This fantasy cannot hold. He knows he needs to go home. He looks down and remembers her blood all over his clothes. He can’t go home like this. He’s too tired to want to figure things out, though he knows he needs to. But then, as ideas do, something comes to him.
For the last time tonight he heads to the river.
He finds their bodies, largely unchanged since he left them hours ago. He examines the man, stiff and cold, roughly his same build. First he takes off the man’s jacket. Then his shirt, his pants.
They fit him well enough. At least they are clean.
He dresses the man in his clothing. Now the kidnapper is wearing the blood of the sister of the dead woman next to him. For him and for now, this is enough.
As he reclaims his personal belongings from his exchanged clothing, he finds the empty powder packet in the suit jacket. He leaves it in the possession of the corpse.
“You,” he says to the dead man. “This is your fault.”
Home. He tries to be quiet as he opens the door. He closes it softly. He crosses the front room, slinks into his office and into his chair. He breathes in and out, trying to calm down. His skin is clammy from the lack of sleep.
He goes into the bedroom. His wife is sleeping. He sits down on his side of the bed, trying not to wake her. He doesn’t bother to undress.
She turns to him, still asleep. She manages to mutter, “Poor baby, always working late. You get a lot done?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s great. Mmm, I got to get up soon. Wake me up at 7, ’kay?”
“Sure.”
He pulls his wallet out of his back pocket, sets it on the nightstand next to his pillow. Does the same with his keys, his change. He reaches into the suit jacket. The right pocket. He finds it there.
The bell, washed clean by the river, traveled on its journey, has arrived here.
Maybe it’s the fatigue, but he’s not so concerned with how as he is with why. The bell demands a story, a confession.
He holds it in his hand, examines the detail.
He does not move. He stays this way for a long time, as long as he can.
His concentration broken, he looks at the clock.
Five till 7.
Everything seems to change.
He rings the bell.
CITY OF COMMERCEBY NEAL POLLACK
Commerce
The call came at 4 p.m., just when I was starting my prep for the day’s first bong hit. It had been weeks since I’d heard from my agent. I put down my gear and listened.
“Some cherry producer at New Line likes your treatment for Cedar Fever,” he said.
This was a crappy horror comedy that I’d written two years before, about people whose allergies get so bad they start turning into plants. Not exactly what I’d dreamed about when I moved here. But after a while, you’ve sleepwalked long enough so you’re not really dreaming anymore.
“No shit?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Stupid fuck read your book, and he thinks you can still write.”
Silence, as I decided whether or not to defend myself.
“You got a clean shirt, one with buttons?” he asked.
“I am still married,” I replied. “So probably.”
“Good. Because I scored you a sit-down at 3:30. Do not be late to this one…”
He bitched at me for a few minutes, then turned nice when he asked if I knew where he could get some weed. By the time I got his ass off the phone, Karen was coming in the door, looking fine as ever. Admissions of love came less and less frequently from her these days, not that I blamed her. One minute she was at a Santa Monica beach party getting felt up in a hammock by a promising novelist, and before she could hiccup, she found herself paying the mortgage on a two-bedroom condo in Glassell Park and coming home every day to an unshaven, unemployed stoner. She was as bitter as an unripe plum, so I was glad to have some good news for her. I just about fell on my ass when she threw her arms around my neck and put her tongue in my ear.
“You get this gig,” she said, “and I’ll cruise you up to Ojai for a weekend of blowjobs you’ll never forget.”
I hadn’t received an offer like that in nearly a decade. She still loved, me, maybe. But I was feeling a little jittery at that moment, and I told her so.
“Maybe I should…”
She blanched whiter than a snow leopard in February.
“No, Nick,” she said. “You’re not fucking going to the casino. Not tonight. Not before the biggest meeting of your life.”
“I’ll play a few low-stakes hands and be home by mid-night,” I said, reassuring myself as much as her.
“Jesus Christ.”
“Come on, babe,” I said. “You know it relaxes me.”
“It does anything but.”
I picked my keys off the kitchen counter and headed for the door.
“You’re going now? You’re not even going to have dinner with me?”
“The 5 can be a real bastard this time of night,” I said.
I was out the door so quickly she couldn’t possibly have jinxed my opening flop.
Before I moved to California, I played poker occasionally at basement tables with ten-cent antes, where the real object was to drink as much Old Style as possible without vomiting. Winning meant zero, and losing even less. I had no idea that I was coming to a place where poker transcended hobby, leaped above pastime, and approached something near civic religion. The first couple of home games almost turned me back toward the path of righteousness; one was full of twenty-five-year-old schmucks hatching plans to date-rape a stripper in Malibu, and the other featured new dads who were busy discussing home renovations and the difficulties of finding a reliable nanny who’d work for less than seventeen dollars an hour. Neither scene appealed much. In fact, I couldn’t think of any home game I’d enjoy, unless I were sitting around a table with nine clones of myself. Other men can be a real pain in the ass.
Then one night, a guy mentioned that he was heading out to Commerce that weekend to play in some tournament that might get him into some other tournament that might get him into the World Series of Poker. I guess it had never occurred to me that the three thousand gambling billboards I saw a week could be advertising poker rooms. And when he said that the games ran twenty-four hours a day, all year, the amateur anthropologist in me began to quiver. This, I thought, could be the ideal canvas for my art, so I went along.
City of Commerce may be the most ironically named place in America, which is saying a lot. I suppose it was once full of factories that made things. But that’s not what commerce is about in this world anymore. The only commerce now is a five-cent rake on the pot. One person in fifty goes home with a profit and one in five thousand actually makes a living. If those had been the commercial odds during the Industrial Revolution, Californians would still be riding donkeys down to the San Diego Mission. Maybe we’ll get there still.
From the moment I first walked in under the faux-gold-mirrored awning, lit with a circumferential rectangle of two-inch-wide bulbs, I knew I was sunk. This hardly represented the seamiest gambling scene I’d encountered-that honor goes to the Friday midnight riverboat blackjack cruise in Joliet, Illinois-but it was probably the most baroque. The place obviously prospered beyond measure. However, unlike Vegas patrons, these players required little frippery. The most lavish theme in the world couldn’t draw the casual gambling tourist to City of Commerce night after night. They were here to play cards.
I’ve never seen garbage on the floor. Someone’s always vacuuming the rugs or polishing the faux-marble, and there’s no sign of chipping paint. The casino has a sushi bar and a sports bar full of flat-screen TVs. Yet the place always seems suffused with a kind of jaundice; the lighting scheme encourages the shakes, and nausea. It’s ugly, almost as though the casino were deliberately trying to throw us off our game.