Peaces, Helen Oyeyemi [best life changing books TXT] 📗

me,” he said. “It was my second-to-last championship tournament, and she broke my eight-year winning streak. She was magnificent. I can’t believe it’s her …”

What … they really had met before? Plus, Xavier had had to leave a bit out. Eddy’s words of awed approval included something along the lines of “this person wrecked my strategy like a quickly scattering pair of evil bitch demon pincers.” Which exceeded Xavier’s own French vocabulary limit. He says your strategy was … like a force of a nature? Nah. The part of him that would grow up to be a ghostwriter was already evaluating how convincingly he could pass his own voice off as someone else’s.

She wasn’t the type who slowed down for compliments anyway. “If you remember that much, sir, then you must remember all the letters I wrote to you afterwards,” she said.

“Letters?” said Eddy (in English), and then Xavier (in French).

“You never replied. Perhaps you never read past the part where I demanded a rematch. Mere formalities: I didn’t really have any hope that you’d agree to that of your own free will. But I do want to know—” The woman had finished counting the black stones and stretched a hand across the board to count the white stones. “Did you truly play your best that day?”

Eddy and Xavier babbled in duet: Of course Eddy had been playing his best. The game became a matter of not losing, of not being humiliated in front of the crowd of spectators who’d come to see Eddy De Souza beat a young upstart nobody had even heard of before this tournament. He’d drawn on every resource he had in order to withstand her aggression. And he’d still lost.

“A weed, your fans were calling me. And you were the mighty pesticide. Some people came up to you backstage wearing ‘Mighty Pesticide’ T-shirts—”

“Do you think I liked any of that?” (Eddy’s English words were faithfully echoed in French, though Xavier took care to point at Eddy when he said “I” …)

“You signed their T-shirts, Monsieur De Souza. So I don’t know what to think. But that doesn’t matter. I could hardly say anything about T-shirts when I was wearing my own floral-print monstrosity with the logo of a soap company and ‘WASH YOUR HANDS BEFORE YOU GO’ printed on the front and back. I’d had to talk a local manufacturer into sponsoring me; there was no other way I’d have been able to fly to Mexico City for the final. And I had to play you. There are more skilled technicians than you, but you’re the lyric poet of this game. You saved me without knowing it. I’d just lost my job at a stationery company in Gatineau. But things like that are hardly rare, are they. I’d been promised promotions and a pension and all the rest of it, and then one of my superiors messed up some figures. Perhaps with criminal intent, but more probably out of laziness, I think, knowing that guy. I wasn’t quick enough to get out of the way when he turned around to point the finger. And I was clueless right up until the final meeting with Human Resources. I asked about my cardboard box. You always see it on TV and at the cinema—the employee walking away from their desk with the cardboard box full of personal effects. And the gentleman at HR said, ‘Look, if you want a box, we’ll sell you one for fourteen dollars, but don’t you already have some plastic bags somewhere, you could just use those.’ Oh yes, I could have taken the company to court, gone bankrupt, and probably still lost the case … Instead I took my severance pay and left with my plastic bags, completely demoralised. I didn’t even have the heart to try to change what was on record about my dismissal. That I was an untrustworthy employee and so on. I did temp work when I could get it, and I read the papers … There was an article about you. The photo of you was just a photo, the face of a winner, so what? But there was another picture, of the board at the end of the game you’d just won. You’d played white. Night had fallen all across the board, but you’d exploded stars all the way across it and even brought the moon crashing down right in the middle. Stars, moon, that’s not really what I mean, but … I saw it when I closed my eyes. I can still reproduce the pattern stone for stone right now. But seeing it all develop … that’s different, better. Watching your games made me feel as if I could begin again. Even as I placed the losing stones, I shared in the making of the art. So I was fine just playing until I won enough games for it to be clear that this wasn’t just love of the game—there was aptitude too. Then I got greedy. It was a three-year project, competing until I qualified for the tournament, then working my way up the ranking so I could play you. All I studied were the kingdoms you laid out on the board. Your orthodoxies, your breaks with convention, your gambits. And the funny thing is, knowing those inside and out were almost enough for me to beat my other opponents. I did have to tamper with the schedule a bit, eliminate a couple of people I knew I couldn’t beat so I’d be assigned new opponents with less intimidating game history. But it was all arranged so that I wouldn’t be found out until after the final, and I was willing to do the time. I don’t know that I even wanted to beat you, sir. I just wanted that game. Every fifth or sixth move a meteor flight … Ah, this moon-and-stars talk again. That’s what you lyric poets do to us. You reveal the indescribable, and then we go gaga.”

The woman’s gun