In a Mist (7 page)

I realized, of course, that things could have just as easily gone the other way. Eddie had warned me from the outset that there was no guarantee his latest venture would prove successful, that my promotion might only be temporary. But the Lotus Blossom was thriving, and I was turning out to be a decent manager, somehow living up to Eddie's expectations. Sometimes I tried to make sense of
the circumstances of Benjamin's death. I wondered what brought him to walk alone on West Webster Avenue in the early hours of December 26
^th
. If disaster could strike down Benjamin, so young, so self-assured, why not me? And yet I could not help but feel that this fear was unfounded, that I had somehow become immune to misfortune. I was still alive, happily so, and would be, I was certain, for some time to come.

* * *

The day Benjamin would have turned twenty-nine happened to fall on Good Friday. After closing up the bar the night before, Jerome and I celebrated the long weekend and I overslept the following morning. It was early afternoon by the time I made it to Sunset Memorial Lawns. Benjamin's headstone was an obelisk, upright, tapering as it rose, greyer than the sky. No one was there when I arrived. I did not hear her approach from behind, though I felt her presence, just as I had felt the absence of her brother several months before. When I turned to face her I saw that her eyes were reddened, her features wan. Without her make-up she more closely resembled him. She wore her cloche hat, the same black wrap-over coat, now torn at the right cuff. In her arms she held a bouquet of lilies, their stems wrapped in silver cellophane. I did not know what to say to her. After her gaze passed through mine I knew it did not matter. She knelt and placed the flowers on his grave.

I turned to her once more. On this second glance the vacuity of her gaze was replaced by a tentative recognition. It was then I smelled the liquor on her breath. It occurred to me my association with her brother in her mind might serve my own end, that I might use this unlikely semblance, the feeling of knowing someone intimately—a stranger. The true nature of my relation to Benjamin was immaterial.
All that mattered was that I was there, at his grave, to console her for her loss. She did not recoil at my touch. Her face turned against my left shoulder, her hands upon the small of my back, I could feel her inaudible sobs. She was surprisingly receptive to my consolation. Or perhaps, given the circumstances—my proximity, our privacy, the profundity of her sadness—it was not surprising at all. Eventually she pulled away and stood by my side, staring at her brother's headstone. We remained there for some time, unspeaking, and then she walked away.

I almost called out to her. As I remember that moment I call out to her. I off er her a lift. She accompanies me to the Tiger Rag where I turn on the lights, make her a cup of coffee. Quietly, soberly, in the corner booth, I give my account of her brother. Somehow, with utter naturalness, as if the gradual, retroactive acknowledgement of something known all along, the truth comes out, dissonance giving way to harmonic resolution. This confession is not at all awkward, and requires little explanation. But I do not call out. Instead I stoop to collect the bouquet at my feet, and breathe the heady fragrance of the soft white trumpet bells.

The game of chess is a supernova, which can warm the backside of an amoeba, or incinerate an entire civilization.

Pavel Rublev
System Chess Champion, 2087-2091

My name is Frank Rinehardt and I am twenty-seven years old. I like racquetball, film history, hard liquor and chess. Up until a month ago I was a PhD candidate at Berkeley. My unfinished dissertation was on the use of chess as a metaphor in the films of Humphrey Bogart. There are those in the twenty-second century who believe Bogart was the greatest screen actor of his era. There is a smaller group that consider him to be one of the greatest artists of any era. Several key proponents of this dogma belong to the Film History Department at Berkeley. This was the dogma to which I subscribed, until recently.

On the evening of February 17
^th
I poured myself a high-ball and went to bed after marking an entire seminar's worth of undergraduate assignments. In addition to my research, I was a teaching assistant for a third-year course on representations of the Second World War in twentieth century film. I had been asked to prepare a lecture on
Casablanca
and give the class an assignment based on my research. This was an
entirely reasonable request, as the film comprised the longest chapter of my dissertation. I first saw the film by accident, as a bored undergraduate on a blind date, having met up with the wrong “red-haired Cynthia” in the lobby of the Brattle, a run-down 2-D repertory movie house. I had made plans with the other Cynthia to see Bergman's
The Seventh Seal
, but it was Valentine's Day and I had nowhere else to go and when the young woman in the lobby insisted on seeing
Casablanca
, I didn't make a fuss. She thought the film was trite. I disagreed. It wasn't until the next morning that she discovered I was the wrong Frank. But by that point it didn't matter. Despite our disparate tastes in twentieth-century cinema we've remained lovers ever since. And it was
Casablanca
that led to my interest in film history, and eventually to my specialization in chess metaphor scholarship. As I researched the film I discovered that the circumstances of its creation amounted to a series of peculiar accidents. In this respect the film seemed not unlike my own life. The only diff erence was that
Casablanca
was a masterpiece.

It occurred to me that if I could make sense of the film in a way in which no one had managed to do before, I might imbue my own life with a sense of purpose it seemed to lack. Through my graduate research, I became increasingly convinced that the magnificence of the film had nothing to do with the numerous writers who contributed to the final script, or the often chaotic circumstances of wartime film production, or Ingrid Bergman's initial failure to be cast as Maria in
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, or even the inspired direction of the churlish Michael Curtiz. It was my conviction that the most significant achievement in cinematic history must be credited entirely to Humphrey Bogart. Furthermore, this achievement had nothing to do with his acting ability, but was in fact a product of his life-long interest in chess.
As I explained to my students, the use of chess as a metaphor in
Casablanca
is extremely subtle. The entire film contains only a single chess scene, the chess board purportedly included by Curtiz only at Bogart's urging. The board appears at the moment we first meet Rick Blaine, the character that solidified Bogart's reputation as one of the greatest icons in the history of the silver screen. At 9 minutes, 14 seconds Rick is seated in his café, contemplating a chess game set up on a board before him. Ugarte, portrayed by Peter Lorre, is seated to his side. As Rick cautiously advances the White queen's knight to the fifth rank, Ugarte persuades him to hold some documents on his behalf. The documents in question are blank transit letters allegedly signed by General Charles de Gaulle, guaranteeing passage from Casablanca to the freedom of Lisbon. They will become the focus of the film, what Hitchcock would refer to as the
McGuffin
, or Lacan the
objet petit
a. At 11 minutes, 38 seconds, as Rick reaches for the letters, he accidentally knocks over the Black king directly in front of him. This is the instant upon which, traditionally, most
Casablanca
chess metaphor scholarship has centred. But if you ask me, and will excuse my metaphor, the Black king is in fact a red herring. The real crux of the scene occurs at 12 minutes, 5 seconds. This is when the White knight inexplicably vanishes from the board.

In order to understand the significance of the missing knight, one must first know something of Bogart's relationship with chess. He was a lifelong enthusiast of the game, a strong amateur player who achieved expert status according to 1950s US Chess Federation standards. His ability was perhaps best illustrated by his draw with Sammy Reshevsky in a 1955 simultaneous exhibition in Hollywood. Before he made a name for himself with
Petrified Forest
, Bogart would hustle at chess for dimes in
Times Square and Coney Island. After his acting career took off he continued to play both on and off the set. It is speculated that the solitary game in
Casablanca
was actually based on a correspondence match Bogart was playing at the time. His opponent remains unknown. What is known is that in 1943 the FBI paid Bogart a visit and insisted he cease his correspondence with European rivals. The FBI had been monitoring Bogart's mail and were convinced his chess notation contained encrypted information. In 1945, Bogart appeared with Lauren Bacall on the cover of
Chess Review
. During his interview he said he liked chess better than poker because you couldn't cheat at chess. Someone should have told that to the FBI.

The shot in question is the last involving the chess board in
Casablanca
. The camera is repositioned as Ugarte rises to collect a drink from the waiter, and the White knight, which has remained at the fifth rank since 9 minutes, 14 seconds, suddenly fails to appear on the board. Neither has Rick captured the knight and placed it to the right of the board in the company of the captured pawns. The knight is simply not there.

If this disappearance is acknowledged at all, it is dismissed as an oversight, a minor instance among several greater instances of discontinuity in the film. Inaccurate representations of chess are hardly unusual in twentieth-century cinema. Perhaps the most notorious example is the game astronaut Frank Poole plays against the computer HAL in Stanley Kubrick's
2001: A Space Odyssey
. The game was based on a real match that took place in Hamburg in 1910 between Roesch and Schlage. HAL declares Black's sixteenth move as “queen to bishop three,” when in fact it is “queen to bishop six,” and as a result Poole resigns unnecessarily. HAL's move is often cited as an error in the film, but Kubrick, like Bogart, was a strong chess player and
it is much more likely the mistake is an early indication that something has gone terribly wrong with HAL's operating system.

Similarly, I contend that the missing knight in
Casablanca
is not an error at all. The knight's disappearance is the only anomaly of its kind I have been able to detect in Bogart's entire body of work. This is why it is so peculiar. How could such a careless oversight occur on a chessboard directly in front of a man with such an affinity for the game? Any self-respecting chess metaphor scholar who gives this instance due consideration must conclude that the disappearance is in fact deliberate, and the question must be rephrased:
Why did Bogart allow the disappearance to occur?

This is the problem I posed to the students of the World War II film seminar. I asked them to discuss the significance of the disappearance in five hundred words and send in their response by Monday morning. As I explained the assignment the blank looks on their faces concerned me. On Monday morning their responses confirmed that the nuances of chess metaphor theory were beyond them. Though the brighter students knew their Bogart, they knew as little about chess as their peers. The game has fallen out of fashion. I doubted that any of the students had ever played, or even observed a game. Two or three made an eff ort to look up the rules and wrap their heads around the basics. One young woman even went so far as to cite classic opening gambits and comment on how the
Casablanca
opening appears to be a unique innovation on the part of Bogart's mysterious opponent. But alas, a rigorously applied understanding of the complexities of the game to the semiotic conundrum I proposed was simply too much to ask for in a five hundred word assignment. Most of the students did not even address the question at all. They simply regurgitated Bogart theory, some more eloquently
than others, all of them no doubt finishing in time to make the latest zero-gravity orgy organized by the film history undergrad society.

As I lay awake in bed on the evening of February 17
^th
, 2105, I thought about what my students had not bothered to consider. I contemplated the uniqueness of the knight. Unlike any other piece on the board, the knight does not move in a linear fashion, but in an ‘L' configuration. It is also the only piece with the freedom to pass over chessmen in its path. Its movement is limited only by the outer boundaries of the board. The sudden foray of a knight can take even a highly experienced, calculating player by surprise. By passing through a solid object directly in its path, the knight achieves the sort of transportation particle physicists have only begun to understand in the last few years, and it has done so since fourteenth century Persia. If there is significance in the vanishing of the White knight, and I am convinced there is, then there is significance in its knighthood. It is as if the knight in
Casablanca
was shot mid-move, in the miraculous act of its transport from one square of the board to another. Where does the knight go, exactly, when it passes through queen or rook or pawn? It exists as pure energy, as the vehicle of the intellect, the assertion of human will. Just as Ilsa and Victor Laszlo fly off into the Moroccan mist, so does the White knight vanish into thin air. The standard rules of engagement are rendered irrelevant. The vanishing is a subtle, spontaneous extension of the preternatural power the knight has possessed all along. What was Bogart attempting (and failing) to communicate to the receptive viewer of his time? What does the vanishing knight communicate to Bogart's twenty-second century audience? These are the questions I pondered as I drifted off to sleep. When I awoke the next morning I believed in God.

* * *

La Belle Aurore: the name of the café Rick Blaine leaves behind in occupied France when he flees to Casablanca. The beautiful dawn. The silhouette of the name cast by Parisian sunlight. On the other side of the window, Sam plays “As Time Goes By,” Ilsa and Rick sip champagne while German guns rumble in the distance. It was raining when I awoke on the morning of February 18
^th
, 2105. I had never thought very much about God before. My life's work was dedicated to a secular aspect of an overwhelmingly secular society. Nevertheless, when I woke up that morning I was struck with awe and humility. I suddenly possessed a firm belief in a transcendent, omniscient, omnipresent Supreme Being. I had no proof that a God existed, but I had utter faith that this was indeed the case. I did not know what my belief meant or where it came from. My parents were atheists raised by atheist parents who came from agnostics before them. There are still believers in 2105. They constitute a fringe minority, a dwindling assortment of fragmented religious sects. I have never had an interest in their faith-communities or their anachronistic, twenty-first century theologies. I have never had any friends who believed in God. There is Ahmed from the Faculty of Astro-biology, with whom I occasionally play raquetball. Someone once mentioned in the locker room, derisively, that he is Muslim. But we have never discussed religion. No one ever does.