In the Shadow of the Towers

by Douglas Lain

  “Why not talk to me now?” I asked.

  “Come on. It’s New Orleans, man! Let’s enjoy the Big Easy,” Mel said excitedly. “Come on, just a drink and some talk. We haven’t seen you since Atlantic City! I’m buying.”

  I relented and offered to meet them in the lobby in an hour. Mel was happy.

  In my room I slammed the door behind me and dropped my suitcase by the bed. I couldn’t wait to be by myself. I was stressed from the flight and the onboard incident and annoyed with Mel. He really was an asshole. I shouldn’t have agreed to go out with them. I just wanted to lie down and compose myself.

  The room was like every other hotel room I’d ever been in for a tournament. It’s as if every Hilton or Ramada or Crowne Plaza or Harrah’s used one architect and one designer for all their rooms. There was a double bed with a nondescript duvet, and a couple of chairs for all the visitors I’d wouldn’t be entertaining. The light brown curtains were open and I could see the lights of the French Quarter beckon me from across Canal Street. I closed them.

  I unpacked my case and took a shower. After drying off I put on some underwear and stretched out of the bed. I focused on my own thoughts and not any others. It was easier when I was alone. I concentrated on tamping down any external stimulus and pushed any telepathic thoughts into the background, where they belonged. It was my choice to read a mind, not have someone’s thoughts in my head without invitation.

  After an hour of rest in the darkened room I dressed. As I steadied myself at the door I took a deep breath to keep my focus and then I walked down the hall to the elevators.

  Doc and Mel were waiting for me in the lobby. Mel was particularly elated to see me. It worried me. Doc was nonchalant. He was busy calculating basketball odds in his head. We headed out across Canal Street and after a short walk we stopped at Hooters.

  “I thought we were going to a real New Orleans bar,” I said.

  “This is real. Besides, Doc wants to watch the games.”

  We entered the restaurant and sat at a table. The place was almost full. The Wizards and Heat game and the Pistons and Hornets game were on most of the televisions as well as CNN’s Headline News. Blocking out the mental chatter of the patrons was easy, since all anyone seemed to be thinking about was basketball, titties, and beer. Mel ogled the waitresses and Doc watched the basketball games.

  “Isn’t this great? It’s just like the one in Houston,” Mel said. It was like McDonald’s, I thought, go into one and you’ve been in every other one.

  I immediately felt uncomfortable. I was still psychically bruised from my unexplained incident on the plane. I needed more time to recuperate. Instead, I was in Hooters. I really wanted to be in a good local restaurant eating oysters and gumbo.

  “I love the waitresses here,” Mel said. I nodded.

  I asked him about the business proposition. He shook his head.

  “Not yet. Let’s have a drink first.”

  A waitress came over and took our order. Mel had his eyes at a level with her breasts and he had a huge grin on his face. I scanned his mind and all I got was sexual desire . . . boring stuff. Mel watched her ass as she left with our order.

  “Man, she’s one hot bitch,” Mel said, shaking his head.

  Doc, who was watching the game and hadn’t looked at her once, said, “She sure is.”

  The table fell into an awkward silence. I didn’t have the energy to figure out what Mel and Doc wanted from me. I’d let them reveal it later. I went back to the drone of background thoughts.

  After a time the waitress brought our drinks. I sipped at my whiskey and soda while Mel adjusted himself in his seat and leaned toward me.

  “Doc and I have a plan. We pool our resources and back each other. We funnel our chips to you so you have a commanding lead. You go the final table. When it’s over we split three ways.” The words tumbled out of Mel’s mouth. Doc was actually looking at me and not the games. He wanted to see my reaction.

  “Why me?” I asked.

  “Because you have a way for reading players that Doc and I don’t. We’re aggressive early on, we can accumulate chips, but we get challenged by players later in the tournaments and our stacks get smaller. You don’t do that. You pick your moves and you usually win those hands. If you had our chip stacks you’d be unstoppable,” Mel said.

  I didn’t like it. I had a style of play that suited my unique abilities. Reading a person’s mind to find out their hole cards gave me an advantage, but it wasn’t like I could read the future and see what the next five cards were going to be. Winning wasn’t an absolute.

  “That’s your plan? If I make the final table we split three ways?” I asked.

  Before Mel spoke I glanced at a television and caught a glimpse of CNN. Footage of the planes flying into the twin towers filled the screen and suddenly I was there.

  I was falling from a tall building hundreds of stories up. There was black smoke and I dived right through it, and I could see the ground rising up to me. I could smell the acrid odor of burnt plastic. I was falling and falling until was on the ground. Then, suddenly, that vision was over and I was right back in Hooters, only the background drone was gone.

  “Are you okay?” Mel asked and looked at my face. He said, “You’re pale as a ghost.”

  “I don’t know. I, I, don’t know.”

  I tried reading Mel’s mind but there was nothing there, a complete blank. Then the familiar hum of many people’s thoughts filled my mind again.

  I downed the remainder of my drink. I needed the alcohol to settle me down. My mind wandered back to the strange falling sensation I’d just had. It wasn’t like a thought. I saw it like I was falling through the air, the ground coming up fast and I was going to die. I couldn’t explain it. I hadn’t read someone’s thoughts; who could think that vividly of something so horrific? This was something else.

  I decided that I’d had enough of Hooters and Doc and Mel. I didn’t feel well. The psychic event on the flight and now this all-too-realistic sensation was exhausting.

  “I’m going back the hotel. I don’t feel well.”

  “You look like shit,” Doc said, looking at me for the first time.

  “Yeah, you’re looking a little green around the gills,” Mel said. “Get some rest so you can play tomorrow. Think about my offer.”

  I returned to my room and soaked a washcloth in cool water. I laid it across my forehead and stretched out in the bed. I felt queasy, as if I had just come off a rough sea voyage. I didn’t know what was happening to me, if it was telepathy or psychosis.

  I woke up late the next day. I was hungry since I hadn’t eaten dinner the night before. I hurried down to the hotel restaurant; I had just enough time for breakfast before the tournament began. I regretted not being able to see some of New Orleans, a city I hadn’t visited since I was a child. I should have ventured out on my own last night, instead of going to Hooters with Doc and Mel. I could have seen some of the sights, gone to Café du Monde, had a drink on Bourbon Street, maybe I wouldn’t have had that strange falling sensation.

  I wondered what those hallucinations had been. Maybe they were stress related, traveling so soon after 9/11. Two planes had flown into New York City’s Twin Towers and nothing was the same since. The world didn’t stop after the attacks, but you could feel a difference. There were hours of security check-ins at the airport; armed shoulders with rifles, machine guns, and shotguns; police were wearing camouflage gear and military helmets. There was a subtle loss of freedom, of movement, of liberty. I was a kind of waking nightmare and it put me on edge.

  Regardless, I needed to ready myself for the tournament. I had to reassure myself that I had the ability to come in the money, if not win the whole thing. After twenty years of playing poker I had enough skills to battle any opponent. The mind-reading was just an added tool to my repertoire of poker plays. Ninety-nine percent of my game was based on probabilities and logic, not telepathy.

  As I was finishing breakfast Doc and
Mel sat down at my table. I didn’t have to be a mind reader to know what was coming.

  “How are you feeling?” Mel asked.

  “Better, thanks,” I said. I paused. I wanted Mel to start the conversation about the deal.

  “Are you in?”

  “No, I’m not in. It’s cheating. If we get caught we’ll never be able to live it down. We will be banned from all future tournaments,” I stated.

  “No one will find out.”

  “They won’t because I’m not in. I can win this thing on my own, without your help.” Besides Mel’s plan being unethical, if I did come in the money I didn’t want to split three ways.

  “You’d better watch out then. If we’re on the same table, we’re going to steamroll you,” Mel threatened. Doc nodded. I almost laughed at their tough guy act. They didn’t know what I could do to them if I wanted to. Their chips would be mine.

  The tournament was held in the ballroom of the hotel. It was a large space that held over forty poker tables. There were chandeliers; otherwise, the room was without ornamentation. Functional and utilitarian, just like the rest of the hotel. There were at least two hundred players, all of whom had paid a fifteen-hundred-dollar entry fee. The prize pool was at least three hundred thousand dollars, beating the casino’s guarantee of two hundred fifty thousand. As I walked to my seat there were still people buying in. There might be more than two hundred fifty players before the cutoff.

  I was on table nine. There were ten players to a table. When someone got knocked out, they brought a player from another table to even things out, or they’d “break” the table and send the players to other tables to even those out. It would be a long time before that happened. With a deep starting stack of five thousand chips, forty-five-minute levels, and blinds beginning at twenty-five and fifty, we’d probably be keeping each other company for five or six hours.

  At my table were the usual suspects: a forty-something Chinese man, an elderly Chinese woman, a Persian gentleman, a Korean man, a Russian man, two nondescript white Southern men, a middle-aged African American woman, and a rotund man with silver hair and a gold diamond-studded lucky horseshoe pinkie. He also had a large Rolex watch. Ostentatious displays of wealth on the table say “Winner.” He was the only one that concerned me, so I was going to read his mind.

  He was quite demonstrative and jovial, talking to his neighbors on the table. He was laughing and joking and taking big swigs of coffee from the cup in front of him.

  “Where are you from?” I asked him. This was a common question at a large tournament.

  “Dallas, Texas,” he replied, and I knew he was lying. His read mind said he was from Tunica, Mississippi. Now, if he’d lie about that with an even tone of voice, what else would he do as the tournament progressed? Tunica was the gambling Mecca of the South. This shark fed on the tourist chum that visited there.

  “Where are you from?” he asked me and I told him the Bay Area. He nodded sagely, as if my answer was deeply profound instead of a statement of residence. Then everyone on the table piped in: New Orleans! Houston! Baton Rouge! Boston! Los Angeles!

  I tried not to lose focus on the fat man. He was amused, a gambler’s mind conditioned to stay aware despite hours of tedious poker playing. I’ve heard poker described as the old cliché of watching paint dry, but it was even more boring when you played it for hours in a tournament. Fewer hands were played than in a cash game and you tried to protect your stack of chips more. The average large two-day tournament lasted anywhere from twelve to sixteen hours a day. You had to keep part of your mind on the game, to see how people played, what they played, how they bet. Telepathy helped since I could scan a player’s mind to see their hole cards. However, if they were unfocused players, or distracted by something else, I couldn’t get a read on their hand. Then it was up to good guessing and the use of probabilities like everyone else. I’d say telepathy gave me an edge, but at times it was negligible. They drew the cards for the dealer button, the person who is last to act. I got caught as the big blind, which is a forced bet to invoke action on the table. Without a big blind or the small blind, which is half the big blind, the game would stall and there would never be a winner.

  The first hand was dealt. I relaxed and let the drone of people’s thoughts wash over me, as I fine-tuned my focus on my “enemy,” the fat, boisterous man from Tunica. I knew he was going to be tough; everyone else on the table was average and ordinary. At least that’s what I thought.

  The man from Tunica wasn’t making any big plays early. I did a test to see if what I saw in his mind matched what his cards were. I chose a few hands where he raised the pot before the flop. I assumed he had a pocket pair or Ace/King or Ace/Queen. Then I would read his mind and see his cards. I was surprised once; he made a raise with six/eight of clubs and was called by one of the Southern gents. He caught lucky with two eights on the flop for three of a kind, and the other player had a pair of Jacks. We all got to see that one since he revealed his cards to claim the pot. So far there were no other surprises, so I decided to expand my telepathy to include the Russian and the man from Baton Rouge.

  My first read on the Russian was that he was passive. He had a deuce/seven off-suit and he folded. I then read the other player, the one from Baton Rouge, and he held pocket Kings and raised three times the pot. I smirked and quickly caught myself and put on a blank expression. The surprise came when the Persian from Los Angeles, who I wasn’t observing, re-raised all-in. I tried to read his mind to see what he had, but I couldn’t get a fix. He was thinking about ordering a drink. He must have two Aces, I thought. It had to be pocket Aces.

  The pocket Kings called and the player I thought had Aces, in fact, held Ace/Queen of Diamonds. It was certainly not a hand worth risking your entire tournament. The flop, the first three shared cards, was Ace, Nine, Ten with two Diamonds. So far the all-in player was in the lead. The next card, the turn, was the King of Hearts, giving the pocket Kings three of a kind. The river was the deuce of Spades and the all-in player was out of the tournament. I tried scanning his mind, but all I read was “cocktails.” Weird. Why was he thinking about cocktails? He wasn’t particularly perturbed that he was out of the tournament.

  I tangled with the man with the horseshoe ring once. I had Ace/King of Clubs, on the button before the flop, meaning I was the last to act before the small and big blinds had their chance, and decided to raise three times the value of the pot. Ace/King suited is a powerful starting hand, especially on the button. The small blind folded and the big blind was the man from Tunica. He hesitated and I decided to read his mind. I discovered he had a pair of Queens. He paused either for effect or he genuinely needed time to think. As I scanned his mind for more information, he raised it four times what I had raised it. He thought I might have pocket Jacks or exactly what I had, the Ace/King suited. I waited an appropriate amount of time and threw my hand in the muck. I was a huge dog in that one. I regretted I didn’t read his hand before I raised it. It would have saved me chips.

  We had a few players leave our table and new ones join before we broke for dinner at seven o’clock. I really wanted gumbo but the hotel’s restaurant didn’t serve that so I had a burger and fries with a soda. With only a forty-five-minute meal break there wasn’t time leave the hotel to eat. Mel and Doc walked by while I ate and gave me the stink-eye. They weren’t doing well. They were on separate tables and Doc didn’t have the opportunity to push his stack to Mel on a bogus all-in play. They had to fight for their chips like the rest of us.

  Back on the tables at seven forty-five, there were only one hundred fifteen players left out of the original two hundred thirty-seven entrants. They were lots of players who thought their hands were worth going all-in. This meant lots of players with huge stacks in front of them, making it difficult to tangle with them. Our man from Tunica, Mississippi, was one of them. Although our table hadn’t broken yet, I had put two players all-in and emerged victorious, but I didn’t need any special abilities to do it. I
had pocket Aces both times and they held up.

  Around eleven o’clock, after me poking the bear a couple of times, so to speak, and not getting a rise, our table broke and I was moved to another. All new players to figure out and I was getting tired. Nine hours of poker can sap your energy so I did a quick scan of all the minds. They were all good players, or they wouldn’t have lasted so long, and they were all as tired as I was. Some had been drinking, others stayed sober. Two players were smokers and were thinking about when to leave the table to have a cigarette. It didn’t take long; fifteen minutes later one said he was going to smoke on his big blind, and the other joined him.

  There was a man with a thin gold chain around his neck. He was wearing a blue running suit and a Yankees cap. It didn’t take telepathy to know he was a New Yorker. I decided to check him out and when I read his mind I learned one single true thought. His outer appearance was calm, maybe a little angry, and confident, but it was an act. He was scared.

  The tournament director announced that they were paying twenty-seven places and the top prize was one hundred seventeen thousand dollars. Second place was a little more than seventy-five thousand. He also said that we would break for the day and return tomorrow when we were down to four tables. Right now we were at seven.

  The last hand of the night occurred around three in the morning. I was heads up against the New Yorker; our stacks were about the same size. I didn’t even have to read his mind; I had pocket Jacks and all his money was going into the pot if I had anything to do about it, which I did. We got all-in and he turned over his hand, it was pocket Tens. I had him crushed. Someone at the table said, “The Twin Towers,” referring to the Tens resembling two buildings, like the World Trade Center.

  Suddenly the New Yorker’s thoughts were filled with what happened on 9/11. He was scared, he was there! He’d been in an elevator at Ground Zero as the plane hit the tower. The elevator had shaken and landed on the ground floor violently. The doors opened and he ran. Then, I was on the plane as it banked left and rammed into the building. The aluminum peeled off the body of the plane as the engines kept pushing the jet through the tower. A fireball rolled down the aisle, scorching the passengers. I could smell jet fuel and burning flesh. Then it was over.