Earlier in the day, Nathaniel had felt a strange, unsettling feeling overwhelm him as he was restoring a 14th century manuscript. Agnes Goldstein, his colleague, saw him stumble at his table and turn green.
"Are you quite all right, Nathaniel?" she asked. She was in her late 40s and, if anything, more stiff than he was.
"I think so..." he said, adjusting his glasses so he could rub his eyes. He was sure he saw some sort of blue light flash through the room just before he fell forward. He felt so ... strange. He felt some sort of unidentifiable feeling that wasn't his own in that moment too. It was so curious.
Agnes walked over and firmly took him in hand to look him over, touching his face and tilting it this way and that to look at him with an expression Nathaniel clearly remembered his mother using whenever he told her he wasn't feeling well. It was not entirely surprising, as Agnes Goldstein was a mother of two children herself. Nathaniel patiently allowed her to do her examination.
"You look terrible. Go home. It's Friday and I won't have you being sick all over the Breviary." She meant the manuscript he was working on.
"But..." he said weakly. He was just getting to the good part. But he did feel awful.
"No 'but's, young man," she snipped, in spite of being not much more than ten years older. "Go. There's a nice deli on your way home. My nephew runs it. Get yourself some matzah ball soup and brush up on your Latin."
"Yes ma'am," he murmured and turned to start properly stowing the document for the weekend when she chased him off, telling him she'd take care of it.
So Nathaniel went home, stopping as ordered to pick up an order of soup, and going home. Agnes would have called her nephew to ask if he'd done so and would have been quite noisy about her disapproval if he hadn't. Nathaniel wasn't even certain he liked matzah ball soup, but even if he'd hated it, the 5.50 spent was worth not having her stomping around the restoration room all next week.
He'd just finished eating the soup (he ended up neither liking nor disliking it and decided in his practical way that if it helped him feel better, he'd have it again) when the phone rang.
No one called Nathaniel because no one had any reason to. He and his parents were not on good terms and hadn't been since he'd graduated college and they saw what his degree was actually in. His last girlfriend had found someone new five years ago. His work friends would make any plans with him at work and never made last minute plans. And he was meticulous about his finances. And yet, the phone was ringing.
Nathaniel answered the phone with a sort of mild surprise. "Yes?"
"Nathaniel," his mother's aging voice said - her tone abrupt to the point of rudeness. "Turn on the television."
There was no need to ask her what channel. His parents only ever watched two of them and if there was something she wanted him to see, it was probably on the news station they followed. Obediently, he turned on the news.
In the few inches of space between the station's banner at the top, the two or three colored crawls at the bottom, and the caption in the lower left corner, there was footage of a reporter looking very stiff and upright in his old-fashioned trenchcoat, his microphone wrapped in the station's logo. "European Correspondent" the caption informed, though his crisp German accent would have told Nathaniel that anyway.
And this is how he learned that the Grand Master of chess had been assassinated. (Nathaniel was certain the man had a name, but he'd held the position for literally decades - longer than Nathaniel himself had been alive, in fact - and so there was only one "Grand Master" to anyone and no one had ever in his lifetime felt the need to specify which "Grand Master" anyone wanted to talk about.)
He'd met the man a few times in his short career as an attempted prodigy and the man had given him a look each time with his terrifyingly pale blue eyes, but never said anything beyond a murmur of greeting. The last time he'd given him that look, he'd quietly said, "If you don't love the game, give it up." Nathaniel took his advice and had been happier for it, so the Grand Master's death was something he immediately mourned.
"Terrible, isn't it?" his mother asked waspishly. She didn't care about the man. Even if she hadn't said anything further, that much was clear. Of course, she continued with, "If you'd stuck to chess, you could have had his position now!"
"Good-bye, Mother," he said quietly and hung up. This was the way their conversations normally went, so he was doing no further damage to their relationship.
His mind was elsewhere now anyway. They'd shown footage of the event someone had managed to capture on their cellphone. From the position and focus, it looked as if the person capturing the event was a parent, proudly recording for posterity the meeting of their child with the Grand Master. The man had finished shaking the teenager's hand, his trademark blue and white marble tile chessboard underneath his arm as he turned and started towards another person, his hand extended and a small smile on his aged face. Then the Grand Master had stopped and turned his head slightly, moving the chessboard over his chest. Then the board shattered, its blue and white tiles scattering everywhere as the Grand Master fell back, dead, to the floor, bleeding from the chest.
The footage cut off from there, but it was enough to shake him.
Nathaniel got to his feet and went to get himself something to drink. (Water, of course. He wasn't a drinking man.) As he went back to the couch, he tripped over the edge of the rug and saw the glass fly out of his hand, the water spilling in the air.
Stop! he said in his mind.
The glass - and its spilling contents - stopped in mid air, as if footage from a movie were paused. But the television kept babbling its news, its crawls creeping along the bottom of the screen.
Nathaniel wasn't sure if he was more shocked that the glass had done what he'd told it to, or with the fact that somehow he knew that it would.
As he stood there, his hand on the back of the couch that had helped break his own fall, he stared at the glass. It hovered for a total of five seconds before continuing its fall to the floor.
Shaking, Nathaniel took his seat.
