Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(19)

Jacob made the reservation, and Julia made the itinerary. They wouldn’t arrive until sundown, but they would arrive for sundown. The following day, they would have breakfast at the inn (she called ahead to ask about the menu), repeat the first half of their hike through the nature preserve, visit the oldest barn and the third-oldest church in the northeast, check out a few antiques shops—who knows, maybe find something for the collection.

“Collection?”

“Things with insides larger than their outsides.”

“Great.”

“And then lunch at a small winery I read about on Remodelista. You’ll note I didn’t mention finding a place for tchotchkes to bring home for the boys.”

“Noted.”

“And we’ll make it back for a family dinner.”

“We’ll have time for all of that?”

“Better to have too many options,” Julia said.

(They never made it to the antiques shops, because their vacation’s insides were larger than its outsides.) As they’d promised themselves, they didn’t write out instructions for Deborah and Irv, didn’t precook dinner or prepack lunches, didn’t tell Sam that he would be the “man of the house” while they were gone. They made clear to everyone that they would not be calling to check in—but that, of course, should any need arise, they’d have their cell phones close and charged the whole time.

On the drive up, they talked—not about the kids—until they had nothing to say. The quiet wasn’t awkward or threatening, but shared, comfortable, and safe. It was the edge of autumn, as it had been a decade before, and they drove north along a color spectrum—a few miles farther, a few degrees colder, a few shades brighter. A decade of autumn.

“Mind if I put on a podcast?” Jacob asked, embarrassed by his desire for both distraction and Julia’s permission.

“That sounds great,” she said, relieving the embarrassment she sensed in him, without knowing its source.

A few seconds in, Jacob said, “Ah, I’ve heard this one.”

“So put on another.”

“No, it’s really great. I want you to hear it.”

She put her hand on his hand on the gearshift and said, “You’re kind,” and the distance from the expected that’s kind to you’re kind was a kindness.

The podcast began with a description of the 1863 World Championship of Checkers, at which every game of the forty-game series ended in a draw and twenty-one of the games were identical, move for move.

“Twenty-one identical games. Every single move.”

“Incredible.”

The problem was that checkers has a relatively limited number of possible combinations, and since some moves are definitively better than others, one could know and remember the “ideal” game. The narrator explained that the term book refers to the sum history of all preceding games. A game is “in book” when the configuration of the board has occurred before. A game is “out of book” or “off book” when the configuration is unprecedented. The book for checkers is relatively small. The 1863 championship demonstrated that checkers had been, in essence, perfected, and its book memorized. So there was nothing left besides monotonous repetition, every game a draw.

Chess, however, is almost infinitely complex. There are more possible chess games than atoms in the universe.

“Think about that. More than atoms in the universe!”

“How could they know how many atoms there are in the universe?”

“Count them, I guess.”

“Think of how many fingers that would take.”

“You make me laugh.”

“Apparently not.”

“On the inside, I am. Silently.”

Jacob slid his five fingers between Julia’s.

The book for chess was created in the sixteenth century, and by the middle of the twentieth century it occupied an entire library in the Moscow Chess Club—hundreds of boxes filled with cards documenting every professional chess game ever played. In the 1980s, chess’s book was put online—many mark that as the beginning of the end of the game, even if the end would never be reached. After that, when two players faced each other, they had the ability to search their opponent’s history: how he responded in different situations, his strengths and weaknesses, what he would be likely to do.

Access to the book has made whole portions of chess games checkers-like—sequences that follow an idealized, memorized pattern—particularly openings. The first sixteen to twenty moves can be hammered out simply by “reciting” the book. Still, in all but the rarest chess games a “novelty” is reached—a configuration of pieces that has never been seen in the history of the universe. In the notation of a chess game, the next move is marked “out of book.” Both sides are now on their own, without history, no dead stars to navigate by.

Jacob and Julia arrived at the inn as the sun was dipping below the horizon, as they had a decade before. “Slow down just a bit,” she’d told Jacob when they were about twenty minutes away. He thought she wanted to hear the rest of the podcast, which touched him, but she wanted to give him the same arrival they’d had last time, which would have touched him if he’d known.

Jacob brought the car almost all the way into the parking space and left it in neutral. He turned off the stereo and looked at Julia, his wife, for a long time. Earth’s rotation brought the sun under the horizon, and the space fully under the car. It was dark: a decade of sunset.