Free In a Mist by Devon Code-mcneil Page A

note that Ilsa writes to Rick.
    â€œOh Frank, darling, you’re such a sentimental retrophile.”
    â€œWell what about you, Cynthia? Your master’s thesis is on Audrey Hepburn’s wardrobe.”
    â€œThat’s diff erent,” she said. “That’s historical.”
    * * *
    My belief continued to preoccupy me. On the afternoon of April 5 th it was raining again and I was trying desperately to make some headway with my dissertation. I attempted to watch
The Maltese Falcon
and turned it off halfway through. Bogart bored me. I opened a musty mid-twentieth century book of chess strategy I had read countless times before and turned to the chapter on end-game theory. I’m not sure exactly what I was looking for. I suppose I was attempting to understand the appeal my research once held for me. It was at the top of the chapter’s first page that I found the quote from Alexander Alekhine, World Chess Champion, 1927 to 1935, 1937 to 1946: “Chess will be the master of us all.”
    I knew what I had to do. I would play chess.
    One of the most intriguing precepts of chess-metaphor theory is that there are more possible games of chess, up to move twenty-five, than there are atoms in the universe. Mid-game play as executed by two grand-masters can be so complex as to appear entirely arbitrary to a layman, or even to an attentive amateur, familiar with basic strategy. It is no coincidence that chess fell out of fashion at the same time as the major world religions. By the early twenty-first century computers started routinely defeating world champions in tournament play, beginning with Kasparov’s loss to IBM’s
Deep Blue
in 1997. As computers came to dominate at the world championship level, they began competing against each other. It was at this point they succumbed to the same haughtiness, paranoia and anti-Semitic posturing as Bobby Fischer did in the mid-1970s. Soon after, computers stopped playing against one another with any degree of seriousness, and for the most part, humans followed their lead. But the solar system is large enough that there are still people playing, mostly former Eastern Europeans who emigrated to the moons of Jupiter after Chernobyl III.
    I have decided to make the move from chess theory to chess practice. It has become my way to convene with the infinite. I have submitted to chess with all the piety of a supplicating monk. I spend as many hours as possible at the board, honing my strategy and technique. Of course I know my limitations. I do not aspire to master or grandmaster status, but to expert ranking, the same held by Humphrey Bogart when he died at fifty-eight of cancer of the esophagus. I continue my work as a teaching assistant, so that I may save enough to travel to Jupiter’s moons. There I may learn from and eventually compete against the greatest living chess players and upon my return I will no longer lose to Cynthia. I always felt a certain inexplicable affinity for Fyodor, the Russian bartender at Rick’s Café in
Casablanca
. Now I understand, and as a result I have decided to drink vodka exclusively from now on. I was just off the mark before, but I have finally found my way. I am a believer.

The Flank and Spur
    It was mid-April and streams cut beneath soiled banks of snow and ran along street-side curbs into storm drains. Isaac stepped carefully to keep the mud from his polished boots. When he arrived it was still early and the bar was almost empty. An acoustic guitar, a bass guitar and a lap-steel plugged into an amplifier rested on stage in front of a drum set. Isaac recognized the front man and lap-steel player seated on stools at the bar, their backs turned to the door. The bartender nodded to Isaac and Isaac nodded and removed his hat. He took off his sheepskin coat and situated himself against a wall without windows so as best to observe the stage and the other side of the room, where most of the patrons would sit. He sat down