And then Corona came.  The worst thing. Alone with myself. No escape to a bar, a date (rarely, mostly blind), or a professional basketball match. At least I had my computer. Not for long. It went on the blink and because of the quarantine, I couldn't take it to get fixed, nor could my computer guy come to fix it. Recipe for insanity, at the worst, or mental collapse, at the best.

Perhaps my trapped-in-a-cell feeling led me to vaguely recall a novel I once read about a man in cell or a room who, to ward off going crazy begins to play chess in his mind. Alas, I had given my chess game and board to my nephew since the game seemed too demanding for a guy like me. Checkers was my speed. And then I remembered I had kept a book about chess which I deemed too advanced for my nephew, not to speak of myself. If I could find it, maybe it could help me to play mental chess. Being in isolation spurs challenges one otherwise would have declined.

But first I had to absorb the basics. The chess board is made up of 64 squares. The board is divided by eight horizontal ranks, from numers1 to 8 and eight vertical files, from letters a to h. This system enables each of the 64 squares on the board to be identified.

After some time of continuous effort, I had become sufficiently adept at using the chess notation system. I was ready to learn from the book about famous chess matches, opening gambits, defenses, and other fine points of the game. In chess - Out, bad thoughts about Corona, or my life, isolated enough, before the virus arrived.

The best chess game is considered that of Kasparov versus Topalov, in 1999. I followed the moves of both players. It included a king hunt that drives the king all the way from one side of the board to the other! And there was the contest of Aronian versus Anand in 2013. Anand showed his attacking skill, particularly 16 …Nde5 according to the mapping system: the knight moved to space d5 where it took the opponent's piece. I began to feel that I was entering into the spirit of the thing. Game 16 of the 1985 struggle between Karpov versus Kasparov kept me glued to the moves of each. In the match between Byrnes versus Fischer in 1956 in New York, Fischer's 11th move … Na4 and 17 … Be6 constitute two of the great hammer blows in chest history.

I learned about the best chess openings: the Roy Lopez, the King's Gambit, the Sicilian Defense, the Center Counter, the Queen's Gambit, the King's Indian Defense, the English Opening, and others. Maybe I could come up with a Corona Opening. I was pleased my sense-of-humor had not yet been destroyed by the virus and my enforced isolation. Yet I felt it was giving way to my growing chess obsession.  

In my dreams, I began to move a rook or a bishop or a king in a, b, or c, and 2 or 3o or 8. I missed the days when potential marriage mates were the subject of my dreams.

My reconstruction of famous matches was mechanical in the beginning, and then I felt I was taking a more creative part in them. I acquired the technique of thinking ahead, of integrating the chess pieces, of attack and defense. Kasporov and the others became cherished friends.

But to repeat their triumphs began to bore me. The repetition began to do away with the surprise and tension I had previously enjoyed. I began to invent new contests instead of repeating the old ones. I would play against myself. The usual two brains of opponents were joined in one in my mind. Where the mental maneuvers of the black pieces wouldn't know the maneuvers of the white pieces, and each had to try to fathom the strategy of the other. Schizophrenia or dichotomy on the game level. I had to keep in my mind the chess board of 64 squares and the positions of each chess piece and the moves of both sides, and to imagine the future possible moves of the white and black pieces.

In the weird game of playing against myself, the white me and the black me, I both praised myself on each successful stratagem that led to a victory and berated myself on each loss. If the Corona plague hadn't subsided and I could return to what had been my pre-Corona chess normality, I fear I would have ended up in a mental institution. This fear summoned up a series of warnings from chess history and literature of how this could happen to me.

The great chess player, Rubenstein, at the beginning of the 20th century, was driven by an ambulance every day to a coffee-house where the chess tournament took place and returned him after the game.

The writer Nabokov knew (and wrote a novel based on) a chess-master whose obsession with the game caused him to end his life by jumping out a window. The character gets drawn into a paranoid vortex as the whole world around him shapes itself into one dominant pattern of black and white squares.

The writing was on the board. The end game was approaching. And with it - the ultimate check mate -- the end of me..