***
2
The visit took place in a large impersonal office. The elderly harsh-breathing doctor with the magnified oyster-eyes was there along with his massive shadow, the expressionless attendant. They didn’t seem to recognize him as the filthy scared interloper in the subterranean room a week before.
His candidate was again seated before a crowded wooden table. Dozens of the Chinese puzzles of the week before formed miniature scrap heaps in a corner. There was the chessboard too. Now the pieces were correctly positioned as for a game. His candidate was crouched over a sheet of paper absorbed in a sketch. It made no sense viewed upside down. Did it make sense viewed the right way?
The foreign doctor, seated in the corner, exuded authority like a force field. He dispensed with amenities. First a command: “Sit down opposite to him. No, not that close. Push your chair to the left. Further.” Then a warning: “Don’t touch him. Don’t touch his things.” Lorz asked why. Impatiently the doctor replied as though to an inquisitive child: “He doesn’t like that people touch him. Nor his things.” A moment of silence.
“Talk to him,” the doctor ordered.
That was what Lorz longed to do. Accumulated for a whole month, the longing was painfully pent up. But there was no question of talking to the boy in the presence of the doctor and his shadow. The room was heavily silent.
“Talk to him, please,” repeated the doctor. The please added asperity to the command.
The director went through the familiar powerless formula. Self-consciously he said his name was Edmond Lorz, director of Ideal Poster. His candidate didn’t look up. “Louder, please,” the doctor ordered, almost as if he, Lorz, were the patient. The doctor was leaning slightly forward in his chair looking at them both. His fountain pen was poised over the sheet of paper ready to note intimate revelations.
The director repeated his identity. He said that they both had been injured in the explosion. What’s your real name? Don’t you remember me? Lorz tried to believe it was in response to this last question that the boy looked up at him. The dark blue eyes were fixed on his face but something was wrong. The focus was unsteady. It wavered between the extremes of inward and beyond. He, Lorz, was somewhere between. Did the boy even see him? Did his questions even reach him?
In the silence that followed the useless words Lorz had an impulse to try another way, to brave the doctor’s prohibition and reach out and touch his candidate. He’d felt the weight of the boy’s body against his once but he’d never touched him. His one attempt had been long ago at the climax of their first meeting. It had been forestalled by the explosion. Sometimes, when pursued by the image months ago, the director’s mind had given to those parallel phenomena an absurd relationship of cause and effect. It was absurd to think that the movement of his hand toward the other had triggered the explosion.
Lorz was summoning up courage to reach out when the old doctor dismissed him. “That will be all. You can go now.”
Had he been there for three minutes? The old doctor, still seated in the corner, was going through his papers. He assumed the director had gone. But Lorz lingered humbly like a student at the end of an oral examination felt to be disastrous. Did I pass? Finally the doctor looked up. He frowned on seeing him still there.
“It wasn’t very successful,” Lorz stated rather than asked, as though hoping that the use of the declarative form to such an authoritarian person as the old doctor would elicit a contradictory affirmation.
“What was not successful?”
“The visit, I mean.”
“He looked at you, he heard you. What more did you expect?”
Was that the measure of success now, after the second “recovery,” like autonomous breathing, after the first?
“He seems to tolerate you quite well,” the doctor added in reluctant concession.
Lorz found the word “tolerate” wounding. Didn’t he tolerate everybody? he asked.
No, was the unelaborated reply.
On Monday the director and his assistant exchanged impressions. She considered that her visit had been an unqualified success. “There wasn’t much communication,” Lorz objected, referring to his own visit, meaning hers too, understating what he regarded as a second fiasco after so much hope. “No?” she said with her mysterious smile, as if in possession of a secret she wanted him to ask about. He didn’t ask. After a few seconds, she said: “You don’t always need words to communicate.” He didn’t answer. She must have reached out.
The director’s second visit the following Sunday was a spectacular success in certain respects.
It began inauspiciously. Lorz came with costly chocolates and Chinese puzzles. The aim was interaction. He imagined his candidate’s hand reaching out for the proffered chocolates and then both of them communing in the same bittersweet taste. He imagined himself expertly unlinking the puzzle before his candidate’s gaze, then assembling it, handing it to the boy who would repeat his gestures.
These gifts, as it turned out, were useless. They cost him, moreover, frustration, humiliation and a great deal of money. The imported chocolates, of course, but why were the Chinese puzzles – mere twists of metal – so outrageously dear too? He’d spent all of Saturday morning selecting them in toyshops. They were fiendishly difficult. There were no instructions, not even in Chinese. For hours the director sat on the edge of his chair, leaning forward, scowling down at the defiant lunatic imbrications in his lap. He wasn’t gifted. A consolation was a feeling of closeness to his candidate who, at that precise moment, perhaps, was engaged, far more efficiently, in the same activity.
The director worked the puzzles even in the underground, at first openly. Then, irritated by the stares of other passengers, behind the barricade of his briefcase. Once he looked up and surprised an elderly female, lips compressed with scandal, wattled neck craned, trying to view the activity of his hands busy in his lap.
In the office, when his assistant left on errands, he took them out of his briefcase. On her return, hearing her hand turning the knob, he would sweep them back jingling into his briefcase. Finally he learned to disassemble one of the Chinese puzzles in less than two minutes. He timed himself.
When he entered the hospital office for the second time the director immediately opened the gift-wrapped package and took out the puzzle he’d finally mastered. “Too late,” said the doctor. There were no more puzzles on the table. “Look!” said Lorz anyhow, jingling the construction to capture his candidate’s attention. He started working on it. In his eagerness he got it wrong. “Wait,” he said. He said “wait” a dozen more times before a triumphant “There!”
His candidate wasn’t looking. His candidate couldn’t care less. And the chocolates were ignored. “He doesn’t accept sweets,” said the old doctor. “And the puzzle phase is over. It is the chess phase now. He operates by phases.”
The director took in the setup of the chessboard, the confusion of pieces. Wasn’t it regression? Two weeks before, in the subterranean maze, his candidate had been in the stage of rehearsing the moves, some correct, even if most were mistaken. He recalled the rook forced into diagonal movement, the knight advancing hobbled square by square, like a pawn. A week ago the boy had learned to place the pieces, progress. Now this chaos.
Suddenly the director realized the logic of the seemingly haphazard pattern of the pieces. It was a game, an end game, the white king done to death by a black knight and bishop. Was it conceivable that his candidate, a week before ignorant of the basic moves, could have played a game? Or if he played, was unable to respond to the director’s greetings and gifts?
“He didn’t play, he can’t have played,” the director exclaimed incredulously, turning toward the old doctor.
“Yes, he played,” said the doctor. The attendant was watching the director and the boy seated on either side of the wooden table with the chessboard between them.
“Who won?”
“He. He also lost.”
/> The director instantly understood the true sense of the ambiguous statement. “How is that possible? How can you play against yourself?”
“He refuses any other opponent.”
The director turned back to the table and encountered the boy’s eyes staring beyond and before him and in despair, isolated somewhere in between, knowing that words were useless, reached out toward him.
At the last moment his hand took fright and deviated to the left and downward and took a chess piece.
“Touch nothing on the table, nothing that belongs to him!” the old doctor snapped, as though an invisible thread attached the piece, a white bishop, to high explosives.
The director’s hand froze. Long seconds passed. The boy hadn’t moved. He was staring down at the chessboard.
Lorz took another piece. The doctor said nothing. Lorz took a third piece.
The boy took a black rook and placed it on its square.
“Do you play chess?” the doctor inquired in a low voice.
“Years ago.”
“Play,” the doctor ordered. “Ask him first.”
The director stared at his candidate’s expressionless face. “Let me play a game with you,” Lorz said as gently as he could. The doctor leaned over and whispered something in the ear of the attendant who got up and sat down next to the director. The doctor drew his chair closer to get a better view of the board.
Lorz took the other white pieces and started placing them on their squares. In adolescence he had played a good game.
The first surprise came from the rapidity with which the hands opposite his placed the black pieces. Then greater surprise at the rapidity of the black counter-moves after the laborious cogitation that preceded his own white moves. The boy’s face was empty but it was as though his hands had independent intelligence, as though each contained a miniature intact brain.
The surprise grew steadily during the game, culminating with the twenty-seventh move twenty minutes later when his candidate’s knight side-winded and uncovered at 5C the black bishop’s diagonal penetration of the white king at 1E.
The director stared down at the checkmate. He laughed in incredulous joy and leaned back in his chair. His candidate also leaned back and immobilized, still staring down at the pieces, like a chess-playing automaton. Lorz turned to the doctor.
“He beat me. Incredible!” He laughed again.
“You did bad mistakes, elementary mistakes,” said the doctor.
The director tried to conceal his irritation at the doctor’s words. They minimized both his patient’s exploit and his own skill at the game, which had been considerable twenty-five years before.
“And he is of only average competence,” said the doctor. “For the moment.”
He paused and then added as if in consolation:
“Perhaps it was better you have lost.”
Before the director could ask what he meant, the doctor went on.
“You are the first person he has accepted to play with.”
“How do you explain that?” inquired the director with a show of perplexity, not really needing an explanation.
He got it anyhow: an upward phase, plus the right medicine with a correct dosage.
The director told his assistant about the chess game. She nodded but said nothing. Didn’t she realize what a fantastic breakthrough this represented? He asked her if she had tried to play chess with him on Saturday. She replied that she didn’t play chess, hadn’t the brains, that anyhow she didn’t need chess to get through to him. There were other ways.
The director had only chess. That evening he rummaged about and came up with his old chess set and the two worn volumes of Schlechter and Moch’s Handbuch des Schachspiels (8th edition, Berlin, 1914-1929). He replayed certain classic tournament and problem games, black and white, puzzling out the comments move by move. It afforded blessed abstraction. The world vanished. Why had he given up chess? In imitation of his candidate he even tried to play against himself but couldn’t achieve the necessary mind-split.
The following day he bought a miniature pocket chess-board with pegged pieces and sat in the train on the way to Ideal, the chessboard on one knee, volume two of Schlechter and Moch on the other. He almost missed his stop. He would have been oblivious to massacres in the carriage.
His sudden craze – the other’s, actually – even invaded the office. It was hard to concentrate on business with that elegant mobile geometry in his mind. He found himself glancing uneasily at his assistant out of the corner of his eye and concealing the massive book beneath papers like something clandestine. Once she saw what he was doing but said nothing. The toilet was a refuge, as for some secret guilty activity.
“Is there something the matter?” he once heard her voice, infinitely distant, on the other side of the locked door, intruding into Anderson vs. Kiesseritzky, London, 1851. He’d been there half an hour.
It all came back, the forgotten language. Even his window-shopping was monopolized by the game. He returned again and again to a nearby specialized shop. He gazed briefly at the ultra-modern sets, the stylized spun-aluminum pieces, and then for a long time at an exquisite old set, the board inlaid rosewood, the pieces intricate ivory and ebony. The price was outrageous.
Following the success of the second visit the director was allowed two hours now, but still only once a week, still on Sunday. He asked why the visits were so limited but received no explanation. At least he was practically alone with his candidate now. The irascible old doctor left after the first five minutes or so and returned a few minutes before the end of the visit. The attendant sat outside in the corridor reading a comic book. The door was left ajar.
When the director entered the office that third time he saw that six chessboards occupied nearly the entire surface of the table. His candidate was staring down at one of the boards. He didn’t look up or respond to Lorz’s greeting. The director turned toward the old doctor and received the latter’s permission in the form of a slow magnified blink.
He started placing his white pieces on the board opposite his chair. The sound activated the automaton who turned to the board and started placing the black pieces. They played again. Both had made tremendous progress since last week’s game, the director perhaps a little less than the boy who again defeated him. But Lorz had narrowed the gap.
The old doctor came back toward the end of the second game at the precise moment the boy fell into a trap by accepting the black rook/white queen exchange. The doctor looked down at the board.
“Do not defeat him,” he said in a scarcely audible voice.
There was no question of Lorz’s doing that. He wouldn’t have been able to. So he passed over the bishop sacrifice with mate four moves removed and shortly after, deprived of the queen, was checkmated.
“You have improved,” said the doctor, as though the vast improvement of his candidate was something minor.
“Not as much as he has,” said the director. “He must play a great deal.”
“He does little else,” the doctor replied.
“With other players?”
“With himself. Except when you come.”
It went on that way for another month.
Later Lorz would look back at the period, for all its frustrations, as one of the happiest of his life. At last his activities outside the office had purpose. The Cycle was distant. Evaluating strategies of approach to the boy or analyzing chess moves on his knee in the train, he hardly gave a thought to the worsening situation in the underground (an average of two murders a week) or to the alarming things happening to the posters even before the vandals got to them.
There was also an improved atmosphere in the office that contributed to the changed quality of his life. The help-wanted section of her paper had vanished from his assistant’s desk. She made no more phone calls in answer to ads or calls of a personal nature. She received none. He was no longer concerned about a possible resignation, not since what he reg
arded as the final unpleasantness between them.
During the second week of October she’d started commenting on how much better he was looking, how much better the business was doing. Her remarks surprised him. He began glancing in mirrors. He scrutinized the accounts. He saw no radical improvement in himself or Ideal. He wondered at her diagnoses until one morning when she told him that the coming week would be her last at Ideal.
She was at the filing cabinet, her back turned to him, when she said it. She added that she’d finally found something else.
He didn’t react. That morning at Central Station, months ago, she said, she’d told him that her return to Ideal would be just for a week or so. They’d agreed then that she wouldn’t have to give notice but she was giving a week’s notice anyhow. There was still that efficient person she’d already told him about to replace her.
She went on filing the invoices in the continuing silence. Finally she shoved the drawer shut and turned around. He was reading a letter and making notes. She returned to her desk saying that she’d drop in now and then to see how things were going. He nodded, absorbed in his work. After a while she added that she’d drop in once a week. They could have lunch together if he liked. He said, “Why not?” and asked her if she’d filed the Prospects letter they’d received the day before.
Three o’clock came round, then five past. At 3:22 she reminded him of the pills. He paid no attention to her remark. He was plunged in paper work. She reminded him at five-minute intervals. He didn’t answer until 4:05 when he cut her short.
“It’ll be a relief anyhow not to be nagged anymore. I’m not a child. I’ll take the pills if I want to. If I don’t want to I won’t. And I don’t want to, now or ever. This is what I do with your bloody pills.”
He yanked the vial out of his pocket, snapped the plastic stopper free with his thumbnail and with the gesture of a sower, created a brief blue spray. The pills pattered to the floor, rolling about.
“And keep your competent lady. I can do everything you do and just as well. I already did once, the first time you left.”
They weren’t her bloody pills, she said, picking two of them from her lap and placing them on her desk. She picked up three more under her desk and placed them alongside the two on her desk and looked around for the others.
He didn’t show up at the office the next day, which was a Friday. She rang him at 10:00am and asked if he wasn’t well. “Not well at all,” he replied with no elaboration. She asked if he wanted her to pick something up for him after work: food or medicine. He replied that it wouldn’t be necessary. She advised him to rest over the weekend.
The following week neither referred to her forthcoming departure Friday evening. Friday morning she asked him if he had advertised the job. He said he hadn’t. She commented on the weather and then said goodbye.
“Monday,” she added as usual.
On Monday evening they left the office. Normally they walked together toward his underground and her bus stop. But when they got out of the building she halted, staring across the street, and abruptly said goodbye to him there. Lorz went his way alone for a few seconds, then turned around.
His assistant was dangerously weaving through traffic toward an antiquated battered black car double-parked opposite the Ideal building. She went up to the car and tried to open the front passenger-door. It was locked. The director could see within a thin arm with bracelets reaching over. The forearm muscles worked and the window jerked down. His assistant tried to open the door again. It remained locked. She remained there in a crouch, talking, her hands eloquent. After a few minutes the thin arm reached over and the window jerked up. The car started down the street slowly. His assistant broke into a trot alongside it, her hands even more active. Again the car stopped. Cars behind honked angrily. Again the car started up but fast, gear after gear, no possibility of pursuit. His assistant stopped running. The car picked up speed and went through a traffic light turning red, turned a corner and disappeared.
The next day it was her turn to ring up and say she was ill. She missed two days. When she came back, pale and drawn, she was doggedly mute. Five past three went by without a word on her part. By 4:00 she still had said nothing.
He took the pills finally. He’d almost forgotten them, perhaps he’d got used to her reminding him, he said. He’d forgotten to take them yesterday, he added.
He didn’t expect her to ring him up to remind him did he? she said. She’d been sick herself.
“What’s this for?” his assistant asked the next day, as though what her employer was holding out to her was a dead cat instead of flowers. She’d just hung up hurriedly as he entered. Without that ungracious remark and expression he might have said, “For you, of course.” Instead, he said, “To brighten the place up,” and the gesture of offering the flowers became a demand for her to find a vase, fill it with water, place the flowers in the vase and the vase on a suitable surface, which she did in silence. A few minutes later (as though disposing of flowers were a non-contractual imposition) she said that she wasn’t getting enough money for the work she did and demanded a ten percent raise. He should have thought of it before she did.
Then one day the atmosphere in the office changed. Her stance of confrontation was gone. It coincided with her first claims of non-verbal communication with Teddy and with the director’s first chess games with the boy. He no longer encountered her painted gaze in the spy-mirror. One day she removed the tarnished mirror for good along with the old calendars. She called it “autumn-cleaning.”
Now she paid as little attention to him as he did to her. It was as though their investment were outside the windowless subterranean office, their mutually disengaged gaze convergent on what was going on in the hospital. They started relaxing into an indifferent familiarity that had never existed between them in the five and a half years of their relationship, marked by an unequal balance of power, first one way then the other. Her appearance no longer shocked him. Her modish political opinions wouldn’t have bothered him anymore even if she’d gone on expressing them, which she didn’t.
Communication was no longer a problem. He’d swivel about in his chair toward her desk and say whatever he had to say without fearful preliminary censorship, she answering politely enough. And then he would swivel back to his affairs. She was no more than his assistant, almost a new, not a rehired, one. Her connection with the “Miss Ruda” of the past was fading in his mind as was “Miss Ruda” herself, reduced to a black-and-white photograph forgotten in his wallet.
At first, before the near-accident on the hospital path, the director had to take her word for it that the boy’s progress wasn’t limited to the sixty-four squares of the chessboard. His assistant spoke of resurrection. She found subtle expression in his face. There was also the way his drawings were becoming “more human.” From her confused explanations, the director understood that the painstaking geometrical figures tended now to the figurative: vaguely human faces composed of tiny circles, triangles, rectangles. And of course the vast improvement in muscular coordination. And the fact that he could walk. She felt sure that he was on the brink of speech.
There must have been even more progress than what she said. She’d bought an expensive-looking diary with twining pink flowers on blue linen covers. It had a tiny heart-shaped brass lock with a microscopic brass key. “To keep track of his progress,” she explained once, intercepting his curious gaze. She had it out all the time on Mondays following her visit when lulls in office activity permitted, but often enough the other days too. She would stare sightless at the wall, biting her pen, leaving lipstick smears on it and then, remembering, she would lower her head, exposing her diligent neck-vertebras and scribble away. Finally, she would place the diary carefully in her lower desk-drawer, which she locked.
One day they disagreed about the date of a minor progress. She took out her diary and proved she was right. The director was troubled. Since the blast nine months before, his memory
had become unreliable. So he bought a school notebook to record the boy’s progress. His fat old fashioned fountain-pen remained suspended a moment over the white rectangle on the cover marked “Subject.” What was he to call the subject? “Teddy”? “The Boy”? “Number Nine”? “My Candidate”? He was tempted to inscribe what all these had in common, the question mark. Finally he settled for “The Log”. He too noted his candidate’s progress on Monday but more quickly than his assistant, in the terms in which the director encountered it: 1. P-K4, P-K4; 2. P-KB4, P x P; 3. B-B4, P-QKt4.
Chess monopolized everything. There was no other form of communication. Anyhow one didn’t talk over the board. When he entered the old doctor’s office the boy’s only response to Lorz’s greeting was to set up the black pieces. He didn’t accept candied orange-peels or sugared almonds or salted nuts or pastry any more than he had chocolates. He only accepted the game. His candidate’s eyes never left the board. Glancing at him hurt, like coming up against a wall. His expression was one of intense abstraction. Lorz tried to recall the jargon term of the old doctor’s concerning his patient’s problem, something like “dissociation of the cognitive and affective.”
His assistant had claimed he could walk. Lorz saw nothing of that. His candidate was always seated at the table throughout the visit. So Lorz continued visiting the hospital during his lunch hour in the hope of seeing the boy in his rehabilitation activities. This happened only twice.
The first time was a week following the initial visit. Through the closed glass doors of the hydrotherapy pool Lorz briefly witnessed the boy’s somnambulist steps in the abolished gravity of the water. It was the first time he’d ever seen him erect, a dazzle of near-nudity in a beam of sunshine from the bay window. Nearly nullifying that emotion was a shock. His candidate seemed impossibly gigantic. The white-capped head of the woman physiotherapist barely reached his massive chest. She held her arms high in a parodical gesture of surrender in order to grasp his outstretched sleepwalker hands. She retreated as though with his towering bulk and empty brutal face he were forcing her back. Lorz tried to remind himself that actually she was in command, leading him forward toward the reduced buoyancy of shallower water.
The boy’s alarming stature was rectified as scale was provided. The white-capped therapist backed past a colleague working over a patient’s knee-flexions and proved to be small. The boy was very big but probably not monstrously so.
Two weeks later Lorz rounded a path in the park and the boy, jogging in the dwarfed company of a physiotherapist, was almost upon him, gigantically. The director stood stock still and stared at his candidate’s looming abstracted face. After this other miracle of recuperation, wouldn’t there be another one, recognition? Contact at last? “Theodore!” he cried, spontaneously finding at that instant a compromise name not devoid of dignity like the shirt-tag one. “Get out of the way!” the therapist cried. At the last moment Lorz shrank aside into the thorny barberries. There’d been no sign of recognition. Even more alarming, no sign of halting or swerving to avoid him. There’d almost been contact, but the wrong kind. With the other’s hurtling bulk he would have gone down smashed, as though hit by a locomotive. Was it that the boy didn’t recognize him disassociated from the chessboard? Had he even seen him?
The following Sunday, the fifth and last of the visits in the old doctor’s office started like the others. By this time Lorz no longer prefaced the games with the useless appeal for recognition. He avoided questions altogether. The silence that followed was too painful. What he said now was neutral. The sky was a beautiful blue, he would say, imitating his assistant’s formulas, the remaining leaves on the trees red and yellow. Often he tried joking things like: “Well, you beat me last time, but wait and see, it’ll be my turn now,” although he knew he’d never have the heart to defeat Theodore.
This time, sitting down at the table, he couldn’t help saying too, “I saw you jogging down the path, last Tuesday. Do you remember? I was there.” Of course he got no answer. The hands opposite went on placing the black pieces for the game. Fear again overcame his impulse to reach out and touch. They started playing.
From the start his opponent betrayed a baffling loss of skill. His hand hovered hesitantly over the pieces as Lorz’s had weeks ago during their first game. He made the same purposeless moves. The game was only ten minutes old when his candidate moved his rook, threatening the white queen but opening himself to obvious checkmate in two moves.
Lorz passed up the opportunity. Deliberately he exposed his king to checkmate. Anyone could see it, even a rank beginner. The boy didn’t see it. Lorz passed up advantage after advantage. He exposed himself to elementary checkmates that never came. It was as though they’d invented a new negative chess-game where to win was to lose, something like the boy’s own solitary games.
The opportunity to defeat his candidate came again a minute later, a glaring blunder. Checkmate was now a single move away: the knight to 6B. How was this radical fall from proficiency possible? His hand poised over the white knight, the director couldn’t help looking up at his candidate even though he knew he’d come up painfully against the usual blank wall.
No wall now. For the first time since the visits started his candidate’s gaze met his. The intelligence of those dark-blue eyes, unwavering and perfectly focused, was at such total variance with the loss of chessboard intelligence that the director reinterpreted everything in a jubilant instant. The seemingly blind moves weren’t a symptom of weakness, after all. Weakness? God alone knew the fantastic progress that his candidate’s brain had realized in the week since the last visit, like the powerful jogging strides days after the hesitant water-buoyed steps in the pool. What else if not a parody of his own incompetence weeks ago? His joking remark at the start of the game, “It’ll be my turn now,” had been understood. His candidate was forcing victory upon him. It was a gift, far subtler than his own conventional chocolates and almonds.
Already in the earlier games, it was now clear, the boy had deliberately offered him opportunities for victory. He’d rejected them out of misplaced pity, rejecting at the same time the offer of communication, contact, in the geometric terms of the game. Now he was convinced that with the acceptance of the gift of victory there would be a smile of complicity, a transformation toward tenderness of those brutal features, perhaps words of recognition.
So he accepted the gift of victory and contact.
He moved his white knight to 6B and announced checkmate.
His candidate stared down on the board, absolutely immobile, in profound contemplation as though seeking a countermove to checkmate. His lips moved silently.
A minute went by. The breathing became more and more raucous. The director, conquering his fright, reached out and touched the boy’s shoulder to calm him. The deltoids were petrified as though tensed to snapping with some inconceivable inward labor. His eyes rolled upwards into whiteness like a statue’s.
The first sounds came from his open mouth. Slowly, endlessly, he towered to his feet, upsetting the victory into a confusion of chessmen on the floor.
The director cried out and fled the room.
Before he reached the end of the corridor he could hear the threatening voice of the attendant, a scuffle, an upset chair, the inhuman sound, much louder. Wasn’t he trying to pronounce his name? Wasn’t it a strangled “Edmond”? If so it was his first utterance. It pursued Edmond Lorz well beyond earshot.