The chess men emerged without comment in early March, sitting in the stoic steam of their coffees, waiting for the rest of the world to catch up with them and become alive again. The chess men came back before the street performers—the live statues that locked and unlocked themselves for loose change, silvery-black-skinned men who beat on overturned plastic buckets, wild-eyed prophets who described in lurid detail the end of the world. The chess men came back before the academic tours of ambitious young people started to create big traffic blocks, before the college students stripped down to only their unnatural tans and fanned languidly across the Square, before all of Cambridge roused itself sufficiently to once again protest the foreign policy disaster of the moment. My favorite opponent was a man named Lars, who stationed himself at the chess sets with such fierce commitment that I’d forget he could, if he wanted to, get up and walk away. The first day I met him he took one look at me and said, “You look like somebody who feels sorrier for yourself than is strictly necessary.”
I’d been out wandering, as I often did in those days. It was two years after I’d gotten my results, and I was halfway through my dissertation on trilingual wordplay in Ada, or Ardor. I liked the bitter cold the best; it narrowed the meandering, self-indulgent courses of my mind into a focused dissatisfaction with what was right in front of me. This, I’ll be the first to admit, was an improvement.
I sat down, and Lars promptly decimated me at chess, then told me exactly what was wrong with my game and with me, more generally. After that, we were friends.
Lars told me a lot of other things eventually, though there was no way that all of it was true. He’d been born in Stockholm, he said, the son of shipping magnates, descended from Swedish royalty. His family had lost everything during the embargoes of 1979. He’d been homeless in Philadelphia, spent a year in Hong Kong, been dishonorably discharged from the Swedish military for reasons he would not discuss. There were conflicts in his stories, mysteries, great gaping holes in time and space, but Lars did not respond to challenges on these fronts except by starting to beat me faster when I asked nosy questions. So I learned not to. Lars lived off of bluffs, wild claims that were never, ever verifiable. He’d worked in a mine on the Black Sea, he said. He’d jumped trains in Moldova, he’d learned to recite the Qur’an from Pakistani immigrants in London. And who could say with absolute certainty that he had not?
There’s an intimacy in listening to somebody’s lies, I’ve always thought—you learn more about someone from the things they wish were true than from the things that actually are. Sometimes, though, there were intentional provocations—allusions to bastard children, assassination attempts, that sort of thing. Or worse, advice. Analyses. Witty aphorisms. “You know what your problem is?” he asked me more than once. And even though I always told him that I did know what my problem was—that it had been revealed to me via the best genetic testing science could offer—he invariably gave his own interpretation. “Too much thinking” or “Not enough sex” or “Not enough thinking about sex,” he would say. These assessments were typically followed by instructive tales from his own life, in which having sex or avoiding thinking saved the day.
The last time I saw him before he stopped talking, Lars told me about being shot at in Turkey. It was the end of March, the time of year in New England when you feel yourself regaining the will to live. The sky was a weak white, and the people floated through Harvard Square like brightly colored aquarium fish of all different shapes and origins. I’d bought us both coffees. Lars put five sugars in his, then sent me back into the coffee shop for more. When I returned and looked disapproving, he said, “You know what your problem is? You’re afraid to have any fun.”
“I have fun,” I said, taking a sip of coffee and spilling some on my coat. The board between us was still a blank slate. There were limitless ways for either of us to win or lose, although we could both be pretty sure which way it would go. “I have all kinds of fun,” I said. “Fun such as you could not imagine.”
“I’ll bet,” he said. “You look just like the kind of girl with a secret life of fun.”
I opened by advancing my king’s knight. Lars mirrored me. “You can’t even imagine the fun,” I said. “You don’t even want to.”
“I, however,” he said, “have had a life full of adventure. I have narrowly cheated death many times. I have earned the right to a little sugar in my coffee now and then.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Did I ever happen to mention the time I was almost killed in Turkey?”
I was not allowed to ask him what he’d been doing in Turkey in the first place; this would be viewed as unforgivably intrusive and rude. The rules of the game were long established.
“It was a few hours outside Ankara,” he told me. There was a flurry of pawn movement, the debut introduction of the bishops. Lars’s attitude toward chess was the same as his general attitude toward life: you can’t be squeamish about it. You have to embrace it, fuck with it a little, see what it will do to you. Excessive calculation leads to paralysis, which leads to death.
“Wait, when was this?” I said, which I knew would irritate him. Irritating Lars was a tactic of mine. I advanced my bishop’s pawn and planned to advance my queen’s pawn next, in order to consolidate a pawn center and finally, for once, perhaps, drive Lars away.
“The seventies. Who can remember, exactly? Before you were born.”
“I’m thirty.”
“Please.” He made a face and introduced his queen. It was early for her, though the move was technically aboveboard. She wasn’t vulnerable to attack, and he was only trying to maintain his hold on the center. I flattered myself that this meant he was worried. “It is not classy for a woman to admit her age,” he said.
I squinted at the board. Lars had folded his king protectively behind his queen and her knight. In the center of the board, my bishop and pawns were lined up as if before a firing squad.
“Anyway,” Lars said. “I was with a friend. A woman friend.” Most of Lars’s stories featured a woman friend—always different, like Bond girls, entering the narration long enough to be seductive and saved and exiting without a fuss. Lars told me again and again how beautiful he was in his youth. When I knew him, he had streaked and matted gray hair and always dressed in plaid, but there was a certain impish quality to his blue eyes that I suppose somebody could have found attractive once, although I don’t pretend to be an expert on these things. Of all the stories Lars told me, the ones about his beauty are the ones I think he most wanted to be true.
“Okay,” I said. “Carry on.” I swiped one of Lars’s pawns out of sheer spite.
“So we find this lovely river hours outside the city. We think, A nice place to have a picnic, have a little rest, you understand.”
“I understand,” I said. The pawn capture, I saw now, had been a mistake. I’d opened up a diagonal onto my king. Lars was hemming me in with his usual bored calculation, letting me make my own mistakes.
“We are thinking to lie down for a while and get to know each other a little better,” he said. Lars took my pawn with his knight. I took his offending knight with my knight, who was prompty captured by Lars’s queen.
“Yes,” I said. “I get it.” I castled. Lars sacrified a bishop, breaking up my pawn center.