Room B Booking Sheet Shows Chess Postmortem Overrunning Into Thursday Home Game's Block

"I told him twenty minutes," said Tessa Fenn, coat still on, standing in the gap Room B's door makes when it cannot open past her shoulder. "He said twenty minutes. Then he said twenty minutes again, with his hands."

Room B at the Lower Third Community Center is bookable in two-hour blocks on a paper sheet by the door. Tuesday's sheet is a strip of lined paper with the hours ruled down one side and the evening's claims written across the other: 6:00 to 8:00, one word, blue marker, initialled. The 8:00 to 10:00 line, in a different hand, reads Thursday Home Game. The 10:00 to 12:00 line has been empty since March.

Tuesday is contested ground. The board game night, the Thursday home game, and the seed swap each believe the evening was promised to them, and each has held a piece of paper saying so. The chess postmortem was never on the sheet. It simply did not leave.

The game that started it ended on move 46 of a 15+10 club rapid, on time, with the loser's clock at zero and a knight endgame balanced enough to argue about. Arguing began at 7:40 and has been conducted since from a board set up on a stacking chair in the doorway, which is why the doorway is now a wall.

The line under dispute is move 38.

"38...Bxh2+ 39.Kxh2 Qh4+ 40.Kg1," said the losing player, to the corridor. "The perpetual writes itself."

"You don't have a bishop," said his opponent, from the far side of the board.

"I have a bishop."

"You had a bishop. Move 31. Check your sheet."

A pause. "That's your sheet."

"It's your handwriting."

Both men keep score. Both men are now reading each other's, and by move 30 the two reconstructions no longer share a position. The seed swap representative, holding a tray of seedling pots against her chest, has been told twice that they are one line away.

In the corridor somebody runs the position on a phone and turns the screen around: plus 1.37, depth 16. "Give it a minute," the losing player says, without looking up.

The center's incident log records eleven overruns this season. Nine are chess. Inez Gable, of the standards board, was asked for a ruling on the tenth and gave the one she gives on all of them: "The sheet is the record. Two hours is a booking. Three hours is a habit, and the sheet doesn't book habits."

The pads themselves are Basil Holloway's: twenty-five lines, $4.50, sold at his shop. Since the seed swap wrote over the chess block in March he has ruled the hours column twice, because people erase their own end times. He has had no complaint about the paper.

At 9:58 the losing player, having decided the argument needed more room than the doorway offered, filled in the 10:00 to 12:00 line himself: two hours, his initials, and a start time recorded before the first move of the postmortem had been agreed. It is the only complete entry on the sheet, and it is already fifteen minutes late.

Tessa Fenn has stopped narrating. In the corridor the Thursday home game has begun on the floor, and somebody has asked for a takeback.