At nine o’clock of the night in question I had just gotten home.

Home at that time was a house I had a long-term lease on on one of those side streets that dead ends into and nestles up against the foothills up Laurel Canyon. It was an older place and the guy I was renting it from was the son of the couple who actually owned it. The couple, who had to have been in their eighties, had moved away to one of those places, Arizona or New Mexico, that is supposed to offer a superior climate for the health of people who are sensitive to the smog and the other rigors of the fast paced life we are stuck with in Southern California. I never met them. They had a nice house, though, entirely furnished with things I would personally rank about two-and-a-half cuts above the furniture I had accumulated over the years. Most of my possessions, other than my books, a few of the nicer lithographs and paintings I own and my intricately carved Siamese jade and ivory chess set, were stored in the detached garage next to and slightly behind the house. The paintings and the lithographs, in their frames, were hung in the few available spots around the house where they fit without making the walls appear too cluttered, complementing in an iconoclastic way the framed paintings and drawings around the home that predated my arrival. My books had been added to ones already in their places in the wooden bookcases in the den and in the living room. My chess set, which other than some stocks and bonds ranks a close second to my car as the most valuable thing I own, was in the place I had designated for it on the low-lying coffee table in front of the divan, which sat opposite the fireplace and mantle.

It had not been a particularly hectic day, but one filled with enough engaging busywork to keep me in the office to just after eight. After going to court on behalf of two clients in the late morning and early afternoon, I was back at the firm’s office by four o’clock and I started in on researching and entirely finishing the drafts of two briefs for other cases, one of which had to be filed the following day. On the way home I had stopped by a supermarket, where I picked up a half-pound of bay scallops, some egg noodles and some fresh vegetables. I parked down on the street, as is my habit, and walked across the parkway, the sidewalk and up the relatively steep concrete stepway that is carved through the middle of the front yard up to the front porch.

Before I went in, I paused and bent down to turn the sprinklers on from the waterworks control panel that had been installed by the owners. Under the covered porch, I struggled in the darkness to make out the correct key on the key ring and fumbled with it in the lock, opening the door. I hit the plastic switch on the left side of the switch plate just inside the door, bathing myself and the entranceway in light. From there I made my way into the living room and then into the dining room and kitchen, where I set the shopping bag down on the counter.

The next five minutes or so I spent doing what a person typically does after arriving home from work and then I turned on the television, tuning into a local station that broadcasts the news at that hour. Washing my hands at the kitchen sink, I set about preparing my supper, boiling water for the noodles, sautéing the scallops in margarine and steaming the carrots, broccoli and cauliflower I had chopped up and mixed with Brussels sprouts. With everything cooking, I repaired to a spot midway in the dining room where I could see the television set. I watched a report about a freeway snarl-up precipitated by an ill-timed get-together of a semi-truck and a sports utility vehicle that touched off a 24-car pile-up that still had traffic backed up. A live video shot from an airborne telecam showed tow trucks still sorting out the mess in the darkness, with red flares marking the divisions for the two lanes that were inadequately allowing the traffic back-up to squeeze past the mishap. I went into the living room and over to the television to turn up the volume and then went back into the kitchen where over the stove I could tend to the final stages of the meal preparation. I heard an account of a brazen bank robbery attempt at a Bank of America branch out in the San Fernando Valley that resulted in the fatal shooting of one of the participants and the wounding of a police officer after a breakneck vehicular pursuit halfway across town. The other suspect, along with the loot from the robbery, remained at large while a door-to-door search of the residential section into which he had disappeared continued. The vehicle they had fled the scene of the crime in had turned out to be stolen. A man described as a six foot tall Latino or light skinned African-American wearing a red baseball hat and lugging a mail sack full of loot was still on the loose, the newscaster intoned, and he should be considered armed and dangerous.

With a fork I retrieved one of the scallops from the frying pan and, blowing on it to cool it, gingerly inserted it in my mouth. It was nearly done. I raked the scallops in the pan to scatter and turn them once more. I fished one of the egg noodles out of the kettle. It was nearly the desired tenderness. I put the frying pan lid back into place. The television volume boomed at the station commercial break. I walked out to the living room to turn it down. Back at the stove, I silently counted backward to zero from sixty and turned off each of the stove’s three burners. Retrieving a colander from the cupboard, I set it into the sink and then used pot holders to lift the kettle and empty its contents slowly into the colander. I squinted through the steam, set the kettle on the counter and lifted the colander to lightly toss its contents before dumping them back into kettle. I then added a couple of tablespoons of margarine to the noodles, mixing it up to melt and blend the condiment. I retrieved a plate from the cupboard and dished myself up a heaping plate of all three courses. From the tap, I unleashed a bristling stream of cool water and filled a glass.

Retreating to the living room, I half listened to the weather forecast while chowing down. I was half-ruminating about opening up a seafood restaurant when my focus returned to the news broadcast. Uninterested in the exhibition basketball scores and highlights, I reached for the remote control and began to switch channels. Seeing nothing that held my interest, I shut the television off.

Almost automatically, I set my still half-full plate aside on the coffee table and slid the chess set directly in front of me.

For the next two minutes or so I laid out the 22 move opening of a game I had played and won months before against a computer program. My win-to-loss ratio against that particular computerized chess system and chess-playing programs in general is not impressive. On this occasion, I had ventured forward with a king’s pawn opening and followed it up with immediate development of my queen, successfully stymieing an early counter threat to my queen, queen’s rook and king by the black queen’s knight with the development of my queen’s knight. Successful development of a gambit that entailed my queen, knight, and bishop in a foray across the board had led to black being necessitated to move its king up to the second row as a defensive ploy to protect its queen, taking away the possibility of a castling defense. From that point on I was able to force my advantage over black’s deteriorating position, going up by a pawn at move 26, a knight at move 28, another pawn at move 33, a rook at move 38, capturing the black queen at move 41 and achieving checkmate at move 49. I had by this point played this game out countless times and I knew the entire opening through the first 24 moves by heart. It was just at this point that the game board opened up and the offensive balance had begun its subtle shift in my favor. What I was intent on studying at that point was looking at the varied possibilities that existed for black’s defense to determine what mistake had been made against me, to see if I could engineer for black a way out from the relentless onslaught I as white had so clearheadedly hatched that one night months before.

Before I did so, however, I got up and went outside to adjust the sprinkler system, shutting the flow off to the cluster of sprinklers on the left side of the stepway and opening the valve to the opposite side. Back in the living room I picked up my plate, went into the kitchen and refilled it and returned to the divan. I studied the board and at last settled upon making a defensive cover of black’s most deeply advanced pawn with the king’s knight.

So continued the evening’s amusement, with me reconsidering, restrategizing and in the end recontorting the original clash between man and machine, in this case playing the match down to a stalemated draw after sixty moves. Back in the kitchen I half-filled the sink with hot sudsy water to do the dishes, scoured them with a plastic sponge, rinsed them and left them to air dry on a towel spread on the counter. I turned off the kitchen lights and went outside once more to shut off the sprinkler system completely. I locked the door behind me and deadbolted it, shut off the living room lights and headed upstairs to my bedroom.

A few minutes later when I laid down and tucked myself into bed, it was ten-thirty. For five minutes or so, as is my custom, I thrashed around trying to get comfortable, lying on my back, then my stomach, then one side, and then the other. I wadded up a handful of sheet and blanket and put that between my knees to keep them from prodding one another and keeping me up indefinitely. At last my neck muscle fully relaxed and that slow-paced, free-associative reverie that typically precedes slumber was upon me. Minutes, if not seconds, later I was out, a dead soldier, sleeping like a baby.

I cannot recollect the substance of my dreaming that night but do know that it was a calm dream, a comfortable one with plush imagery and sensation. I know this because I recall being very resistant when I was called upon to prematurely leave it. I know from experience that when I am in the midst of an unpleasant dream, some internal mechanism I have developed allows me to seize upon any external stimuli and interpret that as a call to awaken. Thus the ticking of a clock will resound as the chiming of Big Ben if, perchance, I find myself caught in a dreamscape involving torture, the imminent collapse of a railroad trestle while I am journeying by train, a prison cell or the like. The opposite is equally true. If my nocturnal excursion has delivered me into the middle of a lobster dinner, a massage or say, a longboard atop the crest of a big one in the midst of the International Surf Championships on the Kona Coast, I cling to sleep with the tenacity of a mother protecting her young and it would figuratively require a freight train running through the adjoining hallway to wake me.

So it was that night as I gradually became aware of an outer clamor, an unpleasant but seemingly distant interference with my internalized universe that I was content to ignore. Whatever it was, it did not seem constant, but rather to come and go intermittently, and it did not bring me fully to consciousness. Then the pounding seemed to intensify, which jostled me, but I was still three-quarters in the comfort zone of the cushy dream and laboring to stay there. At some point a closer and higher pitched sound joined the more distant rumble and night’s netherworld lost its grip on me. I lay there, listening. No sound. Then the rapping started again. And a second or two later, my doorbell. Then more knocks at the door.

I pulled myself up out of the bed and started out of the bedroom. I instinctively stopped, stepped back into the bedroom, threw open the closet and in the darkness felt along my hanging clothes and pulled out my bathrobe, which I identified by its distinctive terry cloth feel. I hastily draped it over me, tying it with its belt. The persistent rapping at the door began again, soon accompanied by bleats of the doorbell. I went out onto the landing at the top of the stairs and turned on the light, which threw a limited swath of illumination down into the living room. I descended into the living room and from there padded noiselessly into the entranceway. I put my hand on the light switch plate but did not hit either of the switches. As I stood there, the knocking resumed. I stood up on my tiptoes and gazed out into the black night. There was a form close in on the porch but I could not really make it out. I hit the switch on the right side of the plate, which illuminated the porch light. I looked again, pressing my eyes up close to the fanlight.

I did a double take. There on my porch stood a ghost.