Excerpt: The Man Who Saw Seconds

“You need to think like a monster,” Fish said as he and Preble walked out of the Flea House. “Just a little bit. Just enough to crush the other guy’s mind.”

“That’s always your answer.”

Fish’s saggy, anarchic face took on a look of mock hurt. “Chess is war.”

“For you.” This was an old debate that Preble Jefferson found ironic, given their preferred styles. Preble was the current New York state champion in both chessboxing—alternating rounds of chess and boxing—and one-minute bullet chess. Fish played traditional, slow chess. But for Preble, both chess and boxing were fun, social games that helped him train his window. He could never beat his friend at an hour-long game, which Fish insisted was half psychology and all war.

They played every Thursday at the new Flea House in lower Manhattan—the original in Times Square had been turned first into the World Wrestling Federation store and then The Disney Store—and always finished with a game of slow chess, because he couldn’t cheat at slow chess the way he could with anything that happened at a faster pace.

Fish raised his hands slightly in surrender. “All I meant was take time to cook your opponent. Whatever that means to your strange brain. You want a lift home?”

“Nah, thanks.” The way the subways ran this late he’d need to transfer, but he could never sleep properly on a Thursday night anyway. “It’ll give me a chance to replay my mistakes.”

Preble walked the two blocks to the subway, then headed underground. The clock behind the empty attendant’s booth said 1:58 AM. The one on the platform said 2:09 AM. “Why would you need two clocks if they told the same time, right?” he said to himself aloud. There was no one else on the platform.

The 4 train eventually arrived, as empty as the platform. He walked in and sat down absentmindedly, thinking about Fish’s opening. Preble knew it was a Ruy Lopez variation, though he refused to study chess books. He kept his chess to Thursdays, tournaments and boxing rings. When someone asked how he could play at his level without studying, he said he didn’t want to turn his brain into a storehouse of useless information. It was true to a certain extent, and offensive enough to other chess players that it cut off any further questions. But Preble’s real reason for not studying was a personal sense of ethics, not anything strictly rational: since he already had one big advantage he felt he should counterbalance it with a disadvantage. He liked balance.

The subway stopped and two NYPD officers came in, looking almost like a couple. As the train started up again, they stood talking at the other end of his car. Preble was always happy to see cops making their rounds. He would never need them himself, but when he and Jane had first moved to Williamsburg the neighbourhood had still been rough—they’d moved in just as the very first wave of lawyers and investment bankers had started to drive the artists out to Berlin or Detroit, their financial comfort visible enough to make their building a target of anti-gentrification posters and a few burglaries. The RMPs driving by and the beat cops walking their routes always made Jane feel safer. And for that, Preble was always grateful, a feeling that multiplied exponentially when Kasper was born. It was the reason he’d been a touch irritated by Fish tonight.

Fish’s real name was Robert Legmegbetegedettebbeknek. The Hungarian word meant “the sickest,” but since that was nearly unpronounceable by anyone other than another Hungarian, since he was only 5’5”, and since he styled himself after Bobby Fisher, he’d gone through some nickname drift from Little Fisher to Little Fish to just Fish. Having survived the communists in Hungary as a teenager, Fish’s opinion of all authority was low, and when they played he tended to talk politics all game long. He called himself an anarchist, and his favourite topic was tearing down “the machine,” or at least, in his words, cracking it a little to let some light in. Fish was also a Leonard Cohen fan.

Preble’s own dislike of the government started and ended with the IRS. On some Thursday nights, by the end of the evening, he might find himself vaguely agreeing with Fish that the city was becoming a bit claustrophobic, that Central Park now seemed to have more fenceposts than grass and that there wasn’t an unlit alley left anywhere in Manhattan. But that political hangover from the Flea House was flushed out every Friday morning by the knowledge that his family was safe because of the fences that the police built with their “thin blue line.” It was no contest, really.

Sort of like their game tonight. Whatever could be said about his politics, Fish could play chess like few others in the Flea House. Preble had responded with the Arkhangelsk Defence because he liked sharp positions, like the chins on the poster he realized he was staring at on the subway wall: three square-jawed passengers—multiethnic Wall Street types, chins bravely raised, ties fluttering back in the wind—held stoically onto subway poles. Bold text reminded riders to WATCH, RIDE AND REPORT, with smaller text underneath saying Report any unusual activities or packages to the nearest police officer. Preble was used to the If you see something, say something message, so much so he didn’t notice those anymore, but this one was new. It seemed stolen from Goebbels. Or Stalin. Or Disney.

He smiled to himself at the thought of Goebbels enforcing his copyright, tried to get back to thinking about Arkhangelsk and how it caused him to delay castling, and looked at the two officers just as the male was saying to his partner, “Next time, they want my badge number, know what, I don’t care. But I ain’t giving the perp my pen. Might stab me in the neck with it. You never know. I’m telling you, don’t put yourself out there, ‘cause you never know.”

The officer noticed Preble watching, and stopped talking as their eyes locked. Preble wasn’t really staring at the officer. He was thinking about the poster and Goebbels and Disney and Fish. Together with the officer’s story, they brought one of Fish’s favourite sayings, crude and unbidden: the pen is mightier than the pig.

Fish used the childish double meaning—pen vs sword and pen as fence, fence as laws—to explain why a self-proclaimed anarchist would become first a lawyer and then a law professor. To Preble this seemed like a recipe for unhappiness, but he knew Fish would consider both the poster and the overheard conversation a gem. But for now, Preble tried to chase his friend out of his head and the smile off his face as he realized he’d been staring and the staring had turned into an accidental contest.

Too late. The cop straightened his belt and walked towards him.

The subway sped up as it went under the East River, bouncing hard, and the big cop had to catch his balance on a pole. The wobbliness clashed with his barrel chest and general size, the muscle-and-fat mass of ex-football players, and it slowed his approach. His partner was small, tiny for a cop, with blond hair in a ponytail. There was a wariness about her, but it was only skin deep, like the premature wrinkles on either side of her mouth—not like Fish’s bone-deep, almost Darwinian circumspection. She followed three steps behind her partner, gyroscopically erect in the bouncing car without holding on to anything. Maybe she’d been a gymnast. Preble couldn’t help but notice the contrast between the way the two cops moved.

He could see the future, and he could see this was going bad.

It had started when he hit puberty, at first barely noticeable, a half second or so. But with a lifetime of training—chess, boxing, gambling—he’d expanded it to nearly five seconds. With a five-second window he was never surprised by events, except when he became emotional or absentminded or there was a heavy human component. Unfortunately, he was absentminded far too often, and most interactions were with humans. Now he broke eye contact with the large cop but couldn’t quite bring himself to stop smiling, even though he knew the cop would take it the wrong way.

Officer L. Paskalakki, according to his name tag, took his time looking at Preble, then at the chess bag on the seat beside him. “Seat hoggery.”

“Pardon me, officer?”

“You’re taking up two seats.” He turned to his partner, R. Gliny. “What was the summons on that? We were doing it a month ago.”

“Section 1050.7.”

There was nobody else on the subway, at least not in this car. Just Preble, his chess bag, and the two standing cops. Paskalakki didn’t stop until he was so close that one of his knees was between Preble’s legs. “That’s right. Section 1050.7”

His biggest problem was people. Maybe every human mind had the potential for so many near-random decisions—he’d seen Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in high school and even then had been struck by the line, “Whenever you come near the human race, there’s layers and layers of nonsense”—that the sheer amount of information was far higher when dealing with people than with a slot machine or a falling rock. He thought of it in terms of ripples: bigger rocks made bigger ripples, humans more fragmented ones. Now, what came out of Preble’s mouth surprised even him. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

Paskalakki shook his head, moving and speaking with deliberate slowness. “You could have answered that in a whole lot of different ways.”

Maybe the WATCH, RIDE AND REPORT message of the poster actually did bother him. Maybe he did agree with Fish a little bit or just because it was a Thursday night. Maybe it was because Paskalakki was so close that Preble had to look straight up to talk to him, triggering something that had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with personal space and two men facing each other.

“I could have,” he said, forced to crank his neck all the way back in order to maintain eye contact. “But I was just sitting here minding my own business, smiling because of that ugly poster up there, and thinking about a friend who’s always complaining that in this city you can get a ticket for sitting on a milk crate or putting on a puppet show visible from the street or climbing a tree or driving a taxi while wearing shorts. If a man in blue has a badge that’s too heavy for him, he can always find something.”

“Maybe what your friend meant is that acting like an ass isn’t going to help the situation. Break the law, and, yeah, I’ll bring you into compliance.”

If Preble didn’t say anything, Paskalakki would just continue to stand there, neither moving to write a ticket nor adding anything for at least five seconds. So he asked, “How much is one ticket, officer?”

“Fifty-seven, ninety.”

“Okay, then. I’ll take two please.”

“What?”

“I’d like to buy two tickets for section 1050.7, please. One for me and one for my bag. Is two enough? I want to make sure I’m obeying the law. So that’s $115.80, right? Or should I buy five just to be safe? Safety is important, right?”

Gliny’s face cracked. “Are you serious?”

Paskalakki took a step back. Preble could see that in a second the cop would flip the cover off his holster, but as the cop stepped back the physical space cleared Preble's head. Five seconds wasn’t enough to get hypothetical answers to personal questions, but maybe Paskalakki was just tired of working the 12 to 8 shift every night, giving bullshit summonses like late-night seat hoggery because that’s when the brass could get the numbers—when the trains are crowded people don’t take up two seats. Maybe his father was sick or he was battling his wife for custody of his kids during the day while working at night. Maybe a million things, and maybe Preble was being an ass. With a twinge of guilt, he reached into his pocket to get his wallet.

Paskalakki flipped the cover off his holster but didn’t draw the gun. “Keep your hands where I can see them!” He pointed a finger at the culprit taking up the second seat. “Open the bag.”

Preble nodded at the holster. “You’re not going to shoot me for being a jerk. Which I apologize for. Let’s just do the ticket. You need my ID, right?”

“Open the bag.”

“Like I said, I apologize. You’re right. Bad manners I picked up in a chess club—”

“Last time. ‘Open the bag.’”

Preble sighed and reached to unzip the bag. There was nothing in there except a chess clock (thankfully not ticking!), board, pieces, and a copy of Liberty Unbound in which Fish had just published an essay. An anarchist essay in a libertarian magazine. Paskalakki wouldn’t care about his reading material—this particular essay was about big corporations being similar to big governments, not anything critical of law or order—there was no reason to refuse to open the bag. Except that the person asking was doing it purely to show who was boss. Preble knew he’d been doing the same thing with the two-ticket bit, treating the cop like a subway attendant, but Paskalakki had the full weight of the United States government backing him. It felt like a violation of an honour code, bringing a gun and a gang into verbal fisticuffs.

Fish always said that if only people with severed heads in their bags claimed their rights, then pretty soon those rights would be gone. Then he’d have to open his bag whenever someone like Paskalakki said so. And soon after, they would start examining his reading material.

Preble took his hand off the bag. “I’m sorry, officer. I apologize for being rude earlier. But I also don’t consent to a bag search.”

“On the subway, you don’t have a choice.”

“The law is that you can search me as I enter the subway, so long as I have the option of walking away. That option is the only reason the subway search law was found constitutional.” He’d had so many conversations about this with Fish and a dozen other aging ornery ex-Soviet émigrés turned libertarians who played chess at the Flea House that Preble felt like a second-hand expert in the Fourth Amendment. It was amazing how much anarchists knew about law. Like vegans who know more about meat and digestion of meat and slaughterhouse procedures and how many acres of feed a cow uses than any normal omnivore—though Fish was more like the vegan who works in a slaughterhouse just so he can really absorb the awfulness.

Preble had never expected to find himself repeating Fish’s voice to a cop’s face. He was tired, he’d played chess all evening and didn’t want to think, and the whole conversation seemed absurd, like he’d jumped into the poster across from him while in the real world cops who were not named Paskalakki continued to maintain the bubble of protection that kept his wife and son safe from all the crackheads, rapists and gangsters. He saw what was coming, a few seconds of it, anyway, but it was like a dream.

Paskalakki was done jumping through hoops. He pulled out his old cocobolo wood baton, the kind still referred to as “n-knockers” by the old-timers. It wasn’t standard issue for the NYPD, which preferred the unmarkable, collapsible metal batons, but cops had some leeway in choosing equipment, especially if they could show it was inherited from an MOS father or uncle. “Let me tell you something, Adam Henry,” Paskalakki said now, his voice slow and cold, like he’d learned at some point in his past that anger didn’t have to go hot, that it can come out either hot or cold. “There’s more law in Billy here than in all your law books. Now open the bag.”

Preble didn’t know who Adam Henry was, and he didn’t need to be able to see the future in order to know things were going downhill fast. Living in Brooklyn was precognition enough. “I’m sorry, officer,” he apologized again, trying to find the right balance in a situation that still didn’t seem real. “I’m not going to open the bag, because that would be consenting to an illegal search. I’m not going to physically stop you. But—”

Preble suddenly shut his mouth, because he saw that he’d just gone much further down the wrong road, as though from the whole sentence Officer Paskalakki had somehow only heard “physically stop you,” without the negation in front. To Preble, he seemed to have a particularly chaotic decision-making process, and together with everything else, Preble’s fatigue and irritation, it shrunk his window. And suddenly it was too late to stop the cascade of events short of letting himself be slapped around.

“We’re done talking,” Paskalakki said and yanked Preble’s shoulder. He lifted him out of his seat and slammed him chest-first into the vertical pole hard enough to knock the wind out of him if he hadn’t exhaled, while twisting his left arm behind his back.

Preble wasn’t easy to shove. Besides boxing, he’d studied a half-dozen martial arts, always picking clubs that emphasized “aliveness” in sparring, from MMA and BJJ to Dog Brothers and garages filled with street toughs who spent the class punching bags of pennies to toughen their knuckles, then fighting to submission while still wearing street shoes. Being shoved by Paskalakki shifted his mindset into a lifetime of almost-mechanical training reactions. They jumped ahead of the knowledge that fighting back was a bad idea.

As Paskalakki reached for his right arm, Preble stepped into it and slammed his elbow into Paskalakki’s own solar plexus. The cop gasped and stepped back.

Behind him Gliny drew her gun. Paskalakki caught his breath and brought Billy swinging.

Preble saw where the swing would go and how his own potential movements would change where both Paskalakki and Gliny aimed. He felt echoes of a giant kick to his left side, knocking the wind out of him without pushing him over, then an intense burn, like someone had shoved a red-hot poker through his ribs that exploded into a hundred burning pieces inside his chest, leaving it hollowed out, a cavity where his heart had been.

He’d lived his death countless times, in millions of potential futures five seconds away—every time a subway arrived or a car drove past, he could not just imagine jumping in front, but experienced that little unlived strand of the future like a chess player who doesn’t just think of contingencies and checkmates but plays each of them out and then rewinds. Gunshot deaths were less common, but not new. Here, it was one possibility among countless, all still a few seconds away, from a shot through the heart to a bullet through his hand to making one cop disarm the other. He chose that one.

Preble stepped back and twisted as Paskalakki came at him, just as Gliny lifted her gun and pointed it at Preble’s torso. Paskalakki’s swing smashed down on her hand, and she dropped her gun with a sound that was half-scream, half-grunt.

Despite the pain, her own training kicked in and she immediately lunged for her gun on the floor with her left hand. At the same moment, Paskalakki tried to smash his club into Preble with an uppercut slash that was all rage. It hit Gliny’s throat. Choking, she grabbed for her larynx with her broken hand and pulled the trigger with the other. Preble knew the bullet was going to hit Paskalakki in the thigh, but under the circumstances that seemed better than getting shot himself.

The sound of the gun inside the train was shockingly loud. Paskalakki collapsed on the floor. Preble twisted the gun out of Gliny’s hand and pointed it at Paskalakki, who’d just started reaching for his own gun.

“Shit,” Preble said, ears still ringing, as he realized he was pointing a gun at an NYPD Officer. They’d both reacted like idiots. But the difference was that Paskalakki was a cop and Preble should have known better.

“Shit, shit, shit!” He was calm now, but too late. He could see consequences before they happened, but those were immediate things, actions. It didn’t mean he “thought ahead” in the grown-up sense of the expression, not when he just reacted as he’d now done.

Paskalakki dropped his own gun, then lay down. The subway floor was already covered with blood. Preble took the two guns, and a radio from Paskalakki.

“What’s ‘officer needs medical attention’?” No, no, no! Preble cursed himself again. He’d turned an avoidable situation into a monstrous mess. Why hadn’t he just taken the ticket and moved his bag?

Gliny gurgled and Paskalakki didn’t answer at all. But Preble didn’t need an answer. He lived in a fragmented future with infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters eventually authoring Hamlet—when he was calm, anyway, and when the reactions on the other end were fast enough—and he could just take a step backwards, from effect to cause. He clicked the radio on. “Ten thirteen. Two officers down in third car of 4 train currently at Bowling Green station headed to Wall Street. Need urgent medical attention. Repeat, 10-13 at uptown Wall Street 4 train in three minutes.”

At that moment, the subway stopped and the car door opened. He dropped the two guns between the subway car and the platform, and started to run.

Then stopped himself. A strong ripple: If he returned to the train, he’d see that officer R. Gliny was drowning in her own throat. She’d probably be dead before the train reached Wall Street.

Preble cursed and jumped back onto the 4 train just as the doors were trying to close.