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Freddie takes his pills now.
It’s funny, because Florence used to have to bitch at him about it every other day because he’d forget, or pretend to forget. Or he’d decide they didn’t help, or that they were poisoning him, and he’d flush them down the toilet. After that stunt she kept them with her and gave him his daily dose from the palm of her hand, like a nurse or a mother with her child.
Now she’s gone, has been for four years, and he hasn’t missed a dose in three.
The first year was hard.
He’d missed her. Still does. Worse now because he’s gonna see her tomorrow for the first time since she walked out on him.
The first year, he’d blamed her for it. Raged at her, raged at how she couldn’t hear him scream, how she wasn’t there to stop him.
The second year, after his new shrink and his new medicine (lithium, 450 milligrams, once a day every day at 10am because that’s around the time he likes to wake up) -- after all that started, he began to blame himself.
He’d taken her for granted, Freddie realizes now, the way husbands take their wives for granted. Not that they’d been like man and wife in any other way, though he’d tried to sleep with her once. Because isn’t that what men and women are supposed to do, when they love each other? Except he couldn’t get it up. She understood why, and she didn’t make him talk about it. Which only made him love her more.
She was supposed to be his partner. Forever. She was gonna be around forever , so what did it matter if they went weeks at a time barely able to stand each other? Freddie knows now she was right to leave. He doesn’t blame her for that.
He blames her for the way she did it: all at once, and with a Soviet she’d known for a fucking week.
When she knew what the Soviets were doing to him.
She’d come into his hotel room right in the middle of a panic attack; he still remembers it vividly even though at the time it was all confusion and chaos. He’d been tearing the place apart. They’ve got cameras -- they’ve bugged the place, they put a hypnotist in the front row of the audience, and in here they’ve got microphones in the walls -- in my teeth -- they’re listening right now, Florence -- the bed a bare mattress where he’d ripped the sheets off, the pictures off the walls, the bathroom mirror smashed because what if it was two-way and they were watching him through there, and he was trying to pull out his teeth but he’d only had his hands to do it with and he couldn’t do it, and then she was there and she was holding him. Freddie, darling, you have to take your pills. He clung to her as she asked him questions about the game. If he moves his pawn there, what do you do with your knight. If his king’s Indian, what does that mean for your rook. What if you’re down to one bishop.
And he’d known the answers as well as he knows them well, would know them in his sleep and in his worst sickness, would know them with his dying breath. He remembered to breathe as he answered her there where they sat tangled together on the cold tile of the bathroom floor. He kissed her hands and her arm as he came back to himself, desperate little kisses for his sister/mother/partner, you’re here. I’m here.
He’d taken his pills, and one day later he walked in on her with the Sergievsky. After everything the Russians were doing to him.
And he knew just what to say to hurt her as badly as she’d hurt him. Who’d ever guess it: daughter in collaboration. Crawling into bed with the people who were trying to drive him crazy, with the people who’d killed her fucking father, had she forgotten? Where’s Daddy?, he’d mocked her; dead, or in the KGB?
And then, before she could say it, he spat it out first: We don’t have to be friends.
So they weren’t, and he hasn’t seen her in four years, and he’s going to see her tomorrow.
Freddie’s taking his pills and his shrink is pleased with him, tells him he’s doing well. He also hasn’t told Freddie that he can’t take other things too. Of course, Freddie never asked, and he has no plans to tell the man how much he drinks, or how he’s developed a taste for coke now that the paranoia is safely at bay.
He always did have a self-destructive streak. He’s not stupid, either, he knows that old friend when he sees it just as well as he’d know Florence by the back of her head in a crowd, or where he’ll be putting his pawn twenty moves from now. Which is to say: very well. One crowded, stinking, polluted town is very like another, yes, but tonight isn’t like any other because tomorrow he’s going to see Anatoly and Florence.
Don’t I want to prove to her I’m better? he wonders. Or he would, if he hadn’t just had two lines of coke and if the music in this club weren’t so loud. He remembers when he couldn’t stand loud noises, but he likes this. He likes the young man (but not too young, no, he doesn’t want that and he’d checked twice) kneeling in front of him too, and he laces his trembling hands through the man’s hair as he drops his own head back against the bathroom wall and closes his eyes.
He has to be up at 6AM tomorrow to meet with Walter and the whole fucking corporate Global Television crew. He has to be polite enough to catch Sergievsky off guard with the video of his wife. He has to show Florence… he doesn’t know what. She’ll be furious with him when he pulls the Svetlana stunt, but if Sergievsky leaves maybe she’ll come back to him anyway, like Walter said. Maybe he won’t be his single good companion. Maybe --
He’s not thinking about it. He’s not.
He tightens his hands in the man’s dark hair and he doesn’t think about anyone else, certainly doesn’t think about a different bathroom in a different town when his heart was pounding for a different reason, no, he clenches his teeth and finally he comes.
It’s a relief, and little more.
The next morning he’s up at 6 and he gets to the meeting on time. When Florence and Sergievsky arrive at the studio, he’s polite, and when he apologizes to her he can see forgiveness in her eyes, and for a moment he’s euphoric until he says he’s better and she believes him.
Which is what he’d hoped for, desperately. But he’d been wrong.
Because that part is a lie. He’s doing better, yes, of course. But he’s not better -better. There’s no cure for a paranoid schizophrenic, there’s only pills (which he takes) and therapy (which he refuses) and healthy behavior (which… well, sometimes he practices this, sometimes he doesn’t).
There is no “better,” but when he says that’s what he is, she believes him.
She used to be able to see right through his bullshit. Four years ago she’d have taken one look at him and know what he’d been doing last night just as well as if it was written across his forehead.
She used to know me so well, he thinks distantly as he takes his seat across from Sergievsky. But he knows her. And he knows Anatoly too. Would have beaten him in Merano if the fucking commies hadn’t cheated, and this isn’t a chess game now but Freddie is still going to play him, and he’s going to win. Let her talk to you, give you her version: how married life has changed since your desertion.
Then Svetlana’s pale, anguished face is across the screen behind him and Anatoly has gone just as pale but it’s Florence that Freddie looks to, Florence who is standing just off the soundstage, clutching her handbag so hard her knuckles are white. She’s furious, and he feels thrill: he was right. He does still know her.
Two days later, during their squalid little ending, he realizes he was wrong about her forgetting him. Turns out she remembers how to hurt him worse than anyone else. She doesn’t even have to open her mouth.
Let him spill out his hate, Anatoly snarls. There’s no point wasting time preaching to the perverted.
All three of them know what that means.
He doesn’t know why he expects Florence to defend him. She’d never said anything about it before, but back then it had been a kindness. A gift, to not make him admit it or say it out loud. But now Sergievsky has said it, shouted it, and she looks Freddie dead in the eyes and doesn’t say a word.
As she and the Russian walk out on him together, he wishes she’d had the nerve to do it herself. That she’d called him a faggot, or a queer like his father used to, because he knows her silence will let her pretend she’s done nothing wrong. He knows her so well.
And then she’s gone, and then he’s thinking of his father, and then of his mother, his mother, his mother, and he needs to find a bathroom before he throws up or cries because he feels like a foolish, abandoned child all over again.
Hunched over the toilet, he forces himself to think of the board. Sixty-four squares, black and white, neat and clear. The reason he knows he exists. Pawn to E4. Pause, wait. Knight to F3. Pause, wait. Knight to E5, take two black pawns. And on, until it’s check and then checkmate and he’s sitting on the dirty floor with his back to the wall and he can breathe.
He can breathe, and he knows what he has to do.
He goes to Sergievsky.
It’s hard. It’s hard for many reasons, one being that Anatoly can be so fucking stupid, Freddie thinks. What is this about?, the man asks, and Freddie wants to scream at him but instead he only snaps. Jesus, am I the only one who cares about chess? How can you let mediocrity win?
Am I, am I? he wonders as he talks Anatoly through how to beat Viigand’s Indian Defense. Am I the only one?
He has his answer when he goes to the game: no.
When he was playing in Merano, he hadn’t been watching Anatoly’s face. Whenever he played anywhere, he didn’t look at Florence, couldn’t look at anyone, anything but the pieces before him. But now, here with the cameras, it’s his job to look, and so he sees it for the first time. In Anatoly’s face where he gazes at the board in total concentration, and in Florence’s too where she sits in the audience, staring not at her lover but at the projection of the game up on the screen.
Yes, Freddie can see it very clearly now. All three of them love this game more than anything.
It could have been different, he muses. If Florence’s father had lived. If Anatoly had known his children. If Freddie’s own parents had… well.
They could have had different loves, all of them, and they’ve tried to, haven’t they? But it was useless. Florence said she left for Anatoly but she was always going to leave Freddie, just as Anatoly was always going to leave Russia; each only needed to find a catalyst in the other.
And Freddie, he’s never gone anywhere, really. He was never going to have a lover. He quit the competition but he never quit the game, and even as he thinks of the three of them his eyes are dragged back to that screen, to the pieces moving bit by bit across those sixty-four squares, and he knows he’s not the only one.
Freddie takes his pills every day. They dull the things they’re supposed to dull, and he’s not paranoid anymore, although he still doesn’t trust the commie bastards as far as he could throw them (he couldn’t throw them at all). But he’s not dull either. That’s what he used to be afraid of, really: not that the pills wouldn’t work, but that they’d work too well, and he’d lose his edge, his passion, his one true love.
He hasn’t lost it. It’s there on the board, laid out so clear to him that five moves in he can already see how it’s going to end.
Anatoly will win.
They’ll all win.
And then he’ll leave, and Freddie will stay, and Florence will go wherever she goes, and maybe they’ll see each other again and maybe not, but they will not let mediocrity win. They will be part of something greater. They will have earned it.
It will have to be enough.