In a Mist

by Devon Code-mcneil

  The shot in question is the last involving the chess board in Casablanca. The camera is repositioned as Ugarte rises to collect a drink from the waiter, and the White knight, which has remained at the fifth rank since 9 minutes, 14 seconds, suddenly fails to appear on the board. Neither has Rick captured the knight and placed it to the right of the board in the company of the captured pawns. The knight is simply not there.

  If this disappearance is acknowledged at all, it is dismissed as an oversight, a minor instance among several greater instances of discontinuity in the film. Inaccurate representations of chess are hardly unusual in twentieth-century cinema. Perhaps the most notorious example is the game astronaut Frank Poole plays against the computer HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The game was based on a real match that took place in Hamburg in 1910 between Roesch and Schlage. HAL declares Black’s sixteenth move as “queen to bishop three,” when in fact it is “queen to bishop six,” and as a result Poole resigns unnecessarily. HAL’s move is often cited as an error in the film, but Kubrick, like Bogart, was a strong chess player and it is much more likely the mistake is an early indication that something has gone terribly wrong with HAL’s operating system.

  Similarly, I contend that the missing knight in Casablanca is not an error at all. The knight’s disappearance is the only anomaly of its kind I have been able to detect in Bogart’s entire body of work. This is why it is so peculiar. How could such a careless oversight occur on a chessboard directly in front of a man with such an affinity for the game? Any self-respecting chess metaphor scholar who gives this instance due consideration must conclude that the disappearance is in fact deliberate, and the question must be rephrased: Why did Bogart allow the disappearance to occur?

  This is the problem I posed to the students of the World War II film seminar. I asked them to discuss the significance of the disappearance in five hundred words and send in their response by Monday morning. As I explained the assignment the blank looks on their faces concerned me. On Monday morning their responses confirmed that the nuances of chess metaphor theory were beyond them. Though the brighter students knew their Bogart, they knew as little about chess as their peers. The game has fallen out of fashion. I doubted that any of the students had ever played, or even observed a game. Two or three made an eff ort to look up the rules and wrap their heads around the basics. One young woman even went so far as to cite classic opening gambits and comment on how the Casablanca opening appears to be a unique innovation on the part of Bogart’s mysterious opponent. But alas, a rigorously applied understanding of the complexities of the game to the semiotic conundrum I proposed was simply too much to ask for in a five hundred word assignment. Most of the students did not even address the question at all. They simply regurgitated Bogart theory, some more eloquently than others, all of them no doubt finishing in time to make the latest zero-gravity orgy organized by the film history undergrad society.

  As I lay awake in bed on the evening of February 17th, 2105, I thought about what my students had not bothered to consider. I contemplated the uniqueness of the knight. Unlike any other piece on the board, the knight does not move in a linear fashion, but in an ‘L’ configuration. It is also the only piece with the freedom to pass over chessmen in its path. Its movement is limited only by the outer boundaries of the board. The sudden foray of a knight can take even a highly experienced, calculating player by surprise. By passing through a solid object directly in its path, the knight achieves the sort of transportation particle physicists have only begun to understand in the last few years, and it has done so since fourteenth century Persia. If there is significance in the vanishing of the White knight, and I am convinced there is, then there is significance in its knighthood. It is as if the knight in Casablanca was shot mid-move, in the miraculous act of its transport from one square of the board to another. Where does the knight go, exactly, when it passes through queen or rook or pawn? It exists as pure energy, as the vehicle of the intellect, the assertion of human will. Just as Ilsa and Victor Laszlo fly off into the Moroccan mist, so does the White knight vanish into thin air. The standard rules of engagement are rendered irrelevant. The vanishing is a subtle, spontaneous extension of the preternatural power the knight has possessed all along. What was Bogart attempting (and failing) to communicate to the receptive viewer of his time? What does the vanishing knight communicate to Bogart’s twenty-second century audience? These are the questions I pondered as I drifted off to sleep. When I awoke the next morning I believed in God.

  * * *

  La Belle Aurore: the name of the café Rick Blaine leaves behind in occupied France when he flees to Casablanca. The beautiful dawn. The silhouette of the name cast by Parisian sunlight. On the other side of the window, Sam plays “As Time Goes By,” Ilsa and Rick sip champagne while German guns rumble in the distance. It was raining when I awoke on the morning of February 18th, 2105. I had never thought very much about God before. My life’s work was dedicated to a secular aspect of an overwhelmingly secular society. Nevertheless, when I woke up that morning I was struck with awe and humility. I suddenly possessed a firm belief in a transcendent, omniscient, omnipresent Supreme Being. I had no proof that a God existed, but I had utter faith that this was indeed the case. I did not know what my belief meant or where it came from. My parents were atheists raised by atheist parents who came from agnostics before them. There are still believers in 2105. They constitute a fringe minority, a dwindling assortment of fragmented religious sects. I have never had an interest in their faith-communities or their anachronistic, twenty-first century theologies. I have never had any friends who believed in God. There is Ahmed from the Faculty of Astro-biology, with whom I occasionally play raquetball. Someone once mentioned in the locker room, derisively, that he is Muslim. But we have never discussed religion. No one ever does.

  There is one reference to God in Casablanca. It occurs in the note Rick receives before he boards the train.

  I cannot go with you or ever see you again.

  You must not ask why. Go my darling

  and God bless you.

  God bless you. This, if anything, is my most meaningful point of reference to the Divine. Ilsa’s note to Rick beseeches blind faith, asking of Rick’s love what that love makes hardest to give. Ingrid Bergman has an imploring way of looking at her leading men; there is in her eyes an almost desperate devotion.

  At first I tried to set my absurd faith aside and get on with my work. I treated my belief much as I would a head cold or a hangover. I took an Aspirin, went to bed early and drank plenty of fluids. Otherwise, I persevered with my research, marked assignments, and played racquetball. But there was no longer satisfaction in these pursuits. My faith persisted. It was not limited to moments of idleness, but was with me in my dreams and in my waking thoughts and in every action I performed. I was no longer content. So I tried a diff erent approach. I devoted more time to my research than ever before, attempting to eliminate all extraneous concerns from my daily routine. I told myself I would complete my dissertation by the end of the summer. But the more I threw myself into my work, the more my faith flourished. I saw God in everything around me. My work, along with everything else in my life, was superceded by my perfect knowledge of God’s being.

  One night, as I lay in bed with Cynthia, slightly inebriated and unable to manifest my aff ections, I confided my belief quite spontaneously.

  “Cynthia, I believe in God.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, of course, and so I explained as best I could, including an account of the note that Ilsa writes to Rick.

  “Oh Frank, darling, you’re such a sentimental retrophile.”

  “Well what about you, Cynthia? Your master’s thesis is on Audrey Hepburn’s wardrobe.”

  “That’s diff erent,” she said. “That’s historical.”

  * * *

  My belief continued to preoccupy me. On the afternoon of April 5th it was raining again and I was trying desperately to make some headw
ay with my dissertation. I attempted to watch The Maltese Falcon and turned it off halfway through. Bogart bored me. I opened a musty mid-twentieth century book of chess strategy I had read countless times before and turned to the chapter on end-game theory. I’m not sure exactly what I was looking for. I suppose I was attempting to understand the appeal my research once held for me. It was at the top of the chapter’s first page that I found the quote from Alexander Alekhine, World Chess Champion, 1927 to 1935, 1937 to 1946: “Chess will be the master of us all.”

  I knew what I had to do. I would play chess.

  One of the most intriguing precepts of chess-metaphor theory is that there are more possible games of chess, up to move twenty-five, than there are atoms in the universe. Mid-game play as executed by two grand-masters can be so complex as to appear entirely arbitrary to a layman, or even to an attentive amateur, familiar with basic strategy. It is no coincidence that chess fell out of fashion at the same time as the major world religions. By the early twenty-first century computers started routinely defeating world champions in tournament play, beginning with Kasparov’s loss to IBM’s Deep Blue in 1997. As computers came to dominate at the world championship level, they began competing against each other. It was at this point they succumbed to the same haughtiness, paranoia and anti-Semitic posturing as Bobby Fischer did in the mid-1970s. Soon after, computers stopped playing against one another with any degree of seriousness, and for the most part, humans followed their lead. But the solar system is large enough that there are still people playing, mostly former Eastern Europeans who emigrated to the moons of Jupiter after Chernobyl III.

  I have decided to make the move from chess theory to chess practice. It has become my way to convene with the infinite. I have submitted to chess with all the piety of a supplicating monk. I spend as many hours as possible at the board, honing my strategy and technique. Of course I know my limitations. I do not aspire to master or grandmaster status, but to expert ranking, the same held by Humphrey Bogart when he died at fifty-eight of cancer of the esophagus. I continue my work as a teaching assistant, so that I may save enough to travel to Jupiter’s moons. There I may learn from and eventually compete against the greatest living chess players and upon my return I will no longer lose to Cynthia. I always felt a certain inexplicable affinity for Fyodor, the Russian bartender at Rick’s Café in Casablanca. Now I understand, and as a result I have decided to drink vodka exclusively from now on. I was just off the mark before, but I have finally found my way. I am a believer.

  The Flank and Spur

  It was mid-April and streams cut beneath soiled banks of snow and ran along street-side curbs into storm drains. Isaac stepped carefully to keep the mud from his polished boots. When he arrived it was still early and the bar was almost empty. An acoustic guitar, a bass guitar and a lap-steel plugged into an amplifier rested on stage in front of a drum set. Isaac recognized the front man and lap-steel player seated on stools at the bar, their backs turned to the door. The bartender nodded to Isaac and Isaac nodded and removed his hat. He took off his sheepskin coat and situated himself against a wall without windows so as best to observe the stage and the other side of the room, where most of the patrons would sit. He sat down at a high, sturdy wooden table, choosing a place with a glass ashtray though he had not smoked a cigarette in almost twenty years. He sat for a moment and observed the quiet room. An older woman he recognized and a haggard-looking man he did not were playing slot machines at the back. There was worn green carpet beneath his boots and a scuff ed hardwood surface serving as a dance floor. The stage was low, no more than a foot off the floor, and crowded with instruments and amplifiers. On the far side of the room there were small square-paned windows between wine-coloured curtains. A grey-haired waitress greeted Isaac by name and brought him a half-pint glass and a pitcher of pale draft. When she off ered him a menu he smiled and declined. He filled his glass and wondered whether the girl would come that afternoon.

  It would be two years that July since he first saw her. Though he did not know precisely he put her between the ages of twenty and twenty-five. Once or twice a month she would come and sit on the opposite side of the room with other men and women of her approximate age. Isaac found it curious that the young women outnumbered the young men. He could not fathom that these men would let the women who sat at their table pay for their own drinks. If he could not help but think of these young women as girls, surely the men in their company were no more than boys. He knew that the man he was several decades ago would have felt diff erently about the girl than he felt now. He could approximate the time, some twenty years ago, when the change in him had occurred. It happened around the same time that women stopped thinking of him as a handsome or desirable man. He watched now as the front man and the lap-steel player took the stage and tuned their instruments and spoke of key signatures and song titles. Eventually they were joined by the others and performed Hank Williams’s rendition of “Lovesick Blues,” the tune with which they always began.

  This was the time Isaac most enjoyed, the afternoon in its potential and him left to contemplate what may transpire. He knew some other old-time regulars would eventually approach him and join his table, another old man, or an aging couple with which he was acquainted. They would laugh at the front man’s swagger and his banter and applaud solos and if someone were to sit in for a number, this would be occasion for further applause. They might share a pitcher, speak of the weather or the milestones of grandchildren and if wallet-sized photographs were produced, Isaac would examine them for evidence of bloodline and personality. Together they would look with approval at the young couples on the dance floor, or eye the older ones and wink. To exercise his independence Isaac would rise on occasion and make his way to the slots, methodically inserting quarters until he reached his three dollar limit. He would return then to the table with a sense of self-control he wished he might have been able to exercise with as little eff ort in other aff airs.

  Gradually the bar began to fill. Isaac looked back toward the entrance as a woman his age entered, followed by a man who had held the door for her. The two were dressed in western shirts with matching embroidery. When they saw Isaac they waved to him but did not approach. They sat down behind him, at the back of the room, and the man went off to the bar and when the woman saw Isaac looking in her direction she winked at him.

  “You sly old devil,” said a familiar voice and Isaac turned and Lloyd grinned at him. Lloyd’s greying beard was newly trimmed. He wore a navy-issue sweater with a collared shirt underneath and a brand new ball cap perched on the crown of his head. Isaac greeted his old acquaintance and shook his outstretched, calloused hand and Lloyd set the half-pint in his other hand on the table and sat down next to Isaac without being asked. Isaac turned to face the stage and it was then he saw that the girl had arrived and was sitting in a crowd of young people on the other side of the room.

  On a crowded afternoon the previous fall, when the young people were more numerous, someone had introduced him to the girl and her party. Isaac had spoken to her twice. She had remembered his name from the first of these occasions and had smiled at him, warmly, on the second. By all signs she was unmarried, which was not uncommon, but which troubled him nevertheless. He did not know whether this caused the same concern in her as it did in him. He knew only that the girl wore horn-rimmed glasses, spoke softly, held her hands in her lap when she sat, curtsied to her partner as a song ended, never dancing with the same partner twice in a row. Though she could waltz, she favoured the two-step and the jive, shied from that formless dance in which partners press closely together, sway to ballads and whisper in one another’s ear. When she danced with a young man who was not her equal on the floor, Isaac had seen her discreetly take the lead. When the girl would be asked to dance by another man, no matter Isaac’s knowledge of him or his opinion as to the man’s moral character, Isaac would feel a strangely bitter sense of relief, of things being as they should.

  When she danced and
the burden of her would lift from Isaac’s thoughts, or at other times, his mind at ease, he would think then of his older brother. It was not that he still mourned Roland or missed him particularly, but strangely his brother had come to inhabit his thoughts in a way he never had while living. Isaac attributed this to the sentimentality of old age. Roland, dead some nine years now, had never learned to speak. After their mother passed on he had spent the last two decades of his life in a home in a neighbouring town. In the early years Isaac had visited. He would sit at the table where Roland was served his meals and watch his brother take infrequent sips from an endless cup of decaf. Roland would smile mysteriously at these times, glancing at him with something Isaac chose to interpret as the acknowledgment of a common origin. As the years passed these glances grew less meaningful and when recognition gave way entirely to indiff erence, Isaac stopped visiting. He felt relief at this, for after nine years he could no longer tolerate the way in which his brother was addressed by the staff of the home, well-intentioned caregivers who spoke to a man twice their age as if he were a child. Though he had never wiped himself, nor bathed of his own volition, nor so much as danced with a woman, Isaac knew that Roland was not a child in his old age if he had ever been one. He knew Roland would have lived a much diff erent life had he been given the opportunity, and Isaac respected him for who he might have been.

  He had long come to accept that his brother could not be held accountable as others were held accountable. This acceptance was bound up inextricably with an image of the kitchen table overturned, warm red smeared on the fainter red and white of his mother’s gingham apron. He could not now ascertain if this had been blood or the remains of an upset rhubarb pie, for each had precedent and each was equally calamitous in Isaac’s childhood recollection. As a grown man he could not accept that Roland was deemed a child and spoken to as such. He knew his brother had endured fifty-some odd post-pubescent years of masculine urges and scoldings and the erratic nocturnal manifestations of frustrated desire. Isaac at least had work—long stretches of highway with predetermined destinations, physical and mental exhaustion, the repetition of tiresome but nevertheless necessary and even useful tasks. This among other pastimes, even on occasion the companionship of women, and always a few friends, acquaintances, who if they did not understand the nature of his reticence, spoke to him at least in the terms of their common adulthood, of time spent working, longing and sometimes being satisfied.