“Uh-huh.” She conveyed a mass of dubiousness. Hell, I thought. (EOE) I’m transfuckingparent. Better take off now. No, wait. That’s even more suspicious-making. I looked up at the nearest one of the nine or so clocks on her desk. It was some I guess Masonic antique that said it was to. The next one in the row was an impossible-to-read skeleton clock-maybe it told the time in Xibalba-but the third one was highly legible: “6:41,” it said. “Smartlite Sweeper ™ /Quartz USA.” Damn. The night is far-effing young. Damn. Okay, just stick it out. It’s no biggie. Don’t get para. All chicks have empath powers. Right? But she can’t actually read your mind. Not without a whole lot of gadgetry, anyway.
“Nothing’s up,” I said. (EOE! EOE!)
“Are you sure-wait, hang on.” She paused for eight seconds. I finished laying out the game. “Okay, just use the Amex number,” she said. “Sorry,” she said to me. Oh, that’s why, I thought. I mean, why she had those big earrings. They were telephones. I mean, one of them was. The other probably had an extra condom in it or something.
“Okay,” I said. I nodded. Marena nodded. I punched my clock. As it does, time seemed to slow down slightly. I’d decided on my move weeks ago, so I put it right down. She’d anticipated it and responded immediately. The world slowed down another five clicks. Despite everything else that was going on, despite whatever little secrets she had and despite the big deal-breaking secret I had, we were in Gametime.
And so it came to pass that there now followed about twelve and one-fifth minutes of silence, punctuated by six raps of stones hitting the thick wood. I always thought one of the most off-balancing things in life is when there’s a pause at the wrong time, and this felt especially wrong, a strange interlude with nothing happening in the middle of-well, maybe it just feels wrong to me. Damn it, how can Korean food take so long? Like it takes time to open ten jars of assorted kimchee. I focused on the board. In the first stages of a Go game it feels like you’re emplacing forts on a wide, desolate frontier. But at this point, almost halfway in, the stone pictures were coming into focus, crosses, flowers, a poodle, a long black staircase growing out of her second corner and bifurcating near the center into distended jaws, like the Star Rattlers balusters at Chichen. I pushed through a gap in the stairs and, maybe too fliply, hit the clock.
She didn’t make a move. One minute. She bit down again on her presumably nonconforming fingernail, noticed she was doing it, and pulled her hand away and tucked it under her thigh. Two minutes.
“Damn,” she said, at two minutes and eighteen seconds. Her biggest group was in real trouble. “This is not good.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“Not good. Maybe you should give me three stones next time.”
“I shouldn’t even be giving you two stones.”
“I’m rusty, I’ve been running an empire and saving the planet and decluttering the kid’s room and stuff. You should give me four stones.”
“No way. With four stones you can beat anybody. Theoretically.”
“Yeah? How many to beat God?”
“The world champion would be at a disadvantage by the fiftieth move with one stone against God.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Seriously.”
“Hey, do you know what game I can beat God at every time?” she asked. “Without a handicap?”
“No, what’s that?”
“Chicken.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like with driving cars at each other, you know, how that kid got killed at the Colonial Gardens desert mall like, last-”
“No, I know, I mean, why, what do you mean about beating God?”
“Because-look, if one of the players is omniscient, like God, he loses. All you have to do is decide not to swerve.”
“Wait, so God can tell you’re not going to swerve, so he has to.”
“Right,” she said.
“Except if he’s God he can’t get hurt.”
“What? Oh-uh, maybe. But he still loses.”
“Are you sure about this?”
“Oh, yeah. They taught Max about it at Logic Camp.”
“Huh. Well, I guess that’s right.”
“We used to play a chicken variant, like, we’d stand on like a wall and throw lightbulbs to each other, and we’d step back each time. Did you ever play that?”
“Well, I had a health-uh, no. We used to play escondidas…”
“What’s that?”
“Like hide-and-seek.”
“Oh, yeah.” She looked at the board and then back up at me. “Did you ever play Time Machine?”
(7)
“What’s that?” I asked. “No, I don’t think so-”
“That’s like-well, I’d sit in this spot in my room just like this.” She closed her eyes and crossed her arms. “And I’d mark the exact-oh, wait, first I’d put on the B side of Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy — and I’d memorize the exact date and time, and I’d sit like, still enough to stop time. And then I’d decide that exactly twenty years, like, to the second, I’d sit in exactly this same position with the same music and have exactly these same thoughts, and all the intervening time would be like it hadn’t happened.”
“Oh.” I’d thought she’d meant some plasticky board game by Ideal or whatever. “Yeah, I guess I did play something like that.”
“Really.” She had a stone in her hand, but she wasn’t putting it down.
“Well, yeah. Basically. I hadn’t thought about it in a long time, though. And I thought I’d made it up.”
“Maybe we both made it up,” she said. She set the stone down on the side star point. It was a fine move, but it was still a book move. That is, not insightful. She hit her clock.
“I guess,” I said.
“It’s our psychic link.” She smiled. It wasn’t an ironic smile, or a wry, knowing, sardonic, nonconformist’s smile, not even a humorous smile. It was just a sincere friendshipish expression. A rare bird these days, I thought. It was a smile like, we’re hanging out and bonding and isn’t that great. I felt a smudge of mistiness in the back of my eyeballs. Squelch that. Hard up. Don’t forget how she made you a sucker. She conned you like she was Fa’pua’a Fa’amu and you were Margaret Mead “Or, I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe all kids play that.”
“No, I don’t think so. Just a few sad, introspective nerded-out kids.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
I cocked my head, closed my right eye, and looked at the board with my left eye to get a fresh look at the position.
“It’s good to keep your different life stages in touch with each other,” she said. “All those years just swish by.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you have any left?”
“Any what?”
“Any second parts coming up in Time Machine, you know, like, where you plan to sit in that position again and whatever.”
“Oh. Yeah, I guess I do,” I said. “I have one left.”
“When is it?”
“Uh… January twentieth. At noon. Four years from now.”
“That’s great, okay, so maybe we should do something together then.”
