The stones were silent to him. Never in Hao’s thirty-two years of playing Go had this happened before. It should not have surprised him. The silence was bound to happen; it was natural in fact—as natural as the new scent laid on the back lawn yesterday. After all, life was vaster and more hopeless than the 10¹⁷⁰ legal positions of a Go game. Anything was possible, literally. The sacred could be profaned. The joined could be unjoined. A heart, fertile and fruiting, could be stripped and sown with the ghosts of loss.

It was another claustrophobic Sunday in his study, in which he wasted away cross-legged before a blank Go board. He pressed his palms against the board’s surface and felt for the gridlines black and faint against the sandpaper smooth wood. How lifeless and unyielding it felt. No tremor, no jitter.

About now Ricardo should whisper, his breath lusciously warm over Hao’s ear, “That’s fucking loco, you know that?” Hao shuddered and conceded that he was crazy or weird about Go. But Ricardo was hardly the one to complain. The blunt-nosed rhino could not sit still and absorb the strategies of the game. Ricardo would explode, “You said the rules were simple, but you’re kicking my ass.” Hao would stroke his hairy hand, smile, and even condescend to coo at him, “Rico, darling,” just to keep his attention on the game.

“You have to admit the rules are simple. You can play anywhere you want. When you surround a stone you take it,” Hao would say.

“I took more of your stones, and you still won.”

“I told you already, the object of the game isn’t eating stones but controlling the largest territory.”

And yet, understanding that was too difficult for the rambunctious Ricardo, who had once boasted of slashing an idiot tadpole nerd as a teenager. Hao could believe the story. In all the years he had known him, not once had he felt the feral preciseness in Ricardo’s eyes dull or wane; if anything, it haunted him even more. And from the first day he had met him at law school, Hao had pinned him as someone who scaled Everests or crossed death-plains. But Hao, who dotted i’s with circles, was quite content with a blue stroll in the neighborhood.

Perhaps too content. Hao brooded. A distant screeching stirred him to look up, only to see a tangerine glimmer splattered over the window. Light skated the long edge of a computer desk and stopped short of his cotton-covered chest. Looking over his slight belly bulge, he clucked at his sad, sorry state. Outside was an infinite day, a vortex of good hope, full of an irrepressible light, and yet it disdained the sinkhole that was himself. Someone please shake me.

Parting a little of his melancholic mist were the dull tams of his phone bleating tones from Purcell’s March for the Death of Queen Mary. He sighed—better to ignore it and let the voice mail pick up the message. But a feeling whispered, Maybe it’s Ricardo? His heart commanded before his ego would restrain, and he dashed out the door, down the stairs, over to the steel countertop fencing the industrial panoptic of the kitchen. And there, like an abandoned baby, his phone was calling and beating beside a pizza box.

“Hello,” Hao said, winded.

“Good, good, good ... We’re drowning in grapefruit.”

Hao deflated at the precise voice of Claus Balko, an acquaintance from the local Go club.

“Can’t even make grapefruit pie to get rid off of these puppies,” Claus said.

Hao groaned away from the receiver. “Grapefruit jam works.”

“Wifey is scared stiff of making bad batches. At this point, I’m thinking guerrilla tactics—ring on front doors and dump them. Leave a tub in Sensei’s hotel room—terrorism by grapefruit.” Claus guffawed.

Hao paced the length of the kitchen and began shuffling the take-out menus on the counter top: Italian, Persian, Indonesian, Filipino, Moroccan, Indian—pizza seemed a good choice for this evening.

“Sensei was asking about you when I picked him up from the airport this morning. You're coming to the dinner thing tonight?”

Hao squirmed. An evening given over to the charades of etiquette, or another evening to the dirges of nothing?

“I had plans already.” Hao felt the hull of his mind deform. “I should get back to you on making his lecture—”

“I just got this good idea! Those who paid to play against Sensei, get grapefruit. Ten people comes to ten per person …”

Hao wiped down his damp face. “You can give the rest to Monica. She can sell anything to the café patrons.” Even sell a lame goat or a sprightly granny.

“You’re good at this. Maybe I should just give them to you.”

“I’m all right, thanks.” Hao felt like a can crushed under atmospheres of pressure.

He hmmed and ahhed through Claus' ruminations on whether Wifey’s plan to grow a thousand pound pumpkin was her Freudian way of staving baby hunger. Ten minutes later, blather about baby pumpkins turned into teasing Hao about his scanty appearances at the Go club, and when Claus was about to mention neither seeing nor speaking to him in the past three months, Hao laughingly excused himself.

A continental silence was crammed tight within the four walls. Hao felt the room yaw and tilt about him, and amid the falling feeling, the emblems of the room blurred to an eerie nonexistence: the fireplace Ricardo roared about roasting a goose in it but never did, the record-player he had drunkenly broken because Hao’s Monteverdi record sounded like pigs squealing, the painting for which he tackled a guy at a garage sale. The house would have to be sold, Hao thought tremblingly. The soul-sucking house, too big and too airy.

Hao’s narrow shoulders drooped as he placed limply the phone onto the counter then lumbers to the French doors overlooking the pool rippling and glittering under the awful sun. Anal, small-minded, uptight, those were the words Ricardo would jeer at him right about now. His son Yuu would chastise him with a dopey mopey look. Good thing Yuu was off at Princeton wasting his filthy lucre instead.

Sure he could attend the dinner. Someone would be certain to ask about Ricardo’s fish tacos or his damned health, and Hao would bravely announce their separation. A long time coming, he might add lightly, a year in the making; anticipated it every night for the past thirteen years, in fact. A jitter worked in his sternum and gathered up a pounding dread. He pictured the club members rearranging their faces to polite unconcern. They would say, one after the other, “Sorry to hear that … Bummer …” The members of the Go club were a civil bunch after all. But inside their pallid souls, Hao knew as surely as he knew his withering self, they would sneer at his moral failure (Livelong monogamy was as natural as the dirty deed). They would secretly reaffirm the inherent inferiority of his proclivities (See? These couples can’t even last thirteen years!). Hao sighed explosively. What a bother.

Still, it would be silly to avoid Kenji Masaki, a seven dan professional Go player, who had come all the way from Japan to give a Go lecture to their club. Shameful and unnecessary. He could act the sane, full-functioning adult and pretend. That was the American way. Smile and say, “I’m good … great … couldn’t have been better,” and even joke a bit about Ricardo’s obsessions with the U.S. Virgin Islands or his lack of affinity for Go. Kenji might rib him with courteous fish-glances. Claus might ramble maniacally about demon grapefruit. Dinner would be spumy with beer, the lecture would be a giddy auditory bullet train to Go wisdom, and gravel would be grinding in his heart. Yes, he would be just fine. He would not crumble and die.

He could hear now the distinct tinkles of the wall-fountain out of sight in the dining room. His gaze whirled from the ivory pale of the drop ceiling, to the cold, bare floor and on through the patio doors to the pool a beautiful blue grave. Gritting his teeth, he asserted, “I’m perfect. Just great,” then picked up the phone and trudged back to confront the silence of stones.

Chapter 2

Too far from the Pacific Ocean, too close to the roar of the 405 freeway, the Cheese and Mints Café hosted a Go lecture by Kenji Masaki to the members of the Atari Go Club. The attendees sat somber and tense before Kenji in the curtained off section of the café. The walls were splattered with plumes of yellow abstractions; chairs and tables crowded around the upright magnetic Go board. Short and gaunt, Kenji swayed about in the rhythms of Go wisdom and would wobble his head curtly whenever bad moves were suggested.

“It’s a great honor that Masaki-Sensei came tonight,” said the mullet-haired Claus, standing at the opposite end of the board from Sensei.

Some smiled. Others sighed, albeit very quietly.

Zoë Jackson, a self-described prodigy thought Sensei was as boring as sand. More interesting was her sensational fiction, which she was writing in a forceful block letters in her binder. She, the heroine, was winning a thirty Go game challenge against the evil Sensei.

Her face was focused on her book. The other’s were still and solemn at Kenji, who took a grateful swig from a water bottle, and then, with the wave of a hand, wiped his glossy brow. He held an emphatic fist to his heart and said, “The American joy for Go. Ureshii, so happy it makes me. In Nihon, so hard to make young people play Go—”

“Fuck Obama. Fuck the government. Fuck eighty degree winters …”

The attendees stiffened with smiles. Claus sputtered little bumps of laughter, which cascaded into a feeble stream of cackles from the audience. It was poetry night at the Cheese and Mints Café, Claus explained to Kenji. Poetry could be quite emotional in America. And with that, the lecture ended with an overly low bow from Claus to Kenji.

The hellos pent-up over the two-hour lecture now frothed pleasantly over the poetic bellows from the podium. Kenji was whisked to a chair, where he lay limp under the canopy of repetitive questions from an assortment of mendicant college students, urban professionals of a technical bent, and teenagers with too-sparse goatees. A great lecture, they said, the epicene voice of Sensei still reverberating in their hearts. Sensei’s endowed insight was certain to resurrect them from the netherworld of low Go ranks.

Their baritone babble passed over Brett Adams, the baldheaded bony senior scratching his buttocks. He was perplexed over a sheet that listed the ten people who had paid twenty-five dollars for the privilege to be beaten by Sensei. The response for paid games had been stupendously great. The more money Sensei could earn, the better it fared for future professional lectures (How much was a ticket from Osaka to LAX again?). But it was already 8:15 pm. Could Sensei (He yawned three times already.) finish ten simultaneous games in less than an hour? Sure he could, for Sensei was a Go god. And so Brett went ahead to line up two rows of five Go boards.

Brett took control of the top rail of Zoë’s chair. “I need to arrange the seating for the simul games. Could you sit over there?” His arm pointed to the couch, its armrests bleeding with foam stuffing.

A scowl of impatience ruffled her medallion face, but she hopped off and stood aside and waited. After a great scuffling of wood against concrete, Brett went on to prod the players to their seats. Zoë hopped back onto a reserved chair. She pushed her hands down on the seat, which made her small shoulders bone up like bat’s wings. The little blonde brandished her iron teeth onto the next-door player and asked her favorite question, “Did you know that the capital of Nepal is Kathmandu?”

Before the player could lie, “No,” Brett said to her, “Please get off the seat.”

Her mother had neither contributed for the lecture nor paid for the game, but Brett was much too grandfatherly to speak truth to the eight-year-old, saying, “Maybe you should sit with your mom.”

“Why not here?”

“Cindy gets this seat. She paid to play against Sensei. Please …”

“Ooh, I want to play Sensei.”

“I’ll tell you what. If someone finishes early, you can have the seat. But for now, Cindy sits here.”

“Pretty, please, pretty, pretty, please …”

Brett’s liver-spotted face crinkled at every plosive ‘p’ of the whine but still retained a rigid smile. He had the temerity to ask her to fetch her mother, but Zoë was wise to the deflection schemes of adults. She folded her arms over the pink heart emblazoned on her tank top, and with a barbed glare, emitted a coloratura scream of dispossession, “I WANT TO PLAY SENSEI.”

Everyone had her attention now.

***

Hao Chen-Li’s day had begun at five am and darted through the mercury: wrestling at thousand dollars an hour with the Irvine startup brats, the oily wreck of the veal scaloppini, the intern with a very unattractive Confucius beard and his illiterate memos, muttering through an hour and a half of choked traffic. And here he was pacing outside the entrance of the Cheese and Mints café.

In the January damp cold, he felt queasily hot in his tailored suit. He condescended to remove his silk tie and fold it into his pocket. His watch—a Swiss monstrosity but a sweet present from Ricardo—glittered 8:30. There was just one plan for the evening: Say hello for five minutes and drop out.

But did he really have to go in there? There was still time to turn around and enjoy another lovely lonely evening of nothing. He shuffled back to the burgundy bean pod of his car but stopped short of opening the door. Drunk with hesitation, he called Yuu’s mother.

“Oh, it’s you,” Nianxi’s hoarse mezzo jabbed from the receiver.

“Don’t act as if you weren’t expecting a call on your birthday.”

“Lately it seems best not to look forward to these things.” Hao rolled his eyes. Nianxi droned, “Call Yuu and remind him, will you?”

“If I have to remind him, a call can’t mean much.”

“No more meaningless than the Facebook app that reminded you of my birthday.”

“Ai-ya, don’t give me grief. Go nag your husband.”

“In another hour or so, he will have completely forgotten my birthday. Don’t worry, I’ve got my slipper ready for him in the morning.”

Hao grimaced. Before he could be ecstatic that he had dodged lifelong monogamy with her, the ambient silence roared in his ears. Nianxi would never bring up Ricardo, a fact that had brined him bitterly over the years. Now it felt such a great relief, but still the silence was punishing.

“Spare Jerry your slipper--I have to go.” Hao dropped the line manfully and texted Yuu, “Why am I reminding you of your mother’s birthday!!!!”

He put the phone away, groaning helplessly to that wine-tinged moon. Just do this. I’m fine.

He braved the door. A cinnamon mélange invaded his senses, and he quivered a smile to Monica cutting a dripping piece of bread pudding at the counter. She lifted her bread knife in high greeting. But before her orange-painted lips could utter a word, he ducked away to the adjoining room.

He made his careful way through the bramble of tables and chairs and to the wall of curtains dusty and floral. Churning in his mind were the possible lies for his long absence. Busy … Contracts don’t write themselves … Went to China for a bit … The Go hobby is making Ricardo jealous. He paused to wilt in the brazen fecklessness of the last lie, loosened his collar, and marched on.

A scream shook him solidly from lies. A seal-like woman swooped past him from behind and swathed open the curtain, zoomed onto a little blonde batting her little hand irately at the table.

The woman shrieked, “Zoë baby, what’s wrong?”

A moment later the mother emerged from the curtains, grabbing a candlestick wrist of Zoë, who was adamantly protesting, “They won’t let me play Sensei.” She wrested her hand away from the silly arms of her mother. “MOM?”

Not quite understanding the commotion himself, Sensei looked paralyzed before a horizontal front of equally frozen Go players. But Hao was shivering at the strange rudeness of the evening and wondering how, in his three-month absence, had incivility grown wild.

“I’ll give her a teaching game,” Hao said quickly.

Zoë’s cheeks rounded into hard stones. “You are not Sensei.”

“Hao’s a Sensei.” Brett blundered forth from the game tables, seizing the chance to save the evening.

“Better than the other Sensei?” Zoë said.

Posturing had always been unwelcome in the club, more so from a child. Although Hao was a god of the game, Sensei was god squared. Brett looked pleadingly to Hao flicking aggressively at the metallic straps of his watch.

Hao snorted at her affront. He was not even supposed to stay long, he fumed, but irritation spun out of gas as Brett sidled to him and palmed his ebony hand over his shoulder.

“You’ll need a handicap of nine stones from him,” Brett said to Zoë.

“So he’s better than you?” she asked.

Brett’s hand was clawing into Hao’s clavicle now. “Yes, very. I have to take seven stones from him.”

“Oh, then I’ll beat him at five stones then.”

Nine stone handicap, five stone handicap, an even game, all were the same to Hao as long as the little girl could make the stones sing again. Excited, he furrowed at the blue pebbles of Zoë’s eyes and queried for something astonishingly brilliant.

“Honey, over here.” Already Zoë’s mother, with diffident motions and happy hums, was setting a board and Go bowls at a table far away from the hallowed Sensei.

Brett patted Hao’s shoulder and said in a hushed tone. “Thank you so much. She’s a little …”

Hao did not oblige to pair Brett’s yellow-toothed grin. Brett hustled away too quickly to fawn at Kenji playing sensationally ten simultaneous games. Hao was left decaying to thorny need. He seated himself across from Zoë arranging five black handicap stones in a wide quincunx pattern over the board. Her movements jumbled giddily.

And his eyes slid across the aisle to a young man counting silently the score of his game against Kenji, who was standing tall over him. Hao did not recognize the young man. Yet, the burgundy tint of his moving lips was familiar as was the peninsula of razor rash stretching along his side burns. Still the young man looked handsome despite the hormonal pox, fresh, lively, smiling now probably because the man perceived a win.

Hao shifted, played his fingers in the bowl of white stones, a showering sound of the stones washing his thoughts. Go was whispering lovingly to the young man. And also to Kenji collecting his lips into a fish pout. And to Cindy focusing her poppy-red nose less than six inches onto her game. And to Brett nodding assuredly to himself. Perhaps not to Claus haggling with Monica over grapefruit. Everyone was so busy that no one noticed his cinnamon-hot heart.

A blue feeling niggled Hao. Go did not seem to have missed him in these last few months, neither had the club.

***

The night was still uproarious with schlock as the Rastafarian assumed the podium and ranted poetry or the praises to Jah. The officious players, scheming for Sensei’s attentions, raved about the lectures, these insightful lectures that rekindled their joy of Go and their smoldering private studies. But before anyone could darken the bright conversations with groans about busy lives or the fractal complexity of Go, someone jeered plans for midnight snacking. Sensei would be, of course, invited to join them on a midnight run for bacon-wrapped hotdogs.

Cindy, having just resigned bravely to Sensei, came round to Hao’s game with Zoë. She, like many others, pegged his clean-shaven look for awkward boyishness, which to her college-aged ignorance, belied his strong sense of personal accomplishment.

Hao uncrossed his legs, conscious of the foppish air around her, widened his knees, and leaning back into the chair, wondered in the precise ways of Go if Zoë was an idiot. Whatever peculiar stock of genius Zoë possessed, it was well hidden behind her speedy moves.

The sound of heels dragging across concrete stirred him from sharp thoughts to see Jessica, newly arrayed in a jacket dripping with tassels, swaying giddily from the poetry section to their game, no doubt having enjoyed the tirade on America’s doom and its lack of organic shea butter. Hao smiled at her guiltily. She smiled back.

Zoë’s voice clinked, “Mom, this is easy. I’m winning.”

“That’s great, Honey. I’m proud of you.”

Cindy squinted, straining to find victory on the board. “This is so cool. Never been able to beat Hao at nine stones,” she said in her too honest and vulnerable manner.

“That’s because you’re too passive,” Hao blurted.

Cindy moped. “Aggression gets me killed.”

Hao loosened one more button at his collar, ratcheted the watch round his wrist, then buttoned up again. Aggression, he decided, infantile aggression was Zoë’s doomed logic.

“I haven’t seen you for a while,” Cindy said to Hao.

Hao took to rapping his white stone softly against the table. “Been busy.”

‘Busy’ seemed to have done the job of killing the bastard beetles of meddlesome concern. She leaned her elbows on the table and rested her ruddy face over the platter of her palms. Her gaze never faltered in the ambient soft light.

“You coming next week? I could use a teaching game.”

Next week? Hao’s mind fast-forwarded over the weekend of bottomless golf, the dicey Thursday meeting with the startup brats and to another ten-hour workday Tuesday. He should be able to claw away from the quicksand of his mansion, if he did not mind teaching the same lessons to a stagnant player or being disappointed in supposed geniuses.

“Probably not,” he mumbled.

“Hey, we are not going to lose another nine dan player, are we?” She said, “It’s bad enough Julien doesn’t come anymore.”

Before Hao could redden, Zoë perked up. “He’s nine dan? I’m beating a nine dan at five stones? Mom, that makes me four dan!”

“Honey, those brains came from your grandma,” Jessica said before pecking her on the forehead and wading back to the poetry section.

Hao did not think about the next move before playing, for that matter any of his previous moves. His mind smeared, leaked away over the glossy white stones or the sinkholes of the black stones, and searched for the soul of the evening. Then his phone rattled in his pocket, indicating a text message.

Did you happen to run across my titanium ring?

The name Ricardo Mendez flickered on the screen. Hao’s heart counted to a thousand in an instant. He blurted, ‘Excuse me’ before catapulting out the café.

The night sky was hazy with stars, and the row of street lamps dusted a lighted trail up the black road. Hao pushed himself onto a settee by the front entrance but jumped off again. He thought ‘Ricky’ could be a conciliatory gesture, but Ricardo always preferred ‘Rico’ a name he judged perfect for pawky slimeballs. ‘Rick’ was respectable, perhaps too stiff for this long awaited phone call. No, Ricardo was best; it had been perfect for the past thirteen years.

But Ricardo had not deigned to return his emotionally colorful calls over the last three months. He had replied with curt text messages, “I luv u too … ??? … Still undecided about the house … Srsly?”

Hao should have texted, “The ring is on your bedside dresser,” and Ricardo would sneak in during the hours when Hao was too busy working to steal the ring and leave tamarind seeds strewn over bedroom balcony, but Hao texted, “Let’s meet for dinner this weekend, and I’ll give your ring.”

The response was too swift. Never mind. You can keep it.

Please, dinner?

Not such a good idea, Chenny.

Hao forgot to bristle at the unwanted pet name and speed dialed Ricardo’s number. He placed the phone against his moist ear. It rang once, twice, thrice, then a dispassionate female voice inflamed his ears, “If you want to leave a voice message—” Without so much as a thought to the haggard man stepping out of the café, Hao hurled the phone into the downstream darkness of the road.

The impression of his abiding idiocy branded him as he flopped onto the settee and grabbed his hard kneecaps. The minutes stretched long and hot and incomprehensible. He buried his heating face in his cold hands for a long moment and ruminated. That was the third phone he had destroyed in the past three months.

He uncovered his face, and there was the haggard man stooping over him.

“What was that game you were playing earlier?” the man asked.

“Go?”

“Like Othello?”

“No.”

Hao’s trembling gaze streamed down the looseness of the baseball tee and searched for something alluring behind its white dullness. The jeans falling off the pole waist, the seaweed curls hedging the eyes, the monkish beard marring the face—Not worth his time. Hao pulled to his feet, remembering he had a kid waiting for him.

“Wait a minute,” the man called back. He shoved into Hao’s hand something mangled. “Your phone. You shouldn’t litter.”

Once more, in the wan light emanating from the door, Hao was obliged to look into the hair, the hazy spots for eyes, and search for a human similarity, but his first conclusion was to deck him. But the violence of it already marred his senses, for he imagined the boy would crumble and crash into a heap of bones upon contact. Then his second thought was to fucking deck him.

Feeling the carcass of the phone in his hands, Hao dimmed at what the three-month hibernation had done to his conscience. Rather pounded it to bits.

“Thank you.” Hao tried to sound gracious. “I might be able to salvage my contacts from it.”

And as he turned inside, an ember of feeling glowed—there was still an eight-year-old to crush.

***

The café strummed its din. Two young men chatted about subtitled anime versus dubbed anime. Mezzo voices argued about cute Chihuahuas versus cute Pomeranians. Go sang its life, its energy, with the irregular clicks of stone against wooden boards, but a distinct exasperated sigh quivered through its rhythms. That was from Luke Collier seated in an alcove basking under a cone of yellow light. After giving Hao his phone, Luke settled back in the café to finish his homework. Before long he was dashing his pencil against a math-ruled workbook in which were scribbled problems on Gauss’ Law. The physics problems refused all his tepid attempts at penetration. And this boredom lifted him off the table and to the seated persons slapping stones on gridded boards.

“Hey Luke, sticking with physics? Brave …” said Cindy, the resident Go cheerleader, emerging from a tableside clique of Go spectators.

Stepping back from the bobbed hair rounding pear cheeks, Luke was puzzled. He could not remember introducing himself to Cindy, much less complaining about the tribulations of physics. But she stepped forward confidently until he was backed up against a table. Her mouth opened, closed, opened, and the vibrations streaming forth still did not jiggle the memory of a first meeting.

“God, physics gives me cold chills,” she said.

Luke nodded, still hoping for something of hers to make sense.

“I just hate the fact that the answer is exact, no fudging, no hedging. Only one answer, if you don’t get it, you’re cooked. I mean how realistic is it? Life ain’t like that. I just hate that.”

Luke could enlighten her about the other things he hated, like the cellphone warm and buzzing in his jeans pocket, probably loaded with another high-pitched voicemail imploring him to lunch with his father. Or his tenants yelling again about a backed-up toilet. Or a friend demanding him to rise from the dead and come surfing.

Cindy became gratefully silent. She was looking away to another Go game, hers lips stern; perhaps she was hating another discrete mathematical fact on the board.

Luke gathered himself. “The game looks just as bad as physics.”

“Oh no, it isn’t.” Her voice pinged a delightful pitch. “You play Go?”

“No … What’s it actually?”

She pinned him to the show she had given a dozens of times before. Go it was called. Weiqi in Chinese. Baduk in Korean. Probably the oldest strategy game in history. Originated from China, but the Japanese perfected its strategies. No, it isn’t like Othello. See? The stones are of solid color.

Big eyes were shining on her small face, and Luke had to remind himself: this was a happy creature, not a frightening wallaby. He calmed himself to sound friendly and match her excited cadence while Cindy, in her wide gesticulations, thought hard and wide on the unsociable, ugly nerds who came to the café.

Nevertheless, she pushed Luke gently into a seat and placed a board on the table. The board was ruled with a 9x9 grid. She placed white stone on a grid point and black stones on the white stone’s four radiating grid points.

“When you surround a stone, you capture it. It's called atari. You can even eat a group of stones,” she said. “But the object of the game isn’t capturing. The player who controls as much empty space, enclosed territory, on the board wins.”

Power. Territory. The epic struggle of wills. Luke concluded quickly that the game did not suit his current temperament. It looked harder than physics.

“The game is incredibly fascinating,” said Cindy, giggling generously. The word 'fascinating' led to more lectures on groups, live groups versus dead groups. But Luke’s attentions were drifting to the server who, with bowls of chili in hand, snaked around tables, his waist neat and inviting under a sleek apron. He caught himself and wrenched a smile his mother would slap him to correct for looking unnatural.

“How about it? Your first game on a small board?” She patted the board twice as invitation.

“How do we start?” he droned, thinking Go should do for a while longer before tackling physics.

“You can play anywhere on the board. But it’s usual to start in the corners though. It is easier to make territory starting from the corner, the sides and then towards the center.” She pushed towards him a wooden bowl of black, biconvex stones. “Black goes first … Oneigaishimasu as the Japanese say before a game.”

“Onei … gaishi … masu,” Luke said.

And the night rode on full with promise despite the grunts of losing players or the loud grouses about Shea butter. It was definitely full of promise when Hao smirked at the little girl finally understanding her assured victory was an assured loss. Child players could be frightening. They could understand the infinite in a moment, at least Hao could during his young years at Go school in China.

Zoë’s fingers vibrated against the table. Her presence ebbed away with the accelerating taps. Ten minutes passed, and she still looked lost. Hao wanted to tell her it was just a game, not a matter of life and death, certainly not like being dumped by a partner of thirteen years.

Aimlessly, Hao turned his attentions to Luke two tables away. The youth looked haggardly enrapt with the white and black mysteries of Go instead of Cindy’s brilliant eyes. Luke looked like a dead group, not worth capturing and taking off the board. But he, Hao Chen-Li, was the same, wasn’t he? Something fortune had deemed irredeemable and love useless. He took a slow and ponderous breath as his being was steeped in the aether that was Ricardo.

Coldness scaled the sides of his torso and barrenness wormed in his belly. Hao barely heard the girl mumbling, “I resign.” He could not even foment the perverse joy at crushing a kid, defaulting instead to graciousness, saying mildly, “Geniuses don’t resign.”

Zoë’s face inflated with red and with renewal. She gave her mom the I-will-win-this-time-I-promise look. As the game progressed, the sound of her stones became harder and more animated. Onlookers gathered, tense and stiff-lipped. Half an hour later the game ended with the girl smiling freely to her mother.

“I count.” Kenji’s stubby fingers intercepted Hao’s from rearranging the board for scoring.

“Sensei,” Hao said, bowing his head slightly to greet him. “I hadn’t notice you were done with your games.”

Kenji nudged him a gentle look. “The game was—how you say in English? Sneaky?”

Hao, blushing, crimped his mouth shut.

Kenji counted Zoë’s score, 120 points for black on the board. Then he counted white, 100 points on the board.

She jumped up. “Mom, I told you.”

“And white’s captured stones …” Sensei said, “… 17, 18, 19, 20. Jigo.”

“Jigo?” she asked.

“The game’s even,” Hao said, self-assured that the game ended exactly the way he had planned.

“White wins ties,” Brett said to Zoë slowing herself back into her seat with a pouty frown.

“Count it again,” she demanded.

“Let’s review the game,” Hao said with masculine abruptness.

“Lemme count it again.” Little fingers pecked across the board. Her lips mouthed a singsong rhythm of numbers.

Her mother pulled her arm from the board. “I’m sorry, we need to go. It’s a school night.” Jessica gathered up the remains of her daughter assuring her that she had really won, and they billowed out through the maze of tables and to the exit. The un-cleared board was their parting slight.

The board? Hao grumbled. Was he supposed to clean it? Smarting about Americans and their penchant for rude familiarity, he cleaned up the board. In his Go school days, the loser cleans, and definitely the younger cleaned up after the elder.

Cindy's pings of "good game" shook Hao to peek at their table. She was rearranging the stones of a finished game to count up the score. And there was the terrible pinecone of hair again looking muddled over the board. Hao loosened in his seat, a sickening release expanding through his belly.

“Wow, good game,” exclaimed Cindy to Luke. “Now you know the rules. As they say, hurry up and go lose a thousand games.”

“Sounds hard.” Luke pulled the hair back from his face, and light slanted cleanly off the bridge of his nose, and his brown eyes glinted back at Hao. Those same harsh, possessive, wanton eyes of Ricardo.

With the whish of Luke’s hair whipping about his temples, Hao recoiled and shrunk back to cleaning the board. Cool, smooth, the feel of the stones could not quell the black rain of self-reproach. How low of him to find grace in the feral face of a vagrant. But he needed grace; he so desperately needed grace.