The Chess Game I Had Already Lost

I play at a small chess club, board four or five on a good night. My opponent that evening was a visitor, an older gentleman with a habit of humming one bar of something between moves.

Around move eight the familiarity started, and by move twelve it was certainty: I had played this game. Not one like it. This one. His offbeat gambit, my slightly passive response, the humming — one bar, always the same bar — even the fact that the radiator behind me ticked twice whenever he took a long think. I knew, with the dull certainty of memory rather than calculation, that on move nineteen I was going to blunder my bishop to a knight fork I would see one second too late.

So I sat there, forewarned, determined to be the exception. This is the part that still frightens me more than any of it: I watched myself approach move nineteen the way you watch weather approach. I considered three alternatives to the doomed bishop move. I had refutations for each — real ones; I checked them at home later with an engine, and they were sound refutations, my reasoning was not sabotaged. Each alternative genuinely looked worse. The bishop move was, by everything my brain could evaluate at the board, simply correct.

I played it. The knight fork landed. He hummed his bar. I lost in thirty-one moves, resigned, and asked him — too intensely, I could see it startle him — whether we had ever played before. He was certain not; it was his first visit to the city, his first year back at chess since retiring.

Deja vu is supposed to be a false signal, familiarity wrongly attached. I have accepted that for every other episode in my life. But that game had a script, and knowing the script changed nothing, and I have not enjoyed chess the same way since. I keep wondering which of my other moves are move nineteen.