Erol and I failed to get into the local chess club that evening. The code didn’t work, the door wouldn’t open, the lights were off. It was bizarrely dark, even though the woman I had sung Green, Green Grass of Home with the night before, at the performance Marisol M, written and performed by Fredrik Ekelund, had told me very clearly to come exactly there and exactly then for the chess club. We had both been drinking quite a bit, admittedly.

We made up for the missed pleasure of playing chess by drinking beer at a nearby bar.

I was walking home fairly drunk when, through the window of a local kebab place, I saw a familiar face. Johannes Anyuru was having dinner with the imam from the local mosque. The way they were eating looked like more than dinner — something almost sacramental. Only later would I realize that it was the month of Ramadan.

I started waving like a lunatic, as if we were old friends who hadn’t seen each other in years. He stared at me, probably trying to figure out whether we knew each other, and then waved me off, likely hoping to remove me from the window and continue his iftar.

I decided to go in.

For those who don’t know, Johannes Anyuru is a well-known Swedish writer of African descent. He converted to Islam many years ago. I don’t know why, but when I stepped inside, the whole scene felt filmic — the famous writer with a kebab in his hand, the imam, a table full of food, the checkered tablecloth of the kebab shop.

“Oooo, so it is you! Johannes!” I said, sounding and looking as if I’d just been dropped there by accident.

“Yes,” he replied.

“Maybe you could give me an autograph?”

I immediately began digging through my backpack, though I knew perfectly well there was no pen in it. Suddenly I felt that nothing I said from that point on would be either reasonable or something I could stand behind. What came out of me was pure and complete nonsense. I think I was trying to hold on to the moment. Every other explanation is frightening to consider.

“Ah, fuck the signature,” slipped out of me.

“I’ve read all your books.”

A lie. I’d read one — They Will Drown in Their Mothers’ Tears. It was strange, dystopian. I don’t like dystopia; it makes me want to kill myself.

“And the one about chess?”

“Chess?”

“Yes, chess. Tactics, strategy, calculated moves.”

I couldn’t believe I wasn’t dreaming.

“Every good story begins with a mistake,” he said, taking a bite of his kebab.

The imam nodded and added,

“Like chess. Sometimes you have to lose a piece to win the game.”

The imam, by the way, looked like Kaufman in the film Synecdoche, New York — a man who fully understood this slippage of reality onto the table with the iftar dinner.

I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t move. I just stood there staring at them when, luckily, Johannes said,

“Our food is getting cold. You may not know this, but we haven’t eaten all day.”

I nodded, as if I had understood and respected it, said something polite — I don’t remember what — and walked toward the exit. Not even the alcohol in my body could blunt the shame rising in me.