by Jack Dann
There was no distance now. Pfeiffer was caught, tiny and vulnerable.
Gayet and his wife were swallowing him, thoughts and all.
It was Joan who saved him. She pulled him away, and he became the world again, wrapped in snow, in whiteness. He was safe again, as if inside Joan's cold womb.
Look now, Joan said an instant later, and like a revelation, Pfeiffer saw Gayet's cards, saw them buried in Gayet's eyes with the image of his aging wife. In that instant, Pfeiffer saw into Gayet and forgot himself. Gayet's wife was named Grace, and she had been eroded from too many surgeries, too many deformation games. She was his 'Blue Angel (yes, he had seen the ancient film) and Gayet the fool.
The fool held an ace of hearts and a five of diamonds.
Now Pfeiffer felt that the odds were with him; it was a familiar sensation for gamblers, a sense of harmony, of being a benevolent extension of the cards. No anger, no fear, no hate, just victory. Pfeiffer called Gayet's hand, thereby preventing Gayet from drawing another card, such as a lucky three, which would have given him a count of nine.
Pfeiffer won the hand, and he thanked Joan. His thoughts were of love, but his repertoire of images was limited. Joan was now part of his rhythm and harmony, a constant presence; and she dreamed of the victorious cats that padded so gracefully through the lush vegetation of Pfeiffer's sphere-the cats that rutted, then devoured one another.
Pfeiffer won the next hand to take the second game. Pfeiffer and his opponent were now even. The next game would determine the outcome. Pfeiffer felt that calm, cold certainty that he would take Gayet's heart. The obsession to expose and ruin his opponent became more important than winning or losing organs; it was bright and fast flowing, refreshing as water.
He was in a better world now, a more complete, fulfilling plane of reality. All gamblers dreamed of this: losing or winning everything, but being inside the game. Even Joan was carried away by the game. She, too, wanted to rend-to whittle away at the couple across the table, take their privacies, turn over their humiliations like worrybeads. They were Pfeiffer's enemies . . . and his enemies were her own.
Everyone was exposed now, battle weary, mentally and physically exhausted, yet lost in play, lost in perfect, concentrated time. Pfeiffer could see Gayet's face, both as Gayet saw himself and as Grace saw him. A wide nose, dark complexion, low forehead, large ears; yet it was a strong face, and handsome in a feral, almost frightening way-or so Grace thought. Gayet saw himself as weak; the flesh on his face was too loose.
Gayet was a failure, although he had made his career and fortune in the Exchange. He had wanted to be a mathematician, but he was lazy and lost the "knack" by twenty-five.
Gayet would have made a brilliant mathematician, and he knew it.
And Grace was a whore, using herself and everyone else. Here was a woman with great religious yearnings, who had wanted to join a religious order, but was blackballed by the cults because of her obsession for gambling and psyconductors. But Pfeiffer could see into her only a little. She was a cold bitch and, more than any of the others, had reserves of strength.
This last game would be psychological surgery. Tearing with the knife, pulping with the bludgeon. Pfeiffer won the first hand. This was joy; so many organs to win or lose, so little time.
Pfeiffer lost the next hand. Gayet exposed Joan, who revealed Pfeiffer's cards without realizing it. Gayet had opened her up, penetrated all that efficiency and order to expose anger and lust and uncontrolled oceanic pity. Joan's emotions writhed and crawled over her like beautifully colored, slippery snakes. Pfeiffer had been too preoccupied to protect her.
Joan's first thought was to revenge herself on Pfeiffer, expose him; but he opened up to her, buried her in white thought, which was as cold and numbing as ice, and apologized without words, but with the soft, rounded, comforting thoughts he equated with love. She couldn't trust him, nor could she expose him. Right now, she could only accept him.
The dealer gave Pfeiffer a three of diamonds and an ace of clubs. That gave him only four points; he would have to draw again. He kept his thoughts from Joan, for she was covering him. She could attack Gayet and his whore, expose them for their cards. Gayet's heart was not simply his organ-not now, not to Pfeiffer. It was his whole life, life itself. To rip it away from him would be to conquer life, if only for a moment. It was life affirming. It was being alive. Suddenly he thought of his father.
Close yourself up, Joan said. You're bleeding. She did not try to penetrate his thoughts; that would have exposed Pfeiffer even more dangerously.
Help me, Pfeiffer asked Joan. This hand would determine whether he would win or lose the game . . . and his heart.
Once again she became his cloak, his atmosphere, and she weaved her icy threads of white thought into his.
This was love, she thought.
Pfeiffer couldn't see Gayet's cards and nervously asked Joan to do something. Gayet was playing calmly, well covered by Grace, who simply hid him. No extravagance there.
Joan emptied her mind, became neutral; yet she was a needle of cold, coherent thought. She prodded, probed, touched her opponents' thoughts. It was like swimming through an ever-changing world of dots and bars, tangible as iron, fluid as water. It was as if Gayet's and Grace's thoughts were luminous points on a fluorescent screen.
And still she went unnoticed.
Gayet was like Pfeiffer, Joan thought. Seemingly placid, controlled, but that was all gingerbread to hide a weak house. He was so much weaker than Grace, who was supporting and cloaking him. But Grace was concentrating her energies on Gayet; and she had the fever, as if she were gambling her own organs once again.
Undoubtedly, Grace expected Joan and Pfeiffer to go straight for Gayet, who had read the cards.
So Joan went for Grace, who was in the gambler's frenzy as the hand was being played. Joan slipped past Grace's thoughts, worked her way into the woman's mind, through the dark labyrinths and channels of her memory, and into the dangerous country of the unconscious. Invisible as air, she listened to Grace, read her, discovered: A sexual miasma. Being brutally raped as a child. After a riot in Manosque. Raped in a closet, for God's sake. The man tore her open with a rifle barrel, then inserted himself. Taking her, piece by bloody piece, just as she was taking Gayet. Just as others had taken her in rooms like this, in this casino, in this closet.
And Gayet, now Joan could see him through Grace, unperturbable Gayet, who had so much money and so little life, who was so afraid of his wife's past, of her lovers and liberations he called perversions. But he called everything a perversion.
How she hated him beneath what she called love.
But he looked just like the man who had raped her in that closet so long ago. She could not remember the man's face-so effectively had she blocked it out of her mind yet she was stunned when she first met Gayet. She felt attracted to him, but also repelled; she was in love.
Through Joan, Pfeiffer saw Gayet's cards: a deuce and a six of clubs. He could call his hand, but he wasn't sure of the deuce. It looked like a heart, but it could just as easily be a diamond. If he called it wrong, he would lose the hand, and his heart.
I can't be sure, Pfeiffer said to Joan, expecting help.
But Joan was in trouble. Grace had discovered her, and she was stronger than Joan had ever imagined. Joan was trapped inside Grace's mind; and Grace, who could not face what Joan had found, denied it.
And snapped.
In that instant, Joan felt that she was Grace. She felt all of Grace's pain and the choking weight of memory, as souls and selves incandescently merged. But before Joan and Grace could fuse inescapably, Joan recoiled, realizing that she was fighting for her life. She screamed for the gamesmaster to deactivate the game. But her screams were lost as Grace instantly slipped into the gamesmaster's mind and caught him, too. She had the psychotic's strength of desperation, and Joan realized that Grace would kill them all rather than face the truth about herself and Gayet.
Furiously Grace went after
Pfeiffer. To kill him. She blamed him for Joan's presence, and Joan felt crushing pain, as if she were being buried alive in the dirt of Grace's mind. She tried to wrench herself away from Grace's thoughts, lest they intertwine with, and become, her own.
She felt Grace's bloodlust . . . her need to kill Pfeiffer.
Grace grasped Pfeiffer with a thought, wound dark filaments around him that could not be turned away by white thought or anything else.
And like a spider, she wrapped her prey in darkness and looked for physiological weakness, any flaw, perhaps a blood vessel that might rupture in his head ....
Joan tried to pull herself away from the pain, from the concrete weight crushing her. Ironically, she wondered if thought had mass. What a stupid thought to die with, she told herself, and she suddenly remembered a story her father had told her about a dying rabbi who was annoyed at the minyan praying around him because he was trying to listen to two washerwomen gossiping outside.
Many years later, her father confessed to her that it wasn't really a Jewish story at all; it was Buddhist. She held on to that thought, remembered how her father had laughed after his confession.
The pain eased as she followed her thoughts: If thought had mass . . .
She was thinking herself free, escaping Grace by finding the proper angle, as if thought and emotion and pain were purely mathematical.
That done in an instant.
But if she were to save Pfeiffer's life, and her own, she would have to do something immediately. She showed Grace her past. Showed her that she had married Gayet because he had the face of the man who had raped her as a child.
Gayet, seeing this too, screamed. How he loathed Grace, but not nearly as much as she loathed herself. He had tried to stop Grace, but he was too weak. He, too, had been caught.
As if cornered, as if she were back in the closet with her rapist, she attacked Gayet. Only now she had a weapon. She thought him dead, trapped him in a scream, and, as if he were being squeezed from the insides, his blood pressure rose. She had found a weakened blood vessel in his head, and it ruptured.
The effort weakened Grace, and a few seconds later the gamesmaster was able to regain control and disconnect everyone. Gayet was immediately hooked in to a life-support unit which applied CPR techniques to keep his heart beating.
But he was dead ....
There would be some rather sticky legal complications, but by surviving, Pfeiffer had won the game, had indeed beaten Grace and won all of Gayet's organs.
As Pfeiffer gazed through the transparent walls of the transpod that whisked him and Joan out of Paris, away from its dangers and sordid delights, he felt something
new and delicate toward Joan.
It was newfound intimacy and gratitude . . . and love.
Joan, however, still carried the echoes of Grace's thoughts, as if a part of her had irreversibly fused with Grace. She too felt something new for Pfeiffer. Perhaps it was renewal, an evolution of her love.
They were in love . . . yet even now Joan felt the compulsion to gamble again.
(ebook v1.1 Some typos corrected and rough paragraph formatting for readability)
