The Extinction Club (33 page)

You don’t have to take a dive. I don’t mind losing.

I stared at the board. Then set it up again, turning it around so that Céleste was black. I moved my king’s pawn two squares. “Your move.”

This time I lasted longer, my fingers drumming on the bed frame, my kneecaps pumping like pistons, taking forever between moves. No clocks, thank God.

Suddenly, in a reckless move, Céleste left her queen unprotected. “Careful of your queen,” I warned, not wanting to win this way.

I watched her take another slug of medicine and then scribble
Your move.

All right, if that’s the way you want it. “
En garde
.” I moved my knight to fork her king and queen. “And check.”

She moved her king out of the way. I hastily captured her queen with my knight, hitting it, sending it flying across the board. She took my knight with her bishop, putting me in check. I moved my king diagonally forward, and she took my rook with her bishop. How did I not see that? Oh well, keep up the attack. I moved my queen menacingly forward …

She ignored this thrust, rashly I thought, and instead nudged an irrelevant pawn. In desperation? I countered with a pawn move of my own, preparing the way to slaughter. She moved another pawn forward, putting my king in exposed check from her other bishop. Three moves later I resigned.

We played six more games. Céleste made her moves quickly, unerringly, advancing without mercy to the inescapable conclusion—a bit like Garry Kasparov playing a chimpanzee. Not once did she queen a pawn; she always chose a horse, her favourite piece. Once she asked if she could leave the pawn there as a pawn, since she already had two horses. Between moves, she did not study the board; she doodled in her sketchbook.

I caught glimpses of things like this:

And this:

In a clear attempt to distract me, she ate pieces of black licorice, with her head thrown back in the way of a sword-swallower. She also whistled “Auld Lang Syne,” her lips stained with grape juice, and asked irrelevant questions.

What beautiful bird has a horrid name?

“I don’t know.”

Peacock.

“I’m trying to concentrate.”

In which movie does a couple fall in love while playing chess?

“I give up.

Hitchcock’s The Lodger.

“Your move.”

Did you know that Hitchcock didn’t have a belly button?

I shook my head.

It was eliminated when he was sewn up after surgery.

“I’m trying to concentrate.”

In which movie does a man play chess with the devil?

“Céleste …”

Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.

“I knew that.”

How’s that book you’re reading?

“Which book?”

The one with no covers. Broken Wind.

“It stinks.”

She moved her black-square bishop one square, in a fianchetto, then wrote
Mate in 2. Happy New Year.

I refilled, dazedly, two glasses with juice. Then set up the board for another game. As I was carefully pondering a complex opening, a Nimzo-Indian variation, Céleste dozed off.

While pulling a wool blanket over her, I caught a glimpse of her sketchbook, opened at this half-page image:

Okay, I admit it. Fifteen-year-old Céleste Jonquères is smarter and quicker than forty-four-year-old Nile Nightingale. Smarter and quicker than any computer I’ve played. She could play against God, give him an extra bishop and win. Next time we’ll play cards.

XXII

“W
OMEN, BY THEIR NATURE, ARE NOT EXCEPTIONAL CHESS PLAYERS: THEY ARE NOT GREAT FIGHTERS.
”

— GARRY KASPAROV

I’ll let you in on a little secret, one that I haven’t told anyone (except Nile). It’s this: I’m more parrot than owl. I’m not really that smart. I just read smart people, and remember. Everything else I know, or almost, came from my grandmother.

I should’ve told Nile last night that she represented Canada at the Nice Olympiad in 1974. And in Prague in ‘76. She lost at both places, but she was a grandmaster.

I’m thinking of becoming a stamp collector. After the chess game Nile showed me an amazing set of chess stamps from Afghanistan. Which I’d already seen because I’m such a snoophound. When I told him how beautiful they were he said I could have them. And that I could have his whole collection if I wanted! I said no. But I was just being polite & I think he was kidding anyway.

He said that his grandfather’s collection (which is now his) contains one valuable stamp from Canada, the 12-pence Black of 1851, and one valuable stamp from Australia, the Inverted Swan
of 1855. One is worth $125,000, the other $85,000. But that he doesn’t plan on selling either one.

He also said that by 2040 there will be no more stamps in circulation. Or newspapers or books, for that matter. “I won’t be around to see that,” said he, “but you will.” Wrong.

Speaking of stamps, we watched another “stamp” movie today, from a 10-DVD set by a Polish director named Kieslowski that I was very skeptical about because it’s based on the 10 Commandments. Volume 9 is about two brothers who inherit their father’s stamp collection. It’s great, and it’s not really based on the 9th Commandment, but the funny thing is that it uses the SAME plot device as Charade: a young boy naively trades 3 valuable stamps for a shitload of worthless ones …

Again, Nile rewound the film to freeze-frame the stamps, but this time I wasn’t listening. When I saw the images going backwards I thought it would be nice to have a reverse button in life. I imagined my body shooting back up from the Bogs, the Exit Bag coming off my grandmother’s head, the bear going up not down on that ramp, Bazinet’s bullets travelling back into his rifle, Déry unjumping me, his penis unpenetrating me.

I haven’t mentioned that last part to anyone, not even my grandmother. Why? Because Déry said if I told anyone what happened before I stuck the pencil into his neck, he & his sons would come & kill Grand-maman. And gang-rape me.

“That’s very interesting,” I said to Nile, who knew I hadn’t followed a single word he said.

Nile & I were talking about suicide today. He brought it up, I guess because I brought it up the other night. He said that a kind of suicide happens every day. That there are lots of collisions on the highway where nobody seems to have put on their brakes, as if the victims had somehow decided on death. And that there have been cases of people stopped on railway tracks with lots of time to get off, who simply sat there. Why was he telling me all this? Because it happened to his mother? He’d told me that she died in an accident, so I asked him if this is how she died, stopped on a railway track, waiting for the train to come. No, he said, she died from “internal decapitation,” where the skull is detached from the spinal column. She was rammed by a tailgating truck.

   XXIII   

A
fter the chess game, as Céleste slept, I leafed through two books I’d stumbled upon in the den, one on child geniuses, the other on how to raise a child genius. The latter, called
Bring Up Genius!
, was written by Dr. Laszlo Polgar, who claims he can turn any healthy baby into a genius. To prove it, he kept his daughters out of public schools, considering them factories for mediocrity, and instead home-schooled them in his apartment in Hungary. Now adults, all three are brilliant, and two are chess grandmasters, the top two women in the world.