“I do it all the time. There’s nothing in there I want to keep anyway.”
My fingers clenched the notebook, unwilling to let it go. How could he not want to keep something on which he’d worked so hard and spent so much time? The talent poured into his sketches, the exquisite results, the memories attached to them: Did he consider these all disposable?
“I’ll put it in my bag,” I said. “I’ve got room. I can carry it for you.”
“What about after you leave? Then what do I do with it? I’ll have to leave it behind anyway.”
The words stung, even though I knew they were true. We only had two more days together. After that, I would return to New York, to my studio apartment, to my next job assignment, while he would continue on to wherever he felt like going. Our time as travel companions was only temporary. Carson was simply being practical. Didn’t I pride myself on practicality?
“Can I keep it?”
He squinted his eyes, hinting at a smile. “If you want.”
I tucked it in the front pocket of my suitcase and wheeled it out the door.
* * *
The Sheung Wan ferry terminal was mobbed. Upon walking through the doors to find a swarm of scowling faces, I began to regret our last-minute decision-making. I imagined arriving in Macau amid a crush of tourists, all the hotels alight with NO VACANCY signs. When the clerk behind the counter informed us that the crowds were due to weather delays, as opposed to overbooked boats, I realized even advanced planning couldn’t have accounted for limited visibility on the high seas. We bought our tickets for the next departing ferry and waited for the fog to lift.
After fifteen minutes of hovering around the departures lounge, we managed to stake out a free bench, where we sat side by side with our feet propped up on our luggage.
“Looks like we’ll probably be here awhile.” Carson slipped a fresh sketchpad from the side pouch of his backpack, along with a black marker, thick around the middle with a fine, tapered tip. He opened to the first page of his book, crisp and blank, then rolled the marker back and forth between his thumb and index finger as he studied the woman sitting across the aisle. She was fast asleep, with her face turned toward us and her head resting on a duffel bag in the adjacent seat. Her mouth hung open, and I could hear her rumbling snores over the din of the crowd.
Carson traced broad black lines across the page, from which an image quickly materialized. It was the sleeping woman, in exaggerated detail. Her nose was bulbous, her lips protruded, her forehead took up half of her face. Droplets of drool hung from the corner of her mouth. Behind her, a boat sailed away toward a distant island, obscured by patchy fog. A thought bubble emerged from the top of her head, revealing her dream about striking it rich in Macau: a slot machine with three matching cherries, shooting out coins and dollar signs from all angles.
“Hilarious.” I laughed. “I can’t believe you finished that so fast.”
“I’ve had lots of practice,” he said. “Could probably do these with my eyes closed.”
I’d forgotten about his job drawing caricatures at Fisherman’s Wharf. “How long did you work there?”
“A couple of years. I gave up my stand when I started this trip. But I loved it. I can see myself going back to it someday.”
He flipped to a fresh page as he scouted for his next muse among the sea of people, settling on an elderly man picking his teeth by the window.
“This is how I’d pass the time on slow days.” He drew as he spoke, his pen strokes driven by muscle memory and instinct. “There were always a bunch of tourists hanging out, stuffing their faces with shrimp sandwiches or feeding the seagulls or whatever. I whipped up their pictures while they stood around and then tacked them up on my board. So when they walked by, they’d see themselves and do a double take. You’d be surprised how many extra sales I made that way.”
“I didn’t know you were such an enterprising businessman.”
“The key is to get inside their heads. In the five minutes you’re sitting there drawing them, you have to read their faces and figure out what it is that belongs in that little thought bubble.”
“So, an enterprising businessman and quasi-psychic, then.”
He finished with a flourish and showed me the sketch: a stooped gentleman, attacking his oversized overbite with a comically enlarged toothpick, dreaming about a gaggle of curvy young women in bikinis.
“Sometimes,” he said, “people don’t know they want something until you draw it out for them. Then when they actually have it, they wonder how they ever lived without it.”
His words rang through my body like an alarm. I looked toward my feet, at the front pocket of my suitcase, where I sensed Carson’s sketchbook burning a hole through the fabric.
“Are you really not saving any of your artwork?”
He turned the page, started over. “You sure know how to beat a dead horse.”
“I just don’t understand,” I said. “Why spend all this time creating these beautiful pieces if you’re not going to do anything with them?”
“Who’s going to buy my shitty sketches?”
“I keep telling you, they’re not shitty. They’re amazing.”
“Fine. Who’s going to buy my amazing sketches? It’s not exactly like there’s a market for pencil drawings from random unknowns.”
“I wouldn’t necessarily expect you to sell them. But doesn’t it mean something to you to look back on what you’ve accomplished? To see the end product of all your hard work?”
“The meaning is in the process, Sophie. Not in the results.”
Carson’s philosophy was foreign to me. My whole job—hell, my whole life—revolved around results. Evaluating metrics. Achieving specific, measurable, realistic goals. Perfectly balancing the numbers in the spreadsheet. If the outcome was not what I’d hoped for, it meant I had probably failed.
“What about memories?” I asked. “Isn’t there anything in the sketches that’s important enough for you to keep for sentimental value?”
“Sometimes,” he said. “The stuff I think is really important I make room for, but there’s not a whole lot of those.”
Then it became clear: the memory of our afternoon on the Peak was not important enough for him to make room for. He discarded it in our rumpled sheets, and, like a fool, I retrieved it. I stared at my bag with blurred vision, swallowing hard against the lump forming in my throat.
“Here.” He ripped a page from his notebook and held it out to me. “Something for sentimental value.”
Two cartoonish faces peered out from the textured paper: one with a glint in his eye and a dimple in his cheek, the other with a wild mass of curls atop her head. They sat on a bench, holding hands at the edge of a mountain, the Hong Kong skyline behind them. Their thoughts converged in a single bubble, inside of which floated a solitary heart.
So maybe that day meant something to him after all. Or maybe he was just giving me what he thought I wanted to see.
“Cute.” It was the only word I could muster without losing my composure. This was supposed to be a short-term fling. So why was I letting myself get so worked up over this man? Or, as Grandma would call him, a boy. A boy with no job, no home, and no plans. A boy who I inexplicably trusted. A boy who would certainly make a mess of things.
I feigned a dramatic yawn, rubbing my eyes with the heels of my hands before the tears could escape. “I’m so tired of sitting here. Where is this ferry already?”
He rolled the paper into a tight, thin tube and tucked it in the side pouch of my suitcase. We sat in silence, the air between us crackling and tense. I felt him looking at me, but I couldn’t meet his gaze.
“Can’t control the weather,” he said finally before scanning the room for his next subject.
I closed my eyes, focused my breath, and asked myself, What the hell am I doing?
CHAPTER NINE
There are no clocks on a casino floor. No windows, either. It’s a strategic decision, designed to distract yo
u. The idea is to get you to lose track of time, disconnect from reality. It’s a labyrinth of sensory overload, with flashing lights and chiming bells, and a pervasive miasma of smoke and perfume. If you need a break from the bedlam or a breath of fresh air, you’ll walk in circles trying to find an exit, weaving between tables, spinning into a trance while you watch the cards shuffle and flip. The dealers stand by, with cool yet benevolent smiles, existing only to dole out your fortune. Before you know it, you fall victim to the impossible fantasy. Your money’s on the table, and then, in an instant, it’s gone.
“Let’s pop in for one second,” Carson said, then led me by the hand toward the glass doors of Macau’s oldest and most opulent casino, the Grand Amadora. Reluctant to follow him, I looked up at the towering structure stretching into the sky and fanning out like a showgirl’s headdress. We’d walked for twenty minutes from the Outer Harbour Ferry Terminal to the edge of Nam Van Lake, where a strip of shiny buildings lined the waterfront. My legs were jelly and my stomach growled. All I wanted was to unload my luggage, kick up my feet, and grab some dinner. But with the sun already on its downward slope, I worried we might not find anywhere to stay and envisioned us roaming the streets with our bags in our hands all night.
“Only for one second,” I said. “Then we really have to find a room somewhere before there are no vacancies left.”
“There will be plenty of vacancies. I’ve been traveling like this for months, Sophie. Have a little faith in me.”
Every sensible cell in my body was telling me this unplanned excursion to Macau was a risky endeavor. I’d only known Carson for a few days, and all I knew of him was what he chose to reveal. When I saw the fire burning in his eyes as we approached the casino, I wondered how much he’d kept hidden. What if he harbored a secret gambling addiction? His dead parents, his trust fund: It could all be a lie. He could be financing this trip with the proceeds from his winning wagers and making up for the losses by swindling foolish, sex-charmed women. The other day at the teahouse, he’d invented our engagement with such unflinching ease, spoon-feeding the older love-struck couple the story they wanted to hear. What if he was doing the same thing to me? And why hadn’t this possibility occurred to me before?
“After you,” he said, holding the door open and motioning for me to enter before him, ever the gentleman. There was no point in hesitating now; I was already there, having ignored the advice of my sensible cells all week. I summoned imaginary faith from deep within the pit of my stomach and crossed the threshold into the cold casino air.
I thought I knew what to expect. I’d been to other casinos, witnessed the raucous crowds surrounding the craps table, and heard the screams when the little silver ball found its landing spot on the roulette wheel. But inside the Grand Amadora, people spoke in hushed tones, barely audible over the piano music piped in on the loudspeaker. The entrance hall was freshly painted in shades of beige, accented with exotic flowers arranged in vases as big as tree stumps. Gilded chandeliers hung from coffered ceilings, and with each step, our shoes sank deeply into lush red carpet.
I’d started to think we mistakenly entered a museum, when I saw a cluster of tables ahead and to the right, cordoned off behind velvet ropes. Men sat around them, silently smoking, studying the cards as dealers passed them across the green felt.
“Why is it so quiet in here?” I whispered, afraid of making too much noise.
“Looks like the baccarat pit,” he said. “Probably high rollers.”
Thus far, my gambling experience had been limited to a few spins on the nickel slots at the Borgata the night Elena turned twenty-one. We’d driven down to Atlantic City and rented a room to celebrate her birthday—the last time we’d gone away together prior to Hong Kong. After losing twenty dollars before the cocktail waitress could return with my amaretto sour, I hustled us off the gaming floor and toward the thumping doors of the club Mixx, where we flirted our way into the VIP room and danced on a banquet until the wee hours of the morning. I knew nothing of baccarat, and certainly nothing of high rollers. Frankly, I wasn’t interested. Placing a bet with unfavorable odds was as good as tossing money on a fire.
So my breath caught when I realized that Carson was heading toward the velvet ropes. I slowed my pace, hoping he would stop, turn around, tell me he was only joking. But he pressed forward with purpose, his eyes on the prowl. Immediately, I pictured our day ending with the empty, white pockets of his shorts hanging inside out while I slipped my credit card across the counter at the front desk of a dingy Macanese hostel. Why have I been such a fool?
“The other tables are over here,” he said, and continued past the high rollers’ pit with his arm outstretched, his finger pointing. I exhaled. At least he wasn’t intent on losing it all in one sitting. Or did he not even have enough money to buy in?
Around the corner, there were no velvet ropes, only an endless corridor flanked by card tables. Baccarat. Blackjack. Different flavors of poker. More baccarat. No craps, no roulette. No jubilant screaming or victory high fives. Instead, players perched quietly on ivory leather chairs, hunched over their cards, their stern faces clouded in a haze of tobacco smoke. Apparently, gambling was serious business in Macau.
I waited for Carson to make a move, but he only looked around, slowing down at certain tables to investigate the play. Perhaps he was there to observe, I thought, taking snapshots in his mind that he’d later transfer to pencil and paper. My shoulders relaxed and I grabbed for his hand, following him as he wound his way around the floor. He’s not a shifty grifter; he’s an artist with a trust fund. I figured if I kept thinking this, I’d eventually believe it with certainty.
“I feel like we should play something,” he said.
“There’s plenty of time for that later.” I instinctively clenched my fist around his hand, searching for an exit. By now I’d lost all sense of location and direction. “Why don’t we go find a place to stay first?”
But Carson had his wallet in his hand before I could finish my sentence.
“Sic Bo,” he said, reading the sign above our heads. “Wonder what this is about.”
We examined the grid on the long table before us, dozens of squares to place bets on, each containing a different number or a picture of dice. There were no actual dice in sight, though. No spinning wheel, either. Not even a deck of cards at the ready in an automatic shuffler. Just a stone-faced dealer in a glossy vest and cuff links, his hands resting limply on the Plexiglas cover of the chip tray. He stared straight ahead, appearing wholly uninterested in offering gambling instructions to a couple of schlubby foreigners trailing suitcases.
“How do you play this?” I asked.
“I have no idea.” Carson pulled out a red note from his billfold and placed it on the felt. Five hundred Hong Kong dollars, the casino’s preferred currency over Macanese patacas. It amounted to sixty bucks back home, give or take. Not an extraordinary sum, but nothing to scoff at either, particularly for someone supposedly traveling on a limited budget. Not your business. Not your money. Not your decision. Still, I cringed when the dealer snatched up the bill and crammed it in the cash slot, replacing it with a short stack of pink chips. Carson scanned the table for inspiration, and I fought the urge to deliver a lecture on the importance of personal finance.
“What should I do?” he asked.
“This board makes no sense to me,” I said. “What are you even betting on? From the pictures, I’m guessing dice, but where are they?”
“I don’t know.” He furrowed his brow and bit his bottom lip. We were the only players at the table; the dealer remained still, waiting for a wager. Cash in your chips and walk away, I thought, hoping Carson could hear me telepathically.
“Pick a number from one to six,” he said.
“What?”
“Give me a number from one to six. Don’t think about it, just say the first one that comes to mind.”
“Two.” Two of us traveling together. Two days left in my trip. Two more minutes of
enduring this nonsense before I gave up and caught the next ferry back to Hong Kong.
He pushed his whole stack of chips across the felt, placing his bet on a picture of three dice, all faceup on the number two.
“Might as well go all in, right?” He was smiling but his voice quavered. I thought of all we’d done this week. I’d been basking in his unconventional lifestyle, enjoying his haphazard approach to travel, lost in a fog of sex and mystery. And here we stood, about to say good-bye to what could possibly be Carson’s last sixty dollars. Regret washed over me when I imagined dipping into my savings account to pay for the next two nights’ accommodations.
The dealer waved his hand over the table, the universal symbol for “no more bets,” a pointless gesture considering we had nothing left to lose. He pressed a small black button to the right of the chip tray, next to which sat an inverted silver bowl with a handle on top, like the cloche cover on a room service platter, but in miniature. I hadn’t noticed it there before, but no sooner had I spotted it than the dealer was lifting it up, revealing a glass globe underneath.
“I guess that’s what we were betting on,” Carson said. We leaned forward to see the contents. It matched the picture under the chips perfectly: three dice, faceup on the number two.
Was I dreaming?
“Oh my God,” I said, two octaves higher than any other voice in the casino. “You hit it!”
Carson’s mouth hung open while the dealer barked an unintelligible command summoning the pit boss to his side.
“How much did you win?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” His eyes were transfixed on the little red dice as if looking away might cause them to vanish. “Did I really just win this?”
“I’m pretty sure you did.” I pointed at the pit boss, who was taking notes on a clipboard as the dealer counted out seven black chips, one green. He slid them across the table as a crowd slowly formed around us, people stopping by to scrutinize the winner, eager to piggyback off the freshly kindled luck. Carson snatched up his winnings and took inventory, thumbing through the chips three times to make sure he had counted correctly.
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