ZGo and love - 2. Go against Ghosts

As they say in go, a rich man does not pick quarrels. But what is a rich man to do when his house is full of ghosts? An attack of prayers and holy water against the invasion might be too quarrelsome; a more pacifist solution might be a gun to the head or the more cathartic head bashing against a tree. These options looked harrowing to Luke Collier, not because dying was harrowing, but because he was a lazy fucktard. Actually he would object to ‘fucktard’ because his mother Lisa loathed foul language. All the same, bashing your head against a tree required as dedicated an effort as acquiring the permits and the gun, barricading yourself inside the barren bedroom of yours, and pulling the trigger. Still he had a problem. There were ghosts encamped in his house, there were ghosts swimming in his head, there were ghosts walking alongside him as he sallied the halls of the math and sciences building.

Various posters were thumbtacked to the cushioned walls: Uncle Sam wants YOU, Mega Calculus and Physics tutoring, Transfer to a UC today. Amongst the students filling the halls, ears plugged in, baggy jeans, skinny jeans, he was the lone pillar of hair plodding beside a bulleting board. Through his mane black, pod-like over his shoulders, a moan wormed its way queasily into his skull, “Come back, come back.” He had enough presence of mind not to spin around and punch out the nearest person to his left. Lights cracked wildly over his eyes. His gait became more rigid, almost goose-stepping but with his arms hard bound to his sides. The moan gained in pitch and acridity, “Your mac and cheese will me kill faster than the cancer will … Close the damn curtains.” Lisa’s voice was the wind howling around sandstone and eroding them away to dumb stumps. By the time he arrived at front desk, he was a pale, damp, wheezing thing languishing against the counter.

The attendant, baggy tshirt and bespectacled, took in the tall tree of hair, with an air of professional aloofness. She took a blue form from him then returned with a barrage of stiff typing at the computer. Luke blinked with concentrated effort as he tried to construe the clicks, her popping noises as a soothing balm.

“You’re set to go. The physics class is dropped,” she said.

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“Dear God, don’t call me ma’am. How old do you think I am?”

He would learn that cheeks crusted with foundation and glossy waxy lips did not indicate old enough to called ma’am. But what would his mother say? He was teeth-grittingly familiar of her military insistence on politeness, then again Lisa was dead, ashes in a kitschy urn dead. His senses sloshing wildly, he turned away stiffly. But Ted was behind him, and his Nordic eyes, and his boyish gleam, and those large veined hands holding the blue rectangle of the drop form. They both shared a smile in youthful solidarity over their sloth. But something brown and feminine shaped by Ted’s side—Miriam, Miriam with bulging amber eyes.

Luke’s smile leaked into a frown, and he sidestepped him to attend to the ghosts in his head.

“I remember you. You’d doze off during physics,” Ted called out.

Luke had to stop and brave him with a smile. Warmth flushed behind his ears on the delightful thought of Ted of noticing him, but this warmth hardened into a gelid crust. Of course people would notice him and his fashion choices better suited to Jesus Christ.

“Physics was beyond me,” Luke said.

“Tell me about it. No engineering for me now.”

No plans for medical school in the foreseeable future for Luke either, but he did not feel like sharing that. Sharing was akin to recognizing the bluntness of his ambition or that he had had plans for medical school to become the neurosurgeon that could have cured Lisa.

Driving to the gas station, stuck behind a big blue bus, Luke realized his Fridays were now free. He could sleep all day or drive to Griffith Park and dive off a lucky ledge—one that can be easily hiked. The bus had crossed the intersection, and the light had turned yellow. His foot brushing against the accelerator, he hesitated, stop or go, stop or gun it. Then Lisa’s voice came upon him, splintering through his eardrums with “Where is he? Where is HE?” He seized, smashing through the pedal as the light turned red then slamming to a halt before the blue wall of the bus.

Hands tight over the steering wheel, he marveled at the golden sheet of light reflecting of the storefronts. He could trace the oblique rays back over the stucco, box-like roofs, through the grille of transmission wires, and then he imagined, to a sweltering spot in the east, that sun stupidly smiling over all. To the west where grimy outlines were shearing upwards through the sky was the ocean. The ocean, he mused, nodding and chuckling, there was yet another way to defeat ghosts.

***

In the meantime, Luke played go. Midnights were wasted away on a thousand blitz games on the online go servers. He sped to lose a thousand games against the double-digit low-ranked kyu players, held his own against the single digit kyus, wasted the time of dan-level players. He came to the go club every week, twice a week. The atmosphere differed little from week to week: Brett herding newcomers, Cindy sighing about male players being such klutzes, Sean bemoaning his tight college schedule of booze and screenwriting, Luke ordering the same lemonade and three-inch diameter peanut butter cookie.

This week, he was seated before little Zoe, wagging the Go tail, play me, play me. She played quickly, with nary a thought or a twist of caution on her little face. A good sound to Luke it was, the chaos of stones slap-slap, slap-slap. It helped a little against the winds eroding away his skull.

Albert stood by Luke’s game, shielding the in fall of light on the table. “Wow, that’s you Luke? I didn’t recognize you,” he said cheerily, to which Luke lifted from the cloud of the game to the cloud of the face above crowned with sandy brown curls.

Nope, Luke couldn’t recall who he was.

Albert laughed shakily, sat down, and rested his pointed chin over the head rail. “These kid players are at the OC club, Asians kids. They play mean go. They play fast and win fast—You remember Dawn? She’s getting married. Who gets married at nineteen?”

Luke gave a turn of the head and smiled as Lisa would pinch him to do when she felt he was being weird around people again. He pulled on his long beard, not un-roughly, as his mind sauntered the halls of high school. Perhaps Albert was the skinhead who kept punching lockers or the chubby boy who waffled on poison toads. Just another human he must have seen everyday in high school, passed by everyday, like the front entrance gargoyle, of which he only realized its chirped nose on graduation day. The puzzle of Albert was ultimately uninteresting and making him drowsy, and with that, he concentrated on slapping stones.

“New York must be real nice. What are you in town for anyway?” His voice shaded with an unsteady, unsettling thrill that did not bother Luke as much as the seeming fact of their acquaintance. “How’s Columbia?”

It was undeniable the man did know him. Luke held back his black stone in between his fingers and held still against the joy of the day when he palmed over the thick mail packet from Columbia University. His heart was high with the birds soaring in the sky but then crashed back to the prison of his chest when he espied the velvet turban of Lisa stepping out of the car.

The stone was quite heavy now. His fingers trembled slightly as his vision tumbled over the waterfalls of black and white on the board. And his lapse in speed was visibly irritating Zoe. She moored over the flowery cover of the table and rubbernecked impatiently over to the next table where another game was unfolding.

He blurted, “I passed over Columbia. Taking classes at the commu—”

“Oh,” Albert said like he at last caught the gist of a joke and feeling vain about it. “Yeah, Columbia’s expensive… I’m happy at UC Irvine. Mom does my laundry every weekend … Gotta like in-state tuition… Do you know how much Jason is paying just to go to Middlebury? I swear the college loan business is a racket. You can’t even discharge the loans on bankruptcy. It’s a good thing you passed over Columbia—”

Luke smacked his stone on the board. Zoe shuddered back to attention. Her brown eyes swept over the board then quivered on the spot where he had just played. A light darting through her eyes, she answered swiftly. Luke replied just as ferociously, but then she slowed, releasing her egg hands flat over the table, glared at him and back to the game. With a shrug, she subsequently proceeded to kill a group of his.

“She caught you in a snapback,” Albert said consolingly, “Just a newbie mistake.”

Luke, playing with his beard, was moored with the swiftness of the loss. Then Zoe raised an eye to him, and her mouth curled inward as he plucked and pulled on the wiry black hairs.

“You’re creepy, and you suck,” she declared, taking off his stones for her own.

“Hey, hey, that isn’t nice to Luke.” Cindy came out of a smattering cloud of spectators. “We are all nice to each other in this club. And that includes you.”

The raspy serious of Cindy’s tone seemed to be curdling Zoe as she puckered her mouth and twisted her eyes at Luke, who was glaring at her evilly. Zoe dumped the final stone, huffing a great wall of release.

“I’m not playing anymore.” She said louder now, “Where’s Hao? I came to beat Hao.”

“You won’t be playing Hao, if you aren’t going to be nice to Luke,” Cindy said.

“Says who?” Zoe leapt away and soon was flapping over the bent tree of her mother at a nearby table. There commenced the piercing tones, tired tones, entreaties to calm down, threats to go home, and then the muffled tones of “But I want to beat Hao…”

Albert said, “I was hoping to see him tonight. We’re supposed to be organizing a tournament.”

And where was Hao? No one seemed to have seen Hao in four weeks since Sensei’s visit. Luke himself had been meaning to talk to him, not about go or littering, but to ask about the miasma of hurt that clung to him, reminding him so hauntingly of Lisa.

“He comes by rarely?” Luke asked Cindy.

“Now he seemed to have dropped off the face of the planet.”

“I hope nothing serious is going on with him,” Luke said warily.

“With Hao?” Scoffing, she took a seat across from Luke, and her bobbed hair swinging forward, as she leaned into him to give the good gossip. “He’s as grouchy as a barracuda. So damn anal about go, he would bite onto your hand and never let go.” Albert neighed something of an agreeing laughter as Cindy scooted back stoically against the chair probably in a ruse for discretion. “Nah. Probably just work. Being a big shot lawyer is a lot of work.”

They talked some more about Hao, how he liked flicking the heads of people not paying attention to the game, how he ordered sixty-year old Brett to shut up and bring him coffee just so he could “think” better, how during the go party in his mansion in Bel Air, his partner would mischievously blow air over his ears to distract him from his game.

“I swear I thought Hao was going to chop Ricardo’s head right off,” Albert asserted jocularly.

“But it was kind of cute. He was all red and tight, and then Ricardo steals a kiss off him,” Cindy said.

“He’s gay,” Luke said to himself, not too quietly.

“Ricardo made this awesome fish tacos at the party.” A smile expanded warmly over her face. “Brett,” she called out, “We have to make him host another party.”

Brett’s grey head whipped from above a dome of go pedants philosophizing. “And give him another heart attack? He only agreed to that party because he lost a bet.”

Their strums of nostalgia hardly colored Luke and could not paint over the disconsolate impression he had already of Hao. What he remembered was of abysmal uncertainty and horrific anguish, and it frightened him of the harrowing task of adulthood. When you became an adult, joy would not be granted to you, nor understanding, contentment, certainly not those mysterious clues on how to live. The uncertainty would remain, the fundamental unease, and those pesky questions would not be answered. You just became older.

He looked over the linoleum-covered tables for Zoe, eyes glisteningly red, nestled against her mother’s massive thighs. His father’s girlfriend had a daughter who might be as old as Zoe. Of her age he was uncertain or whether she had flared bangs like Zoe’s or the little slip of her nose. Either way, lurking over their fragile heads was the same tragedy that awaited all men.

Zoe caught his gaze and held with the swishing of her eyes before marching over to his side. Cindy, Albert, stirred scant attention to her or the glossy mop of light on her head. Luke preferred to count the zipper teeth on Albert’s fly peeking through the chair rail.

Zoe implanted herself in between Luke and Albert. “I’m sorry for saying that you suck.”

“You also called him creepy,” Cindy said.

“I’m sorry, ok?” Zoe’s face contorted wrinkly and squirmy. “Now can I play Hao?”

“Well Cindy, do you have his number?” Luke asked. “She really wants her rematch.”