ZGo and love - 5. Rasputin, Rasputin!

The Saturday mornings begins as Luke crawls out of his bed at 8:20 am, stare at the mist and daze on his bathroom mirror for five minutes, then solve the mystery of toothpaste and toothbrush, and slap on clothes from a tilting pile of mephitic smells. At 8:40 he is figuring out that keys fit into the ignition. And then the five-mile drive to the Cheese and Mints Café is a freely meandering slog.

Hao will have been waiting for at least fifteen minutes at the settee installed on the outside front wall of the café. A hand cradles a tea; the other swings a tin of homemade cookies. The whites of his eyes slit narrow, donning him a contemplative but languorous stare at the city trash can to his right. Cars drive by with a staccato cadence. To his left the door of the cafe swings open, closed, open to the stuttering stream of customers too cheery for his droopy mood. He greets the bag lady with a shopping cart, who is sifting through trash for recyclables. A conversation ensues on the ethics and economics of shopping cart theft. The lady replies vociferously with the market tribulations of the recycling business.

Perhaps it is 8:58 or 8:59 am when Hao turns away from the yellowed and mottled face of the bag lady, and sees straggling down the slope of the street Luke, a brittle reed in the wind of cars, the person he had been and successfully evaded when he was younger. And Luke sees down at the bottom, not the heavy glint round his left wrist or the skull shirt clinging to the torso scrawny and sickly, but a man who has evaded the Furies.

When they meet, Hao asks dejectedly, “Still with the hair?”

Luke opens the door; bells tinkle, “After you, old sir.”

“Forty is not old. Fifty is old.”

“I am not old!” The bag lady interjects.

Hao politely revises his age estimate of what is old, but the lady’s hotness does not subside, “I am not old!”

Luke yawns, his curly hair like a dead weight over his face. “Whatever you say, sir.”

They stand at the counter. A rainbow rack of specialties teas, Oolong, Puer-eh, Dragon Well. The cranks and the squishes of the coffee maker. The gingery scent layering and weaving with the hungry smell of strawberry muffins.

“Well, Luke how are you doing this morning?” Hao asks.

“Do you want the long version or the short version?”

Hao grimaces. “The short version.”

Luke bites down on his lip and prepares himself. “I’m fine sir. And how are you doing today?”

Hao looks a shade of scarlet. “All right… just give me the long version.” He immediately regrets asking.

“There was a truck in the clouds today, obviously unreal, just condensed water formations that my brain seeking order in the randomness, deemed a truck. I would not care for these cloud exercises, but Mom says you need to strengthen your imagination. Well yesterday, I saw an urn, the other day, a cookie, can’t be a peanut butter cookie obviously. A cookie made of mist... Probably won’t like that the taste of that. I remember seeing two giant rooks and a bishop and then a suit, Mom would probably say that I’m seeing what I want see. But I did not want to see a truck today—”

“I think I get the idea.”

“Do you really?” Luke’s face is like a tiger’s. “Are you just saying that because you’re bored or irritated or angry or hurt—”

“Would you like a breakfast croissant or muffin?” Hao is hopeful for a good answer, but Luke clears his throat for too long and with a hard mouth, looks for a trace of softness in Hao’s eyes. He wants to order lemonade with extra sugar, but Hao has banned Monica from serving him that. Shiftily, he refuses Hao’s offer. Then he sees in the adjacent room, among the slinking rows of empty tables, a table already set with a board and two stones. He wonders how long Hao has been waiting or how in the name of photons and neutrons Hao can be proud of waking up at four am everyday. But the curiosities seep away after Hao swings the cookie tin before his ticking eyes.

“If you’re good, you get to have this after your lesson,” Hao says.

Luke stares at Hao for a good minute then resigns himself to the seat, sets up the handicap stones, and plunges into an abyss of concentration.

Hao again asks, “You looked wasting. Could use breakfast, a ham and cheese croissant, no?”

Another refusal.

While Hao is inured to the impression of Luke being obstinately impish, Luke is divided. It strikes him week after week that underneath his shady air, Hao is probably a caretaker in his personal life. The thought upsets Luke more than it dulls him. It frightens him as he feels himself slide towards Hao’s charm.

Lessons continue unabated with a quick check on the life and death problems Luke is to have solved during the week, a review of the serious games he should have played every day, a replay of the first hundred moves of a pro-game he should have memorized that week.

The drones of the Narcotic’s Anonymous meeting about failed hopes and failed prayers to a higher power filter from an adjoining room. A vast window overlooks the teacher-student pair where one can see the metro growl to a stop every twenty minutes. The paintings of ephebic imaginations rattle against the wood paneling in complaint. And one-hour later, members of the narcotic’s anonymous scatter out the back door, their hands reach for cigarettes and lighters—burnt offerings to the gods of continence and need. Amidst their grunts, the slapping of sandals against the concrete floor and the tables and chair scuffling, two men sit hunched in thought, one anxious, the other bored, over a board of stars.

***

A white stone cleft in between his forefinger and middle finger, Luke’s right hand curved high into the air, hard, graceful like a ballerina’s arched back. His lips were taut. His eyes were unblinking over the board—beady cloud of white stones. The stillness of his pose concealed turbulent thoughts. The game was difficult. Hao had made him play a version of go where both players used the same color. This was, he claimed, to help Luke with visualization.

The air was February cold, the sky white and thick. Inside, on their board, everywhere was white and the brown of wood and the black of gridlines. Nowhere was a clear direction of play. Sequences played and replayed in Luke's mind, clashed against the wrong colors on the board, melted into the white confusion of chaos. But there was no chaos, just stones on board circling and clumping to intentional order. All he had to do was keep calm and see the entire board with its correct colors in his mind’s eyes. Simple, right?

Luke slid carefully a move. Hao, with a glance and two nods up down the board, tossed a move then returned to smiling crookedly, eyes lopsided, at his blackberry. Luke would have been happy not to know that as he was sweating over a game, Hao was thumbing through sex engagements for the evening. TheAssManCometh666 aka Jamal Williams had deemed the webcam video featuring a shirtless Hao worthy and initiated a rendez-vous, but it would be all the way in Compton. Hao could go for the closer, safer but diminutive David Wang who insisted he was Taiwanese NOT CHINESE. But the Compton date had a rounder butt, and if Hao disregarded his twisty-looking ear lobes, his side profile traced a lovely ebony line of hardness and suppleness.

Possibilities of the evening bloomed in Hao’s mind, and the definite chance try someone has big as Jamal. Ricardo’s rakish comments on his size still had their sting. Hao remembered the evening pelted with rain and tremulous with Ricardo’s jests when he broke down and measured his length—it was one-eight of an inch smaller than the average.

Directions to Compton from Santa Monica looked straightforward, but unsettling fast plans were television images of gang-sundered Compton, big black men with trousers falling of their rump, big black men and whooping police sirens. He hiccupped; perhaps he should reconsider.

“Have you been to Compton?” Hao said as if talking would make Luke play faster.

“Driven around there a bit …”

“Doing what?” Hao cried.

“Driving around.”

Luke’s tone shamed Hao a little. He re-suited himself and asserted the new Hao who would try dangerous and exciting things. The thought plumping him with pride, he added dryly, “I have a date in Compton. It should be interesting.”

The ledge of Luke’s massive brows inched upward. “Are you cheating on your partner, sir?”

Hao was appalled; his mind scrambled with words. “I’m not cheating… Ricardo and I have an arrangement… Monogamy doesn’t work for everybody, you know.” Hao cried a little inside as he was parroting the same words Ricardo had said to him two years ago.

“You surprise me, sir. I didn’t think you were the sort who subscribes to polyamoury.”

“We’re all surprisingly in little ways,” Hao’s tone was feathery, and his cheeks were tinted an uglier shade of crimson. The last few weeks of Luke never smiling, never laughing, blinkering embarrassment at his reclaiming the lost highs of a college idiot riffled through Hao with distressing speed. Hao could not wink at his new self without the side looks of sheepishness at Luke. However, he had long accepted Luke as sort of household god, like Zao Jun the Kitchen God, to which you had to give regular offerings of inconsequential cookies or your peace would always be skewed awry.

Hao descended to scowling at the rice hat of teeming black curls, the contours of lips eaten up by a wooly sludge. Smiles, frowns, pouts were all hidden in the thick beard. Humanity was left to be discerned from the smearing and rounding of the eyes or the tightening and flattening of cheeks or the hands, hairless, drumming fingers against the armrest. The contrast of the fresh bareness of his hands compared with the wild face was more confounding. Perhaps even more confounding was the irrefragable truth of a youth man who had elated him with the magnificent recall of seven games of his go hero

With a snigger Hao steeled himself against a fascination driven by curiosity, and not physical attraction. The old Hao would be concerned, perhaps paternally so. The new Hao should be aloof, charmingly aloof.

“You take too long to play. I have nothing but your giant hair to look at,” Hao said sharply.

Luke plopped down his move.

The board was a rectangle of tattered white. Hao had lost track of the colors, so he closed his eyes and replayed them mentally. Stone clicked after stone into place, sparse areas were filled into frameworks of solid territory. And there, Luke’s black group, a trailing dragon, more clumpy than spacy with territory, darting across the board. The dragon was kinked at the waist—a confluence where its two halves met, a weak point, a point to probe.

But where had Luke played? An ill-thought invasion. The stone would die a gory death. More painful for Hao, for he would have to put up with the desperate ludicrous moves to save the stone. He could ignore it and play elsewhere and lose at most ten points while cutting apart the dragon and killing both groups would cost Luke the game.

“You think a great deal and still play useless moves,” Hao concluded with a blasé flick of the eyes.

Luke flattened back against his chair and headed Hao a dark glare.

The testiness was surprising for the cheeky runt. Hao sat bemused with a sense of déjà vu. Ricardo was testy in the mornings, too testy to sit for a long time and contemplate the black and white nothings of Go. And Ricardo still needed to get back to him to discuss the particulars about their house.

Resentment at the unresponsive Ricardo brewed as did the combativeness of Luke’s glare, but Hao sipped his tea for one moment and a longer moment and threw his head towards the window and thought about taking the bus to Compton.

“Your impatience ruins my concentration,” Luke said.

“Now that young man is a cop-out.”

“What is meant by cop-out?”

“Your ability to concentrate has nothing do with me. You should be able to concentrate through an earthquake as far as I’m concerned.”

“I see by cop-out, you mean self-serving, warrantless excuse.” Luke nodded to himself an appreciation of deeper knowledge. “Interesting word.”

Hao stared into hairy blur for Luke’s eyes, was perhaps daintily tickled by the seeming fragile sincerity, but was more puzzled as to its source. However, critical gears spun and veered him off fascination to a hard verdict, ‘Luke was an incarnation of Rasputin,’ and giddily hot with the assertion, he tossed back the stone Luke had played. “Play something else. I’ll let you even go back to playing with black.”

“I don’t need to,” Luke said.

Hao concurred. Rasputin that he was, Luke was a rock of concentration, not a boring man at all, albeit an aggressively unattractive pinecone.

Luke limped a white stone onto the board. “This seems better.”

Yes, it was so much better. Hao held onto his chair, at the cusp of a happy urge to leap across the table and ruffle the head of his masterful dutiful student. But the hair …

“What’s wrong with a proper shave and haircut? I didn’t think women went for that sort of look.”

“Since I don’t care for women, I think I’m well.”

“Even if you’re monkish or gay, especially if you’re gay, you’d still need to present your best—” Hao glared coldly at the dark spot for eyes. “Are you gay?”

“Yes?”

There, youthful indifference, youthful priggishness, the usual combination still hurtful and prickly to Hao's new self; chest hot, he had to ask, “You are normal?”

Luke twisted the ends of his moustache. “Normal depends on your distribution, no? A distribution centered in Gujurat, India might find me extremely simple. Out here in Los Angeles, normal is a tweaked out bonobo monkey, who would find twenty-one year old virgin the strangest specimen from the Antarctic. But these things are matter of distribution, place, and time. I think I was going to—”

“You are twenty-one and still a virgin?”

Luke weaseled glances over Hao’s head then bent his face over a white glove of his hand. The hair, like a corrugated roof, shielded his eyes and cheeks. “We should finish this game.”

There again, the pinecone chiding him on his new avocation. Hao felt flagellated. But such feelings one sought to suppress or blot out rather than tease out and examine, so the feeling waned and was pushed aside for the heat of domination to reign. He would beat the kid.

“What shall I kill next,” Hao said, drywashing his hands, glaring over the board. The thinking only lasted a glance. The game was his.