The place-name was spelled out in vanity bulbs underscored with red tube lights. The Resistance Casino and Sports Lounge. By the entrance was a cherub statuette that doubled as a scanner, or so it appeared as Norman swiped a card across the cherub’s face, once for himself and once for Bruce. They stepped inside and immediately Bruce teetered on the edge of hope. Really? Hope? Yes. On his left: the world’s greatest subject for a documentary; on his right: the money to finance it just in case no one else agreed. He was excited but also relieved. As though he’d just loosened his belt after a large dinner. It had been six months since he’d dropped money in this way. And his paychecks from Interior went straight to the bank, though no amount of savings would get him and Rita out of the hole. Between them, they had eight thousand dollars and the house. And the car. Though the car was leased and the house was double-mortgaged. So they had eight thousand dollars. His credit card spending limit was a quarter of that. He couldn’t even get an advance. He felt in his pocket for his Visa.
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.