Ravan needed no convincing.
The child squirmed and cried, stretched out his hands to one edge of the screen. Menar’s wife broke into the frame. Ravan had met her only once, at the wedding. She was a gentle, fine-boned woman with a translucent complexion, the signature of the Muslim clan his brother had married into a few years ago.
The union had driven a slight wedge between the two Menars, Sr. and Jr., though they still worked closely together. After the marriage, work seemed to become the central plank of their closeness, and this was not lost on the son. It changed him, his father’s chilly response to his wife and her family, which included higher-ups in the Pakistani military his father thought needlessly radical, and moreover who seemed to be suspicious of his own research collaborations with the U.S. government — though, infuriatingly, they would always stop short of saying so.
She took the Indo-Aryan boy to a place off-screen without saying anything to Ravan.
“Look, however it is, I’m glad you’ve got everything,” Menar said. “The gold ones, I know I’ve said this, are the ones that will do what’s needed. God willing.”
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.