going on? You look sort of . . . drawn.’
It’s a kind way of putting it.
I tell him I got fired, and he’s so sympathetic about it that I tell him about the lump and the bees and the no sleeping and the revision I can’t write. I tell him about the interview and the math band and how I’d blown it by feeling too comfortable and how bizarre it was that I actually wanted to stay for lunch. I don’t tell him about reading his story because it would mean telling him about being at Oscar’s, but I want to. He is listening so carefully, nodding and fiddling with his coffee cup lid. He hasn’t eaten much of his sandwich, either. He gathers up all our trash and throws it out and when he comes back I assume he’s going to say he has to go, but he sits back down with both hands on the table now, close to mine.
‘Remember when I asked you out then left town? It was because everything felt like it was coming loose and I’d have to get up and walk around the city at two in the morning. I couldn’t stop walking. I felt like if I stopped walking I’d die. All last summer I kept packing my bags and not leaving. Then I met you, and I knew I couldn’t go out with you until I felt more normal. So I finally took off.’
‘I don’t have a Crested Butte.’
‘You have something.’
‘It’s more like an abyss.’
‘Something you need to get to.’
‘Yeah. The rest of my life. It feels like the way is blocked.’
He smiles and takes a breath. ‘Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita—’ he stops and laughs at my expression. ‘My accent is really bad.’
‘It’s atrocious. But go on.’
‘Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura che la diritta via era smarrita. I took a Dante class in college, and we had the choice of reciting five pages in English or one page in bad Italian.’
‘It’s a beautiful first line.’
‘I think of it a lot more than I ever thought I would.’
‘I’ve really lost my cammin.’
‘We all lose our cammin.’
‘It’s so physical. It feels like my body is rejecting me.’
He nods like he really knows what I mean. ‘Have you tried, you know, concentrating on the top of your head then your forehead then—’
‘It just makes it worse. The only thing that helps is clenching.’
‘Clenching?’
I lift up my arm and squeeze my right fist. I count to ten and release it. I raise my left fist and squeeze and he copies me. I release and he releases. We do many muscles this way, arms, stomach, legs, feet. The last thing I show him are the face muscles, squeezing everything tight shut then opening our eyes and mouth wide. We look like crazed demons guarding a temple.
Afterward things feel smoother.
‘That’s good,’ he says. ‘I feel like I’m floating.’
We go outside. There are a few games going on at the chess tables.
‘Hey,’ Silas says, touching my jacket, ‘Let’s play.’
The guy at the last table is alone, waiting for a player. Silas asks him if we can play just ourselves and hands him ten bucks and the guy takes off. Silas lets me have the guy’s seat, which is still warm and faces out to the rest of the courtyard and down Mass. Ave. toward Central Square. He takes the chair opposite. I haven’t played in a long time. My father taught me on a small travel board with a magnetic bottom. We’d play on airplanes. This one is inlaid, black and tan, in the stone table. The pieces are marble, black and ivory.
‘Ok, you’re Adolf Anderssen and I’m Lionel Kieseritzky,’ he says, straightening his knights. ‘It’s London, eighteen fiftyone. Bishop’s Gambit. White opens.’ He points to my pawn above the king and I move it up two squares and he nods. He moves his opposite pawn to face mine directly. ‘I have this book about famous chess matches, and sometimes I play them.’ He looks up at me. ‘My version of clenching. Escaping into someone else’s mind for a little while.’ He taps the pawn above my king’s bishop and I move it up one and he shakes his head and I move it up another, putting it directly and unnecessarily at risk from the only pawn he’s moved.
‘Why would I do that?’
‘It’s a risk.’ He takes my pawn. ‘But I think it gives you more control of the center of the board.’
I don’t