Chapter 10: ch.10 [The Price of Being a ‘Genius’]

Seth opened his mouth.

Nothing came out.

Astrid watched his throat work.

Once. Twice.

She had prepared for a yes.

She had prepared for a no.

She had not prepared for a man who looked at a question as if it were a staircase and he could not see the top.

"Can we sit?" he said.

"Sit."

"My knees are doing something."

"They are shaking."

"It’s the stairs."

"It is not the stairs."

"It’s mostly the stairs."

She stepped back from the doorway and let him choose.

He chose the hall. Not the table. Not the sofa.

The narrowest place in the apartment with the lamp from her room laid across the carpet in one long gold stripe.

She went down beside him in stages.

Almost six-three barefoot does not fold.

It falls in installments.

Knees first.

Then the rest.

Then the wall at her back.

Even seated her head rode higher than his.

She noted it the way she noted a weakness in a position.

Without comment.

With interest.

Then she caught him looking at her feet.

He looked at the carpet so fast his glasses slid.

They are cold. He has noticed. He is horrified.

She tucked them under the hem of her hoodie with the air of a woman concealing evidence.

"I will not grade this." she said.

"That’s a first." Seth turned the cap over in his fingers.

"Nobody’s ever said that to me."

"Nobody has ever said it to me either."

"Then we’re even."

"Yes."

Silence.

He looked at the carpet. He looked at the cap.

He drew a breath.

"Yes." said Seth.

It was very plain.

"I’ve been lonely. I don’t know if it’s as long as you. But a long time. Like... as long as I remember being a person."

Astrid did not move.

(Four.)

Troms? in December had no sun.

It was not dark. It was blue.

A deep windless blue that lay on the town from nine until three and then went black as ink.

The whole city sat at the bottom of a very cold glass of water.

The kitchen was yellow.

One lamp over the table. A circle of gold on the oilcloth.

A radiator that ticked.

Everything beyond the circle a long soft nothing.

Her mother sat across from her in a green cardigan that smelled of coffee and classroom chalk.

Solveig Lind taught mathematics.

She was a middling club player who loved chess the way some people love a dog that will not obey.

She owned a travel set with one black pawn missing.

A brown button stood in for it.

"This one is the knight."

"It looks like a horse."

"It is a horse. It jumps."

"Why?"

"Because it has to get past the others."

"Why?"

Her mother put her chin in her hand and smiled with her whole face.

"Tell me. What does it want?"

"The king?"

"Why the king?"

"Because he is the one standing in the corner."

Her mother laughed. A big helpless laugh with a snort at the end.

"Vesla. Where did you get that?"

"From you. You look at him funny. Like you are sorry for him."

Her mother stopped laughing.

"Nobody is born good at anything." She set out the pieces.

"You are only born curious. The rest we make together."

We.

She had been four.

She had thought it the most beautiful word in the language.

Here the lamp made a gold stripe on the carpet. No radiator. No oilcloth.

But a person sat beside her in the circle of it.

She turned her head away so he would not see her face do whatever it was doing.

"My mom worked." Seth did not look at her.

He looked at the cap.

"Nights mostly. She left notes on the fridge. Dinner’s in the freezer. Don’t wait up. She signed them M."

"M."

"Just the letter."

"Was she unkind?"

"No." He said it fast. Then slower.

"No. She wasn’t mean. She was just always on her way somewhere. So I got good at knowing when a room was empty. From the sound."

"The sound."

"A closed room has one. Like holding your breath."

"Yes." Her voice came out lower than she meant.

"I know the sound."

(Six.)

A school gym. The week before her sixth birthday.

She remembered it in smells. Floor varnish. Wet wool.

Oranges peeled in a cold room by nervous parents.

Forty tables.

Her feet did not reach the floor.

Her mother stood at the back in her good gray coat with her hands knotted in front of her. Not allowed to speak.

Astrid won seven games.

She did not know it was remarkable.

She only knew that when the last man shook her hand his face had gone odd and soft.

Like bread.

A man from Nordlys knelt in front of her with a camera.

The flash was the first she ever saw.

It exploded white. The world went blank.

When the color came back her mother was on her knees with both hands on her shoulders.

Laughing.

Crying a little.

Wiping her eyes with the back of her glove.

"Did you see? Astrid. Did you see what you did?"

She had not been looking at the board.

She had been looking at her mother’s face.

They took the bus to the harbor café.

Waffles with brown cheese.

Coats on.

Steam off the plates.

Snow beginning on black water.

It was the best day of her life.

She was nearly certain of it still.

Something buzzed in Seth’s pocket.

He flinched.

It buzzed again. A long rattle. A wasp in a coat.

"Gus?" said Astrid.

"No. Gus texts in full sentences."

He drew the phone out an inch.

New post on r/AstridLind: "Seth Pawn’s HEIGHT. A thread. (They are NOT the same height.)"

He pushed it back in.

"The wiki has an update." he said to the floor.

"Your height against my height. With a diagram."

"Is it accurate?"

"It says six centimeters."

"That is the correct number."

"It says it in a font."

She looked at the opposite wall.

Her shoulders gave one traitorous tremor.

The intercom sounded.

Long. Flat.

One sustained note that went through the plaster like a drill.

Both of them stopped.

It was 12:52 a.m.

Nobody who loved them rang a buzzer at 12:52 a.m.

It sounded again. Longer.

She was on her feet before it ended.

Four strides barefoot to the gray panel by the coat hooks with its black-and-white screen the size of a playing card.

The front steps. A sodium streetlight.

A man in a baseball cap stood with one thumb on the buzzer.

He held a camera with a lens as long as a forearm.

He was not pointing it at the door.

He was pointing it straight up.

At the ninth floor.

"How did they—" Seth had come up behind her on whatever his knees had left.

"Someone always does."

"At the store we’d call that a loiterer."

"He is not loitering. He is waiting."

"Is there a difference?"

"Loiterers leave when they are cold."

She pressed one button.

The screen died and left a faint gray shadow on the glass like a breath.

At six a flash made my mother cry for joy.

At twenty-eight a lens waits outside my window for a boy.

She did not like the arithmetic.

"The curtain in the hall." she said. "The cord by the pillar."

He drew it.

When she sat again she did not take her old place.

She took the one beside the wall. And left a space.

The exact width of a person.

She did not look at the space.

He sat in it.

Neither of them mentioned the inch between their shoulders.

"I used to turn the TV on." Seth’s voice had gone small.

"So something would be talking. I’d sit so close my nose almost—"

He stopped.

His whole face closed. Like a hand around a coin.

"You stopped." said Astrid.

"Yeah."

"At what?"

"At the good part."

"Is it a long part?"

"It’s kind of... a while."

"And you will not tell me."

It was not an accusation. It was a statement of position. Like a move.

He looked at her.

She kept her face very still.

A thing she was good at.

A thing she had never once wanted to be good at.

"Not yet." said Seth.

Her breath caught.

"I said that." she said. "In the kitchen. The first night."

"I wasn’t sure you meant me to hear."

"I did not." A pause. "I am glad you did."

She meant it. She was almost alarmed by how much.

"That seems fair." she said.

(Seven.)

A green spiral notebook.

She found it on a Sunday in the drawer under the telephone while looking for tape.

The cardboard cover was stiff.

The first page said in square neat letters:

DATE / OPPONENT / RESULT / HOURS.

She read the first line. The second.

By the ninth she understood that her mother did not write Astrid anywhere.

She wrote A.

The A had a small tail like a signature on a receipt.

"Is that me?"

"Hm?" Her mother looked up from the stove. "Oh. Yes. It is easier."

"Easier than what?"

"Than writing it out every time."

She did not say vesla.

Astrid did not notice that until years later.

It was the last time the word was ever missing from a sentence without being missed.

She looked at the boy beside her.

He had stopped himself. At a door.

For no reason except that the door was his.

Nobody had ever stopped before a door of hers.

They had written it down.

"How long for you?" said Seth.

He asked it to the carpet.

As if he were afraid of the answer.

As if he would take any answer and carry it somewhere safe.

"Since I was nine." said Astrid.

(Nine.)

Oslo.

A trophy as tall as her ribs.

She carried it in both arms like a child holding a goose.

A man in a gray suit hung a medal around her neck.

A photographer knelt in the aisle.

"Smile for us sweetheart."

She did not know how.

It had always been a thing that happened to her. In the kitchen.

In the yellow light. When her mother laughed.

She did not know where it came from.

She did not know how to go and fetch it.

"A little smile?"

She looked across the room for help.

Her mother was checking her watch.

"Astrid." She did not raise her eyes. "Smile. They have a car waiting."

It came out as a stretching of the mouth with nothing behind it.

The flash.

That night in a hotel bed she counted the ceiling tiles.

Forty-one.

She counted again.

Forty-one.

A very good number. It did not change.

"There were forty-one ceiling tiles in the hotel."

she told the opposite wall.

"I counted them for a week. A man asked me to smile. I did not know how."

She said it flat. It was the only way she could say it.

"Nobody tells you that one day you are a child who plays a game. And the next you are a thing people photograph. It seemed a fair trade at the time."

"Was it?"

"I counted tiles in every hotel for eleven years. One night in Singapore I looked up and there was nothing left to count."

She felt him go still.

She had expected I’m sorry. People said it.

It was a coat they handed you. It never fit.

He did not say it.

He leaned forward and set something on the carpet between them.

A bottle cap.

Small. Blue. Chipped. A crown drawn in marker and nearly gone.

"What is that?"

"A queen."

"It is a bottle cap."

"It’s a queen. I drew the crown. I was eight." He swallowed.

"She’s brave."

"Is she?"

"She has to be. She was playing against a chair."

Astrid looked at it for a long time.

She had expected a number. A name. A reason.

Instead a boy had put a piece of his childhood on the floor without a word of explanation. And waited.

She did not touch it.

She understood that it was not hers to touch.

"Who did you have?" she said.

"What?"

"When it was quiet. Who was there?"

He thought. Seriously. As if it were a puzzle.

"Gus. I mean he’s my boss. But he gave me a hot dog. A guy who buys one banana every night at the same time. We don’t talk. But he waves."

A small frown.

"And an old man in the park who plays chess by himself. I never got his name."

"That is all."

"That’s the list."

"Good."

It came out of her so fast and so flat and with such private satisfaction that it rang off the wall.

Seth turned his head.

She had gone rigid.

"That was not what I meant."

"You said it like a door shutting."

"I said it like a—"

"Like I told you the store had no other customers."

"That is not a thing I would say."

"It’s exactly what you said."

She wished to be elsewhere.

She wished it with the whole of her body.

"I am not glad that you were alone." Her voice was cold and exact.

"I am only glad the list is short."

"Okay."

"A short list is—"

She stopped.

Her fingers had curled into the carpet.

She had not noticed. Small. White-knuckled.

Gripping the floor as if it might tilt.

She waited for the question.

Are you all right.

Is it too much.

Are you well enough.

(Twelve.)

A fever of thirty-nine point two.

She remembered the number because her mother read it aloud in the hotel bathroom in the steam with the door half shut.

"It is not ideal."

Then she opened the schedule folder on the sink and turned two pages.

"You are up at ten. Black pieces. A Dutchman. He plays the Leningrad. You can do that in your sleep."

"I’m sick."

"I know."

Her mother’s face in the steamed mirror was careful and pleasant and tired.

"But are you well enough to play?"

It was a question.

It was not how are you.

It was a technical question asked by a person assessing a piece of equipment.

She has forgotten what I am, Astrid had thought.

She remembers what I do.

"Yes."

She won in thirty-one moves.

She threw up behind a pillar and wiped her mouth with her sleeve.

Her mother handed her a bottle of water and a piece of dry toast.

"Good. That is two more points."

Nobody had ever noticed her hand on a floor and let it be.

Seth had seen.

She knew he had seen.

His eyes had gone to her knuckles and away.

As fast as a man closing a door on a sleeping room.

He said nothing at all.

She felt something give in her chest.

Quietly.

Like a stair taking weight.

"And now?" she said. Her voice had steadied.

"The list. Who is on it now?"

He considered.

A kettle. A grocery bag. A pen cap put back on the right end.

"You." said Seth.

"And Ingrid probably. In a hostile way. And a lawyer I haven’t met."

(Seventeen.)

The last game of the championship.

The man across the board tipped over his own king.

The hall rose like a wave.

Cameras.

Flowers.

A hundred voices in a dozen languages.

Her mother’s hand on her elbow. A cold dry voice in her ear.

"We have forty minutes before the interview. Wipe your face."

She wiped her face.

She did not blame her mother.

She was seventeen and the room was so loud.

And she thought for one moment that no one in the history of the world had ever been so alone.

A camera swung toward her.

She looked into the lens.

Somebody is watching, she thought.

Somebody must see.

It lasted one second. Then her face went smooth again.

Nobody had.

Eleven years.

"I am first." said Astrid.

It was not a question.

"I mean—" Seth’s ears went the pink of a boy caught holding a flag.

"I mean obviously. You’re—"

"I am first."

She heard herself. She heard exactly how it sounded.

"Alphabetically." she added with great dignity.

"Alphabetically you’d be after Gus."

"Then we will re-sort."

He laughed.

It cracked in the middle.

It sounded like something dropped and caught.

She looked at the ceiling. She appeared to count something.

I should like to hear that again, she thought.

I should like to hear it every day.

It frightened her slightly. She put it away.

"Go to sleep." she said. "Five o’clock."

? ? ?

Her bed was one centimeter longer than she was.

The lamp was on.

It was always on.

She had not slept in full darkness since she was nine and she did not discuss it with anyone.

She lay on her back and reviewed the evening like a lost game.

One. The hall. I said "Good."

Two. I said "I am first."

Three. I said "Alphabetically."

She closed her eyes.

She had won a World Championship at seventeen.

She had once told an arbiter his clock was slow and been right.

And tonight she had sat in her bare feet on a carpet and made a possessive remark about a banana man.

I should like to file a complaint against myself.

A shutter clicked nine floors below.

The man in the cap had not gone home.

Let him wait. The coldness startled her. He will not have this.

The wall between her room and his was a single sheet of plaster painted white.

Thinner than anyone had promised.

She had not known that until tonight.

She had not until tonight had a reason to listen.

A phone buzzed on the other side.

Once.

A body slid slowly down a wall.

A voice came through the plaster.

So low it might have been for no one.

"She said please."

She stopped breathing.

M.

Don’t wait up.

"Please." said Seth.

In the voice of a boy sounding out a word in a foreign language.

Then nothing.

It was a very particular nothing. She knew it.

She had lived in it for nineteen years.

It was the sound of a person holding still in a closed room.

She was standing before she knew she had moved.

Her head nearly brushed the lamp. Her pulse was ninety-four.

She did not count it.

Not for that, she told herself.

I will not ask him anything.

I will only be on the other side of the door.

In the hall the strip of light from her doorway lay across the carpet. It ended against the base of his.

As if it had been trying to reach it all night.

She had been climbing since dusk.

Four.

Six.

Seven.

Nine.

Twelve.

Seventeen.

One step left.

(Twenty-eight.)

On her own phone in a folder she never opened sat an email.

Eleven days old.

No attachment.

Same sender. The subject line was one word.

Vesla.

She had looked at it four times with her thumb above the screen. Four times she had turned the phone face-down and gone to find something to straighten.

Schedule attached. - S.

Don’t wait up. - M.

Two women who had both once been devoted.

Who had both learned to sign themselves with one letter.

She was standing at a door at two in the morning to tell a boy to answer his mother.

She had not opened hers.

It is very easy to be brave on someone else’s door.

She almost lowered her hand.

She did not.

She had needed eleven drafts to ask one question.

For this she needed none.

She thought of a boy who rapped on a counter.

Twice. Softly.

When he wanted to be let in.

She knocked twice.

And waited.