Henley was sad to see this proletariat henhouse dry up, but he understood how I had to let Ben’s friends return to Ben. How I needed to create a permanent firewall between his world and mine to teach Ben a permanent lesson about the limits of patience and capital in a loveless world.
My own friends from school and childhood had all been achievers and climbers, boring socialites who worshipped and feared me like a force of nature for the way that I preferred the company of men, of games, of dissolution, of narcotic despair.
I was glad to be rid of them, frankly, and avoided anything like reunions or late-night phone calls to reminisce. I had never done social media. I had never created an Instagram account or tried my hand at Twitter like Gabriella, attempting to replace the sucking void of my soul with something like a brand or a fixed identity. I relished the sucking void and had no desire to pretend that it could be plugged, that there was anything like a piece of cork that might take the shape of my wound and stop the respiration process of my shabby, sobbing pain.
“I do not have any friends who I would trust to take care of me in this situation or who I would want to burden with the danger of what might be happening right now,” I finally reply.
Ed and Mel look at each other, so full of knowing compassion that I want to vomit on their shiny shoes.
“Listen,” I say. “I need to clear my head and get away from all of this. I know a place in the Village where we can play very high-stakes board games. I will cover the two of you if you accompany me as my guests and not merely as my employees for the afternoon. If I am going to be murdered, I would rather be murdered there. Actually, it’s probably the safest place in the city I could go. No one knows about it and there are cameras everywhere.”
Ed and Mel look at each other and shrug.
“We have to go where you go,” says Ed.
“Do you like board games?” I ask.
“Sure,” says Ed.
“Do you like gambling?”
“When it’s somebody else’s money,” chuckles Mel.
“Well, I’ll make it easy for you. You can place side bets on the action, betting on any given player to do well. You should just place your bets on me, honestly. If I win, you’ll make some extra cash that you can keep as your own rakings. You will be my personal invited guests.”
“Like I said,” says Ed, “we have to go where you go.”
I pull out my phone, just to make sure Cardboard Struggle is open. It would be rare for them not to be operational on a Friday afternoon, but the proprietor is a cantankerous son of a bitch named Raj Pandat and he keeps to his own hours and runs his board game speakeasy according to his own sadistic whims.
“What?” he says, picking up my call.
“You open?” I ask.
“Yeah, there’s five people playing fifty-grand Sea Farmers, about to stab each other to death over the way the coral is rolling up. Your dad would be proud as shit to see them so angry over something so stupid.”
“I’m on my way,” I say. “If we can get all five on board, I’d like to get a game going. Maybe Diplomacy? Or Teeth of Steel?”
“What’s your bet?” asks Raj.
“I’ll stake a hundred grand, just to call the game. I’m bringing some friends. Security, actually, but tell everyone not to be alarmed. I’m going to stake them, too. They don’t intend to play, but they will certainly enjoy the action.”
“I’m not going to bet on you today,” says Raj. “You don’t sound good. You don’t sound steady. You sound wild and stupid.”
“We’ll be there in thirty minutes,” I say. “Make sure they wrap up this game of Sea Farmers without anyone getting stabbed. Anybody who loses their shirt will have an opportunity to make it back as soon as we get there.”
We take the train down to the Village.
Cardboard Struggle is in a loft apartment off Minetta Alley. I am one of the original investors, having met Raj at the Compleat Strategist long ago when we were both moody, inscrutable jerks who enjoyed being underestimated by the fresh-faced eager teenagers and old crew-cut military men who made up the city’s churning population of elite gamers. He was independently wealthy like me, the son of an Indian steel baron. We both wanted a place where we could be assured of a game that would be challenging but professional, where the stakes could be as high as we wanted and where no one would flinch from the thrill of cardboard carnage.
I ring the buzzer downstairs and, after an interminable wait, the buzzer downstairs correspondingly goes off, signaling that it is okay to come up.
“I guess these are the friends I have left,” I tell Mel and Ed. “Besides you two, of course.”
28
Cardboard Struggle is a three-room loft with a kitchen and two bathrooms.
Two rooms are just for gaming, containing long tables and short ones. There are bars and flat-screen televisions that play video feeds from other high-stakes gaming parlors around the world. If you are bored by the slowness of a game, you can bet on the action elsewhere. Correspondingly, there are cameras all over these gaming rooms that broadcast the feed from here, if everyone agrees to make a game public.
The third room is a giant game library, which has been stocked with almost every existing board game, rows and rows of first editions and reprints. It is a circulating library of the best and the worst, of the most complicated and successful crystallizations of rule and process, arcane systems meant to provoke conflict and satisfy tenuous hierarchies.
All three rooms
