It was the age of automatons; and, already there was a fly made of brass, a mechanical tiger, an eight foot elephant, and a duck that swallowed a piece of grain and excreted a small pellet. There was a dancing woman and a trumpet playing man. A miniature Moscow that burned and collapsed and sprung up again.
And once there was, and once there wasn’t,
in the time when magic was mystery and science was fact,
in the time when God’s hand could arm man’s puppet,
when miracles were seen to be believed, and schemes were believed to be seen,
there was the Ottoman Turk, the chess-playing mechanical man.
Philadelphia, 1827
Outside the Turk’s cabinet is the stage, the audience, the opponent coaxed out of the audience by Maelzel the showman, the moment when S. will be allowed to slide open the back and be released into air. Inside the Turk’s cabinet is the dim light of the candle, its smoke which does not ventilate as quickly as it burns, the magnets and mechanics that allow S. to control the automaton’s movements, the small chessboard that allows him to control the larger game. Outside of the cabinet is all of the mystery and wonder and suspicions that he alone should be free of, the one person who does not have to ponder how it works—inside is a man, him. He is the Turk’s beating heart, he is its brain. Its skill is his, its first move, its reactions, the many wins and few losses, all his. And yet.
Outside the cabinet, the Turk is a champion, but inside the cabinet there are only endless moves, no trickier than the moves S. makes to slide his mechanized seat from left to right, from front to back as Maelzel opens the various doors of the cabinet to prove to the audience that nobody is inside. Maelzel is a master of proving what is not true.
Still there are rumors. A boy, a dwarf, a man without legs. Some have even guessed the truth, mentioning S. by name. And yet the crowds arrive. They will not relinquish their amazement.
They have performed in Philadelphia a month already the evening she comes to the stage, the last match of the night. “Never a woman before,” Maelzel—replendent, S. knows—shouts. “Finally a woman. Can she beat the Turk? Can she?”
In the café, in Paris, S. sometimes played women, sometimes they flirted with him, but rarely. His appearance was not one to draw them in, nor was his manner. It is no matter: he will play whoever.
Gone are the days of playing masters.
“What is your name, Madam?” Maelzel asks, but S. does not hear her answer.
She takes the stage surprised. She did not mean to volunteer. Her children willed her to, she believes. The power of them together, wishing, with the same force that caused her to take them to the performance in the first place, the first time any of them have gone for an entertainment since the disappearance (death, she tells herself) of her husband, their father, Thomas, eight months ago.
There have been whispers: another family, a secret debt, a sudden madness. But she does not believe them. Given a mystery, people, she finds, force startling narratives on the unlikeliest characters. Thomas was a Quaker, a teacher and reformer, a person of family; and now people want to believe him less than he was. But she does not care what they want to believe. After all her time in the faith, after all her efforts to hold their community together–it astonishes her to realize it–but she does not care if she sees any of them again. Instead all of her work goes to accepting the most logical truth: she will never know what happened, and Thomas will always be gone. Every day she must convince herself of this or else she will merely pass the time waiting for his return.
Her first look at the Turk is no more than a glance. But when she looks more steadily at him, she wants to laugh—at his height, his fur lined robes, his ridiculous turban—there is an air of the absurd to the whole occasion, playing chess on stage against an oversized toy–but she finds she feels sorry for him. His dark downcast eyes, painted on of course, make her think of a serious man forced to attend a costume party. He’s sad, she thinks, before she can chase the idea away. He makes her think of Thomas on the occasions when he was forced into society, and she was the one to comfort him with the thought of coming home again.
She settles in her seat, arranges her skirts, focuses on the ivory pieces in their familiar formation in front of her. She looks out into the audience, tries to see her children, but all is darkness and shadow.
Thomas Jr. is three years older, fourteen to Margaret’s eleven, but in recent months they have twinned themselves. During meals they stare across the table, one at the other, refusing any longer to eat meat and pretending—yes, pretending, she is certain—they are able to communicate without speech. They take long walks by themselves, and force her to wait through long silences before they will answer any question. They all live now in her father’s house; she herself sleeps in the room she had as a child, a strange comfort, and the children have two small, adjacent rooms with a door in between. At night she can hear them talking across the divide, though as much as she strains she cannot make out what they say. During the days they frequently close themselves in one room or the other, and though she stands often outside the door, it is so quiet, she feels forbidden to enter or even knock.
She has thought sometimes of sending Thomas Jr. away to school, to sunder them.
Perhaps she is jealous. They have each other.
But she is their mother; it is grounded in love, her concern.
She herself has stopped going to meetings, no longer calls on friends, rarely receives calls from friends; she has refused all invitations for missions and cancelled those that were already scheduled. Perhaps her children’s strangeness is merely a reflection of her own. She cannot seem to move forward in her old life, nor determine how to begin anew.
“Madam will have the first move,” Maelzel says, though she knows that is not the Turk’s custom. Because she is a woman, she assumes, but she does not argue.
It was Thomas who taught the children chess, and after his disappearance (death, she tells herself) it was her father who taught her, when she and the children moved into his house, when it became clear Thomas was not returning and that she needed both shelter and a job, and her father had, so gently, offered both. Now the four of them play long tournaments, the only thing to reliably keep the children in her presence.
She had thought she was a good mother. Before.
She studies the pieces, imagines the game ahead. She wants so much to win. For them, she thinks, so they will be proud of her. She should find it wrong she knows, to want so much, to be on this stage even, but it is hard to believe now that God would concern himself with such things.
She is embarrassed to see her hand quiver as she raises it over the board, but thankfully only Maelzel is close enough to notice. She glances up at him, and he smiles.
“Do not worry, Madam, he has not leapt at anyone yet,” he announces loudly and the crowd laughs.
How angry people make her lately. She constantly wishes for more grace, but finds herself failing daily at the task of merely being kind. Only her father is still patient with her.
She cannot tell anymore if it is her grief that has taken her over or some other force.
She takes a breath. Makes her first move. Waits for the Turk to make his.
There was once an Ottoman city of seven hills, of three seas, of four hundred fountains, and within that city was another city of fulfilled desires. Within that second city was a pleasure house encircled by a garden of wild tulips where shot into the earth was an army of arrows that had arced over the wall in flight from the bows of a tribe of men driven mad by love. To the east, there was a river valley, once a desert, flooded by their tears.
The Turk knows there is a kind of desire that causes roses to bloom.
At least, once there was.
Each night, by this hour, S. is curved in on himself, shoulders bent forward, legs bent upward. His fingers claw over the pieces, his eyes track the magnets and the moves, and his mind is nearly curled in on itself.
He had thought he would travel. Instead he is in a space barely larger than himself, forbidden to talk of his work, left with only Maelzel and the mechanical man as his companions. When all options were open to him, he desired only chess, but now that only chess is open to him, he desires everything else. This lost love pains him more than any other. Each night he thinks he will quit.
It is the heat, the smoke, the endless games; they are inside of him just as he is inside of the Turk and they press to be released just as he does.
He makes his move and above him the Turk responds.
There is a wind, the Lodos, that rises from the south and reverses the currents of the three seas. There are citizens so consumed by the Lodos that they believe they have been driven mad. Using the excuse of their madness, they speak plainly to those they love, but because they are believed to be mad, their words are not believed.
The Turk knows the language of madness is not far from other languages including the language of love.
He knows there were once Ottomans so versed in love they spoke only in poetry.
She is a fast player. Early in her lessons she memorized whole games, delighting even the children with her quick mind. More than one new side to her has been discovered, not all bad, since Thomas’s disappearance (death, she tells herself). She knows she should not have pride, that she should not put stock in games. But she knows too, that this, now, is what she has, and if she does not take pleasure from somewhere, if she does not find ways to stay close to her children, she will have nothing.
She and the Turk exchange piece after piece, motion after motion. Finally she is focused, and does not think of her children or her husband or even the magical mechanics of the figure opposite her.
At first there is a rhythm and S. is relieved to realize he will last the night. He had expected she would be slow and her concentration would lead to his own distraction. But then she is quick and he finds himself responding even more quickly, as if it is a race and he is pushing her forward faster and faster, and then maybe she is pushing him or it is some other force all together, because finally, he makes a mistake.
S is a master; he cannot believe what he has done. Had he done it? He lifts his hand and looks at it in the light of the candle. His breathing first stops, then comes quicker.
Outside S. is the next move, the lifting of the magnets, the shifting of gears that give S.’s motion to the Turk’s hand; but inside S. is the growing sense that inside of his self is some other self. S. turns his hand over, palm up, and imagines above him the Turk, too, turning his hand over, palm up. S. holds his hand still and feels an overwhelming desire to move it. He feels the Turk’s desire. I am possessed, he thinks. God, help me, I am possessed. The feeling grows inside of him, an invading conqueror, the Turk the Turk the Turk.
She sees it immediately. Automatically she looks up at the Turk’s painted eyes but of course they reveal nothing. She looks out at the audience but they cannot see, do not understand, what has happened. Even Maelzel, who sometimes paces the stage and sometimes stands behind her and sometimes fusses with a crank at the side of the cabinet as if he is adjusting the machinery, does not seem to notice.
She cannot be contained.
I will beat him, she thinks.
Opposite her, for long minutes the Turk sits motionless, as if in thought. Finally Maelzel declares the game suspended until the next night. “The machine must get its rest,” he says with a flourish that draws, from the audience, a loud laugh. Nobody asks her if she can return the next night, but of course she will.
Maelzel, with barely a look at her, escorts her down the stairs and she joins the crowd exiting the theater. People congratulate her for her play as she walks among them. Some smile, some stare, some do not seem to realize she has been their entertainment and stare instead at those who greet her. “Thank you,” she says over and over, but all she can think is, tomorrow, I will beat him tomorrow.
The children await her at the front of the theater, and immediately they too come undone.
“We saw father,” they say in unison and she, already excited, feels a flush come over her.
“Here?” she says.
“Of course,” Thomas Jr. says. “Couldn’t you see him?”
She looks first at him then his sister. There are people and carriages and horses crowding the streets and sidewalk, but they do not notice any of it. They are euphoric. “What do you mean?” she says.
“He was standing behind you. On the stage. Couldn’t you tell?”
“There was no one there,” she says. “Except that man, Maelzel.”
“Father was there,” Margaret says. “We saw him.”
“It’s what we’ve been hoping for,” Thomas Jr. says. “What we’ve been working toward. A manifestation.”
“Come,” she says, grabbing each of them by the hand so quickly they are too surprised to avoid her grasp. “We are going home.”
“Where you’ll be punished,” she says as she pulls them down the street. “That is not what we believe,” she says, though even as she says it she hears Thomas’s voice: “We cannot tell them what to think. We can only teach them how.”
It is as if the children have conjured him, after all.
“He is making me lose,” S. insists and Maelzel looks at him with bemused concern.
“Perhaps we should cancel the next evening’s entertainment,” Maelzel says. “You do not seem well.”
“He is controlling the game. I cannot do what I want.”
“Rest now. You will feel differently in the morning. Or perhaps Georges can play in your stead.”
S. points a trembling finger at Maelzel. “Do not replace me,” he shouts.
And then, more calmly, “I will not let her win just because she is a woman. No matter how beautiful.”
“She is perfectly ordinary,” Maelzel says. “And nobody has suggested you let her win. Play the game!” he says in a burst of anger.
S. lowers his gaze.
“She’s quite good, isn’t she?” Maelzel says. “That’s what has got you so disturbed, isn’t it?”
“He is in love with her,” S. says turning away, though not quickly enough to avoid hearing Maelzel’s sharp laugh.
“Perhaps you have begun to confuse yourself with the machine,” Maelzel calls out, but S. turns again and says crisply, “I have not,” before walking away.
“There is surely a man inside,” her father says, when she mentions the Turk’s mistake. They are downstairs, by the fire, the children upstairs. She has abandoned them while she ponders what to do.
“What makes you think so?” she asks.
“Because mistakes are human. They are not Godly and they are not mechanical.”
“Machines make mistakes.”
“Machines break. They do not make mistakes.”
He is right, she realizes. It is the only logical explanation. Her father and the children often puzzled over the mystery of the automaton, her father arguing for mechanical genius and the children arguing for God’s creation. She herself, when pressed to choose a side, would only say, “It is a mystery.” It had been a mystery she was willing to live with.
“Are you disappointed?” she asks.
“Maybe a little,” her father admits. “But still, to imagine how man could invent such a thing…it’s remarkable.”
“Should I tell the children?” she asks, but her father shrugs.
“Maybe they do not need to know,” he says.
“They think they saw Thomas. At the theater.”
Her father flinches, then tries quickly not to show that he has.
There had been a time when she thought she would not marry, her mother had died so young, and her father, she assumed, would need looking after in his old age. But it was her father who encouraged her to marry Thomas, who hired him as a clerk at his bookshop; and it was her father who helped Thomas with the children when she traveled on missions, often for weeks at a time. The two of them must have shared so many moments that she did not even know of. And yet for months, her father had let her sadness take precedence over his own.
“Perhaps they saw someone who looked like him?” her father says. “Even I have been struck, many times, by people with a resemblance.”
“They believe they saw him on stage. A manifestation, they called it. They think they summoned him.”
“I cannot tell them what to believe,” she continues. “But they should not be allowed to lie.”
“They are grieving.”
“As am I,” she says angrily. And then more quietly, “As are you.”
Her father leans forward as if about to speak, but then he leans back again and says nothing.
“What?” she asks.
“I do not know if I should tell you this. I had decided not to, but now I think I was wrong.”
She waits.
“There was a body. Many months ago. It was disfigured and I couldn’t be certain, so I didn’t mention it.”
“That was kind of you,” she says without moving. “You have borne so much of my burden.”
“He wore Thomas’s watch and his rings,” her father pauses. “But I could not bear to identify him by his belongings rather than his face.”
“Oh,” she says. She is surprised to realize it does matter. There has been a body all this time. Thomas truly dead. Certainty. She tries to stop the tears, but cannot. “I’m sorry,” she says. “It was kind of you.”
“I know it was absurd,” her father says, “but all I could think was if only he would speak, than I could be certain it was him.”
“It’s all right, Father,” she says. “I understand.”
“I’m afraid there’s more,” her father says, and he waits while she collects herself. “He had been dead only a few days.”
She cannot for a moment understand what he is saying, but then she realizes. “How long was he missing before he died?” she asks.
“At least a month.”
“Oh,” she says again, but this time she does not cry. “Oh,” she says again.
Her father never remarried after her mother died during the yellow fever, though surely he could have. How dear he is to her. How hard it must have been to see what he saw.
“What did you do with the body?” she asks as quietly as she can.
“He is buried in my grave,” her father says, and a sob overtakes him. Quickly she drops to her knees at his feet, and leans her cheek up against his knee.
“I’m grateful,” she says over and over. “I’m so grateful.” And when she cries it is at the thought that one day she will no longer have him, and it seems as if all that is ahead of her is one grief and then another.
They were children together she and Thomas. And then had come the day, at nine years old, when she received the inward light, the word of God (Had she really? Still she wondered.) And everyone in the meeting, including Thomas, witnessed it, and afterwards, she went with her mother on one mission after another, the child who so early in life received God’s attention, until the day her mother died, and she continued the missions alone, but fourteen years old at the time.
She could not herself remember the moment, not even falling to the floor or waking in her father’s arms. The closest she could come to a memory was the next morning when she woke in her parents’ bed, a place she had never before been. She was alone and it was late morning. Her chores, minor as they were, had been done for her—the breakfast dishes washed, the bedrooms dusted. It was the kind of gentle treatment reserved for the ill, and so she lay in her parents’ bed, afraid, until finally her mother came looking for her, told her how she would accompany her on her next mission. “You’ve been called, just like I was, though much younger,” her mother said. And that had been all the discussion she ever had about what became her life’s work, traveling to other Quaker meetings and testifying, or more often sitting quietly, wondering if God had really entered her, and if he had, why he wouldn’t let her remember.
When she and Thomas met again years later, when he went to work in her father’s bookshop, where he began his school, he told her what he remembered. “You went bright red, like a hot brick, and you fell to the ground, and you quivered. And your expression, it was… I can’t describe it,” he said. “You were a living angel. Everybody said so.”
How strange it seems to her now. How long she believed herself special, until the very moment Thomas disappeared, and she saw how little reason—how little meaning—there is in any of it.
She misses him. She lived a long time without God’s word, living off of the testimonial of a moment she could not even remember. She had lived off of Thomas’s belief, it seems, and without him, it is gone. It was Thomas who was special, she always understood that, she drew so much from him, from the things he taught the children. His own desire for God’s word, for the inward light which he never received, had made him stronger, she knows. If only she could learn from him.
She tells the children gently: their father is certainly dead, and tomorrow they will visit where he is buried.
It is Margaret who answers first. “But, of course, he is dead,” she says. “That is how we’ve been speaking to him.”
“Did you think he was alive?” Thomas, Jr. says kindly, like the little gentleman he had been eight months ago.
The children have been, it turns out, studying books on death and reincarnation and spirits, ones they somehow snuck out of the shop, and they have been conducting séances on their own in this room.
She wants to tuck the children into their beds, to climb into her own, but when they offer to conduct a séance for her, she does not stop them. They are happy as they show her, Thomas Jr. especially. It is a relief to them, it seems, to call a truce with her. They clear a space on the floor and the three of them sit. Margaret lights a candle, and Thomas Jr. pulls from his pockets a handkerchief stained with ink, a pen, and a folded piece of paper with his father’s writing on it.
She feels the urge to snatch the objects up and hide them away, to press her lips to them in secret, but she has many of Thomas’s belongings, and not one of them has truly been a comfort to her.
Where had he been the month before he died? How can she remove this new image of him wandering, beaten, rotten from her mind?
She almost cries out at the surprise of Thomas Jr.’s touch as he says, “Take my hand, Mother.”
“You don’t have to be frightened,” Margaret says, taking her other hand. “We only raise friendly spirits.”
She is surprised again when it is Margaret who leads, calling out “to the beyond”.
“Margaret is a better conductor,” Thomas Jr. whispers when his mother glances at him.
When her daughter speaks again, it is in a false voice, deep and ridiculous.
She is embarrassed to realize she was hoping to hear Thomas’s voice, that she is disappointed.
“Who are you?” Thomas Jr. asks, and Margaret replies, “I am the keeper of the dead.”
It is a phrase she recognizes from one of Margaret’s favorite stories. The child is pretending, she thinks.
“Have you seen Father?” Thomas Jr. asks. “Is he well?”
“Yes,” Margaret says. “Very well. He was so pleased to see you. He is so glad you, too, are well.”
“Will you tell him we feel the same?” Thomas Jr. says. His voice is tremulous.
“Of course,” his sister says in her false voice.
She stares at Margaret, who glances first at her, then at Thomas Jr. who has his eyes closed and a beatific smile on his face. Her daughter turns back to her and smiles sheepishly, gives a little shrug. She understands then. Margaret is not playing a game, but comforting her older brother in the manner that works best.
It is a chance for conspiracy, she realizes. And yet she snatches her hands away. “Stop it,” she says. “You are making a fool of him,” she says to Margaret who stares at her open-mouthed. “You are letting her make a fool of you,” she says to Thomas Jr. who looks sullen now. Angry again.
“She’s not ready to believe,” Margaret says to Thomas Jr. “Don’t listen to her, she just isn’t ready to believe.”
Thomas Jr. nods and the children silently gather their things off of the floor. It is as if they pity her.
How could she have done it?
They are compassionate children. They worried so over the orphans who died in the Asylum fire some years ago. And more recently over the colored boys who were kidnapped, and believed sold South. They have their father in them, she knows.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “You are right. I do not know what to believe.”
Thomas Jr. is folding the piece of paper with his father’s writing on it when she takes it from his hand.
They stand waiting, heads down, while she reads it.
“Where did you get this?”
She looks first at one child then the other but neither will look at her.
“It is from one of Father’s journals, isn’t it?”
Thomas had asked her long ago to grant him one privacy, to not read what he did not invite her to, and she had sworn that she wouldn’t. And yet he was gone but two days before she went to his journals, only to find them missing from their shelves.
“We didn’t read it,” Thomas Jr. says. “We just tore out the last page. It was the last thing he wrote.” He sobs then, and in an instant, little Margaret gathers her brother to her small chest.
She cannot bear to stand outside of their circle, and so she clutches them both to her, the page still in her hand.
When they have all calmed themselves, the children bring her the stack of journals they had hidden, and she takes each of their hands and kisses them, and then ushers them to bed.
“You know I miss your father,” she says standing in the doorway between them. “You know it is almost unbearable to me to have lost him. But it would be so much worse to lose you.”
“Can we still have séances?” Thomas Jr. asks, and both children watch her as they wait.
What is the right thing? She wants so much to comfort them. She looks particularly at Margaret, who was a comfort to her brother when he needed one, and who now is studying her with a face of open curiosity.
“Yes,” she says finally, and the children rise out of their beds with joy, directly into her arms.
It is awhile before, journals in hand, she searches out her father, to ask him to do what she cannot.
S. dreams of her all night. Awake or asleep, he cannot stop imagining her. He believes she has bewitched the Turk and the Turk has bewitched him. He knows this is impossible, understands even the mechanical workings of the machine, and yet, against his own will, he believes it. In the night, he lifts his hand out from the bedcovers and turns it over and back again, imagining somewhere the Turk is doing the same. You are at my command, he thinks. He reaches out his hand, feels his fingers unfurl, but what he sees is the Turk’s hand reaching out, touching her cheek, caressing it.
In the city of seven hills, three seas, and four hundred fountains there is a story the Turk wishes he could tell, of love.
The beautiful daughter of an ordinary man, Leyla was a child when she met Mejnun, the son of a powerful chief, and they played together without the notice of their parents, until one day Leyla’s mother saw how often they chose each other’s company and was troubled by such intense affection between two so young. She sent Mejnun away, intending for their separation to be brief, a test, but soon Mejnun was appearing outside Leyla’s house at odd hours, not knocking but staring into windows and climbing the wall of the house’s garden just to look over the edge. He was sent away again, and then again, and then told finally to stay away for good.
He fled to the desert, where he wandered.
During this time, Mejnun’s father begged Leyla’s parents to allow the two to marry, but her parents would not marry their daughter to a madman. So Mejnun’s father carried Mejnun out of the desert to be treated, but upon receiving his cure, Mejnun begged God to increase his love and he escaped again to the desert. Again his father found him, brought him home, and again Mejnun sought the desert, the only place large enough to house his love.
Leyla too was faithful. She kept to the interiors, walled inside her garden where she would sing songs of Mejnun’s invention.
In the desert, Mejnun met a crow and asked it to relay the message of his love to his love, and in her garden, Leyla heard Mejnun’s song of love sung by a crow.
In the desert, Mejnun heard the wind and asked it to relay the message of his love to his love, and Leyla, in her garden, heard it.
In the desert, Mejnun met an old woman and asked her to bind him in chains, to pretend they were beggars—to be beggars—so they could approach Leyla’s house unnoticed. But when the old woman did as he asked, and they entered Leyla’s house as beggars, and he glimpsed the object of his love, all Mejnun could do was break his chains and run to the desert where his love was housed.
Finally Leyla married another but she would not allow her husband any right but the right to look at her.
When Mejnun’s father died, his tomb was watered with Mejnun’s tears.
When Mejnun’s mother died, roses sprouted from her grave.
Leyla arranged to meet Mejnun in her garden, but he refused to let her see him, and so they each remained hidden, a small distance between them, while Mejnun recited a poem of his love for his love.
“Mejnun,” Leyla said.
But Mejnun would not speak her name.
“Your name is inside of mine,” he said, “like the fruit inside its skin. There it is protected.”
When Leyla’s husband died and Leyla’s time of mourning passed, she arranged to meet Mejnun again. Mejnun entered her room, and they stepped, for the first time, into an embrace, but Mejnun fled again to the desert, calling out behind him that he carried her with him.
His love for her had grown so large it could only be contained by all things.
In the end, Leyla fell ill and died, and upon her tomb, Mejnun died.
But many have dreamt of them together in paradise.
The Turk knows inside each of us is a black light and a love without end. He wishes he could tell her so.
The next night the game resumes, and since she cannot see the opponent she now believes is hidden somewhere, she directs her gaze at the Turk. Straight at his downcast eyes she looks, willing them to turn upward. She believes she is somehow challenging the man in control (could he really be inside?). She believes he can see through the Turk’s eyes, but as she stares she is overcome first by a sense of unease and then by a sense of familiarity. The same feeling she would have when she was in one room and could hear Thomas in another.
She shudders, and then she feels her breath rise inside of her, a moment of desire.
Thomas, she thinks, and she looks over her shoulder, only to see Maelzel staring back. Thomas? And then it is as if she can feel him emanating from the machine opposite her.
Have I been playing Thomas? she thinks.
How can she consider such a thing? She is not the kind of person to consider such a thing. And yet she does.
It is the children. They have gotten to her with their stories.
How she wishes she could touch him.
It is the beginning of the night and S. should be fresh, not yet discomfited, but he cannot relieve himself of the feelings of the night before. He is hot already, fevered yet again, his mind is pitched fast against concentration. He is all of the things he formerly told his students not to be: distracted, rushed, and too much in need of winning.
Perhaps in France there is some unchosen life S. can still return to. If he was to expose Maezel it would be a sensation. His name would be everywhere, he would be recognized as a great master, the man who beat so many masters, but he would also be known as a cheat and a charlatan. Perhaps there is money in the story, but money has never satisfied him. If only he could tell somebody. He has grown so disdainful of people, of the ease with which they can be fooled.
She is going to beat him; he would like her to know that she beat a master. He would tell her, too, that the Turk wanted her to win.
But how can he tell her both things—that he was the master and that the Turk was as well? How can he believe both things?
She finds herself wanting to laugh. Could the after-life be something so ridiculous as an eternity inside a machine playing a game against all-comers? It hardly seems likely. Perhaps her father, the avid chess player, would enjoy such an eternal existence, but Thomas? No. But perhaps he wanted to reach her—or the children—and this was the only way. Or perhaps, she wants to laugh again, she is losing her sense. Her lack of sleep has affected her rationale.
It is possible she loved Thomas more than she loved God, she realizes. And perhaps this is her punishment. She is to be without both.
But what if she chooses simply to believe? To lay claim to the idea as a fact: Thomas has visited her, and their children, and he has done it out of love and a desire to see them again, to know they are well and surviving.
Why not let that be a comfort to her?
She read only the one page torn from Thomas’s journal. “I know what I hear and yet I know I cannot be hearing it,” he had written. “I know I am sane and yet I feel as if I cannot be. God has spoken to me at last, and yet the things he says. The things I now know. I am the man in the story, whispering to the reeds, ‘King Midas has ass’s ears.’”
Her father read the rest, and said only, “I think perhaps Thomas was unwell.”
“How well he hid it,” she said, and her father nodded.
“It seems impossible,” she said.
And yet it wasn’t.
S. is hot with fever. His hands are trembling. He thinks nothing is his own anymore. He cannot control his thoughts let alone his actions. Perhaps inside of him is another man controlling him, and inside of him another man controlling him, and so on.
“Stop it,” he says aloud, and he believes surely the crowd has heard him, but there is no response, and so he shouts it, but there is not even the grinding noise that Maelzel uses to cover his coughs.
How would it feel, he wonders, to sit at a chair and play the Turk. To sit opposite him and watch the hand extend, grasp its piece, make its move.
He longs for it.
The audience thinks the Turk is the body and somewhere hidden from sight is the soul; but, S. knows, he has become the body, and the Turk is the soul. Together perhaps he and the Turk are a complete man—but no longer is he such a thing when they are apart. He can no longer hold himself together.
If people were to believe the Turk’s magic was real, they would burn him, drown him, destroy him. What they want is to choose to believe in something they know is not real. An easy kind of faith. One they can control. S. does not have this comfort any longer.
He looks one last time at the small chess board. He cannot win unless she makes her own mistake, something she has not done in the course of their hours of play. He leans his head back against the cabinet interior. He pinches out the candle’s small flame with his thumb and forefinger. He will not make another move, not even to exit. Maelzel shall have to drag him out.
Perhaps she will be the one to rescue him, to pull his head onto her lap, where it will nestle deep in her skirts while he lies with his eyes closed refusing to look up at her.
He should not have extinguished the candle, instead he should have used it to light a flame and burn the Turk to cinders. He wishes he could be disassembled and folded into a crate as the Turk so regularly is.
In Paris, S.’s opponents had watched his hands, followed his eyes. He had wished, so many times, to be invisible.
Now, in the dark a peace comes over him. He thinks he can smell her perfume. He is suffused. He can feel her across from him and he wants nothing more than to reach out and take her hand so that the warmth from it spreads through him.
How can he have gone so long without love?
She sees the move and yet she struggles to bring herself to make it.
She wants some kind of sign. Proof. She wants to know Thomas is healed.
Maybe it is not Thomas’s absence she must live with, but this new presence. She looks at the long fingers of the Turk that have reached out and moved each piece. She imagines taking him by the hand, and warming his fingers with her own. Perhaps her father is right. It does not matter if there is a person inside—or a ghost. She should simply be amazed at man’s creation.
What she misses most about Thomas is the way he spoke to her. He would inspire such thoughts in her. Perhaps she and the children can do that for each other.
She makes her last move, and the game is hers. The crowd cheers, somewhere in the room her children leap to their feet, even Maelzel congratulates her, and still the machine keeps his eyes cast down, as if studying the board to determine the cause of his loss.
What the Turk wishes he could make her understand is she is not Leyla, left behind. She is Mejnun.
Inside of her is the capacity to love beyond love.
Inside of her is the history of time up until this moment.
Inside of her is an infinite space that contains all things, including what she has lost.
What he wishes he could make her understand is there is no her, there is only inside of her.
How he wishes he could tell her.
“The Missing Beloved, The Gathering of Desire” originally appeared in The Normal School and has been republished here with permission of the author.
