They rented a room at a downtown hotel not far from Yonge Street. They unpacked the few things they had brought, including the Woodward guitar Susan had carried back from Chicago. Meager fractions of their lives. She rested on the bed while John showered.
“The change” was something she didn’t really want to think about. Dr. Kyriakides had intimated that John might die. John said that wasn’t really likely … but the question was open. And there was nothing that Susan or anyone else could do about it: no real treatment apart from the bottle of pills Dr. Collingwood had prescribed. There were questions she would have to begin to face, unpleasant as they were, such as: What would happen if John collapsed? Should she take him to a hospital?
This was all beyond her.
For now she was simply accommodating John’s wishes, helping him find Amelie. After that … well, it was impossible to predict. She remembered Dr. Kyriakides describing John’s illness as “a radical neurological retrenchment, a shedding of the induced growth … a one-time event, which he might survive in one form or another.”
One form or another. As John or Benjamin. Or some unpredictable amalgamation of the two.
And the event would be traumatic, Dr. Kyriakides had said: like a fever, it would run its course, would peak, would then be finished and its effects irrevocable.
He’ll be different, Susan thought. He’ll want me with him. Or he won’t.
He won’t be the same: something new will have been born … something will have died.
But now he is John, she told herself sternly. The future was always the future, always mysterious. What mattered was that he was John and she was with him now.
He came out of the shower looking stronger, though there was a certain persistent hollowness about his eyes that Susan didn’t like.
“It’s early,” he said. “We haven’t had lunch. Let’s head over to Yonge Street—the place Amelie used to work.”
They braved the cutting wind. Susan was afraid the Goodtime wouldn’t be open; a lot of places had closed because of the weather. But the lights were all on and the sign in the window said, OPEN REGULAR HOURS.
Their waitress was a tiny, timid-looking woman named Tracy; the food was greasy but filling. When Tracy came back with their coffee, John asked about Amelie.
Tracy gave him a wide-eyed stare. “I don’t know anything, anything about that!”
She hurried off with the check still clutched in her hand.
John looked at Susan. Susan shrugged.
It was the manager who brought back the check. He wiped his hands on his apron and said, “What’s this about Amelie?”
“She’s missing,” John said. “We’re looking for her.”
“So? She’s not here.”
“I know that. I thought she might have talked to somebody.”
“Haven’t seen her. Haven’t talked to her.”
“Well, all right.” John stood up. “Your waitress—Tracy—she seemed pretty nervous.”
The manager began an answer, then hesitated and took a closer look at John. John returned it steadily. Susan wondered if this was John’s “hypnotic” power at work, though she could see no sign of it—saw instead maybe a calculated sincerity.
Then the manager seemed to reach a decision. “There was somebody else here asking after Amelie. Tracy’s just skittish … she gets upset.”
“Somebody else?”
“Her brother, Tracy says. Big guy. Kind of strange. But he hasn’t been back for a while.”
Susan said, “It only confirms what we suspected.”
“But that’s important,” John said. “That’s useful.”
He led her back through the snowy streets—not to the hotel, but to the doughnut shop on Wellesley where she had discovered him all those months ago. Susan wondered if this was some kind of deliberate irony … but John was too serious for that. He took the table with the chessboard engraved on its surface; Susan sat opposite him. “What now?”
“We sit here for a while. Carbohydrates and coffee. We look around.” “What are we looking for?”
“I don’t know yet.” He shrugged out of his jacket. “You want a game?”
“Won’t that be distracting?”
“No.”
“All right, then.”
They played twice. The first game was a rout. Susan’s mind wasn’t focused on the board—she was cold, and frightened by what the manager at the Goodtime had said—and John pried out her castled king with a bishop sacrifice; checkmate came quickly.
She took the second game more seriously. She played a King’s Indian defense and pondered each move scrupulously. By playing a combination of aggressive and defensive moves she was able to keep him at arm’s length. Her interest deepened. She saw a chance to open up his king—a knight fork that would force a pawn move; she would lose the knight, but it would leave her bishop and her queen in a single, powerful diagonal aimed at his broken pawn ranks. Was there a flaw in this reasoning? Well, probably … but Susan couldn’t find it. She shrugged and advanced the knight.
John captured it with his pawn.
Susan hunched down over the board. If she brought the bishop down—and then the queen, while his knight was still pinned—
John said, “Look.”
She raised her head.
A man had just come through the door. A short man in a heavy coat, shivering. He bought a doughnut and coffee at the counter, turned and spotted John.
Recognition flashed between them. The man muttered and turned toward the door.
Susan whispered, “Who is he?”
“His name is Tony Morriseau,” John said, “and we need to talk to him.”
She stood up with John and cast a last glance at the chessboard.
She was a move away from checkmate. He hadn’t noticed.
Chess, John had told her, was mainly a memory trick. The difference between a chess master and a “civilian” player was that the master had stored a vast internal library of potential positions and was able to recognize them as they developed on the board. That, plus a certain finely honed ability to concentrate attention, made all the difference.
John was not technically a master because he had not played in enough tournaments to acquire a significant rating. His chess playing had been an amusement. (“An experiment,” he once called it.) He had played, at least in those days, to relish his easy superiority over his competitors. It was a cruel, private entertainment. Or so he claimed. But Susan remembered what he had said when they first met, across this table, when she asked why he went on playing when it was obvious that he would win: “One hopes,” he had said.
Hopes for an equal, she thought. Hopes for recognition, for understanding. Hopes for a touch, for a contact, miraculously, across that divide.
What matters, Susan thought, is that he had never really abandoned that hope. Even now, deep in this killing winter. It was alive inside him.
She took a last look at the chessboard, then followed him toward the door.
22
John followed Tony Morriseau out into the cold afternoon.
A bank of snowclouds had rolled in from the west; the sunlight was fading into winter dusk. Strange how vivid all this seemed. It was true, what he had told Susan: since childhood he had lived in a world of Platonic abstraction. Schema and essence, the word behind the shadow. It was Benjamin who had inhabited the universe of surfaces and colors.
But that was changing. He felt it now, and he felt it accelerating. He stepped into the biting winter air in a shower of snow crystals, and he was stunned by the immediacy of it all. Was this how Susan experienced things? All sense and no cogitans—this playground of perception? Made it hard to think.