The Infinite Sea (26 page)

60

IN THE CONSTANT
sterile glow, I measure the days by the uneaten meals he brings. Three meals, one day. Six, two days. On the tenth day, after he sets the tray in front of me, I ask him, “Why do you bother?” My voice like his now, a throaty croak. I’m soaked in sweat, fever spiking, head pounding, heart racing. He doesn’t answer. Razor hasn’t spoken to me in seventeen meals. He seems jittery, distracted, even angry. Claire’s gone silent, too. She comes twice a day to change my IV bag, look into my eyes with an otoscope, test my reflexes, change out the catheter bag, and empty the bedpan. Every sixth meal, I get a sponge bath. One day, she brings a tape measure and wraps it around my biceps, I guess to see how much muscle I’ve lost. I don’t see anyone else. No Mr. White Coat. No Vosch or dead fathers pumped into my head by Vosch. I’m not so out of it that I don’t know what they’re doing: holding vigil, waiting to see if the “enhancement” kills me.

She’s rinsing out the bedpan one morning when Razor comes in with my breakfast, and he waits silently until she’s finished, and then I hear him whisper, “Is she dying?”

Claire shakes her head. Ambivalent: could be
no,
could be
your guess is as good as mine.
I wait till she’s gone to say, “You’re wasting your time.”

He glances at the camera mounted in the ceiling. “I just do what they tell me.”

I pick up the tray and hurl it onto the floor. His lips tighten, but he doesn’t say anything. Silently, he cleans up the mess while I lie panting, exhausted from the effort, sweat pouring off me.

“Yeah, pick that up. Make yourself useful.”

When my fever shoots up, something in my mind loosens, and I imagine I can feel the forty-four thousand microbots swarming in my bloodstream and the hub with its delicate lace of tendrils burrowed into every lobe, and I understand what my father felt in his dying hours as he clawed at himself to subdue the imaginary insects crawling beneath his skin.

“
Bitch,
” I gasp. From the floor, Razor looks up at me, startled. “Leave me, bitch.”

“No problem,” he mutters. On his hands and knees, using a wet rag to mop up the mess, and the tart smell of disinfectant. “Fast as I can.”

He stands up. His ivory cheeks are flushed. Deliriously, I think the color brings out the auburn highlights in his blond hair. “It won’t work,” he tells me. “Starving yourself. So you better think of something else.”

I’ve tried. But there’s no alternative. I can barely lift my head.
You belong to them now.
Vosch the sculptor, my body the clay, but not my spirit, never my soul. Unconquered. Uncrushed. Uncontained.

I am not bound; they are. Languish, die, or recover, the game’s over, the grand master Vosch mated.

“My father had a favorite saying,” I tell Razor. “
We call chess the game of kings because, through chess, we learn how to rule kings.
”

“Again with the chess.”

He drops the dirty rag into the sink and slams out the door. When he returns with the next meal, there’s a familiar wooden box beside the tray. Without a word, Razor picks up the food and dumps it into the trash, tosses the metal tray into the sink, where it lands with a loud clang. The bed hums, maneuvering my body into a sitting position, and he slides the box in front of me.

“You said you didn’t play,” I whisper.

“So teach me.”

I shake my head and say to the camera behind him, “Nice try. But stuff it up your ass.”

Razor laughs. “Not their idea. But speaking of asses, you can bet yours I got permission first.”

He opens the box, pulls out the board, fumbles with the pieces. “You got your queens and kings and the prawns and these guard-tower-looking things. How come every piece is like a person except those?”

“
Pawns,
not
prawns.
A prawn is a big shrimp.”

He nods. “That’s the name of a guy in my unit.”

“Shrimp?”

“Prawn. Never knew what the hell it meant.”

“You’re setting it up wrong.”

“That could be because I don’t know how to freaking play. You do it.”

“I don’t want to do it.”

“Then you’re conceding defeat?”

“Resigning. It’s called resigning.”

“That’s good to know. I have a feeling that’ll come in handy.” Smiling. Not the Zombie high-voltage type. Smaller, subtler, more ironic. He sits beside the bed and I catch a whiff of bubble gum. “White or black?”

“Razor, I’m too weak to even lift—”

“Then you point where you want to go and I’ll move you.”

He’s not giving up. I didn’t really expect him to. By this point, wafflers and wusses have been winnowed out. There are no pussies left. I tell him where to place the pieces and how each one moves. Describe the basic rules. Lots of nodding and
uh-huh
s, but I get the feeling there’s a lot of agreeing and not much grasping. Then we play and I slaughter him in four moves. The next game, he falls into arguing and denying:
You can’t
do
that! Tell me that isn’t the stupidest damn rule ever.
Game three and I’m sure he’s regretting the whole idea. My spirits aren’t being lifted and his are being totally crushed.

“This is the dumbest-assed game ever invented,” he pouts.

“Chess wasn’t invented. It was discovered.”

“Like America?”

“Like mathematics.”

“I knew girls just like you in school.” He leaves the point there and starts to set up the board again.

“That’s all right, Razor. I’m tired.”

“Tomorrow I’m bringing some checkers.” Spoken like a threat.

He doesn’t, though. Tray, box, board. This time he sets up the pieces in a strange configuration: the black king in the center facing him, the queen on the edge facing the king, three pawns behind the king at ten, twelve, and two o’clock, one knight on the king’s right, another on his left, a bishop directly behind him and, next to the bishop, another pawn. Then Razor looks at me, wearing that seraphic grin.

“Okay.” I’m nodding, not sure why.

“I’ve invented a game. Are you ready? It’s called . . .” He taps on the bedrail to produce a drumroll. “Chaseball!”

“Chaseball?”

“Chess-baseball. Chaseball. Get it?” He plops a coin beside the board.

“What’s that?” I ask.

“It’s a quarter.”

“I know it’s a quarter.”

“For the purposes of the game, it’s the ball. Well, not really the ball, but it
represents
the ball. Or what happens
with
the ball. If you’d be quiet a second, I could explain all the rules.”

“I wasn’t talking.”

“Good. You give me a headache when you talk. Name-calling and Yoda quotes about chess and cryptic elephant stories. You want to play or not?”

He doesn’t wait for an answer. He places a white pawn just in front of the black queen, saying that’s him, the batter.

“You should lead off with your queen. She’s the most powerful.”

“That’s why she bats cleanup.” He shakes his head. My ignorance is astounding. “Real simple: Defense, that’s you, flips first. Heads, it’s a strike. Tails, a ball.”

“A coin won’t work,” I point out. “There are three possibilities: strike, ball, or a hit.”

“Actually, there are
four,
counting fouls. You stick to chess; I’ll handle baseball.”

“Chaseball,” I correct him.

“
Anyway.
If you flip a ball, that’s a ball, and you flip again. Comes up heads, though, and then I get the coin. See, that gives me a chance to get a hit. Heads I connect, tails I miss. If I miss, strike one. And so on.”

“I get it. And if you flip heads, I get the coin back to see if I can field it. Heads I throw you out . . .”

“Wrong! So wrong! No. First
I
flip, three times. Four times if I get a TT.”

“TT?”

“Two tails. That’s a triple. With a TT you get one more flip: heads is a home run; tails, just a triple. Heads-heads is a single; heads-tails is a double.”

“Maybe we should just start playing and you can—”

“
Then
you get the coin back to see if you can field my
potential
single, double, triple, or homer. Heads, I’m out. Tails, I’m on base.” He takes a deep breath. “Unless it’s a home run, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Are you making fun of me? Because I don’t know—”

“I’m just trying to absorb—”

“It kind of sounds like you are. You have no idea how long it took me to come up with this. It’s pretty complicated. I mean, not like the game of kings, but you know what they call baseball, don’t you? The national pastime. Baseball is called the national pastime because, by playing it, we learn how to master time. Or the past. One of ’em.”

“Now you’re the one making fun of me.”

“Actually, I’m the
only
one making fun of you right now.” He waits. I know what he’s waiting for. “You never smile.”

“Does it matter?”

“Once, when I was a kid, I laughed so hard, I peed my pants. We were at Six Flags. The Ferris wheel.”

“What made you laugh?”

“I can’t remember now.” He slides his hand beneath my wrist and lifts my arm to press the quarter into my upturned palm. “Flip the damn coin so we can play.”

I don’t want to hurt his feelings, but the game isn’t that complicated. He gets very excited on his first hit, triumphantly fist pumping, then proceeding to move the black pieces around the board while he calls the play in a hoarse, high-pitched imitation of an announcer’s voice, like a kid playing with action figures.

“It’s a deep drive into center field!” The center-field pawn slides toward second base, the bishop second baseman and the pawn shortstop drop back, and the left-field pawn runs up, then cuts toward center. That’s with one hand while the other manipulates the quarter, turning it in his fingers like a ball spinning in flight, lowering it as if in slow motion to land in center-left field. It’s so ridiculous and childish that I would have smiled if I still smiled.

“He’s
safe
!” Razor bellows.

No. Not childish. Childlike. Eyes fever bright, voice rising in excitement, he’s ten again. Not all things are lost, not the important things.

His next hit is a blooper that drops between first base and right field. He creates a dramatic collision between my fielder and baseman, first base sliding back, right field sliding up, then
smack!
Razor cackles at the impact.

“Wouldn’t that be an error?” I ask. “It’s a catchable ball.”

“Catchable ball? Ringer, it’s just a dorky game I made up in five minutes with a bunch of chess pieces and a quarter.”

Two more hits; he’s three runs up at the top of the first. I’ve always sucked at games of chance. Always hated them for that reason. Razor must sense my enthusiasm waning. He amps up the commentary while sliding the pieces around (despite my pointing out they’re
my
pieces, since I’m on defense). Another drive deep center-left. Another floater behind first base. Another impact of first baseman and outfielder. I don’t know if he’s repeating himself because he thinks it’s funny or because he has a serious deficit in imagination. There’s a part of me that feels as if I should be deeply affronted on behalf of chess players everywhere.

By the third inning, I’m exhausted.

“Let’s pick it up again tonight,” I suggest. “Or tomorrow. Tomorrow would be better.”

“What? You don’t like it?”

“No. It’s fun. I’m just tired. Really tired.”

He shrugs like it doesn’t matter, which it does, or he wouldn’t shrug. He slips the quarter back into his pocket and packs up the box, muttering under his breath. I catch the word
chess.

“What did you say?”

“Nothing.” Cutting his eyes away.

“Something about chess.”

“Chess, chess, chess. Chess on the brain. Sorry chaseball has nothing on chess in the sheer thrill category.”

He shoves the box under his arm and stomps to the door. One last parting shot before he goes: “I thought maybe I’d cheer you up a little, that’s all. Thanks. We don’t have to play anymore.”

“Are you angry at me?”

“I gave chess a chance, didn’t I? You didn’t see me bitching.”

“You didn’t. And you did. A lot.”

“Just think about it.”