A Partial History of Lost Causes (43 page)

“Thank you,” he said, waving me away.

I couldn’t look away from the set. “Are you playing?” I said.

“Chess.”

“Yes, I see that.”

He dragged a bishop into the center of the screen, then made the corresponding move on the set. “You played at home, right?” he said. His voice was hoarse, as though he’d recently talked quite a lot or hadn’t spoken in several days. It would have to be the first, I decided.

“Not too much. With one of the chessmen in Harvard Square. And with my father, some, as I said.” I waited for him to comment. He did not.

“You know the Fool’s Mate?”

“No.”

“It’s the shortest possible route to checkmate. It’s this.” He reset the game on his chessboard. “Two staggered pawns and a bishop in the right place. That’s it.”

“Does that ever happen in real life?”

“No, never. It’s just theoretical, really. It’s a scrupulously theoretical game.” He sounded, I thought, slightly bitter.

I stared at his set. The manes of the knights twisted out behind them as if moved by some mythical battlefield wind; the kings were bent, gnarled, stately. They were magnificent, more like statues on a medieval bridge than what I had to remind myself they were—essentially toys. The look of the kings made me bold.

“How did you learn to play?” I asked.

Aleksandr scratched his nose. “I saw a problem in the newspaper and I solved it.”

“Yes, but how did you learn?”

“That’s how I learned. I was four.” With his thumb, he tapped over the fool’s king. It landed on the board with a click. “Then my mother found me a trainer. Then I enrolled in a correspondence course. Then I came here. The end.”

“Oh,” I said, and I didn’t know what else to say.

“Did you know that in Saudi Arabia they play without bishops or queens?”

“I guess that sort of makes sense.”

“It really is a subversive, militantly feminist game, when you think about it.”

“Who was your last match?”

He looked at me, as if trying to ascertain whether I was being cruel. “A computer,” he said. “Didn’t you know?”

“Oh.” I lowered my eyes. I remembered this now, vaguely—the amused headlines, the newspapers tripping blithely sardonic over the revelation that man had invented his own match. The best chess mind in the world was defeated by a machine; what, then, was the use of chess minds, or minds in general? I was almost glad that my father hadn’t kept his own mind long enough to see it. “I remember something about that, I think,” I said.

“You probably do.
Newsweek
called it ‘The Brain’s Last Stand.’ ” He laughed ruefully. Then he started to tell me about it.

The thing about the loss, he said, was this. If there had ever been a point to chess—and Aleksandr would be the first to admit that there might not be any point to chess—it was conclusively defeated by the revelation that all chess problems of the world could be unscrambled unconsciously by robot neurons firing into the void. Great chess was no longer the elegant accomplishment of the human mind; the true accomplishment was the ability to create something bigger and better than oneself and to then stand back, amazed. Humans should retire or else find more modest modes of occupation. Everybody knew this. Even the jokes afterward—at the bars, on the news, on the Internet—reflected this knowledge. “In a related story,” one of the talk-show hosts had said, “the New York Mets were beaten by a microwave oven.”

The worst part was the speed with which the program played—Aleksandr’s moves were instantaneously matched and outsmarted by the computer, without the hemming and sweating and doubting that made any brilliant human move feel as though it could have been otherwise. The computer moved with a clinical ruthlessness, and it made Aleksandr understand with a sickening certainty that there was nothing he could think of that the computer hadn’t thought of first. It worked with the efficiency of a guillotine.

The man who played for the computer was soft-looking, chubby-cheeked, his hands like chicken cutlets, his leporidian face innocent and wide. He made a little gesture with each move, a nearly imperceptible half-shrug (Aleksandr was never sure whether or not the cameras had recorded it) as if trying to disown it—not me, he seemed to say, not me who’s doing this to you, who’s humiliating you, who’s unraveling the human brain. I’m just the conduit here, the messenger, the mechanism. I am, humbly, just the pawn.

In the end, it took a paltry nineteen moves—the shortest loss of Aleksandr’s career. He’d opened with the Caro-Kann Defense—not his usual against human opponents, but for a little while, things were under control: he met the computer’s advancing duo of pawns with his own staggered pair, and a brief frenzy of exchange commenced. Next came the ritualistic introduction of the knights. He’d broken his own rule—don’t move the same piece twice in the opening—but the beginning was conventional and promising enough. The computer advanced its knight farther, and Aleksandr introduced the second of his. The three knights assembled in a crooked-elbow single file. The computer advanced its bishop. Aleksandr advanced his pawn to e6, bringing it to the flank of his farthermost knight. The computer roused its second knight in response. Then Aleksandr flicked his pawn forward to h6, and as soon as he lifted his finger, he knew. The avid watchers knew. He’d moved it too early in the sequence—he should have introduced his bishop, then awaited the grand entrance of the computer’s queen, and only then brought his pawn to h6 to menace the computer’s closest knight. That knight would have retreated to the center of the board only to be followed by Aleksandr’s. The h6 move in response to the knight was a mistake. It was a mistake, but it wasn’t
a mistake of strategy—it wasn’t a misjudgment, an incorrect forecast into the future. It was a mistake of memory, of basic competence—like losing your car keys, like dropping a dish.

The computer’s knight took another pawn, at e6, and crouched breathing down the neck of Aleksandr’s king. Should he have taken the knight immediately? Maybe. Later, many, many people—mostly anonymous, mostly on the Internet, mostly people who’d had a decade in their pajamas to think about it—would say that he should have gone straight in then. But he hadn’t. He’d wanted to give his king another square to maneuver. He’d allowed the common knight sacrifice, which was not a reflection of the computer’s fantastic strategy, in particular; that sacrifice was a dull, almost juvenile move, well known to theory. He’d used it himself against Rusayev in one of their fifty-three games—back when he’d been the new astonishment, the brilliance at which everyone had marveled.

At this point, the newspapers said later, there’d been a look of “terror” on Aleksandr’s face that obtained for the rest of the game.

So he’d lost the ability to castle, which the computer then did—quietly, brutally, without comment, the soft man’s brow remaining smooth and dry.

Aleksandr took the knight, as he had to, and the bishop sailed into the space that his pawn had prematurely abandoned and put him in check. He jockeyed his king to the right; he had nowhere else to go. It was only the tenth move of the game.

The computer’s second bishop crept halfway down the board and sat there waiting. Aleksandr halfheartedly menaced it with his knight, and it temporarily retreated by one square.

There was another exchange of pawns, this one dirtier and more desperate. Aleksandr’s neck was soaking wet, and he instinctively looked around the room for an exit. Across the table, the fat man looked calm, his cheeks alternately swollen and slack with the movement of his self-satisfied breaths. This man—who was he? Had he helped to build the computer? Had he studied chess theory and computer code for years, learning how to translate the one into the other, hoping to create an entity that could extrapolate and infer? Probably not. Probably he was a nothing, a person who knew how to push a button or two. Aleksandr
thought bitterly that he wasn’t only a traitor to chess, as some of the Internet critics had said. He was a traitor to people.

Aleksandr had closed his eyes and sacrificed his queen to take a bishop and a rook. He took the fat man’s bishop greedily, as a kind of petty, interim revenge. This was a frantic move: he could feel himself falling down a well; he could hear the scrape of fingernails against concrete. Everybody could. The fat man coughed. The crowd murmured, looked away.

And then he’d resigned. He might not have been smart enough to beat a computer, but he was smart enough to know when he was beaten by a computer. He wasn’t going to submit to a humiliating inevitability; he wasn’t going to let himself be chased into ever more hopeless cover as the entire world watched. He stood up. He walked out. He did not shake the fat man’s hand.

Afterward, people kept asking him about the pawn—the h6 move, a beat too early. He’d had to tell them he didn’t know, he didn’t know; it was a mistake, and he didn’t know where it had come from or why. On the Internet, conspiracy theorists wondered whether he’d thrown the match intentionally, so that he might one day demand a rematch, so that he might one day win more money. But that wasn’t true. Maybe it wasn’t true, either, that a computer couldn’t be beaten. Maybe it wasn’t true that a computer’s brilliance exceeded all human imagining. Maybe it was just that Aleksandr was forty. Maybe it was just that Aleksandr was tired.

Now the computer sat in the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., and every day it played reenactments of that final game for public viewing, automatically and on repeat.

Aleksandr told me this, and we were silent. It was the kind of confession that makes you so uncomfortable that the only possible response is to offer one of your own.

“Well,” I said. “I have a disease that’s going to make me lose my mind.”

Aleksandr raised his eyebrows. “What?” Behind his voice, there was a faint hint of laughter. People’s response to outlandish information is often to laugh.

“It’s called Huntington’s,” I said. “It’s what my father died of. They
can test you for it. It’s motor functioning, first, actually, then cognitive functioning. Cortex on down.”

Aleksandr looked away, which is what everybody does. Then he looked back, and I watched him trying to harness the proper reserves of compassion and pragmatism and empathetic imagination so that he could formulate the right response. Announcements like the one I’d just made have a tendency to fluster and upset people, and their shock and bewilderment often become the central facts of the discussion. I’ve had a long time to think about Huntington’s, and they haven’t. But it’s true that I sometimes resent the way other people’s responses so often own these conversations, and I appreciated Aleksandr’s efforts to avoid making that the case.

“This will happen to you—soon?” he said. I could hear him keeping his voice careful and clear.

“This year. Or maybe next.”

“God.” He looked down. He took off his glasses and squeezed the skin above his nose, a gesture I’d seen him do often enough, and for mundane enough reasons, that I did not believe it to be affected. “God. Irina. I’m so sorry.”

It had always been a difficult thing to say to someone. I always felt guilty for ruining the other person’s day, and the other person invariably felt guilty if their day hadn’t been sufficiently ruined. I will admit it sometimes felt strange to me to make the confession to someone and later catch them laughing, or flirting, or eating a sandwich, instead of tearing at the injustice of it all or sitting quietly at the center of a grand and monstrous grief. The disaster of my life might be only the worst thing another person heard that afternoon; they might have forgotten by dinnertime; they might have been more heartbroken by watching certain movies. I’m always confronted, quite horrifically, with my exact net worth in the eyes of the other person—whether they cry, or have to sit down, or pull their mouth into the expression of a frown even though their eyes are somewhere else.

“Christ,” said Aleksandr. “Are you afraid?”

I wasn’t sure anyone had ever asked me. People had called me brave, had assumed that there was a courage being exhibited when I smiled at things and showed up to work and brushed my teeth. I
wasn’t sure that there was. I went to work for the same reason that a person with a gun to his head walks upright: there was absolutely no other option. I could have lain down and died, I suppose. But that was precisely what I was trying to avoid.

“Yes,” I said. “I am terrified.”

He nodded as though he knew that was the right answer. He picked up his fallen king and rolled it between his forefinger and his thumb. “This is what made you come here.”

It wasn’t a question, but I said, “Yes.”

“This is why you’re looking for all these answers about losing games and certain defeat.”

“Right.”

He put the king facedown on the table. “Let me show you something.”

He got up and reached for a large cigar box on the shelf above the desk. He sat down again with the box between us. He opened it, and out popped papers. There must have been hundreds—some were yellow and weathered, others were crisp and white, others were the kind of heavy cream-colored papers that one might reserve for the most important of business transactions. Some of the papers had handwriting—chicken scratchings in faded pencil; bold inky strokes that blurred into smears; the labyrinthine swirling of cursive Cyrillic, almost indecipherable for a person used to reading print—and others were typewritten. A few, ominously, were done with text cut out from magazines.

“What is all this?”

“Death threats,” he said. “All for me.”

“Oh.” I looked at him. I understood that he wasn’t trying to make me feel better—or worse, for that matter—but that he was only sharing with me a common reality. It was the taciturn exchange of reminiscences by veterans of some unwinnable war. It was the acknowledgment of the truest and most terrible thing about us—not the only thing but the thing that everybody else tried to ignore. “May I?” I asked.

“Please,” he said. “Go ahead.” I started to paw through them.
I will hunt you down in the night and cut off your balls
, read one.
You are
a traitor to your people and to your country
, read another. Some were subtle—hinting at people and places Aleksandr should probably think to avoid—and others were explicit, explaining in lurid detail exactly how Aleksandr should be killed. Some looked amateurish and unhinged, and I imagined unstable people with matted beards writing by candlelight. Others looked professional and purposeful, and it was easy to envision a different kind of person: a person in a black suit, a person with the money and means to turn threats into reality. A person who wrote what he meant.