In a Mist (8 page)

There is one reference to God in
Casablanca
. It occurs in the note Rick receives before he boards the train.

I cannot go with you or ever see you again.
You must not ask why. Go my darling
and God bless you.

God bless you. This, if anything, is my most meaningful point of reference to the Divine. Ilsa's note to Rick beseeches blind
faith, asking of Rick's love what that love makes hardest to give. Ingrid Bergman has an imploring way of looking at her leading men; there is in her eyes an almost desperate devotion.

At first I tried to set my absurd faith aside and get on with my work. I treated my belief much as I would a head cold or a hangover. I took an Aspirin, went to bed early and drank plenty of fluids. Otherwise, I persevered with my research, marked assignments, and played racquetball. But there was no longer satisfaction in these pursuits. My faith persisted. It was not limited to moments of idleness, but was with me in my dreams and in my waking thoughts and in every action I performed. I was no longer content. So I tried a diff erent approach. I devoted more time to my research than ever before, attempting to eliminate all extraneous concerns from my daily routine. I told myself I would complete my dissertation by the end of the summer. But the more I threw myself into my work, the more my faith flourished. I saw God in everything around me. My work, along with everything else in my life, was superceded by my perfect knowledge of God's being.

One night, as I lay in bed with Cynthia, slightly inebriated and unable to manifest my aff ections, I confided my belief quite spontaneously.

“Cynthia, I believe in God.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, of course, and so I explained as best I could, including an account of the note that Ilsa writes to Rick.

“Oh Frank, darling, you're such a sentimental retrophile.”

“Well what about you, Cynthia? Your master's thesis is on Audrey Hepburn's wardrobe.”

“That'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.

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 at a high, sturdy wooden table, choosing a place with a glass ashtray though he had not smoked a cigarette in almost twenty years. He sat for a moment and observed the quiet room. An older woman he recognized and a haggard-looking man he did not were playing slot machines at the back. There was worn green carpet beneath his boots and a scuff ed hardwood surface serving as a dance floor. The stage was low, no more than a foot off the floor, and crowded with instruments and amplifiers. On the far side of the room there were small square-paned windows between wine-
coloured curtains. A grey-haired waitress greeted Isaac by name and brought him a half-pint glass and a pitcher of pale draft. When she off ered him a menu he smiled and declined. He filled his glass and wondered whether the girl would come that afternoon.

It would be two years that July since he first saw her. Though he did not know precisely he put her between the ages of twenty and twenty-five. Once or twice a month she would come and sit on the opposite side of the room with other men and women of her approximate age. Isaac found it curious that the young women outnumbered the young men. He could not fathom that these men would let the women who sat at their table pay for their own drinks. If he could not help but think of these young women as girls, surely the men in their company were no more than boys. He knew that the man he was several decades ago would have felt diff erently about the girl than he felt now. He could approximate the time, some twenty years ago, when the change in him had occurred. It happened around the same time that women stopped thinking of him as a handsome or desirable man. He watched now as the front man and the lap-steel player took the stage and tuned their instruments and spoke of key signatures and song titles. Eventually they were joined by the others and performed Hank Williams's rendition of “Lovesick Blues,” the tune with which they always began.

This was the time Isaac most enjoyed, the afternoon in its potential and him left to contemplate what may transpire. He knew some other old-time regulars would eventually approach him and join his table, another old man, or an aging couple with which he was acquainted. They would laugh at the front man's swagger and his banter and applaud solos and if someone were to sit in for a number, this would be occasion for further applause. They might
share a pitcher, speak of the weather or the milestones of grandchildren and if wallet-sized photographs were produced, Isaac would examine them for evidence of bloodline and personality. Together they would look with approval at the young couples on the dance floor, or eye the older ones and wink. To exercise his independence Isaac would rise on occasion and make his way to the slots, methodically inserting quarters until he reached his three dollar limit. He would return then to the table with a sense of self-control he wished he might have been able to exercise with as little eff ort in other aff airs.

Gradually the bar began to fill. Isaac looked back toward the entrance as a woman his age entered, followed by a man who had held the door for her. The two were dressed in western shirts with matching embroidery. When they saw Isaac they waved to him but did not approach. They sat down behind him, at the back of the room, and the man went off to the bar and when the woman saw Isaac looking in her direction she winked at him.

“You sly old devil,” said a familiar voice and Isaac turned and Lloyd grinned at him. Lloyd's greying beard was newly trimmed. He wore a navy-issue sweater with a collared shirt underneath and a brand new ball cap perched on the crown of his head. Isaac greeted his old acquaintance and shook his outstretched, calloused hand and Lloyd set the half-pint in his other hand on the table and sat down next to Isaac without being asked. Isaac turned to face the stage and it was then he saw that the girl had arrived and was sitting in a crowd of young people on the other side of the room.

On a crowded afternoon the previous fall, when the young people were more numerous, someone had introduced him to the girl and her party. Isaac had spoken to her twice. She had remembered his name from the first of these occasions and had smiled at him, warmly, on the second.
By all signs she was unmarried, which was not uncommon, but which troubled him nevertheless. He did not know whether this caused the same concern in her as it did in him. He knew only that the girl wore horn-rimmed glasses, spoke softly, held her hands in her lap when she sat, curtsied to her partner as a song ended, never dancing with the same partner twice in a row. Though she could waltz, she favoured the two-step and the jive, shied from that formless dance in which partners press closely together, sway to ballads and whisper in one another's ear. When she danced with a young man who was not her equal on the floor, Isaac had seen her discreetly take the lead. When the girl would be asked to dance by another man, no matter Isaac's knowledge of him or his opinion as to the man's moral character, Isaac would feel a strangely bitter sense of relief, of things being as they should.

When she danced and the burden of her would lift from Isaac's thoughts, or at other times, his mind at ease, he would think then of his older brother. It was not that he still mourned Roland or missed him particularly, but strangely his brother had come to inhabit his thoughts in a way he never had while living. Isaac attributed this to the sentimentality of old age. Roland, dead some nine years now, had never learned to speak. After their mother passed on he had spent the last two decades of his life in a home in a neighbouring town. In the early years Isaac had visited. He would sit at the table where Roland was served his meals and watch his brother take infrequent sips from an endless cup of decaf. Roland would smile mysteriously at these times, glancing at him with something Isaac chose to interpret as the acknowledgment of a common origin. As the years passed these glances grew less meaningful and when recognition gave way entirely to indiff erence, Isaac stopped visiting. He felt relief at this, for after nine years
he could no longer tolerate the way in which his brother was addressed by the staff of the home, well-intentioned caregivers who spoke to a man twice their age as if he were a child. Though he had never wiped himself, nor bathed of his own volition, nor so much as danced with a woman, Isaac knew that Roland was not a child in his old age if he had ever been one. He knew Roland would have lived a much diff erent life had he been given the opportunity, and Isaac respected him for who he might have been.

He had long come to accept that his brother could not be held accountable as others were held accountable. This acceptance was bound up inextricably with an image of the kitchen table overturned, warm red smeared on the fainter red and white of his mother's gingham apron. He could not now ascertain if this had been blood or the remains of an upset rhubarb pie, for each had precedent and each was equally calamitous in Isaac's childhood recollection. As a grown man he could not accept that Roland was deemed a child and spoken to as such. He knew his brother had endured fifty-some odd post-pubescent years of masculine urges and scoldings and the erratic nocturnal manifestations of frustrated desire. Isaac at least had work—long stretches of highway with predetermined destinations, physical and mental exhaustion, the repetition of tiresome but nevertheless necessary and even useful tasks. This among other pastimes, even on occasion the companionship of women, and always a few friends, acquaintances, who if they did not understand the nature of his reticence, spoke to him at least in the terms of their common adulthood, of time spent working, longing and sometimes being satisfied.

For eleven years before Roland's passing, all that remained of the place in Isaac's life once occupied by his brother was a birthday card, signed with his brother's name by the staff of the home, accompanied by a gift certificate
for a chain of coffee shops Isaac had not patronized since he quit smoking. These tokens, and memories of a childhood shared with his brother, would come upon him at times when he was otherwise at ease. He had long forgotten the date of his brother's birth and could not bring himself to ask. Out of a steadfast sense of obligation that ended only with Roland's death, he would reciprocate his birthday card with a card for his brother at Christmas. His brother had always taken some pleasure in music. And the card would, on better years, be accompanied by a recording of something he hoped that Roland might enjoy.

Isaac himself sought out music on AM radios and in bars. He would tap his foot inaudibly, could mouth the words to hundreds of songs so long as they played, could hum something resembling the tunes to as many though he had never owned a record. If he heard a melody he had not heard in years, he would feel the pleasure of recognition, as if chancing upon an old acquaintance in a motel bar or walking the streets of a distant town from a favourable time in his past. He could dance with a confidence that came from a certain degree of practice, beginning with a long ago series of afternoon lessons given by a red-haired sitter in the years when his mother worked and his father was at war. He could remember dancing with this girl, who was years older and a head taller. He could recall the feel of his hand on the back of the girl's cotton print dress, though he could not remember the names of the songs to which they had danced or who sang them. Given the presence of a jukebox in a truck stop or an all-night diner he would make selections at random or ask an idle waitress to choose her favourite tune. In 1959, at the suggestion of a girl he was seeing at the time, he had taken to styling his hair in the pompadour style of Elvis Presley. It suited him and he saw no reason to change and though his hair had since
grown pale and thin to the degree that what remained was hardly worth the eff ort, he still kept a fine-toothed comb in a brown leather sheaf in his back pocket so that he might maintain this ghost of youthful vanity.