ZGo and love - 12. Raise the sun

The go tournament is a pageant of anxiety, boisterous shrills, go mothers idling with go wives in Korean or Japanese or Chinese, the toddlers gamboling around the go cake, the out-of-towners who came especially for free lunch, and the masseuses making their rounds kneading away desperation into smiles.

Luke comes to the front desk where people are typing away on laptops to prepare game pairings. He asks to enter as six kyu; the past week has been light on practice and heavy on ennui. But Brett angles up from behind the front desk and says, “Hao said you’re entering as two kyu.”

“Two kyu sounds hard.” Luke eyes the carton of muffins on a table.

“We’ll keep you there for now. If it’s too hard, your next opponent will be of weaker rank. You’ll keep dropping until you find your level. No harm done.”

Luke’s head lops at a woeful angle, and he slinks away to the breakfast table. He is partial to his chemical noodle diet: cup ramen stroganoff, cup ramen waldorf, cup ramen a la king. But for the past week his stomach gurgles at the pinging saltiness of sodium guanylate and demands something less caustic. He eats a muffin, a chocolate chip muffin, and ponders a recipe for a peanut butter muffin. His eyes scan the yellow rows of go boards dotted with the burgundy red game clocks.

After another three muffins and a sleepy starter game against Cindy, Luke is seated with his first opponent for the day. The opponent calls himself Henry, says he drove from Sacramento, boasts he’s a solid two kyu and perhaps a one dan on a lucky day, keeps clearing a dry throat. Words, words fall over Luke’s ears like the dry leaves.

The speakers belch with a masculine voice gabbing about the good, great, grand morning then spits the game rules: Ing Counting, forty-five minutes on the clock with five periods of ten-second byo-yomi.

Henry asks Luke, “Ing counting looks complicated. Could we go with Japanese counting instead?”

Ing counting indeed sounds complicated as Luke’s mind wanders from table to table for the suited fellows that might be Hao.

“Sure.” Luke mulls the contraption of a clock to his left. “I press the white button and you start?”

“Yes. Whenever you’re ready.”

Luke yawns and presses. Henry plays black on the hoshi point, the four, four, point. A beginning that hints for the Chinese Opening which emphasizes fast development and a moyo strategy, a strategy for use of spacey territorial frameworks instead of a frugal game of tight territory hoarding. Should he spoil the intended Chinese Opening or go ahead and continue with the moyo strategy?

Luke’s stomach flattens with hunger pangs. It disturbs him how he has been feeling ruthlessly hungry all week, then Henry heads him a tense smile. The regulars from his club are thumbing him good luck from their seats. A row of bright teeth is squashing Cindy’s face. The room empties of its murmur, and clicks of stone against wood swarm over the grumbles of the central air conditioning. The lingering taste of chocolate is acerbic on his tongue. Something feels off-kilter as if he is waiting for his mom to smile in satisfaction over the mac and cheese he prepared for her. But the game needs his move and the paralysis of analysis is setting in. Hao’s voice echoes in, saying his brain’s mud, it’s a stinky egg, it’s congee.

Now the room is void and his opponent is a blur, but there’s a delightful heat glowing in his groin. Right at the base of his spine, a tingle, a flush, a bundle of blithe neurons firing. An erection is warm and hard against his thigh and the second move is yet to be played and the clock shows five minutes elapsed on his time. Still he eases his soul with savage thrusts into Hao’s poor mouth, the runaway intensity with which his body decries against his twelve-month melancholy. It is all right he came onto Hao. He is, after all, young and very male.

But he is also a careless, heartless man who is undeserving of peace and pleasure. Why did it take Lisa’s twenty moans of ‘no’ against his twenty plates of mac and cheese for him to have figure out that cup ramen noodles were the perfect palliative against chemotherapy-induced nausea? All delight and heat escape from him, leaving his soul a flaccid balloon, and in swarms a confusion of groans and languishing swoons for him to return him his father. He’s limp, he’s damp, he can’t think. The game’s a mistake. The tournament’s a mistake.

“Excuse me.” Luke flits for the front desk and asks Brett about cancelling his registration.

“Why? You haven’t even played yet. Nerves taking over?”

“No, sir. I just don’t feel well enough.”

“Hao’s going to be disappointed. He has been excited about your performance.”

The mention of Hao flares memories of Hao’s house, the convex view of a night sky floating stars beyond the ceiling, Hao’s mindless nods to Yuu’s defecating political maxims, his tongue rolling around the salty sweet bolus of barbecue pork buns, and his stares at the wall clock, 9:30, 9:35, 9:37 …. His pulse silent and anticipating a distant noise to alert him of Ricardo’s entrance and to usher him home—home where ghosts were waiting with barbed wire.

But the minutes exhausted his weak pulse, and his eyes welcome the oval palace of Hao’s mouth—open, ready, perfect. And as soon as Yuu skipped away from the dinner table, cooing to his phone, “I missed you, chouchou,” Luke asked Hao, “do you think you can fellate me sometime?”

Hao’s mouth collapsed shut and a shadow ate up half his face. “Don’t be so careless, my son’s around!”

“He isn’t here now, so I asked.”

Hao checked himself, reformed himself with a curmudgeon’s smile. “Maybe after you become six dan.”

Before Brett’s narrowing gaze, surrounded by the dull showers of stones clinking, Luke is feeling the heat of that night again. He shuffles away to the restroom. The room feels empty and its black tile sheens a harsh white in the light. He barrels into a stall and proceeds to whisk away at the meddlesome development. His feelings inches to clarity on every stroke. Hao is being needlessly inflexible on his request; he will have to confront him on that. His house feels dark and small and muggy and dreary. He should tune up his car. He should open the blinds and welcome the sun. He should ask Ted if he’d like to learn go. He should prepare himself a three-course meal. Herein lies the secret of life: Taking and enjoying and throwing away. He knows it so well from his parents, why insist with the impotent routines of lethargy?

Wretchedly, he pants a climax across porcelain and chrome. He cleans up sanguinely and quickly. He returns to his seat, barely smiles at the masseuses with rabbits nestled in their bosoms, and twenty minutes has elapsed on his clock. Henry conceals barely a victorious smirk, and yet Luke feels brilliant, liberatingly brilliant.

***

The tournament had vroomed through three games and lunch. The colors outside the patio doors were sepia and somber, but inside remained a hotbox of plans for dinner and a goodnight’s rest, animated commentaries over games ruinously lost, games expertly vanquished. Luke himself was stretching and arching his brows in a strange bid to keep his gaze wide but not weird at his last opponent Gabriel’s monobrow. Gabriel had been manic about the one-point loss on their last game, almost ecstatic. He barred Luke within the cage of his commentary on the opening, failed intentions, miscalculations, flawless executions. Luke rather wished for peanut butter and lemonade to break up the goo in his head, but every raspy declaration of “I knew it! I knew I should have played there… I was stupid, so, so stupid… I knew it!” shoved more sop into his skull.

Gabriel, his monobrow scaling up the prominent forehead, wagged a finger at him tremblingly. “You’re a very sneaky player. I couldn’t keep up with you.” Luke ruminated on the carrot-stick finger and hoped he had not offended him, hoped it would not offend him further if he excused himself.

Gabriel’s nose shined with perspiration and his face a bright red disc of awe. This emboldened Luke, and he swallowed and blinked and parted his mouth to speak. But the scent of something flowery and fruity barreled down the dry passage of his mouth and choked him to shudder to his right—Jae, wearing a jacket of zippers, gripping the lissome hand of a lady draped in animal prints.

“Where’s Hao? He isn’t here to see me keep my five-dan rating. Things still go-related with you two?” Jae said in two octaves too low and ten decibels too loud.

The phrase “go-related” sank its slow way through the dross of Luke’s tired brain. And in the meantime the zippers darting at oblique glimmering angles on Jae’s jacket fascinated Luke. His eyes were ticking along with the pendulous ingot of a zipper, the words swaying still through ratty neural nets, then Luke shook with an awareness of meaning. Kissing Hao wasn’t go-related neither was fellating him nor asking him to do likewise. He should tell the truth and say no, but a wight of a feeling whispered Hao would object to his truthfulness. And now that he was thinking about Hao, five minutes of fellatio would be lovely before bedtime.

Jae crooned into his tiger lady, uttering in mysterious tones, “Dido, yeah he’s a little creepy staring like that. Funny. In Asia go is a game of aristocratic refinement. The players are debonair and Casanovas. In the America, it’s nerdy white guys too scared to talk to girls.”

The distant trill of Cindy screaming her last three of games awesome pulled Luke away from zippers and to a semblance of engagement. He rubbed down the hair wrapping his sore head and pondered the ways and means of polite conversation.

“Dido, your name was?” Luke blinked twice and remembered to be awake. “Dido as in the Dido and Aeneas, the doomed queen of Carthage…. An intriguing opera. My cello teacher loved Handel more and Bach less—a strange predicament for a cellist. Nevertheless she was given to soliloquys, frankly perplexing, on the tragedy of love. Still don’t understand why love should drive one to suicide… Suicide should be a rational act, a careful conclusion after considering your debts and offerings to the living, not to be taken lightly on account of emotional turmoil. But easy for me to say as someone who doesn’t know much about love or emotional turmoil either … Maybe you can enlighten me. Have you seen this opera?”

Dido’s mouth swished to an angle Luke thought uncomfortable to hold for more than ten seconds. He gathered she was upset, perhaps angered or worried or saddened. It certainly could not be joy or contentment forcing her into such a strange pose, but there could be a twenty percent chance of it—

“I just thought my parents named me after the singer,” she said.

Jae guffawed. “I thought Dido was a dog’s name.”

Dido replied with a vicious punch to Jae’s upper arm, which precipitated a squall of tinkling laughter, diverse thoughts on dog names that could be girl names, and that corrosive headache in Luke. Then Gabriel, who had been replaying the game, pumped an uppercut into the air, and cried like someone had stabbed his neck with a adrenaline shot of inspiration, “That corner was epic.”

Epic, and that was go. It was the vagaries of life itself: the heart pounding before a vision of failure, the fingers trembling as one sought a tree of life for floundering group, the dumbfounded silence over a board demanding a move, the 19X19 grid a matrix to cut up and carve up and unroll a prevision of domination, all by mind and by will. Epic also demolished Luke’s capacities for good conversation.

Thankfully, Jae and Dido flapped away for the superior company of young women undecided on Korean or McDonalds for dinner. Gabriel left too, but not before he imprisoned Luke’s hand in a vigorous hand shake for ten minutes, rapid firing about go servers and a date and a game and a room and handle names.

Luke’s right forearm still bounced with the up and down sensations from Gabriel’s handshake as he lumbered amongst the tables in a loopy direction for the sunset-red exit sign. The sounds of elated argument, passions, winsome camaraderie were encompassing, should have propped up a sun in Luke’s purview; still he peregrinated in the twilights of distrait. The night would be another evening of a cup ramen noddle dinner and unfocused preparations for a microeconomics final. Tomorrow would be another day of two games and heavy thinking. How did he devolve from juggling cello, chess and judo in high school to sleepwalking through a sparse schedule?

Whatever the case, it was more important to finish the games. It should make Hao happy, and making people happy should make Lisa happy. And if he was going to make Hao happy, he might as well make Gilda happy, and Miranda, and Trent. That was the least he could do even if he did not understand the wherefores of happiness or how these nugatory actions could roll that soul-expanding boulder of happiness. But the obdurate task of understanding was perhaps immoral in the face of distress, as in now with Zoë flopping her pallid head over an empty board, eyes red and scornful, cheeks glistening under the lacteal light. Here too, he must try to effect happiness without understanding.

“How many games did you win?” Zoë demanded Luke.

“Two games.”

“How come you win and I lost all three of my games? You’re the bad player.”

Luke considered the tight and elongating lines on her small face. “Four-dan was maybe too high a rank for you. Tomorrow your games should be more comfortable.”

“Not coming tomorrow. I’m not playing go anymore,” Zoe said.

“Zoë… Hao says, geniuses don’t resign,” said Cindy adjusting her eyes to the pure lights of the hall, strutting away from the patio doors, where the sour light of evening curdled with the Turkish motifs on the carpet.

Zoe sharpened as severe a face an eight-year-old girl could. “Where’s Hao anyway? Probably afraid to lose.” But she did not stay for answer, leaving Cindy smiling magnificently at Luke. He waxed to wondering the politeness of asking her for cookies and lemonade.

“You’re so going to be a one-kyu when this is over.” Cindy was breathless with astonishment, for the boy she had tutored had more sprinted past her in the ranks.

“I can’t say…” Luke droned.

“Why do you always have to sound so blah? Sure you will. And I’ve decided you’ll teach me everything Hao teaches you.” Cindy splashed her floral forearms over the table and leaned in the best-friends-forever eyes, almost whispered, “I’d ask Hao myself, but I don’t think his flicking does me any good.”

“He thinks it makes knowledge sinks faster. I can’t say one or another. Maybe it does, but I wouldn’t know. A controlled experiment to test the hypothesis might be noteworthy task. At least ten subjects say, a project—”

“Are you going to teach me or not? “

“Sure.” For it would make her happy.

He came now to somber and aching red of the lobby bombastically intricate with gilded volutes. His thoughts raced away from the beveled edges and hard angles and sought a refuge in the rotating door view of the impatient evening discordant with strident pedestrians. Then his phone rang, chilling him towards sensible engagement and upright duty. But the harsh ‘hello’ on the phone, shaded with midtones of warmth, leveled him with safety that hardened into concern as he replied, “Everyone was wondering where you were.”

“Busy,” Hao said. “How are you doing so far?”

“Two games won,” Luke said. “I ran out of time on the lost game.”

“Don’t run out of time tomorrow.”

Luke wizened with the duty fast lashing him. “I don’t plan to.”

“Good. I’ll probably see you next Saturday.”

“You aren’t coming by this Tuesday?”

A nervous laugh whinnied from the receiver. “Another of those rendezvous, I’m afraid.”

“You didn’t come last week, and now this week, are you avoiding the club?”

“Some things are more important than go lately—don’t lose tomorrow. Tell Cindy not lose either, or I shall have a bitter melon dish prepared for the both of you.”

The tone sounded more tired than usual, and Luke hazarded a thought to inquire further. But that would be a great waste of bytes and electrons, for Hao would lie—lies as he had claimed every human told in responsibility to their hearts. Hao’s statement hurled back to Luke that night trembling with unease and dolor, Hao agitating with the terrible singing of the passing cars. And he pondered now the demands of the machine crucial for pumping blood and nothing else. Yes it was precious for life, but was it so weak that it demanded logical charades and tortuous indirections? Maybe Hao’s heart was so weak that it needed such desperate defenses. But did it mean that because he did not feel the need to lie, his heart was strong and healthy?