Dead Stones [manxman] [boyxboy]

Opening

The stones were silent to him. Never in Hao’s thirty-two years of playing go had this happened before. It shouldn't be so surprising that go was abandoning him too, he felt. The silence was bound to happen, natural in fact, as natural as the new scent laid on the back lawn yesterday. After all, life was vaster and more hopeless than the 10^170 legal positions of a go game. Anything was possible, literally. The sacred could be profaned. The joined could be unjoined. A heart, fertile and fruiting, could be ravaged and re-sown with the ghosts of loss.

It was another claustrophobic Sunday in his study, another muggy afternoon with him wasting away cross-legged before a blank go board. He pressed his palms against the board’s surface and felt for the gridlines black and faint, and the wood grain matte and sandpaper smooth. How lifeless and unyielding it felt. No tremor, no jitter.

About now Ricardo should whisper, his breath lusciously warm over Hao’s ear, “That’s fucking loco, you know that?” Hao turned his head and supposed numbly that he was crazy or weird or spooky about go. But Ricardo was hardly the one to complain. The blunt nose rhino could not sit still and absorb the strategies of the game. Ricardo would explode, “You said the rules was simple, but you’re kicking my ass.” Hao would stroke his hairy hand, smile, and even condescend to coo at him, “Rico, darling,” just to keep his attention on the game.

“You have to admit the rules are simple. You can play anywhere you want. When you surround a stone you take it,” Hao would reply.

“I took more of your stones, and you’re still won.”

“I told you already, the object of the game isn’t eating stones but controlling the largest territory.”

And yet, understanding that was too difficult for the rambunctious Ricardo, who had boasted about slashing an idiot tadpole as a teenager. Hao could believe the story. He had never once felt, over the years, the feral preciseness dull in Ricardo’s eyes; if anything, it haunted him more. And from the first day he met him at law school, Hao pinned him as someone who scaled Everests or crossed death plains. But crazy, weird Hao was quite content with a blue stroll in a neighborhood.

Perhaps too content. Hao sighed. A distant screeching stirred him to look at the tangerine glimmer splattered over the window. Light skated the long edge of a computer desk and stopped short of his cotton chest. And looking over his slight belly bulge, he clucked at his sad, sorry state. Outside was an infinite day, a vortex of good hope, full of an irrepressible light, and yet it disdained the sinkhole of himself. Someone please shake me.

As if beating to his inner call, the dull tams of a drum kicked onto the study and parted a little his melancholic mist. The sound was his phone bleating tones from Purcell’s March for the Death of Queen Mary. He sighed—better to ignore it and let the voice mail pick up the message. But a feeling whispered, “Maybe it’s Ricardo?” His heart commanded before his ego would restrain, and he dashed out the door, down the stairs, over to the steel countertop railing the industrial panoptic of the kitchen. And there, like an abandoned baby, his phone was flashing and beating beside the pizza box.

“Hello,” Hao said, winded.

“Good, good, good ... We’re drowning in grapefruit.”

Hao deflated at the precise voice of Claus Balko, an acquaintance from the local go club.

“Can’t even make grapefruit pie to get rid off these puppies,” Claus said.

Hao sighed away from the receiver. “Grapefruit jam works.”

“Wifey is scared stiff of making bad batches. At this point, I’m thinking guerrilla tactics—ring on front doors and dump them. Leave a tub in Sensei’s hotel room—terrorism by grapefruit.”

Claus guffawed; Hao paced the length of the kitchen and began shuffling the take-out menus on the counter top: Italian, Persian, Indonesian, Filipino, Moroccan, Indian—pizza seemed the good choice for the evening.

“Sensei was asking about you when I picked him up from the airport this morning. You're coming to the dinner thing tonight?”

Hao squirmed. An evening to the charades of etiquette, or another evening to the dirges of nothing?

“I had plans already.” Hao felt the hull of his mind deform. “I should get back to you on making his lecture—”

“I just got this good idea! Those who paid to play against Sensei, get grapefruit. Ten people comes to ten per person …”

Hao wiped down his damp face. “You can give the rest to Monica. She can sell anything to the café patrons.” Even sell a lame goat or a sprightly granny.

“You’re good at this. Maybe I should just give them to you.”

“I’m all right, thanks.” Hao felt like a can crushed under atmospheres of pressure.

He hmmed and ahhed through Claus' ruminations on whether Wifey’s plan to grow a thousand pound pumpkin was her Freudian way to stave off baby hunger. Ten minutes later, blather of baby pumpkins turned into teasing Hao about his scanty appearances at the go club, and when Claus was about to mention neither seeing nor speaking to him in the past three months, he laughingly excused himself.

A continental silence was crammed tight within the four walls again. Hao felt the room yaw and tilt about him, and amid the falling feeling, the emblems of the room blurred to an eerie nonexistence: the fireplace Ricardo roared about roasting a goose in it but never did, the record-player he drunkenly broke because Hao’s Monterverdi record sounded like pigs squealing, the painting for which he tackled a guy at a garage sale. The house would have to be sold, Hao thought tremblingly. The soul-sucking house, too big and too airy.

A droop caved in Hao’s narrow shoulders as he limped the phone onto the counter. He lumbered to the French doors overlooking the pool rippling and glittering under the awful sun. Anal, small-minded, uptight, those were the words Ricardo would jeer right about now. His son Yuu would chastise him with a dopey mopey look. Good thing Yuu was wasting his money at Princeton.

Sure he could attend the dinner. Someone would be certain to ask about Ricardo’s fish tacos or his damned health, and Hao would bravely announce their separation. A long time coming, he might add lightly, a year in the making, anticipated it every night for the past thirteen years in fact. A jitter worked in his sternum and gathered up a pounding dread. He pictured the club members rearranging their faces to polite unconcern. They would say one after the other, “Sorry to hear that … A terrible thing really …” The go club were a civil bunch after all. But inside their pallid souls, Hao knew as surely as he knew his withering self, they would sneer at his moral failure (Livelong monogamy was as natural as the dirty deed). They would secretly reaffirm the inherent inferiority of his proclivities (See these couples can’t even last thirteen years!). Hao sighed explosively. What a bother.

Still, it would be silly to avoid Kenji Masaki, a seven dan professional go player, who had come all the way from Japan to give a go lecture to their club. Shameful and unnecessary. Well then, he should act the sane, full-functioning adult and pretend. That was the American way. Smile and say, “I’m good … great … couldn’t have been better,” even joke a bit about Ricardo’s obsessions with the US Virgin Islands or his lack of affinity for go. Kenji might rib him with courteous fish glances. Claus might ramble maniacally about demon grapefruit. Dinner would be spumy with beer, the lecture would be a giddy auditory bullet train to go wisdom, and gravel would be grinding in his heart. Yes, he would be just fine. He would not crumble and die.

He could hear now the distinct tinkles of the wall fountain out of sight in the dining room. His gaze whirled from the drop ceiling ivory pale, the floor bare and cold, and beyond the patio doors, the pool a beautiful blue grave. Gritting his teeth, he asserted, “I’m perfect. Just great,” then picked up the phone and trudged back to confront the silence of stones.