A Partial History of Lost Causes Read Online Free PDF Page B

with them and become alive again. The chess men came back before the street performers—the live statues that locked and unlocked themselves for loose change, silvery-black-skinned men who beat on overturned plastic buckets, wild-eyed prophets who described in lurid detail the end of the world. The chess men came back before the academic tours of ambitious young people started to create big traffic blocks, before the college students stripped down to only their unnatural tans and fanned languidly across the Square, before all of Cambridge roused itself sufficiently to once again protest the foreign policy disaster of the moment. My favorite opponent was a man named Lars, who stationed himself at the chess sets with such fierce commitment that I’d forget he could, if he wanted to, get up and walk away. The first day I met him he took one look at me and said, “You look like somebody who feels sorrier for yourself than is strictly necessary.”
    I’d been out wandering, as I often did in those days. It was two years after I’d gotten my results, and I was halfway through my dissertation on trilingual wordplay in
Ada, or Ardor
. I liked the bitter cold the best; it narrowed the meandering, self-indulgent courses of my mind into a focused dissatisfaction with what was right in front of me. This, I’ll be the first to admit, was an improvement.
    I sat down, and Lars promptly decimated me at chess, then told me exactly what was wrong with my game and with me, more generally. After that, we were friends.
    Lars told me a lot of other things eventually, though there was no way that all of it was true. He’d been born in Stockholm, he said, the son of shipping magnates, descended from Swedish royalty. His family had lost everything during the embargoes of 1979. He’d been homeless in Philadelphia, spent a year in Hong Kong, been dishonorably discharged from the Swedish military for reasons he would not discuss. There were conflicts in his stories, mysteries, great gaping holes in time and space, but Lars did not respond to challenges on these fronts except by starting to beat me faster when I asked nosy questions. So I learned not to. Lars lived off of bluffs, wild claims that were never, ever verifiable.He’d worked in a mine on the Black Sea, he said. He’d jumped trains in Moldova, he’d learned to recite the Qur’an from Pakistani immigrants in London. And who could say with absolute certainty that he had not?
    There’s an intimacy in listening to somebody’s lies, I’ve always thought—you learn more about someone from the things they wish were true than from the things that actually are. Sometimes, though, there were intentional provocations—allusions to bastard children, assassination attempts, that sort of thing. Or worse, advice. Analyses. Witty aphorisms. “You know what your problem is?” he asked me more than once. And even though I always told him that I did know what my problem was—that it had been revealed to me via the best genetic testing science could offer—he invariably gave his own interpretation. “Too much thinking” or “Not enough sex” or “Not enough thinking about sex,” he would say. These assessments were typically followed by instructive tales from his own life, in which having sex or avoiding thinking saved the day.
    The last time I saw him before he stopped talking, Lars told me about being shot at in Turkey. It was the end of March, the time of year in New England when you feel yourself regaining the will to live. The sky was a weak white, and the people floated through Harvard Square like brightly colored aquarium fish of all different shapes and origins. I’d bought us both coffees. Lars put five sugars in his, then sent me back into the coffee shop for more. When I returned and looked disapproving, he said, “You know what your problem is? You’re afraid to have any fun.”
    “I have fun,” I said, taking a sip of coffee and spilling some on my coat. The board