The Genius

by Jesse Kellerman

  To my surprise, my lengthy apology e-mail brought an equally lengthy reply—in French. Since Marilyn knows I don’t speak French, she had to have sent it knowing I’d need a translation; who knew what kind of mortification she intended to subject me to. I hesitated before calling Nat over.

  “ ‘Following the death of King Louis XIV, the court returned to Paris from Versailles. Residences were constructed on the Faubourg, displacing the horticultural marshes.…’ ” He scanned down. “There’s something in here about a restaurant.… You know what this is, it’s the history of her hotel. It sounds like she cut-and-pasted it off the website.” He looked at me. “Does that have any meaning to it that I’m missing?”

  “It just means fuck off.”

  THE SNOWSTORM DELAYED SAMANTHA’S RETURN, and when I talked to her, she urged me to continue without her. I decided to use the time to follow up on the information I’d gotten at the stationery store. For weeks I’d been calling local game rooms and chess and checkers clubs, thinking that Victor might have gone in search of a challenge. The places nearest the Courts were actually in Brooklyn, and without exception they turned out to be full of two-bit academics; anxious teenagers with bad haircuts; dead-eyed prodigies salivating over their victories, or else sitting in chairs too high for them, swinging their feet and clutching electronic clocks as they waited for a worthy opponent. I would tiptoe around, trying to ask if anyone knew a Victor Cracke, small man with a moustache, looked a little like—

  “Shhhhhh.”

  The second-to-last place on my list was the High Street Chess and Checkers Club, located on Jamaica Avenue. Thursday, the answering machine said, was checkers night, round-robin at seven thirty, five-dollar entry fee, winner take all, soda and chips provided.

  Calling the place “High Street” could not mask the fact that it was a shithole: a grimy room four floors above a bail bondsman, up a vertiginous stairwell, to which you gained admittance by hammering on a metal door until someone came to fetch you. I arrived fifteen minutes early. A painfully thin man in a flannel shirt and hideous corduroys came down and demanded to know if I had a reservation.

  “I didn’t know I needed one.”

  “Aahhh, I’m just messing, har har har. I’m Joe. Come the fuck on up.”

  As we mounted the stairs, he apologized for the lack of access.

  “Our intercom’s broken,” he said, wheezing. He had a slight limp that caused his hips to swing aggressively behind him, like he was trying to shake free of himself. “The rest of’m work, just ours is screwed. Landlord’s not interested. We have to keep it locked cause there’s been some break-ins. Somebody got aholda the fire extinguisher and sprayed down the carpet. I don’t know what the problem that is, piecea wet carpet never hurt a man, har har har.” He took out a hankie and blew his nose.

  I said, “I was actually hoping to ask you about one of your players.”

  He halted, one foot on the top stair. His whole demeanor shifted; I saw him withdraw. “Oh yeah? Who’d that be?”

  “Victor Cracke.”

  Joe scrunched up his face, scratched his neck. “Don’t know him.”

  “Do you think someone else might?”

  He shrugged.

  “Is it all right if I come up and ask around?”

  “We’re about to play,” he said.

  “I can hang around until after you’re done.”

  “It’s not a spectator sport.”

  “Then I can come back,” I said. “What time do you finish?”

  “Depends.” He drummed his fingers on the banister. “Could be an hour, could be four.”

  “Then I’ll play,” I said.

  "You know how?”

  Who doesn’t know how to play checkers? “Yes.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Reasonably.”

  He shrugged again. “Okeydoke.”

  Taken as a whole, the checkers constituency of the High Street Chess and Checkers Club made the Brooklynites look positively trendy. Queens, I gathered, drew a more diverse crowd: a jittery man with an immense Afro and Coke-bottle glasses; an obese man wearing Velcro sneakers and purple sweatpants; twins who stood against the far wall, steadily consuming Coca-Cola and mumbling to each other in Spanglish.

  Joe was clearly in charge. He made announcements, reminded them about the Staten Island tournament, and then went around the room pairing people up. I was shown to a rickety card table where my opponent sat in a fully buttoned parka, moonface luminous from within his hood. “This is Sal. Sal, meet new guy.”

  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.

  “Thaaaank you,” 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.

  • ?coming here a few months ago so I don’t know

  • ? everyone’s name, Joe knows everyone though did you

  • ? 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.

  • ?Yes he was the nat champ in 93, he is also a master

  • ?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 wa
s 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 expression—all of them—are 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 PRIZES —by which I mean the lump sum of $50, awarded to Joe by Joe—took 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 table-tops.

  “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.

  Outside, snow had again begun to fall. Joe tossed the bag into the alley and walked toward the bus stop. His limp seemed worse, his gait almost spastic. He also looked larger than before, as if he’d grown a layer of blubber. A breeze opened his coat, revealing a second coat, and protruding from its collar, the collar of a third.

  “Do you want a ride?” I asked.

  He looked at me.

  “I’m going to call myself a car,” I said. “I can have it drop you wherever you need to go.”

  In the distance the bus turned the corner. He looked back at it, then at me, and he said, “What I really am is hungry. You hungry?”

  WE WENT TO AN ALL-NIGHT DINER. All I wanted was a cup of decaf, but when I said I was paying, he ordered fried eggs, bacon, hash browns, and a milkshake. Listening to him gave me heartburn. The waitress started to walk away, and he called her back to add onion rings and a green salad.

  “Gotta get all the food groups,” he said.

  He ate slowly, giving everything about fifty chews, until I couldn’t imagine he was tasting much more than mush and his own saliva. Long gulps of milkshake followed, his face stuck so far forward into the glass that his nose reemerged tipped with froth. He would then wipe his face on a napkin, crumple it, and drop it on the floor. All the while his eyes kept up a nervous hopscotch, to the door, to the counter, to me, the table, the waitress, the jukebox; his fingertips red and feathery with hangnails.

  He asked when I had last played checkers.

  “Probably twenty-five years ago.”

  “I could tell.”

  “I never claimed to be any good.”

  “Victor’s a good checkers player. He’d be better if he slowed down a bit.” This tidbit intrigued me, as for some reason I’d always pictured Victor as contemplative, at least when not drawing. I mentioned to Joe that the art had a strong gridlike feel to it, especially when assembled as a whole. He shrugged, either in disagreement or out of apathy, and went back to eating.

  “You live around here?” I asked.

  “Sure. Sometimes.”

  I didn’t understand, and then I did, and when he saw that I’d caught on, he started to laugh.

  “I could have you over sometime. We’ll have a sleepover. You like the great outdoors? Har har har.”

  I smiled politely, which made him laugh even harder.

  “You know what you look like,” he said, “you look like I just took a dump on your living-room rug and you’re trying to ignore it. Hell, I’m just messing. I don’t really live outside.… Feel better now?”

  "No.”

  "Why not? Don’t believe me?”

  “I—”

  “Yes I do, then. I sleep in the park. Har har har. No I don’t. Yes I do. No I don’t. What do you think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He smiled, kicked back the last of his milkshake, and waved the empty glass at the waitress. “Chocolate, please.”

  There were still a couple of onion rings left, as well as the entire untouched salad. With his new drink he resumed the process—chew chew chew chew swallow gulp gulp wipe—and I got the impression that he was obeying some weird ritual, that he needed to finish his food and drink at the same time. I had a vision of us sitting there until sunrise, ordering and reordering until a happy coincidence gave him permission to stop.

  Either that or he was just really, really hungry.

  He said, “You see that?”

  His chocol
ate-tipped nose pointed across the street to an unlit church.

  “They got a shelter,” he said. “Doors close at nine, though, so on game nights we finish too late.”

  I didn’t need to ask why he chose checkers over a bed. It would have been insulting for me to ask. Instead I said, “Where did you learn to play?”

  He wiped his face with a revoltingly soiled napkin. I handed him another and he wiped, crumpled, dropped. “The nuthouse.”

  Again, I smiled politely, or tried to.

  “Har har har, dump on the rug, har har har.” He forked his salad and held the dripping leaves up to the light before popping them in his mouth. “I love me some greens,” he said, chewing.

  “When were you there?”

  “Seventy-two to seventy-six. You can learn to do anything in there. Lots of time, you know? It’s like the best college in the world. I got my four-year degree, har har har. If you weren’t nuts before they put you in there, you’d go nuts from boredom.” He laughed and drank and coughed out some milkshake and wiped his chin.