Checkmate, Death

by Cobyboy

  Who else was a chess player? Who else had enough of an understanding of the game to, if they wanted, play against me and perhaps even manage to take one of my pawns before I won?

  The answer is: a surprising number of people. Chess has already long since proven its place in history. It will remain a mainstay of culture until that fabled moment when God's goal is met and humans surpass Him in some watershed moment... at that time, I imagine the game will either disappear (unlikely) or evolve to a higher form that I will most likely be required to learn and master, because there will still be souls to reap.

  ***

  I came to Philadelphia in a strange, in-between time. The Declaration of Independence had been signed, the nation that would become known as the USA now balanced on the precipice of a great history to come. The year was 1790 and the weather was dreary, threatening a cold Eastern drizzle. It seemed everything was on a precipice. The weather was tipping between winter and spring, spring and summer. The nation was tipping between flight or fall, like a baby bird taking its first leap from the nest. And the man named Benjamin Franklin had opened the door to the afterlife, had even stuck one foot through, and was peering into the shadows beyond, trying desperately to discover what was obscured therein while he was still living.

  I found him, an obese and profoundly sick man, in his bed. I took my sweet time in revealing myself to him. He kept coughing and gagging, nearly throwing up. If you read back through history and realize all the different health problems that ailed this man, you would wonder how he had ever made it to his current age of eighty-four. A bit of a wonder, especially back in the days long before antibiotics and other boons of modern medicine. But his last few years of life were hard-won. He had rarely been seen by anyone outside the staff of his house, not since signing the Constitution three years earlier.

  If I lowered myself to the level of picking personal heroes out of the rabble of humankind, I would probably put Mr. Franklin somewhere on that list. And for a rather silly reason that I doubt many shared.

  In the area of chess, Franklin was definitely a teacher rather than a doer. As the saying goes; those can't do, teach. If you are very interested in a certain subject, if you know all about it inside and out, but you lack the talent requisite to excel at it, the next best thing you can do is to pass your knowledge on to others.

  Thus it was with Franklin. He played chess for a large portion of his life. He probably could have beaten at least half of the people he played against, if not more. But by all accounts, he had never become a master. He never reached a level of skill in chess where he would feel right about calling himself great at it. Probably because he was so busy doing other things, as you might know if you are even cursorily knowledgeable about American history.

  In 1786, he published an essay entitled The Morals of Chess wherein he draws the inevitable comparisons between chess and life itself. The essay, which he had been thinking about for decades, shows very well and in a condensed way the wisdom and thoughtfulness of the man himself. If you want to read any one piece penned by Ben Franklin, consider this very short essay.

  Am I a fan of Ben Franklin? Am I a fanatic, sucking up every bit of history I can about the man? No. It's just hard not to learn about such a large historical figure when you spend as much time as I do in the country where he had been famous for a long time.

  By the time I appeared to Mr. Franklin, he had fallen into a state of lethargy that resembled death to an alarming degree. Even though I knew he wouldn't be able to depart the mortal plane until I let him, I harbored an illogical fear that he might die before I could get a chance to speak to him.

  "Fear not death," I said quietly as I approached, "for the sooner we die, the longer we shall be immortal..."

  His eyes opened. He looked at me angrily. "What's that? Someone stealing my quotes and throwing them back at me as I lay dying? That was very insensitive of you."

  "Mr. Franklin," I said, sitting on the side of the bed. "I loved your essay, The Morals of Chess."

  He stared in disbelief. "You've broken into my home, slinked like a thief into my bedchamber, and you have the gall to claim to know me through that single little thing I wrote? What about the gulf stream? Bifocals? Swimming fins? The flexible catheter? Do you have any idea how many lives were improved by that one? Wait..."

  He narrowed his eyes to get a better look at me. He tried to lift his head closer, but lacked the strength; his whole neck and head trembled and he was forced to lay down again.

  "You're no mere trespasser," he said. "You're..."

  "Death." I smiled down at him, giving a little wave with my fingers. "Hello."

  "Why are you here?" Franklin asked. "I promised myself I was going to live forever. And how in the world did you ever know about my essay?"

  I shrugged. "I had some downtime during a reaping in the area a while back. When I saw the title, I couldn't resist. You spoke a lot of truth in that essay. Though some of the sportsmanlike advice didn't sit with me."

  "Are you a player of chess, then?"

  "A ruthless one."

  Franklin sighed. "Then perhaps you should marry a woman named Ruth and fill in some of the gaps in your vapid personality. How can you live for millions of years and still come across as so... one-dimensional?"

  I contemplated the question, trying to understand how he could make such a quick judgment of my character, with no evidence or basis... and yet be so profoundly correct.

  "Well," I replied, "I'm working on it. I'm thinking of writing a book."

  "What's stopping you? You have all the time in the world, don't you?"

  "I need an ending," I told him. "That's hard to come across, when your entire existence revolves around the infinite and the endless."

  Franklin fell quiet. I could see that he was deeply pondering my statement.

  "It will have to be a human ending, then," he said. "It cannot revolve around you or your compatriots. It will have to revolve around one of us mortals. That's the way to do it."

  I was astounded by his answer. Right away, I knew he was right.

  "But which mortal?" I asked.

  He waved a hand. "You'll just have to pick one and go with it. I'm sure you'll know when you find the next good candidate."

  I nodded. "Thank you. I'll keep my eyes open. You've been a huge help."

  He shrugged and turned his head away, as if he was now disinterested in me and anything I had to say. I followed his gaze, and realized he was looking quite forlornly toward a lonely chess table on the other side of the room.

  "One last game, maybe," he said quietly, as though speaking only to himself. "Just one..."

  He didn't seem to have any knowledge of the game of Life and Death, or he would have pounced on the opportunity. Or maybe he did know, and he just didn't believe it. This was, after all, the beginning of a newly rational and eventually atheistic period in human history.

  "One last game," I said. "Maybe we can play together."

  And so we did. Franklin obviously couldn't get out of bed, so once again I had to pull the chess table over close enough for him to reach. I was used to that configuration, and I was also starting to get a little tired of it. I felt like a nurse obligated to shoulder the odious task of making these miserable people's last moments a little less unpleasant. Yes, obligated was the right word. I think, by the time the year 1790 rolled around, I was starting to resent my work just a little.

  But I played. And I really phoned my performance in. I don't think Franklin noticed at all; I was still a more than worthy opponent and I was able to beat him easily while losing only three pawns and a knight. I even reached his back rank with one of my pawns, promoting it to a queen, thus having two queens on the board. It was kind of a slaughter. But Franklin loved it. He laughed every time I made a simple, easy move that put him into great jeopardy. When the game was over, he insisted on giving me a hug.

  He died not long later, slipping away into lethargy and then into death.

  *** />
  What more is there to be said? I may have hit a dead end across every avenue in my entire existence. The other day I went to a party at the Palace with every intention to drink hard and talk an angel into my bed for the night. But then... what happened? I don't really even remember. I just found myself walking the nocturnal streets of Lower Heaven, listening to sounds of laughter from house parties. I was stone cold sober, I didn't even have a taste of wine on my tongue. And there was no beautiful seraph beside me, twining her fingers between mine.

  Where was I going? I don't know. I guess I was going nowhere. I walked for a long time, searching my brain and trying to determine the cause of this sudden existential malaise which had come over me.

  I had played chess against the greatest humanity had to offer. Thomas Jefferson, third President of the United States. Carl Gauss, the great German mathematician and physicist. Johann Goethe, another German who wrote some famous works including the play Faust, which has some basis in reality. I had played against great people you've probably never heard of. I have played (and won decisively and easily) against Albert Einstein; against Paul Erdős, another mathematician; Joseph Conrad, a great writer who somehow wrote beautifully and perfectly in English despite only becoming fluent in that language in his adult life; David Hume, a great philosopher and historian; Saladin, the first sultan of Egypt...

  And yes, I won every single game. The only time I ever "lost" against a human was the game with Mahendra, which I intentionally threw.

  As I walked through Lower Heaven that night, peering in at all the recursive, private paradises in the houses around me, I assumed that my gloomy mood was because my belief and faith and love for humanity was being tested by the unimpressive chess game they were playing collectively. And, because chess is so comparable to life, I took this failing to mean that humanity was flawed in so many fundamental ways. That moment God dreamed of, when humankind surpassed their need for him, seemed now to be impossibly far off, if not downright impossible.

  There was no challenge anymore. I could not be beaten in any game by anyone, Celestial or human. The only being who could beat me would be God, but He would never agree to play. It had been centuries now since I had stopped trying. The games were effortless. I could have played them in my sleep...

  At some point during my walk I realized I was lost. I could have just teleported back to the pearly gates, like a magnetic particle pulling into configuration around the pole of a magnet. But I needed to feel something real. I needed to relate to the universe around me directly, with tactile sensations, with emotional connections. And here I stood in the Suburbs of the Holy Dead, the counterpoint to Hell's City of the Damned, where all good souls had come to spend eternity in their personal fantasies.

  For the first time, surprisingly, I was hit by the realization that every single one of these people had been touched by me. I had interacted with them. I knew who they were. We had shared words, or at least a few meaningful glances. They were all here because I had visited the scene of their death and finished writing their name in my book. I wouldn't remember every last one of them, there were far too many, but each one of them would remember me.

  Why not check up on a few of them? See how they were doing? Maybe I would feel better about myself if I witnessed the peace and endless ecstasy I had helped facilitate.

  The Suburbs of the Holy Dead take up the bulk of Lower Heaven. They are a huge grid of buildings, each pretty identical to one another. They are rectangular, crafted of generic marble and red tile roofs. The roads that run between them are about ten feet wide. The grid is square in shape, with one thousand roads running north and south and another thousand east to west. From end to end, the square is somewhere around a hundred miles in length. The buildings are about eighteen feet wide by thirty-six long and there is almost no empty space between them. That's a lot of houses!

  But not enough, in Euclidean terms.

  Let's talk about modern humans. Genus Homo sapiens. Let's talk about the total number of deaths.

  A whopping hundred billion of you have died on Earth in the past. Minimum. I'm happy to report that somewhere around eighty percent of you end up in Heaven. As such, God has had to run Heaven somewhat like an automated factory, rather than the "exclusive club" vibe that the Devil has been able to maintain down below.

  In order to fit that many blessed souls, God and his design team had to make use of the same twists and turns of spatial geometry that I've described from the Celestial Palace.

  There's a specific way of thinking I like to employ whilst walking the Suburbs. With the perfect grid and the uniform buildings, I have recently begun to imagine the place as a sort of computer data storage unit. And that's kind of what it is.

  A memory chip inside a solid-state hard drive from the early 21st century can hold hundreds of gigabytes of data, even though it's about the size and thickness of a small cracker. The buildings in the Suburbs, although technically only large enough for a single family to live a single life, can actually store hundreds of thousands of lives and souls simultaneously.

  This trick can make finding the right person in the house an imposing challenge, which is why I have never bothered trying to look anyone up before. Can you imagine going into a city, and then searching every room in every building in the hopes of coming across a specific resident of that city? Doesn't sound very fun, does it?

  But that night, during my walk, I wasn't trying to find anyone in particular. I just wanted to open a door and see what happened.

  Certain Celestials can go into these buildings and shuffle through private heavens like cards in a deck, or pages in a book. Angels, for example, have this ability, because they often have to find residents of Heaven and inform them of whatever news they requested be delivered to them. Usually this would be news about surviving family members, or just current events down on Earth.

  I do not have that ability. When I open a house, a random heaven solidifies into my reality and that is what I am stuck looking at until I leave the house and shut the door again.

  When a person arrives in Heaven, they are first run through a basic primer on how it operates, including the business hours of certain administrative buildings and community events. They are then asked to describe, in as much detail as they please, what they would like their private Heaven to look like, the domain in which they will spend most of their time. If you get to Heaven, you have already passed a test and you can do whatever you want; you can even change your private Heaven later on.

  What do you think the most common request is? I think most adult people would take a sexual route if I asked them that question. But you can copulate with as many beautiful people and celebrities as you want and still end up bored and dissatisfied. That is far too one-dimensional to spend eternity on.

  Most residents do alter their Heavens from time to time, just for a breath of fresh air or to remind themselves why they picked what they did. But they always go back to their original choice again.

  The most common request is one that probably won't surprise you. Most people wish to return to Earth... although their own private Earth. A world within their own domain. They wish to live on Earth as it was when they were alive, or during a favorite historical period, and they wish to be the God of that Earth, able to do what they want without consequence, and to change and add things at will.

  It really is the wisest choice. If you request this version of Heaven, you can have everything. And no one will judge you for whatever you choose to do. You have already been judged and deemed worthy of Heaven; no one will bother you again.

  So the Suburbs are pretty much nothing but a galaxy of tens of billions of Earths, each caught in a different time period, with a different mind acting as judge, jury and executioner over it. To walk into one of the houses here is to step onto a new Earth which may be wildly different than what you know, to an extreme degree of bizarreness and surreality.

  Depending on the mind who fashioned it, these Earths can be Hell o
r Heaven. You really can never tell until you step inside.

  I stepped through a door and found myself on a broad main street through a huge city. It looked like one of those sprawling, unchecked places you see in certain places in America. All the buildings were dark. The street lights burned, but they seemed to be dimmed to half their brightness. The traffic lights continued on as ever, cycling through red and yellow and green. The cross walks went of their own accord, showing a red hand, a countdown, a white figure in midstride.

  There was no one to be seen. The street was choked full of cars. But not in the gridlocked pattern of stand-still traffic. These were deliberately placed, some crooked and some straight, in a sort of maze. Or like a course used for a game of paintball. They were all sun faded. Some of the windshields were cracked. The tires were all without air. None of these vehicles had moved in a very long time.

  The sun was setting over the silent city. I could see the fiery orange of its descent at the end of the valley of desolate skyscrapers in which I stood, alone.

  As I looked around, trying to figure out what sort of afterlife this could be, another detail jumped out at me. There were red signs, in the familiar octagon of the stop signs you can find anywhere in America. But there were so many of them. I could see hundreds, placed every ten feet on both sides of the road. And they did not say STOP on them; they said REMAIN SILENT, in bold, white letters.

  I was feeling a bit perturbed by now. I do not generally like to partake in my own nightmares, let alone someone else's.