A Gambler's Anatomy

by Jonathan Lethem

  “My game last night didn’t materialize.” Whether spooked by sight of the anomalous Americans, or for some other, unknown reason, Yik Tho Lim had sent an emissary with an apology to Falk, deferring the contest.

  “Sorry to hear it. Christ, this heat. This is, like, our fifteenth country, and I’ve pretty well exhausted my curiosity for meandering around in the blazing sunlight. I’d love some iced coffee, though.”

  He’d read her wrong, despite her eagerness to put the hotel behind her. Perhaps she’d expected him to have come in a car. “We’ll jump in a taxi,” he said. “I’ll take you to the market, if only just to look.” They’d crossed Bras Basah Road, but other hotels approached and finding a taxicab wouldn’t be difficult.

  “I imagine I might work up some appetite once I’m sitting in the shade. No offense, but if I didn’t know any better, I’d imagine I was walking in LA, you know?” She waved at the toy-skyscraper skyline and, nearer, at the narrow, empty pavement, with its inadequate cover of trees.

  “None taken.” He recalled what Los Angeles signified, if you lived in Northern California: the contemptible height of vacuity and poor taste, where only Mexican cleaning women were ever sighted on the sidewalks. Partisans of the Bay Area were so certain they had it better. To Bruno the two ends of the state might nearly be identical. “I’ve no stake in your opinion of Singapore. I don’t think much of it myself.”

  “So what’s the appeal, just ‘the women are cheap and the boys are cheaper’?”

  “I wouldn’t know the price of either. What I like about Singapore is how little it asks of me. It brags three or four native languages, a mélange of cultural styles and so forth, but in truth it’s perfectly flavorless.”

  “Would you like some ABC gum?”

  “Gum?” He actually did feel an irrational and disproportionate surge of panic, as though Keith Stolarsky and Tira Harpaz had been sent to him in some obscure sting operation.

  “ABC gum. Already Been Chewed. Sorry, just free-associating. I read in the guidebook about the prohibition on chewing gum, and then you reminded me of this joke from Plantation Farm Summer Camp, in Sonoma, circa 1988.”

  “Ah, flavorless because chewed, I understand.”

  “Are you hiding?”

  “Only in plain sight.”

  “What keeps you here, then?”

  “Nothing does. You find me here because nothing keeps me elsewhere.”

  “My native tour is looking really promising at this point,” she said, with mock exasperation.

  “We can sit and talk. I’d like that.” He surprised himself. He turned his body, just enough to guide her to the left, toward the entrance to the Swissôtel. “Here, they’ll summon a cab for us in the lobby.”

  “Fuck it. Let’s check out their bar. I don’t need texture, I need air-conditioning.”

  Inside, they plumped themselves in a vacant corner of the Swissôtel’s modern lounge and ordered iced coffees from the disinterested waitress. Opaque conversation droned from the only other occupied booth, salaryman Japanese. Tira texted Stolarsky their location, then placed her smartphone on the table between them, but it lay dark. Bruno eased himself back in the booth, pleasantly abstracted, faintly turned on, hovering in a benign cloud of non-urgencies.

  Tira said, “Look at this.” She tugged at her neckline to show a fresh stripe of sunburn between her collar and where she bulged from her red brassiere. “I walked out yesterday in a new shirt, without any sunblock. I’ve been using it pretty religiously, but I figured I could afford fifteen minutes—guess again. The advertising campaign for this place should be: Too impatient to wait another hundred years for global-warming apocalypse? Try Singapore!”

  “You don’t feature a lot of natural defense.”

  “No. Me and my girlfriends used to walk around Goth for a while, they’d go in for dye jobs and then spend half an hour at the mirror doing the whole ghoul-white powder application. Whereas with this black hair and white skin, all I had to do was pretty much slash on the bloodred lipstick, et voilà.”

  People delivered themselves, helplessly, if you gave them the chance. It was to Bruno a matter of permanent wonder, though he seldom knew whether to be bored or enthralled. Tira proved herself an extreme case. “I’m sure you were a fright,” he said.

  “You should have seen me before this tan. The men in Thailand stared like I was radioactive. I guess that must be what blondes feel like everywhere they go.”

  And yet she never quite got to the point. Few did, without help. “Are you two really sex tourists?” Bruno asked. “Or some kind of swingers?” It would be blunt, if Keith Stolarsky and Tira Harpaz hadn’t dropped what seemed like a hundred hints.

  “Har!” Her laugh was a seal bark.

  “What?” To himself, he already sounded defensive.

  “It’s just that where I come from, by which I mean the Bay Area and the twentieth century, or I guess this is the twenty-first now, we use the term open relationship. Which, if you’d asked me in so many words, I’d have had to say, Sure, maybe sometimes, I guess. Keith does pretty much what he wants, which I deal with in my various and sundry ways. But I’m certainly no swinger, Alexander. I’m not sure I’ve ever even met a certified authentic swinger, not by that name. Christ, this stuff is like maple syrup.” Tira had swigged half of an iced coffee, plumped down by the waitress during the course of her monologue.

  “They don’t know any other way,” he said. “And no offense intended.”

  She barked again. “It’s cool, Keith has been accused of plenty worse than sex tourism! So have I, just for being in his general range of operations.”

  Operations? It struck Bruno as an odd word. “What’s the source of all this money?”

  “Are you pulling my leg? When did you last see each other?”

  “Not since high school.”

  “But you must have come back through Berkeley in the last, uh, thirty or so years, right?”

  “Not once.” It was probably as near to a distinctive accomplishment as he could claim in his life. A slow-forming, barely perceived performance-art piece: Alexander Unreturning (1981–Present, Found Materials).

  “I guess that’s what it would take not to know. Keith owns about half of Telegraph Avenue. You know Zodiac Media, right?”

  “No.”

  “The superstore? Electronics, games, T-shirts, all that garbage? Or Zombie Burger?”

  “No. Neither.”

  “Well, those are his stores. The source of the dough, since you asked. Keith’s empire takes up a block of what used to be, you know, head shops and used-book stores and Afghan tabbouleh joints, all that good old Berkeley shit. They call it the Death Star. Keith’s viewed as kind of like Darth Vader in your hometown, Alexander, that’s why I figured you must know the score.”

  Bruno shrugged. She looked at him oddly.

  “I’m not confused—you did grow up there, right?”

  “I moved to Berkeley with my mother when I was six. We’d lived in Marin County before that.”

  “So…”

  He was free to decant himself as readily as any other person. Tira’s question was obvious, even if she couldn’t put it in words. It was Bruno’s to answer or duck. He tried to recall the last time he’d chosen to go at it directly.

  “I don’t know whether June is alive or dead,” he said. “Though I’d be surprised if there’s much left of her. She fled the affections of her guru in San Rafael, as I said, when I was six. Her idea was to lay low in Berkeley, let the drugs wear off over time, but she was in poor shape already. I mean, mentally. We lived in a shabby apartment in the flats, and she worked making custom architectural plasterwork, on San Pablo Avenue. I wonder if the place is still there.” Bruno didn’t bother describing the two chubby, imperious gay men who’d run the storefront workshop, where they produced concrete pediments and decorative plaster scrollwork for restored Victorian ceilings. The Italian and the American, with their beards and bottomless supply of marijuana, which t
hey’d made too available to June, not helping a bit, and how they’d bully June to tears when she cracked some fabulous plaster construction coming out of the mold, spoiling a day’s effort. “When I was in the seventh grade I started washing dishes at Spenger’s Fish Grotto, and then they let me bus tables, but I really had my eye on the Gourmet Ghetto—do they still call it that?”

  “Sure.” Tira’s eyes were wide. “The Cheese Board, right? And Keith said you worked at Chez Panisse? When you were in high school?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you just, what, ran away from home?”

  “I wasn’t living at home. June couldn’t maintain a home or anything else. She was in a city shelter, except I’d see her quite a bit at People’s Park, too, living in a rather…feral manner.” June’s street boyfriend was a man with a shopping cart and a distinctive rasp that seemed to resound through a megaphone buried in his chest. Bruno had sometimes heard it outside the classroom windows of Berkeley High as the man gleaned the school grounds for recyclables, between recess and the lunch hour.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t think of it that way.”

  “You lived at the shelter?”

  “I’d farmed myself out to some friends’ extra rooms, a thing you could do in Berkeley back then. Maybe you still can.”

  “Wow. Did you stay at Keith’s?”

  “By friends I don’t mean at school. I mean restaurant people, waiters and so forth.”

  “So you were, like, the most legendary teenager ever. I can’t believe Keith never told me that part.”

  “Keith wouldn’t have had even the slightest suspicion.”

  “Because you were, what—already too cool for school, nobody’s fool, and dressing like Peter O’Toole? I’m writing a poem about you, if you hadn’t noticed.”

  He waved it off. “Keith, remember, was in a lower grade. I’d learned to keep June out of my life with other…children…long before then.”

  Tira’s phone pulsed on the glass tabletop. She grabbed it and read. “Here he comes now. Will he ever be pissed he missed out on your confession.”

  It was absurd that the risk of Keith Stolarsky’s learning about June, at this late date, a century and continent distant from Berkeley, should feel somehow like a noose tightening. “You can give him a paraphrase,” said Bruno to Tira now. “Just don’t make me sit and listen while you do it. And please, let him think there was some cost, that it didn’t come spilling out so easily. I have a reputation to uphold.” The room seemed suddenly smaller. Even the Mandarin-speaking businessmen appeared to be listening to him.

  “Maybe I waterboarded you? Or—” Tira put fist to lips and tongue-ballooned her cheek from within, miming fellatio.

  “Watch yourself,” said Bruno, trying to cover his surprise. “That type of sign language might be illegal in Singapore.”

  “What’s a horny deaf girl to do? I was going to suggest chew gum, but then I remembered.” Tira had hit the accelerator, as if frantic, at the prospect of Keith’s arrival, to confirm her mastery of innuendo.

  “She could always write her proposal down on a piece of paper.”

  “What if she’s illiterate too, poor thing?”

  Bruno was as exhausted by the banter as he was dazzled, or titillated. “I should have at least questioned you in return,” Bruno said. “Instead I learned next to nothing, outside your sinister background as a Goth.”

  “I’m pretty much what I look like. Just your typical Israeli-born, St. Louis–raised, academic-brat Berkeley Rhetoric Department all-but-dissertation recovering-Goth sex tourist.”

  “I had you pegged, then.”

  “Meet one, you’ve met them all.”

  Keith Stolarsky waddled across the lobby and joined them and the banter ended, as if dropped off a cliff. Along with it, the confessional atmosphere and the raw sexual taunting, each of which had floated just beneath the banter, fronds in a murky pool. Stolarsky seemed uninterested in what they might have done in his absence, as if confident it hadn’t amounted to much. Maybe it hadn’t. Nor did Stolarsky pursue the questions he’d claimed such interest in, the evening before, at the Smoker’s Club.

  “Okay, you fucker, I’m going to eat your lunch.”

  “You want lunch?” asked Bruno.

  “Sure, but that’s not what I’m talking about. We’re gonna play backgammon tonight, or this afternoon, as soon as you’re ready. I want to see if you can surprise me.”

  “I play for money.”

  Stolarsky just smacked his lips and rolled his eyes.

  “Fair enough, we’ll plan to sit down,” said Bruno. He’d seen men pronounce themselves instantaneous players before, gripped by a fever upon discovering that high-stakes backgammon existed, and captured by the romance Bruno represented, wishing to climb into his skin. That it should happen to Stolarsky wasn’t so distinctive, no matter the odd circumstances. “Would you still like a go at the food stalls at Lau Pa Sat?”

  “Sure. Look at him, cool as a cucumber. Lead on, Flashman.” But Tira said nothing. She’d receded joylessly behind him, a moon.

  “I’ll ask for a cab,” Bruno said. “The sun’s only getting hotter.”

  Really, Stolarsky’s arrival in the Swissôtel bar described the sharpest possible U-turn in Bruno’s encounter with Tira. Not just at that moment but for the remainder of Tira’s and Stolarsky’s sojourn in Singapore. Bruno couldn’t make contact again. Where there’d been double entendres, exposed cleavage, and doggerel about Peter O’Toole, now—nothing. Bruno had realized the startling sweetness of their exchange at the last instant, like the condensed milk at the bottom of his glass, which crept between his lips only after he’d drained the black coffee above.

  “You an adherent of Paul Magriel?” Stolarsky was saying as they entered the shady courts that housed the vendors’ stalls. “I mean, I gather he’s like the J. D. Salinger of backgammon, right? But then again a lot of that shit seems out-of-date now since the computers came along, huh?”

  “Tournament play may have changed somewhat. A serious money game, less so.”

  “You played the top programs? Jellyfish, Snowie?”

  “No.”

  “You ever play against Magriel?”

  “Never had the chance.” Stolarsky had peppered Bruno with lore through the cab ride and while they began browsing the stalls. Whether Stolarsky was a quick study or merely a magpie for jargon remained to be seen. The two weren’t mutually exclusive, anyhow. Both traits would be congruent with the adolescent gadfly Bruno recalled from Berkeley.

  “Wow, this whole place is pretty slick. You could make something like this fly on Telegraph, pull a bunch of grunky street merchants under one roof, legitimate ’em, and take a flat skim off the top. Call it the People’s Park Atrium, hah!” Stolarsky looked to Tira. She only half grunted in reply.

  “Of course, you wouldn’t have the benefit of a really hard-ass police state to keep it all so spanking clean. More’s the pity, eh, Flashman?”

  Under Bruno’s gentle stewardship they sampled char kway tweo and sambal stingray, rinsing the spice with cold pale beer. Pulut hitam—black rice pudding—for dessert. Bruno couldn’t discern a hint of real delight in Tira Harpaz at the exotic food, or his company, or anything else. In Stolarsky’s presence she only seemed numbed, enduring. Had the arrangement between these two soured just lately, perhaps in a hotel in Cambodia or Hanoi? Was the erotic animus they’d each revealed a brandishing of some fresh wound, a Band-Aid on recent betrayal? Or were they bound in slow-cooking love-hate, a folie à deux obscure to anyone outside their secret system? Bruno knew just enough not to imagine he could tell the difference.

  III

  Bruno stopped by Edgar Falk’s rooms for a drink at nine, before making his second visit to Raffles.

  Bruno had spent the afternoon in his own hotel in a deep slumber, after the heavy meal and the unsatisfying encounter with Tira and Stolarsky. He’d slept dreamlessly but woke into melancholy. A nap ending precisely
at sunset, with its undead overtones, was rarely a good idea. In fact, Bruno realized as he waited for the butler to open the door to Falk’s rooms, he had dreamed, not of a situation, nor of a lost person or place, but merely of an image. Bruno had dreamed a reverse sunset, a black sunset.

  The black sun had been sinking against a field of yellow. This sun was haloed in electric purple, a purple unstable like a pattern of interference or static. In Bruno’s dream he’d watched this black-purple apparition sinking below its yellow horizon, only to abruptly re-center in his vision’s field and begin its lonely plummet again. It was this that had brought the profound melancholy upon him, and this that, when he awoke and moved the curtain aside, had made the orange half orb on Singapore’s harbor appear so dire and alien.

  Later he’d recall this as his first conscious apprehension of the blot.

  Falk’s Singapore “butler” was a houseboy, really, supplied at first by the hotel but soon usurped to Falk’s local purposes. For the hundredth time, Bruno had forgotten his name. The houseboy served Falk with a deference suggesting a wholesale blindness to vice, and was present for any number of untaxed transfers of gross amounts of Singapore dollars, among other dubiously legal exhibitions. Bruno would hardly be surprised to learn he also reported routinely to unseen authorities, who’d then contact Falk for their touch. Falk conducted an invisible orchestra of graft; his mantra was “price of doing business.” In Southeast Asia, particularly, Falk held off the incursion of officials and mobsters on Bruno’s delicate operations, such as closing maneuvers on a drunken rich man, after a night of letting him win just enough to risk a double-or-nothing match on a debt that had grown outrageous. Then, while Bruno departed his hotel to the airport, to evaporate into a new locale, Falk stayed behind to settle affairs and collect debts. Falk always collected debts. Bruno supposed it was here the routine investments in policemen became essential. No doubt Falk had spared Bruno jail a few times, too, without Bruno ever knowing of it.