Checkmate

I used to work in the defense industry. In the 1980’s. I was a clerk. Well-A ‘Technical-aide,’ as my pay grade said. So I was a glorified clerk that the company could overcharge the government for. I worked in a steel grey office sitting at a steel grey military style desk doing steel grey tasks, mostly involving filling requisitions for overpriced parts, many of them steel grey, required to overhaul overpriced submarines, also ditto, sitting in the yard and needing repairs vouchsafed to the day they could go back to costing the government even more money to operate doing things we all prayed they would never have to do. The military is always hungry.

So was I. So I worked.

In the next room, in document control, worked a friend-droid of mine named Gene. He was a sharp guy and filed his forms with precision. He was a Palestinian. He would talk about the Israeli war against Palestinians in the Mideast, the modern state of Israel built on a thread of land stolen from its previous and current inhabitants. How the state of Israel attacked the USS Liberty to stop it from observing their war crimes. He was clear to distinguish between Israelis and Jews, a distinction mostly lost today. I had lived in Israel for a year and knew Israelis, Jews, and Palestinians and respected them all and this was the first counter argument to the Zionist propaganda I had been exposed to. It was…disturbing. Something to think about.

He also played chess. He had a little, magnetic chess set in his desk, next to his pencils and his saltshaker. At lunch I used to come by his desk and we would play.

He mostly won. Dramatically. He had this habit of taking his piece de gras and throwing it down on the space that was my Waterloo, shouting, “CHECK!” Or even more dramatically, “CHECKMATE!” Sometimes I saw it coming, mostly it was completely out of the blue. Occasionally, I would get the upper hand, at which time he would resign. He could see it coming and just cut his king’s jugular, forfeiting the game. Regicide is preferable to admitting defeat, after all. How many kings have been suicided on their own swords? The king makers can always make another king. Dime a dozen. I generally fought until the bloody end. Usually mine. He rarely lost. Well, only once.

I have no idea why he liked to play with me. Easy blood, I think now. Or only blood. Nobody else would play him. I liked to think he wasn’t just interested in easy blood then. After all, what’s the fun in that? Other than when you are actually hungry, that is, in the actual world surrounded by actual prey that might like to actually kill and eat you as much as you desire to actually kill and eat them. And when you are hungry and meat is in the forest and death is on the table, any blood will do, as long as it can’t fight back. And thus hunters became herders.

Oh, we weren’t hungry. Not in the, ‘Kill and eat them before they kill and eat us,’ sort of way. This was just a game, after all. But it was more visceral. Still, there was no question of survival. It was played in the mind, not the stomach, if there is a difference. At the end of the game, or at the end of lunch hour, he would put the board, finished or bearing a partially played game, back in his desk by the cigarette lighter and paperclips, and I would go back to my steel grey, military grade behemoth in the next room, working at my steel grey, military job of playing a game of chess with the Soviet Union, our banal existences resuming. Paperwork to Ivan’s Requisition Seven. CHECK!

I asked him to give me some pointers. He spent a half hour lunch hour running through a hypothetical game, explaining the strategies of both players as he went. You could do this and I could do that, with the intention of accomplishing the other, while trying to thwart the thing you think I just did and advancing your own agenda, making sure you were prepared to give it all up in a wink if necessary. Huh?

Right.

It was interesting, but I’ve never been a good chess player or a good geostrategist, for that matter. I just can’t see things that far in advance. And I just expect other people to work with me, somehow, making me a lousy diplomat. And a worse dictator. Somewhere in there I just hope there is a decent human being. Maybe. Or at the very least, not a willing sheep. But back to the real world.

One day we were playing, as usual. The crowds around me were eating their lunches, reading their sports sections, and doing what the deplorables of the day did when they weren’t entertaining deplorable thoughts and such, as usual. They were being just people, also as usual. And I was losing, even more as usual.

His strategy was to bear down with as much force as possible on the left side of the board, from my perspective. I don’t even remember if I was black or white. We had both castled early in the game, in the same direction; my right and his left, so he was attacking me on my vulnerable bits to the left. My least protected side that had a clear shot at my king, guttered behind a row of pawns on the right side, both protection and stranglehold. As was his king directly across the board. If he could dominate the rank in my territory, well. Game over. Or soon to be. I had the same option, if I could seize it.

My strategy-well. My strategy was to not lose, as always. But I kept an eye on his king… Alone… There… Across the board… With all of his heavy hitters marching hither and yon towards my defenseless underbelly on the diagonally opposite side of the board… Creating a defenseless underbelly of his own… Interesting… In the flower of victory lay dormant the seeds of defeat.

And so I gave up defending my soft spot-Let them come! As long as I could lunge at him one move before he managed to close his pincer strike against me. My castle was defending my king from the rank. My queen was also on the first rank. She was superfluous. Extraneous and available to do mischief on the enemies ranks. I could see how he was setting up pieces to outnumber those two, formidable opponents while ignoring his own exposed flank. Pity him,

Take out the queen. Then march against the castle. Then the king would be his. So he thought. He could take them out, one by one, in a few moves, sacrificing his pieces, one by one, until he had another piece ready to close in on my king:

One knife poised for the blow, two for the crippling, three for the death. Four for victory.

I watched him remove his guard from his own king, nestled smugly behind three pawns at the upper rank of the board. Unguarded. Assured. Vulnerable. His finger on the button. Just like mine on yours, you son of a bitch! He was one move closer to destruction than I. If only I could manage it.

I brought my queen back close to my castle, two spaces from my king, also nestled vulnerably behind three pawns opposite the enemy, plotting his counter strike. I took her out of the fury of his assault on my left files. They were abandoned. He was too intent on his strategy to care and didn’t notice the feint. When the enemy lunges he leaves his heart exposed.

I moved my queen one step diagonally forward and in front of my castle, on a file six spaces away from the pawn guarding his king. She was now invulnerable. He was too far into blood lust to notice that he had left his king completely exposed while mine was momentarily protected. For a glance. For a move. For a nod to death in your direction one may win and one may lose. Such is war. He continued on his strategy, gaining my first rank. “Take it,” I thought. Now the board is mine.

I took his pawn with my queen. “CHECK!” I said, less dramatically than I could have.

I refrained from throwing it down dramatically, preferring the more noble, ‘You’re going to die, mother-’ approach. He was nonplussed. Confused, he paused, looking back and forth diagonally across the board. He realized he had no defense with which to take my queen, and then pushed his king one space left, somewhat distracted as if he felt it an annoyance. Like I was just fucking with him before I had the good sense to die on the sword. He was so intent on his plan he didn’t see what was happening. Pride goeth… I had him.

I pushed my queen forward, invulnerable due to my castle loyally standing behind her back on the first rank, guarding both my king and my queen… His king, trapped behind a wall of his own pawns, inescapable.

“CHECKMA-!“

Realizing what was happening, he quickly tipped his king over. Hari-kari.

Technically, he lost. When I put him in check he could have given up then, but he chose to move, so it was then my move and I put him in mate. He would rather die than admit defeat.

Of course, this is but a game. Like the sound and fury it encompasses, it signifies nothing…

…perhaps…