The Fourth Factor

I’ve gone to a school building to hold a chess club meeting there. It’s dark, like an early winter morning before school hours, and it’s drizzling out. The layout of the building is reminiscent of the second high school I attended. I realize I’ve left my equipment in the car, but I still have plenty of time to get it and set up before students start arriving.

I’m still setting up when Coach A arrives. (He taught math there, as well as coaching track and cross country.) He’s apparently going to be here for the lesson today. The students start arriving as well, but I still haven’t got my board up. Looking around the room, I notice that I also seem to have brought my bouzouki along, in its hard case, as well as a Jolly Roger on a short staff (which, in retrospect, was maybe the first sign that things were about to get a little weird).

I hang my board in the front of the room, but some students say they could see it better in the back, so I move it there instead and begin the lesson. I start with ladder checkmates, asking whether anyone is already familiar with them. Some are. I continue, but Coach A comes in with an explanation of his own which seems to be a bit of a digression. I’m not really happy about his presence, but he does work here, so I just have to work with the situation.

In what follows, I give a version of the lesson which is recognizable, though a bit twisted in places, explaining how the rooks work together to trap the opponent’s king on one side of the board – I recall comparing the rooks to clumps of dough around the king when the checkmate has been accomplished. I’m aware that this seems to be taking an unusually long time, and most of the students who would really benefit from it aren’t here today, and at this rate I don’t know if I’ll have time for the rook and king checkmate, too.

I then proceed to explain the checkmate again, in a different way, by launching into a long, elaborate story about a man who is walking along the street one day, minding his own business, when he finds himself closed in by an impassable wall. He tries to escape, but he is already trapped, and the walls keep getting closer and closer without there being anything he can do about it. The visual aspect of the dream is now the story’s events rather than the classroom. I can’t remember many of the details now but you can probably get a good idea of what it was like by watching a video on ladder checkmates and then reading Kafka’s The Trial.

-24.5.22