Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

“Nina.”

“Nina. Of course. And so?”

“Ah, no.” Aleksandr shifted the phone to the other ear. “No immediate plans.”

“I see. You’re much too busy, I’d imagine.”

“What are you calling about?”

“Well.” Aleksandr could hear Petr Pavlovich gearing up to make his pitch, stripping his voice of its endemic weary sarcasm. “I know you’re very into technology. Very up on the latest developments. The caller ID and so on.”

“Mmm,” said Aleksandr. He eyed the stereo system nervously.

“As you’re probably aware, IBM has been building a program that plays chess.”

“I know,” said Aleksadr eagerly. This he actually did know.

“Big Blue, Deep Blue Sea, something like that. It’s very good now. Been in testing for years. It beats everyone who plays it. They program all possible responses to all possible moves into its — whatever — its brain, I guess, and then they program it to know which ones are most likely to be successful in every possible scenario. It’s what your brain must do, essentially. You’re programmed for exactly the same kind of responses.”

“Yeah, but I have to think about them.”

“This thing thinks, right? It just thinks faster. It’s what — algorithms, right? I don’t know, it’s not my area. Anyway, they want you to play it.”

“Should I?”

“Of course. Can’t you beat it?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s a pile of tubes. You’re the greatest living chess player in the world. I’m sure these kids at MIT who made it are smart, but it’s going to be a game of Tetris for you, right?”

“Probably. How should I know?”

There was a pause. “When you were a younger man, you know, I don’t think you would have hesitated.”

Aleksandr went to the picture window. Outside, the St. Petersburg sky was ensconced in folds of blues and grays, masking all the new construction projects, the new billboards, the new fruits of what was fast becoming a new kleptocracy. It was the future. They wanted him to play a computer. Aleksandr would not have hesitated when he was a younger man, but he was no longer a younger man.

“It’ll be a disaster if I lose,” he said.

“It’ll be publicity if you lose. But you won’t lose.”

“I don’t know.”

“Aleksandr,” said Petr Pavlovich merrily. Aleksandr could almost hear him smiling. “You forget you’re the world champion. Have a little confidence.”

Aleksandr would remember the game much as he’d remember the entire decade, when he remembered it at all, which was rarely. It came back distorted, in fragments — the puckered cheeks of the man who stood in for the computer, inflating and deflating with distraught little breaths; the silence of the crowd — still, then suspenseful, then stunned. Afterward, there was the astonished grimace of Petr Pavlovich — he’d often been surprised by Aleksandr, but never this way. Then there was the gleeful chattering of the MIT people, the Internet enthusiasts, the tech reporters — the triumphalism, everybody buzzing happily about this brand-new kind of apocalypse. Aleksandr knew — even as he was playing, even as he was losing, even as he was taking the limousine back to his apartment — that he’d have to approach this evening in the same way that he’d approached his marriage. He would try not to think about it. He would try not to remember its details, its sequences, its accumulated humiliations.

Nina had been following online, and when he got home, he caught her, feet curled up under her, silk nightgown shimmering in the moonlight (Nina owned so much silk that he wondered whether she had an entire silkworm army somewhere in the closet) — and he knew that she’d been poring over the results, the analysis, the obsessive online speculation. She might not understand the details, but the tone — the headline, the upshot — was inevitably clear.

“I’m sorry, Aleksandr.” She closed the computer quickly.

“Yes.” He beelined for the cabinet and poured whiskey into a water glass.

“I really am.”

Aleksandr considered ice, then rejected it. “I really am, too.”

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

He did not want to tell her about it. He did not want to tell anyone about it. He did not even want to tell himself about it in his own head. The people who had watched had understood. What was there to say about it? Nobody would ever beat that thing. Nobody would ever again do sums on an abacus. And could he be sorry? What kind of person could be sorry to watch history march forward, and progress be attained, and problems be solved? Yes, yes, there was some romance lost when they mapped the entire globe, but still. You couldn’t root against it; that was like wishing that all the tiny villages of the world would keep their untranslatable, useless languages and their horrific hygiene practices just so we could all go and look and think that they were authentic and quaint. Aleksandr had an ego but not that kind of ego. He would not demand that the world know less so that he could know the most.

“You look awful,” said Nina.

He poured another whiskey. “I’m fine.”

“You look like you’re about to kill yourself.”

“Well, I’m not.”

“Or me.”

“Never fear.”

Nina went to the couch and produced a nail file from somewhere on her person. Aleksandr poured a third glass. On the couch, Nina commenced vigorous filing, and he watched her for a few moments. He never understood how she managed not to start filing her actual fingers. Aleksandr sat down at the computer.

Nina looked up. “You don’t need to look at that stuff about the game.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“You really don’t.”

“I really wasn’t.

“There’s some stuff on there you don’t want to see.”

“Christ, Nina,” Aleksandr roared. “I know.”

She looked at him, eyes brimming with emotion. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen Nina look sorry for him. He knew he did not like it.

“Really, Alyosha,” she said. “It’s only a game.”

There was a détente then — there must have been. Some benumbed years, an admission of estrangement that resulted, oddly, in more kindness. Once he stopped trying to make Nina his wife, he could better appreciate her as a friend of a sort; a person to enjoy spending money on and with. There are as many ways for a marriage to work as there are ways for a marriage to fail, and theirs, he thinks now, was working. He knows because he is sure — absolutely sure — that on the day of the bombing, he was gazing at Nina with fondness.

It was the tail end of August 1999, and they were spending the weekend in Moscow with some friends of Nina’s. He’d been waiting for Nina to finish trying on shoes at a store in Manezh. He was standing outside the shop and watching her through the window — he could see the slight sour curve of her frown as she pressed her porcelain heel into some punishing scrap of footwear — and he knows that things must have been going better for them because he remembers admiring her, thinking how beautiful she was, how proud he was to have an exacting wife who knew what she wanted in a shoe. Striated light came sieving through the big picture windows. Nearby, a little girl shrieked on a small plastic indoor ride — it was a blue bewhiskered walrus that moved slowly up and down — and Aleksandr felt that the world was well. They were headed out that night to a sushi dinner, followed by an evening at a club, and Aleksandr was already looking forward to his sashimi and his buzz. Inside the store, the light caught Nina’s red hair, and it glinted nearly gold. “Mama, Mama, Mama, it’s a walrus!” said the little girl on the ride.