The Cardturner (13 page)

Cliff and I make a good team that way. He breaks the ice; then I'm able to keep things flowing.

"You're a natural card player," Toni told Leslie as we all headed to the door.

Leslie beamed.

"What about me?" asked Cliff.

"You're
un
natural," Toni said.

"You want to do this again sometime?" I asked.

"That'd be good," said Toni.

"Or something else," I said.

She smiled at me and said, "That'd be good too."

I glanced at Leslie, who gave me a little nod of approval.

"Gilliam's having a party tomorrow night," said Cliff. "You guys want to come?"

Toni and I looked at each other.

"Okay by me," she said.

It was then that I remembered Trapp's bridge tournament. "I can't," I said. "The sectional."

In fact, now that I thought of it, Cliff had mentioned Gilliam's party to me earlier in the week, and I had told him I couldn't go.

"Oh, I forgot," said Toni. She placed her hand on my arm and said, "That's more important."

"Absolutely," Cliff agreed. "Trapp's tournament means a lot more than some stupid party."

That wasn't what Cliff had said to me when I first told him I couldn't go to Gilliam's party. Then it was "a stupid tournament."

"You know about Trapp?" asked Toni.

"He's an amazing bridge player," Cliff said sincerely. "I just hope he wins."

Toni nodded.

"He will!" said Leslie.

"You can still come to the party if you want," Cliff offered. "If you got nothing better to do."

Toni looked at me to see if I had any objection, but what right did I have to say she couldn't go to Gilliam's party?

"You'll have fun," I said. "Gilliam's a riot. Gilliam's his last name, but that's what everybody calls him, probably even his mother."

Toni laughed. She turned back to Cliff and said, "Okay."

"Cool," said Cliff.

Leslie's eyes filled with anger. She wasn't looking at Cliff or Toni. Her anger was aimed at me.

31
Smoking Ears

I left for Trapp's house at ten the next morning. The tournament wasn't until one-thirty, but I'd have to pick up Gloria, too, and then it would take an hour after that.

I saw no reason to be mad at Cliff. I never told him I liked Toni, just the opposite. Besides, it wasn't like he was making a move on her. Cliff was just being Cliff. And anyway, he already had a girlfriend, and I had no doubt that Katie would be going to Gilliam's party.

Who would have thought I'd ever take comfort in the fact that Cliff was with Katie?

I must not have taken a whole lot of comfort in it, however, because everything I just told you, I told myself over and over again all night long. It played like an endless loop inside my head.

As I drove to my uncle's, I thought back to earlier in the week when Cliff first told me about Gilliam's party. At the time I was glad to have Trapp's bridge tournament as my excuse, since I wasn't exactly thrilled at the prospect of being there with Cliff and Katie.

That was before Toni. Strange, I thought, how everything can change in just two days.

Thinking about Gilliam's party got me started again on my endless loop about Cliff and Toni, Cliff and Katie, me and Toni. I was able to plug my iPod into my new car's sound system. I turned it up loud so I wouldn't have to listen to my own stupid thoughts!

I parked in the driveway, then rapped on the door using the heavy iron goat-head knocker. Mrs. Mahoney answered with a finger at her lips.

A hush seemed to have settled over the place. Even Captain didn't bark. I smelled cinnamon and cloves.

Trapp lay on the floor. Teodora knelt beside him, holding some kind of burning cylinder. Black smoke poured out the top. The bottom of the cylinder was sticking into my uncle's ear. It was as if the cylinder were a giant fuse and my uncle's head were the bomb.

I watched the small ring of flame move closer and closer to his head. Next to Teodora was a ceramic bowl of water, with images of the moon and stars. When the ear candle (as I later learned it was called) burned down to about three inches from his head, she lifted it away and doused it in the water.

"Is that any better?" she asked my uncle.

"Maybe," he said. "Alton, is that you?"

"Yes."

"Say something," he said. "Say a card."

"Um, six of diamonds."

"Clear as a bell," said my uncle.

"If diabetes and blindness aren't bad enough," Trapp said as we drove to pick up Gloria, "now I have too much earwax. Not too much wax, really—too many little hairs growing inside my ear canal. You need earwax. For most people, it just oozes out, imperceptibly. My ear hairs hold on to it like Velcro, which causes it to build up."

"Thanks for sharing," I said.

"Hah!" he laughed.

He asked me if I'd ever done the experiment in school with an egg and a milk bottle.

I didn't know what he was talking about.

"The idea is to somehow get the egg into the milk bottle. The opening in the bottle is too small for the egg to fit through. You sure you never did that?" He seemed surprised.

"Pretty sure," I said.

"I guess it's all about computers now," he said.

"I guess."

"What you do is, you place a burning piece of paper in the empty bottle. Then you put the egg, hard-boiled, without the shell, on top of the bottle, plugging up the opening. The flame will use up all the oxygen inside the bottle, and this creates a vacuum so strong it sucks the egg right through the hole."

I nodded. You would think I would have learned to stop making useless gestures around my uncle.

"Teodora's ear candles work on the same principle," he said. "The flame creates a vacuum that sucks the wax out of my ear."

"Cool," I said.

I never thought I'd use that word in connection with earwax.

"Do you want some advice?" he asked me. "Don't get old."

"Too late," I said. "I already am."

"Hah!"

A thought struck me. "Did you ever work as a milkman?"

"What?" he asked, following it with an emphatic "No!"

Of course, just because he denied it didn't mean he hadn't. Would you admit to having been a milkman if you'd sold your uniform for a thousand dollars to a senator's wife?

Based on all the jewelry Gloria always wore, you might have thought she was really rich, but she lived in a fairly ordinary condominium complex. "Did you ever do that egg and milk bottle experiment when you went to school?" Trapp asked her when she got into the car.

She hadn't heard of it either. He seemed disappointed, almost sad.

We'd been driving awhile when he suddenly said, "Alton, you have a philosophical bent. I have a question for you."

I didn't know if I was bent that way or not, but I suppose I was glad he thought I was.

"Are your fingers alive?"

I wiggled my fingers on the steering wheel. I considered making a joke about them coming alive and attacking me, but that joke would be mostly visual, and not that funny anyway.

I decided to take his question seriously. "I'm alive," I said, "and my fingers are a part of me."

"But what's the part of you that is actually living?" he asked. "Your heart? Is your heart alive?"

"I wouldn't say it's alive," I said. "But I can't live without it."

"Not the same thing, is it?"

"How about the brain?" Gloria asked from the backseat.

"That mass of gray matter," said Trapp. "The brain's just another organ. Like Alton said, you can't live without it, but that doesn't make it a living entity."

"Then what are you suggesting?" asked Gloria.

"Our bodies are not alive," said Trapp. "The only living entities are
ideas
."

"That's the brain," said Gloria.

"No. What if ideas exist outside the brain? Our brains simply perceive them."

There was that word again,
perceive
.

"You smell a flower, or hear a violin, but the flower and the violin aren't inside your brain. Your brain simply registers the smell or the sound. The same can be said about ideas. They are alive, living outside our brains. Our brain simply perceives and registers them. After all, a brain surgeon can't tell you where a certain idea exists inside your brain. She can't tell you what cells make up that particular idea. She might look at an electronic image of your brain, and she can tell you what part of the brain is active when you listen to music, or eat, or play bridge, but that's the perception of the idea, not the idea itself."

"So how does that make them
alive
?" I asked.

"Think about it," he said. "Ideas evolve. They reproduce. That's the very definition of life."

"They
reproduce
?" asked Gloria.

"Through communication," said Trapp. "Are you aware, Alton, that another word for
communication
is
intercourse
?"

Gloria laughed. I think I might have blushed, but fortunately Trapp couldn't see me.

"The urge to communicate is even stronger than the sex drive," Trapp said. "Why do you think people gossip so much? Why can't we keep secrets? Why have we invented the printing press, the telephone, the Internet? It's so ideas can grow and reproduce. Our bodies, our brains, are just machines that ideas use for a while, then toss aside when they wear out."

"Okay," I said, "but here we are, talking about the idea that ideas are alive, right? So who are
we
talking about that idea?"

(Don't worry if my question doesn't make sense to you. It doesn't make sense to me now either, as I write this, although I think I understood it when I asked it.)

"When you think of yourself, Alton, when you think,
Me,
what comes to mind? Do you think about what you look like? Your arms, your legs, your face? Or is the
Me
that's inside you something else?"

I didn't answer. I have a definite sense of who I am, and it has nothing to do with what I look like, but I couldn't put it into words.

"Your body will wear out someday," he said. "It may deteriorate slowly, like mine, or perhaps one day a piano will fall on top of you."

"Hah!" I laughed, sounding surprisingly like him.

"One way or another, the body of Alton Richards will cease to exist," he said. "But the
idea
of Alton Richards will live forever."

I suppose that was somewhat comforting.

"So what happens to ideas that are not communicated?" asked Gloria. "Do they die?"

"What do you mean?" asked Trapp.

"What if Alton thinks of a brand-new idea, but before he can tell anyone, a piano falls on top of him?"

I was beginning to get concerned about falling pianos.

"Or say a songwriter creates a beautiful melody," continued Gloria, "and then dies before he can play it for anyone. Does the melody exist?"

"An idea doesn't die," said Trapp. "It exists somewhere, in its own dimension, waiting to be perceived."

"How? Where?"

"Who knows? Maybe those are the voices that Toni hears."

"Toni?" I asked. The mention of her name instantly triggered all my worries about Cliff and Toni, Cliff and Katie, me and Toni.

"Toni has a psychological abnormality," said Trapp.

"I don't think you should discuss this," said Gloria.

"I know she sees a psychiatrist," I said. "For schizophrenia."

"Just because someone has a diploma hanging on his wall doesn't mean he's qualified to declare her a schizophrenic," said Trapp. "But then, Gloria knows my opinion of the psychiatric profession."

"That was over forty years ago," said Gloria. "And just because one doctor may have been corrupt, it doesn't mean—"

"It was more than just one doctor," said Trapp.

I was confused. Were they talking about Toni or about her grandmother?

"Toni hears voices," said Trapp. "But who is this Dr. Ellsworth to tell her she's a schizophrenic? Maybe she just perceives better than the rest of us. Maybe the voices she hears are uncommunicated ideas, floating free."

32
A Singing Pig

The sectional tournament was held in a Shriners' meeting hall. I didn't know what a Shriner was, but according to Cliff, they are people who wear funny hats.

There must have been more than sixty bridge tables set up in neat rows. I don't think I saw any Shriners, just a lot of bridge players, and a few of them wore funny hats. Bridge gibberish was coming at me from every corner of the room.

"After going into the tank for ten minutes, he leads a club, giving the declarer a sluff and a ruff! Then, in the post-mortem, he asks me if there was something he could have done differently. ‘Yes,' I tell him. ‘Play
any other
card.'"

We made our way to the long directors' table. There were three directors, two men and a woman, all wearing matching purple shirts with the ACBL logo printed on the front pocket. Trapp gave me his wallet and I paid for the entry.

"This is Lester Trapp," said Gloria. "I spoke to a Harvey Willfolk about a special table."

One of the male directors looked up for the first time. "What kind of special—is he blind?"

"Very astute," said my uncle.

"I'll take this," said the woman director. "Welcome, Mr. Trapp. We have you in section B, table seven."

She took back the entry form that the other director had handed me and gave me a different one, with
7-B
marked on it. "You're his cardturner?"

I said I was.

"You understand that you are just to tell him what cards are in his hand? You are not to tell him what cards have already been played, or in any way suggest what card he should play?"

"Sorry, Trapp," I said. "They won't let me tell you what card to play."

"I'll manage somehow," said my uncle.

People stopped and stared at us as we made our way to our assigned table.

"Can't be any worse than the partner I had this morning," I heard someone say with a laugh.