Jake Lourim

I realize after a couple of minutes that I will not be doing any reading tonight. I’m facing an Indian student leaning against a wall and looking like he’s in charge. I have to ask what’s going on.

 

“This is the Michigan chess club,” he says frankly.

 

They play in the Union every Wednesday at 6 p.m., he tells me. And it’s open to everyone. I feel a slight pull in my heart. “So anyone can come and play?” I ask him. “Huh, I’d love to play some time,” I say, figuring I’ll come back another time and try it.

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“You can jump in anywhere there’s an open seat,” he says. Most of the tables already have games in progress, but right in front of us is a board with the pieces set up — a begging invitation, like an empty basketball court with a ball on the floor or a blank page with a pen sitting on it. One guy is in one chair with nobody across from him.

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“Were you looking for someone to play?” I ask.

 

“Sure, I’ll play you,” he says, and with a weird tingling sensation in my arms, I take a seat in the past.

 

***

 

My dad taught me to play chess when I was maybe 5. I liked the black-and-white rules. Every piece moves in a certain way, my dad explained. The object of the game is to checkmate the opponent’s king. When your king is under attack, you must either move it to safety, capture the attacking piece or block the attack with one of your pieces; if you can’t do any of those, you lose. Checkmate.

 

I started playing more often, and more appealing than the actual gameplay was the feeling I had when I played it. I picked it up quickly — at a young age, I once played my mom (who doesn’t play often) and used a trick I learned to beat her in four moves. “Look, mommy,” I said in a high-pitched voice. “The blitzkrieg!” Playing made me feel smart, like I could see things before they happened or form my own game plan, if only on a 64-square board with wooden figurines and not in life. Sniffing out a pawn sacrifice or landing my rook on the seventh rank made me feel like I could do anything.

 

As I grew up and my interest intensified, so too did my commitment. I played other people online and played chess computer games and bought chess scorebooks to write down moves so that I could re-examine them later. My dad would drive me to a store called All the King’s Men, where a coach named Louis with messy, white hair would give me lessons in the back room. Afterward, my dad and I might play a game on one of the tables, and on the way out we’d grab flyers for any tournaments coming up at the store.

 

When I showed up at a tournament, I locked in. Just as I saw winning as being able to think a step ahead of the person across from me, I saw losing as not thinking fast enough. Losing stung. Losing was personal. The emotion I placed into each game put a knot in my stomach during the car ride there and in the room before the game started. And then my dad gave me the best advice he’s ever given me: “You’re OK. You just need to make your first move.” When I did that, I found that zone and felt like the whole world was on that chessboard.

 

The people around me in the Union talk like I did when I was younger. They come to meet up with people, and they throw around chess jargon like “king’s gambit” and “Scandinavian” and “rook sacrifice.” They use shorthand for opening styles (e4 and d4 and c4) and clock rules (“60” and “30” and “15-10”). Their banter tonight is only vaguely familiar to me. Once upon a time, I could have joined right in.

 

When I was most dedicated to chess, I had the same conversations that went on in the Union, but on a grade-school level. The farthest I ever drove to play chess was two hours for the state tournament in third grade. I competed in the reserve division (for less experienced players with no rating) and finished fifth. Thirteen years later, the Indian player in the corner — who I’d later find out was named Atulya — is talking about going around the country for tournaments. Philadelphia has a well-run event, but it’s far. St. Louis’ is good, too, but it’s smaller. Chicago’s is close, but it’s very competitive. To someone like me, Atulya knows everything.

 

He even talks about going to All the King’s Men. From the way he describes it, it’s the same way it always was: The store is elaborate, the owner Ed is quirky and the tournaments always run behind schedule. Listening to Atulya talk is like hearing an older, taller, deeper-voiced version of 8-year-old me.

 

Years have gone by since I’ve been in this environment. Boards are all over the place, each one in a different stage of the game. Along the walls, other students surf the Internet or read or eat dinner. Every couple minutes, the sandwich toaster at Subway beeps four times. But the chess players are in a bubble.

 

It seems foreign to me now, but when I sit down, that knot comes back. I’m playing with the white pieces, so I move first and slide the pawn in front of my king forward two spaces, a standard opening move called e4. I find the zone. The outside noise persists, and Atulya is talking with one of the other players about something, but I block it out. The other player and I don’t say anything, not even our names. My phone buzzes in my pocket, but I don’t answer it.

 

I haven’t played in a while, but I can tell he hasn’t either. We’re both a little sloppy, and in the first game I let him hang around too long. Finally I skewer his rook, capture it and finish him a few minutes later. Checkmate.

 

We shake hands and make a couple of idle comments about the game. He offers to flip the board and play again, and I agree. This time, I win more easily. He tries a hasty attack in the beginning, I take his queen and we’re shaking hands again before long.

 

These two wins hold little meaning — my opponent was nothing special, and nobody recorded the results — and yet I hadn’t felt that rush in a long time. Not a life-changing rush, not an I-have-to-go-home-and-play-this-all-night rush. Just a rush that brought back memories of what used to be. An unscheduled night that began with me ambling around looking for something to do ended with me recapturing some of the sweet feeling of just moving the pieces around the board. I used to feel like I never wanted it to end. Tonight I felt sated. I decide not to keep playing, so I stand and thank Atulya. They’re here every Wednesday, he says. I’ll be back.

 

***

 

Seven days later, I leave my house around 6 and turn left instead of right, only this time I know where I’m going — to the same spot, to wait for a board to open up. A few minutes go by, and two guys are sitting next to each other, with no one across from either. Games have started on adjacent tables. It’s hard to gauge everyone’s skill level, but as far as I can tell, there’s a wide range, from people like me who just go to play casually to people like Atulya, who appears to be the best. He talks (modestly) about tournaments he’s been to, and he speaks confidently about the intricacies of the game. When another player wants a question answered, he asks Atulya. “Atulya, how would you define the Sicilian opening?” someone asks, and Atulya tells him.

 

Tonight I go up to one of the guys with no opponent and ask if he’s looking for a game. He hesitates. He’s sitting at the board, but he confesses that he has an exam tomorrow and would rather get some studying done. “This guy will play you, though,” he says.

 

“OK, great,” I reply, and I sit across from the guy next to him. He’s wearing a black Adidas sweatshirt, glasses and gray pants. Only when I sit down do I notice that it’s Atulya.

 

When I was little, the Atulya my age was a kid named Jacob Fauman. For the period in which I paid attention to these things, he was the top player in the state in his age group. One regular Sunday 10 years ago, I went to All the King’s Men for a tournament. As tournaments go on, the matchups are based on results from the early rounds, in which the pairings are random. When I arrived at the store and looked at the first-round draw, I saw a daunting name across from mine: Jacob Fauman.

 

At that time, I was good at chess, but I didn’t have a chance against a prodigy. Before tournaments, he would walk around to other people’s practice games started and comment. I gulped. The panic consumed me. Back when I was 11, when that happened, I looked for a place where no one could see me and found the bathroom.

 

The bathroom that day was a dirty, dimly lit room that looked like it was maintained by a chess store owner. I hid there until my dad found me and tried to console me. “You’re going to have a great tournament,” he whispered. “Your first game is against Jacob Fauman, so it’s going to be a great challenge —”

 

I felt a wrench in my heart. After a moment I went back out and sat down in time for the game. He beat me as I knew he would.

 

That was when I practiced chess often. When I’m rusty and playing against Atulya, I’m cooked from the beginning, but that’s OK. In the basement of the Union, I have no expectations. It’s fun just to come and have something to do. Atulya starts with an unfamiliar opening — c4, then g3 — and sets up his pieces. At one point early on, he traps one of my bishops on the side of the board and captures it, taking the lead.

 

A few moves in, with the game still even, I decide to stall rather than attack. That’s a death sentence against a player like Atulya. You have to always be in attack mode, which he is. He pounces on my weaknesses, keeps his own position stable and foregoes early gambits in favor of the later knockout. As the game goes on, he searches for the best way of finishing me. Victory is almost inevitable. He starts peeking at other boards. Perhaps he wants me to give up.

 

In chess, you do that by tipping your king over onto the board. When I was little and I’d fall behind, my insides would tighten up and I’d start sweating. The thought of losing ate at me. I stopped seeing a path to victory, and my heart would start beating harder. This is torture, I would think. Get me out of here, and I’d tip over my king, shake the other kid’s hand and walk away.

 

In addition to playing the role of motivator before every game, my dad was also a life coach afterward. Once, after I conceded, he asked me why. I stammered. He thought I still could have won, or at least that it was too close to surrender. “I couldn’t have won,” I insisted.

 

“How do you know?” he pressed. “Why do you give up?”

 

“What, do you want me to never give up?” I answered.

 

“Well, sure,” he said. “Why would you ever need to give up?”

 

So to this day, I never give up in a game of chess.

 

Finally, Atulya pins me in my own end, and I think hard and conclude that he’s two moves from winning. I take his rook with my queen, he checks my king with his queen, I make the only move left and then he checkmates me. We shake hands and reassemble the board.

 

He stands and goes to watch another game. A spot opens up at the next board, and I sit across from a heavyset guy with a blue Detroit Lions winter hat and a Nirvana T-shirt. He plays with a clock. He asks if it’s OK if we play game-10 (where you have 10 minutes total to make all of your moves), and I decide to agree, even though I know that’s not enough time. I hurry and make some bad moves, and he checkmates me just as my time runs out.

 

During that game, I think I hear a kid named Rajesh from a couple tables over say that he’s from Troy High School, where I went to school. When the tables shift again, I end up sitting across from him. He tells me he graduated two years after me, and over the course of the evening he talks with other guys about how he played on the Troy chess team, sharing stories with another player who went to a high school near ours. Some of the others played competitively in high school, and it dawns on me that I’m looking at myself in another world, the person I’d be if things had gone differently and I had kept playing chess all the way through college. My competitive days were long in the past, but it was interesting to think about what life would be like if the kid from Troy High School in the chess club were me.

 

I’d have spent less time on other activities, and I might not even know that I want to become a journalist after college. I’d have spent Wednesday nights in the basement of the Union, which means I wouldn’t have spent them helping my friends make newspapers, which is a world I can’t even imagine. The days of chess every day just seem so far in the past, the days without newspapers so implausible.

 

I start playing against the kid from Troy, and he’s good too. He traps my knight in the corner and sets up his pawns to form a wall against my pieces. With my attack stymied, he preys on my king protection and wins with little resistance. But even this loss doesn’t faze me. Ten years ago, when I was overmatched, I ended up in the bathroom. Now, here I am, about to graduate and move to a new city and start a new job with new people, and I wouldn’t even consider that an option there, much less in a game of chess. Perhaps that’s another of the lessons that chess taught me that I’ve used elsewhere. I would have picked it up anyway, but maybe the first step was walking out of that bathroom and playing a game of chess against Jacob Fauman.

 

Tonight in the Union, I’ve lost three games in a row, and it doesn’t bother me at all. That feeling is so unusual for me that it’s appealing. Today, playing chess is something I do when I’m not doing anything else — not the other way around. It feels good to have the pressure off, and good to have fun without it being an everyday routine. I live off everyday routines — anything else feels uncomfortable. But for now, stumbling upon chessboards in the basement of the union gives me peace. If I had written three bad stories in a row, I wouldn’t sleep for a week. Here, I’m able to capture fun in a way that I’m not typically able to find.

 

By now it’s well after 8 p.m. — time to go. Only Atulya and one other player remain, and I help them pack up the boards and pieces into a big plastic box. Atulya lifts the box by himself, and the college student I could have been carries it out of the Union and into the night.