Transposition

Ahab sets the carved chessmen out on the board in the department store window. An unfinished game. His fingers hold the muscle memory of each position. The image of every chess piece is burnt into his mind. He sees them in the streets at night, in the lines of people’s faces, in the dreams he has that make the man in the hostel room next door bang on paper-thin walls in the small hours and shout for him to be quiet.

Sokolsky opening. Pawn to b4.

Expensively dressed dummies surround him, blank eyes staring. The mannequin nearest to him is bent down, peering over his shoulder, watching under the hot display lights as he prepares to take up play.

Bishop to e5. Black castles.

His hands are shaking. He slides them along the chair, under his thighs, tries to still them with his weight, knucklebones against smooth wood.

Plate glass separates him from the people crossing the tiled walkway outside like pawns in another game. None of them are looking at him. Not yet. He wonders what strategies they have to make them move with such purpose.

Knight to f6. Your game is passive, tonight, Ahab, my friend.

The words play across memory again and again, always so clear that he finds it hard to believe he does not hear them spoken aloud, although he tries to hold onto this knowledge – it is the least he can do. So little of the here-and-now remains steady, these days. The fight to stay tethered in the empty present tires him. In the mornings when he goes to the public library, the high ceiling merges with that of a shaded lecture hall half a world away. In the autumn damp of these streets he tastes the desert.  He sees the sun-washed stone of that other city, his rooms, the dark stains on the table where he last pored over this board. He remembers their conversation, that night, their moves. He remembers everything.

Your strategy is a little off, here, I think.

I am happy with my position. You must worry about this knight. Or do you choose to lose your bishop?

Eyes flickering in the candlelight, laughing. Ahab can smell the hot wax.

Bishop to e2.

Across the table, in his mind, he sees Rami.

Rami. Slight, quiet, broken by years of living in a city under siege, his body branded with scars that mapped the deeper ones inside his head. Rami, who could no longer walk in the street after dark, who cradled himself into a foetal curl under his desk when a car backfired. Rami, who could see ten moves ahead in a game, hold possibilities in his mind that Ahab couldn’t guess at. Rami, whose quick smile came rarely but made Ahab feel the ground beneath him slip, the two of them together, falling.

Bishop to g4. Ahab’s move. He speaks as he lifts the chess piece, concentrating on placing it accurately so that he will not have to look Rami in the face.

They will never stop until we are all dead, Rami. All of us. Academics, teachers, doctors. All of us.

Pawn to c4.

You know this is true.

Queen to b3.

The end of Rami’s cigarette glows. He breathes out long, studies the board.

Ahab persists.

Come with me. I have a little money. We can go to Europe, make a new start. We can do it. Together.

White castles. Rami looks up at last.

l cannot. You know this.

Knight to a3.

I know that I want you to come with me.

I cannot leave my homeland. The cells of my body were made from the dust here. What else is there? I cannot even go out in the dark. I would rather stay and die in my own city than live as a stranger in a land that does not know me.

Rook to – rook to –

What else is there?

Ahab picks up the rook, turns it over in his hand, sets it back down.

You know what else, Rami. You know. But. If you really—

He gets up, turns his back on Rami, walks over to the tiny kitchen, and this is when it happens, the banging on the door, the near-simultaneous crash, the shouting, and Ahab is inside a cupboard hiding before he knows what he is doing and he hears Rami’s voice, crying, saying there is nobody else here, there is nobody, and then five shots, so loud that Ahab can hear nothing more, for the seconds or minutes or days it takes for his body to unfold itself, but his own heart pounding, pounding, his own pulse freight-train loud in his ears. Then he runs, runs to find Rami alone on the floor and his blood spread over everything Ahab has ever owned, its metallic smell, and somewhere there is a sound like a fox screaming, and it is a while before Ahab realises that it is coming from his own mouth.

And now Ahab is here, in this new land, this unfamiliar place that fades from his mind like a ghost city, where none of his cells belong, and there is banging on the door of the department store display, but he has wedged a chair under the handle, and people are gathering outside the glass, now, watching him, watching the foreign man with the chessboard, weeping silently in a shop window.

He shuts his eyes, and the world shrinks down to black and white, until there are only squares and chess pieces. Order and logic. He runs potential moves over in his mind, sees how the game might unfold, strategies he’d thought forgotten playing out with cinematic realism. He touches lightly each piece in its turn in the litany, each move flowing from the last and foreshadowing the next.

Pawn takes knight, and Ahab has the advantage, but he doesn’t want to take it, and now there is constant hammering on the door and shouting, the sound of heavy boots running, and people are being driven back from the window, and he will not hide, this brown man barricaded in the western shopping mall. He knows what will come, and he will not hide.

He allows bishop to b5 and does not act; sacrifices his knight, his queen. Lays down his king in surrender and hands the game to Rami, to his cells that lie in the dust of home, to what else there could have been.

Transposition was first published in the Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology Volume 11.