The homeless guys droned on, bickering over their half-assed efforts to get a fire started in the stone fireplace. A piece of shit, as one called it.

“Who built that?” Frank asked.

“National Park. Yeah, look at it. It’s got a roof.”

“It looks like a smoker.”

“They were idiots.”

“It was the WPA, probly.”

Frank said, “Isn’t this place closed at dusk?”

“Yeah right.”

“The whole fucking park is closed, man. Twenty-four seven.”

“Closed for the duration.”

“Yeah right.”

“Closed until further notice.”

“Five-dollar game?” the youngster said to Frank, rattling the box of pieces.

Frank sighed. “I don’t want to bet. I’ll play you for free.” Frank waved at the first vet. “I’ll be more batting practice for you, like him.”

“Zeno ain’t never just batting practice!”

The boy’s frown was different. “Well, okay.”

Frank hadn’t played since a long-ago climbing expedition to the Cirque of the Unclimbables, a setting in which chess had always seemed as inconsequential as tiddly-winks. Now he quickly found that using the timer actually helped his game, by making him give up analyzing the situation in depth in favor of just going with the flow of things, with the shape or pattern. In the literature they called this approach a “good-enough decision heuristic,” although in this case it wasn’t even close to good enough; he attacked on the left side, had both knights out and a great push going, and then suddenly it was all revealed as hollow, and he was looking at the wrong end of the endgame’