“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.
“I don’t believe this,” he said. “What is this?”