I retreated to baseball cards.
Like Paul Morphy, grandest of grand masters, who still played the odd game in the period when he believed that government agents were controlling the international chess federations, or like Bobby Fischer, who was still playing chess privately while expressing the idea that the Jews controlled international commerce, I believed I could in fact play and whip D. Tyrannosaurus, collage artist, without much problem. Unorthodox chess openings, as you may know, are in the DSM-VIII, along with, e.g., waitstaff, habitual harassment thereof, and while these disorders are not covered by all insurers, they do get us closer to an idea of how psychology works. The Creepy-Crawling opening, the Shy opening, the Garbage Formation (where the knight is pinned down uselessly at A3), these can be treatable tendencies, and god knows I could have used a therapeutic intervention after my witless opening against Sashi.
At Ho Chi Minh, D. stood over a couple of kids with a board, at one of the nearby tables. A candle guttered beside them, and the pieces seemed grander somehow, more expressionist, in this shadowy illumination. We were getting to the end of electrical twilight. D. threatened the kids, with his imposing height and his severe face, persuading these striplings to surrender to us the board and its men. It was at this point that I generously volunteered to play the game blindfolded, if only we could find a stylish and effective textile for the purpose. Eventually, we tied two crimson napkins end to end and affixed this suggestion of a blindfold over my eyes. I promise I didn’t need to cheat, to look under the lip of my eye diaper, because D. Tyrannosaurus was such a haphazard player that it was unclear that he comprehended the most basic movements. He began with a ridiculous opening, as I had with Sashi. Amost immediately, I could feel him drumming with his long, bony fingers on the tabletop, as if to make up for his disorderly play. I concentrated on this and other ambiences while sporting my crimson blindfold. There was the snorting of the cappuccino maker; there was the relentless braying from the sound system. A couple to our left was arguing. Somewhere across the room, a young woman sniffled, perhaps in some state of grief. I could hear fingers on computer keys; I could hear what was clearly a one-sided telephone conversation about bariatric resectioning. A wind was blowing up outside, broadcasting widely the dust and detritus of the post-imperial desert. While I was listening to these pleasant sound emanations, I took command of files E and F, easy enough to do even blindfolded.
D. began attempting to push his pawn on the G file all the way to the other end, as if I wouldn’t possibly notice, but I overcame this strategy and, somewhat anticlimactically, I mated him in eleven moves. I didn’t lose a man.
“Bad luck!” I said. Removing the fashion accessory.
D. gazed at the board disconsolately. He shook his head. “Been playing for thirty years. It doesn’t show. Well, let me drive you back.”
We stepped outside the café into that most compelling and dazzling moment of modern life. The moment when the electricity utterly failed. As you may have gathered, Rio Blanco was one of those places where the night sky reached out and struck dumb the citizenry, rendered it puny and insubstantial. The sun dipped behind the mountains, and there was the enormity of the Milky Way, the rioting of nebulae. I can’t tell you the number of days that I have lain in the empty roads at three or four in the morning, watching cascades of shooting stars.
The city lights went off in the distant zones first. Each night about ten P.M. First, the southern quarter of town, where all the good Mexican and Colombian and Venezuelan food was, and then the downtown, where the empty skyscrapers languished, neglected. Then the bohemian neighborhood, near the community college, where we stood. Then the blackout swept east, into the districts with the fences and walls and barbed wire, all the way up into the foothills, until, in a minute or so, the two of us stood in total darkness.
“I’ll tell you what,” D. said. “I am going to read up, and I’m going to play a few more times, and then I’m going to challenge you again.”
“I’d like that, Mr. Tyrannosaurus,” I replied. “Actually, I haven’t played in a while. But what I could use right now, Mr. Dinosaur, are a few distractions. So, I accept.”
D.’s automobile seemed to have no shortage of pieces of chassis that were falling off. The drive was conducted in quiet, but not an awkward quiet, in a serene quiet in which the two of us could float without concern. I did wonder why me, why would this interesting and accomplished socially inept gentleman, in a town not noted for its population of persons of African ancestry, be interested in a baseball card dealer with a sick wife? In lieu of an answer, I accepted the following: that I had apparently made a friend.
It wasn’t five minutes after I closed the gate, shuttered the windows, and locked the several locks that my portable digital assistant tolled, using the ring tone from one of the big band songs from the 1950s that I favored. Making use of the caller-identification feature, I checked the number, and it was revealed to be none other than the URB Medical Center. There was a catch in my breath, in my already highly irregular breathing.
My wife had waked!
In the tolling of the bells, I counted the days since I had seen her conscious, I counted the ways that I had been redeemed, without meriting it at all, by my marriage. And then there was the wheezing of some kind of oxygen-supplying apparatus, after which I heard Tara’s groggy voice.
“Monty?”
“Tara!”
“Monty!”
“How are you feeling?”
“It looks like I was sawed in half. Have you seen this? Were you using me for some kind of magic trick? Did you make me play the role of the girl who gets sawed in half?”
“You were away for so long. So I had to, I had to maximize whatever income streams were available to me. Including sawing you in half.”
She didn’t laugh. My wife. She failed to laugh. “How long is long?” she slurred, drifting away.
“Didn’t they—”
“I want to hear you say it.”
“I’m coming over.”
“It’s late,” she said. And here her voice fell into a whisper. “I’m just going to fall asleep. No visitors till morning.”
“But I want to come now.”
“You can’t.”