Sal nodded once.
“You might as well play,” Joe said to me. “Without you there’s an odd number. Five dollars.”
We took out our wallets.
“Thaaaankyou,” he said, plucking the bills from our hands and moving on.
Despite the room’s mounting heat, Sal continued to wear his parka. He also wore mittens, making it hard for him to pick up my pieces when he captured them, which he did with dismaying frequency. As a courtesy I began handing them over.
I said, “What happens” “Shhhh.”
“What happens when you have an odd number?” I whispered.
“Joe plays two at once. King me.”
The game took about nine minutes. It was the checkers equivalent of an ethnic cleansing. When we were done, Sal sat back, grinning. He tried to put his hands behind his head in a pose of casual triumph, but, as he was unable to lace his fingers together, he had to content himself with cupping his chin and staring at the board, now free of any pesky black pieces. The rest of the room played on in silence, save the click of a plastic disk or the occasional King me.
I whispered, “Did you ever meet someone na” “Shhhh.”
I took out a pen and a business card and wrote my question on the back. I handed it to Sal, who shook his head. Then he motioned for the pen, and with his paw loopily wrote out a response.
No but I only started
He motioned for another card. I handed it to him. He waved impatiently and I gave him three more. As he wrote he numbered each card in the corner.
(Ă) coming here a few months ago so I don’t know
2) everyone’s name, Joe knows everyone though did you
3) know he used to be a national champion
I took out another business card. I was down to three.
Is that a fact I wrote.
)4) Yes he was the nat champ in 93, he is also a master
(5) in chess and backgammon
On my final card I wrote Impressive.
Then we endured an awkward silence, both of us nodding at each other, having established just enough of a connection to make our lack of ability to communicate excruciating.
“Next match,” Joe called.
I played and lost eight more games. The closest I came to victory was making it past the fifteen-minute mark, a feat I achieved largely because my opponent, a veteran with hearing aids in both ears, fell asleep midway through. By the end of the night only Joe had gone undefeated. When it came time to play him, players groaned as though they’d been kicked in the crotch. My own game against Joe was my eighth and final. I pushed a piece into the center of the board.
“Twelve to sixteen,” he said. “My favorite opening.”
He then proceeded to wipe me out in calm, steady strokes. It was as if we were playing different games. In a sense, we were. I was playing a game from childhood, when the goal is to entertain oneself, and my decisions must have seemed to him random or nonsensical, achieving no more than short-term gain, if that. He, on the other hand, was engaged in self-analysis, which is what any activity becomes at the highest level.
Watching him, I felt a kind of thrill similar to what I felt the first time I saw Victor’s drawings. That might sound strange, so let me explain. Genius takes many forms, and in our century we have (slowly) come to appreciate that the transcendence given by a Picasso is potentially found in other, less obvious places. It was that old reliable provocateur, Marcel Duchamp, who showed this when he abandoned object-making, moved to Buenos Aires, and took up chess full-time. The game, he remarked, “has all the beauty of art, and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer.” At first glance Duchamp seems to be lamenting the corrupting power of money. Really, though, he’s being much more subversive than that. He is in fact destroying the conventional boundaries of art, arguing that all forms of expressionall of themare potentially equal. Painting is the same as chess, which is the same as rollerskating, which is the same as standing at your kitchen stove, making soup. In fact, any one of those plain old everyday activities is better than conventional art, better than painting, because it is done without the sanctimony of anointing oneself “an artist.” There is no surer route to mediocrity; as Borges wrote, the desire to be a genius is the “basest of art’s temptations.” According to this understanding, then, true genius has no self-awareness. A genius must by definition be someone who does not stop to consider what he is doing, how it will be received, or how it will affect him and his future; he simply acts. He pursues his activity with a single-mindedness that is inherently unhealthy and frequently self-destructive. A person much like, say, Joe; or a person like Victor Cracke.
I will be the first to admit that I swoon in the presence of genius, the burning pyre onto which it throws itself in sacrifice. I hoped that, standing beside the fire, I would feel it reflected in me. And as I watched Joe capture my last piece and set it down among the pile of victims, the little plastic corpses that used to be my men, I remembered why I needed Victor Cracke and why, now that I’d lost my ability to create him, I had to keep looking for him: because he was still my best chance, perhaps my only chance, to feel that distant heat, to smell the smoke and bask in the glow.
THE DISTRIBUTION OF PRIZESby which I mean the lump sum of $50, awarded to Joe by Joetook place with little fanfare. One of the players, long knocked out of contention, left after losing his sixth game in a row, a streak that made me feel a tad less alone in my wretchedness, although as he stormed out I felt a twinge of concern at not being able to question him.
It turned out not to matter, though: everyone else knew Victor. They told me he had been a regular at the club up until a year ago. If I really wanted to know about him, they said, I should ask Joe, who was around more than anyone else. I found this puzzling, to say the least, as he had already disavowed knowledge. When I turned around to ask him what was going on, I discovered that he had disappeared.
The man with the Afro counseled me to wait around. “He’ll be back.”
“How do you know?”
“He has to lock up.”
I waited. One by one the rest of the players drifted out. From the window I watched them humping up the sidewalk through the snow or scrambling after the Q36. Two stuck around, playing additional games until eleven thirty, at which point I was left alone among the tables and chairs, listening to the fluorescent lights buzz and staring at a torn, crumby package of Lorna Doone shortbreads.
It was after midnight before Joe returned. He had to come back. I knew this not only because the man with the Afro had told me but because no true genius would ever leave the object of his obsession in disarray. I heard the key rattle in the gate below, heard him huffing and puffing to the top of the stairs. He walked into the room as though I wasn’t there and began stacking chairs. I got up to help him. We worked in silence. He handed me a roll of paper towels and a spray bottle and we wiped down the tabletops.
“I saw you in the paper,” he said finally. “You’re the one put up the show.” He tied off a trash bag with an elaborate knot. “Am I right?”
“That’s partly why I want to talk to Victor. I have money that belongs to him.”
“Partly why else.”
“What?”
“What’s the other reason you want to talk to him.”
“I want to make sure he’s okay.”
“That’s very nice of you,” he said.
I said nothing.
“How much money?” he asked.
“A fair amount.”
“How much is a fair amount?”
“Enough.”
“Any reason you’re not answering me?”
“At least I’m not lying to you.”
He smiled. He transferred the garbage bag from his right to his left hand; his body likewise slumped. He had terrible posture, and a tendency to lapse into a grimace when not speaking, the look of someone whose basal state is discomfort.