checkpoints and disregarded diplomatic protocol. Bits of dust fell from the ceiling and caught the limited glow of the lamps, making the room frosted and dreamlike. Aleksandr drummed his fingers, which he knew was cruel and theatrical. Rusayev’s face hemorrhaged momentary disbelief before easing into the nearly grateful expression of someone whose bitter disappointment is outmatched in the end by his profound fatigue. He had seen. He took his next turn with a resigned graciousness. The rest was ritual, the stately etiquette followed by a retreating army. Rusayev smiled slightly and swallowed. Aleksandr blinked and saw his future flash before his eyes. His hands shook, his head emptied, a cable ran arctic-cold from his throat to his stomach, and he was surprised even then by how the best moment of his professional life could feel so much like absolute terror.

And then it was over. Rusayev’s king was idling on the tile, and Rusayev was signing the score sheet, and Aleksandr’s ears were failing him. A man was loping up the stage with a cavernous smile, an outstretched hand, and a trophy.

Afterward, Aleksandr sat at the hotel bar while Dmitry went to pack. On state television, an ugly news reporter was talking about Aleksandr’s win. His youth was much remarked upon, as though the best thing that could be said of him was that he’d had the courtesy not to be around for very long.

The next morning Aleksandr woke, as he often did, to a ringing phone. “Get it, Dmitry,” Aleksandr groaned, until he remembered Dmitry was gone; he’d left the night before, pink-eared and elated to be finally done with his job and returning to his silly fiancée — Galina, was that her name? Aleksandr realized he’d never asked. He stood up. On the floor, Dmitry had left some scattered belongings, the accrued bits and pieces of his half a year as a glorified refugee butler. There were pens and coat hangers and mysterious scraps of paper — receipts of purchase that Aleksandr did not recall being present for, though they’d been side by side the whole time. Who was Dmitry? Where was he now? Why wasn’t he answering the phone?

For a short, buoyant moment, Aleksandr thought of who might be calling to congratulate him — his mother, most plausibly, though she usually waited for him to call her these days. It was unlikely to be anyone from the chess academy; their undisguised resentment had bothered him back when he felt he deserved better. Now it seemed appropriate. He did not wonder whether it might be Elizabeta, because he never thought of her anymore.

The phone kept ringing. He knew — and really, he’d always known — that there was only one person it could possibly be.

Petr Pavlovich sniffed happily into the phone. “Congratulations, friend,” he said.

“No thanks to you.”

“Quite a lot of thanks to me, if you think about it.”

“I don’t.”

“How does it feel?”

Aleksandr went to the window and looked out at the graying morning. The day already looked like a dirge. There was a horrible taste in the back of his throat. “Like nothing. It feels like nothing.”

“Oh, come. Don’t be bitter.”

“It feels the same.”

“It surely does not.”

Petr Pavlovich was right. It did not feel the same. Now that he’d gotten what he wanted, he had justified his entire life — every isolated and selfish and odd childhood habit, his lack of friends, his lack of romance. His decision to stop the journal, his decision to hang around these people for the past four years and eat every imported delicacy they fed him. It had all paid off; it had all been warranted. He’d chased his own ego across an enormous country, and here, in Moscow, in Hotel Sport, he’d finally caught it. He was the best chess player in the world for now — though every moment he crept closer to the day when this would no longer be the case, and who was to say (even now, even right this second) that there wasn’t somebody out in the vast world who could beat him? Some wild-eyed prophetic prodigy in a cave somewhere, perhaps, or some nobler version of himself in some alternate universe who hadn’t had the stomach to make the compromises he’d made. The victory, such as it was, was bitter — that was to be expected. How odd that it also felt elusive. He watched the second hand flinch its way across the face of the clock, and in each moment, he wondered. Was he world champion now, really? Was he world champion now ? You couldn’t ever be sure. Funny that he’d never thought of that when he was deciding whether to cash in the entire rest of his life for a chance at this. He’d never be able to be sure of his success. Even if he were world champion, truly, the man who would someday beat him (and of course it would be a man) had already been born, no doubt — he was already making puzzles in the sand, or tearing chess games out of the newspaper, or staring silently at the wall for hours on end. He was already lonely. He was already worrying his parents. They were already seeing in him the radiant seeds of greatness or lunacy or both; they saw their child driving a wedge into the world and opening up a new rift where he would someday sit, anointed, applauded, when Aleksandr was old and forgotten.