“Why?”
“There is this beautiful young woman, wearing almost nothing, who is doing very well. Suddenly she stops and literally runs away. Her companion is an unshaved Quasimodo with glasses. And you ask why?”
“What did you do?”
“Well, I had to make a decision while still trying to keep count. I decided to keep playing for her but to play reasonably badly. I was going to lose as little as I could until she came back. My thinking was that if I played badly and lost a little, I would decrease the likelihood that anyone would pay much attention to me, that they would pay less attention to me than to the two of us wandering around with our chips, an incongruous couple waiting for the perfect table.
“ ‘Do you want me to take over?’ I hurriedly called out to her before she’d gone too far.
“ ‘Yes, take over,’ she called back, without turning around.
“We were, both of us, sweating by the time she came back and I’d lost her eight hundred dollars. It was the best I could do.
“ ‘Sorry,’ she said, for everyone to hear, as she slipped back in.
“ ‘He’s the one who ought to be sorry,’ said the young shaggy-haired fat man in the T-shirt. ‘Your boyfriend’s been losing all your money.’
“Everybody laughed, as the fat man had hoped they would. I shrugged my shoulders in mock resignation and we went back to the way it had been before nature had forced her to run away. Gently, slowly, and with just the right amount of faltering, we started winning again, and attracting onlookers. I could tell she was enjoying it, often counting the chips between hands and joining in the chatter about cards or luck with the dealer, or the young fat man in the T-shirt, or the floating players who came in and out to bask in the apparent bonhomie of the table. The crowd was growing too big for my liking, though clearly not for hers. She was enjoying their enthrallment. I had a sense that she was in part playing for them, playing to them, anyway. There was no opportunity to tell her to tone it down. Remember, we wanted to make the money as quickly and as inconspicuously as possible and then get out.
“Then, with a thousand dollars in five-hundred-dollar chips riding on the next hand, a sum it had taken time to build up to, she started to play for herself. The crowd was closing in, jostling against me. We had a pair of tens against the dealer’s ten. She decides to split. I didn’t tell her to split. You don’t split with a pair of tens facing a ten. You never split tens, never.”
“What exactly does it mean to split?”
“Splitting refers to splitting pairs. When a pair is split the player has to bet the same amount again on the split card so that now he’s playing two hands and betting on two instead of one. We had a pair of tens. Twenty is a good total to draw to. I don’t know what she was thinking. She wasn’t thinking. She wasn’t listening to my signals. She said she was, and her excuse made some sense. She said that I signaled for her to split. I suppose with the crowd pushing into us, pushing me into her, it is possible that my hand went into her back involuntarily. I don’t know. I can’t swear to it.”
“And what happened?”
“What happened shouldn’t have happened. I don’t know the odds but I could work them out. She got two more tens against the dealer’s nine.”
“So she was right to do what she did? It paid off.”
“It paid off, that’s for sure. By this stage we were about fifteen thousand ahead. But she was wrong to do what she did. It was crazy. She wasn’t listening to me.”
“But, Dennis, you said she’d just misread her signal. Didn’t the crowd push you into her and—?”
“Stop defending her, Alex. If there’s one thing I know—perhaps the only fucking thing—it’s the odds against splitting tens. But with the chips piled high in front of her, she thought she knew it all. It was after this hand, the one that had us up fifteen thousand, that the heavy-set man finally stood up and announced, ‘I’m out. Can’t compete with that kind of luck.’ This appeared to unsettle her. She had liked him, or had liked having him there with his inane remarks. I can understand this. There’s an almost irresistible tendency to think that the smallest thing is the only reason you’re winning. It was like he was absorbing everyone else’s punishment and thereby improving everyone else’s luck. Other people were losing too, but not like this guy who sat there and took it, hand after hand. As hard as it was to imagine where his money came from, it was even harder to imagine what he was getting out of it.”
“A sense of community, perhaps?”
“No. We were the only ones left from the start of the shoe. Even the gum-chewing guy had quit by then. There was no community. He was living in some kind of world I’ve never been to.”
“You’re angry with him, aren’t you, Dennis?”
“Shut up! I’m angry with the whole lot of them. This guy was asking for it, like the woman at the retreat who told everyone she’d been molested as a child. There are some things you don’t do unless you’re asking for it.”
“Like jumping backwards off a ladder?”
“For Christ’s sake, Alex, he played like someone who thinks you win if you play defensively. All he wanted to do was to never go bust, to just survive.”
“You hate him for that, don’t you?”
“He didn’t ever draw a card when he had a total of twelve or more for fear of going bust.”
“Dennis . . . Why does this make you so angry? Why does it make you cry?”
“Because this man is ignorant. His strategy is the fastest way known to lose money at blackjack.”
“You see yourself in him.”
“He lost every damn thing. You always draw to a hand under seventeen when a dealer shows a card from the seven to the ace.”
“You’re not talking about blackjack, are you?”
“I am talking about blackjack. I’m talking about her, and why I’m here now. The heavy-set guy got up to leave, and she got worried. Then the dealer changed, just because they change periodically, and she stood up. I thought she might want to stretch so I didn’t say anything. Then she grabs the chips and starts walking away from the table. I thought maybe she had to pee again, so I followed her to ask her. It felt as though everyone was looking at us as I dragged my leg along the carpet trying to brush my way through the crowd to get to her. I thought she’d gone mad.
“ ‘What are you doing?’ I asked her when I’d finally caught up.
“ ‘That table wasn’t going to be good for us anymore.’ “ ‘What are you talking about?’
“ ‘I didn’t feel good there anymore with that new dealer. I didn’t like the look of him. And that other guy, the big one. I liked him, and he was going. Maybe our luck would go with him.’
“ ‘Angelique, how many times have I told you: This has nothing to do with luck. Have you forgotten? I’ve been counting the cards and telling you what to do. It’s a system. As soon as you move away from the system, as soon as you move away from strict rationality, you’re gone for all money. These people are fools. They’re blind. They’re throwing good money after bad. Some of them know the odds, and they’re doing it anyway. There’s no luck. There’s nothing to ride. It’s science or it’s nothing. You’ve got to calm down. You’ve got to listen to me. Where are you going now?’
“She stormed away from me in the direction of the ladies’ room and, seeing her head in that direction, I didn’t pursue her, didn’t even try to keep up. That’s how she was able to get away from me.”
“Did you lose her?”
“Just long enough for her to veer away from the ladies’ room toward a roulette wheel. I saw this and in horror I went after her. I got there in time to see her place fifteen thousand dollars on the red. She said she felt lucky. I heard her say it just as I got my fingers to the back of her neck.
“ ‘I’ll stop here if I win. I promise,’ she whispered.
“The croupier called, ‘No more bets.’ In the time it took for the wheel to spin and for the ball bearing to revolve within it, I wished I’d ne
ver agreed to play for her. I wished that I had used her like all the others had. I should have been just another booking and made her do what she did with everyone else. Pay your money and get the service. No risk. Any other man, any that my wife would call a ‘real man,’ would have grabbed her, even hit her a little right then and there. It was Cup night. There were fifteen thousand dollars spinning around on a game with fixed odds, a suckers’ game. No one would have denied I would have been justified in treating her the way anyone else would have, the way everyone treats everyone whenever they can. I should have forced myself to—”
“Dennis . . .”
19. “Well, that’s how I felt, Alex. That’s how I felt until it was me she turned around to hug. She hugged me, Alex, in front of everyone while everyone applauded. It fell on the red. She had doubled her money. We had walked in there with five thousand dollars, which I turned into fifteen thousand dollars, sweating on every dollar. In a fit of complete madness she’d risked all of it and won. She hugged me spontaneously for free in the garish light of midnight in front of anyone who cared to look, and many, many cared to look. I could feel the sweat of her as she held the thirty thousand dollars’ worth of chips.
“I’m telling you, Alex, when she held me like that, for one instant it felt as though everything had paid off. I don’t care how many times any of you bastards have ever slept with her. None of you have ever known the joy I had that moment knowing that I’d helped get her exactly what she wanted and that she would never ever forget me because of that and because I was the one, the only one, who hadn’t fucked her. I had helped her, helped her help someone she loved in a way that excluded me from being loved by her in that same way. And I’ll be damned, Alex, if I was not more alive inside her embrace in front of all those people than I had ever been before. You see, others, maybe even you, have felt her sweat against your skin but it was only ever the sweat of her exploitation, not of honest exhilaration.
“We were giddy. She kept her word. That was it. She had her thirty thousand, and the two of us went to cash in the chips. She squealed and we punched the air. The cashier pulled out one of those bound bundles of one-hundred-dollar bills fresh from the Reserve Bank and asked her if she wanted them counted in front of her. Angelique looked at me for a moment before answering, “No, no, it’s all right. I trust you.” She had just won thirty thousand dollars and was numb to a hundred more or less. I know how that feels. It’s dangerous, Alex, it’s deliciously dangerous. It’s better than you imagine it to be and it’s why you do it.”
“Yes, I can understand that, but why don’t you do it?”
“What?”
“You said you hadn’t done it in over a year. What stops you from doing it all the time?”
“As I told you, I’ve been banned. Sooner or later they’d recognize me. And anyway, even if they don’t . . . At the bottom end, fifties, hundreds . . . you can’t feel it. The money, the amount at stake, has to be higher and higher each time for you to feel anything.”
“And what stops you from making the amount higher and higher?”
“I can’t. I can’t do it. I don’t have the nerve. You need the nerve of someone who doesn’t see what can go wrong. I’m not Joe Geraghty. When it gets as high as I need it to get . . . I lose my nerve. Mind you, I don’t know that I could do it now even if I kept my nerve. It would always remind me of a moment I can never recapture, and the struggle to rid my mind of that moment would screw my concentration. She . . .
“She had her arm around me all the way to the car. We had done it. She was still cheering as I started wondering about the future. She opened the car door for me. I got in and while she walked around to the driver’s side I wondered whether now she might visit me on some sort of regular basis . . . you know . . .”
“For nothing?”
“Yes. She could visit me. I could make dinner for her. She got in the driver’s seat still saying something about not believing her luck. I don’t know exactly what she said. I was a little lost in my own thoughts by then. She pulled into the traffic. I wasn’t really listening. She said she was hot. I started to worry about her reference to luck. What if she focused on the roulette? I mean . . . she’d have a real problem. She said something about her eyes. I didn’t want her forgetting how we’d gotten, how I’d gotten, to fifteen thousand. It had been by counting, not by luck, Alex. I began to tell her that.
“It was just then that she called out, ‘Jesus, Mitch, my eyes!’
“She’d never called me Mitch before. I don’t know where that came from.
“ ‘They’re blurry!’
“We veered slightly to the other side of the road and hit an oncoming car. Time stopped with a thud and the tinkle of glass and the hiss of steam. Then silence. She was hurt, Alex. Did you know that?”
“No.”
“Why do you think she hasn’t been keeping appointments? Doesn’t anyone follow these things up? Yours is meant to be a caring profession, isn’t it?”
“Dennis—”
“I was just in shock, but she was out cold. An ambulance came and took her somewhere. I didn’t know where. Maybe they said it, but it didn’t register with me. A second ambulance came a little while later for me. They said I was slightly concussed. She was bleeding, Alex. I’m not crying for myself, you idiot! If it hadn’t been for me, she wouldn’t have gone there in the first place. I still don’t know where they took her. I’ve been leaving messages for her at the agency. It’s the only number I have. She hasn’t returned them. I don’t know her last name, Alex. I don’t know her real name. Tell me how I can reach her. Her family’s out of town.”
“You know I can’t give you her details—”
“But you have them to give.”
“I’m sorry, Dennis. You know I can’t answer that.”
“But it would help me to help her. I’ve got you there, haven’t I? I’ve got you there on two counts. You’re morally, and perhaps even professionally, bound to help me help her, for her sake. And you’re both morally and professionally bound to help me want to, for my sake. If higher needs are inconsistent with depression, that’s what you’ve said, then you are obliged not to subvert them.”
“I’ve also told you it’s not that simple. Remember?”
“No, but it is. It is this time.”
“Dennis, wanting to help someone doesn’t stop you from being depressed. Perhaps I should have expressed it as a matter of probability. Someone capable of feeling a higher need and, more than that, of trying to satisfy it is less likely to be depressed. It does not guarantee it. In your case your apparent need to be in contact with her stems from the blame you inappropriately pin on yourself. Something undoubtedly bad, but beyond your control, has happened to her and you blame yourself for it. You feel guilty. This is itself a classic symptom of depression.”
“You’re fucking her, aren’t you?”
“That’s both ridiculous and untrue.”
“I don’t care if you are. I only want to help her. You will admit I’m at least partly responsible for her situation. I haven’t lost the capacity to help people, you know.”
“Yes, that’s good, but I couldn’t give you her details even if I had them.”
“You want to be the only one, don’t you? You want to be the only one capable of helping anyone, the great messiah, Herr Doktor, the only one that everyone needs. Well, what about me? You’re sure as hell not helping me.”
“We have a great deal of talking to do if I’m to be of any help to you, Dennis. There’s a lot to get through here.”
“What the hell are you talking about now? Some sort of talking cure, cognitive therapy or something? You think I’ll feel better talking to you? I don’t like the odds, Doctor. I don’t like the chances of all your wisdom, your speculation, your pre-Newtonian psychology, getting me through even the week. You know what I think you should do? Take out your prescription book. Write me a prescription for Prozac or Zoloft and at the bottom just write down her phone number. Go on
, Alex, you know I’m right. Is that your prescription book there? Go on, Alex, for Christ’s sake, pick it up. Write me a prescription. Everything I touch, Alex—”
“You should have both.”
“Both what?”
“Both pharmacological and talking therapy.”
“No, I need the pills, you need the talking. But if it’s a matter of making a deal . . . okay, I’m in. Pick it up, write it out, and I’ll come back. I promise I’ll come back, and dance to the tune of your psychotherapy or philosophy or whatever.”
“Yes, yes, Dennis, I know . . . There are more things in heaven and . . . Before you get this filled, we’ll need to talk about dosage and about possible side effects.”
“What was that? What did you say about things in heaven?”
“No, don’t worry about it. It was nothing.”
“What was it?”
“I was mumbling to myself.”
“What was it? You’re not falling back on religion, are you?”
“No. It’s from Hamlet . . . something a friend of mine . . . something her boyfriend might have said.”
“Alex, I know you’ll help me.”
“I’m so glad to hear you say that.”
“I know you will. I have the money.”
“What money? Dennis, it’s not a question of—”
“You will help me, won’t you?”
“You know I’ll do everything I can.”
“Yes, I know. I have the money, her money. I have her money. She left it in the car. Everything I touch, Alex . . . everything. You can see, you have to help me.”
part
five
1. He is known as the Turk, or just Turk. Because of the tendency in this place to slavishly follow even the rules and traditions they themselves have developed, everybody here calls him that. Not only does he not hear his language, he doesn’t ever hear his name anymore, not his real name. And I, the sensitive prick who always prided himself on being so finely attuned to ethnic nerve-endings, don’t call him by his real name either. I’m not at all sure of his real name—Yakub, I think. I’m not sure. I call him Nazim, both because it is somehow comforting and because he doesn’t mind. He even answers to it, though it’s not his name, not his nickname, not something he asked to be called. I’m just doing what I can to endure confinement in a place designed, not with an indifference to your welfare but with a concern—a concern to crush the very best out of the very worst people, or perhaps just out of those who hadn’t gotten away with it, whatever the it was. People here use names and all the weaponry of language they can get their hands on to bludgeon, impress, intimidate, insult, humiliate, and control, in order to survive. And I am as guilty as they are.