Opening

                “White moves first,” Mark suggested, his eyes only a little too wide.

                “I know, I know, I’m just thinking,” John answered with a frown, “It’s just… It’s just so hard to pick a first move. There are so many possibilities.”

                “Not at the beginning,” Mark countered, blowing a thread of smoke and ashing his cigar onto the concrete, “You’ve got two possible moves for each of your eight pawns and two for each of your two knights. None of the other pieces can move at this point. So that’s what, sixteen plus four, only twenty possibilities. Not that many.”

                “Well, if you want to make it a numbers game, sure,” John assented, staring at the board, its sixty-four squares and thirty-two pieces that, with a little cleverness and patience, worked themselves into a game of infinite variability. A game that contained a whole world of loss, of struggle, of victory. A game of high stakes. A game worth playing.

                “Why don’t you make a move, then?” Mark sighed, crossing his arms and turning to examine the flowers that lined the gently rising slope to the right.

                “Well, I guess it’s that maybe the first move is simple, but it sets the tone for the whole game, you know?”

                “A strong opening is crucial, yes,” Mark rolled the cigar between thumb and two fingers, visibly admiring its texture and the snowy color of its ash.

                Silence ensued. John spotted a little white cat, apparently a stray, creeping beside the flowers with a slinking step, as if on the hunt. He looked about, but could see no sign of the feline’s quarry.

                John turned back to regard the board with an unpleasant urgency in his heartbeat. He eyed the squares, the pieces, black on white, white on black. A summer breeze mussed his hair as he watched Mark draw on his cigar. Breathing perhaps a bit harder than usual, he shifted his gaze back to the arrangement of pieces and squares. The board seemed to shift and buckle slightly, as if John were viewing it through some thick, clumping liquid.

                “Well?” Mark prompted. The little cat turned, gazed at him with great green eyes for a fleeting moment.

                John sat motionless, seemed to be trying to stare through the board. Mark cleared his throat loudly and John looked up shamefacedly, said, “Sorry, I sort of spaced out there for a minute. God, I’m dizzy!”

                “Come on John, just make a move.”

                “But you know what I was thinking about as I was looking at the board? It was all the little black and white squares that got me thinking about it, really.”

                Mark rolled his eyes and ashed his cigar once more, “What was it?”

                “Well, I read somewhere or other that our human perceptual systems are set up so that what we really notice when we see something, or smell something or whatever, is the way it contrasts with its background. We only see the tree against the background of the sky, kind of thing.”

                Mark gave a forbearing nod, “Right. Or like the way you feel cold after you get out of a hot shower.”

                John smiled, “Exactly. So I was wondering, looking at the board, whether I was looking at a white board with black squares or a black board with white squares.”

                “You should have been thinking about what move to make.”

                With a warbling howl the cat burst into a run and pounced. In a flurry of feathers and feline hisses a startled raven flew up from the ground to land in a nearby tree.

                “Well, what the squares got me thinking about was, was that what if everything around us, like what if our whole life was like that?”

                “What do you mean?”

                “I mean, what if our whole life, everything we know and love and see and taste and touch… what if all of that was like the figure appearing against some greater background?”

                Mark shrugged, “ I don’t know, John. Can you even imagine what that background would look like?”

                “I doubt it would look like anything, because if it did it would mean we could only see it against some even greater background we’d never see.”

                Mark whistled. The cat went to sleep among the flowers. After a minute or two Mark asked, “Are you ever going to start this game?”

                “Oh, you’re right,” John exclaimed, laughing, “Really I knew what my first move was going to be all along.”

                “Of course you did, Mark groaned, ashing his cigar one last time as, with a sharp eye, John moved his pawn.