“It tastes all wrong,” he said. It was not a question, but the confusion had built to audible levels in my friend’s voice.
Inside, the bells and whistles bleated an unhappy garble. The casino was packed with people, but it was a slower crowd than the sea in the streets. No one rushed past one another, each instead fixated on his or her own world. Every pair of eyes was either stationed around a table, or carefully studying television screens fixed to the walls. Luffy and I passed a large table with several older men gathered around it. Something clattered on the table, and the group groaned. Winding between the patrons, men and women dressed in black carried trays and beverages, the same contented smiles fixed on each of their faces.
As we walked, Luffy stopped to watch a woman feed a five-dollar bill into a slot machine. I had seen ones like it before in comic books and movies, but this one looked far more complicated. Luffy’s gaze followed the five dollar bill into the machine where it vanished into the slot, triggering a fresh set of bells and whistles while the colors spun into a blur on the screen. The grid of shapes came to a halt, showing a random looking display of fruit and numbers. The tray below caught a handful of quarters that the woman happily scooped up, jingling the change in her bony hand.
“It tastes like candy here,” said Luffy, watching the woman feed those same quarters back into the machine.
“Like candy?” I asked, trying to understand. I wondered if we experienced things in mirror images — I could see and hear, but he could taste and smell.
“It’s going to make my stomach hurt if I stay too long.” Luffy put one hand around his thin belly. The red rings around his eyes had settled into the dull blue of a bruise only beginning the long healing process.
My eyes went back to the woman, trying to imagine the flavors tangling in Luffy’s stomach. I could sense glimpses of it — all the flashing bulbs and music possessed a similar tinny quality, like it would be hard to relax here. If I spent too long in a place like this, I imagined I would start looking all hunched and tired like the people in the chairs too.
The woman pushed another button, and the whirl of fruits sparked to life once again. This time, not a single quarter dropped into the tray. I noticed, though, that a neon-looking blue tube pulsed above the slot machine as the whirling colors came to rest. I had seen slot machines before, but never anything like this tube. It was vague, blurred at the edges, and made of a texture out of place with the plastic environment. Luffy had begun walking again, following the round of clapping from a small table where a man in a black bow tie flipped cards for several moms and dads positioned around him. I stayed where I was, pondering the blue tube.
It looks alive.
The woman fed another five-dollar bill into the machine. Again, the slot machine kept the offering for itself. The tube pulsed, carrying something like liquid light through the slot machine and out of sight. The way it twitched, it reminded me of the veins beneath the pale skin of my forearm. If I pushed my finger against my wrist just right, they would stand out, pulsing in that same way until I released my finger.
“Luffy?” The vein was making me nervous. Looking around the rooftops of slot machines and other games, I saw blue veins pulsing from each one. All of them squirmed as light drained from each station every few moments. Beneath the tubes were people, transfixed by the worlds in their screens. All were in a daze, some looked angry, none looked happy.
“Luffy? Where are you?” I turned this way and that, looking for my gray friend amidst the unmoving people. I found him across the room. His body was contorting, wrapping itself around the leg of a chair. Occupying the seat, a woman was digging through her purse while the bow-tied man watched her impatiently. The entire table was looking at her, and this time I could taste the cloying anxiety dripping from of her. Luffy seemed completely entranced by her stress, reaching compulsively with one hand to touch the hem of her dress beneath the chair. His outstretched hand was turning from the familiar muddled browns and grays to a sickly green — like mold that had hidden in the corner of a basement for too long.
“Luffy, stop!” I ran for my friend. His eyes were fixated, unseeing in their lopsided fascination. I didn’t care who saw me, or if anyone tried to stop and tell me this was no place for children. I knew that, I didn’t want to be here a second longer than I needed to. At this moment, the only thing I could see was that Luffy was being poisoned by whatever dripped from that woman.
I reached my friend, pushing past a man with a massive stomach who threw a mean expression down on me before moving on. The woman looked relieved as she pulled a crumpled handful of cash from her purse, but the poisonous green was flowing even more freely into Luffy now. I wrapped my arms around his impossibly thin torso and pulled with all of my might. He clung tightly, gripping the chair with steadfast obsession. It felt like pulling a tooth as I cracked his muscles every which way to break him free.
“Luffy, she’s making you sick!” I cried. His eyes were blank, completely fixed on the bills in the woman’s hand as they were passed to the card dealer. I was afraid that if the green leeching into his body reached his heart there would be no going back.
“No… No!” Luffy was writhing, fighting me with every ounce of his strength. One of his hands lashed out and scraped my face. It stung, tears welled up and fell into the cut, which burned under the salt. I couldn’t relax my grip, though. If I let him go while he wasn’t himself, even for a second, he would be gone forever, lost to that toxic green.
“Snap out of it,” I cried. A thin drop of mixed blood and tears fell from my face onto his poisoned arm. The second it touched his skin, the green retreated, replaced by a splotch of familiar brown. A small light relit in his eyes, and his grip loosened by a fraction.
“Help.” His voice was small, frightened.
I reached with a free hand, still keeping my other wrapped tightly around Luffy’s body and wiped my face, collecting more of the mixture. I rubbed it into his shoulder and arm, relief spreading as the green washed away like wet paint under fresh water. Luffy’s grip went slack, and we went toppling from the table in a heap behind the group still transfixed on the game above our view. The man in the bow tie called out a number, and the woman placed her head in her hands.
Luffy lay wheezing, holding his chest while trying to pull air back into his lungs. I lay beside him, sore and stinging, exhaustion fighting the jittery energy evaporating through my arms and legs.
“I’m… so sorry,” said Luffy between gasps.
“What happened?” I asked, pulling myself into a sitting position. Was it because I was with Luffy, or was something completely engrossing the crowd here? Not one person had turned to look at us, even after the ruckus we had made. Even the woman with the wad of money should have noticed me after the scuffle beneath her seat.
“I don’t know,” said Luffy, panting. “The flavor got too strong. I gave in for only a moment, I just wanted to know what was so interesting, what had her obsessed. It was like nothing I’d ever tasted before. It hurt a lot. It didn’t taste good, but I couldn’t stop, and then the next thing I remember, you were pulling and something cool landed on me.”
I reached a hand up and felt the scrape on my face. It didn’t seem to be dripping anymore, but it felt raw.
“I don’t think this is a good place to be,” I said. Luffy nodded. He looked shaken, the way Maggie had last night when Mom had sworn at her.
Laughter broke out from a table further down the cavernous room. It felt wrong in the setting, as though responding to a joke no one else could hear. I had wanted to leave, to get out of this place as quickly as possible, to hope that Luffy had been following the wrong trail and we would never have to come back. I had wanted to leave, but there was something in one of the laughs that caught my attention.
I know that laugh, said the voice in my head. I could not place the specific sound even though it rang every bell, setting off a flurry of memories. I could not place it because the sound itself was out of plac
e. It was like when I had put Twizzlers in my sandwich, thinking the sweetness would make my boring turkey and mustard taste better. The flavors had been the same, but in the sandwich the stiff licorice had tasted all wrong. This time too, the sound of laughter I had grown up with tasted out of place.
“Silas, where are you going?” Luffy’s voice was distant behind me.
This time, I was the one engrossed, the one pulled by sensations I had no choice but to obey. Around the corner, past a fresh set of veins pouring from a pyramid of televisions, was a table where a group of cheerful looking adults had gathered around a circular table. Some were standing, some sat, but all looked lovingly at the scattering of chips and cards in small piles about the table between them. They would look at each other, but then always back to the cards. Another burst of laughter, and my eyes fixed on the source that had found me through the commotion.
My father sat at the table, smiling and laughing with a group I’d never seen before. He had a glass in his hand, something deep and red that that colored his cheeks the same shade. A man with a thick mustache said something to him while my father grinned and replied with words lost in the distance between us. Even though I couldn’t make out what he was saying, he seemed to be in a better mood than this morning. I wanted to be happy for him, but there was something wrong about the whole scene, something that was only coming to me in bits and pieces the longer I watched from my hiding spot.
He looked at ease, but the smiles he passed from one person to the next never quite reached his eyes. They weren’t the same smiles he gave to me when we played in the waves, or when I would jump out from a hiding place to scare him during hide-and-seek. Even then, I knew I wouldn’t be able to trick my Dad. I would try, but he was too old to be fooled. But now, the fake smile pooling at the dark lines above his cheeks was as obvious as my hiding places.
“Silas, what is it?” Luffy had come to crouch beside me, perhaps tasting the sudden stress pounding through me. I couldn’t bring myself to answer him. All I could do was watch as my father took a last gulp from the ruby drink, the false smile redoubling its efforts to push its way up his face.
Luffy’s hand stiffened on my shoulder. In the vague part of my brain, I wondered what was going through his mind. He knew my father too, after all.
A woman came walking around the table. The smile fixed on her face was no forgery; its beam captured everyone at the table’s attention. My father’s gaze turned from the mustached man to the woman, a new energy lighting behind his eyes.
He doesn’t know that woman, I told myself.
He does, said another.
The woman had a tray in her hand filled with liquid colors. She picked up my father’s empty glass, replacing it with a fresh drink as deeply crimson as the last.
My father drank in big, thirsty gulps. A drop of the crimson liquid spilled over the corner of his mouth onto his white shirt. The grin on his face was larger when he put the glass down, overflowing past the edges of his eyes.
He’s ok, I thought. I wanted him to smile, right? That’s what Dads were supposed to do. But some other, more honest part of me didn’t want that smile to make it all the way across his face. It wasn’t my Dad’s smile, it was the waitress’s smile.
The attention of the table returned to the game, but my eyes were still on my father. Luffy took in a large breath of air next to me. I was seeing this scene, but he was tasting it, taking in something completely different. My father’s attention moved back to the cards, but his hands were not following his eyes. One hand went up, vanishing from view around the backside of the waitress. His fingers reappeared — wrapped tightly around the woman’s hip.
Something cold pulsed through my chest as those fingers clenched softly, something that hurt like the scrape on my face. That was how he was supposed to hold Mom. He held her that way when he thought Maggie and I weren’t looking, but we saw anyway. We saw because that’s what we were supposed to see.
This is not something I’m supposed to see.
The woman giggled, her short hair bouncing as her head twisted to look at him.
This wasn’t right — the place, my father, the waitress — it tasted poisonous, like the green I had washed off Luffy had slipped into my mouth.
“I didn’t know who she was,” said Luffy beside me.
I turned to him, needing some words, anything reassuring that could bring me back to the ground. I was afraid of being touched, and afraid that I would come apart if I wasn’t held together at the same time.
“Who is she?” I didn’t want to know.
“I saw her in his dreams. He thinks about her. It doesn’t make him happy. She doesn’t have a name. She isn’t real, at least as far as he thinks of her, but he likes the way she feels.”
I didn’t want to hear this. I didn’t want to think I would have the same dreams, dripping with sickening sweetness like stale cake. I didn’t know who she was. She didn’t have a name. She didn’t belong in his dreams or in our family. The woman broke away from his grasp, his hand slipping beneath the table. It was as she turned that the hidden vein came into view. Crossing the floor, the liquid light pulsed from the small of her back where my father’s hand had been, sucking something thick away from her walking body.
She isn’t real, at least so far as he thinks of her.
Something was turning over in my brain. Unhappiness was secreting a thick sludge between my thoughts, keeping some truth I was wrestling with from coming into focus. I studied the dull faces fixated on screens around me, trying to put the pieces in order.
The blue veins, the light, the woman that isn’t real.
There was no natural light here. Everything was artificial. The blue vein twisted and twirled away from the woman who followed a narrow path towards an untouched group of men around a second table. This time I didn’t follow the woman. I followed the tendril downward, twisting and alive beneath the current of feet.
Chapter Seven
The vein caught on the edges of tables and chairs as I followed it around the floor of the casino. Luffy rushed to keep up, hammering me with nervous questions. I was too absorbed to untangle his concerns though. The longer we walked, the more I understood that the casino was built as game itself, designed to take you around and around in a great circle with no natural ending point. The path of the circle was growing dimmer, the long hallways casting our shadows in darker and darker shades as the rooms became less exciting. Faces passing us looked more intently on their endeavors, each one less human somehow with their fixation on every turn in the cards or click of the wheel. The veins were becoming more distinctive as well, transitioning from faint blue to a deep, pulsing purple. There was no doubt they were alive, that what connected them was absorbing the light spiraling to the center of the circle.
Luffy and I crossed into the deepest, a different world from the whooping lights of the main room. Like a city’s skyscrapers at night, the machines loomed over the two of us on both sides. We were being funneled through the mostly empty rows, occasional sounds echoing in the emptiness.
Even though the machines were made of reflective metals and plastics, without anything but themselves to mirror back and forth, they appeared two-dimensional — sets on a stage without a narrative to put them to use.
A deep rumble vibrated the brittle plastic of the machines.
Luffy grabbed my arm, pulling me close in the wane light. “We went deeper than we should have.”
Another thud, followed by a groan, rumbled as something shifted out of sight. A machine rattled, change shaking in its tin body. Veins wrapped around the corner, knotting and twisting into a braided chord. The light was easier to see sliding through the tubes in the poor lighting, like tapioca balls sliding up thick straws from the bubble tea Maggie liked to drink.
Another groan. Something masked in shadows rolled over the hedge of slot machines. Clanking and squeezing, the shape hidden in the maze pushed its way towards us.
I was at first unsure if I was
hearing properly, but through the groans and sighs, words were taking form across the rows.
“I smell you.” The voice was thick, full of excruciating effort.
Luffy’s grip around my arms tightened.
We reached the end of the row and came to a halt. Exposed without the plastic and metal between us, it was too late to escape.
A great shadow poured through the row to our right, propped beneath the weight of skin and fat slopping in the cramped space. Its skin was a mess of greens and blacks. No legs appeared to support its form, instead spilling like sludge in a loose balloon.
Two eyes, red and black orbs set into the mass, found us, turning one at a time to focus on our tiny bodies. Arms extended, too small in comparison to its engorged body, gripping the last slot machines in the row and pushing itself the rest of the way towards the open space. Skin drooped around its mis-inflated body onto the ground in vomit-green heaps. Small shapes of black stretched in and out of patterns through its flesh as it leaned into us.
The gash beneath its eyes opened to speak. “You came, I was worried… the last wouldn’t make it.”
Both eyes fixed on Luffy cowering behind me. The form of the monster before us — yes, I was wrong before, this is what a monster truly is — sent fresh pangs of white-heat through me. Luffy’s legs buckled under the pressure, left to hang on my back for support. The veins around my feet quickened their pulse, responding to the monster’s excitement.
“It… you… whole time,” said Luffy, his voice reverting to the broken drawl he had carried when we’d first met. Fear was crippling him, robbing my friend’s sense of personality he’d built over the past day. I tried to shake him, hoping to snap him back into his usual self.
This is his usual self.
I needed Luffy right now, though. I hadn’t been prepared for this. The monster squished towards us, the pattern in its stomach bending into shapes I couldn’t quite make out.
Deep, Deep Ocean Page 8
