by Daniel Mason
‘We’re up. It’s our game.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘No way. No fucking way.’
‘I signed us up for a game.’
‘I didn’t consent to that.’
‘Well it’s too late now,’ Hayes says innocently. He shrugs.
‘This is ridiculous,’ I protest.
‘Look, man,’ Hayes says. ‘It’s one shot. That’s all. Just like the testosterone injection. One lousy shot is all it takes to make you feel on top of the world.’ Sure, just one shot. Tie it off. Push it in. Top of the world, Ma. I am unconvinced. Roulette is a drug, like heroin is a drug. Testosterone is a drug, like cocaine is a drug. And it all looks to me like the morphine that keeps the pain away when you’re dying in the hospital. Reality sets back in as soon as the drug fades.
‘It’s one shot that ends another man’s life,’ I answer.
‘Life? What do you or I care about life? We’re going to die, at least we can do it on our terms.’
‘These aren’t my terms.’
‘Would you rather spend the rest of your days floating miserably around until you drop dead?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Define the difference between living and existing for me.’
‘What?’
‘Right here. Right now. Tell me: would you rather live, or just exist?’
‘I don’t know,’ I answer. Nobody in the room seems to be paying attention to our conversation. The cleanup has begun; the body of the dead player is being carefully removed. Already the gun has vanished. The surviving player seems to have disappeared too, and I scan the crowd but I don’t see him among the sea of unfamiliar faces.
‘Right,’ Hayes says. ‘We are going to have a game. One of us is going to die. At the end of the game, the surviving player is going to know the difference between living and existing.’
‘Why me?’ I ask. ‘Why do you have to play me?’
‘We’re both terminal,’ Hayes says with a shrug. ‘What does it matter? If I get up there and I lose, my life has been worth the sacrifice so that you can understand what it truly means to be alive. And if you die, then your death is my fuel, you keep me alive, you keep me riding the high. Either way, each one helps the other. If it weren’t you tonight it would be some other player, but somebody far less worthy. You can understand what this is all about. The others, I don’t know if they have any comprehension.’
I say nothing. My head is aching. I want another cigarette, need another drink.
‘Don’t act like you don’t understand,’ Hayes tells me. ‘Quit pretending you’re uninterested in this shit. Quit acting like I don’t have anything to offer you.’
‘What do you have to offer me?’ I ask.
‘This,’ Hayes says.
‘So let’s do it,’ he says.
Let’s do it. One shot. Click or boom. One shot, game over.
‘I need to go to the bathroom,’ I say.
‘Sure, sure. Don’t want to die with a full bladder,’ Hayes says. He lights a cigarette. ‘Piss all over the floor, stinking up your corpse. No, get rid of that fluid.’
I push away from the table. I’m very light on my feet, like I’m not really walking. The pain in my head reduces everything around me to background static. I stumble blindly to the bathroom and wash my sweating brow. I look deep into the mirror, searching for whatever it is that Hayes tells me he can see in my eyes. Is that it? No. There? Maybe. Something, some kind of hollowness. An emptiness that the growing death inside of me has created. And I think to myself, what if I can put a bullet right into that tumour?
Blast the cancer out one side of my head; paint the wall with its growing mass.
Boom.
I’m fondling the reflection of my face in the mirror, as if I can really feel something. There’s a crack in the surface just above the reflection of my left eyebrow, and it seems to follow me as I tilt my head. I press at the crack with the tips of my fingers and it seems to widen, rippling the surface until the crack doubles in length, then triples and sends a series of cracks running outward from it like little vines. The mirror falls out at me in a thousand shredding shards, collapsing downward in a wave. The sound of breaking glass echoes as the pieces dance and tumble to a stop. Then there is silence again and I’m staring at a blank space of wall where my reflection used to be.
I exit the bathroom and Hayes is at the table beneath the floodlight, the game table. He’s tied a red bandana across his forehead.
He beckons me, like a ghost calling me to the other side. Silently I take my seat across from him on the opposite side of the table. I am tall and my knees scrape against the underside of the wooden surface. Around us people are talking among themselves, sitting at their spectator tables, waiting and watching. Hayes smiles at me dreamily and says, ‘Do you know how many men have died at this table?’
I say, ‘Three hundred.’
He says, ‘I haven’t got a fucking clue.’
‘Neither do I.’
A man comes to the table with a six-chamber weapon and one bullet. I don’t get a good look at the bullet because he inserts it immediately into one of the six empty chambers. He produces a coin and looks to Hayes.
‘Heads,’ Hayes says. ‘Always heads.’
The man nods and flips the coin. ‘Tails,’ he says.
He pushes the firearm toward Hayes on the other side of the table, and then he walks away. The rest is left up to the players. Hayes does not seem frightened of the weapon before him, though at first he does not pick it up. He looks at it, his eyes dark and serious, contemplating. Then he reaches.
He takes the gun. Spins the chamber. Wraps his fingers around the butt. Lifts the weapon. He presses the muzzle against the side of his head, filled with confidence. He keeps it there long enough to wink at me, and then he pulls the trigger.
Have you ever seen a man blow his brains out the side of his head at close range?
What I see is a look of surprise on Hayes’ face which lasts the briefest moment, just as he understands he has drawn the losing chamber. Then there is the explosion and I blink my eyes shut because I’ve never heard anything so loud so close in my entire life. I’ve blinked for a short second and then I am seeing brain and skull and blood and—
I am seeing a lifeless husk, alive and thinking a few moments earlier.
I am staring into its eyes, looking death in the eye.
I am seeing a body tumble sideways with the force of an explosion, and there is blood spraying against my hands which are pressed flat on the table. I don’t hear the smack as the body hits the cold floor because my ears are still ringing.
I am still staring at a space where once there was a man.
The soundtrack resumes a steady rhythm, rising above the scene.
Fade to black.
ACT TWO
FAST FORWARD
Establishing shot: Ha Tien, a long white beach, palm trees, dark ocean.
Grey day in Vietnam, and this stretch of coastline is abandoned. Phoebe is wearing a white string bikini and she is sprawled out on a towel on the sand despite the obvious lack of sun. She’s reading a paperback novel and I’m watching her from behind my sunglasses. I’m not sure if she’s aware of my eyes on her, but if she knows it she doesn’t seem to care.
It’s just the two of us here. This is the kind of beach without waves rolling in on the white shore. To get here we drove past several black-pepper tree plantations being tended by small silhouettes wearing wide hats. There are small ripples on the dark water that sweep in with the wind like an invisible hand has brushed the surface. There are no sounds apart from the gentle lapping of water and the occasional gull cawing, or Phoebe turning a page in her book.
As always, I am smoking a cigarette. I’ve converted Phoebe to the Asian brand now and together we smoke like a chimney on an eighteenth-century factory. I ash into the white sand.
Phoebe isn’t smoking this afternoon. She is wearing her glasses about halfway down her nose and it looks peculi
ar in a cute sort of way, and I almost feel like smiling. We are sitting apart on separate towels. I am not wearing a shirt and I haven’t bothered with the sunscreen, because there is no sun and I already have cancer anyway so what does a malignant exterior growth matter? Phoebe asks me to lather her up and I observe the small freckles on her shoulders as I do so. After a while she reaches out and stays my hand. She says, ‘Hayes, stop it. You’re hurting me, stop it.’
I tell her that I had no idea, but that’s a lie.
I leave her alone on the beach to be raped by the natives and I go for a swim, not because I need to cool off and not because I feel like it. The water is lukewarm around my ankles and I stand there for a while looking off at the dead horizon, a flat dark line against the pale grey sky. The ocean here slopes away into the depths swiftly, and I push out into the darker waters and begin to swim.
I swim slowly until my shoulders begin to ache and the water around me seems pure black, but when I cup it in my hands it reveals its clarity. I tread water for a long while and wonder how many sharks there are out here and how long it will be before they tear my legs off.
I imagine what it’s like to have a shark brush up against you in the water, to feel the coarseness of its skin as it passes.
The shore is a long way off.
The skeleton of a shark is composed entirely of cartilage. Its body will not float when it dies.
Gills flap open and closed, a series of slits. Eyes, cold, black pits.
Its teeth, if it shows them, will be stained and chipped, looming row upon row.
The upper lobe of the tail is the most powerful. The tail won’t stop moving, thrusting its mass forward, otherwise it will sink and die.
Beneath me, at the level of my feet, the water is much colder than the surface. I feel the change in temperature as I pedal. When my feet rise they are massaged by warmth. As they descend, the cool envelops them.
Distant thunder rumbles in the black cloud on the horizon. I might have been floating out here for a very long time, I can’t be sure, but suddenly the air feels just as cold as the water around my feet and it seems like time to return to the shore. It takes a longer time to swim in than it does to swim out. There is relief in my arms as my feet touch sand.
I walk dripping from the ocean with a thunderstorm to my back.
Phoebe lies on her stomach and she looks up from her book as I approach. She says, ‘You were a long way off.’
I look back out at the black ocean and I see the fin of a shark cutting its way across the bleak surface five hundred yards out from the shore.
I turn my back on the ocean. ‘I suppose so.’
REWIND
Phoebe had a great time maxing out Hayes’ credit cards. A slew of bills came and I dumped them immediately into the trash at Hayes’ apartment. She didn’t seem to notice. She came home from shopping one afternoon and said, ‘They rejected one of your credit cards today.’
I raised an eyebrow. She said, ‘Hayes, are you listening?’
I said, ‘Uh-huh. Just use one of the other ones.’
Phoebe smiled. ‘That’s exactly what I did. Would you like me to show you what I bought? Just let me go into the other room and I’ll change into it.’
It was late afternoon and the room was lit only by the setting sun. I had been sitting alone in the shadows when she’d walked in. Phoebe turned a light on in the bedroom. I heard the rustle of fabric, the sharp intake of breath as she snorted cocaine. More rustling fabric, another snort. Then she appeared in the doorway and said, ‘Ta-da!’
She wiped at her nose. She wasn’t wearing her glasses anymore. The light came through the doorway behind her and she was a dark outline in her black panties and bra and stockings. The pale skin of her arms and belly and upper thighs seemed to glow.
I lit a cigarette and said, ‘Suits you.’
She took a bow and said, ‘Thank you, thank you.’
‘Do a twirl or something,’ I said, indicating with a finger.
She twirled like a ballerina. Her panties were riding up her buttocks.
I said, ‘Wonderful.’
She smiled and went back into the bedroom. Then she appeared in the doorway again holding a straight finger under her nose. She said, ‘I’m bleeding.’
A trickle of blood ran over her finger and onto her pouting lip. She pinched her nostrils and more blood spilled out. She asked, ‘Why am I bleeding?’
I sat my cigarette in the ashtray and let it burn. I stood and said, ‘You’ve ruptured something.’
Phoebe gave a look of confusion.
I said, ‘Pinch here.’
I said, ‘Tilt your head back, like this.’
There was blood on my fingers as I helped her into the bathroom.
She said, ‘I feel dizzy.’
I asked her if she had a headache. She said, ‘I don’t think so.’
I said, ‘Put your head in the basin here, rinse your face.’
She complied and I went to the shower, opened the frosted glass door and turned on the water. The room filled slowly with steam. I went to Phoebe and placed a hand on her shoulder. Her face was wet and pink. I eased her toward the shower. She clung to me as if I were a life preserver. I could feel her body shaking. ‘Take a shower,’ I said.
I helped her out of her underwear and into the shower stall. She stood shivering under the blast of hot water, and I closed the door and left her alone. I went back to the ashtray to finish my cigarette. I paced restlessly back and forth. Outside, the sun was half an orb sinking behind the smokestacks of factories and old buildings. Half the city were turning their lights on as the sound of homecoming traffic increased. I stubbed the life from my cigarette and returned to the bathroom.
I stood outside the shower door and listened to the running water. I called out, ‘You okay in there?’
There was no answer.
I opened the door and Phoebe was curled into the foetal position in the corner of the shower, blood running from her mouth and swirling with the water down the drain. I said, ‘Fuck,’ and closed the door.
I went to the bedroom and started packing my things. I threw some of my clothes—some of Hayes’ clothes—into a bag. I lit another cigarette and cursed repeatedly. I punched a wall.
Rubbing my knuckles I returned to the bathroom, which had completely filled with steam. I rolled up my sleeves. I opened the shower door. Phoebe was conscious again. She was sitting with her head in her hands, sobbing under the flow of water. I could hear each whimper, a low and barely audible sound. I pinched my cigarette out of my mouth and said again, ‘Are you okay in there?’
She didn’t look at me, shook her head.
‘This is a fucking disaster,’ I said.
Still, she didn’t look at me.
I said, ‘Come on out of there.’
She looked at me now with pathetic eyes. Her hair was plastered to her skull. She wiped at her nose. She said, ‘I’m sorry.’
I offered her my hand, felt the warmth of water splash against me. She took it. I hauled her from the shower and she collapsed against me for support.
We stood there awkwardly. I tried to push her away. Her wet body clung tight to me.
She reached up and plucked the cigarette from my hand, put it to her own mouth. I felt her lungs draw in, her body briefly ease away from me. When she was done, she placed the cigarette carefully back between my fingers. She breathed smoke against me.
She tried to kiss me, angling up, lips reaching my own at a skewed angle. Her eyes were closed. She tasted like smoke and the blood that had run from her nose down her throat. Her face was wet and she held the back of my neck. I wondered if she could feel the pulse of my tumour as it sent vibrations down my spine.
I pushed her away. ‘No,’ I said.
I pried her away from me. She said, ‘Am I ugly to you?’
I stared at her. Her eyes were bloodshot. I stubbed my cigarette out in the sink. I said, ‘Right now, you are.’
She said, ‘I’m s
orry.’
I shrugged and went back to packing my bag.
She came to the doorway wrapped in a towel. Her head was bowed in shame. She told me that I shouldn’t go. Please, don’t go. This won’t happen again. Promise.
I kept on packing my things.
She came to me and let the towel fall away. To me she was small and frail, afraid. She begged me not to go. She took my hand and placed it on her body. She said, ‘Please.’
I stared her cold and hard in the eye. There was nothing but fear and shame in her. Strands of wet hair hung over her red-rimmed eyes. I brushed them aside with the back of my hand.
She said, ‘Please.’ I felt the warmth of her body where she held my hand low on her thigh.
I bit my lip and pulled away. Lit a cigarette. Stood there with my arms crossed.
Tears were welling in her eyes. Her lips were trembling. She sat heavily on the bed with a sigh, and attempted to control herself. But the tears came. She began to sob.
I stood over her.
I offered her my cigarette. She warily accepted. She crossed one arm over her breasts. She exhaled smoke. She asked me, ‘Will you stay?’
I leaned in close to her and I said, ‘Don’t fuck up again.’
She told me that she wouldn’t. I smiled and took the cigarette, blew smoke over her. She reached out to touch the side of my face with her hand. I dropped the cigarette to the carpet. Stepped on it with my shoe. I took Phoebe by both her wrists, held them apart from her.
Her lips tasted now like tears.
I told myself that I wouldn’t hesitate if I needed to get rid of her.
I forced her back against the sheets. There was still fear in her eyes. I released one of her wrists and loosened my pants, guided myself in with one hand. I didn’t look her in the eye.
When I woke later, half clothed on the bed, Phoebe was no longer beside me. The light to the bathroom was on, and I listened: scrape scrape, tap tap, sniff, snooort. I gave a sigh, rolled over, went back to sleep.
Hayes had been dead for a week and I was sitting alone at the bar in the Rex Hotel with nothing to do. One of the suited thuong gia approached me with an envelope. I presumed they recognised me from my attendance at the roulette with Hayes. Inside the envelope was a single piece of paper, with an address in English written on it.
