Lisa, A Chess Novel

by Jesse Kraai

  Lisa and Igor slowly walked back through their run of the day before. The sounds of heavy machines and clanging metals came from the warehouses. The southern shore parking lot was now empty of cars, only a few sticky condoms baked upon the pavement in the morning sun. They went over the high bridge. They were about to skirt the dog park, to then climb the mound that held the racetrack and descend to the Bulb. But Igor stopped.

  “Is time,” he said. And he started walking into the dog park, next to the Berkeley pier. “I tell you now about good friend. Name, Aleksander Wojtkiewicz. American chess fan gentrify him, call him Wojo, as if he cuddly bear. They never know beauty of mind that travel from one small tournament to another in big Greyhound bus. When he drink self into sickness, they not get doctor.”

  Igor got down on his knees and started to shovel up the manicured grass with his bare hands. From his pocket be brought forth what looked like a large friendship bracelet to Lisa, but the string was covered with worn wooden beads. Igor placed this in the ground. Igor said, “Was his. From time in Soviet prison. He not let us help. He not take morphine. He not wish debt, you understand? When sick he hide, holding these beads, forever alone.”

  Igor covered the mound and both players continued their walk in silence. Lisa imagined hordes of Eastern European boys. She had seen some of them in Chalkidiki. They carried heavy packs and sought the ascent. The sublime was up there. They could see it as they approached. They would molt their personal pasts and all of their infantile fallibilities at the mountain’s peak. And they would be reborn as men, strong enough to perceive and wield beauty, strong enough to not need women, to not need money. The complex harmonies they played together spoke of this coming truth. And their aspirations were flattered by the echoes that resounded from the nearby peaks of math and music.

  Each of these men did travel upward, and chess rewarded their sacrifices by allowing them to manipulate the power of the transparent world. But they did not find peaks on which they would slough their lower selves and jump off into the higher with their noble spirits. They found themselves on plateaus. There they would struggle with one another, and prove their strength. They pushed each other down to reach for the higher.

  Years of battle ensued. They did not have the physical space, or breath, to pause. Fresh challenges called out to their manhood and demanded struggle. Igor had told her of the rabbit, the guy who was always getting beaten down. He was probably the one who showed the others the ledge of their tabletop plateau. Together, they then looked out into the meaninglessness below. And they were strong enough to concede the nothingness and untransparency of the world from which they had arisen. Up high, they were isolated in a sad and lonely world of men. So they huddled together and drank.

  Now Igor was on a journey back down. He buried his friend’s wooden beads, and would soon give his set to Lisa and the homeless library of the Bulb. He would return to the unclean and opaque thought of daily life. The path Igor had used to get up to his plateau would now be completely unrecognizable. Year-round snow covered everything above the tree line. Igor would fall through that snow, the ice would cut his legs. Then he would have to bushwhack, the thorns would tear at him. That would be his practice for the long bike ride into the emptiness.

  As they approached the library, dogs began to charge them from the shrubbery. Lisa huddled close to Igor’s thigh as long fangs snapped just inches from her face; frothy drool dripped onto the nice leather shoes Jan had bought her when they were still rich. Then three worn faces began to approach. Covered in uneven whiskers, their skin looked like uncured animal hides. Lisa thought they were noble, that they must have undergone some kind of rugged enlightenment. Igor said something about Stalin and camps.

  The veterans gathered around Igor’s board and carved pieces, amazed to hear that such a beautiful piece of art would soon belong to the library. The tallest, a man named Clint, challenged Igor to a game. But Igor refused, he said that Lisa would play. The other two enjoyed the awkwardness of Clint’s situation. They saw that he was now obliged to beat the girl, to tear her clothes and give her a bloody lip, right in front of her old man. Clint would have to fulfill the silent accusation they saw in the fearful eyes of civilization whenever they left the Bulb. His friends jeered him, “Go on Clint, don’t ya got any napalm left?” “What’s wrong, monkeys coming down out of the trees?”

  The second man, Carl, used the space created by Clint’s mumbling dissatisfactions to ask for a game against Igor with the library’s plastic pieces. Then the third, a big black guy named Ronnie, said, “Shiiit, who am I supposed to play then?” Lisa unpacked her own plastic set that she always had with her and said, “I’ll play all of you, at the same time.” They laughed at her, “Shiiit,” “No, lil’ darling’,” “Ah, c’mon she jus’ foolin’ you man.” But Lisa wasn’t fooling. “And I’m gonna play all of you blindfolded.” The trio was all laughing and having a good time at the silliness of the whole thing. “Twenty bucks a game,” Lisa said.

  All eyes turned to Igor, as if he were the arbiter of this strange event. They followed him to the wide plush chair near the entrance of the library. A wealthy house might have found a small tear in the upholstery unsatisfactory, and released this lounge onto the sidewalk. Then a man like Clint had pushed the chair in a shopping cart down the hill to the shore. As Igor fell into the chair he said, “Is decadence. I like.” Then he just sat there, quietly, waiting for the event to happen. The men started setting up the pieces outside the library; Lisa sat in the half darkness of the library, behind Igor, ready to call out her moves. Igor closed his eyes and told Lisa, “You wake after big fuck.”

  Lisa taught the men how to call out their moves. And she made them write the moves down, so they couldn’t screw up the position. Her blindfold would be the walls of books inside the library. She would call her moves out from there.

  Each book had been worn into pliancy, not only with notes in the margins, but with a mind that had appropriated its ideas, to fight in the world. Each had been honed, in a personal way, like Igor’s board. Lisa felt like she was in the middle of a pile of ancient weapons, like the way men in violent societies used to disarm, placing their daggers and bows in a common heap so that no one would die when they came together to discuss matters of importance.

  Lisa was only disturbed once, when one of the dogs came into the wooden shack. A red cock came out of its sheath and viciously poked at Lisa’s pant leg. He whelmed her with his unwashed smell and sexual appetite. Lisa screamed, but the men laughed. “I think he likes you!” they hollered. Ronnie had to come in to pull the dog off her; Igor didn’t help—he was fast asleep. Lisa had to pause, to rediscover the positions after the disturbance, without looking at the boards. Lisa fell into her well and found the early structures of each game. Then she quietly unrolled each of them to their current position.

  The men had no money to pay Lisa with. In the midst of their embarrassment and shame, Lisa began petting the dog who had humped her. They told her his name was Johnny. “I’ll take him,” Lisa said. The men started hooting, and thought it an agreeable way out of their financial disgrace. Especially since no one really owned Johnny. “But here’s the thing, Lisa,” Clint said. “Any dog who leaves the Bulb has to have his balls cut. Those are the rules the man has made.” The men nodded agreement. Then Charlie said, “And we can’t allow that. There’s been too much ball-cuttin’ already.” Lisa stared at the mutt. They said he was only around six months old, but he was already huge. She thought of the old men in Igor’s Senate, and couldn’t imagine being friends with any of them after cutting their balls off. So she said, “Alright, I’ll come out every day to take care of him. He can sleep with the other dogs at night. But his name isn’t Johnny. I’m naming him Cherub. He’ll protect me.”

  Lisa returned to the library; Igor snored and flies slowly droned in a shaft of sunlight. She found Emma on the library’s shelves, by Jane Austen. It was water-stained and soiled. But she could read the words and the book
was hers to borrow. Lisa remembered what Jan had said of her grandmother: that she thought the world good, that it would provide, that she didn’t need money. Lisa also remembered the day Ted brought his spectacular TV home and yelled, “Ya get what you pay for!”

  Lisa woke Igor from his slumber and shoved Emma in his face. Jan said Austen talked about the world as if it were a chess game. Igor would tell her if that was true. “Known momient,” her teacher said as he dragged himself out of the deep chair, “is about people who wish for be married and have money. No one understand.” The rain had already begun, and Igor said it was time to start running. Lisa left her plastic travel set at the library alongside Igor’s. She said goodbye to Cherub and they ran.

  *

  The following day Igor marched Lisa to some place called the Berkeley Bowl. It was a big and sprawling grocery store, with aisles and aisles of stuff to choose from, like every other supermarket Lisa had ever known. But it was as if her master didn’t see any of that. Undistracted, he made a direct line to the back of the store.

  There, on a few wooden shelves, was a huge pile of fruits and vegetables. Squished under the weight above them, many of the skins broke and released slicks of orange, purple and yellow. Seeking a leak, these colors crept up the sides of the plastic bags that held them, like slurpees and sherbets, like Lisa’s own spit after she had stuffed nearly twenty Mike and Ike candies into her mouth.

  “Best always cheap,” Igor said. “Rich people not understand ripe, they leave for us. If no money have, look for fruit in dumpster.” Igor bought three bags of oranges, two bags of apples, two bags of pomegranates and one bag of red onions. Each bag cost ninety-nine cents. Then they ran up to Hillegass Street and picked lemons from a tree.

  Back at his cottage, Igor gave Lisa a pair of scissors and told her to cut some of his kale. Lisa wandered through Igor’s forest, and carefully cut from the Siberian dwarf, dinosaur, rainbow and perennial walking kale. Then Igor had Lisa strip the kale leaves from their stems while he put thin slices of red onion into the lemon juice.

  “Put all together,” he said. “Push lemon juice and onion into kale leaves. Squeeze!” Igor oversaw Lisa as she macerated the thick leaves, and the lemon juice burned her soft hands. “Now we let sit for momient, let lemon talk to kale. Eat fruit outside.” Igor sat on the ground with his plants and took his shirt off. With his bare hands he started to twist a huge pomegranate, looking for a seam. Overripe, the fruit exploded like a grenade and splattered his hairy chest with dark red. He handed the halved fruit to Lisa and broke his own. Lisa watched him take huge chomps, his chin stubble catching the exploding spritz. Her master was cleaning the whole fruit out, eating the white interstices that everyone else worked around. Dreaming of the pomegranate soup that Dorsa made with her mother, Lisa began to carefully pick each kernel out of its bed. She patiently gathered a handful, and held the springy kernels up to the light. There she saw shimmering purples and blacks hidden inside the red. She threw them all in her mouth, and they were the best thing she had ever tasted.

  Lisa’s eyes followed the red from Igor’s mouth as it dripped down his torso. There she noticed something truly remarkable: Stretch marks were etched into Igor’s lean body like ancient stratifications in an exposed layer of rock. An excess skin hung about his belly, loose and papery, like the slough of a snake. Igor had really once been a fatso.

  “Eat, Lisa, eat!” Igor exhorted her. They moved onto the kale salad. And as he sprinkled some quartered almonds into Lisa’s bowl he asked her, “Today we go for Walden Pond?” Lisa said she didn’t know where that was. Igor explained, “Is American tradition; for find self and truth in nature, alone. Is big make-believe. Thoreau go only three mile from home. Ha! Big journey. Is like your journey. Like way Fischer lock self in Pasadena apartment for big training.”

  Lisa was startled to think of herself as an American. More than anything she was Russian. She sprinkled some of her own hard-won pomegranate seeds into Igor’s bowl, onto the kale her own hands had mushed with lemon and red onion juice. The men who looked at her online. All of Jan’s hypocritical expectations. Lisa never felt any of that when she was Russian, with Igor. No one ever told her she should be in school when she was with him.

  A feral cat named Laska visited them. The walking kale stretched up high above her, into the pleasantly warm noonday sun. Like a lullaby, Igor told Lisa of the brisk air that came from the vast Pacific, scooping out the pollution of the cars. He told of the many hills he rode his bike over, reaching the top in a sweaty bath of manhood. He told of the fruits and nuts of the Central Valley, growing effortlessly in a sunny paradise.

  Then he said, “Today final lesson.”

  *

  “Jump, Lisa, jump!” Igor’s head disappeared and then reappeared, bobbing in the three-foot swells just off the shore of the dusty brown peninsula that held her library. The tide brought in the salt water that had been up in Alaska just a day or two before. That brackish water mixed with the pure mountain waters of the Sierras that the Sacramento River washed down. Dolphins, crab and sturgeon swam in there. Thick rain clouds suffocated a pale sun.

  Cherub whimpered beside her. He didn’t like this momient. Lisa had stripped down to a cotton T-shirt and some athletic shorts—the kind grandma Lena wore when she ran on a gym treadmill to stay perky for the men who passed by her metallic green desk. Igor was practically naked. It seemed he always was.

  This was the final lesson. Ruth had wanted her to follow this man. What was she supposed to find out there? But she already knew. She was supposed to go to the other side of pain, to find someone stronger, to find someone else. It was an atheist’s baptism.

  “Jesus Fucking Christ!” Lisa screamed as she surfaced. The January cold bit the papery shell of her body into a blue numbness, and she began to die. From the world of the living, Lisa heard Igor calmly call, “Put head in water, Lisa, swim!” She was furiously dogpaddling a couple feet from the rock she had jumped from. Cherub yelped in terror, and then dove in after his new master.

  Lisa scrambled back onto the slippery boulders that lined the shore. Igor called to her, “Today one minute. Tomorrow two.” Lisa shivered all over. Her teeth chattered and she rushed to get completely naked so she could dry off and put her layers on. Cherub kept spraying Lisa and all of creation, violently convulsing his body in quick revolutions. Lisa heard Igor call, “Is time for earn nihilism!” Then he was gone.

  In the far distance the Berkeley Pier floated on the horizon like the kind of insignificant stick Cherub wanted to fetch. That’s where Igor was going. He would swim around it, over the lines of the fishermen. Lisa didn’t know where he would go after that. But it seemed he was going off to write in his journal. And, in some strange way, he was doing it for her.

  *

  That evening, Lisa stitched together two garbage bags that she had cut to fit her body. In them she would become an it. No one would see her as she ran out to the library every day. Igor’s board and her chess trophies had disappeared into that black plastic; now she would too.

  At first it was real cool, to run to the water and the library. She could do anything she wanted. For several days, Lisa flipped through the books that others had given. In them, she expected to find some vision or path that she could follow. There had to be a manual on how to play life well. There had to be masters whose lives she could study. But Lisa always came back to Jan’s apartment, leaving Cherub to bed down for the night with Clint and his dogs.

  Jan and Lisa pretended that Emeryville High was still part of their lives. They had conversations like, “What the hell are you wearing?” “My school uniform.” And, “How was school today?” “Fine.” Lisa had a line of defense ready if Jan started poking her. She was going to shout, “You haven’t even been there! Why don’t you go to Project Darkness for a day! Igor came to see it.” But Jan never tried to rip that scab off.

  Most of the library’s books were about conspiracy theories, some structure out there in the world that
prevented us from being who we really were. But Lisa could do anything she wanted. Nothing was stopping her now. And Chessbabes was a world away, on the other side of the black plastic, in some place with an internet connection.

  Clint and the other veterans offered Lisa their histories of the world. “Yep, I’m just sittin’ here, waitin’ for my patriarchal dividend,” they liked to say with a laugh. “Check’s comin’ any day now!” Lisa’s skin hardened and cracked in the salty wind. She nailed driftwood and two-by-fours onto the library.

  Lisa felt most lonesome when the books couldn’t hold her interest. She tried reading the library’s weather-beaten copy of Emma, but it was like digging a hole in wet ground. Obscure words like “valetudinarian” and “drawing room” were soppy shovelfuls of mud that just led to more water. Those words belonged to Emma Woodhouse’s foreign and petty world. Igor was right. It was just a dumb book about some hottie who wanted to get married and have lots of money. So what if she could never get over herself.

  Lisa couldn’t focus on anything; the drip-drip of a leak would lead her into daydreams of how she would rebuild the library, with towers and many special areas to study. A whimper from Cherub made her think about what Clint had said, that Cherub was often scared at night, when the coyotes came out to hunt. He could smell them, Clint said. Cherub could also smell Lisa, and would always come out to greet her before she was even close to the library.

  Lisa’s days were often just a collection of these threads that didn’t lead anywhere, when she and the mildewy smell of the carpet became trapped in the little wooden structure, rain pouring all around. Igor’s immaculate board was right there; all she had to do was unpack the pieces from the purple bag that said Crown Royal. Where the hell was he?