Joseph O’Neill - The Dog

Still, it’s in everybody’s interests that the internship goes smoothly and productively, and to this end I’ve introduced the little big guy to Sudoku. The puzzles come in paperbacks and therefore do not offend against the no-computer rule; neither do they break the no-fun-and-games rule because they offer a brain workout that’s certainly better than meaningless number-crunching. To make things even more exciting, I’ve introduced Alain to the Martial Arts Sudoku series, which has White Belt puzzles for beginners, and so on, up to Black Belt for real experts. When I call him over to my desk and explain how Sudoku works, he seems uninterested. But not much time passes before he tosses the White Belt book onto my desk and says, ‘Too easy.’ ‘Wow, that’s pretty fast,’ I say. I have the next book ready for him and not without ceremony remove it from a desk drawer and deliver it into his possession. I say, ‘Check out the frontispiece .’ (I feel it will do the kid good to hear the word ‘frontispiece’, even if I am not exactly sure what ‘frontispiece’ means. I like to slip him the odd ten-dollar word, like ‘litigious’ and ‘iconoclastic’ and ‘intricate’. They might come in useful.) I show him the plate that, in anticipation of this moment, I’ve pre-glued onto what I think may be the ‘frontispiece’ of this book. The plate reads,

Alain Batros is hereby admitted to the rank of Sudoku Green Belt.

The kid neither acknowledges the honour nor disdains it. He returns to his seat, assumes his slouch, and sullenly flicks through the pages of new puzzles. For what it’s worth, sullenness strikes me as a logical, healthy and correct stance for Alain. But whether he is sullen or sunny — or in good or bad health, or succeeding or failing — is something I refuse to be dragged into. Once I have satisfied myself that he is for the time being safe and self-sufficient, I am entitled to view him as factically as possible, that is, view him as being on a par with the other occurrences — pencils, microbes, light streams, sounds, galaxies, etc. — out of which arise the accidental phenomena of this room and my consciousness of it. The kid becomes just part of the givens. That he may be overweight or fear the dark or have trouble making friends or enjoy watching basketball is not my concern and cannot be made so by Sandro placing him in the same room as me and counting on this obligatory mutual vicinity to make me act in loco parentis or in loco amicus or otherwise wear some unwarranted caretaking hat. I am obliged to accept the son’s presence as my intern and to be a decent and reasonable temporary boss; but I am not obligated to accept and will not accept any responsibility for his greater welfare. Any occasional act of kindness I may choose to do for the kid is of a strictly private nature and between him and me and does not as it were constitute any kind of waiver or abandonment of my right to dwell within the aforementioned limits of obligation.

In order to strengthen and give helpful physical expression to these limits, I have instructed Ali to arrange for a partition to be placed between me and Alain — to, in effect, enclose me in my own room-within-a-room. That way the kid and I won’t have to spend the day feeling under the other’s surveillance. Although he may be an inept teenager, I would be crazy to lose sight of the fact that he is a Batros and in a position to blab about me. This will not have escaped him. Children are natural snitches and squealers and accusers. This is because adults are natural policers, prosecutors, fact-finders, judgers, punishers, torturers, hangers, electrocuters, gravediggers, and defamers of the dead.

The kid is flipping to the back of the puzzle book, where the solutions are set out.

‘Hey,’ I say. ‘You can’t do that.’

He slouches some more. Evidently he is stuck.

‘Let me see that,’ I say, and there is a loud squawk of chair legs as he gets up. I take a look at the puzzle. ‘Mm,’ I say. ‘Not easy.’ I’m not lying. It isn’t an easy problem; and the fact is, I’m only a Brown Belt, and just barely. A lot of Brown Belt puzzles stump me, and too often I am faced with the choice of making a guess or abandoning the puzzle. Guessing is out of the question, of course, since that would defeat the point. The trouble is, not finishing the puzzle also defeats the point.

(I am in awe of Sudoku Martial Arts Black Belts. I would love to meet one of these logical warriors and find out how he or she does it — how, in particular, s/he masters the challenge of bifurcation. Bifurcation is called for when the path to the solution fatefully forks and it is no longer possible to induce whether numerical path A or B is the correct one. (Maybe it would be clearer to think of it as a ‘symbolic’ path, since the nine Sudoku numbers are not mathematical objects and function only as representations of nine unique things.) At my skill level, the player/martial artist has no option but randomly to choose one of the two paths and provisionally follow it in the hope that the guess will turn out to be correct. This process of tentative exploration is the hard part, because (assuming you don’t cheat by lightly pencilling numbers into the puzzle with an eraser-tipped pencil) it is far from easy to keep aloft in one’s mind the multiplying number-scenarios produced by one’s progress. If the provisional path proves to be a dead end, the player must backtrack all the way to the fork in the road (bifurcation is sometimes called ‘Ariadne’s thread’) and take the alternative path — which could itself bifurcate, down the road. I have never met a Black Belt and find it hard to believe that actual Black Belts are out there, in the real world.)

Before I disclose the solution to his problem, I say to Alain, ‘This here is the wall in the puzzle. You’ve hit the wall. And beyond this wall, there’s probably going to be another wall. That’s why you play Sudoku in the first place — to scale the walls.’ (‘Scale’: a sneakily high-value verb for the kid.) ‘I’m going to give you a little bit of help this time, but next time you’re going to do it yourself.’ Throughout this little pep talk he looks into space with an expression of vacancy I completely respect. He thinks I am very, very lame, and he is right. Still, we must go on. I show him a way to figure out his next move. He catches on and rapidly fills out a few more boxes. ‘OK,’ I say, ‘now we’re cooking with gas.’ As he makes to leave, I say, ‘Hold on there, mister.’ I get scissors. I cut out the solutions pages and toss them into the trash. ‘We won’t be needing these. Our prowess renders them superfluous .’

And he drags himself back to his seat ten feet away from mine and I begin again to boil with rage that I have had taken from me a workspace that by rights should be mine alone and in which I should be entitled to put up my feet and pick my nose if I want to and live my life on my own fucking terms.

Eddie — I want to go back to the last responsive thing you said to me. You’ll recall this was back in November: I asked for your help with the Luxembourg thing, which as you know put me in an untenable position. The gist of your response was: ‘If you don’t like it, you’re always free to leave.’ Out of shock, I said nothing at the time; and also, to be honest, out of some idea that you were right. But let me now say: ‘Always free to leave?’ You know as well as I do, it’s not that simple. And suppose I were ‘free’ (I take it you mean ‘at liberty’) to leave — well, you were likewise ‘free’ to help me out, and your freedom (liberty) preceded mine, and the cost to you of exercising your freedom would have been much smaller than the cost to me of exercising mine. So let’s not kid ourselves. You were the chooser, not I, and you chose to strong-arm me to the maximum degree permitted by your bargaining position. Eddie, that’s not amicable.