The challenge came in the usual way.
It was that standard envelope with the upper left corner cut off. No one alive still recalled the origin of the diagonal snip, some dumb gesture that once signified something. But everyone knew what it meant anyway. And so did Lem. As he lifted the envelope obliquely to the light, he could just make out the writing on the slip of paper inside. It was a simple note containing only a day and a time…Thursday, 7 am. That was the day after the day after, he figured. That soon. It did not give him much time to plan his strategy. Lem leaned the unopened envelope on a shelf and walked away from it. As though leaving it sealed meant that he had not read it. As though this would somehow give him more time to decide on his response.
The envelope sat there all secret for the rest of the morning. From time to time as he walked by, it reminded him of the note Sophie had put there when she walked out on him all those years ago. It was right after her best friend decided to tell her about the furtive little lovemaking that she and Lem had indulged in. Sophie left her goodbye note on the shelf for him to see, but Lem did not open that one either, thinking that it might undo the decision and win her back. It did not of course. Yet he somehow did not learn from that.
Lem went into the living room where he sat at the Zeno board and thought about what to do.
The rules of the challenge were simple. If he did not answer the note that same day, he would never be allowed to play again in public. If he answered the challenge but lost the game, he might just as well never play again. To lose a challenge game of Zeno was to lose one’s dignity after all. If he won the game, he would move up yet another notch in the arcane, intricate world of Zeno mastery. There was a lot at stake. But two days was hardly enough time to prepare.
The Zeno board lay before him like a teeny cubic universe full of its own secrets. The board was really an energy field in 3space relying on ionic repulsion to hold itself together. The game pieces were perfect duodecahedrons that were generated endlessly as you played and hovered within the grid of the board. Quantum rules of time and space held within the board such that it was possible in Zeno for one piece to be in two different places at the same time or for separate pieces to occupy the same space. Moving a single piece had countless effects throughout, annihilating or birthing other pieces, warping the shape of the board, altering the flow of time.
This was no simple game of chess with its rigid logic, in which each move led inexorably to a vast but limited number of responses. Chess was an exercise in calculation, which is precisely how a computer had become Grandmaster. Nor was it as rudimentary as Go with its flowing patterns of movement. No, Zeno was quite different. It was precise and majestic, involving both patterns and positions, strategy and imagination, the flexibility of dreams and the sternest of calculations. Logic, beauty, chance, uncertainty, memory, intuition, luck…they all mattered in a game of Zeno.
To play it was to play at God creating a world in grand sweeping moves as well as little nudges, full of intention and purpose but without a plan. A god with impudence not omnipotence. And to watch a master Zeno player was to see a mix of dance and deliberation. It was the beauty of this kind of rational ballet that had attracted Lem to the game in the first place. Zeno was like life…the only way to play it was to play it with complete commitment. And with that thought in mind, Lem decided right then to accept the challenge. He would boldly open the note, read it aloud, and then – it being written on ipaper – tap his answer back to his challenger, Kolovski, the old Armenian with the crystal teeth.
That night Lem sat up in bed and thought only of the game. How best to approach the match with Kolovski, who had the finesse of a stump? There was of course the Feynmann Gambit, a complex series of maneuvers based on the possible structures of unfolding change. There was the Vico Posture, an endlessly shifting arrangement that took into account certain recursive aspects of the patterns. The Quantum Foam Approach set in motion key limitations of interactive mass and velocity. And then there was the so-called Gesture of Chuang-Tzu, which focused not on gaining winning positions at all but only on becoming one with the rhythm of the field. The Carroll Maneuver…make a quick move in reverse time and set up the outcomes before the preliminaries?
The trick, as Lem well knew, was not to try to be either heroic or hectic. Again unlike chess with its self-important puffery, annoying whizkids, and rumpled experts, Zeno was for dreamers. It was a game for poets who would rather play with the world than try to control it. But thinking through all that he knew, it was hard to stay simple-minded about it. Like any game, there were too many tales, too many metaphors for Life with a big L, too much riding on every single move.
Tales like that of the magnificent Donatello Miaka with his flashes of sudden insight and epic moves of thousands of pieces at once, who lost to an illiterate boy of nine and instantly turned to a life of absinthe and despair. Or the story he had read about another game with only one piece and two squares and a 4,000 page strategy booklet that mentioned moves like the white heron flies to the moon and disappears into the night sky. There was that Indian general who won the battle by first defeating the enemy on the chessboard. And the legend of Candolini, who ended up in an asylum, sweeping the pieces off the board and shouting “Why, why must I lose to this idiot!” and in that one exasperated move, winning after all.
Not being able to sleep, or focus too much on that kind of dribble, Lem turned to other thoughts. To wit: why had he even had the affair with his wife’s best friend in any case? He had not planned it or thought it through. It just happened, in spite of the fact that he had been in love with Sophie the whole time. What a fool! But this was in the beginning of their marriage and he had not yet understood what lay ahead. He had not yet even learned to think ahead. And besides, the friend was so alluring, so new and different. A forbidden body, a secret lust. He had tried to explain all that to Sophie once she found out, but it sounded ridiculous even to him. And of course, she left him soon after.
When he finally fell asleep, his dreams were of the wrong bus in the wrong city to the wrong destination. And of not being able to find his way back.
In the park the next morning, an ugly baby all smeary with ice cream began to holler. A hoverblader streamed down the path past a line of caretakers pushing carriages or wheelchairs. Two girls were playing with neuroFrisbee. And there was the playground itself, enclosed in a mesh fence, with its swings and slides and at the back of it, the line of stone tables set up for checkers, chess, and backgammon. At the far end of these were the Zeno tables, humming with magnetic flux. There was Blaustein, the refugee, his thick fingers tripping giddily over the hedrons. Across from him was Muhammed, a pleasant looking young black man, a chess prodigy who had dispensed with the game of kings in favor of Zeno. A soccer ball bounced his way and without missing a beat he kicked it away and thrust his hand in an arching motion, fingers diddling, to make his next move.
Kolovski, the challenger who had sent the note, was lording over his board with the expansive but grim manner of someone who has started a new life in a new country. Kolovski was big and gruff, and his bushy eyebrows normally jittered as he rolled or pushed or caressed or wished the balls across the board. But this morning found him just sitting and waiting. Waiting for Lem along with a small crowd of onlookers. To defeat him would be the crowning glory of the day.
Lem was still at the far end of the park and no one had noticed him yet. He stopped to gather his wits and observe his challenger. Kolovski was sweating and tapping as he sat at the table. Pawky bastard, Lem thought, thinking he had made up a good word when in fact he had not. Patterns in the spaces between the clouds, in the shadows falling across the cracks in the pavement, and of the branches of trees – patterns deep inside the operations of the natural world -– seemed to perfectly capture some kind of inner truth about things. Some hint to winning strategies perhaps…but Lem could not make them out.
Years after their divorce, Lem accidentally ran into the best friend on the street. He finally got to ask her why on earth she had decided to tell Sophia about their tryst? The affair had already been over for some time and no longer mattered, so why hurt everyone in that way? Why destroy the marriage? Why? Because, she said, it was time for her to move on. Time to deal with the past. And better for everyone if everything was known. Known? He had no answer to that. Not because he agreed but because it explained nothing. She did what she did and he had to live with the results. Simple as that. He walked away from her and never turned around.
As he neared the entrance to the playground, Lem began to waver in his conviction about the challenge. He felt confused. In his mind were no great ideas or tactics. No shining plots and plans in the kitchen of his will, as that lousy poet said. Just the open-ended possibilities of the game, those endless domains of motion, of unfolding geometries. They said that the number of possible moves in Zeno were more than the number of molecules in the universe. They said that as mathematics was to physics, so Zeno was to…but what was it? Metaphysics? History? Silence? Life?
It all suddenly seemed quite useless to Lem. The game, the strategies, maybe even the whole day-to-day grind. The big picture was too big, impossible to keep in mind. You could be as careful as could be and still some idiot could do something that would wreck everything. The range of things you could control was as slim as a joke. Your moves, whatever they were, no matter how clever, would be lost in the tumult of everything that happened.
Zeno was the perfect example of that. To make the very last move – winning or losing – you had to make the one before that, Lem thought. And before that, you had to make the one before that. And so on. But to make the very first move, you had to walk to the park. And before that you had to open the challenge, and get divorced, and have the affair, and get married, and on and on. Before you were born, they had to build the pyramids, and the apemen had to burn grass, and hydrogen had to implode, and god-knows-what before that, through infinite sequences of chance and fate back to the origin of time itself.
When he saw Sophie again at their college reunion, she seemed different than the woman he had married. She struck him as being less than attractive and a bit too solemn. They did not mention the affair or the divorce but instead talked about work and classmates. This he found profoundly boring. Was this the woman he had fallen in love with? The one he pined for after their breakup? Perhaps her best friend had actually done him an unexpected favor!
Lem stood motionless on the pathway, helpless to move. Go or stop, play or run, he could not decide. To take a single step seemed beyond his power. How was it ever possible, he wondered, to do the first thing knowing that it was all worked out down to the last detail? How was it possible to do anything at all? How was anything possible in light of fate? No, there was no question about it. Effort was an illusion, action a lie. Nothing could be done. Lem stood still there, frozen in indecision, not budging or inching. He knew that by not showing up he would forfeit the game. Lose his standing as a master. But that all seemed infinitely distant. News on another planet, irrelevant to the real problem, which was living one’s life right here in spite of everything.
It was in that moment that he decided to turn down the challenge. But not by turning tail and sneaking away. No, he would step forward, one foot and then the next, and walk to the board. There he would bow to Kolovski and sweep his hand across the board left to right in the formal gesture of denying the challenge. He would lose his status, but no one would have to know that it was because he had lost his will to try. That was some consolation.
Of course, standing there absorbed by his own doubts, Lem could not have known that Kolovski too had been thinking. Troubling over the game and ruminating about all that it implied. Zeno had a way of doing that to you. Perhaps it was the impulse of the field or the quantum snag. Whatever the cause, Kolovski too was frozen for the moment. Waiting, sweating, thinking about the arc of his own life. That nasty divorce from a Polish woman named Franna who overcooked everything. And the series of companions since then, dull women with great bosoms who knew nothing of Zeno or anything else that mattered to him. The way thing seemed to lead inexorably to the next, beyond one’s own ability to guide it.
But Kolovski was not like Lem and through all this he came to an entirely different conclusion. Certainly the world was complex, and women were distracting, and the game of Zeno was. But to hell with all that, he thought, life must be lived not played at! You might as well just enjoy yourself. Knowing full well that it meant he was forfeiting the game to Lem, he got up and went to make himself a nice breakfast of hash and eggs and bury his head in
Lem, thin in his clothes, had absolutely no idea why the onlookers were applauding him as he approached the board. Did they think he had made the right decision?
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