by Martin Seay
Kagami laughs, wipes his mouth on his napkin. This is really nice, he says. Let me just throw something on the table. Okay? What if this isn’t a big misunderstanding? What if Stanley hasn’t been returning Damon’s calls because he just finished screwing him? What if Stanley really did hit the Point, and all those other places? What if he put that team together, and he used the Spectacular’s own money to help bankroll it? He’s done stuff like that before, kid. Many times.
Sure, Curtis says. Thirty years ago. But Stanley doesn’t work with big teams anymore. You said so yourself: he doesn’t have to, he’s got Veronica. Besides, Stanley and Damon are friends. You know how loyal Stanley is, Walter. You really think he’d take advantage of Damon like that? That’s just not Stanley, man.
Okay. I also know Stanley doesn’t take any shit off anybody. Has Damon done anything to piss him off?
Not that I know about.
Well, you wouldn’t know, would you? Damon’s the only one you’ve been talking to. Right? When’s the last time you saw Stanley, kid?
Curtis looks down at his plate. Picturing Stanley on a bench by the Tidal Basin, fanning a deck of cards for Mawiyah’s little cousins. Mawiyah and Curtis’s dad shouting from their pedalboat in mostly mock disapproval. Foamy clumps of cherryblossoms adrift on the water. Danielle beside him, laughing, invisible, on his left. Her fingers laced in his own. It’s been a couple years, Curtis says.
Kagami looks off into the sun for a while. He’s changed a lot, you know.
How do you mean?
For one thing, he’s sick. I don’t know what’s wrong, but he was walking with a cane when I saw him on Wednesday. He didn’t look too great.
Stanley’s never been sick a day in his life.
For another, Kagami continues, he’s crazy. For the past couple of years, Stanley has been losing a tremendous amount of money. Just throwing it away at the tables. He comes up with these new systems that don’t make any sense at all, that have nothing whatsoever to do with probability. He’s gotten really strange, Curtis. He dropped six grand in here the other night without batting an eye. I shouldn’t have done it, but I pulled him aside, asked him what the hell he thought he was doing. I told him to knock it off with the metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. I told him to stop believing his own bullshit.
You told him that?
That’s what I told him.
What did he say?
He told me a Zen story.
Say again?
He told me this story about a famous archer who lives in Japan. The guy is known universally as one of the great masters of his art. People come from all over the world to study with him. And although he’s very old, and he’s been shooting for many years, the guy has yet to hit the bullseye.
That’s the story?
Yeah. Stanley likes telling me Zen stories. It’s a little joke we have.
Is it true?
Kagami gives Curtis an exasperated look, opens his mouth to say something, closes it again. Stares down into the valley.
Walter, Curtis says, Stanley is always going on about that mystical stuff. It’s all just part of his act. He doesn’t really believe any of it.
Kagami shrugs. Maybe when he first started it was an act, he says. Maybe there was always a grain of truth in it. Sincerity. Fantasy. Wishful thinking. Maybe he’s been doing his act for so long now that it’s become who he really is. Or, hell, kid, maybe all any of us do is just an act. Who knows?
Kagami swirls a bit of duck in its blueblack sauce, lifts it to his mouth. You ever counted cards, Curtis? he asks. Seriously?
No sir. I understand how it works, but I’ve never tried to do it myself.
Kagami chews very slowly, washes down the mouthful with water and wine. If you’re running hot, he says—and when I say hot I’m not talking about luck; I mean you got a solid true count, you’re shuffletracking, you got a weak dealer and nice deep penetration in the shoe—there comes a moment when you are in complete control of the game. You know what your cards, the dealer’s cards, even the guy down at first base playing basic strategy’s cards are going to be, as well as how they’ll be played, until the cutcard comes up. It is very difficult to describe this feeling. It’s almost like—
—and here Kagami looks up and reaches abruptly into the air above their heads, as if to pluck a word floating there, his face at once alive and very old, the sunset igniting his gold rings and wire-rimmed glasses and thin black hair, a few stars peeking out of the deep blue behind him—
—omnipotence, he says. Take it from me, kid, this feeling can do funny things to your head. It becomes very easy to fool yourself into thinking that the whole world might be a big blackjack game. If you could just recognize it, see the correspondences, learn to read the cards. Even the best players—and I hope you’ll forgive me for saying that I am one of them—hit this moment only very rarely. Stanley lives there. In that moment. All the time. And I believe that this has gradually driven him out of his mind.
Curtis isn’t sure what to say to this. He nods, looks away.
I’m not making a lot of sense, Kagami says. That’s okay. It doesn’t matter. All I’m saying, Curtis, is that you should never underestimate people’s capacity to believe weird things. I mean, let’s just take a look around.
Kagami jerks a thumb toward the Mormon temple. The folks in that building, he says, believe America was first settled by a lost tribe of Israel. Your dad thinks white people were created by an evil scientist. You never know what somebody’s going to grab onto when he starts to sink, kid. Don’t be too sure you know where Stanley’s coming from these days.
Curtis thinks about that for a moment. I figure it like this, he says. Maybe Stanley’s lost his mind. Maybe he hasn’t. Maybe he was part of the team that hit the Point, and maybe he wasn’t. None of that really matters to me. What matters is, he’s either running from me, or he’s not. If he’s running, then there’s no way in hell I’m ever gonna catch him. If he’s not, then I believe he’ll talk to me.
A sudden gust comes down the mountain, flapping the tablecloths and toppling an empty tray; somewhere nearby one of the ravens squawks in surprise. For the first time since he arrived, Curtis is glad he’s wearing a jacket.
Kagami is smiling: a warm smile, with no malice in it, but it could be hiding anything. Well, he says, good luck to you, kid. If I hear anything from Stanley, I’ll tell him to call you up.
I’d appreciate that.
One of the ravens hops onto the rock wall just behind Kagami’s back and preens for a moment, looking satisfied with itself. It caws, and its voice echoes in the darkening valley. Then it launches itself into the air, circling, flying back up to the ridge.
Curtis nods toward it. These guys are a nice touch, he says. How do you get them to stick around?
Stick around? Kagami laughs. Christ, we can’t get rid of ’em. They were here before we laid the foundations. That’s where our logo came from. The owner calls ’em Bill and Melinda. I can’t tell which is which.
Kagami doesn’t look up; his knife and fork snicker quietly on his plate. There was a third one, he says between bites. But he was too aggressive. He liked shiny things, and he’d get right up on your table. Some of these old ladies, you know, they wear some pretty gaudy jewelry. He was a real character. The boss named him Larry Ellison.
What happened to him?
I came up here one morning about dawn with the rearview mirror out of my car and a Remington twelvegauge I borrowed off a buddy of mine. Flash-flash, flash-flash, blam. The head chef made old Larry into a plate of mole enchiladas for me.
Kagami wipes his mouth on his napkin, smiles sadly, shakes his head. Hell of a lot of meat on that bird, he says. Tasted like shit. But what I kill, I always eat.
12
One of the Quicksilver’s shuttlebuses makes an hourly run back to the Strip, and Curtis buys himself a club soda and finds a quiet spot near the bingo room to wait for it.
The rich, spicy food has settled unevenly in his sto
mach, and he thinks about looking for the head before the bus arrives. He tries to sort through everything Kagami just told him—to line it up against the stories he got from Veronica and from Damon, to spot contradictions and coincidences—but it’s hard to concentrate among the frantic warblings of the casino floor, and eventually he finds himself peeking through the bingo room’s doorway, drawn by the intense calm he senses there.
Maybe twenty old ladies inside. Most playing five or six cards at once, some with fifteen or more, holding them in place with PVP gluesticks or blobs of adhesive putty. The caller is a young white girl with braces and a clear empty voice; her announcements pass through the room like swells. The air seems denser here, the transmissions clearer. The women stoop like oracles, their blue and pink perms intently bobbing. Knotted nimble fingers placing daubs in atavistic patterns. The numbers eclipsed even as they’re revealed. Curtis watches, transfixed, until he has to rush to catch the shuttle.
On the long downhill ride back to the Strip he thinks of Stanley. He thinks of what Kagami said about blackjack—about the illusion of total control—and then he thinks of the bingo ladies in their quiet room, their fierce mastery of cards and daubers. It all begins to make a kind of desperate sense to Curtis, and as the shuttle slows to a stop in front of his hotel, he remembers a late-season football game from his junior year—how he saw the blitz coming well before the snap, saw it in the faces of the Banneker kids, the way they carried themselves. Recalling with his whole body the calm that came upon him then, the clarity. Empty and weightless. Everything moving on rails only he could see. He pivoted away from the defensive end that mirrored him across the line of scrimmage, just letting the guy drop. Shaking himself loose. Backpedaling into the path of the blindside. Arms windmilling. Unpretty. In the way. The cornerback running flat out—helmet down, rocketlike—right over him. Knee dropping on his wrist. The dull crack somehow right, somehow perfect. The sweetness of it. Hammerblow on a box of chalk. The pain transfigured him, lit him from inside. He knew without looking that the pass got off, connected. His cast stayed on until the end of February.
A month after it came off, Reagan got shot coming out of the Washington Hilton, and Curtis knew then exactly what he wanted to do with his life.
The elevator has never seemed so slow, rising balloonlike and unhurried through twenty-eight floors before discharging him. By the time he reaches his door he’s already unbuckled his belt, and he slides his keycard and drops his trousers and tears the paper ring from the sanitized toilet in one smooth motion. He sits for a while in the scented dark—goosepimpled, tasting vitriol, wiping his clammy scalp—before shrugging off his blazer and setting his holstered revolver in the marble sink. The curtains are drawn from the windows at the end of the suite, and a dim wedge of light leaks through the door, multihued and pulsing. Watching it, Curtis thinks of Christmas lights, Christmas trees, and he thinks for probably the twelfth time today that he really ought to call his wife. He thinks about what he’d say, what she’d say, how he’d explain. Imagining her on the phone in the kitchenette. Warming milk, maybe, for hot chocolate. Her short white robe falling open. Fuzzy red socks. Tomorrow’s uniform pressed and laid out on the dresser. Leaning against the fridge with one stiff arm, like she’s holding it shut. Cowrie shells clicking against the handset. Her brow furrowed. The little wrinkle there. That and a couple of rings are all he’s given her.
I’m real sorry, Dani. Hell yes, I miss you. I just can’t talk right now. That’s about it: the extent of what he’s got. Can’t say what the plan is because there is no plan—hasn’t really been one since he got hurt, since he shipped home from Kosovo, since before he met her. Two years adrift, reacting. He’d have to be able to explain it to himself first. He flushes, undresses, showers, lies down on the rack and thinks about it.
He’s thinking about it when his cell chirps to life, his home number in Philly on its display. He thinks about it as it rings, and as it stops ringing, and a minute later when the phone beeps and the message symbol appears, he’s still thinking about it.
He turns on the TV and mutes it and tries to concentrate on the text that crawls across the bottom, flipping between CNN and CNBC and Fox, dozing off from time to time, until a few hours have passed and he’s hungry again. Then he rises and dresses, locks up his pistol, heads down below to get a sandwich.
The elevator puts him out on the second floor, the shopping level, and he strides over black cobblestones toward the cool light of a painted sunless sky. At the wide terminus of the hotel’s indoor canal a gondolier is bringing his craft around, shouting songs over his passengers’ heads as they film him in wobbly digital video. The blue of the water is uncompromised, void, a screen for projections.
An arcade opens to Curtis’s right, and he follows it toward the food court. Somehow he makes a wrong turn; even after he realizes it he keeps moving forward, letting himself be swept along by tourists and conventioneers into the great indoor piazza of Saint Mark’s Square. Browsers fondle trinkets in umbrella-shaded carts; a string quartet duels with an unseen opera singer on a balcony; sidewalk patrons dine on gnocchi and tuna niçoise. Up ahead, in the middle of the square, a knot of people surrounds a living statue.
Curtis draws closer. The statue is dressed entirely in white—white gown, white sash, round white cap, a fat little loop of fabric—and white makeup pancakes its arms and face. Curtis can’t guess its sex with any certainty. For a few minutes he watches it between the heads of the people in front of him; he never sees it blink. Its eyes are empty, focused on some invisible thing. After a while he realizes that many of the spectators, himself included, are nearly as motionless as the statue. A creeping paralysis. Curtis shakes himself, turns back the way he came.
He wonders whether he should try to find something for Danielle—a guilt gift—but everything he sees is handmade and imported, too expensive, nothing Dani would want anyway. Jeweled masks, leatherbound books, glass pelicans. A silver mirror framed in crystal. A wooden marionette with a footlong nose.
As he’s going through the menu at Towers Deli he starts to get nervous, worried that he’s in the wrong spot. Stanley might be in the building now, but he’d never be up here. There’s another food court down below, just off the gaming floor. Curtis doubles back, retraces his steps.
As the escalator carries him down, the classical music on the shopping level’s PA fades into a Phil Collins ballad, and the white noise of the gaming area engulfs him like a steambath. Everything seems vague and equidistant. With the war brewing, and all the active-duty guys either in Kuwait or locked down on base, Curtis figured tonight would be a slow night, but it doesn’t look slow. He doesn’t see any crewcuts or high-and-tights in the crowd, but there are lines at all the ATMs, the high-roller area looks active, and traffic to and from the cage is steady. This isn’t a jarhead joint anyway, Curtis thinks, so it probably doesn’t matter. By the entrance to the washrooms, a group of men waits for wives and girlfriends, rattling coinpails or studying basic-strategy cards to pass the time. Most of them are Curtis’s age or younger.
He makes his clockwise loop on autopilot, picking out details he’s missed along the familiar route: massive chandeliers, colors in the carpet, the placement of surveillance cameras overhead. He checks the tables, the machines, the sports-book room, the high-limit slots, the video poker games in the Oculus Lounge. Stanley’s not here, and neither is Veronica, at least at the moment.
He buys a Philly cheesesteak at the San Gennaro Grill and finds himself a table near the food court’s entrance. He finishes half, washes it down with a gulp of iced tea, checks the message on his cell while starting in on the rest. Danielle’s voice, punctuated by the soft clicking of his teeth. Sammy D, it says, this is your wife calling again. You remember you got a wife, right? That thing we did at the church, with the music and the flowers? You had to wear a tux? You remember that? See, since I hadn’t heard from you, I’m wondering if maybe you got hit on the head or something. It is Saturday, nine o�
��clock in the p.m. Philadelphia time, and I would sure as shit like to hear from you, Junior. I know we’re supposed to be in a fight, and if you don’t want to talk right now, I guess I understand. But call and let me know that you’re okay, at least. If you can’t—
She cuts herself off with a sigh, then starts over. Look, she says. Curtis, I know I shouldn’t have said all that stuff I said. But I think you understand why I said it. I just think you’re selling yourself sh—
Curtis deletes the message, hangs up. The clock on the phone’s display says 10:42. Nearly two a.m. Philly time. It still feels early. He stares at the phone until it says 10:43, then 10:44. Then he picks it up again to send a text. Im ok, he types. He examines the letters, the blinking cursor. The message seems inadequate. Ill call soon, he adds. Luv u.
He eats the last of his sandwich and drains his tea and walks back onto the casino floor. He makes another survey of the blackjack tables, taking more time, looking closer. Fifty-odd eight-deck games going, plus a handful of six-decks and two-decks. Curtis pays particular attention to those tables—that’s where cardcounters will congregate—but none of the faces looks familiar. The swingshift’s been on duty for three hours now. He wonders where Veronica is.
Back in the Oculus Lounge he finds himself a Deuces Wild machine with a good sidelong view and stops a passing cocktail waitress to order a cranberry juice. He thinks she’s the same one who served him last night, but he can’t be sure. Like all the girls here she’s tall, pretty, sharp-eyed. Dressed in an absurd burgundy-and-gold corselet with chiffon ruffles at the hips. The bridesmaid of a trapeze artist. She probably clears eighty grand a year in tips alone. A vast smile is drawn across her face like a curtain.
