Playground, page 13
THE ISLAND ROSE like a hatbox floating on the waves. Wai took the boat windward, into the stiff trades blowing from the southeast. Kinipela pointed toward the horizon where the Mareva Nui, the supplies boat from Tahiti, on its two-week-long, twice-a-month tour, chugged away from the island on its enormous loop to Mataiva, Tikehau, Rangiroa, Ahe, Manihi, and finally back to Papeete.
Wai piloted to the fringe of coral bounding the shallow lagoon. He circled leeward past the island’s headlands, along a fifth of the thirteen-mile coastline. Beyond the promontory, shapes emerged: a gutted cylindrical loading silo, an arc of concrete pyramids, two abandoned industrial buildings, twin riprap jetties, and the ghost of an old, cantilevered, telescoping pier that had loaded phosphate onto ships that once floated just beyond the now-ruined harbor. Even after months, Evelyne marveled at the sight of a port covered in barnacles and mold, crumbling down into the rock-strewn surf.
The dive boat motored down the leeward coast. As it approached its mooring between a freshwater spring and another abandoned village, three slight boys waved at the boat from a spot under the cliffs. Kini saw the welcome committee long before Evelyne could. Those formidable young girl’s eyes made out the shapes before her father, although the laughing Buddha pretended otherwise. Soon enough, even Evie’s ancient eyes could see the figures move along the shore, waving to the boat. All three wore board shorts and oversized tank tops, one bright red, one blue with a white Nike swoosh, and one camo with black letters reading BE ALL YOU CAN BE.
The trio of boys scampered toward the mooring as the boat pulled in. Kinipela grimaced as the excited gang came up the beach. Wai gestured at them with mock threats that made the boys laugh. Evie waved and called out, “Ia orana!” The trio felt to her as endangered as the creatures she had just swum with in the open sea.
Wai tied up to the small dock and rolled out the gangplank. He cut the engines, and in the sudden silence Evelyne heard Kini humming Latin names under her breath, like a little song. Evelyne Beaulieu knew of only one other person who made up jingles to remember Linnean nomenclature. Any creature could become a little tune. Carcharhinus, Carcharhinus, men have named you.
But all mnemonic tunes scattered again in the shouts of the marauding boy army. From her place on the crude dock, Evie heard the trio shouting over one another. The thrill in their voices was audible. Something—anything—was happening in this tiny world at last. But their words dispersed in the breezes blowing across the beach.
The gang drew close enough to be intelligible. Mori, the leader, traced his ancestors back to Makateans who’d lived on the island for centuries before the French arrived. Taka, his stout advance scout, the son of the island’s Protestant minister, was raised all over the Society Islands. Afa, the smallest, was the ward of two foreigners who had lost their way in the world. Together, they roved around the island, climbing the cliffs, exploring the freshwater springs that flowed through underground caverns near Moumu, and excavating abandoned tools and machinery that had been left to the advancing jungle. Evelyne knew all three of them, but the youngest always cracked her heart open to see.
The squad came up to the dock, keeping up a steady shout. “Les Américains vont débarquer! Les Américains vont débarquer!”
Beaulieu looked up to the cliffs above the coast where the scar of history ran diagonally across the island. Makatea felt like a great flensed whale, a third of its body scraped away. And yet, as the Makatean Expeditionary Force descended on the dock, they shouted their alarm in the language of the flenser.
“Les Américains vont débarquer, et tout prendre pour eux!” The Americans are landing, and they’re going to take everything!
Understanding them at last, Evie wondered: What in God’s name is left to take?
........
RAFI AND I BONDED OVER having skipped a grade and being largely self-taught. We bonded over being the sons of fucked-up fathers and erratic mothers who couldn’t cope with their mates. We shared a contempt for the hierarchies of prestige and coolness that ran the school, and neither of us saw our outcast state as anything but a massive asset in the life ahead. We were both nuts about Tolkien and Star Wars and Ursula Le Guin. But even with all that in common, the only way the two of us would ever have spent so much time together was over a chessboard.
Something turbulent was warring inside him, a darker, more desperate game. I sensed it but didn’t understand it. He didn’t bother hiding it from me, but he wasn’t about to share. The two of us weren’t going to visit the place together.
One afternoon, I surprised him in the library with a copy of a book called The Master and Margarita. The book wasn’t on any syllabus in that school. He tapped the spooky cover.
“They’re keeping the good shit from us, brother. Too dangerous!”
A few weeks later, in humanities class, as Father Kelly was declaiming e. e. cummings’s “somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond” for the entire numbed class, I turned around to roll my eyes at Rafi in the row behind me. His eyes were wet and he was mouthing along with the words. He saw that I saw that he was crying, but his murderous gaze told me that if I so much as alluded to this, ever, he would cut me dead.
WE PROMISED TO KEEP IN TOUCH over vacation after junior year. But we met up only once, at the Cultural Center downtown, to play out a handful of lightning chess matches. I was lifeguarding at Lee Street Beach and running my basement software games company. He was shelving books at the Taylor Street library and reading insane amounts of obscure fiction. It simply took too much time and effort for us to cross the length of Chicago no-man’s-land that lay between us.
On the first day of senior year, we spotted each other across a packed corridor full of kids at their lockers. He was not especially tall, but he was up on his toes, looking out over the crowd. Looking for me, I think. I was certainly looking for him.
We approached with our arms out and thumped each other on the shoulder blades—what passed for a hug among male teenagers in Chicago, 1986. He gave me a big, toothy grin and fell into his parody of ’hood talk, ladled on for my benefit.
“Aight! Dope look, mutha! But that shirt be wack.”
He tugged at the popped collar of my polo. He himself was sporting a new, sparse, short goatee that made him look a little like Mephistopheles, even in his blue button-down shirt and black pressed slacks. He brought me up to date on his vacation reading—mostly classics—and I told him about the new turn-based space strategy game I’d written that I was now selling through mail order.
He was bubbling over with suppressed excitement, struggling to remain laconic. His fingers did a little air arabesque. “Somethin’ we gotta look into. I’ll tell you at lunch.”
“Tell me now!”
“Later, ’tater.”
The morning passed, a buffet of new classes that would see us through the next four months. I truly loved Saint Ignatius. Rafi did, too—all those priests and smart lay teachers trying to fine-tune our brains the way Swiss watchmakers calibrated gears, balanced wheels, and fitted mainsprings. It was only our classmates we couldn’t quite stand.
At lunch, we took our trays of sausage and sauerkraut to the end of one table and sat down to the business of getting caught up. He’d started to write poetry over the summer break, and he showed me a few efforts. It was a weird mix of Langston Hughes and Rilke.
A girl I’d tutored in quadratic equations the year before walked by and hissed at us. “Why don’t you two just move to San Francisco and get on with it?”
Rafi snapped his head back, baffled in her wake. “What on Earth did you do to her, man?”
“I’m not sure. It’s possible I may have flirted with her, once.”
He did that thing with his hands: Don’t drag me into all your white-people stuff. “Okay. Brace yourself, mofo. You ready to head through the wardrobe?”
He reached into his green khaki book satchel, brought out a Bible-sized beaten-up volume, and laid it next to my lunch tray. The Game That the Gods Play, by Hideo Ohira.
It was an old gray clothbound book that had lost its dust jacket. The cover showed nothing but the title and the author’s name. Rafi had found it on a Sunday on Maxwell Street. It had been published by a West Coast publisher just after the Second World War, when our fathers were kids. The pages were yellowed and moldering, and they smelled of aldehydes, ketones, vanillin, and decomposing lignin—a mysterious, heady scent, almost narcotic.
That’s how it started: Rafi’s and my trip through the universe of Go. Everything that happened later—the course that our two lives took—everything was launched from the opening moves of that book.
Rafi waved his frantic hands like he was conducting an invisible orchestra. “I was tired of having my ass repeatedly handed to me in chess just because you had a ten-year head start.”
“And on account of my superior intellect.”
“And on account of your natural North Side arrogance, which makes you perfectly suited to games of aggression and destruction. But this, my friend, is a game of creative exploration and ingenuity. This game is going to take you to the farthest edge of your ability to contemplate. You ready for that, asshole?”
It was not like Rafi to be hyperbolic. I picked up the book and flipped through it. Every other page had poorly printed engravings of Go boards cluttered with inscrutable patterns of black and white stones. Something about the growing, shifting, geometric configurations excited me. I could sense the power relations rippling across the board, although I had no idea how the rules worked.
He grabbed my wrist. I’d never seen him so theatrical.
“This game is to chess what singing is to sucking your teeth. It is the summit of contemplative philosophy. It makes chess feel like Chutes and Ladders. Get this. If every atom in the universe was a little universe that itself had as many atoms as the entire universe had, the total number of atoms would still be smaller than the number of possible Go game states. And I can teach you how to play in under three minutes.”
I figured he had to be exaggerating. But both claims turned out to be true. The rules were simple, as if they’d existed long before humans stumbled onto them. Place a stone on any intersection of a nineteen-by-nineteen grid of lines. Try to surround your enemies’ groups of stones by occupying their last pathways to further growth. Connect your stones; control territory. The person who occupies the most area is the winner.
It looked to me like glorified tic-tac-toe.
He’d picked up a cheap board in Chinatown and had it stashed in his locker. We played our first game after school that afternoon. We set up outside on the concrete under the pillars of the school’s back portico and went at it.
From the start, everything felt odd. Instead of beginning with a board full of pieces and picking them off, we started with nothing and added one stone at a time. I waded in, confident that the simple rules would yield to simple play. Within thirty moves, I got my red-assed self-esteem handed to me on a platter.
I understood the rules, and up to a point, I could see how he was trying to split my stones with wedges, build up his walls, and surround my poor stones to kill them. But for the life of me I couldn’t figure out how to defend myself or mount any kind of attack that he didn’t easily swat away.
The vast, empty patches of intersections seemed arbitrary. Stones that I thought were on the outside line of a battle flipped and were suddenly on the inside of another, larger war. And this was going on in a dozen different board locations at the same time. The grid of the board became the streets and neighborhoods of Chicago. Some local race war in the blocks of Pilsen was going to unfold until it shook the blocks of Elk Grove to their foundations. How could a person hope to command so many subtle and flickering battles all at once?
When we played chess, I always felt guided by a very few core principles. I knew what every piece was worth and when it paid to trade them. I hewed to the known opening moves, developed my pieces, and tried to control the center board, keep a strong pawn formation, maintain the pressure, lay traps, look ahead several moves, and build toward a dominant endgame. But in this little allegory of unfolding cosmic creation that Rafi had dug up—so much older, larger, harder, subtler, and more complex than the already infinite and impossible-to-master game of chess—I couldn’t even tell who was ahead.
Calculating the value of a move was impossible. Whatever I did, he had a couple hundred possible replies. Convinced that I had just forced his next move, I watched him blithely ignore my thrust and place his stone half a board away. When we did go head-to-head in an all-out pitched fight—Jesus! The branches of the fray multiplied so profusely that for dozens of moves I couldn’t tell what was happening or who was getting the upper hand.
Put a stone on the board. Just put a little pebble on the board. God only knew what byzantine structure it might become or what its enveloping environment might grow into. I couldn’t tell which of us owned large swaths of the board, and I still wasn’t sure, fifty turns later. A game might last three hundred moves or more. Chess was almost always over in fewer than forty.
I lost that first showdown. Badly. And I lost again immediately after that.
“One summer, and you’re already three levels ahead of me.”
“Naw, man. I’m still flailing, myself. Making moves just a step or two better than random.”
I was stunned. I felt like I was on a tiny raft floating far out on a sea much bigger than any continent. “Why have I never learned how to play this? I’ve barely heard of it, before today!”
He grinned as I wandered into his trap. “Yeah. It’s weird. This thing is the oldest continuously played board game in the world. Billions of people play it. In China, it’s part of the four means of self-betterment. In Japan, it’s state-subsidized—a way to become enlightened.”
“Why does no one play it here?”
“You tell me, brother.”
“One more,” I demanded. He shrugged. He had nowhere to go but the firehouse where his father worked, and even there, he was hardly expected.
Dusk was settling over us. I hadn’t told my parents I was going to be late. I ran out to the pay phone in front of Saint Ig, a block down on Roosevelt toward Racine. I pushed my coins in the slot, dialed, and got my mother. She was furious with worry, shrieking into the phone like she hoped the sound might come out the other end of the connection and slap me in the head.
I went back to the portico behind the school. Rafi hunched over the board, pushing stones around, playing through some positions in a classic game from the early Qing Dynasty called Nine Dragons Playing with a Pearl.
“Sorry, man. Gotta go. I’m toast, up there.”
“Whatever, mama’s boy.”
“Bring it tomorrow, okay?”
“It’s staying here. In my locker.”
We played a thousand matches that year alone.
On monday morning, Ina Aroita walked her family along the wheel ruts of crushed coral up to the sala that housed the one-room school. Madame Martin and the eight students already present came out to meet them. The youngest children crawled all over Rafi—Monsieur Young! Enfin, enfin! Finally! The older ones tugged at his elbow, vying for attention. Rafi followed them into the schoolroom, toys pouring from his pockets and semi-grammatical jokes spilling from his mouth in three languages.
Hariti, still young enough to be proud of her father, joined in the fray. Afa, who had reached the age of awakening discomfort, hung back. He didn’t think it right that his father, with a doctorate in educational psychology from a major American university, should be the assistant of a demi schoolteacher half his father’s age who did not even know what crabs’ shells were made of.
The knot of happy kids paraded into the schoolroom with Monsieur Young in the middle—a thin black scarecrow flocked by shouting brown birds. Afa watched them. Ina Aroita nudged her boy.
“Go on. I’ll be back this afternoon to see your match.”
Afa trotted off into the schoolhouse. It wrecked Ina to think that her son would be off before long to Rangiroa, to continue his schooling. How the island’s mothers sent their thirteen-year-olds so many miles across the ocean to go to high school was beyond her.
Much about the island still evaded her, even after years. Everyone here had some blood pact with fenua—the land—forever connected by mystical, umbilical pito to the place where their placenta was buried. And yet they came and went, migrating to new islands all the time. Countless more Makateans lived elsewhere than lived on Makatea. The diaspora that had colonized every habitable spot in the world’s greatest ocean was still under way.
Ina herself had grown up throughout the Pacific, in an island family. But six years in the dead middle of an endless continent had baffled her soul and left her an imposter to herself. She had no home anywhere but where she lived, and that was Makatea now. Makatea: the capital of métissage in the middle of the hot mix that was the South Pacific. In some ways she felt more Makatean than she felt American, a role she’d had so little real experience with.
So it shook her to hear the schoolteacher ask, “Why are your people trying to take over this place?”
“My people? Take over Makatea?”
A minute sufficed to prove that Madame Martin was clueless about the gossip she happily passed downstream. Several Americans with too much money, as she put it, were going to reconstruct the crumbling port of Temao and rebuild the abandoned railroad that had once run the length of the island. Then the Americans were going to use Makatea to build a floating city.
Ina Aroita chuckled. “Are they mad?”
Madame Martin was not exactly Makatean, either. She had been born in Papeete and took five years of college in Lyon before asking to be posted to the little island where her maternal grandfather had once cut and loaded six tons of rock into wheelbarrows six days a week. But that made her Makatean enough to resent Ina’s skepticism. Her wounded look insisted that of course the nine square miles of gutted and abandoned island would be a hot buy for any shrewd adventure capitalist.
