Chicago is presented as Alexander Gideon’s American professional base and the setting of a defining image of his isolation: a 27th-floor window above the lakeside, where he stops writing and looks out over the fading light. The city connects his academic identity and long-distance correspondence to a scene in which apparent command gives way to loneliness and strain.

Academic and Correspondence Address

Gideon is identified as a political science professor at Midwest University in Chicago, Illinois. The institutional address recurs in correspondence directed to him, including a formal letter addressed to Lieutenant-Colonel Professor A. Gideon and another addressed to Professor A. A. Gideon. These headings make Chicago more than a passing place-name: it is the professional address through which other characters reach him. The correspondence also shows the limits of treating Chicago as a fixed point in the book’s geography. One document gives Gideon’s department and Chicago affiliation before a Jerusalem dateline in April 1976; another letter bears a Chicago dateline in July 1976, while a later address names Princeton University. The records establish his association with Chicago, but do not make every letter or every stage of his life originate there.

The Lakeside Window

Chicago’s most substantial appearance is a scene inside an office building by the lakeside. The building rises twenty-seven floors and is made of glass and steel; its shape recalls a ballistic missile. The comparison brings the city’s modern architecture into an uneasy relation with the violent, tactical language occupying Gideon’s thoughts. He has been writing to Ilana Sommo and stops for about half an hour, looking for a truthful and lethal answer to the problem of mate in three moves. The pause turns the window into a threshold between the written exchange and the world outside it. Rather than advancing the letter, Gideon stands with his brow pressed to the glass and searches the fading exterior for an answer.

Gideon in the City

The description makes Chicago legible through Gideon’s posture rather than through a broad portrait of its streets. He is thinner than the addressee remembers and has less hair; he wears dark blue corduroy trousers and a red cashmere sweater. Although he is imagined in black and white, these details give him a specific, materially present form against the glass-and-steel setting. His hands are clenched in his pockets. Every few minutes he shrugs and hums in a British manner; when a coldness passes through him, he takes his hands out and clasps his shoulders. The gesture is described as the embrace of someone who has nobody. Yet his stillness is not wholly passive: a tightly coiled animal tension remains, as if he could spring back against assailants. The scene holds vulnerability and readiness together, making the high window a frame for both solitude and defensive alertness.

Narrative Significance

Chicago’s function is therefore concentrated rather than panoramic. The university affiliation and repeated address lines establish the city as the institutional base from which Gideon conducts correspondence; the window scene gives that distant base an inward, dramatic dimension. The professor who seeks a lethal answer is also a solitary figure at the glass, separated from the outside by the very structure that lets him look out over it. The passage’s tension comes from the contrast between scale and exposure: a towering office building resembling a missile surrounds a man who folds his arms around himself. Chicago does not resolve Gideon’s isolation or provide an answer to the problem he is considering. Instead, the city becomes the setting in which his intellectual and strategic language meets a visible moment of human vulnerability.