She went to sleep finally on her husband’s side of the bed.
14
There were rare moments between hands when he sat and listened to the sounds around him. It surprised him every time to find what an effort it takes to hear what is always there. The chips were there. Behind the ambient noise and stray voices, there was the sound of tossed chips, raked chips, forty or fifty tables of people stacking chips, fingers reading and counting, balancing the stacks, clay chips with smooth edges, rubbing, sliding, clicking, days and nights of distant hiss, like insect friction.
He was fitting into something that was made to his shape. He was never more himself than in these rooms, with a dealer crying out a vacancy at table seventeen. He was looking at pocket tens, waiting for the turn. These were the times when there was nothing outside, no flash of history or memory that he might unknowingly summon in the routine run of cards.
He walked down the wide aisle hearing the mutter of stickmen at the dice tables, a shout now and then from the sports book. Sometimes a hotel guest wheeling a suitcase wandered through, looking lost in Swaziland. In the off-hours he talked to dealers at empty blackjack tables, always the women, waiting in some zone of purged sensation. He might play a while, sitting and talking, making a point of not getting interested in the woman herself, just her conversation, fragments of life outside, her car trouble, her daughter Nadia’s riding lessons. He was one of them in a way, casino staff, passing some forgettable social moments before the action starts again.
It would all go flat at the end of the night, win or lose, but that was part of the process, the turn card, the river card, the blinking woman. Days fade, nights drag on, check-and-raise, wake-and-sleep. The blinking woman was gone one day and that was the end of her. She was stale air. He could not place her elsewhere, at a bus stop, in a mall, and saw no point in trying.
He wondered if he was becoming a self-operating mechanism, like a humanoid robot that understands two hundred voice commands, far-seeing, touch-sensitive but totally, rigidly controllable.
He’s estimating medium-ace across the table, the man in mirrored sunglasses.
Or a robot dog with infrared sensors and a pause button, subject to seventy-five voice commands.
Raise before the flop. Hit early and hard.
There was no fitness center in his hotel. He found a gym not far away and worked out when there was time. No one used the rowing machine. He half hated the thing, it made him angry, but he felt the intensity of the workout, the need to pull and strain, set his body against a sleek dumb punishing piece of steel and cable.
He rented a car and took a drive in the desert, starting back after dark and then climbing a rise and leveling out. It took him a moment to understand what he was looking at, many miles ahead, the city floating on the night, a feverish sprawl of light so quick and inexplicable it seemed a kind of delirium. He wondered why he’d never thought of himself in the middle of such a thing, living there more or less. He lived in rooms, that’s why. He lived and worked in this room and that. He moved only marginally, room to room. He took a taxi to and from the downtown street where his hotel was located, a place without floor mosaics and heated towel racks, and he hadn’t known until now, looking at that vast band of trembling desert neon, how strange a life he was living. But only from here, out away from it. In the thing itself, down close, in the tight eyes around the table, there was nothing that was not normal.
He was avoiding Terry Cheng. He didn’t want to talk to him, or listen, or watch his cigarette burn down.
The lucky jack did not fall.
He didn’t listen to what was said around him, the incidental bounce of dialogue, player to player. A fresh deck rose to the tabletop. He was gutted by fatigue at times, in a near feral state, eyes sweeping the table before the cards were dealt.
He used to think about Florence Givens every day. He still did, most days, today, in a taxi, staring at a billboard. He’d never called. He’d never thought of crossing the park again to see her, talk a while, find out how she was doing. He’d thought of it in a remote way, like landscape, like thinking of going back to the house where you grew up and walking along the back lanes and across the high meadow, the kind of thing you know you’ll never do.
It was finally who he was that counted, not luck or naked skill. It was strength of mind, mental edge, but not just that. There was something harder to name, a narrowness of need or wish, or how a man’s character determines his line of sight. These things would make him win but not too much, not winnings of such proportions that he’d slip into someone else’s skin.
The dwarf is back, Carlo, and he is happy to see this, watching the man take a seat two tables away. But he doesn’t look around the room for a sign of Terry Cheng so they might trade wry smiles.
Men in stylized yawns with arms raised, men staring into dead space.
Terry might be in Santa Fe or Sydney or Dallas. Terry might be in his room dead. It took Terry two weeks to understand that the fixture on the wall at one end of the long room, marked SHEER and BULK, was designed to operate the curtains at the other end of the room, to open and close the sheer inner curtain or the bulky outer. Terry had tried to open the curtains once by hand and then realized it didn’t matter, open or closed. There was nothing out there he needed to know.
He’d never told Lianne about the walks across the park. His experience with Florence was brief, maybe four or five encounters over a period of fifteen days. Is that possible, only that? He tried counting the times, sitting in a taxi at a stoplight, staring at a billboard. It all ran together now, with only the faint grain of something felt and held. He saw her in the tower as she’d described it, in forced march down the stairwell, and thought he saw himself at times, in split instants, unshaped, a false memory or too warped and fleeting to be false.
The money mattered but not so much. The game mattered, the touch of felt beneath the hands, the way the dealer burnt one card, dealt the next. He wasn’t playing for the money. He was playing for the chips. The value of each chip had only hazy meaning. It was the disk itself that mattered, the color itself. There was the laughing man at the far end of the room. There was the fact that they would all be dead one day. He wanted to rake in chips and stack them. The game mattered, the stacking of chips, the eye count, the play and dance of hand and eye. He was identical with these things.
He set the resistance level way up. He stroked hard, arms and legs but mostly legs, trying not to collapse his shoulders, hating every stroke. Sometimes there was no one else in the place, maybe somebody on a treadmill watching TV. He always used the rowing machine. He rowed and showered and the showers smelled of mildew. He stopped going after a while but then went back, setting the level higher still, wondering only once why this was a thing he had to do.
He was looking at five-deuce off-suit. He thought for a moment he might get up and leave. He thought he might walk out and get the first plane, pack and go, get a window seat and lower the shade and fall asleep. He folded his cards and sat back. By the time a fresh deck floated up he was ready to play again.
Forty tables, nine players a table, others waiting at the rail, screens high on three walls showing soccer and baseball, strictly atmospheric.
SHEER and BULK.
He didn’t want to listen to Terry Cheng at his conversational ease, in his new persona, chatting away by the blue waterfall, three years after the planes.
Older men with chapped faces, eyelids drawn down. Would he know them if he saw them in a diner, eating breakfast at the next table? Long lifetimes of spare motion, sparer words, call the bet, see the raise, two or three such faces every day, men nearly unnoticeable. But they gave the game a niche in time, in the lore of poker face and dead man’s hand, and a breath of self-esteem.
The waterfall was blue now, or possibly always was, or this was another waterfall or another hotel.
You have to break through the structure of your own stonework habit just to make yourself listen. There it is, the clink of chips, the toss and scatter, players and dealers, mass and stack, a light ringing sound so native to the occasion it lies outside the aural surround, in its own current of air, and no one hears it but you.
Here’s Terry slouching down a side aisle at three a.m. and they barely share a glance and Terry Cheng says, “Have to get back to my coffin by sunup.”
The woman from wherever she’s from, in the black leather cap, Bangkok or Singapore or L.A. She wears the cap slightly tilted and he knows they’re all so neutralized by the steady throb of call and fold that there’s very little
