Tactics of Conquest Read online

  I do not wish to give the impression that I am fond of Louis. Although from the very beginning our careers and personal lives have meshed strikingly, I consider him to be nothing more than a parasite. Indeed I believe that his very decision to be a chess master was one appropriated from me; he showed no interest in entering the National Juniors, for instance, until I declared my own intention, and it was not until I obtained from the Roxbury Press a contract for Fianchetto and Fork: Bishop Versus Knight that he expressed interest in becoming an author and obtained a publisher for his own miserable To Castle or Not to Castle: The Intricacies of Defense.

  It has always been this way; there have been times, in truth, when I thought that Louis might not be a discrete personality so much as a horrid extension of myself, a phantom, a creation, a literal extension of my own desire not to be lonely, which had led me to create another of similar will and intention with such cleverness that the dop-pelganger could literally pass itself off in the world as an actuality. But one look at Louis twitching over a chessboard in mutual competition, one glance at him shrugging his shoulders and toying with his massive beard while feeding pigeons in Mallorca, and I realized that this was sheer mega-lomaniacal fantasy. It would be nice, but the sheerest vanity, to think that I had invented Louis. He exists as and of himself; he is no less real than I and the unfortunate insight which I have had recently is that he might have selected defense of the forces of evil even if given a choice (this he was not; he had to take what was left), because Louis all of our lives has represented evil to me: corrupt, scuttling, foolish, apologetic, sanctimonious evil cutting into all the corners of existence and painting it with dull little strokes. I would not be surprised to know that this creature engages in devil-worship—having never had an original thought or creation in his life he would be bound to be an admirer of Satan.

  Our relations, never cordial, have, of course, deteriorated severely through these initial fifteen matches. I refuse to speak to him and even when we are both away from the table, taking a mutual break or awaiting referees’ instructions, I turn from him as would any man of decency, and pay no acknowledgment whatsoever to his presence.

  It is unfortunate that the weight of the universe rests upon my shoulders, but it does so only in the abstract, because the struggle is with myself; an internal struggle of self-knowledge and self-realization in which Louis himself plays no part. Increasingly he has shown agitation over this attitude, his realization that he is not only beneath my contempt but beneath the contempt of all those who support the cause of justice to which I am dedicated and which must prevail; his realization, as I say, has acted to diminish him, and I am given to understand from recent published reports that he is having incidents of stomach trouble, attacks of vertigo, a general if slight decline in his physical condition, which I think is directly attributable to the psychic powers I have brought to bear upon him.

  It is necessary, however, that I defeat him in chess just as I have in person and therefore the wretched, exhausting, miserable series of matches must go on although now that I have decided to assist the Overlords no longer, to string out the suspense of the final confrontation no longer, the matches will not persist to the degree that they might have before I lost patience.

  I leave the stage from the moment that I make my brilliant response, Pawn to King Four. Some lingering perversity, some shred of doubt, however, compels me to remain in my seat until Louis scuttles from backstage like a frog, having been given word by his seconds that he is losing clock-time. He must have been urinating, the poltroon, because a few spots of damp surround his fly (which is split in the middle) and as he passes me, sliding toward his seat, Louis’ eyes momentarily connect in a horrid way which refracts into me stunningly ... and I realize that he is seeing his own defeat.

  He has dreamed it already a hundred times knowing the depth of his disgrace; now he looks at the pieces with a little sigh of despair and then like a hunchback being carried forth in a chair at Lourdes to another despairing conclusion, he braces his hands on chairside, those little hands turning a disgusting and palpating white, hitches his chair nearer the board, and looking once at his clock, jaws moving, huddles in an excess of concentration, attempting to find some responding move in a game which I know (and if I were him would also know) to be lost.

  INTERREGNUM: Fianchetto

  In my early teens I learned that my father had no grasp of my passion for chess or my great if muddled destiny. Then matters diminished.

  “It’s madness,” he said, talking about the Royal Game, ‘It’s not an activity but an obsession. You must do something useful with your life; perhaps you should go on and meet people.”

  “That’s not so,” I said to him, “you have no right to tell me what to do with my life. Chess is a noble pastime, and you’re merely unhappy because since Mother died and you got dead-ended in your job you have nothing with which to involve yourself, nothing with which your intellect and soul can find themselves embraced. So you’re jealous and taking it out on me, your only son, your only child.” (I will admit that I did not say this to him. The theatrical impulse toward revision—to set up one’s life and its scenes as they should have been rather than as they were—is quite prevalent among us practitioners of the Royal Game and in fact the old man reduced me to stumbling inarticulateness most of the time. But I would have said it if I had had the insights I have now. Therefore, I did say it and if none of you likes this impulse to alteration you are quite welcome to change it back again, thereby committing the same lapse of which you might accuse me.)

  “Lout,” he said, “ungrateful lout,” and went on from there to various mumbled threats, imprecations and predictions of destruction but he took no heart from them, apparently, nor did I take any meaning. My career was well in ascent by this time. I had finished third in the Eastern Junior Regionals the year before and was now in deep preparation for displacing Louis from that crown. (He had won on a technicality; the mental illness of the original first-place holder necessitated his withdrawal on the very day of the last round.) “All right,” he said sometime later, “I can see that there’s only one way to get this nonsense out of your head, only one way to wake you up,” and he stumbled then to the cabinet in the dining room of our miserable three-room Brooklyn apartment, sweeping away gin bottles and decks of cards in his desperate attempts to get at something hidden. “Let’s play,” he said, taking a filthy old chessboard “and pieces from some hidden cavity. “I’m going to beat the shit out of you, that’s all”

  My attention turned inside out, as it were; one moment my concentration had been deep within, working out an ancient compositional problem of fairy chess (a game I have grown to deplore), struggling over the miserable library text, the next it was as if I unfurled, came inside to outside and projected myself deep within not only the situation as it suddenly emerged but into my father’s will and consciousness, obtaining a perception into the old bugger previously missed, a perception, as it were, into his very heart. “I used to play chess too,” he mumbled, his hands trembling. He recovered the pieces from their noisome grave, perched the board on the table top perilously and seized a Black and a White Pawn to offer me the usual choice. “If the old man beats the shit out of you even though he hasn’t played for twenty years that’ll show you. Won’t it? Won’t it?” he said rather plaintively, determination falling from the panels of his face to reveal a surprisingly defenseless and pleading expression, and then he extended his two tight, shaking little fists to me for the presentation. I slapped forward like a boxer, chose the left hand, the one (even then) which sheltered the forces of light. The great struggle began, that epic game with my father in which, with sublimated patricide, I went out to destroy him.

  It was a strange sensation: to play chess with my father under the one dismal bulb of our living room; it was as if that inversion of consciousness continued and instead of being merely myself, that constant trap in which I have managed to work out most of the passions of these fifty
years, I was him as well, was my father, could penetrate his consciousness and was aware not only of the nuances of my own attack but of the thin beating of the membranes of his old mind as he plotted his own, so that a simultaneity of purpose overtook me. I knew what I was going to do, but I also knew what he was going to do—and I cannot say which was the more horrifying.

  He began with a King’s Pawn attack; I countered at the sides, bringing out the King Knight and castling early in a variation of the Nimzo-Indian; a Queen’s Gambit he offered was declined, a Knight Sacrifice was declined, a Bishop Sacrifice was declined and after twelve moves, all of his pitiful attempts to launch a premature attack had been blunted; he saw that it was hopeless and sat quivering in the midst of his pieces, his wrists seeming to expand with hematoma as he looked beyond the board to me, then through the wall. “Son of a bitch,” he said (my father had never cultivated tournament manners), and attempted to drive through that net through hasty sacrifice but this time, taking his Queen’s Pawn with my Knight, the sacrifice was accepted and the Knight almost instantly set up a dangerous pin of his Queen’s Bishop, locking in that hapless piece so that he was unable to initiate any kind of activity, and it was as if then I fell straightaway into the sewers of his mind, the chesspieces the conduits into his psyche, so that I could poke and prowl those dull corridors to the limit of curiosity, seeing the thin little lights of purpose gleaming in the forehead, winking for just a moment in their feeble light before collapsing.

  I saw that mixture of grief and resentment which was all that my father could bring to life in terms of an attitude, and then something about the Queen’s Rook caught his attention, something about its possible positioning, so that four moves later, Rooks doubled, he could venture an attack against my King. He reached forward a hand to touch that Rook; simultaneously I was hurled from his mind like an insect tossed from a mat being furled and flapped outdoors, fell back fifty miles gasping into my own head on its customary tilt and watched as he moved the Rook. Then, clasping his hands, he looked at me with an expression as open and helpless as any that I had ever seen on another human’s face. “Do you think that will do?” he said. “Do you think that this gives me a chance?”

  I had literally broken the man, caused him to come unstrung within thirteen devastating moves, and now he was asking me out of his torment whether or not his move was satisfactory. “How do I know?” I said. “How can I tell you what’s right and what’s wrong? You’re my father, aren’t you?” and saying this reached out to make my own response move, a move of the King’s Knight, which would have guarded my own at the same time that it unleashed an attack against that very square on which his Rook would perch two moves subsequently. Concentration swathed me, giving me vast feelings of power and connection.

  The world dwindled to a beating heart, which was the board, but as I reached forward to touch the piece that would initiate the attack that would lead to his final humiliation and my victory, a strange reluctance seized me; I do not know if it was a fear of patricide (which after all is a very profound if common archetype according to the teachings of Freud). Most likely it was that uncommon perception of my father, that feeling to which I have already referred, that I literally dwelt within the tortured man and could see the effect that my victory would have upon him.

  In any event, for whatever reason, I found that I could not make that move, my hand hanging above that board in paralysis like a dangling scrotal sac might overlay a trembling vagina (I can use explicit sexual imagery when I dare; I am not, for all my lack of experience, naive about the matter of sex), the little scrotal sac of the hand bulging with power (or maybe it was only reluctance), and I could not force my hand to move; it hung above the Bishop, I could not get it to move forward; it trembled above the Bishop and at that moment my father’s own hands reached forward across the depths of the boardand gripped my pieces, my Rooks. “J’adoube,” he said apologetically, a wisp of a smile on his face,“je merely adoub’e,” and one glance at the old failure’s face and I could divine his purpose, perceive with that new-found and cunning ability on which I have dwelt the depth of his purpose. But I was frozen then, unable to move, unable to challenge him and slowly his brown, gnarled, speckled hands brought my two Rooks into theirfists, brought those fists down upon the board it-I self ... and the board quavered, the board rocked perilously upon the table, and then it fell to one side. I heaved out a knee, I unbalanced the sliding board completely and it fell to the floor in an explosion of pieces, Pawns and Bishops vaulting into the air, the stricken Kings rolling underneath my scrambling, scurrying feet. A faint halo seemed to come upward from the board, little firmaments of light streaking my father’s face and my own, the light coming from the dead-center of disaster.

  “Clumsy old fool,” my father said meditatively, “my, that was stupid of me, I do want to apologize,” and stood, pushing back the chair with his calves, brushing imaginary specks of dust or lint from his pants. “Most regretful,” he said, “hate to spoil our game like that but on the other hand I had you on the run, surely you know that; spared you a most terrible and humiliating defeat, my I son.” He turned then to leave the premises—or at I least I think it was his intention to leave the premises—but with a sheer and terrible growl of frustration I launched myself upon him, my hands going for his neck; beating and beating away at him I started to choke the life out of my father (which by all accounts is a very profound experience—the killing of the father in Freudian terminology being associated with many other levels of meaning which are hard to explicate in this context but no less painful).

  “You old bastard,” I said, “you can’t do this to me, I was going to win the game, I had you trapped, I had you obliterated.” I continued to wring and saw a way at his neck; pure droplets of terror came from his mind, coalescing as little spots on his face, and he began to thrash within my grasp. “You can’t do this to me,” I pointed out, “it isn’t fair, I had the game won, you know that I had the game won and now look at what you’ve done to me.” But there was no power in my gestures, no true force in my voice, and after a moment my hands fell away from him like paper, little diseased claws opening and closing in the harsh spaces of the room.

  “Anyway,” I said, “you play a lousy game; I could have Fool’s Mated you in seven if I had set up the attack that way.” He paled, he turned from me, he scuttled from the room at great and increasing speed, leaving me standing there all by myself, looking at those hands which hung from my wrists now, little knots of implication.

  I find it hard to recall if I had further relations with my father or whether our dealings were stopped at this point; I find it hard to remember if he lived for ten years after this disastrous game or chose that very night to die of a massive cerebral hemorrhage (if I ever get the chance I must go into the files of family history I compiled and look this up). My mind is blurred by the tension of the match in which I am engaged, but of one thing I am quite sure, and I have little doubt on this point: My father and I never played chess again, and when I returned to the apartment much later I found that the board and pieces had been discarded in the garbage. Like dead minnows, the pieces nestled amidst the waste, as sullen and ungiving in this aspect as I like to think Louis is when one gets inevitably into the question of higher strategy.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Queen to Bishop Three

  Now, feeling already blocked, my P—K4 having blunted for all time his fiendish intention to take over the center of the board, Louis has pushed his Queen peremptorily.

  It is a characteristic of his. The man tends to panic, tends to respond to pressure poorly by bringing out his heavy pieces before the pace of the game has really given them range or sweep. Now, seeing his Queen emergent, seeing the peculiar, nauseated expression on his face as he quickly looks over the board and then bolts, I know that the game must be mine.

  For I have already won. The quick movement of the Queen is Louis’ concession that midway in the second exchange of moves I have a
lready overpowered him. I feel a certain sympathy for him at this moment, knowing that backstage he must be in the hands of seconds, gasping, sweating, his face agonized while they try to convince him that he still has a chance ... but he will be vomiting in the lavatory now. (There is a center bowl which I use myself in circumstances of this kind. Surrounded by walls and space it is possible to make the act of regurgitation an almost sacramental and sacrificial one. The sounds of vomiting, I have always thought, are very close to the sounds of prayer.) And a little after that he will be back at the board to see my own devastating response move which will plunge him even further into gloom. Truly, Louis is in a difficult situation and well he might be, for he represents all of the evil in the world.

  It has occurred to me at least once during the course of these matches that I might attempt a secret consultation and rapprochement with Louis, to try to work out something between us to alter or at least extend the course of the matches. As is customary in a series of this sort (the Overlords have set up the match protocol and regulations very much as our own recollected international matches have been; they have no original ideas to contribute), Louis and I stay in the same lodgings, deal with the same people, use the same facilities, although at different times, and are often left to ourselves for hours without supervision, nominal “rest and recuperation” periods during which we are free to wander through the controlled atmospheres of the enclosures in which we have been stationed. (The atmospheres of most of the systems we have visited, of course, would kill us in a trice.) It would be easy, thus, to arrange some secret meeting with him in a deserted part of the hotel; the Overlords for all of their sanctimony are quite stupid in many areas and would probably not even know that such a meeting had taken place. Thus I could find Louis in a corridor or a room of some sort and make a suggestion, say, that we throw games alternately to one another, extending the series as much as possible; and that we then, at the forty-first game, engage in a series of grandmaster draws—shuffling the pieces around three or four moves and then with bearded nods and smiles conceding a willingness to settle for a draw. It would be possible if we did this to extend the series indefinitely.