our language. How can you stop thinking about us? You see us and hear us all the time. Ask yourself. What comes after America?”
Martin spoke quietly, almost idly, to himself.
“I don’t know this America anymore. I don’t recognize it,” he said. “There’s an empty space where America used to be.”
They stayed, she and Martin, the only patrons left in the long room, below street level, and talked for some time. She told him about the last hard months of her mother’s life, ruptured blood vessels, loss of muscle control, the smeared speech and empty gaze. He bent low over the table, breathing audibly. She wanted to hear him talk about Nina and he did. It seemed all she’d known of her mother for an extended time was Nina in a chair, Nina in a bed. He lifted her into artists’ lofts, Byzantine ruins, into halls where she’d lectured, Barcelona to Tokyo.
“I used to imagine, when I was a girl, that I was her. I stood sometimes in the middle of the room and spoke to a chair or sofa. I said very smart things about painters. I knew how to pronounce every name, all the hard names, and I knew their paintings from books and museum visits.”
“You were frequently alone.”
“I couldn’t understand why my mother and father split up. My mother never cooked. My father never seemed to eat. What could go wrong?”
“You will always be a daughter, I think. First and always, this is what you are.”
“And you are always what?”
“I am always your mother’s lover. Long before I knew her. Always that. It was waiting to happen.”
“You almost make me believe it.”
The other thing she wanted to believe was that his physical bearing was not evidence of illness or some steep financial setback affecting his morale. It was the end of the long story, he and Nina, that had brought him to this dispirited point. Nothing more or less than that. This is what she believed and this is what stirred her sympathy.
“Some people are lucky. They become who they are supposed to be,” he said. “This did not happen to me until I met your mother. One day we started to talk and it never stopped, this conversation.”
“Even at the end of things.”
“Even when we no longer found agreeable things to say or anything at all to say. The conversation never ended.”
“I believe you.”
“From the first day.”
“In Italy,” she said.
“Yes. This is true.”
“And the second day. In front of a church,” she said. “The two of you. And someone took your picture.”
He looked up and seemed to study her, wondering what else she knew. She would not tell him what she knew or that she’d made no effort to find out more. She had not gone to libraries to examine the histories of underground movements in those years and she had not searched the Internet for traces of the man called Ernst Hechinger. Her mother hadn’t, she hadn’t.
“There’s a plane to catch.”
“What would you do without your planes?”
“There’s always a plane to catch.”
“Where would you be?” she said. “One city, which one?”
He’d come for the day, without a suitcase or carry-on. He’d sold his New York apartment and had reduced the number of his commitments here.
“I don’t think I’m ready to face that question. One city,” he said, “and I am trapped.”
They knew him here and the waiter brought complimentary brandies. They lingered a while longer, into twilight. She realized she would never see him again.
She’d respected his secret, yielded to his mystery. Whatever it was he’d done, it was not outside the lines of response. She could imagine his life, then and now, detect the slurred pulse of an earlier consciousness. Maybe he was a terrorist but he was one of ours, she thought, and the thought chilled her, shamed her-one of ours, which meant godless, Western, white.
He stood and lifted the flower out of his breast pocket. Then he smelled it and tossed it on the table, smiling at her. They touched hands briefly and went out to the street, where she watched him walk to the corner, arm raised to the tide of passing cabs.
11
The dealer touched the green button, a fresh deck rose to the tabletop.
In these months of mastering the game he was spending most of his time on the Strip now, sitting in leather recliners in the sports-book parlors, hunched under shade canopies in the poker rooms. He was finally making money, quiet amounts that began to show consistency. He was also going home periodically, three or four days, love, sex, fatherhood, home-cooked food, but was lost at times for something to say. There was no language, it seemed, to tell them how he spent his days and nights.
Soon he felt the need to be back there. When his plane came down over the desert he could easily believe that this was a place he’d always known. There were standard methods and routines. Taxi to the casino, taxi back to his hotel. He managed on two meals a day, didn’t require more. The heat pressed into metal and glass, made the streets seem to shimmer. At the table he didn’t study players for tells, didn’t care why they coughed or seemed bored or scratched a forearm. He studied the cards and knew the tendencies. There was that and the blinking woman. He remembered her from the casino downtown, invisible except for the fretful eyes. The blinking was not a tell. It was only who she was, some grown man’s mother firing chips into the pot, blinking in nature’s own arrangement, like a firefly in a field. He drank hard liquor sparingly, nearly not at all, and allowed himself five hours’ sleep, barely aware of setting limits and restrictions. Never occurred to him to light up a cigar, as in the old days, at the old game. He walked through crowded hotel lobbies under hand-painted Sistine ceilings and into the high glare of this or that casino, not looking at people, seeing essentially no one, but every time he boarded a flight he glanced at faces on both sides of the aisle, trying to spot the man or men who might be a danger to them all.
When it happened he wondered why he hadn’t known it would. It happened in one of the high-caste casinos, five hundred players assembled for a no-limit hold ’em tournament with a major buy-in. Over there, at the other end of the room, above the heads at the clustered tables, a man was standing to do a series of flexing exercises, loosen the neck and shoulder muscles, get the blood running. There was an element of pure ritual in his movements, something beyond the functional. He took deep full abdominal breaths, then dipped a hand toward the table and appeared to toss some chips into the pot without glancing at the action that spurred the bet. The man was strangely familiar. What was strange is this, that after the passage of several years someone might look so very different while being unequivocally himself. It had to be Terry Cheng, easing back into his chair now, dropping out of Keith’s line of vision, and of course this is who it was because how could any of this be happening, the poker circuit, the thunderous runs of money, the comped hotel rooms and high competition, without the presence of Terry Cheng.
It wasn’t until the next day, when the woman at the podium was making announcements about available seats at certain tables, that they stood together outside the rail.
Terry Cheng showed a wan smile. He wore tinted glasses and an olive jacket with wide lapels and glossy buttons. The jacket was too large, hanging off his shoulders. He wore loose trousers and hotel slippers, velour, and a silk shirt gone stale with wear.
Keith half expected him to speak in fifth-century Mandarin.
“I was wondering how long it would take you to spot me.”
“You spotted me, I take it.”
“About a week ago,” Terry said.
“And said nothing.”
“You were deep in your game. What would I say? Next time I looked up, you weren’t there.”
