Woke Up Lonely (44 page)

The books he’d read on addiction said that a need passes whether you give in to it or not. So you might as well hang tough. Because it would pass. And pass again. And again and again, and what book talked about that? He’d always want to be doing something great. Why was that an illness? The advice was retarded. In fact, trying to impose a rubric of thought on something as unwieldy as need simply made him feel all the more needy.

The gaming floor was arranged by square and corridor, so that each room bled into the next. It was huge. It was so huge, an area had been cordoned off for throwback, so that if you missed the good old days, here was a slot machine for you. The levers grimed in sweat. The jangle of coins in the hopper.

“I’ve only been here once or twice before,” Norman said, “but in case you missed it, everything I believe in just collapsed upstairs, so what the hell, right? You get your betting card at that booth across the floor.”

Bruce did not even hesitate; he flew at the booth and returned in seconds. So much was alive in this place for him. The black pile carpet snarled with orange and cyan, magenta and wheat. The colors dizzied by chandeliers and fluent across the walls, which were marble and bright. He’d put $500 on the card and took his place on a swivel stool at a bank of dollar slots. The touch-screen instructions told him what to do, not that he needed their guidance. He hit the Spin button. Lost $100, made $1.25. “Whoo!” he said. “Just getting started.” He clapped his hands and rubbed them together.

Norman looked bored. He watched the others up and down the aisle. He sighed.

“You realize you’re not helping,” Bruce said. Four hundred dollars was three hundred. Wham.

“No one even recognizes me,” Norman said. “I don’t know any of these people.”

“Casinos aren’t for friends,” Bruce said, and, by way of adduction, a man next to him caught his wrist in a tube attached to the respirator hitched to his wheelchair.

“This was a bad idea,” Norman said.

Bruce waved him off.

“You’re already out three hundred? You go down fast.”

“Hey, you can be positive or you can take that doomsday shit elsewhere.”

“Okay.”

Bruce took a long breath. Muttered, “Don’t go far,” but never turned around to see which way Norman went. Two people were waiting for his chair. He could feel their eyes on the screen, watching his credit dwindle. He was hemorrhaging by the minute, and then by the second, unable to hit the button faster than he was losing money for it. So maybe Norman was more talisman than not. He pressed the button again, lost again, and heard as though for the first time the quiet at his back. Norman? He spun around. Ah, Christ, Norman was gone.

He popped off his chair, which actually felt like a popping, a freeing, because he’d nearly lost his mind for a second. Priorities, Bruce. Jesus. He scanned the room. Cruised the aisles. What the hell? The casino was not
pied,
it was just white, so how was this roly-poly black man able to blend in? He began to run. A woman in marching-band jacket and matching skirt was stopped at the end of a row, manning a cart of drinks. He bought two cups of whatever she was serving—
Ahhhhhhhhhhhh
—smacking his lips, exactly the Scotch and soda he’d been praying for. He asked if she’d seen a black man. She said, “Once or twice.”

He made for the bathroom. There were no pay phones anywhere, nor the usual spotting of people on their cell phones, either. He was not ready to call his wife, but it would have been nice to know he
could
when the time was right. Because the longer he waited, the harder it would be to pretend the delay was anything but vindictive. Rita wanted to name their kid after Thurlow Dan? Yeah? Maybe while she was waiting by the phone for Bruce to call, she could explain his absence to her swollen belly thus: Your namesake stole your dad. He’d call her the second he locked down Norman and secured enough money to back the film.

In the bathroom, the toilet seat was veiled in a cellophane doily that moved on its own. At the sink, the faucets were automated. The paper towel dispenser reacted to the motion of his hands. This was no place to be when probably the one thing that could stop your headlong plunge into financial destitution was the voice, the reason, the care of another human being, or even just a reminder that such humans existed and were worth being good for, which was precisely the kind of reminder dispatched by the robotic amenities on duty in the Resistance bathroom.

How could he have let Norman go? No, no, how could he have sent him away? Was nothing sacred next to gambling? Next to his work? Would he sell his wife for a buck, especially if the buyers trafficked in slave labor and prostitutes and had never told their story on camera before? The vampirism of art was pathetic—he knew it was pathetic—and yet there he was, teeth bared.

He was being methodical now, touring the rows of slot machines from left to right and stopping at ATMs as he went. Stopping and taking out the max from each. Shredding the receipts and leaving a paper trail. Pausing at a slot—just one—lose $100, make $1.25. Norman? He thought he saw the black hand of fate larking about the poker tables, and he headed that way.

An irony that frequents gamblers who are and are not addicted to gambling? They are and are not very good. Bruce took a seat at a table. High stakes, no dealer, just a friendly game among five. Four guys and, who knew, the queen of England; she was at least eighty and wore a Day-Glo pink suit and, pinned to her lapel, a diamond brooch shaped like the Commonwealth. She, more than the others, looked on him like fish food. The others were sizing up his affect for clues to his talent, while she plumbed his heart and knew he was doomed. Everybody in? Yes.

He hardly paid attention. He was in free fall, which was the madness he liked best. It was like adulterous sex when you knew your wife was due back any second; like sharing needles with someone you knew had AIDS; like driving through the desert with a tank on empty. It was not about risk but ruin, not about chance but certainty, and though you didn’t want your wife to find out, or yourself to end up with AIDS (there were easier ways to devastate or die), you’d still suffer this fate just for the thrill of its prelude.

Bruce tossed his chips as if feeding the birds and finally offered up his tower and watched as this tower was assimilated into a cityscape across the table.

He maxed out his credit card and bet his wedding ring. The queen of England said there was a special phone for guys like him and gestured at a console Bruce had not seen before. It looked like one of those car-rental kiosks in the airport. Call 123 for Visa, 456 for AmEx.

“Representative,” he said. He pressed one, then two. Three for stolen cards. “Representative.” Because if he got one on the phone, he’d say: My card was stolen, and I need a new one right now.

He watched the game wind down and started to press all the buttons at once. Goddamn it. “REPRESENTATIVE.”

He returned to the table. Everyone in play seemed to have at his disposal many chips, silos of chips, so that it was just insulting to see his wedding ring back up for grabs. The man who’d won it had a braided ponytail, which he stroked lewdly every time he anted up, and more so when saying, “It didn’t fit, not even my pinky.”

My God. His wedding ring was going to pass from one asshole to the next. It wasn’t even real gold. The man with the ponytail clamped Bruce’s wrist midair. “The ring’s in play. Leave it alone.”

“I’ll buy it off you.”

Laughter.

Bruce reached for it again. This time, a hand clamped his neck from behind. Security. He tried to wriggle free, but the clamp was tight and siphoning off air he probably needed to live if this kept up. It didn’t. The hand shrank from him like a bat from light, and when he spun around, the guard was gone; here was Norman.

“What the hell?” Bruce said.

“How about
thanks?
”

“Thanks. But what the hell?”

“The Helix has friends.”

“The Helix is over.”

“Correct. But news travels slower down here than you’d think.”

“I’m sorry about before. This is not a good place for me. I have a—a
history.
Can we go somewhere and talk for a second? I want to talk to you.”

“I don’t feel like it,” Norman said, and he sank his hands into his pockets.

“I don’t think you understand. You have to talk to me. You’re my only way out at this point. Don’t you see the wreckage of my life piling up all over this casino?”

Norman shrugged. “When Thurlow and I were kids, one Halloween we were the Hamburger Helper hand. We spent months sewing pillow cases and making the hand big enough for two, but then when it was time to trick-or-treat, we realized we forgot to make eyeholes for us both. Only he could see. Even then I thought it was a metaphor.”

Bruce heard a siren go off two banks down—someone had won a jackpot. He tried to focus. He said, “I just don’t get it, really. My wife got all excited about the Helix, but I couldn’t understand what she was excited about. When I pressed, she’d just get angry and say I was badgering her, and God forbid I said maybe it was the hormones—she’s pregnant—well, that made it even worse.”

“You told your pregnant wife she’s hormonal?”

Bruce laughed. “I know, I know.” And something in him dislodged, because when was the last time he was met with compassion on any topic, especially the thousand missteps he’d made with his wife? When was the last he indulged the camaraderie of a guy who, just for being a guy, a straight guy anyway, understood what traumas inhered in the pleasing of your wife? He said, “It’s rough out there, lemme tell you. My son’s due in a little less than four months.”

“You got a name for him?” Norman said.

“No”—and he shrank into himself and vowed not to say another word.

“The thing about the Helix,” Norman said, “people used to say Christianity was a cult, too. Anything that’s a threat to convention is a cult, which is the saddest part of all, because when did this horrible loneliness get to be the norm, so that whatever tries to break it down is threatening? None of us expected Thurlow was going to kidnap anyone.”

“Fair enough,” Bruce said, swearing not to talk, not another word, “except for the part where you’re urging people to civil war or whatever and still thinking the man is Mother Teresa? Isn’t half your manifesto about leaving the Union and governing yourselves? What’s that got to do with bringing people together? In fact, now that we’re talking about it, the stupid fucking Helix is ruining my marriage. It’s not the money or even that I’m irresponsible or that my priorities are screwed; it’s the fucking Helix. Tearing my union apart. So, yeah, big success over there. Huge. Congrats.”

Norman’s face went dead, and what light had crawled into his eyes went dead, too. He said, “There’s someplace I have to go. You are on your own.”

Was Bruce the worst documentarian ever? He was. “No, please, wait. I’m sorry. It’s been a long day. I was kidnapped? Look, I’m sorry. Let me go with you. We can talk some more.”

“Thanks, but no. I paid my dues cocounseling. I was thirteen and doing RC in New York. Thirteen! I
discharged.
I’ve cried and yawned and laughed my guts out. I’ve been looking for a place to fit in all my life, and all my life has brought me to is this. Can’t you just leave me alone?”

“How about I come with you without talking?”

“It’s a free country,” Norman said, and he walked away.

They left the casino. By now Bruce had gotten the idea there was a second life here below Cincinnati. Clubs and bars. Spas and brothels. Whatever could not be conducted aboveground was encouraged below. They walked the tunnels as before, and this time when they passed three guys toting gunnysacks, and one stumbled, so that a hundred official Major League baseballs rolled out and crowded their feet, Bruce said nothing, just bent down to help. It did occur to him to filch a ball and whistleblow—See? They’re juiced! Right here in Ohio!—but only for the second it took the bearers to read his mind and threaten his life. At least, such was conveyed in the hairy eyeball coming off each one.

Finally, they came to another door. Bruce looked for the card scanner—he was going to be helpful from now on—but there was none. They broached the front desk, where a woman flipped through a binder of names, looking for Norman’s. She wore a headset, which freed her hands to fly about her face as she yelled into the mouthpiece because the system had been down for
hours,
and it was Neanderthal having to thumb through a binder looking for guest names and IDs. “Think it’s good business when one of the Supreme Court justices stands here while I’m trying to figure out which one he is, and he’s like, Name rhymes with urea—which isn’t helping me any—but what am I supposed to do, let him in? He could be, what’s those two, Woodward and Bernstein, so look, my point is, when’s the system going to be fixed? Ugh, hold on”—and she found Norman on the list and asked for his ID, and when that cleared she let in Bruce, too, because Norman was high Helix, enough said.

She buzzed them through frosted glass doors.

Bruce did not ask where they were headed—
No talking
—and then they were there, in a theater that sat three hundred inside soundproofed, padded walls. The energy of the room was condensed in two guys who were beating the crap out of each other in a wire-framed cage. The fighters looked like soccer dads nabbed from home in the middle of Sunday sports. Like Fight Club for fatsos. One wore a football jersey and cargo shorts. The other was in a green henley and chinos. The audience was three-sixtied around the action; the bleachers were wood, the ceiling a rig of spotlights and flood; and because the space was not much bigger than the concentric arrangement of show and crowd, steam appeared to rise off everyone without prejudice.

Bruce said, “What the—”

Norman skirted the ring and had words with a referee, who wrote something down on a clipboard. The ref made room for them in the front row. Their neighbors were cased in garbage bags, which made sense to Bruce only when the sweat rained down on him two seconds later.