ZGo and love - 4. Cookie Monster

During high school Luke brought peanut butter cookies daily for the members of the cookie table. Those days of baking three-dozen cookies weekly were long gone, even though his sweet tooth remained. And after his phone call with Hao, he brindled up with the aftertaste of his awkwardness, dabbing him with a vague need for the metallic-tasting peanut butter cookies sold at the front counter.

Before he could stir, Brett informed him that Hao had amended his bargain, demanded the games be memorized in one week. Luke bristled, plucked on his moustache but chose to accept Hao’s viciousness. However, Zoë, red rising through her cheeks, hopped about Luke and demanded why she had to memorize boring stupid games of an old guy. Cindy replied it was so that she could get a better feel for gameplay, to which Zoe grumbled Hao was just a scaredy cat afraid to lose to a little girl.

Her blustering flew past Luke then back to his foggy mind, then his cheeks lifted. “Let’s make it a game between us. If I memorize them, your mom makes me a dozen—two dozen peanut butter cookies. Homemade—I hate the carton stuff. And I make you cookies too if you get them all.”

Zoë’s lips were puckering, the fine line of her brows edging low. “I don’t want cookies. I want an ice-cream cake.”

“Sure, a deal,” Luke said, happy he would not have to reclaim his kitchen from the dusts of the dead. Then he trotted off home, at last pleased but not to smiling, with the long lost pearl of a boon.

Memorizing the games was easy enough. These mechanical exercises had always been his forte like when his elder sister Carly was killed in a car accident. His only chapter in the family tome of grief was locking himself in the bathroom and playing scales, nothing but scales on his cello. Or when he bought twenty different kinds of cheeses and in a one whirlwind of an afternoon made twenty different plates of Mac and Cheese.

In the amber clove of his bedroom, replaying a memorized game on his laptop, Luke heard a groan beyond his shut door. He stiffened, his memory gagging over the twenty plates of mac and cheese, which had failed to please Lisa’s rusty taste buds. The groan, again, trembled through the room. Then a vision unfolded of Lisa propping herself against the front door, cheeks like paper soggy with milk, her eyes tight and steady on his father’s pickup backing away from the driveway for the last time.

Luke squeezed his eyes, tightened and focused for the peaceful wisps that behind the dark void of his eyelids. His heart was rent, his mind astir. But through the raging sounds in his minds, the groan seemed to have solidified into a knock. “Luke, are you in there?”

Luke opened his eyes, waited to a few moments to recognize the orange tongue of his surfboard against the closet.

“Luke, are you there?”

Luke lifted himself off the chair and opened the door. It was Miranda, his house tenant, her face prickly fruit of pink lipstick and large teeth. She said, “Hey, can you watch him about an hour or so? I need to run some errands.” A slender shrub of a human divided from Miranda’s velvet trousers, jellybean eyes, his head a cone of wiry hair. “Thank you so much. I appreciate it.” Already her voice was fluttering from down the corridors.

A door bang ringing through the walls, Luke peered at Jake standing with his mouth agape. Luke flickered at his eyes at the flat nose then the open mouth—a spider could crawl out of its pink cave. He placed one hand on the head and another under the chin and tried to close the jaw shut. The mouth yielded under pressure to a wan close. Luke, satisfied, stood aside, but the mouth fell open. He closed it again, and pleased with mouth seamed shut, returned to his desk. Just as he took a seat, the groan whispered behind his ears, jerking him out of the chair and to glaring at Jake’s squirming face.

His chest was tight, but his mind contorted for the order of reason. Yes, yes, phantasms of a Lisa was long dead … misfiring of neurons… ghosts of the chemical kind. And the kid was shriveling smaller by the minute. Luke flurried to him and stooped over the eyes drowning in a murky sea. Those bronzed pupils could be like Lisa’s …. Suddenly he pulled Jake inside and shut the door purposely and scrambled him over to his bed. Flumping beside the kid, Luke wondered timidly if now perhaps was the time to return Jared Wilkin’s phone call.

***

His buttoned shirt long to his tights, his trousers sleeves wide as timbers, Luke ambled into the go club, buoyed with peanut butter dreams. Sweet feelings coursed his heart; he jostled his head to the baroque cello sounds looping in his head. The café teemed with the sounds of off-key croons and off-kilter go players: Klaus grumbling about his muddy mind, Ling Ling vilipending the lost art of Chinese scoring, Cindy bewailing a game so close, but so lost. Luke was thankful that Albert had stayed put in Irvine

Then Zoë canted in by Luke’s table, the paisley sac of her mother waddling behind her. The light sleeked over Zoë’s cheeks round and ripe with pink pasties. Upon catching her diamond eyes, Luke shuffled a board giddily over the table and then tapped his fingers musically for that palpable scent of cookies.

“I don’t care about playing Hao anymore.” She rounded the seat across him instead bounced by his side and brandished her farded cheeks. “My best friend Brandie painted them. Do you like it?”

Luke was inching with peanut butter need, but he remembered his manners as Lisa would insist: smile and agree. “Yes. The outline of fuchsia and the black … a seven-leaf flower might be more realistic. It’s the Fibonacci—” He could feel preternaturally Lisa pinching the small of his back, then stiffening, said apprehensively, “It seems I win. I memorized all seven games. You owe me two dozen homemade peanut butter cookies.”

“I would have won if I played,” Zoë said.

“But you gave up, so you lost. I’m still owed cookies.”

“I didn’t lose. I just decided not to.” Zoë stamped her feet. “Mom says I don’t have to if I don’t wanna.”

“But an agreement is an agreement. You still owe me peanut butter cookies.”

“WOULD SOMEONE BUY THE BUM A COOKIE?”

Luke jolted to the direction of the resonant bellow. Past the tables seated with plugged-in robots, at the entrance stood Hao. And over the country strums of open mic, an inquisitive noise gathered around his presence rather garishly casual in dress jeans and glimmering gray tshirt. “Hao? Hao? Where have you been… Long time … A teaching game? I need a game review… Looking good!” Crimson shaded his temples, and he trotted away to Monica at the counter, in a pushy air that hinted a day of bottomless coffees and slugabed secretaries.

Amid their soft sounds of pleasantries, whipped-up tones on the misery of law school applications, Luke stared as a weak light touched up the contours of his smile. The wide flat face beamed a look of boyish roguery; and even with the strident lines striating Hao’s temples, he detected nothing of pallid shadows or the damp look of desuetude. A warm feeling seeped Luke’s pores as grisly ideas of Hao were falling away like snowflakes upon a concrete pyre.

Hao, coffee in one hand, the shadow of a precious package in another, strode across the briar of chairs to Luke’s table. Cologne spiced the space between them and floated Luke to the earthy quietude at three in the morning when he would lose himself among the barren downtown warehouses and search for a true spot in the city where the ghosts were still and the sky was the blackest.

Luke shuddered to realize he had been staring into Hao’s eyes for too long. His mother would have barked him to stop, and his father would have laughed in heartening cadences. And seeing now his gaff, he could not quite turn away without rising the mercury of his clumsiness. However, Hao tsk-ed and faced to his right, Cindy donning masculine with her hands in her skinny jeans pockets.

“Looking good, Hao. I love your classy casual look. Never liked those bulky suits anyway,” she said.

Hao’s brows bunched. “How many of the tsumego have you solved?”

Cindy, neck slender in a turtleneck, simpered. “Fifty … serious.”

Hao looked down on Zoë designing a white heart of stones on the board. “At least one person isn’t a lazy tart.”

Zoë hopped off the chair and sang to Jessica drowsy in a book. “Mom, he called me a lazy tart.”

“Don’t worry about it, Honey,” came her soupy voice. “Remember people call you bad names because they are bad and terrible inside.”

Zoe, fortified within the safe thighs of her mother, retorted to Hao, “Mom says you’re a bad person, and I don’t play with bad people.”

Dropping into the Zoë’s old seat, Hao sighed long and hard then leaned into Luke’s inviolable stare. “Not only do you have terrible manners and terrible hair, you harass little girls for cookies?”

Luke began plucking his moustache. “Sir, you crush little girls crudely with demands for seven games in seven days.”

“Crush? Crude? It’s my prerogative to set the terms for a game…”

“Sure, a prerogative. Still mean of you.”

“You just say whatever comes to mind, don’t you?”

“No, no, no, Mom would kill me. If I were to be completely honest, I’d say I prefer your suit and dress shirt from before, not this the tshirt and jeans. The look could be a good idea, Mom liked tshirt and jeans, says it makes her young and perky. Never understood wanting to look young and perky. Maybe you can explain it, you seem want this young and perky look. Never understood even the ideas of clothes. We’re born naked, strangle ourselves up in pants, shirts, dresses, corsets—”

“Shut up,” Hao muttered.

“Sorry, sir. I over-spoke.”

“I’ll make sure to avoid that land mine, next time.” Hao’s eyes flicked over Cindy empurpling then to the hairy gauze over Luke’s face. “Since you were arguing over cookies, I take it you memorized the games.”

“Yes, sir.”

Luke stared into Hao’s eyes slit like needles. His throat tightened. “Am I going to get cookies afterwards?”

“Ai-ya, what are you, a stunted wallaby?” Angrily, Hao whisked the precious package of a cookie onto the table. “There.”

“Two dozen cookies. Homemade. Peanut butter.”

Hao shook head and began unwrapping it. “And now, it’s my mean prerogative to eat this cookie—”

“Wait, wait, see my games first.”

“Sure.” Hao shifted the cookie aside. “Impress me.”

The games flowed: Honinbo Shusai, Kitani Minoru, Sakata Eio, Iwamoto Kaoru ,Fujisawa Hosai. Jared had always teased Luke that the Devil rewired ninety-nine percent of his brain wrong and left him a precious one percent for living and loving. Jared would whisper to him, lips warm against his neck, that bare one percent made him perfect.

Jared’s husky words of perfection were not on Luke’s mind as he laid down his last stone on the last game. He lifted up his eyes to the shadowy shrubs of faces crowded over him, their eyes glinting acridly in their sockets. A glissando of alarm shivered him. His breaths quickened, his eyes hardened into round stones. And a wild thought sowed of the terrible things he had done, killed a sister, a mother, would have killed Stanley Hoyt too as Lisa had sobbingly rebuked him. It had been his fault instigating the altercation against Stanley she said. What did he expect to happen when you ask a six foot four of braided steel to join your table and have a cookie?

His head lowered slackly as his mind seized on Lisa’s face refracted through crags of ire. His fingers dithered crazily against the table. He bled salt. Around him the tight view of bodies and faces, and he peered the bulging cheeks, the lunula row of teeth for the precious shard of an opening, an escape outside to the sylvan of cars and tar. Then he felt his cellphone vibrate in his cotton pocket—three short rhythms warming his right thigh—It shook him back to Hao, across from him, smiling a diadem of stars.

Luke lurched his eyes down to the board, and with his hands, began sweeping disorder over the ordered black and white stones. A soft laugh wafted in from Hao’s side, but it did not tempt Luke to slow down.

“You deserve a thousand cookies.” Hao forwarded the cookie to Luke’s side. “What was your agreement with the child genius again? Two-dozen homemade peanut butter cookies? Sure, I might have that ready for you.”

Luke regarded the disc of sugared goodness, considered the poison invisible in it, then the smile still wide and brilliant on Hao’s face. It feathered him into a pleasant lull that tickled his earlobes.

“Thank you.” Luke held up the cookie, like it was the Eucharist. Good and sweet it was when strangers gave him things, like when idling at the beach, passersby would press dollar bills into his hands or half-eaten sandwiches or Styrofoam packs of greasy orzo.

“It seems, your brain isn’t made of bad hair,” Hao said.

Luke blushed wrathfully, opened up his cookie, nibbled on it. The taste was lacking. In the end homemade was best.

“Next week? you’re bringing the cookies,” Luke asked.

“Before we get to that, we should play a game.” Hao took control of the board. “How many stones do you want? Or do you want to stun me some more with your genius?”

“I have no genius,” Luke grunted. “Go’s hard. I’d take twenty stones if it’s possible.”

“Hard work makes anything easy. At the very least, I can give you lessons if you so desire.” With a melodic air Hao placed nine black handicap stones on the board.

The game commenced. One by one the spectators, who had been awed by Luke’s thesis of seven games, took a seat, stood aside; at last light poured down over the gridded board, and the stone glyphs sheened in the suns of serious thought. Hao’s smile had faded away to a sculpted look of concentration, as he played carefully but quickly. Luke, however, played fitfully, was knocked about in the sewers of plans and strategies, then struck blind with the need to resurrect Hao’s smile. Fast or slow, here or there, his thoughts frayed for anything to see Hao’s eyes flash

Hao, sighing, slipped a stone into the wooden bowl and said, “We’ll stop here.”

“Thank you for the game, sir.”

Luke tossed back the last stone and leaning limply against his chair, he allowed himself to ascend to cookie heights. The taste watering his tongue, he felt content with the expression of his will on the board. He had tried. Couldn’t win, but who would dare win against a god of the game? His fingers sought the ends of his beard, stroked the gritty, natty tips of it, and his soul eased with the shifting moments. The café breathed more freely, more lively the sounds of a violin over the game stones resonating. Perhaps seeking parity to his gentle feeling, he glanced at Hao, who evidently had been studying him. His face was taut, not even a spectre of that elated smile ghosted his face.

The board glared to Luke a massacre of dead groups and failed invasions. Several rungs of manifold ladders crashed within him. He thrust his hands into his oceanic pockets and sniffled noiselessly. His eyes were roving over broken cords of the black and white, fluttering at the punishing finality emblazoned on the board. And poured down his throat now were the shards of his stupidity. His moves had just been pebbles cast to still a storm. And the storm was still spinning its hungry rage over the board, blacker, greedier. It wanted more than pebbles, it wanted everything—he hardened a sweaty fist inside his pocket—everything, his life, his heart, the dry bones of his dead will. His mind shook with bellows, useless, useless in vain, useless like he had been when Lisa railed at him to return her his father.

Her bony face with eyes jellied in their sockets staggered Luke. In the minutes murmuring a restive still, he felt the cellphone buzz against his cold fingers. He softened a little, thinking it was his father’s girlfriend wanting to initiate contact. Certainly won’t be his skeezy Dad. No, not ever. The thoughts whistled high, shrieking, and the storms roiled apace, and he cleaned up hurriedly the board.

“Next week, I’ll be here for to get the cookies,” Luke said, winded then decided it would be last of his visit to this pestilent and abysmal café.

Hao tilted his face in an attempt to pierce the veil of curls over Luke’s eyes. Their heads moved about in the air, for they were unsure of who was seeking whom. Then Hao proceeded to replace the nine black handicap stones onto the board.

“I’ll review the game, then we’ll talk about cookies,” Hao said slyly. Luke’s eyes cracked over Hao’s playful and prideful smile.

Hao’s recall of the game was perfect. Although Luke had memorized seven games previously, he could not remember the moves of the current game because the baleful hydra of speed, tactics, strategy had scattered him. And there was he staring at Hao’s smile, marveling at the kyu-killer’s manicured fingers so light, so graceful on every stone placement.

“I see you have taken up Cherry’s silly habit of blitz games,” Hao said sternly, “Play fast. Lose fast. Quick to decisions, blind to whole board judgment.”

“I get impatient,” Luke defended.

“Impatience makes for bad habits.”

“You didn’t seem to think about your moves at all.”

“Did my moves look thoughtless?”

“You, sir, are a master of the game,” Luke said with the reverence of a humbled acolyte.

“A master? That’s silly thinking. It isn’t magic or genius. It is just work. While my peers played with girls, I spent the better of my youth studying go.” Hao played through some more sequences with a bitter hard rhythm. “And you play one or two moves of inspiration, but the rest are… hopesugi, insulting really.” Talent! That oft-quoted word from dull mothers to their snort-faced Johnnies. He plucked his beard and counted the twitches of Hao’s lower eyelids.

“Hopesugi?”

“Hopesugi like tesugi, hopeful play instead of skillful play,” Hao said.

As the silliness of pun dawned on Luke, he could do no more than neigh indistinctly. But in the corner of his eye, he saw Ted, skinny tie over buttoned-up shirt, guiding a lithe Miriam to a sepia-toned alcove. Sounds snagged in Luke’s throat.

“Now you’re done ogling women, shall we get back to the review?” The sigmoid lips of irritation hardened Hao’s countenance, and Luke snatched a hair from his moustache. Hao continued, “You need to learn basic shape to progress.”

“Everyone talks about shape. Meaningless to me.”

Hao stuck hand to chin, nibbled at his fingertips. “There is a strong shape and weak shape. Strong shape leads to live strong groups that can’t be easily cut apart. Weak shape leads to this—disaster.” He tossed a disdainful glance upon their game then proceeded to dilate a lecture to his audience of one.

Luke’s attentions scrambled over the walls and pillars of the café, Ling Ling’s pearly nose, the painting could be of a buxom woman or an infirmed cow, and in the nexus of high chairs, high tables, and cream light, Ted and Miriam kissing through a cannoli. Tinnitus shredded Luke’s ears with the tortuous syllables, one-space jump, two-space jump, the knight’s move, the long knight’s move, the iron pillar, the diagonal extension. Too much information. Too much boring information in a Chinese accent. And when would he get his cookies?

“I know this already,” Luke blurted.

“Do you? How do you cut the knight’s move connection?”

Luke felt the question unfair. If he wanted theory and philosophy, he would stick with his chess, not go. He played for the exhilaration of hard striking sounds puncturing his torpidity, the daze of thoughts going miles per minute over haphazard plans for victory. Go was useful and efficacious only for procrastination.

“Go isn’t my sort of thing,” Luke concluded as he gathered the stones into their respective bowls. The plastic sounds of pebbles tinkling washed over sighs of resignation. Demanding he be more precise, more focused, more deliberate for victory would require him to come off months of lethargy.

Hao cast his glance to the concrete ground flecked with yellow paint. “Disappointing.”

“I play only for fun.” Luke clasped lids on the bowls and pushed them aside.

“Losing is fun?”

“The process is fun.”

“The process of losing is fun?” There was Hao again swaying his head at Luke to catch a glimpse of his eyes.

Luke leaned back in his chair and combed irately through his beard.

“Yes or no, losing is fun?” Hao sounded more hurt than combative. His eyes thinned to tight blades of black.

He did not like Hao’s face then again did not like the growing chance of returning home without a future of two-dozen cookies. Luke shifted in his seat and strained for the limpid notes from beyond the shadowy dais, then he saw Ted and Miriam leave the café hand-in-hand, lovingly cannoli-stuffed. Luke looked back, his senses falling, over the table, the heavy silver watch strapped to Hao’s left wrist, and the forearm itself an island of corporeality in the gridded stone sea.

Lips protruding, Hao leaned in. “Admit it, you hate losing.”

Luke stared at the affront, measured himself some composure. The sun and the moon had since set in his life. It would take more than childish jabs at his ego to prop the heavens in place again.

Hao’s cheeks rounded and reddened a tint, and a smile was forming. “Here I’ll make you a deal. You give me effort, and I’ll teach you. For free too. Once upon a time, people paid me fifty bucks an hour for lessons.” The voice tinkled like a slot machine clinks.

“Thank you for the offer sir, but I can’t give you what you want.”

“Well then,” Hao said ruefully, “We can forget this business of cookies.”

“Are you breaking you promise?”

“I never promised.”

“You said—”

“I say many things.” Hao smirked. “How about this, I’ll give you your cookies after two months of effort?” Luke glared. “I’m a lawyer. I’m supposed to be a vicious bastard.”

Luke exhaled to the world being a cold dark place yet again. “You won’t keep your promise anyway.”

“Look I’ll get you cookies every week. You just give me effort, and in no time, you’ll be one dan…” Luke twirled his moustache as he allowed himself to feel the glow of being one dan. Hao added, his eyes glancing over his black thick hair, “Doesn’t hurt if you get a proper shave. At the very least those … tresses need to go.”

Luke resettled himself into the uneasy fact of Hao being gay. It might explain his probing demeanor. And with also uneasy clarity, Luke recalled Trent blustering on greasy old queens and their predilection to pederasty, and even to Lisa’s pallid shock, boomed he had the right to shoot any boyfriends of his five years too old. Luke’s heart drained of blood as he could not stop staring at Hao’s unreadable eyes.

“Are you really a bum?” Hao asked. “I’ll even throw in dinner too. Great, now I’m paying you to take my lessons.” He threw back a snigger that Luke found unnervingly mysterious.

Luke dropped a white stone into its bowl then picked up a black stone. Murmurs grew heady and dissonant with the arrival of mohawked girls, all the while Luke picked and dropped stones, asking himself just how much he cared for cookies and go. However much he liked the thought of being proficient, the thought of Hao hounding him to brilliance with a lupine zeal was already scouring at his chest. He could barely wake up to go school as it were.

Besides, nobody he cared to impress knew about Go. Was there even anyone he wanted to impress? But the imagined acclaim of being a dan-level player worked its tendrils of magic, resurrecting the ego that life had since pounded to bits. And there was reason seeping in with the magic and through Luke’s defenses of dullness, and crowning all, that raillery animating Hao glossing up his cheeks and chin…

“All right,” Luke said with a hopeful surrender, “I don’t need dinner or cookies. I’ll pay ten dollars an hour for your time.”

“And you promise to do everything I tell you?” Hao had interlaced fingers on the table now, his lower eyelids rather twitchy.

“Everything go-related, yes.”

Hao held a smile, unfazed. “And we have a deal.” He fished for the wallet in his back pocket and the produced a business card and before handing it to him, said, “In spite of your bad hair, I can respect you disdaining easy charity… commendable, maybe charming …. Here’s my business card just in case. Right, you already have my cell number.”

Nodding graciously, Luke fingered its stark gold lettering, 'Hao Chen-Li. Senior Partner at Hodgson and Associates. Attorney at Law.' His eyes scaled back to Hao, down those shoulders narrow, maybe stiff under the tight tshirt, and the slight hump of his biceps underneath the soft short sleeves. He thought Hao looked risible, ridiculous even, but perhaps that was the required fare he had been missing all along to life’s journey, the risible and the ridiculous.