Lee woke up around noon, and sat for a long time on the edge of the bed with one shoe dangling from his hand. He dabbed water on his eyes, put on his coat, and went out.
Lee went down to the Zocalo and wandered around for several hours. His mouth was dry. He went into a Chinese restaurant, sat down in a booth and ordered a Coke. Misery spread through his body, now that he was sitting down with no motion to distract him. 'What happened?' he wondered.
He forced himself to look at the facts. Allerton was not queer enough to make a reciprocal relation possible. Lee's affection irritated him. Like many people who have nothing to do, he was resentful of any claims on his time. He had no close friends. He disliked definite appointments. He did not like to feel that anybody expected anything from him. He wanted, so far as possible, to live without external pressure. Allerton resented Lee's action in paying to recover the camera. He felt he was 'being sucked in on a phony deal,' and that an obligation he did not want had been thrust upon him.
Allerton did not recognize friends who made six-hundred-peso gifts, nor could he feel comfortable exploiting Lee. He made no attempt to clarify the situation. He did not want to see the contradiction involved in resenting a favor which he accepted. Lee found that he could tune in on Allerton's viewpoint, though the process caused him pain, since it involved seeing the extent of Allerton's indifference. 'I liked him and I wanted him to like me,' Lee thought. 'I wasn't trying to buy anything.'
'I have to leave town,' he decided. 'Go somewhere. Panama, South America.' He went down to the station to find out when the next train left for Veracruz. There was a train that night, but he did not buy a ticket. A feeling of cold desolation came over him at the thought of arriving alone in another country, far away from Allerton.
Lee took a cab to the Ship Ahoy. Allerton was not there, and Lee sat at the bar for three hours, drinking. Finally Allerton looked in the door, waved to Lee vaguely, and went upstairs with Mary.
Lee knew they had probably gone to the owner's apartment, where they often ate dinner.
He went up to Tom Weston's apartment. Mary and Allerton were there. Lee sat down and tried to engage Allerton's interest, but he was too drunk to make sense. His attempt to carry on a casual, humorous conversation was painful to watch.
Ale must have slept. Mary and Allerton were gone. Tom Weston brought him some hot coffee. He drank the coffee, got up and staggered out of the apartment. Exhausted, he slept till the following morning.
Scenes from the chaotic, drunken month passed before his eyes. There was a face he did not recognize, a good-looking kid with amber eyes, yellow hair and beautiful straight black eyebrows.
He saw himself asking someone he barely knew to buy him a beer in a bar on Insurgentes, and getting a nasty brush. He saw himself pull a gun on someone who followed him out of a clip joint on Coahuila and tried to roll him. He felt the friendly, steadying hands of people who had helped him home. 'Take it easy, Bill.' His childhood friend Rollins standing there, solid and virile, with his elkhound. Carl running for a streetcar. Moor with his malicious hitch smile. The faces blended together in a nightmare, speaking to him in strange moaning idiot voices that he could not understand at first, and finally could not hear.
Lee got up and shaved and felt better. He found he could eat a roll and drink some coffee. He smoked and read the paper, trying not to think about Allerton. Presently he went downtown and looked through the gun stores. He found a bargain in a Colt Frontier, which he bought for two hundred pesos. A 32-20 in perfect condition, serial number in the three hundred thousands.
Worth at least a hundred dollars Stateside.
Lee went to the American bookstore and bought a book on chess. He took the book out to Chapultepec, sat down in a soda stand on the lagoon, and began to read. Directly in front of him was an island with a huge cypress tree growing on it. Hundreds of vultures roosted in the tree.
Lee wondered what they ate. He threw a piece of bread, which landed on the island. The vultures paid no attention.
Lee was interested in the theory of games and the strategy of random behavior. As he had supposed, the theory of games does not apply to chess, since chess rules out the element of chance and approaches elimination of the unpredictable human factor. If the mechanism of chess were completely understood, the outcome could be predicted after any initial move. 'A game for thinking machines,' Lee thought. He read on, smiling from time to time. Finally he got up, sailed the book out over the lagoon, and walked away.
Lee knew he could not find what he wanted with Allerton. The court of fact had rejected his petition. But Lee could not give up. 'Perhaps I can discover a way to change fact,' he thought. He was ready to take any risk, to proceed to any extreme of action. Like a saint or a wanted criminal with nothing to lose, Lee had stepped beyond the claims of his nagging, cautious, aging, frightened flesh.
He took a taxi to the Ship Ahoy. Allerton was standing in front of the Ship Ahoy, blinking sluggishly in the sunlight. Lee looked at him and smiled. Allerton smiled back.
'How are you?'
'Sleepy. Just got up.' He yawned and started into the Ship Ahoy. He moved one hand—'See you'— and sat down at the bar and ordered tomato juice. Lee went in and sat beside him, and ordered a double rum Coke. Allerton moved and sat down at a table with Tom Weston. 'Bring the tomato juice over here, will you, Joe?' he called to the bartender.
Lee sat at the table next to Allerton's. Tom Weston was leaving. Allerton followed him out. He came back in and sat in the other room, reading the papers. Mary came in and sat down with him.
After talking for a few minutes, they set up the chess board.
Lee had thrown down three drinks. He walked over and pulled up a chair to the table where Mary and Allerton were playing chess. 'Howdy,' he said. 'Don't mind if I kibitz?'
Mary looked up annoyed, but smiled when she met Lee's steady, reckless gaze.
'I was reading up on chess. Arabs invented it, and I'm not surprised. Nobody can sit like an Arab.
The classical Arab chess game was simply a sitting contest. When both contestants starved to death it was a stalemate.' Lee paused and took a long drink.
'During the Baroque period of chess the practice of harrying your opponent with some annoying mannerism came into general use. Some players used dental floss, others cracked their joints or blew saliva bubbles. The method was constantly developed. In the 1917 match at Baghdad, the Arab Arachnid Khayam defeated the German master Kurt Schlemiel by humming 'I'll Be Around When You're Gone' forty-thousand times, and each time
