Continuations

By John Best

 

It’s my bedtime. I hold the curtain open for one last look at the arctic scene outside my bedroom window. Above, the stars wheel in their eternal nightly pavane. And below, a brittle silence is the order of the night here on earth.

A bone breaking would snap like a pistol shot. The snow cover has bleached all color from the backyard. I let the curtain fall closed and climb into my oversized bed.

I’m not that sleepy, even though I am tired. Actually, “tired” is probably not the right word. It’s more like an empty weariness born of ennui or lassitude. Cramped and crabbed. Feeling hemmed in with no freedom of movement. Why bother with anything? Fighting that feeling is an old man’s constant battle. One of many, I know. I need to shake it off. And I have an idea.

I lift a hinged protective cover on my nightstand and hit the button underneath. The machinery below my bed begins to hum. A second later, I feel the scissors jack lurch into action, and my bed and I are riding up toward the bedroom ceiling. As I approach it, a panel swings away and the powerful legs of the jack continue to push me and my bed higher.

Now I’ve entered the dusty and hopelessly disheveled attic. Above my head, as I continue to rise, a section of the roof is pulled away on tracks, and the crystalline night opens above me. I’m assaulted by the frigid night air as I continue to rise above my neighborhood.

Below me, I hear the sound of the blast shield unfolding from the almost fully extended scissors jack. I deploy the electrostatic canopy with a switch on the foot treadle. Now, the instrument display is projected on the bubble canopy over my head. I still have my head on the pillow, but I can reach the touch screen of the display.

I start the launch thrusters, and soon the heat comes on inside the bubble canopy. The scissors jack is now fully extended. I’m lying in my bed twenty feet over the roof of my house on an almost perfectly still winter night.

I press the power button for the main engine. As the turbofans of the Pratt and Whitney F100-PW-220 begin to spool up, a light on the instrument panel tells me the launch thrusters have reached maximum power.

I push another button on the instrument projection, and the landing claws release the bed from the support trunnions on the top of the scissors jack. I use the downside camera to verify the successful disengagement. Free of the jack, my bed continues to gently rise on the thrusters’ power, up into the night. I’m floating sixty feet over my neighbors’ homes when I pull the throttle back for the main engine. I use the joystick to bank around my house in a tight circle.

I want to make sure the jack is retracting and the roof section is sliding back into position. It wouldn’t do to have the furnace running all night trying to heat a home that has a twelve-by-eight-foot hole in its roof.

Rotating the downside camera, I look at the rooftops of the houses in my neighborhood. In my small rural town, the Midwesterners who have adopted me as one of their own are too polite to ask what I’m doing with a bed like this during the past year that I’ve had it. But they would love to know. “Heard you takin’ off last night,” they say with a smile. “Yep, nice flying weather,” I reply with studied nonchalance.

Let’s just say this was a project aided by the government, and leave it at that.

And now I put my plan into action: a bracing flight out over the ocean at wavetop level. That will cure my boredom. I bank right and set an eastward course. My bed can do six hundred miles per hour, and probably more. It won’t take long before I’m out over the rolling waves.

The mighty Atlantic. The stormy Atlantic. This last phrase gives me a little pause. The electronic rescue beacon that the aforementioned government insists be activated the entire time I’m aloft wouldn’t do me much good if I lost power over the ocean. I’m sure I’d sink like a brick. But then, isn’t that the idea? To die in one’s bed, I mean? I chuckle at my little witticism.

I turn off the instrument projection to look at the stars. The engine noise fades to a hush. The bed’s vibration is nothing more than you would have from a bunk on the lower deck of a cruise ship. I think about my contrail dissipating in the night air behind me. Is anyone looking up to see it?

My course has taken me to Dover, and soon I’ll be out over Delaware Bay. Then the Atlantic. On my left, I see the lights of Philadelphia sixty miles away. Suddenly—I don’t know why—I feel drawn to them. I give in to the feeling, banking left and flying to the city of my birth and young adulthood. I haven’t been back in many years.

After my parents died, my siblings and I cast ourselves to the winds in a sort of family diaspora. But still: lots of great memories there. Like having a cheesesteak on the subway platform on my way to an antiwar protest downtown. Hearing the progressive rock bands in the little clubs on Sansom Street. But I cut off the reverie because it always ends up with something more recent. Something unpleasant.

I loop around City Hall at Billy Penn’s hat level. Unsurprisingly, Center City is unpopulated. Then I notice a solitary figure on the plaza three hundred feet below me. I turn on the bed’s floodlights, extend the landing feet, and come in on the thrusters, touching down about forty feet away from him. I cut the thrusters’ power, and silence once again rules the scene.

The man is sitting at one of those pedestal tables made out of what look like varicolored pebbles pressed into some sort of concrete. On the tabletop there is an inlaid chessboard. Two stools made of the same pebble-encrusted concrete are arranged on opposite sides of the table.

From my distance, I take in the man’s appearance. Now, I’m old, and I look it. But this guy is biblically old. Those eyebrows, wiry and ferrous, haven’t been greeted by a scissors in maybe forever. His face and neck are unshaven, and the beard, which matches the color of the eyebrows, hangs down to the neckline of his shirt.

I wonder if he’s homeless. But his clothes look newish; there’s no sign of a shopping cart full of belongings anywhere. He’s studying a chess position, apparently so intently that he hasn’t noticed that someone just landed a jet-propelled bed beside him in Dilworth Park.

My curiosity gets the better of me. I retract the canopy and get my slippers out from where I’ve wedged them between the frame and the mattress. I pull my heavy comforter off the bed and wrap it around me like a cape as I put my feet on the pavers and walk over.

“Excuse me,” I say. “I’m sorry to barge in, but there can’t be many opportunities to play on a chilly night like this.”

The man looks up. His blue eyes shimmer like the water in an infinity pool. “Sometimes when the clubs close,” he says, “there are people who want to play despite the hour. I’m always available for a game.” His voice doesn’t sound old at all. His eye contact is steady. “Would you like a game?”

“Sure. How much?”

“Ten dollars will get you twenty minutes on your clock.”

I keep some cash stuffed in one of the pillowcases, and I now retrieve some bills. He puts the money in his shirt pocket, then picks up two pawns and moves them behind his back. Next, he holds out two fists. I tap his left hand. He opens it to reveal the black pawn. That’s fine with me. “I used to play a pretty good game with Black,” I say, “but I’m just a patzer now.”

“You’ll be surprised how much comes back to you.”

We set up our pieces, which are intricately carved, heavy and hand-filling. That done, the man nods his assent and I start his clock. He also has twenty minutes, not that he’ll need it, probably. He opens with P-K4 and hits my clock.

I respond immediately with P-QB4, the Sicilian Defense. He was right; I couldn’t have said what the first move of the Sicilian was. But it was just there for me. He accepts that line, and we play out the opening. His hands are as beautiful as a pianist, and immaculately clean.

The long fingers flutter over the board for a second before each move. I’m not sure why he does this, because it’s obvious that he knows what move he will make no matter how quickly I play. And after each move, I look up from the board to find his eyes drilling into me, measuring me.

I’m hoping to get to the Dragon variation—I love getting my dark-square Bishop fianchettoed on f8! But he plays N-N3 on Move 9, so I settle for the Najdorf instead. I can’t get unpacked, though. I still haven’t castled by Move 21 when he plays P-QR3. I’m like a groggy boxer. I forestall the knockout punch by backpedaling and muddying up the position.

I’m just delaying the inevitable, but he doesn’t seem to mind. His play is patient, silent, and relentless. I remember how breathtaking and lush chess felt to me when I played it as a child: the millions of continuations available; each one singular, gorgeous, and laden with possibility. Vectors of force and resolution ebbing and flowing across the oceanic expanse of the board.

I survive out to Move 31 when he plays RxKP. I still have two minutes on my clock. But I have no possibilities left. I gently lay down my king. The man extends his hand, and we shake. “Nice game,” he says. “You played well.”

“Thanks.” I stand there looking at the final position. That’s when it hits me: Chess feels infinite when you play it. But it isn’t. It’s merely vast. The continuations stretch out in so many directions. But once taken, those moves are as fixed and remote as the past days of our lives. So, each game’s degrees of freedom must dwindle with each move, dwindle down to the final outcome, the only one there can be.

Time for me to go. A light snow is beginning to fall. I back away from the chessboard and climb back into my bed, putting the canopy back up and starting the thrusters. In thirty seconds, I’m rising amid the snowflakes. On the downside camera, I see the chess player has reset the position he was studying. I pull the throttle back and rise above the snow clouds.

 

They ripple and crest before me. Lit up from below, their frothy tops lap and fold over each other. I point my craft to the West. Fragments of some classic poem I had to memorize as a child are milling around in my head like tadpoles in a pond. I grasp at them, but they just won’t quite cohere.

 

The tumblers of the lock turn one by one until the luminous portal opens . . .
A meteor and a leaf are each entitled to one final descent . . .
The moon ahead glows like an eager lover . . .
The stars watch in their delight . . .
She never had a chance to see the bed . . .

 

O Pilot! Bend sail
and steer you to safe harbor.
Its lights ahead still glimmer.
Roaming the ancient whale-road must now end,
as years gone by grow dimmer.

 

John Best from US is a professor emeritus of cognitive science from a Midwestern university. His short stories have appeared in the Scarlet Leaf Review, and in Fecundus Magazine. Despite having grown up in Philadelphia and played chess, he insists that everything about Continuations is made-up. Except for the bed, he adds.