In Vegas, a father and a son argued about how the son had played his poker hand. The father was a lifelong cardplayer who’d taught his son to play at a formative age, maybe four, five, getting him a leg up on his generational brethren, since the strategies of poker were among the eternal verities, as worthwhile to instill as alphanumeric characters and the hitting and pitching fortunes of the Yankees. The son was inclined toward long bouts of staring into inclement weather, mesmerized by window-splatter and downflowing rivulet, and for a while the father thought there was maybe something wrong with him, that his swimmers hadn’t traveled in first-class, but later on in life it turned out that this same son had been even then composing rudimentaries (his word for the early symphonies), been absorbing rhythms and, as he would later describe it in an interview on public television, synesthetically allowing the notes to fall upon the staves of the mind. When the father listened to the son’s compositions — and he did, he really tried, spent hours, reset his ringtone so it played none other, pushed himself on the treadmill to his kiddo’s homage to Lugosi or Ligeti — he heard randomness, chaos, a defiance that his son had never exhibited behaviorally (his dad had all but told him how to sneak out, all but lowered him onto the limb that extended by his window, all but signed a contract to the effect that he’d look the other way if the boy wanted to meet up with one of their cute neighbors, the blond — what was her name — Nichole or the other one and run down by the creek and smoke a bowl and do some undershirt groping and some grinding). No, he’d been unswervingly a good boy, and the father listened intently to the music in hopes of gleaning traces of lust — for power, for nubile flesh, for market share, for bragging rights in the AL East — none of which was in evidence. So here they were out in Vegas, the trip arranged by dad, turned the big six-oh. All he wanted was to spend some alone time with his boy without his mom’s platitudes, her admonitions and her sayings and most especially her voice, its cloying the sound equivalent of that godawful soap she insisted on torturing them all with in the bathroom, that floral ambush. And so he’d flown him out here, where the kid kept ordering some kind of lemon slushie business, and he must’ve reviewed the rules a dozen times, no exaggeration, made him a cheat sheet with the terms—flop, turn, river—not even anything technical, played out a slew of open hands with him in the comfort of their suite, slipped him a crisp pile of bills to play with (though whom, exactly, was he trying to impress with those tips?) and brought him to the 50/100 no-limit table, and the kid stood by and watched at first while his dad showed him the ropes, and when the seat emptied next to him and his son put down his lemon ice and got dealt in, it reminded him of when he’d taught the boy how to drive, a wavelet of nostalgia until he remembered that then, like now, his son proceeded to do everything wrong, got the wheel locked, drifted over the median, and now he’s playing it too thin-icy when he’s toting three jacks, then playing his next hand like he’s got the nuts and the next thing you know, he mucked the hand, as if he zoned out completely mid-play, still that kid at the window, at the wheel, only now he’s ruining not only his own fortunes but his dad’s and, frankly, this whole trip. His dad pulled him aside, and while he would’ve settled for an explanation of the thrown hand, what he meant was, What’s going on in there? and wanted to know What will be enough? and Will we ever be any way other than this? Whatever words he was going to drive at these were swallowed in the shattering, flesh rending, everyone diving for the closest table or bolting for the exits, a panic of smeared colors, till all that could be heard was the music of the slot machines and a roulette ball, its hops growing farther and farther apart until it came to rest.
Part of what made it so difficult to detect the Conversations was their pristine logic, their lavishness with detail, the intricacy with which it felt like someone had put them together. They were camouflaged in the way a flounder picks up six or seven shades of stones from the bottom and presents itself, an unfinished mosaic, one whose tiles haven’t yet been glued into place, and might just keep shifting.
The other thing that made it difficult to pick up the Conversations is that no one had the faintest fucking clue as to what they could possibly be.
They were, it ought to be emphasized, about everything and nothing. They were about the best place to get bubble tea in all of Tokyo. They were about whether anime was a fundamentally self-aware genre. They were about ghost sightings and the existence of paranormal beings. They were about ridiculous roommates who left their shit everywhere. They were about whether that dress made her look fat. They were about whether it was ever okay to scroll through someone else’s text messages. They were about whether the affiliation of Walt Disney with the L.A. Philharmonic was ultimately a good thing. They were about whether or not to stay in/leave/go deeper into Park Slope/New York/an affair. Loosely, they could be grouped under the heading of “disagreements.” What they weren’t were online chats, phone conversations, small talk, screaming matches, Skype exchanges, the letters pages of The New York Review of Books, the catacombs of blog commentary threads. They were face-to-face, live theater in the round, and called for mouths and throats and sweat glands and gestures intended and incidental and facial tics. No one knew exactly how long the Conversations had been going on before it was recognized what they were. It took a damned spot of time to figure these things out. To realize that some of the slaughtered had not only been at the epicenter of the blast but that they had been the fuses.