A Partial History of Lost Causes (5 page)

I walked out of the alley and Claire was standing there, holding my coat for me. I had vomit on my shoes. She put the coat around me and held it around my shoulders on the T. I sat shaking, and Harvard students gave me dark looks on their way back from the internships that would propel them into the great wide world. We watched the smoky gray clouds in the pink sky across the river. We counted the sailboats. We went home and drank and swore for three days straight.

I was still in college then. There had been much agonizing over whether to give me my results so young, but I convinced everyone that it was the responsible thing—so I could plan whether to have children, so I could set the kind of short-term attainable goals that terminal people are so fond of. I employed depths of maturity and bullshit I didn’t even know I had at the time, talked philosophically and stoically, pretended to have a faith in God and a good attitude (of which I have neither). I met with a psychologist, and I said things like “I’m not going to let this thing beat me” and “It’s in the hands of the Lord.” Afterward, I collapsed and drew in on myself and fell into the dark depression I’d promised everyone I would avoid.

Claire and I were living in a big gray two-story near Somerville that year. I was, I fear, very difficult. I stopped doing schoolwork. Claire dragged me through my Formal Logic problem sets. I stopped going to campus or eating. Claire brought me bagels and left them outside my door. I moped. I skulked. I monopolized our shower for hours, running all the hot water and using all the grapefruit shampoo, because it was the only place in the house where nobody could hear me crying.

I started bringing home different men every weekend, and all Claire did was ask me to bring home cuter ones. “I know you’re having a breakdown, and I respect that,” she said. “I just think you could be doing better in this department.”

Now, of course, it’s very different, and I look back on that time with a sort of bemused chagrin. It’s a wonder that I escaped college
without an unwanted pregnancy at the very least—full-blown AIDS at the worst. Somebody asked me about it once—a frat boy, strangely enough—as I was shrugging off the condom he dangled before me. “Don’t you worry about AIDS?” he said. And out loud I said no, not really, but in my head I thought, Please, please, please let me get AIDS so I can die of pneumonia, so my brain is the last thing out the door, so that when I die, it is actually me dying and not somebody else.

I graduated somehow, barely. I majored in philosophy. A false premise yielding a false conclusion is logically valid, as I recall. Then I went for my doctorate in comparative literature. I studied Nabokov.

Other people laugh about staying in academia their whole lives: spending an eternity earning a Ph.D., gathering up knowledge they can’t hope to practically employ, studying the countless refracted interpretations of a world they’ve never experienced. Being a perpetual academic is living in a potential energy that never becomes kinetic. I have trouble laughing about this.

After college I calmed down considerably. I’m not out much, but very occasionally—once or twice in the past five years, let’s say—I’ll meet someone interesting, with a dry sense of humor and a dark intelligence, and I’ll know objectively that this is the kind of person whom, in another lifetime, I would want. I can see this other lifetime sometimes, if I squint, but I don’t particularly resent it. It’s like looking at other people’s vacation photos. And if there is an actual sense of loneliness or longing, it’s like feeling a human hand touch you through gauze—removed and almost unrecognizable.

I began playing chess Saturdays in Harvard Square, against the old wizened men who charge you a dollar to lose to them. I did not grow up to be a chess prodigy—or any other kind, for that matter. But I find something compelling in the game’s choreography, the way one move implies the next. The kings are an apt metaphor for human beings: utterly constrained by the rules of the game, defenseless against bombardment from all sides, able only to temporarily dodge disaster by moving one step in any direction.

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.