by Jesse Kraai
Arun’s face was calm and blank. He said, “No, really, I don’t know it. What is it?”
Lisa pulled her math textbook out of her backpack. She had tried to study it several times in the last two weeks. There was no desk in her new room, so she would lie in bed with it. There, the problems would demean her. They stood in long lists, like the unexplained expectations Jan had, both infinite and catalogued. The book made Lisa sleepy. But she always kept it with her. The extra weight in her backpack made her remember who she wanted to be.
Arun looked upon the page Lisa took them to and read: “The ninety-degree triangle theorem. Find the unknown quantity.” There was a picture of a mustachioed smiling triangle whose ruler pointed to a whole page of problems like 16+9=c².
“I guess I usually thought of that as the Pythagorean Theorem,” he said.
“Whatever,” Lisa shrugged. She felt the eyes of the two men on her and her inadequacy. She thought both men were wondering why she couldn’t do math. “C’mon Lisa, you’re a chessplayer,” they seemed to say. “This should be easy for you.” That’s what they told Jeffrey, Lisa remembered.
Arun asked: “Do you know why the theorem is true?”
“Look,” Lisa said. “It doesn’t matter if I prove the thing or not, OK? I just have to get all the answers right.”
Arun closed his eyes, and in that silence Lisa’s mathematical failures briefly left her. The shaded undergrowth of the Redwood grove they were in had a thick smell of grubs and slow decay. From out in the open fields, where the Pacific wind scraped all the old air away, Lisa could hear the yelps of smart boys playing ultimate Frisbee.
“Let me show you,” Arun calmly said. He was ready to celebrate the rebirth of an ancient companion who was always the same, like an old friend who never changes his clothes. But Lisa wasn’t. She knew she would never get it.
“Let’s begin by drawing a right triangle on a piece of paper,” he said. “Make it any way you like.” Lisa again complained that this wasn’t what the teacher wanted. It wouldn’t help her pass the test. And she tried to make the whole situation impossible by creating the following oblong thing:
Arun continued: “Good, now we’ll call the bottom line the rank, the side the file, and the diagonal the bishop. Now, let’s build a square out of each of those lines.” Arun got down on his knees with the little black ants and began tearing out notebook paper. Everything was inexact. “You make the square out of the bishop’s line, and I’ll make the squares for the rank and the file.” Three squares soon stood in front of them; smudged thumbprints and incautious tears did not seem to promise truth.
Lisa attacked the dubious edifice: “What do these hokey squares have to do with the problems I’m supposed to do? These are squares. My problems have numbers.”
Arun calmly replied, “Well, when we say a number is squared this is what we’re talking about.”
Lisa didn’t like this thought much at all. Where were the numbers? They hadn’t talked about math this way at her school, and the distance between the crude shapes before them and 9+16=25 seemed tremendous.
Arun continued, “We want to say that if we add the area of the file square to the rank square we will get the bishop’s square. So, let’s begin by looking at what the equation would look like in our case.” Arun then took the squares and rearranged them like this:
“That’s so ridiculous,” Lisa said. “How are you going to smoosh that little square into the bigger one?”
“Well, let’s try.” Arun said. “First, let’s create a square whose sides are all the length of the bishop diagonal, sometimes called the hypotenuse. We’ll need three new triangles the same size as our first one. Lisa and Arun made these triangles and then Arun arranged them like this on top of the matted pine needles:
“So, Lisa,” he said. “This has to be the same square we built out of the bishop’s diagonal, right?”
Lisa stared at it for a moment, trying to not be deceived. But there it was; all four sides were the length of the bishop diagonal. Lisa thought it a neat trick that she could overlay their bishop square they had made on top of this one, but she was still certain that the little file square could not be squished into the rank square. Arun then began rearranging the triangles around the new square, the inside square, that they had outlined on the ground:
“Now, let’s see if we can find the rank and file squares in this shape. If they are in there then they are equal to the square we built out of the bishop’s diagonal. Which is what we wanted to prove, right?” “Right.” Lisa answered. She stared triumphantly at the construction. It was clearly not going to work.[1]
Then Arun overlaid the two squares they had created from the sides of the triangle, named the rank and the file squares. It was amazing. But Lisa didn’t want to admit it. “These shapes aren’t exact.” Lisa cried. “There’s no way they could ever be.”
“Good, Lisa,” Arun said. “You are right. The theorem is only correct for the perfect shapes in your head. Out here they can never be true.”
*
Lisa arrived at her next lesson at the Berkeley Public Library armed with a speech: “When all the information was gathered,” she slowly recited, “it became clear that black’s moves were good, but his position was bad. It was quite obvious that to obtain counterplay, it was necessary to play more actively.”
“You speak like Tal?” Igor asked. “Note to move five of game ten?”
“Right. So look, I have a favor to ask. I want you to give me some more chess problems. I’m gonna find a seat in the back of my classes and do those while I pretend to be doing whatever it is they want me to do.”
“Look, Lisa, I understand. America no intellectual culture have. This Mr. Reese, he weak mathematiker, rating maybe only eleven hundred, but . . .”
Lisa cut her teacher off. She spoke with so much force that she spat, like Igor did when he explained something fundamental about a position, and like the way she imagined he had once yelled, “First big drink, then big fuck!” with Jeffrey Phillips. “They only teach you how to play with the knobs, Igor! They never show you how the machine actually works!”
“But Lisa, what about triangles and religion of Arun’s fathers? Maybe shit now, in class with player rated six hundred. But you improve, later come to higher level.”
“I’m done with later,” Lisa said. “The main thing they want is attendance. They want you to show up and be quiet; that’s how they make their money. I’m gonna dress up like a bag lady, you know, real floppy clothes. I will become invisible. No one will bother me.”
Igor looked down at his helpless overlarge hands. Math, music, chess—they were the wonder he had known in the world.
“Listen, Igor,” Lisa said. “Don’t be like my mom. She expects me to go to that place. But she doesn’t know. She’s never been there.”
*
Igor came to Lisa’s school the next morning. He must have walked through the double doors, past the fat lady behind the thick pane of glass at reception. He had survived her slow eyes. No one asked the tall and lean man with the aristocratic posture what he was doing there. For Lisa, Igor had purchased slacks and a button-down shirt from Goodwill. He looked like a supreme bureaucrat from Sacramento, come for a surprise inspection.
In the halls and in the yard, Igor had seen the races self-segregate into herds: blacks, Hispanics, southeast Asians, whites. They shouted “nigger,” “whitey,” and “spic” at themselves. Igor had seen the pants drawn low over the naked ass cracks of overweight American children.
On a school map, Igor found Mr. Reese’s classroom. From the hallway door, he watched Lisa’s class. He saw the teacher’s jeans, tattoos and piercings. He saw the mustachioed triangle struggle to marshal the class. He saw Reese dock points from misbehaving students, documenting their names and their point loss on the blackboard. But he didn’t see Lisa.
Lisa imagined Igor meeting Janelle outside; she was late. Tight denim lollipopped her tits. High heels sprang her ass. Igor as
ked her, “Uh, Excuse. Is Lisa in this class?” Janelle’s look insulted Lisa’s teacher: Who are you to say anything to me, old fool? Do you have any power here? Then she said: “Lil’ white fatty?” Igor assumed that’s who Lisa must be, and he nodded. “Oh, that girl couldn’t keep her trap shut. Reese sent her on down to Project Darkness.” Igor wanted to ask her more, where Project Darkness was, but Janelle slipped through the door to the hooting satisfaction of her peers. Mr. Reese docked her 70 points. But she had also stopped caring.
Igor couldn’t find Project Darkness on the school map, so he went back to the glass wall he had passed near the main entrance. “Uh, excuse,” Igor asked the secretary. “I look for Lisa Schmied in Project Darkness.”
Sitting behind her bulletproof glass wall, the lady with the slow eyes said, “There is no Project Darkness here, sir. But we do have a Project Light. Are you her parent or guardian?” Igor supposed he was. And he even got a visitor’s pass to prove it.
Igor came to find Lisa in Project Light, a square cement block which the school map knew as Building I. He stood in the entrance while he waited for his eyes to adjust to the scant murmur of light. Black craft paper covered the windows and cut the sun’s broad spectrum to reveal the floating world that you can only see in murky half light. The other adults always called the levitating dancers that filled the room “dust.” But Igor knew from his days of desperate alcoholism that yeast is everywhere. Thousands of spores were landing in his mouth and nostrils with their spades, eagerly digging for death. The misty cloudburst of a kid’s sneeze didn’t just fall to the ground. A diverse multitude of viruses would ride the moist particulate. Airborne bacterial colonies were hungry. If they did not eat soon, they would die. To retrieve Lisa, Igor had come to this hole—so incongruent, and hateful, to the clean mathematical architecture of his mind.
“Can I help you, sir?” A tiny voice spoke from behind Igor’s thigh. Igor had not seen the woman in the darkness. But she was right beside him, guarding the door. Lisa’s gray hoodie was slowly emerging from the darkness. There were about a dozen kids with her. Most were practicing the same pose as Lisa: Hands in pockets, the body crumples over to find a forehead post on the laminate particle board in front of it. The main difficulty is keeping the pose as still as possible, relaxing into it. The contact point of skin and laminate will become moist, and this creates a balance problem which can slide the head out from its peaceful slumber. From the mouths of Lisa’s most experienced comrades hung the delicious drool which proved that they really could sleep through it all.
In his best English Igor said, “I need to speak to Lisa for couple minute. Outside. Is important.” Lisa awoke to Igor’s voice and proudly wiped the viscous stream of spittle onto her cotton forearm. Leaving class with Igor promised freedom, and she shouted, “Later, bitches!” to those who had to stay behind as she marched into the September sunshine with Igor.
Outside, Igor solemnly said: “Is big shit. You have right.”
Finally, the adult world saw the injustice she faced. They would now set her free.
Igor continued, “For this purpose, I give you problems, Lisa. You obvious dissident. You can’t, how you say, keep trap shut? Like Siberia here, Project Cold.” Igor gave Lisa a hard stare, as if he were wearing a heavy coat in a gulag prison yard, come to share a bit of precious and stolen cheese rind with his best friend. “We work from Armenian grandmaster Kasparyan’s book Domination in 2545 Endgame Study. Is favorite. Written for truth in Russian, but chess universal language.”
Igor smiled at Lisa. “Not make sense to give book. They take away. I make photocopy, but not bind. Pages small enough for put inside whatever book they wish you for look.” With his hairy hand, Igor pointed back at Project Darkness. “We then look solutions before each lesson.”
Lisa shouted: “Whaddaya mean? YOU’RE SENDING ME BACK IN THERE??”
Her mentor looked up. His eyes passed beyond the chain-link fence that surrounded her new school, over the high clocktower of the Berkeley campus, and out to the mountain Lisa had climbed on her bike. “Not so easy for leave, Lisa.”
“Whaddaya mean? You got the pass. Let’s get out of here!”
Igor paused, and then said very quietly: “I had friend, was famous grandmaster, was student of Tal. Russians also put him in prison as young soul. He not wish for speak much about it. But sometime he say: Test of man is for be free in mind, wherever he is.”
Lisa could not befriend this Eastern European vision of imprisoned freedom. Like Tal had said: She had done nothing wrong, she didn’t deserve to be where she was, and she needed some fucking counterplay.
Igor continued: “Many time, we talk to pieces. I teach you how. It is a pleasure. These problems I give are for another. They know only mathematical labyrinthos underneath position. Must open mind. Be prepared to go deep. Sometime more than thirty move. But length not hard part. For truth, you will be numb with new way pieces wish for move. You will be blind, tapping in their emptiness. You sit hour, day, sometime week. Go aggressive into dark tunnel. Eventual you feel rope in dirt. Follow him.”
CHALKIDIKI
With her good news, Lisa sprang up the wide granite steps of the Berkeley Public Library’s tall staircase chamber. Noisy and potent, her footsteps slapped the quarried stone. She burst out of the noble stairwell onto the third floor, the children’s floor, where Igor waited with his ornate wooden set.
“I had to sign for this LETTER!” Lisa shouted. Her teacher took the stack of official documents into his oversized hands and read: “The United States Chess Federation would like to congratulate you on being selected to play for the United States Chess Delegation to the World Youth Championships in Chalkidiki, Greece this December.” And: “Your November rating of 1923 is the highest in the country for girls aged 12–14.” Igor skimmed down the page, and then read so loudly that everyone on their floor could hear, “All travel expenses will be covered!”
Lisa shouted: “I can’t believe I was chosen for the US Chess Team!”
“Ho-ho-ho!” Igor laughed. “You not chosen. No committee make for big sit and say: ‘We like way Lisa look. We give her spot.’ Not way it was. You make own way in the chess.”
Lisa smiled and said, “Well, with your help.”
Igor answered, “Maybe that why committee choose Igor for be coach on American team! Ha, I come too, Lisa!”
Her mentor beheld her, in the same intimate and thoughtful way she remembered him regarding Jeffrey Phillips in Fresno. Igor would take her away. The letter plainly stated that there was a higher order that she belonged to, and that her school must release her.
“Lisa!” Igor shouted. “I show you now big Russian tradition. We make Chess Dance. For celebratzk.” Igor sat back on his heels into an imaginary chair. He clasped his arms in front of his torso to make a table. Then he started kicking his legs out, faster and faster. He shouted salutations in Russian. The librarian told him to be quiet. But he wouldn’t, not until his dance was over. All the while he grinned, like a mischievous boy and a wild drunk.
Lisa thought she understood why it was Igor’s chess dance. The pain of a thousand lunges would be embraced until it liberated him. He needed to smile through the torture he inflicted on himself. But Lisa disapproved. It wasn’t personal enough, he was following some kind of Russian dance. It wasn’t his. And she thought the gay frivolity of Igor’s broad smile inconsonant with the prayer she hoped her chess dance would be.
Lisa began her dance with a reserved face, thoughtful. As if that expression held too much weight, her body folded in on itself and she collapsed into an unstructured ball, limp. She then unfurled upward slowly, blooming anew into her thoughtful pose. Lisa collapsed a second time. Then her body became suddenly muscular, tense, and an explosion went off. Lisa sprang viciously toward Igor, and the heat of warrior qi flowed out of her. Her eyes pushed so far out that Igor had to see the little red veins that reached back into an impolite dissection of catalogued bones and unnamed soft tissues. Lisa�
��s tongue and palms stretched out toward Igor as if she were hitting him as hard as she could. Big Igor jumped back. Then she retreated back into her thoughtful pose, and repeated the cycle, several times around the room.
The librarian tried to shush Lisa too. But that only gave her dance more power; it made her think about how Christine, Saheli and Sang would crush in Reese’s class. They would keep their traps shut. They would do what they were supposed to. And they would score like a zillion on the SAT. That’s how they would be exceptional. But Lisa couldn’t follow their example. And the lousy math textbook she carried around was too heavy.
The argument Lisa was going to have with Jan festered: Look Jan, she would say. I can do a mate-in-five in my head. It’s true the same way math is true. But there’s a difference. The interesting positions in chess aren’t about truth. They are at war with each other. And that’s what life is, right, a war? Lisa had given this speech to Jan several times as she watched time pass in the big black and white clock that hung over Reese’s class.
In this imagined argument, Lisa was always smug, convinced by her overwhelming victory. But then Jan would answer: Damnit Lisa, it’s a war if you don’t learn math. Look at my life. I had nothing to fall back on after the store fell apart. The kids who learned math are all down in Silicon Valley, just laughing it up. They have so much money that they work for fun. Lisa didn’t have a great comeback. So she waited to start this argument, and the heavy book continued to wear her down. She hoped that Greece would show her something beyond math, beyond Christine, Saheli and Sang. And she would show that special thing to Jan.
“Lisa,” Igor said. “I like dance very much. We celebrate with something beautiful. Remember game one of Tal-Botvinnik match? That game Tal ideal: move Kd1 make people think about the chess and the life. Everyone think they can refute Tal unorthodox play. They see unconventional pieces developed, coming together in center. They laugh, make big face. But then previous discord and confusion resolve into major key. They must ask themselves big question. I now wish for show my chess ideal. Game is Paul Morphy versus Evil Duke. Not know if duke evil for truth, that only what they say.”[7]