ZGo and love - 9. Love doesn't own anybody

Luke drove to Hao’s place with lazy anticipation. Twilight cast a glare over the windscreen, and in the resulting patina of white, the traffic lights were hard to see. After switchbacks, zigzags and numerous diversions up private driveways later, lively streets became the black roads of bare tar, greenery overtook the sidewalks, pedestrians became rarities, and lazy anticipation roused into irritation.

By the time he was cruising Hao’s neighborhood, patience flaked away over the prissy clean streets and their snobbish signs that disallowed street parking. Eventually he found parking on a steep inclined dirt road that bordered a sheer drop of devastating views, which featured the Frank Canyon’s open space in its verdant glory.

Luke turned the steering wheel right then left, confused over which way the wheels were supposed to face when a car is parked on an incline. Deciding it was towards the curb, he pulled the hand brake then got of the car.

The sky was still alive in the glow of waning daylight; the horizon melted into a plasma stream of red. He was early, one hour early. A middle-aged woman jogged past, her mutt scampering a few paces ahead. She slowed down to an almost aggressive stare before demanding a, “hello.”

“Hi.” Luke leaned back against the passenger door. Stroking and combing through his beard, he did not care to seem less the prowling stranger.

The woman halted in front of him, biting her lip, eyes darkening, seemingly awed in the shadow of rising fear.

“Stand aside, you’re taking up my view of the sunset,” Luke said.

The woman obediently stepped to the trunk of the car. Twilight wrapped them in a cold breeze from the north. The moon seemed apologetic with its dim light. Luke felt stillness, not of peace, but one of disquieting ineffability. His mind frayed with the teeming echoes of groans, pleas calling on pleas for undecipherable requests. And heedless of the woman’s vacuous stare, he so remained muted until darkness pervaded the sky

His phone rang.

“Where are you?” Hao’s inflected Chinese accent was diffuse with irritation.

“Waiting for the sun to set.”

“You’re wasting because of the sunset?”

“Old sir, I don’t think one wastes time, observing the sunset. The regularity of sunsets notwithstanding, every sunset is unique. In the earth’s five billion year history, no sunset has been alike in color and hue. Much too do—”

“Get down here now,” Hao’s barking, as usual, was tipped with a comical edge that only assured Luke’s prompt compliance.

Luke nodded to the stranger and grabbed his bag pack before descending the hill.

The trees and shrubs buried the driveways and fizzled upwards into inky heights. A black hand waved at Luke in the mauve air. He kept to a languid pace and held back with a feeling of reticence. Perhaps it was more caution that held sway as he made out the silver outlines of Hao’s glasses floating in the air. Luke was rudely aware of his own little and oafish strides as he intruded on the house of a genius.

“Still with the terrible hair?” Hao said by way of greeting.

“Yes, old sir.”

Hao offered laughter, a laughter that rippled through Luke’s brittle senses. Hao placed a hand lightly on Luke’s shoulder and herded him into the Moorish gateway that opened to an inner garden. They climbed the four, five steps up to the front door as totems staggered in the benighted front lawn. A dry garden with boulders Hao had called it, raked sand instead of cool grass.

The craftman’s door was imprinted with a maze design. A stranger would be at loss to know which of the metal grooves was the door handle. Luke watched Hao insert his hand into the shadowed recesses and depress on a bar. In the moment the door cranked opened, and the inside light rushed upon Hao’s face, profiling a snapshot of a wan, tired mouth and metallic glass frames looping glitteringly about black eyes. Something momentous rose in Luke and bespoke of broken dreams and exhausted nights. Startled, he scrambled ahead of Hao.

But Hao pulled him back sharply by his collar, almost strangling him. “Take off your shoes.”

“Sorry sir,” Luke said to part away eddies of embarrassment. Reminding himself to relax, he took a deep breath. He kicked off the ratty sneakers and placed them in a rack of cubbyholes in the foyer. He twiddled over the black flippers of his feet and wondered if he needed to take off his socks as well.

“Just my shoes?” Luke asked.

“No. I want you to get naked in my foyer,” Hao barked.

Luke startled, frozen with unkind images.

“You’re really...” Exasperatedly, Hao pulled Luke by the arm into the walkway paved with cool black marble. “Seeing you naked would send me to bed with dreams of starving children. Now that will ruin my date tomorrow.”

Luke’s head turned with thought, the secure feeling by his arm all encompassing. “Sir, I must admit, these dates baffle me. You don’t seem well enough—”

“Ai-ya! Are you saying I’m old and ugly? If you want me to remove my shirt, I will.”

Luke discarded promptly his sickly impressions of a pained Hao and stepped into the living room. He was flattered to stillness at the high ceiling crowned with mauve skylight.

Hao stood beside him and gazed at the ceiling. “You’re impressed?”

Luke looked down to Hao’s bastardy smirk. “It’s an interesting idea for a ceiling.”

Hao shook his head, muttered promises usual to codgers to punish arrogant lads, and shambled towards the high doorway of dim light set in a wainscoted wall.

“We’re going upstairs,” Hao said.

Luke was kept a studious step behind and noticed Hao’s almost plodding gait, something of a patient wade across the cool floor. It struck him how the gothic heights dwarfed Hao’s stature, and the black suit clung to the back like drapery hanging on hangers. Hao seemed to vanish in height and in presence as he climbed and climbed.

Hao, seemingly aware of being observed, turned back sharply and said, “I ought to make you pay for your tardiness. You know what? Just get a shave. Something to make you look a man with purpose, not a slacker. That should be payment enough...”

Luke stomped up the stairs, nodding to frustration at Hao’s preoccupation with his leonine coiffure.

The house gave the impression of being lost in the leafless woods. Curtains of a trapezoidal boards demarcated private spaces from more open spaces. Everywhere was surrounded in the woody hues of the mahogany paneling. And walls were bisected from side to side with bands of windows overlooking a light-polluted sky.

They ascended two flights of stairs and came into a room walled high with books. An executive desk dovetailed into one corner. By the desktop monitor were portraits of Hao and someone.

Hao opened a shelf at one end of the bookshelf and was fumbling for something when Luke asked, “I take it, your partner isn’t home?”

Hao halted for a moment and twitched a smile and went back to searching for something. “No. He won’t be coming home till much much later.”

Luke wandered from the desk to the corner where there was a Japanese style goban—a board seated low on four stout legs. The board and bowls were made of very dear kaya wood. The black stones were black slate, and the white stones diaphanous jade. One had to sit on a ground cushion to use the board.

“We are playing with this in the dining room.” Hao held up a heavy-looking board. “You grab those stones.” And they went downstairs again.

The tinkling sounds of a wall fountain welcomed them to the dining room. Luke removed the laptop from his backpack and popped it open for Hao.

“This was a game from last night,” Luke said.

In the laptop’s glow Hao’s fine lines over his cheeks fanned more tributaries as he clicked through the game. “And he played the taisha. That’s just stupid… Yes, yes, show me that you’ve memorized a hundred pages of joseki… Idiot even got the sequence wrong.”

Hao switched his attentions to the board and gave a demonstration of the taisha, the avalanche joseki, an opening sequence with a thousand variations. He stopped, went back upstairs, and returned with handbook on joseki—opening sequences.

Luke rested his chin on the palm of his hand. His fingers curled upward like spider legs and tickled the moustache. That variation or this variation had gone up in the smoke of Hao’s babble.

Light fell obliquely over Hao’s shoulder and cast a shadow behind him that moved about like a gigantic marionette. Hao looked tired even as his fingers proffered go wisdom. Silver streaks were swept along in the tide of Hao’s black hair curving over an asymmetrical part and terminating in an abrupt upward angle. The head was big, Luke thought, stuffed with go and ways to aggravate him.

Hao glanced back as if aware that he was being watched. Luke did not feel the need to look away as Hao’s glare softened to a smile.

“The taisha looks difficult. I’m not sure I want to learn that. I just went by instinct in the game,” Luke said.

“Instinct is working. You’re winning.” Hao shifted back to the laptop and clicked through the game.

‘Oohs’ glided over the regular clicks then a spastic ‘Ai-ya’ destroyed all good feeling. Red coalesced over the bridge of Hao’s nose. He patted the seat next to him and beckoned, “come over here.”

Luke twirled his moustache, the seat was leaking evil.

“Come over here,” Hao said louder.

Luke obeyed. The woody scents of Hao’s cologne calmed him none as Hao brandished curled fingers ready to flick his temple.

“Playing the bamboo joint instead of connecting directly, yes?” Hao said.

“Yes. I wasn’t thinking,” Luke said.

And a flick twanged against Luke’s temple.

“Next time you look before you leap.” After few more clicks, Hao simmered a stare. “That’s an empty triangle.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Ai-ya, tell that to the go board.” Hao poked a well-trimmed middle finger at the screen. “Ugly empty triangle. Look at that clump. Don’t you feel it being ugly?”

“I felt myself losing.”

“Nope, amazingly enough you’re still winning with all this ugly shape.” Hao clicked some more then paused. “Here’s a desperate invasion from white. You should be able to kill his invading stone.”

“I lost miserably in the end.”

Hao clicked the next move, “no,” and the next move, “no and no,” and the next move...

“At this point I need a cane to whip sense into you,” Hao said gloomily.

Amidst darting thoughts sketching Hao in a fetishist’s costume, Luke reminded himself never to come to Hao’s house again.

Hao rested his cheek over his palm, and there passed a moment of quiet rumination. Then, he popped upright as if pricked with inspiration.

“Knock, knock. I’m a woman demanding to sleep with your boyfriend, what do you do?” asked Hao.

Luke’s eyes flickered left, right. “I let her in? And I take a walk.”

Hao’s brow took on a definite slant to the left. “You would?”

“Like you said monogamy doesn’t work for everybody.”

Hao ticked his head lukewarmly. “Ok, ok. Say she interrupts a nice blowjob, you just let her in?”

“Hmm … That’s indeed difficult. But she’s a visitor. Guests must be always welcomed,” Luke said firmly

“You’d just let her in and walk away?”

“Yes?”

Hao pushed the laptop aside, and began flicking the metallic straps of his watch to collect thoughts. “You really have no sense of self, do you?”

“I have enough sense not to start a meaningless fight.”

“What about just shutting the door in her face and going back to the blowjob?”

“What has this got to do with anything?”

Hao pointed to the game. “There. You had built such a beautiful thick wall. Instead of using it to constrain the eye space of the invader, you helped the white stone to get back to life. Along the way, it wrecked your territory and opened you all these weaknesses.” Luke could buy the lesson. Hao continued, “The woman waltzed into your house, fucked the boyfriend, made a baby and dirty dishes, and then left it for you figure out child support and she gets to back to her house, very very happy.”

“Not seeing these babies on the screen.”

Flick.

Luke rubbed his forehead furiously and scowled; however Hao was a flutter of smiles.

“Your analogy is faulty anyway,” Luke said. “If a thief had showed up, yeah, I’d kick him out and shut the door.”

“Your boyfriend who professed to you a commitment to livelong monogamy isn’t considered yours?”

“Given that I see romantic love as essentially chemical responses, mammals have developed over millions over years to better insure the pair-bonding necessary for a successful raising of offspring, I’d say love doesn’t own anybody.”

Laughing in helpless wonderment, Hao scooted the laptop closer to himself. “Such a beautiful thickness, so pretty, so useless.”

“Thickness?” Luke’s words were directed to Hao’s waist.

“I mean the thick wall you built up in the game. God!” Flick, flick, flick…

A delirium swirled down along with the tingle on Luke’s forehead. He interpreted the sensations as signs of go wisdom sinking into his brain or could be hunger light-headedness.

Luke took a hold of Hao’s fingers and pressed them to his knees. “No more flicking. It hurts.”

The sound of water tinkling over stones permeated the room with a deepening timbre. In a search of a lost memory, Luke was stroking Hao’s fingers—cold and weathered. Like his mother’s hands wiping his grubby little hands under the toilet sink or her hands holding onto his shoulders as they discussed her funeral arrangements.

“Are you hungry?” Hao’s voice was like a cool breeze over scalding wounds.

“No.” Luke let go of Hao’s hand to pluck at his beard.

“Yes you are. You look ever dour. And I’m hungry.” Hao jumped up from the chair. “Take a look at the taisha while I prepare some of Dim Sum I got.”

“Dim Sum?”

“Never had it before?” Hao paused and headed Luke a look that curiously hinted of mischief. “Well then, I’ll have you finish all of it. I got too much. Sometimes I forget, I’m singl—Ricardo doesn’t like dim sum much...” Hao laid his glasses onto the table and misery weighed down on his shoulders.

Hao made his way past the twin statues of Masai boys and the wall fountain to the white light of compact fluorescents billowing from the kitchen area. A door banged, and what sounded like the scuffling of suitcases from the foyer stopped him cold. The light flickered, puffed and snowballed into a white avalanche overtaking Hao’s senses, and he stumbled madly and blindly through the white darkness, praying for Ricardo.