Square Wave (43 page)

The smirk made the briefest of appearances. Then a hot stare shot down somewhere near his feet. Finally there was a firm smile back at his brother.

“Got it,” Ravan said.

“You really must come and see this boy,” Menar said, looking off-camera with a softer smile toward his wife and child. “Before he gets any bigger. You’d be a fool not to.”

31

The nap of the cloth was as dense as jenko’s pool tables, but the green was deeper, carrying thick casino light that broke up the dark between games of cards. Lewis thumbed it in a slow spiral, felt the trapped warmth. He ran his finger over the cold white paint of the stenciled box, and then the card sitting face-up within it, a ten of diamonds. The second card came. He was looking for an ace, a blackjack. A king arrived instead.

Lewis’s hand froze beside the pair. There was no hitting a hard twenty, so he waited for her, this young Vegas dealer with a face like an arrow and a platinum blond ponytail bobbing behind her head. She had a six showing. He nodded to show he would stand. She flipped her hole card. Another ace, giving her a soft seventeen. She pulled another card from the dealing shoe, still four decks thick and resistant to counting, though he wouldn’t have known how to anyway. He wasn’t a real gambler, just passing time till the show. Now a second face appeared, not a king’s but a queen’s. Twenty-seven. Dealer bust. She pushed a small stack of chips toward him.

He and the blonde had been going heads up for an hour now since the others had dropped off, first the old woman with the bottomless cosmopolitan, then the young man whose unfussed boredom suggested he was a local. Lewis was left alone with the dealer, who played, as she had to, like a machine, standing and hitting by rule alone. He was ahead, on intuition.

Janice was gone. She wouldn’t answer his texts even. There was no fight, he’d been too stunned. She’d called her sister and quietly moved out of their apartment.
His
apartment, he had to get used to that now. The two sisters packed Janice’s things up while he lay hungover in bed, pretending he was asleep while everything was taken away. She said he’d already left her in every way that mattered. Whatever its truth, he resented her resort to a breakup cliché. They didn’t fuck. They didn’t talk, for a while now really. He’d stopped asking about her life, the kind of restaurant she dreamed of opening someday, and he didn’t answer her about his.

He’d left himself behind too, she said. That was less of a cliché, but it was also less true, he thought. Yes, he didn’t paint, didn’t work, didn’t do much but go out at night, without her. And whom was he meeting, she wanted to know. No, she didn’t really want to know. But there was no one else, if that’s what she meant.

He hadn’t left himself behind, he felt, only a promise of what he might have been that turned out wrenchingly false: that he might be one to transmute life into paint and back into life, reformed. Should he apologize for the gift he didn’t have? Maybe she would rather see him die trying, vainly trying, for what was beyond him.

Really, he’d only resuscitated an earlier version of himself, the one he’d left behind for art, after college and those Wintry seminars. He was back to politics again, and in the most straightforward way. He’d never been so practical. He was going to transmute life only into life, without the indirection of either art or theory, the Wintry and its talks, this time.

Even just before the end, though Lewis and Janice would go to bed on separate sides of the mattress, they’d wake in the morning tangled together. She would separate herself from him then, resent the false intimacy. There was nothing less false for him. It was what was left of them: the quietest, most sustaining part.

There were no more of those tangles now. She was gone. And he was gone in one way at least, the flesh and blood of him. Without her he was an abstraction, a thought-in-the-world, not a being.

It diminished him in every way but one. When the world fell away, its costs and risks did too. Bringing to life the idea he was now—even on the largest scale—suddenly seemed possible. He owed it to Janice. He’d put all but fifty grand he had into this scheme, including the money he’d earmarked for her restaurant.

He was here in Vegas alone to see his handiwork tonight. He thought he was alone, anyway. Past the humming slots discharging coins, in a cave of a bar shielded from the light, he saw the creamy shoulder blades and the dark hair nipping at them, and then just the edge of her jaw. She was facing away, toward the bar and an assemblage of bottles backlit in the color of bourbon. But her profile, the unusually sharp angles, was enough to kindle something in him, a vague displeasure, a mild sense of shame or fear, twinned to a gauzy curiosity.

She was sitting in a raised, short-backed chair, talking to a very old man in a very good suit who stood rather than sat. Going by the man’s posture and expression, the two didn’t know each other intimately but would shortly. She put her hand over his and with the other she lifted a broad martini glass to her lips. An olive looking twice its size through the vodka or gin rolled around the base of the cup.

The blonde waited for Lewis to ante up. Instead he gripped the two stacks of chips he’d won and poured them into his pockets. He left nothing for her, not even a smile. A few seconds later, though, he found himself walking back to the table, reflexively pulling chips from his pockets. He placed a few of them on the lip of the green without checking their value. Tens. She didn’t notice the chips, or perhaps pretended not to, offended by their meanness at a table with fifty for an ante. But that was luck.

The falling coins kept chiming in the slot machines as he sought a better view of that woman at the bar. But her face stayed angled away from him, so the improving image only clarified what remained beyond it.

The last row of slots receded and the noise of the casino turned mute and distant as he crossed into the cavernous bar. He moved to one side as he approached, carving around her, but just as more of her face came into view, and his memories began to stir again, she twisted away from him. He waited for her face to return, but the man was whispering in her ear now, and she was listening, and it seemed they would stay posed that way forever.

He reached the bar and ordered a drink by touching one of the beer taps. A few customers separated him from her. The old man looked at Lewis as he talked into the woman’s ear.

“Do you really?” she said, finally, just as the bartender served Lewis’s pint.

Familiarity came all at once. The last of them—she’d called herself Lisa, in the street by his open car door, and under the overpass just before he’d done what he’d had to do. Three words and that was enough for him to know. Somehow she’d made it here. A shadow. Was she on the flight over? Three rows up, in a seat on the other side of the aisle, there was the dark hair, the pale skin of the legs. But again, the face out of view.

The bartender had just said something, clearly and loudly and definitely to Lewis. Except for the soft scratching whispers of the old man in Lisa’s ear, no sound competed. But still Lewis didn’t understand the words.

Before he could form a thought, Lewis searched his pockets to pay for the drink and rid himself of the bartender. His wallet was wedged beneath the chips. He scooped out as many as he could and set them on the bar, returning to his pocket to fish out the wallet.

The intervening customers, silent men he hadn’t realized were a group, paid for their drinks and left together. Now only empty space separated him from Lisa, the one girl he couldn’t read. He’d failed with her, it looked like. She was unchanged, still hooking, thousands of miles away. How many others had he failed with?

The bartender gestured and said something more, and Lewis, in fear or confusion or frustration, pushed the beer and the scattered chips toward Lisa and walked out of the bar into an indistinct chaos of noise, which was matched only by the confusion of light streaming down into the atrium at all angles, in several colors and as many intensities, freighting the air.

■   ■   ■

His father had told Lewis once about the time he saw Mike Tyson fight in this arena, with business colleagues, just a year before the boxer fell from greatness. It was not much of a fight. His British opponent’s reflexes were betraying him with age. But then, every boxer’s reflexes seemed to fail him against Tyson. The fight was over in five rounds, on a TKO. It would have been shorter still, Leo told him, had the Brit not taken to clinching from the opening bell.

But he had no thought of winning. It was a foregone conclusion that Tyson would triumph. Somehow this didn’t manage to dim the moment. The trick can’t be repeated too many times, but Tyson had only recently come to seem indomitable. For a while it was a thrill simply to see that status confirmed.

The bout turned from sport to theater, classic repertory work. There was almost sympathy for the Brit, as the only question was how, not whether, he would succumb.

Tyson seemed playful during the match, Leo said, shooting around the ring in little leaps, smiling through his mouthpiece, tossing the other man around with his forearms. All the while he was finding his timing. The opening came on a separation, the conclusion written in five punches: a double jab, a right cross, a tight left hook that sent the Brit’s mouthpiece into the front row, and an overhand right on the way down that sent his chin into his chest, making a mess of his tongue as he sprawled onto the canvas. He spat mouthfuls of blood as the victor, preordained, stood on the ropes over a turnbuckle, hopping down seconds later to congratulate the Brit on the part he’d played.

That day, decades ago now, Leo Eldern had been ringside. Today his son was in the closed circuit theater next to the arena, watching in, as if through the one-way window of an interrogation room.

Pornography awards not being prizefights, the theater was only half full, though the industry’s sex workers, hundreds of them, completely filled the auditorium itself. Lewis, who had calmed himself some since stumbling upon Lisa earlier in the day, scanned the seats right around him, but there wasn’t enough light to make anyone out. He wondered what sort of person would pay for a screening like this, assuming the ceremony was to unfold roughly as planned, that the vents in the auditorium gave nothing but chilled air. Some must be raincoaters on other nights, he thought, in other theaters, and they’d leave only after they’d made the floors sticky.

For the next three hours, he studied the screen, its glossed women and the ponytailed men, no less glossed and steroidal in appearance than the women, yet not merely of secondary interest but of hardly any at all. Their words, few though they were, and even less significant than they were few, barely caught his ears.

Most of all he monitored the master of ceremonies: a former queen of porn, now a producer and figurehead for her own adult studio. She was the ideal barometer, as she was onscreen most, and through the whole length of the ceremony. If the atmosphere was changing, it should show in her first.

But between the three-way and costume design awards, and between those and the girl-girl prize, had her skin flushed any? She’d been red to begin with, presumably from the Vegas sun outside, so it was hard to tell.

He listened carefully to her too, for botched words, names, stutters or any other struggles of the tongue. There were some, but then there were always some, even in the speech of the best. A decline is what he needed, and he couldn’t find one.

There was eye contact to assess. The auditorium was filled with the distractible. You wouldn’t arrive, and certainly not survive, in the industry if you weren’t. But was the hostess any more distractible toward the end, as the best-new-starlet award approached, than she was at the start? Did her eyes flit faster now? Did she forget the films, nominees, punch lines, and stories of the year that was in Porn Valley, only hours away in California? When she looked into the camera, did her gaze miss the lens, or the point beyond it, where the consciousness of the viewer lay?

There was her stride to attend to. She started the night with a textbook whore-strut, lightly pasteurized by the ease of Valley life. It was a carefully coordinated gait, its moving parts were many, and it could break down in any number of ways. But it didn’t seem to alter. No collapse into a lopsided swagger or a beach stroll, no retreat into a common strip-mall hustle. If there was any change at all, it was only in the direction of greater command. Whatever contempt there was in it at the beginning remained to the end, when she called up the best new starlet, Violet Skye, who trotted onto the stage with the sexualized power that five-inch heels a waxy red guaranteed.

All the while, Lewis was listening to the room itself, to the gaps between speeches and the hostess’s drivel. A presumed silence. There was always a hum, though. Was there any change in that? Was a hiss growing, and could this be picked up through the theater screen? Or did one need to be in the auditorium itself for that?

Could the hiss correspond to a draft from the vents? Could you see collars rustling, single strands, or tufts even, of bleached hair twirling, the lightest earrings swaying in it? Or was it too delicate a change for that? Could you only feel it, this cooling vapor on your neck, from inside the room, through a sense the screen couldn’t provide for?

Lewis heard nothing and saw nothing. Not even Lisa.

The curtain was falling as the hostess, still unfazed, invited everyone back for next year’s ceremony. As the cameras whirled about, the guests rose. The audience of which Lewis was a part, in the theater, mostly stayed put. They would wait to watch the sex workers file out before they did the same.

Lewis’s mind whirled like the cameras, and there were only more questions everywhere he turned. Could they be immune to the gas? Could their plastic poise not be taken from them? Were their senses beyond further derangement? Was their compass so true that nothing could disorient them? Could they not be made to sleep either? Was it unnecessary, for the deathless?