Born at the dawn of the Atomic Age, world-famous during the Cold War, and a fringe figure by the time of his death last year, Bobby Fischer remains a quintessential American icon if not its own portrait of Dorian Gray.

Eerie how his end can be told so precisely as a fable:

And so the Fisher-King, maddened by his terrible wound, fled to the Land of Ice, where he had fought his greatest battle, nevermore to return to his homeland. The icelanders welcomed him and gave him sanctuary, and declared the mad king one of their own to protect him from those of his country who wished him ill. No knight came to heal him, for the Grail had been lost long ago, and so he died an exile: wounded, mad, and alone.

For those of us living smack dab in the Age of Engineering, where a seller of thinking machines is the richest man in the world, it is hard not to suspect that telling Bobby Fischer’s death this way is a gimmick and a trick, because we know in our bones that there are no tragic deaths in the Age of Engineering, which might just as accurately be called the Age of Accounting. Our age’s children die democratically, leaves falling from a tree, all buried under identical headstones that could just as well read “another dead sucker.” We come, we go, we are replaced. Still, one cannot really say that the mythic account is inaccurate by any factual standards: that is what is eerie about it. The more I read of the man, the more I seemed to see him with a kind of linguistic double-vision, as details cropped up that, simply listed down, seemed to turn effortlessly into the stuff of myth, the stuff of fable.

Robert James Fischer was born in Chicago Illinois on March 9, 1943 to Regina Wender and her lover, Paul Felix Nemenyi. Nemenyi was a nuclear physicist , a Hungarian who had fled to the United States when the Nazis rose to power in Europe, and who enlisted in the Manhattan Project where he worked alongside the architects of Hiroshima: Fermi, Bethe, Feynman, Oppenheimer. Regina Wender, born in Switzerland but raised in Missouri, had married the German biophysicist Hans Gerhardt Fischer in 1933, in Moscow. Wender returned alone to the United States in 1939, formally divorcing Fischer in 1945, the year the Manhattan Project was dropped on Hiroshima.

In 1949, Wender’s eldest daughter Joan bought her little brother a chess set from the candy store on the ground floor of the building where they lived in Brooklyn.The set came with instructions. Bobby was six years old. Eight years later, he was the U.S. Chess Champion, the youngest player ever to hold the title.

Madness. It was as if the geeky, socially crippled Fischer had unwittingly become the vessel for the madness of his entire culture.

Genius. The young genius born as the atomic age chilled relations between the two world powers, turning both camps paranoid and delusional. Heartbreaking black-and-white footage on YouTube showing a gangly boy in a plaid shirt simultaneously playing at least 13 games at once for the cameras, probably at the Brooklyn Chess club. In an interview with the writer Ralph Ginzburg, the 19-year-old prodigy presents the aspect of a boy in a hurry to grow up, slavering over custom-made shirts and dreaming of leaving the tawdriness of Brooklyn to become an aristocrat of chess. Yet at no time did his legendary bullheadedness ever demand that he be called Robert or Robert James, remaining content with the contraction “Bobby” until his death this January—and “Bobby” he remains in the memorials on the internet. The young genius, the young prince.

The young prince, the cold warrior. Like Krishna in his chariot, the hope of the Pandavas, or maybe Legolas Greenleaf. Interview from a BBC documentary on YouTube where Bobby looks like a young Nicholas Cage, only more intense and aristocratic. The tones of Brooklyn riding lightly in his voice, not the gnarled and knotted song snaking through the vowels of the madman on Bombo Radyo, crowing at the collapse of the Twin Towers. Early hint of madness as he asserts that the Russians indicated their intent to assassinate his character as early as 1956, when a Russian periodical mentioned his name in print for the first time. The madness seeming to intensify in realtime as we watch him proceed to assert that he has had the fillings in his teeth removed to prevent the Russians from reading his thoughts. The documentary also interviews Boris Spassky, the World Chess Champion that Fischer resoundingly defeated in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1972. Spassky—sounding very terribly old and crushed and weary and European—asserts that the psychological and political pressures that accompanied his match with Fischer, where each were forced to play out the hysterias of their respective governments, destroyed both their lives.

Madness. It was as if the geeky, socially crippled Fischer had unwittingly become the vessel for the madness of his entire culture. Because he was not alone in his craziness, having his teeth hollowed of their protective fillings seemed plausible. The Bomb made the idea of secret technological weaponry credible. It was as though the bomb’s demonstration of the identity of matter and energy had driven zeitgeist batshit crazy. The Americans asserted that the Russians were using psychics to scramble Fischer’s thoughts. The Russians accused the Americans of planting a kind of thought-ray mechanism in Fischer’s chair and took the chair apart midmatch. It seems as if Spassky’s worldliness, his distance from the ideology he represented (in the interview, Spassky remarks on the irony of not being a member of the Communist Party at the time that he was being touted as the champion of Communism) protected his mind from the full brunt of the pressure, even though he lost the match. More ironically, it was Fischer—the victor—who saw the match in exactly the same terms as his government did, who paid the greater price.

“It is really the free world against the lying, cheating, hypocritical Russians. This little thing between Spassky and me. It’s a microcosm of the whole world political situation. They always suggest that world leaders should battle it out hand to hand. And this is the kind of thing we are doing—not with bombs, but battling it out over the board.”

Sixty-four squares of combat. The game we know as chess is said to derive from the ancient Indian game Chaturanga. The game was a strategical sketchpad, the name deriving from a battle formation mentioned in the Mahabharata. It is a representation of war, as are thousands of other games. However, there seems to be something about chess  or something about the culture of chess, that leads to a kind of fanaticism in which the behaviour of the players and lovers of the game indicates that they believe a defeat in chess constitutes a form of existential defeat, that winning demonstrates an essential, definitive superiority over the vanquished. Chess at the highest level is perceived as gladiatorial combat: as a fight to a kind of spiritual death. In the BBC documentary, Spassky speaks as if he had lived through having his cock sawed off in public. Fischer himself spoke of the joy of watching his opponents’ egos crumbling.

Perhaps the sheer complexity of the game plays into this idea. It has been observed that the total number of possible chessgames dwarfs the number of atoms in the universe. The chess master learns to winnow the chaos of possibilities, to discern and perceive only what is important and ignore what is not. A defeat is forced by a failure of perception, by intellectual blindness. The masters of chess appear to perform miracles of perception, seeing beyond, seeing around, seeing through the pieces on the board, like theoretical physicists piecing out overarching mathematical equivalences from a welter of seemingly unrelated facts. Chess as combat theoretical physics. Stephen Hawking staring down Murray Gell-Mann over a chalkboard chaos of Taylor polynomials, murder in his heart.
It’s hard to escape the idea that Fischer had been traumatized by the pressure at Reykjavik, that the intense, global pressure had somehow generated a cellular aversion to ever going through that gauntlet again. The history of the match shows Fischer at war with himself, caught between the desire to be World Champion and the naked fear of death. The history of chess is replete with stories of champions happily avoiding title matches for spans of years. The unprecedented tonnage of ideological baggage the warring world powers loaded on his shoulders must have been unbearable to Fischer, but he had no critical tools with which he might have shed the burden of their meanings. He responded as a child would respond: 1) with avoidance (he did not play another game in public for 20 years), 2) with a search for an authority figure (he donated over one-third of his winnings to the Worldwide Church of God and observed the Jewish Saturday as the sabbath), and 3) with raging tantrums.

The tantrums, first directed at the communists, shifted in focus as he aged. A blogger quipped that Fischer was almost as good a hater as he was a chess player. The range of his invective extended to include the Jews, and then the United States. One wonders if his rage at America was rooted only in frustration or whether there was some glimmer of insight involved, however warped, into the role its paranoias played in his fate.

“YES THIS IS ALL WONDERFUL NEWS, IT IS TIME THAT THE FUCKING JEWS GET THEIR HEADS KICKED IN. IT’S TIME TO FINISH OFF THE U.S. ONCE AND FOR ALL. I WAS HAPPY, COULD NOT REALLY BELIEVE WHAT HAS HAPPENED. I JUST CANT BE CRYING ABOUT THE U.S. , YOU KNOW.
 . . . ALL THE CRIMES THE U.S. IS COMMITTING ALL OVER THE WORLD. THIS JUST SHOWS WHAT GOES AROUND, THAT COMES AROUND EVEN TO THE UNITED STATES. THAT’S WHAT HAPPENED TONIGHT, WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND EVEN TO THE UNITED STATES.”

-BOBBY FISCHER TO PABLO MERCADO OF BOMBO RADYO,
SEPT 11, 2001 BAGUIO CITY

After 20 years, Fischer emerged from obscurity to play a rematch with Spassky in Yugoslavia during the Bosnia debacle, when it was subject to U.N. sanctions. Americans were forbidden to engage in economic activities in Yugoslavia, and the State Department wrote a letter to Fischer, ordering him to desist. YouTube footage of Fischer spitting on the document.

And so the king fled southward, away from the gaze of his people, down to where the earth’s belly swells outward from the swing of her turning and the islands named after a king of Spain. Las Islas Filipinas! Sanctuary to pornographers, pedophiles, yakuza, terrorists, data pirates, Marcoses, demobilized spooks, and fugitive geniuses. Tangier and Casablanca on speedballs and Jesus, where the lost and disgraced come to forget and be forgotten. Where one can still hide in the age of Google. The king’s people speak of his time in the Philippines as The Forgotten Years, The Lost Years, as if he had holed up naked in a cave in Kazakhstan with a loaf of bread and a canteen, and his pictures do nothing to dispell the impression. Liver spots, beard grown long and hoary over the long bones of his face, looking like a saddhu at Khumbh Mela or a Russian monk out of Karamazov. Holed up in Baguio, as it turns out, at the house of Grandmaster Eugene Torre, who introduced him to Justine Ong, his Filipina girlfriend, who, according to the Dutch writer Tim Krabbe, couldn’t give a rat’s ass about chess. In and out of the country apparently, sometimes to Japan, where he would dally at hot spring resorts with the Miyoko Watai, president of the Japan Chess Association. But the Japanese authorities arrested him on behalf of the United States, and Fischer escaped deportation and trial only through Iceland’s generous offer of citizenship.

The king went north again, where he died when his years reached the number of the squares of the game that had made and ruined his life.

He is survived by his daughter Jinky Ong, rumoured to be living in Davao, who (it is said) stands to inherit some three million dollars from Fischer’s estate, should she choose to claim it.