A Novel About the Cost of Greatness
This manuscript is being released as a serialized novel.
Each chapter is presented exactly as it appears in the manuscript.
Inside, the room was warm in the way that overused indoor spaces are warm, a thick used warmth made of bodies and machines and the long absence of any window to let it out, and the first thing that met him was always the smell, a smell he could not have described to anyone who had not been there, the smell of carpet that had absorbed thirty years of cigarettes from before the smoking stopped, and coffee left too long on a burner, and the particular sourness of human beings concentrating, which is different from the smell of human beings at rest, and Adrian breathed it in the way you breathe the air of a place you have promised yourself you would not return to, with a small involuntary loosening in the chest that he hated and depended on.
The room was not one room. This was the thing the movies never got right, that it was not a vast chandeliered hall but a sequence of low connected rooms in a building that had been other things before it was this, the dropped ceilings with their water stains, the fluorescent panels of which one always flickered, the carpet patterned in a busy maroon and gold whose purpose, he had read somewhere, was to hide what spilled on it, and he believed it, because the carpet looked like a thing designed by someone who had thought carefully about spills. There were no clocks. He knew about the clocks, everyone knew about the clocks, it was the one piece of folk wisdom about such places that had penetrated the ordinary world, and yet knowing it changed nothing, because the absence of clocks was not a trick played on you, it was a mercy you came for, the abolition of time being one more window the room had bricked over.
He gave his coat to no one. There was no one to give it to. He carried it over his arm and moved through the first room, where the machines were, the slot machines that he never played and held in a private contempt he recognized as snobbery and indulged anyway, the machines and the people feeding them, and there was the woman he always thought of as the same woman though it was never the same woman, the woman at the machine with the paper cup of coins and the face of someone performing a duty rather than seeking a pleasure, pressing the button, watching the wheels, pressing the button, and Adrian moved past her with the small ugly comfort of a man who has located someone he can feel superior to, and despised himself for the comfort, and took it anyway, because the room stripped you down to the small ugly comforts fairly quickly, that was part of what it did, part of what he came for, the way it dissolved the elaborate self he maintained everywhere else and left only the appetite and the few mean little consolations the appetite permitted.
He did not play the machines and he did not, usually, play the tables in the second room, the blackjack and the roulette, the games of pure chance dressed up as games of skill, and he held these too in a contempt that was, he knew, a way of telling himself that he was not really one of these people, that he was here for something more refined, and the refinement was a lie he needed and he let himself have it, walking through the second room with his coat over his arm toward the third room, the back room, the one without a name on a door because it had no door, just an opening, where the games were played that were actually games, where the chance was real but so was the reading of other people, and it was here, in the third room, that Adrian came, because here at least he could tell himself that the outcome turned partly on him, on his attention, on his ability to see what another person was concealing, and this self-flattery was the last self-flattery the room permitted before it took everything, and he clung to it the way you cling to the last dignity, knowing it is the last.
Marek was always there, or seemed always to be there, which was different, because Adrian had never seen Marek arrive or leave, had only ever found him already present, the way you find weather present, and he was a broad unhurried man somewhere past sixty with a face that had been handsome once in a heavy way and had settled, with age, into something more useful than handsomeness, a face you told things to without deciding to, and he was sitting not at a table but at the edge of things, on a stool by the wall, with a glass of something clear that Adrian had never once seen him drink, watching the room the way a man watches a river he has watched for forty years, without anticipation, without anxiety, simply watching the thing do the thing it always did.
“Professor,” Marek said, when Adrian came in. He always called him Professor. Adrian had never told him he was a professor. This was the first thing Marek had ever done that frightened him, knowing the thing Adrian had not said, and Adrian had decided long ago not to ask how he knew, because the not asking was easier than any answer would be.
“You look like a man who had a day,” Marek said. He did not say it warmly and he did not say it coldly. He said it the way he said everything, as a simple observation offered without stake, and this was the thing about Marek, that he had no stake, or seemed to have none, that he profited from the room and was somehow not of it, watched it consume men with neither pleasure nor pity, the way you might watch a tide come in over a sandcastle you did not build and did not mourn.
“I had a day,” Adrian agreed, and Marek nodded slowly, as though this confirmed something, and gestured with his clear glass, the smallest movement, toward the table, and said, “They’re light tonight. You could sit,” and the you could sit was not an invitation exactly and not a temptation exactly, it was a door held open by a man who did not particularly care whether you went through it, who had held it open for a thousand men and watched most of them go through and would hold it open for a thousand more, and the indifference of the holding was the most seductive thing in the room, because everything else in Adrian’s life was conditional, was watched, was scored, and here was a man holding a door with no investment in whether he entered, and Adrian found, as he always found, that the indifference drew him through in a way that eagerness never could have.
The table was not beautiful. The felt had a burn near the rail and a pale ring where someone had set a wet glass down too many times, and the men around it were not beautiful, were not cool, were a heavy silent man in a golf shirt and an old man with magnificent white hair and trembling hands and a younger man, younger than Adrian, with the bright depthless eyes of someone in the early happy part of the thing before the part that was not happy, and Adrian looked at the young man and saw himself at the first room, years ago, and felt the small cold thing and looked away. He bought in. The mechanics of buying in he performed without thought, the counting out, the receiving, the small stacks assembling themselves in front of him, and he did not let himself attend to the number, because attending to the number was the beginning of a kind of arithmetic that the room existed to silence, and the silencing of arithmetic was part of what he had walked twenty minutes through the cold to purchase.
This was the thing he could never explain, would never try to explain, to the version of himself that watched from behind his eyes or to Claire if she ever asked, which she would not, that the money was the medium and not the message. It was not nothing. He wanted to be clear with himself, in the rare honest moments, that the money was not nothing, that he was not one of those wealthy men for whom the stakes were theater, that the money he was setting down was real and its loss would be real and the reality of the possible loss was precisely the point, because a wager you cannot lose is not a wager, is theater, and theater was the thing he had everywhere else in his life, the safe performance, the contained risk, and he had come here for the opposite of theater, for stakes that could actually take something from him, and so the money mattered enormously, mattered as the thing that made the jeopardy real, and mattered not at all as a thing he wanted to possess, because he did not want to possess it, winning gave him almost nothing, winning was a kind of anticlimax, winning meant the interval had ended in his favor and the interval ending was the loss regardless of which way it broke. The money mattered and did not matter at the same time, the way a man crossing a high wire needs the height to be real and does not want to fall, needs the drop and does not desire it, and the drop is the entire meaning of the walk.
He would not describe the game. Even to himself he kept the mechanics at a slight distance, because the mechanics were not the thing, the mechanics were the apparatus, the trellis up which the actual thing grew, and the actual thing was not the cards, was not the odds, was not the reading of the heavy silent man’s stillness or the young man’s bright leaking tells, the actual thing was the interval, and the cards existed only to produce the interval, the way a church exists to produce a silence, and Adrian sat and felt the apparatus assemble around him, the small decisions, the watching, the slow accumulation of a hand into a situation, and all of it was prelude, all of it was the long liturgy before the moment, and he moved through the liturgy with the competence of long practice, and his mind, for the first time since the seminar room that afternoon, began to quiet.
It did not quiet all at once. That was not how it worked. At first the world came with him into the room, the day came with him, Bryce in the doorway and Eleanor’s don’t disappear on us and the dead document on the laptop and Claire, Claire most of all, Claire’s sentence, which had followed him down through the descending streets and through the door and into the warm windowless air and was sitting in him still, you cannot tell the difference from the inside, and for the first hands the sentence stayed, the world stayed, he was a man at a table with his whole unbearable day still loud inside him, and this was the part the moralizers would never understand, that the early hands did not help, that you did not come for the early hands, the early hands were the cost of admission, the slow grinding work of getting the apparatus tall enough, getting the stakes real enough, getting the hand built into a true situation, because only a true situation produced a true interval, and a true interval was the only thing in the world strong enough to do what he needed done.
And then there was a hand.
He felt it become a hand, become the hand, the way you feel weather change, a pressure shift in the room, the heavy man committing in a way he had not committed before, the young man already gone, folded, leaking relief, and it came down to Adrian and the heavy silent man in the golf shirt, and there was money in the middle of the table now that was a real amount of money, an amount that mattered, an amount whose loss he would feel for weeks, and the situation had become true, fully true, the apparatus had grown tall, and Adrian sat with his cards and looked at the man and the man looked at nothing and the decision arrived, the decision to put the rest of it in, to commit the whole real frightening amount, and Adrian did not so much make the decision as recognize that it had been made, that the whole evening, the whole day, the whole descending walk had been the making of it, and he pushed the stack forward into the middle, and the heavy man, after a long stillness, called.
The cards were down. The decision was past. There was nothing left to do, nothing left to read, nothing left to control, the entire situation had passed out of his hands and into the hands of the next card, which had not yet turned, which sat in the deck or in the dealer’s fingers in a state of perfect undecidedness, and in the gap between the calling and the turning, in that interval, that held suspended instant before the universe delivered its verdict, Adrian felt the thing happen, felt it arrive the way it always arrived, the great roaring silence, the drowning, and it was this, this was what he had walked through the cold for, this was the thing no prize and no praise and no love had ever given him.
It was not pleasure. He wanted to be exact about this, in the one place he was ever exact with himself. It was not pleasure, it was not excitement, it was not the cheap thrill the word gambling conjured in people who had never felt it. It was closer to anesthesia and closer to prayer and closer to violence than to pleasure, it was all three of those at once, it was the anesthesia of a mind that had been screaming all day going suddenly, blessedly numb, the screaming cut off mid-note, and it was the posture of prayer, the helplessness of it, the total surrender of a man who has done everything he can do and now can only wait for a verdict from somewhere outside himself, the same helpless waiting upturned face that prayer was, except that the god he waited on was not merciful and not cruel but simply, perfectly indifferent, an indifference that asked nothing of him and judged nothing about him and would deliver its number with the same blank fairness to a saint or a fraud, and there was a peace in being judged by something that did not care what you were, a peace he had never found in the conditional judging eyes of every other thing in his life, and it was violence too, was the held breath before an impact, the body braced, the animal certainty that something was about to happen to you that you could not stop, and in the convergence of those three things, the numbness and the surrender and the braced waiting, Adrian found the only silence his life contained.
Claire’s sentence was gone.
That was the thing. That was the whole thing, if anyone had ever been able to make him say it. In the interval, Claire’s sentence was gone, the sentence he could not convert and could not escape and could not bear, you cannot tell the difference from the inside, it was simply gone, drowned, not answered, not resolved, not metabolized, just silenced by a roar so total that no sentence could survive in it, and with it went everything else, went the unwritten novel and the dead document, went his father going back down to his plate, went his mother’s encrypted love that he could not decrypt, went Bryce’s velvet blade and the woman who had left him saying he was always taking notes, went the entire accumulated weight of a self he could not stop being, all of it drowned, all of it silent, for one suspended instant the whole unbearable apparatus of being Adrian Mercer switched off, and there was only the table and the unturned card and the roaring peace, and in that instant, and this was the horror of it, this was the thing he could never tell anyone, in that instant he was happy. Not happy. There was no word. He was at rest. For one held breath in a windowless room over a felt table with a burn near the rail, Adrian Mercer was finally, completely, at rest, the way other people were at rest in love or at rest in faith or at rest in a Sunday afternoon with someone asleep against their shoulder, the way Daniel was at rest in his whole life, Adrian was at rest for the length of time it took a card to turn, and he understood, in the part of him that never stopped understanding even here, that he would pay any amount of money and any amount of his life to extend that length of time, and that the extending of it was not possible, that the interval was indivisible, that you could not make it last, that the moment the card turned it was over regardless of the outcome, and so you had to do it again, and again, not to win, never to win, winning was nothing, winning was the interval ending, you did it again to return to the interval, to the one place the screaming stopped, and that this returning, this endless purchasing of an instant that could not be made to last, was the whole shape of the thing that was going to destroy him, and that he was going to let it.
The heavy man’s hand was better, had been better the whole time, and the money that had been in the middle of the table was gathered toward the heavy man with the small efficient motions of the dealer, and Adrian watched it go, the real money, the money whose loss he would feel for weeks, and felt, watching it go, almost nothing, a small dull pang that was nothing next to the thing he had felt in the interval, because the loss was not the point, the loss had never been the point, the interval was the point and the interval was over and the only way back to it was forward, was another hand, was more money pushed into more middles in pursuit of more intervals, and he sat for a moment in the after silence, the ordinary silence, the cheap silence that was just the absence of sound and not the great drowning silence he had come for, and he felt the world begin to come back, felt Claire’s sentence begin to seep back in at the edges, you cannot tell the difference from the inside, and he reached for his remaining chips, what was left of the buy-in, and across the room on his stool by the wall Marek watched him reach, and Marek’s face did not change, Marek’s face never changed, but Adrian felt the watching, felt himself being seen by the one person in the room who understood exactly what had just happened and exactly what was about to happen next and had seen it happen ten thousand times and would see it ten thousand more, and for a moment Adrian met Marek’s eyes across the room, and there was in Marek’s eyes neither judgment nor pity nor encouragement, there was only recognition, the flat patient recognition of a man who had long ago stopped lying to himself about what the room sold and to whom, and Adrian, who lied to himself about almost everything, felt the recognition land, and could not hold it, and looked away, and pushed his remaining chips forward, and waited for the cards, and waited for the interval, and waited, in the only church he had, for the screaming to stop again.
A Novel About the Cost of Greatness
Next: Chapter Six — Morning Returns the Truth with Interest
© Michael P.S. Rogers. All rights reserved.
