I noticed she was several moves into her game, playing herself.
“Who’s winning?”
She didn’t answer, absorbed in making her moves.
I stared as she moved her pieces, retreating or defending appropriately. The rook took bishop. Pawn, the knight. After a few moves, the game was over. She set up and started again.
Some time passed before a man came by.
“Excuse me, what are you doing?” he asked.
“I was hoping to get a game of chess.”
“And?”
“She hasn’t really said anything to me. I’m sorry, is she your…” I hung on the your.
He dutifully completed it for me. “My patient. She’s deaf and mute… I think it’d be best if you leave now,” he said.
“Does she come here every day to play chess?”
“Sir.”
“Maybe she wants some competition.”
“She’s been doing this every day of her life for the last ten years. I don’t think she wants any company.”
I looked at her. Then got up. She was still absorbed in her chess game. As far as she was concerned, I was never even there.
VII.
But I couldn’t just walk away.
VIII.
She wasn’t there the next day, nor the one after. But she was there on the third day. No one was around and I sat across from her. She said nothing, kept on playing. I thought about the conversations I’d heard earlier that day. A couple of guys asked some friends out to play croquet on donkeys. A young lady dressed in expensive clothes called in sick as her male friend waited outside the booth. A teenager was telling someone about a problem.
“I’m obsessed. I can’t stop drinking shampoo and cologne. I get so caught up with the idea of violating and destroying all the disgusting smells inside me. It’s like taking my hand, sticking it down my throat and ripping out my larynx and splattering it all over the floor ‘cause my shoes and shirts stink so bad. It runs through my head a million times. You try to think about this lady’s nice Tiffany necklace and how much her husband spent getting it for her and there’s all the beautiful people in the world and all of them stink to hell when they die or take a shit or wake up in the morning. All I’m thinking is, When is work over so I can go home and chew on soap? I can’t stop myself. I know it’s going to screw me badly, but even then, I just think, one more time, one more time. I’m so tired of bad smells.
The chess player waved her hands at me. I startled, looking up. She was making a writing gesture with her fingers. I checked my pockets, found a pen. She ripped out a piece of paper from her notepad and wrote, am i here?
I stared at her. “Uhh. I…” But she shook her hand and gestured that I write it out for her.
Yes, I wrote.
how can you tell? She had very pretty writing.
Because you are sitting across from me
how do you know im not just part of imagination?
You’re playing chess
touch my face
She grabbed my hand, then directed it to her face. When my palm pressed against her cheek, she closed her eyes and held it.
Abruptly, she let go and wrote furiously on the paper. When she finished, she pushed the paper across to me.
It read, i am disappearing every day. no one wants to talk to me. my parents stopped coming long ago. eventually, i will be gone. i cant speak or hear anything. nothing exists for me, just like this chess game. i play and play every day but no one remembers, no one can tell you who died on the battlefield and who sacrificed their life for victory. i collected feathers to try to see, marbles and crayons from countries you’ve never heard of and colors that no longer exist. but none of them convinced me i was real. even you dont exist. i cant tell that you do. i feel your touch but i could be imagining it. sometimes, i pretend i can hear people but i know i cant. if you cant hear people and they cant hear you, you dont exist.
I don’t exist either, I wrote back. No one hears me and I don’t hear anyone else.
symbolic deafness and muteness dont count.
How do you know I’m not really mute or deaf? I wrote. You can’t hear me and you can never tell if I’ve heard anything you said. I wondered if that last line would provoke her but I decided to give it to her anyway.
She laughed soundlessly. thats true… why are you here?
I thought about it, thought about it for a good long time.
I’m here because I can no longer hear myself. I can’t hear anything. Everything’s so distant and alien… but I’m hoping I can remember my voice by listening to others.
any luck so far?
I sighed and shook my head. All I hear are echoes that faded a long time ago.
She held my hand again. at least you can hear the echoes, she wrote with her other hand.
I gripped her fingers. Then in a moment of inspiration, reached across and kissed her softly. Her lips felt like dead peaches. She was shocked; her eyes dilated wide. She broke out into an awkward smile, her fingers nervously tap-dancing across my face. A few minutes later, her guardian arrived.
Tomorrow? I wrote.
She nodded.
When I returned the next day, she wasn’t there. I searched several more days for her. But she was nowhere in sight.
Maybe, like she said, she’d finally vanished.
IX.
Unfortunately, my essence too was just a shard, a sublimation of everything I’d wanted.
It was evening and I found a hidden area in a park where I could sleep. I guess it was possible for me to find a home again, possible for me to try to get a job — to try and live a ‘worthy’ life. I remembered one night shortly after my wife left me, I was sitting in front of my computer surfing the web. There was a mosquito flying around, which I tried to crush with my hands. I walked to my bathroom, and on the way back, noticed a dead butterfly on the floor. I picked it up and realized it was actually just a leaf cut into pieces. For no explicable reason, I smashed the wall and threw my CDs and DVDs and flung plates at the glass table my ex-wife had purchased. Death was the normal end for everyone: there, and only there, would my search for normalcy end.
The Interview
I.
I didn’t realize you could get fired for mistaking a really masculine female manager for a man. I said, “Mr. Blah and blah, can I possibly blah and blah?”
She replied, “Excuse me, did you just say mister to me?”
“Yeah, why?”
“I’m a woman, that’s why.”
I swear it was a perfectly innocent mistake. But that’s not the way she decided to take it. Two hours later, HR called me in and told me my employment was being terminated. Twelve years of sleepless service, working around the clock to analyze esoteric graphs while kissing ass, and some college grad fresh out of school got me fired
My wife didn’t empathize. She was off sleeping with some guy she’d met at church. My daughter didn’t want to speak to me since she was going through the teenage phase where it wasn’t cool to talk with her parents. All my buddies were on leashes at home, no longer allowed out of the house without advance notice. I popped some popcorn and searched the Internet for job listings. Then thought about how tenuous and flimsy even the closest of relationships could be. One misspoken word, one misplaced gesture, a drunken outburst or a shy quiescence, then the closest bond shattering like a box of broken light bulbs.