Sweet Thursday

4 There Would Be No Game

As he got to know him, Joseph and Mary regarded Doc with something akin to love—for love feeds on the unknown and unknowable. Doc’s honesty was exotic to Joseph and Mary. He found it strange. It attracted him in spite of the fact that he could not understand it. He felt that there was something he had missed, though he could not figure what it was.

One day, sitting in Western Biological, Joseph and Mary saw a chess board and, finding that it was a game and being good at games, he asked Doc to teach him. J and M easily absorbed the characters and qualities of castles and bishops and knights and royalty and pawns. During the first game Doc was called to the telephone, and when he returned he said, “You’ve moved a pawn of mine and your queen and knight.”

“How’d you know?” the Patrón asked.

“I know the game,” said Doc. “Look, Joseph and Mary, chess is possibly the only game in the world in which it is impossible to cheat.”

Joseph and Mary inspected this statement with amazement. “Why not?” he demanded.

“If it were possible to cheat there would be no game,” said Doc.

J and M carried this away with him. It bothered him at night. He looked at it from all angles. And he went back to ask more about it. He was charmed with the idea, but he couldn’t understand it.

Doc explained patiently, “Both players know exactly the same things. The game is played in the mind.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Well, look! You can’t cheat in mathematics or poetry or music because they’re based on truth. Untruth or cheating is just foreign, it has no place. You can’t cheat in arithmetic.”

Joseph and Mary shook his head. “I don’t get it,” he said.

It was a shocking conception, and he was drawn to it because, in a way, its outrageousness seemed to him like a new, strange way of cheating. In the back of his mind an idea stirred. Suppose you took honesty and made a racket of it—it might be the toughest of all to break. It was so new to him that his mind recoiled from it, but still it wouldn’t let him alone. His eyes narrowed. “Maybe he’s worked out a system,” he said to himself.