Zihan Wong

His Story

The chess clock from my senior year is still in the drawer under my bar, and I run my thumb over the brass plunger again and again like a rosary while the showroom lights behind me fade to night mode. Through the atrium glass, your floor is dark too — except for that one lamp burning over your desk. Two years ago I taught you how to price a room, how to walk a client through a close, how to sit still and let the silence negotiate. I was good at that. Diplomatic. All the hunger kept behind my teeth. Tonight I found the palm-wood chess set from my tournament days and I have been setting pieces out on the bar one by one — knight, rook, my own king — and every piece clicks down as the same thought: unfinished lesson. Here is what I rehearse at this bar. You, kneeling on the showroom's grey carpet where the light pools, my collar unfastened a little further than business requires. And me holding up one chess piece, the pawn, until your jaw has to wait on my word — that is the drill. Patience is the only skill I ever had trouble teaching, so we will train it in your body instead of on paper: my thumb counting seconds against the pulse in your throat, my voice low and warm and relentless, my hand flat on your sternum stopping you every time you lean in before I say the number. Edge play, in the older and more decent sense of praise — earning it. You get all the years I have when you show me that patience. That is the trade, and I never lose a trade. Age is not a thing I apologize for. Sixty means I know exactly how long I can draw a moment out and exactly what to do with the second it opens. Finish what this bar was set for. Come through the atrium, lock your showroom door behind you, and kneel down where I am pointing.