A Partial History of Lost Causes by Jennifer Dubois

Author:Jennifer Dubois [DuBois, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780812982176
Publisher: Dial Press
Published: 2012-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The next morning Aleksandr woke, as he often did, to a ringing phone. “Get it, Dmitry,” Aleksandr groaned, until he remembered Dmitry was gone; he’d left the night before, pink-eared and elated to be finally done with his job and returning to his silly fiancée—Galina, was that her name? Aleksandr realized he’d never asked. He stood up. On the floor, Dmitry had left some scattered belongings, the accrued bits and pieces of his half a year as a glorified refugee butler. There were pens and coat hangers and mysterious scraps of paper—receipts of purchase that Aleksandr did not recall being present for, though they’d been side by side the whole time. Who was Dmitry? Where was he now? Why wasn’t he answering the phone?

For a short, buoyant moment, Aleksandr thought of who might be calling to congratulate him—his mother, most plausibly, though she usually waited for him to call her these days. It was unlikely to be anyone from the chess academy; their undisguised resentment had bothered him back when he felt he deserved better. Now it seemed appropriate. He did not wonder whether it might be Elizabeta, because he never thought of her anymore.

The phone kept ringing. He knew—and really, he’d always known—that there was only one person it could possibly be.

Petr Pavlovich sniffed happily into the phone. “Congratulations, friend,” he said.

“No thanks to you.”

“Quite a lot of thanks to me, if you think about it.”

“I don’t.”

“How does it feel?”

Aleksandr went to the window and looked out at the graying morning. The day already looked like a dirge. There was a horrible taste in the back of his throat. “Like nothing. It feels like nothing.”

“Oh, come. Don’t be bitter.”

“It feels the same.”

“It surely does not.”

Petr Pavlovich was right. It did not feel the same. Now that he’d gotten what he wanted, he had justified his entire life—every isolated and selfish and odd childhood habit, his lack of friends, his lack of romance. His decision to stop the journal, his decision to hang around these people for the past four years and eat every imported delicacy they fed him. It had all paid off; it had all been warranted. He’d chased his own ego across an enormous country, and here, in Moscow, in Hotel Sport, he’d finally caught it. He was the best chess player in the world for now—though every moment he crept closer to the day when this would no longer be the case, and who was to say (even now, even right this second) that there wasn’t somebody out in the vast world who could beat him? Some wild-eyed prophetic prodigy in a cave somewhere, perhaps, or some nobler version of himself in some alternate universe who hadn’t had the stomach to make the compromises he’d made. The victory, such as it was, was bitter—that was to be expected. How odd that it also felt elusive. He watched the second hand flinch its way across the face of the clock, and in each moment, he wondered. Was he world champion now, really? Was he world champion now? You couldn’t ever be sure.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.