by Mat Osman
“And then one night we were both working and we walked into the casino and there was this air of anticipation, so thick you could feel it. And that meant one of two things. Someone famous was playing or someone was on tilt.”
I hadn’t interrupted. Her voice had fallen into a lovely dark rhythm, like being read to as a child. The stale air of the camper van had melted away until there was just me and a voice.
“On tilt?” I asked.
“Yeah. Like a pinball machine I guess. Huh. I’ve never thought about its meaning before. It’s when someone loses all sense of logic and starts spiralling. They start making crazy bets. It can be kind of amazing to watch. Terrifying, but amazing. The whole room is electrified because it means a feeding frenzy is coming. And this night there are three tables playing but it’s obvious where the action is. Six players in the corner table, sitting in dead silence, as everyone is watching. The pit boss comes over — this lovely, lovely man, Ernie, an old-school Vegas guy who was there when it was just gangsters and cacti — and even he’s sweating because he needs someone who knows Pai Gow Poker.”
“Pai Gow?” I switched off the neon tube over the bed to lose myself deeper in her voice.
“It’s this Chinese poker game that’s very fast moving and there’s always a ton of big bets but only a few casinos played it back then. And the guy who is on tilt is this obese Chinese guy in a ten-gallon hat who is threatening to leave and go play across the road at The Sands because they’re like the Pai Gow experts. But he still has a stack of chips in front of him and everyone wants a piece of it and luckily, because me and Bran are recent graduates, it was one of the variants we’d been taught. So in seconds the other dealer is off and Bran’s dealing Pai Gow for huge money. I get the table next to him, dealing the five to twenty-five dollar regulars but to be honest everyone, the other players included, are just betting on autopilot so they can watch this guy crash and burn. And it’s horrible to see, just a bloodbath. Bran deals, they bet, Ten Gallon Hat loses. Bran deals, the same thing happens. And you watch one pile of chips shrink and all the others rise. The guy who is winning biggest has headphones on so he can’t be spooked and the other players are keeping their eyes down and Bran is watching Ten Gallon closely, because this is like the moment in a nature documentary where the cheetah finally gets his claws in the wildebeest or whatever. And then Ten Gallon starts talking to Bran.
“You know it’s just because he can’t get a rise out of the others at the table, but still it’s constant. ‘Fucking shitty cards from a dumb fuck dealer you smiling there fucker? You smiling? Yeah you Billy Idol. You watching, yeah, you think it’s funny? I tell you what’s funny fucking Eraserhead looking motherfucker this fucking hand I just lost is what ten times your fucking salary and I don’t even care I lose money like that down the back of the couch.’
“And he loses again. Loses big and I’m willing Bran please don’t smile but as he collects the cards he turns to the winner and says, ‘beautifully played sir’ and I don’t think I’ve ever heard Bran call anyone sir before and then he deals the next hand and he’s whistling ‘Hot in the City’.
This hand, now the guy is playing it like he’s playing against Bran. The others have been forgotten, even Headphones Guy, who has ninety percent of his chips now. Ten Gallon is saying ‘fucking albino fuck I see you smiling like you think it’s a big deal fucking thousand dollars it’s a big deal to you Billy Idol fuck’ and Bran’s still whistling ‘Hot in the City’ and he has this half-smile going that’s got to be a hundred times more annoying than if he were laughing and the chips are stacking up and Ten Gallon doesn’t even look at his cards. He’s betting blind which makes the others nervous because all the time he’s been on tilt they’ve been reading him like a book but now who knows what might happen, right?”
Dusk had fallen and Rae’s voice was soft as moth’s wings.
“Still, no one’s dropping out. They’ve all got his chips to gamble with and this could be the last time around. Bran’s just singing the ‘say your prayers’ bit and even Headphones Guy has taken them off now so he can listen to Ten Gallon’s spiel “fucking Billy Idol albino fag fuck smile one more time I dare you” and the pit boss is watching carefully but no way is he getting involved, not with six players still in and this car crash of chips in the middle. And the cards get flipped over and the winner is this old girl who’d been so quiet I’d hardly noticed her. She’s this little old lady with those cataract shades who I knew from before because she was a total shark. She won fifteen thousand dollars once when I was dealing Blackjack and she tipped me in homemade cookies.”
I heard Rae move away from the phone. “Just getting a sweater, it’s cold here.”
My eyes were shut tight so I couldn’t see the camper van and coke wraps and the clothes muddied from last night as I waited for the voice to tether me back to the ground again.
“And Ten Gallon stands up and stretches like it’s no big thing and looks through the few chips he has left, and he’s turning them over and over. And he throws a handful of them at Bran. Like five or six, right at him. They just bounce off him and he doesn’t move. And everyone is quiet now. On my table we’ve stopped even pretending to play and Ten Gallon says, ‘Don’t you want your tip Billy Idol motherfucker? All you have to do is bend over.’ And I’m trying to add up how much he threw, because it was a proper handful and he’d been playing with these gold chips that we don’t even use on my table. Back at dealer school we roleplayed this exact scene and I was hoping the voice in Bran’s head was saying the same as mine: keep calm, don’t engage, wait for the pit boss and then Ten Gallon comes very close to Bran and whispers, but loud enough for us all to hear, ‘Bend over and take it, boy’. And for a long moment I thought Bran was just going to let it go. And then he leant in very close like he was about to whisper in the guy’s ear and he whipped his elbow round.”
The excitement in her voice painted the whole scene for me: a chicken wing of an elbow, pow, out like a punch and I could taste the crunch of it, the pulping of lip against tooth. I made the same gesture silently to myself.
“And Bran was out of there before the guy even hit the ground. Up and walking. And I can see Ten Gallon’s hand now, tens over sevens, not a bad hand really, and beads of blood on the tens and on the baize. Ernie just swept in there like he was on casters as Ten Gallon was being seen to and promised Champagne and oysters up in his suite, and that the room would be comped, and in come the waiters and the baize was changed and new cards and drinks for everyone, not just at their table but everywhere in the card room. And Ernie just shoves me into the dealer’s seat and says you’re up Voodoo and on we go as if nothing had happened. Ten Gallon with a bloody handkerchief and Headphones Guy back in his bubble of sound and the little old lady off to count her winnings. And I didn’t really want to ask the pit boss about the chips because the cleaners know not to touch them so I’m dealing and trying to keep my cool but at the same time I’m exploring under the table and counting up four, five chips with my stockinged feet and wondering what denomination they are and whether we’re talking five hundreds or five thousands. And, and, I need a pee, sorry…”
Every few seconds a car drove past, soaking the camper’s interior in pale light, making my eyes hurt. I felt sick and my neck ached and by the time Rae came back some of the hypnotic air of her story was lost. She told me how she knew that she should have walked out in solidarity with Bran — it’s what he would have expected — but instead she dealt on, the match reaching some kind of stalemate and it was two hours later after the table broke up that she managed to get the chips off the floor. Six chips in all, each one $25,000. And then her second dilemma of the night, but the pit boss had been insistent, the chips had clearly been a tip, it wasn’t for him to take them, and what Rae and Bran did with them was up to her. And how, in not so many words, he implied that it was better for her to spend them on Bran and her than for him to have them outright.
I took the phone from my ear
and switched to video chat so that I could watch her. The bedroom light was on, turning her into a silhouette, and she was hunched, as if the weight of dragging up the memory was tiring her.
“My legs shook the whole drive home. All the lights were blazing but Bran was nowhere to be seen. $150,000 in my pocket and more stashed around the estate. So I gathered it all up, packed Robin into the car seat and we drove. Back to Vegas to redeem the chips first. And then north on the 95. I sort of knew where I was going, sort of didn’t.”
She looked around the room she was in. “And four hours later we stopped to stretch our legs so I pulled off the road into this little loop of houses and there’s this place, for sale and looking like something out of Disney. Seriously. There were cardinals and blue jays nesting and people walking dogs and you could smell pine and ozone and there weren’t any fucking vultures in the sky.”
She pulled a shawl around her. “And I was crying, just a little bit, and people kept coming over and checking I was OK and did I need anything, old people who had that look, like they’d learned how to live properly, and I could see into this house and it was so small and friendly looking. And in a flash I knew that if I went to the real estate office that this place would cost less than the value of the chips, I just knew it.”
She looked around the room again and touched the table in front of her as if she couldn’t believe it.
“And what did Bran say?”
“What could he say? Nothing. It’s your money Rae. Really. He stayed in Vegas at first but now he was barred from working in every casino in the state and it’s a company town, y’know. And it was the beginning of the end for him and me. I know it should have been the other stuff. The cheating or the missing nights or the fucking degenerates he brought around, but that night, the chips and the house and the idea that I could put something ahead of him. I think it ended something for him. Me too.”
She smoothed out the bedspread in front of her. “Do you know the difference between a compulsive gambler and a normal gambler?”
I shook my head.
“They did a study on it that came out while we were working there. Most of us, if we have a near miss, y’know: ‘nine, ten, jack, king, ace’, or five of the Lotto numbers — then we feel bad, even a little bit sick.”
I nodded to myself, the asymmetry of her list of cards had made me feel mildly nauseous.
“But there’s a certain subset of people who, when they have one of those near-misses, the pleasure centres of their brain light up like it’s a win. Those are the people this country’s built on.”
I’d never heard her so fierce. “Losing is winning, pain is pleasure, poverty is the just the waiting room of millionairedom. It’s a nation of fantasists. And I just wanted to cash out. Not to pretend that our life hadn’t been bet on red when it came up black. I wanted to win, just once.”
A couple were arguing out in the street, louder than the traffic. Rae walked down the hall to the kitchen.
“Ads, have you been listening to Bran’s lyrics?”
“Not really. Something about them just slides right past me.” The occasional phrase stuck with me, but I was unsure why. But mostly they were just noise.
“I think he’s leaving clues that they killed him. The band. Kimi, Baxter and Saul.”
Poor Baxter, poor Saul. Despite it all I got the impression that they both quite liked Brandon. There was a history, sure, but nothing that deserved this.
“Didn’t he say, right back when this started that there would be clues hidden in the music? I haven’t thought about it since.”
“A couple of things jumped out at me. And I suddenly realised it would be the most Brandon thing ever. To get the three of them to play on songs that pointed a finger at them.” She chewed a cuticle. “Why do you think he’s like that?”
“Like what exactly?”
“Like has to get one over on everyone. With the Smile record and this, it’s all about him being smarter than the people around him. It’s so needy, don’t you think? Kind of insecure. I mean, he’s smart, right?”
I remembered Brandon at school, in class, before they separated us. He was good with words, less so with numbers. Competitive enough to do well on tests.
“He was, yeah, but one thing about being a twin is that your differences get magnified. I was the good twin so he was the bad one. I was the quiet one so he was the loud one. And I was the smart one. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t particularly quiet or good at first. I was fractionally quieter so our roles were set. And Brandon wasn’t dumb, no. But he was the dumb one and that can be so self-fulfilling.”
I lay back and looked at the pattern on the van’s roof.
“My mother used to tell me something: imagine a raindrop falling on the continental divide, up in Mount Snow in the Rockies. When it hits the peak it splits — half falls left, the other right. One half follows the Columbia River to the Pacific, one winds its way to the Atlantic via Hudson Bay. Two identical molecules: two very different paths.”
A phrase echoed in my mind: sensitive dependence on initial conditions.
“It’s pretty difficult to shake.”
In the dark of the van I saw a lone raindrop falling through a night sky, the peak of the mountain like a compass needle.
“Even as a grown up?”
“Of course, it’s worse in a way. You’re set by then. It’s a long way back from the Atlantic to the top of a mountain.”
“What mountain?” The voice came from off-screen.
The picture shook as Robin threw himself on the bed. “In Umbrage?”
Rae threw a blanket over him, making him squeal. While he thrashed around she brought the phone close. Her face filled the screen.
“You see. I got my big win.”
Once they’d gone everything receded around me. The wall of black water was no more, replaced by an endless warm static. I spread-eagled myself on the floor, picturing myself safe in the thin line where grey sea meets grey sky. I slept, on and off until the rattle of my phone woke me. An email from Jay.
“Our mutual friend says that sleeve notes are a bad idea, especially for a track that she says you haven’t managed to finish. If you were to go ahead there are certain edits she insists you make. She’s included them as edits on the original document, attached here. See you tomorrow.”
I opened the attachment, a Word document, and started to read.
Slowing of Light
The Word doc has comments in the margin at a couple of points, presumably from Kimi. I’ve included them here, asterisked at the point they were commenting on.
I listened back to “Are We Going to be Alright?” dozens of times, trying to imagine it as the last track on the record. Sometimes it sounded right. I liked the way the only answer to “Are We Going to be Alright?” was silence. And it was good that my voice was gone from the track before it finished, like Elvis in the limo with a cheeseburger and a malt while his band vamped through the last five minutes of “Suspicious Minds”. But most of the time it just sounded out of place. I called Kimi.
“Hello ghost,” she said.
“Hello robot,” I replied.
She was in a cab. Kimi was always in a cab. Over the last week she’d called me four or five times while she was in transit, seemingly just to chat. She knew that listening wasn’t my strong suit but I had the feeling that she had no one else in her life like me: so broken and unimportant that she could ditch the positive mask. With me she was funnier and crueller than she came across in public, rich with resentments that could be poured down the phone to a cipher like me. It didn’t matter what I thought.
I told her, “Listen Kimi, I need an ending.”
She snapped back, “I thought we had that sorted. It’s soon isn’t it? No, don’t tell me, it’s best I don’t know. Or would it be better I did know so I could be out of the country?” The question was to more to herself than to me.
“No, that’s sorted…” I said, realising what she was talking about. Th
e other thing: the actual ending.
“But you’re having second thoughts? You’re bottling it.” She sounded a little drunk. There was a playground sing-song to her words.
*(Yeah, we need to lose this whole exchange, from “Listen” to “words”. I think it’s obvious why.)
“Not that. For fuck’s sake shut up a moment Kimi. An ending for the record. I need something that…” I wasn’t sure what I needed. “I need something final.”
The last track. The end of the end of the end. My “Five Years”, my “Hurt”, my “A Day in the Life”.
I could hear the white noise of traffic.
“There is something,” she said. “Something from forever ago. I wrote it when Remote/Control split up but I could never finish it. I’ve been carrying it around with me ever since. Hang on.”
A car door closed. She was walking somewhere. Changes in sound: outdoors, indoors, large room, smaller.
“It’s a song. Or rather it’s half a song. I don’t know. It’s something. I’ll Dropbox it to you.”
I sat out on the balcony and watched the pigeons strut until my phone pinged. I played the track over the big speakers. It was a slow, plain-faced ballad with chords as old as the moon. It trudged along, every step as inevitable as taxes, and her band sounded like some cruise-ship combo five hours into a six-hour marathon. Kimi came in maybe a minute deep into the groove. This was pre-voicebox and her voice was rich and low as she incanted a set of long lines, somewhere between a shopping list and a sentencing.
