Picture it; the sun is beating down on you from an azure sky, there's a pounding in your skull in a rhythm with the pulse in your temples and the street is awfully hard beneath your feet. You stagger to one side and sigh in relief under a balcony, you still can't see from, having just left the white glare of the sunlit streets, but you can feel the cool interior of an old building beckoning you, drawing you within. You stagger, almost tripping, up the stairs where a man in a suit gestures towards an elevator, a surprise since you thought he'd just politely hurl you back down the stairs.
A minute or so later, your eyes are just beginning to adjust and you can make out some of your surroundings, you find yourself in the midst of what appears to be a small convention. You stumble past a noticeboard to a table with a large number of books on it, now if those spots in front of your eyes would just clear away you might be able to work out just what exactly you've stumbled into. You pick up a book to occupy yourself with while blinking vigorously to clear your vision, fragments of words from a title spring out, "Games ..." something "... Fischer." For some reason that strikes a familiar note, which inevitably results in many more familiar notes striking up in your head. It isn't until you have One Night In Bangkok playing in your head continuously that you realise you've stumbled into, of all things, a chess convention. A little more fumbling along the tables and you find a programme which explains that you've managed to find the Australian Chess Championships.
Now that you think about it, it is rather quiet for something you mistook to be a convention. This, however, is not an advantage since Murray Head is still explaining, in the way only an '80s rock musical can, that he's in control because he's watching the game. Though finding yourself in a position where all you can do is watch you seem fairly convinced that there's no real control to be had in such a position. This, however, is a digression since you find yourself trapped in a hall surrounded by people who clearly know exactly what they're doing and you pray desperately for two things: that you won't be immediately marked as an outsider and that the Chess chorus line would exit stage left.
So now you're trapped in a hall full of row upon row of chessboards, each with armies arrayed against each other. The atmosphere is tensed with an enforced quiet not unlike that of a library, though here, instead of quietly reading, people are quietly duelling. Each participant attempting to slaughter their opponents, to turn the board before them into killing fields without being annihilated in the process, and all without raising their voices above a whisper. As you look around the hall you will see hundreds of battles and countless skirmishes, but there are no screams of agony or cries of victory here, not even a whimper before destruction. Just the endless ticking of the clocks, the scratching of pens on scoresheets and whispered conversations around some of the boards.
A quick glance at the crumpled tournament programme tells you that the tournament is at least half way completed, by this stage there ought to be some amazing games in progress. You wander over to the Championship tables, at least you assume they're the Championship tables tucked safely behind their crimson barrier at the far end of the supper room, to have a look. You watch the game for about half an hour, trying to look like you know just what the Hell the players are up to. You remember when your father taught you how to play when you were eight or nine years old, you know the moves, but none of that explains what you see now. A lot of the moves made just don't seem to make any sense. Why move that bishop deliberately into range of that pawn over there? Why didn't the other player take it, it certainly wouldn't have placed his king in any danger? Isn't that the point of the game, to get the opponent's king without letting your own topple? Surely then, removing many of an opponent's pieces would weaken his defence, so why was that Bishop left alone?
You ponder these questions for a while, wondering just what the top players of the country are up to when they leave such things alone. It's not, of course, until you see the completion of the game and the completion of the strategies that it all makes a sick and twisted kind of sense. These people are all planning their games for any possible move their opponent might make ahead of time. Everyone does that, you suppose, but these people manage to plan twenty or more moves ahead and cover not just what will happen if you take a piece, but also what will happen to the area of the board you've moved a piece from earlier to take a piece! It makes you worry just what on Earth actually goes on inside their calculating brains during games of this calibre. How many of them apply what they do on the chessboard to everything else they do in life? If so, how many of them are in politics? You glance at the chart displaying who's in the Championship?and breathe a sigh of heartfelt relief as you don't recognise any of the names as being the same as any politicians on either a Federal or State level. At least calculating and strategically adept doesn't necessarily correlate with manipulative and Machiavellian.
Now that your eyes have adjusted and your head no longer feels like the inside of a drum kit, you're feeling a little more comfortable. Glancing furtively around you realise that no one's paying any particular attention to this remnant of the outside world. Now that you think about it, though, why would they? They have the game of kings to occupy their time, so you might as well join them and watch the Championship too. After all, watching is the first form of learning and you might even be able to improve enough to join them in a more active way in the future.
Thursday January 8th, 1998
Copyright © Benjamin D. McGinnes, 1998
[Re-edited for conversion to HTML; 29/8/2003]
Copyright © Benjamin D. McGinnes, 1998-2003