ZGo and love - 6. There's no love on the go board.

Hao’s house was shaped like a displaced Rubik’s cube—unevenly stacked boxes of viridian glass. Something more traditional looking, perhaps an old Victorian in the West Adams district would have suited him better. Its unshapely design rebelled against Hao’s immigrant notions of fitting in.

However, Ricardo overrode his objections. To him the house proclaimed his escape from the midnight lullabies of rogue ice cream trucks, the stucco constructions of bullet holes and piss yellow, and had arrived to his America dream

Still the house ended up being partly Hao’s choice. Ricardo had wanted an even more absurd beach castle in Malibu, but its cliff views of the ocean Hao deemed ghastly. The waves rolled forth blue, insistent as advancing battering rams, inescapable reminders of his failing: he did not know how to swim.

For seven years, Hao never dared to wade in the shallow section of the swimming pool in his house. He did not even dip his toes despite Ricardo’s jeers to jump in and let nature take over. But Ricardo was gone; four months now and the emptiness felt more and more palatial. He awoke to the pale sun in the window, the titanium ring on bedside table, and the cold emptiness that smoothed over half of the king-sized bed. Hao was given to tense stares at the glass doors that opened to the pool area. How could he aspire to be the flaming libertine or the Mandarin asshole if he could drown in four feet of water? Intrepid, Hao arranged for a swim instructor to coax him out of the forty year old notions of gravity, bipedality, and the incongruity of man and fish.

As Hao would not do with the possibility of masculine brutishness stubbing his fragile efforts, he chose the buxom Edith Payson to teach him. Her presence rounded a matronly image of tenderness and placidity. Her crow’s feet made her look like she was permanently squinting.

One such Sunday lesson, a breeze, from the open space of Eucalyptus and sycamores, blew piney scents and brown seeds into the swimming pool area. Sunlight glanced off the cerulean awning hanging over the pool deck. Under its lively blue glow Hao, wearing swimming trunks, paced barefoot the floor mosaiced in quartz. For two weeks he had practiced blowing bubbles while being submerged underwater. Today, Edith promised a lesson in floating.

A smiling figure stepped out of a shadowed passageway behind which the dressing room was located—Edith in a black shapely swimsuit. Hao juddered at her soft eyes, then clenched his fists, and asserted boldness and fortuitous favor. He followed her to the shallow end of the pool.

“Cold?” Edith asked.

“Just right.” Hao tensed through a shiver.

“Ready to float?” Her tone was kindly, and a smile curved wide as if to support her brown bob.

A Eucalyptus leaf was floating by Hao’s side. He watched it curving and uncurving over the hills and vales of water eddies. It floated just like babies or pencils floated. Fish floated too—dead ones floated. Non-floaters included Ricardo’s Our Lady of Guadalupe candles or the bronze fat Buddha on his desk. And there was the troubling third branch of undecipherables. Did God float? If he is infinite in spirit and in space, was it a logical possibility for God to float in water? Was this an oxymoron?

As Hao tried to divide divine metaphysics, he became increasingly aware of the pool floor, its solidity, its integrity, which gave way to a sense of upward pressure on his feet. His toes curled tighter to the ground for his dear life.

He dawned to the wet warmth of Edith’s arm around his back and her voice wet and gentle in his ears. “It’s all right. Just let go of your leg… I got you.”

Hao wiped his face and saw death spreading wide over the pool breathing blue and hungry. In some tiny corner of himself, he felt ridiculous. A man of his success, braving America and its corporate heights and braving the wilds of Compton for sex, should be able to let go off his damn legs and float.

But the Compton affair could have been a disaster. He remembered he had barely lasted ten minutes on the first bus to Compton before getting off, panicked and disoriented. He returned to his car and called Jamal and pleaded mea culpa and suggested a lovely dinner in West Hollywood the next week. A curt, “Forget it,” and the beep of a disconnected line came the reply. Hao had begun to slide towards catatonia, voices demanding he do something: drive, take the bus, walk, just be something other than the staid old Hao. Tremblingly, he called again, reconfirmed the evening plans, and drove to Compton. When Hao arrived, Jamal promptly asked for a ride to Long Beach. The man claimed to be a twenty-seven year old student at Cal. State Long Beach. But all’s well that ends well. Hao was magnificently fellated as a reward for chauffeuring, enduring a conversation about a faceless but presumably famous singer.

This blowjob Hao was now recalling in liquid detail while Edith commandeered his right hand, cooing, “Let go. I promise, you won’t drown.”

Her hands morphed into Jamal’s hands soothing his afterglow. The water became his feet, melded into his legs, and stretched out an extension of his body. His toes loosened, feet lifted off the ground, legs buoyed upwards. His body elevated.

“There you are,” she said.

And he was floating. The water line tickled the soles of his feet. He panted forcefully and pushed away thoughts of dead bodies floating in pools, or the dread strumming in his heart. Slowly, the panting cooled, and unease fluttered upwards to the sky—so blue, so full of popcorn clouds.

This was nature taking over. This was what Ricardo had so often chided him about. Along with the ripples stroking the sides of his chest, a light ruefulness came over him. He should have learned this ten years ago, twenty years ago. What had he been so preoccupied with all these years?

A sudden movement of water currents against his cheeks drew his attention to Edith smiling and floating by him.

“Stand up, and we try again,” Her voice sounded muffled in his waterlogged ears.

Hao quickened and his hands grabbed fistfuls of water. His senses defaulted for a feeling of secure ground, which caused his legs to lash out into the water. The actions were too jerky, and in an instant his face had slipped underwater. The pool tiles simmered bluely geometric, graded into a darker green, and wavered into a dizzying grey. In one moment all was black and tight. Something catastrophic lodged into his mind. A worm of terror wiggled up the squeezing throat and stung his nostrils with chlorine. This was also nature taking over. Hao thrashed against the waters, flailing his arms, and clawed for a vain transmutation of water into air.

Edith clasped her thick arms around him and propped him up against the corner wall.

“It’s all right, you just need to relax.”

Momentarily, Hao felt her embrace secure and welcome. But as his back sagged into her thick mammaries and the fatty flag of her arm barred against his chest, her touch no longer felt soothing but alien. The whiff of an herbal scent glided above the soggy press of her cheek to his cheek. He pulled aside and, looking down on the boundary between water and wall, leaned on the pool ledge. He mulled over the words used commonly express gratitude. Words balled up in his throat, rolled on his tongue. In one furtive glance, the profile of matronly competence had morphed into an upright splat of fat and flesh. The woman was privy to his ‘loco’ moment as Ricardo would say.

“I apologize. I was unbalanced,” Hao said testily.

“No problem. Different people take to water differently.”

Was that it, an aspect of difference? Hao thought, looking to the rack of towels by the glass sliding doors leading to a lounging room. He climbed out of the pool, leaving Edith squinting and tight-lipped.

“Practice is the only way get comfortable with water,” she said too enthusiastically.

Hao was much too occupied with drying his hair fastidiously to retort something intelligent. Fifteen minutes later, she was dressed in an unflattering velvet tracksuit and still promising progress. He walked her to the door and spoke under his breath about appointments for the next week's lesson.

Her ridiculous smiling shut out of sight, he fell back against the door and glimpsed the overhead array of colored lights. He reached high his hand into the air, and not matter how hard he rose up on his toes or wiggled his fingers, he could not touch the ceiling. Perhaps corruptible efforts would not do to reach for that apogee of contentment. But he must try. What else was he to do? With that he prepared himself for the evening date.

The date ended up being successful, but unsuccessful were Hao’s many attempts to pet the ugly head of the man’s pet iguana. The date sucked apologetically on his fingers, and Hao thought perhaps nature’s rules were best followed, not flouted.

***

Some nights Luke dreamed of Lisa’s hand dithering on the grey hook of her steel cane. Other nights he dreamed of that evil evening when he was preparing dinner to Lisa’s precise orders. One minute she was sighing, “Oh Jason,” over a phone message, the next minute her body was thrashing in the air then suddenly limping and falling over like a felled tree. He had caught her body in time only because he had been looking at her face, trying to understand what she meant by “sauté the onions till they are soft and translucent.”

Some nights he dreamed of go. Perhaps of the biconvex stone wedged in between his fingers, burdening heavier with the force of his stratagems, the concentrated air of Hao before him, his mind and eyes unknowable. Only through the energy of stones, he could feel some fabric of Hao’s heart. Other dreams were more of excited stones, stones zooming onto and kicking off warped grids. His body convulsed in spastic delight. He bolted awake, half exhausted, half exhilarated, hard with need. Light fanned from underneath the track blinds and crept illumination up the towering stack of papers on the desk and down to the dusty surfboard jutting out of the closet. The air wakened him to a musty odor tempered with the taste of packaged ramen noodles. Then he remembered he had no right to mirth when ashes could not smile. And he fell back, hollowed, into the damp sheets, closed to his eyes, and dreamed of Lisa shivering and scalded with sweat.

***

No one in the go club could guess of the last Sunday’s ill-fated swim lesson as Hao opined on game moves from table to table, wearing a checkered shirt and tight fitting jeans. Cindy remarked approvingly that Hao needed a cowboy hat, which drew the cross-eyed glances of Brett, who was teaching a newcomer the rules.

At a lonely table Luke ignored Ling Ling playing blitz too excitedly, or Jim declaring the deity of pro players, or Kent proclaiming how sweet and fitting it is to make chain mail by hand. He was watching Hao.

Something warmed up right where his heart would be as he thought Hao looked happy. He was pleased Hao looked happy, but then again, he couldn’t be sure. A glad face could conceal a wall of pain, or a geyser of anger, and he would not be able to tell, except if he asked. But people lied. Everybody lied. The one irrefragable fact he had learned in his short existence was that humans would lie for any reason fathomable.

The clops of stilettos against concrete and the musky notes of cologne jabbed violence to his idyll; something blotted his view of Hao replaying a game. He ground his teeth for moment before his irises readjusted to the tall view of a young man sandwiched between two ladies looking up to him as if in an Ecce Homo painting. Erinaceous furrows of his black hair glistened with gel, and his pinched smile favored to his left the bone-china face.

With reposeful movements, the man corralled two more chairs and then took control of the empty seat across from Luke. One eye to his friend’s limp hand, he said, “You must be Luke.”

Luke wondered if he was making a statement to the friends or him.

“I’m Jae. Hao said I should give you a six stone handicap.”

Luke grimaced and thought Jae must be strong and he did not feel like thinking hard. But Hao had decreed, and so it must be.

While Luke’s eyes were floored to the game, Jae’s eyes roved over the fake lashes, the red-winged blush over a cheek, the drop necklace dipping into round breasts, the soft mounds beneath the tiger print blouse.

“It is hard playing a handicapped game?” One of the friends asked Jae.

“Not really. White has only one strategy in handicap games. Play peekaboo all over the board.” He goggled his eyes and fell playfully over her smooth hump of her shoulder. Recovering, he said, “I’m good at peekaboo. Confuse black, make his mind go million places trying to read out moves he can’t understand, and in the meantime, collect the spoils. A chair here, a house there, before black knows it, you have a knife to his throat.”

“Sounds like a bunch of man nonsense between nerds.”

“Yeah, Sandra, that could be the word for it, man nonsense,” Jae said to the friend twirling a curly strand, “Nerds or not, Men are men. It’s all about the win, the kill.” he slapped down a move that ignored Luke’s previous move, “there’s no love on the go board. No room for nice. The smell of blood can be hotter than a hot chick—sometimes.”

Luke glanced at the move and thought distinctly that Jae’s moves too often glimmered a brilliance of dull dross. Hot, but too often nauseatingly warm. Or was he being falsely lulled?

Luke’s mind circled over the strange white stone floating in an island of territory then over the other little fires white had started all over the board. Luke held his breath, white and black blurring, Hao’s voice firing, “Don’t be lazy! Look for what’s not on the board.” Suddenly there beamed a way to use the white’s move to his advantage, then he responded. Jae answered without looking. Luke answered without thinking. And with a wide flourish, Jae plopped his next move. The white perhaps of victory glittered off his geometrical teeth, and he jeered, “Ladies, here’s a little lesson in fighting. If you can get your opponent to do what you want, you’re halfway there.”

Lost in doubt, Luke rolled the hairs of his beard and brooded. The move was as he had predicted, but should he be more cautious? He stole a glance at the checkered back of Hao leaning into the soft voice of an older male player. Luke’s mouth soured dry as he framed the sight unfair, cutting. His bright face, he needed to see it, leastways his fatherly scornful look, anything physical of him to birth him courage.

His breath whistling away to silence, Luke looked back on the game and had a thought to force the mountain to himself and then played calmly the way he had planned.

The game progressed fitfully to the sprawling softness of laughter and his steady boom. Jae hovered a stone over the board and said in a coda to the women, “Girls don’t usually play go, at least not the cute ones… unless you want me to teach you.”

Jae checked himself with a smirk and then lowered a look onto the board. The woman named Sandra nudged his side to take a look at a picture on her smartphone, he shrugged lightly, not obliging a peek. She nudged again, and he brushed her off, not un-roughly. His left eye flickered, arched a painful twitch for a long moment, then he looked across the table to Luke’s downed face sinking beneath his heavy black hair.

“Hao says you’re his new go dilettante.”

Luke shook to face him while his parents’ voices warred in his head. Trent: Ask him what he means by go dilettante. He’ll think you’re stupid, so what? At least you’ll know. Lisa: Don’t ask people trivial things you should know already. It’s embarrassing.

Inclined to side with a dead parent over a faithless one, he twisted his beard and wondered if this fitted into the category of trivial. It hit him that he had been staring at Jae too long (Mom wouldn’t like that) and shrank back to the board.

Jae dropped the stone back into its bowl and sat back into his chair and headed Luke a dark glare. “Hao picks up students like a man picks up—I shouldn’t say anything… I used to be Hao’s student. Way back when I was the nerdy ugly kid. Now, I’m too busy with life to play much go. Life’s just too interesting these days.”

Luke lifted his eyes to Jae’s rust-colored eyes and inquired of his own limited wisdom how anybody could be too busy with life. Life was breathing and sitting, watching and waiting over ashes, the Brownian motion of molecules zigzagging infinitely many times between ticks of the seconds hand. Life was life was life. How could you get less of it or even more of it?

He felt a warm palm on his back; he flinched but immediately hunkered into a rigid pose upon making the outlines of Hao’s face turning to him.

“White’s losing,” Hao said starkly, his hand dropping from Luke’s back.

Luke trembled a little; the warm imprint smoldered on his back.

“Six stones were the wrong handicap,” Jae said offhandedly.

“Maybe. But the cookie monster is rated six kyu on kgs, that would suggest he’s more like one-dan. I’m not quite ready to believe that. Either this game was sloppy or you’ve dropped a couple of stones.”

A vacuum swallowed all sound and all movement at the table. Hao staring at Jae. Jae staring at Hao. Luke staring at Hao.

A rambling fog swallowed Jae as he kept rubbing his nose, clearing his throat, never yielding a glance to his friends and then yawning into a sly laugh. He settled a lovely gaze on the women. “We should get going or we’ll be late … Luke, sorry, got to go. But thanks for the game. It was good.” They gathered shawls, smiles, phones and all. Jae, however, trailed behind then stopped and checked himself with a pointed finger to the air. He turned back, studied Luke’s rapier eyes, and presumably satisfied with a carefully arranged conclusion, he looked to Hao still taking stock of their game.

“Luke, you need watch out and make sure his lessons stay go-related. He can be pretty desperate,” Jae said. “Probably see you at the tournament in a few weeks. Still have to defend my five-dan rating. Maybe I will win all five games and knock you down a couple stones, Hao.”

Jae’s strident footsteps had dissolved into the chilly night. But Luke was still staggered with internal questions, and there was no answer on Hao’s face turning purple. Their eyes met and Hao looked away quickly and demanded him to replay their game.

“How was Compton?” Luke asked innocently, cleaning up the board. .

Hao shook, cut him a flick of the eyes, recovered with a faint scowl. “Good. Very good.”

Luke thought dimly that Hao was lying, but lying was a natural act, an evolutionary mechanism evolved to insure social bonds. The stones flowed to Hao’s deepening snorts and grunt and the feeling of Hao’s constructed falsity pricked Luke, mired his recall over a particular sequence. However, Hao bumped a hard fist to his lips and muttered, “What’s he mad about? His moves were bad.” Luke lightened a moment to extract some praise from the brusque words. The harsh tacks of Hao flicking his metallic watchstraps perturbed him, and Hao’s eyes seemed to have drooped farther than earlier. The face was of undecipherable weave of something that perturbed Luke in a mysterious way. He let down his stone and looked at the discolored lips. Of course, there was no information there. Nothing either on the wide board of his cheeks. He looked at the caved-in brow; that should tell him something. But the moments now were biting with desperation, and he hardened at the barrier of skin and skull hiding from him unjustly the feelings that for all of his conscious childhood, he had suffered himself to understand. Still nothing was incipient. He stared harder at the facial cage and hoped the chaos of neutrons firing in his frontal lobe would light up insight on the peregrinations of the human heart.

Hao’s exasperated clucking wakened him to the heady scent of chilli in the air. Hao excused himself, kept rubbing his temples and told him with an even more dire expression to solve more tsumego.

“See you on Saturday. It’s time for bed.” Hao walked around the café to deliver his good byes, his closing exhortations to the still-confused players, and was soon lumbering into the dark night, leaving Luke with the uncomfortable feeling scaling up his side.

The chair was empty. The space previously occupied by a hard puzzle of skin and bone was empty. Luke thought it supremely unfair. He noticed his knees vibrating against the table leg and recalled Jared telling how he had be more aware of his feelings, of what he liked, of what he didn’t like. It was violence to yourself to deny the knowledge of your heart. But Luke looked over rankly the gridded boards, the myriad heads in their myriad coifs and fingered finally on a feeling: the apparent order in the café was appalling, appalling precisely because Hao was hurt over something.

Stirring with the high of an eureka feeling, Luke dashed out the door. The air nipped at his nose and was spicy with exhaust. Along the rows of parking meters, something glinted dully off the hand of someone checking a lighted screen. Luke called for Hao, and without waiting for the man to pause, flitted to his side.

“You seemed uneasy —”

“I’m fine.” Hao, gripping his phone, lurched from the face shadowed with hair and mystery. He felt the presence to be Luke’s. It had to be the boy staring at him, measuring him, judging him, summarizing him so unjustly as Jae did two years ago. That dratted day by the swimming pool engulfed him, and something was burning in his eyes.

Hao snorted harshly, and still Luke’s gaze was sharp on him.

“The game wasn’t to your standards. I’ll be sure to do better next time. I hope Jae does too.” Luke took a moment to clear his throat. “You look hurt. Is there anything I can do—”

“Ai-ya!” Hao flew up his hands in exasperation. “You need to be more … less—how’s it possible? Everyone grows up to be like everyone else. Believing idiotic things, parroting the same nonsense, doing the stupid little things that hurt each other. Everyone learns to guard their heart with lies and bravado. And you, Luke, go on with this childish ruse of innocence.”

Hao felt winded and his neck was hot and damp and Luke was staring at him rigidly. He palled to think that Luke would absorb any insult he gave and even apologize for it.

“I’m sorry, sir.”

There—What kind of guy is this? Hao wanted deck him, wanted to carve on his face the important lesson of the world being no kinder to gentle souls. It would be for his own good.

Luke began firmly, “Interesting perspective. Not altogether different from Mom’s. A bit illogical and unfocused, but there could be a more particular point. Your thought on the heart and lies is intriguing. I think lies make a poor guard against the heart. I’m not so sure the heart needs guarding. And what is this heart anyway—”

“If you have time to waffle, you have time to play go. I need to go home and sleep.”

“I’m sorry sir. I over-spoke again.”

“Goodnight.” Hao turned away sharply and tramped in a direction quite opposite to his car. His heart was a storm, his thoughts fitful in envy. The regular rush of oncoming cars, the night black and crowding his sights, the constant question between his ears: how can you live like Luke and not be crushed instantly?