Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [81]
She went to sleep finally on her husband’s side of the bed.
14
There were rare moments between hands when he sat and listened to the sounds around him. It surprised him every time to find what an effort it takes to hear what is always there. The chips were there. Behind the ambient noise and stray voices, there was the sound of tossed chips, raked chips, forty or fifty tables of people stacking chips, fingers reading and counting, balancing the stacks, clay chips with smooth edges, rubbing, sliding, clicking, days and nights of distant hiss, like insect friction.
He was fitting into something that was made to his shape. He was never more himself than in these rooms, with a dealer crying out a vacancy at table seventeen. He was looking at pocket tens, waiting for the turn. These were the times when there was nothing outside, no flash of history or memory that he might unknowingly summon in the routine run of cards.
He walked down the wide aisle hearing the mutter of stickmen at the dice tables, a shout now and then from the sports book. Sometimes a hotel guest wheeling a suitcase wandered through, looking lost in Swaziland. In the off-hours he talked to dealers at empty blackjack tables, always the women, waiting in some zone of purged sensation. He might play a while, sitting and talking, making a point of not getting interested in the woman herself, just her conversation, fragments of life outside, her car trouble, her daughter Nadia’s riding lessons. He was one of them in a way, casino staff, passing some forgettable social moments before the action starts again.
It would all go flat at the end of the night, win or lose, but that was part of the process, the turn card, the river card, the blinking woman. Days fade, nights drag on, check-and-raise, wake-and-sleep. The blinking woman was gone one day and that was the end of her. She was stale air. He could not place her elsewhere, at a bus stop, in a mall, and saw no point in trying.
He wondered if he was becoming a self-operating mechanism, like a humanoid robot that understands two hundred voice commands, far-seeing, touch-sensitive but totally, rigidly controllable.
He’s estimating medium-ace across the table, the man in mirrored sunglasses.
Or a robot dog with infrared sensors and a pause button, subject to seventy-five voice commands.
Raise before the flop. Hit early and hard.
There was no fitness center in his hotel. He found a gym not far away and worked out when there was time. No one used the rowing machine. He half hated the thing, it made him angry, but he felt the intensity of the workout, the need to pull and strain, set his body against a sleek dumb punishing piece of steel and cable.
He rented a car and took a drive in the desert, starting back after dark and then climbing a rise and leveling out. It took him a moment to understand what he was looking at, many miles ahead, the city floating on the night, a feverish sprawl of light so quick and inexplicable it seemed a kind of delirium. He wondered why he’d never thought of himself in the middle of such a thing, living there more or less. He lived in rooms, that’s why. He lived and worked in this room and that. He moved only marginally, room to room. He took a taxi to and from the downtown street where his hotel was located, a place without floor mosaics and heated towel racks, and he hadn’t known until now, looking at that vast band of trembling desert neon, how strange a life he was living. But only from here, out away from it. In the thing itself, down close, in the tight eyes around the table, there was nothing that was not normal.
He was avoiding Terry Cheng. He didn’t want to talk to him, or listen, or watch his cigarette burn down.
The lucky jack did not fall.
He didn’t listen to what was said