Three Moments of an Explosion

by China Miéville

  “Having a good time?” Sugarface said.

  The card didn’t show up again. I rubbed the deck between my fingers and it felt standard and cheap.

  When we were done and packing up, I walked as nonchalantly as I could to the bookshelf and picked up those rules. I checked the contents page and the index, for Dowager, Bees, Hidden Suits, Suits (Hidden). Nothing.

  I realized that the others had stopped talking and were staring at me indulgently.

  “Bless him,” Denno said.

  “The round’s finished,” Sugarface told me. “You won’t find anything now.”

  He threw all three decks into the trash. I was still reading, looking through the lists of hands. There was nothing about a Full Hive.

  “You’re only inducted once,” Joy said. “Buy yourself something nice.”

  She waited in the doorway without complaining while I went to the bin and rummaged around in the cigarette ash and fished out every card and separated out the deck I’d bought.

  It contained no Dowager of Bees. I did find extra cards: there were fifty-five, but two were Jokers, and one was instructions for Solitaire.

  I made sure I had her address, and three hundred and forty-seven days later, I found Joy and did her a favor I didn’t want to.

  The second time I saw a hidden suit was in Manchester.

  It was six years later. I wasn’t a Poker top-ranker but I could hold my own, and besides, I’d diversified, could play you at Baccarat, Whist, Rummy, Bridge, Faro, Spoil Five Euchre, Chemin-de-Fer, Canasta, Uruguay Canasta, Panguingue, Snap. Pretty much anything. I’d find ways to bet on any of them too. I won my first car at Tarabish. It made me want to win more.

  There was a GameFest (they called it) at the Corn Exchange. Mostly families checking out kids’ stuff. The few professionals there were goofing around or accompanying friends. There were five of us in a little roomlet made with temporary walls in the corner of the hall. We were drunk and playing unlikely games for petty cash and giggles.

  We were on Old Maid. That’s the one where you start by removing one Queen, then deal the fifty-one and pass cards one hand to the next and get rid of pairs until everyone’s out except some poor schmuck who’s left holding just that last mismatched Queen, the Old Maid. They lose.

  A civilian would say it was pure luck. No such thing.

  We thought up a way to bet. Antes into a pot, which got distributed as people came out. Whoever had the Old Maid would end up losing double. It was a burning hot day and I remember a blaze of light came right down through a high window and made our table shine.

  I was out, sitting back safe, having made my cash. People took cards from each other and discarded pairs triumphantly. Three people left. More passing. Pairs down. Two. A woman in her twenties with a strawberry-blond bob and a leather jacket too battered not to be secondhand, facing down a plump, blinky, middle-aged guy in a corduroy jacket. We watched them swap and throw down cards, their faces set, and then someone gave a little cry and I frowned because the two of them were sitting back staring at each other, and each still held a single card.

  “Did we mess up?” someone said. “Did we miscount?”

  The man turned his: the Queen of Spades. He was the Old Maid.

  We all looked at the young woman. Her eyes were wide. She looked at me. The back of her card looked the same as all the others. I didn’t feel drunk any more.

  “Show,” I said.

  She lowered it face up. Its background was dark flat gray. The design was of two rows of four links of metal picked out in white.

  She swallowed. She said, “Eight of Chains.”

  Someone went to bar the door.

  “What now?” her opponent said. He was terrified. “I don’t know what happens.”

  “None of us do,” I said.

  “Gin’s my usual game, I don’t … What’s the rule?”

  A tall guy to the young woman’s right was leafing through a tatty paperback of Hoyle’s. The fat man looked up a gaming site on his phone.

  “I don’t understand,” said a boy of about seventeen. “What is that?”

  By that time I knew that, definitionally, if he didn’t, everyone else present did understand what was happening. If there’s any, there’s only ever one.

  “You’ve been inducted,” I told him. “Just watch and listen. Who else had it?” I said. “At any point?”

  The guy looking with the rule book raised his hand. “I got dealt it,” he said. “She took it from me. Here we are.” He started to read. “Old Maid: Rules for Hidden Suits. It’s the what of Chains?”

  I said, “The Eight,” but the man with the Queen interrupted.

  “Got it,” he said, squinting at his phone. He sagged with relief. “I’m still the loser,” he said. “I still lost.”

  I could see the boy was about to complain that he didn’t understand again and I showed him a warning finger.

  The young woman licked her lips. “There must be a forfeit, though,” she said. “Even so.”

  The big guy hesitated and nodded and passed her his phone. She read. The rest of us were too polite to ask but I caught the eye of the man with the rule book and he gave me a tiny reassuring nod.

  “OK,” the young woman said. She was tense but controlled. “OK, that’s not so bad.”

  “Right?” her opponent said. “It could be worse, right?”

  “That’s not so bad.”

  We all breathed out. I picked up the cards and folded them back into the deck and shuffled. We all got silly as the tension eased. I made the cards spring from one hand to the other and dance about. People cheered.

  “I don’t understand,” the boy said. “Can I see?” He held out his hand for the deck and I made the cards jump through the air to land right in front of him and everyone laughed, even the woman who’d ended up with the Chains.

  “You can try,” I said. “I wouldn’t hold your breath, though.” He went through the deck and, of course, did not find the card. Without asking, he picked up the phone too, but the round was over and there was nothing about the hidden suits on the site, or on any site.

  The young woman took a while to clear up her stuff and she kept looking at me. She wanted me to wait for her.

  “You’re really good at that stuff,” the big man said, making flickering fingers.

  “Many hours,” I said. “Sleight and magic.”

  He glanced behind him. The woman was putting on her jacket. He lowered his voice.

  “I almost didn’t give her the phone,” he whispered. “The Eight’s not so bad. Which is good, because …”

  I shook my head so he wouldn’t tell me more.

  “But if she’d seen what it said about the Nine,” he said, and shook his head. “Or the Six. Or if she’d ended up with the Two of Scissors … !”

  “She didn’t,” I said. It was crass of him to talk this way. “There’s no percentage thinking about the might’ves.”

  He left as the young woman approached. He gave me a friendly wave. As if I wasn’t a hypocrite. As if all of us, all players, don’t live in a dense forest of might’ves.

  The kind of event for which I’d hoped when I was young and endlessly practicing passes, turning cards around my fingers, didn’t come. I couldn’t have said what it was exactly anyway—some chimera, something epochal, valuable, ostentatious, and secret.

  I didn’t cheat often or big enough to attract notice, my big wins I won straight, but occasionally, depending on the stakes, the game, my opponents, my finances, and whim, I’d twist my fingers according to muscle memory and take a trick that would otherwise have escaped me, withhold from my opponent some card I knew they needed.

  If I was very drunk I might show Belinda a trick or two. She loved seeing them and I loved to see her look when I showed her. Sometimes I called her the Chains. Sometimes she called me Bees.

  She had more luck than me, and she bet higher, and she knew hands and odds and combinations better, but she lost more, too. We once work
ed out that our earnings were almost identical.

  We went to Paris for the art. We went to Brazil and took pictures of the Jesus. We played Go Fish in Bucharest. We loved watching each other at the tables but didn’t play against each other often because we knew we wouldn’t hold back.

  We’d swapped numbers that day in Manchester, but it was a few weeks later that she called, and her mood was good when she did, so I figured she’d got through the forfeit.

  She didn’t ask me if I ever cheated and I didn’t volunteer any information and I never did it against her but she was too good a player not to suspect.

  For the first year or so we didn’t talk overmuch about the hidden suits, though we said enough to start to use those pet names, shyly. Every once in a long while she’d disappear for a day or two and come back tired and thoughtful. I knew it was the terms of the forfeit and I didn’t say anything.

  Once in Vegas a Canadian oncologist blithely told us there were hidden suits in the Baraja deck too. I was appalled by the conversation and we made our excuses.

  I understand the interest in the Baraja, the Italian deck, the German with its other colors, the Ganjifa, and so on, but I was always a devotee of the standard modern Rouennaise fifty-two. I loved the history that led to what we play with, the misprisions, the errors of copying that got us suicide kings and one-eyed Jacks. I loved the innovation of the rotational symmetry that isn’t a reflection. I loved the black and the red, against which the colors of the hidden suits are so stark—blue, gray, green, the white of Chains, the yellow of the Bees.

  “I only saw one other,” Belinda told me once, carefully. “The Nine of Teeth. But just for an instant.”

  The difficulty is that it’s bad form to talk about them brazenly, but once you’re inducted it’s also a good idea to learn as many rules for as many hands featuring as many cards in as many suits in as many games as you might ever play, just in case. And you can’t exactly look them up most of the time.

  No matter how proper you are, there are questions you’ll end up hearing asked, or asking. What bird is it flying above the Detective of Scissors? Where’s the missing link on the Nine of Chains? Why does the Ace of Ivy grow on bones?

  You might feel you know these cards, whether you’ve seen them or not. “We all end up getting to know certain cards pretty well, I guess,” Belinda said to me once. “One way or another.” You might have a favorite.

  The third time was Lublin.

  We were playing Bourré in a deconsecrated church. I’d faced two of my opponents before, and had had a fistfight with one. Belinda and I were taking turns: she stood behind me with her hand on my shoulder. She could see my cards but no one else’s.

  I picked up my hand. Five cards. One of them I’d never seen before.

  One two three four blue smokestacks, protruding into blue sky, gushing stylized clouds of blue smoke.

  I showed nothing. Belinda’s hand twitched. I wasn’t afraid anyone noticed but to me it was as if she screamed, “Oh my God!”

  I went into my memory for whatever I had about the Four of Chimneys. What it would do in combination with my other cards. I weighed up possibilities.

  There was a lot of betting. I got tenser and tenser. When I eventually laid down my hand I cannot tell you how much I loved the sound of everyone’s amazement. They were calculating the extra losses my win would mean for them, they were gasping with envy, they were stunned at the sight of the card.

  No one asked what it was. Everyone present was a previous inductee. The only time that ever happened to me.

  People passed me their chips and their extra chips. They wrote down their secrets for me. I wondered what I’d do with the horses and keys that were now mine. I hadn’t only been dealt a hidden card; I’d played it well.

  I’ve told myself repeatedly that it was an instant’s insanity to do what I did, something I can’t explain. But then, I had been perfecting finger-tricks for a long time.

  As everyone relaxed and a heavy-faced ex-soldier picked up the deck and collected our hands, I laughed at some witticism and nodded and barely looked at him as I folded my cards and passed them. I don’t know if Belinda’s hand tightened again. I didn’t fear that the dealer, or anyone else, would notice the fleeting fingertip motion by which I extracted the Four of Chimneys from my hand and slipped it into my cuff.

  I didn’t know if it would still be there when I got home. But I sat in my bathroom and rolled up my sleeve and there it was, waiting to be folded back into the deck so it could leave as it arrived.

  “You’re going to have a long wait,” I whispered.

  Four chimneys, two by two, two facing up, two down, blowing smoke in strong dark blue and black lines.

  I felt shy. I put it away.

  “What a game,” was all Belinda or I ever said about that night. We carried on. We won more than we lost.

  I kept the card in stiff clear plastic in my wallet. I didn’t want to scuff it. Sometimes I’d take it out and glance at those block-print chimneys for a couple of seconds, until I got all anxious, as I did, and turned it over and looked for a lot longer at the back.

  I’ve played with super-expensive decks as well as with the gas-station plastic. Pros aren’t that precious; mostly we use the workhorse deck produced by Bicycle, as close as you can get to a default. It’s had the same meaningless filigree on the back for years. You want choice? It comes in red or blue.

  We’d been playing a red-backed Bicycle deck when I got dealt the Four of Chimneys.

  I kept up my finger exercises. I listened for stories about the hidden cards. I maybe listened extra hard for stories about hands with Chimneys. I was never superstitious but I did develop one tick. I liked to hold the card against my skin. I liked to feel it pressed against me.

  Before a big-pot game, I’d take my Four of Chimneys out of its little case—always with a thrill of excitement, surprise, regret and relief that it was still there—and slip it under a little band on the inside of my right forearm behind my wrist, under my shirt, a kind of simple cuff holdout. It made me feel lucky, is how I thought about it.

  Some freight shipping companies put aside a few cabins for paying customers. You can cross the Atlantic that way. We got word that one of them had set up a floating big-money game. Of course we booked passage. It was expensive, even though it wasn’t as if we were tripping over pleasure-seekers or looking down from our deck onto a sculpted pool. It was a merchant ship: our view was a deck full of containers.

  For two days we kept to ourselves. On the third day, before play, I was out under the sky and someone tapped me on the back.

  “Kid.”

  “Sugarface!”

  I was astonished he was still alive. He looked almost exactly the same.

  “Should have guessed I’d find you here,” he said. “Been following your career.”

  Belinda liked him a lot. He flirted with her and stayed on the right side of sleazy. He told her exaggerated stories of our first meeting. He showed her the face he said I’d worn when I saw the Dowager of Bees, not even hesitating to find out whether she’d been inducted before he told the story.

  In the evening I tucked my card face down into its little band on my right wrist as usual and flicked it before covering it with my shirt and jacket. We gathered in the makeshift state room and sipped mojitos while the sun went down.

  Seven players. I’d sat across from all but one before: it’s not that big a world. Besides me and Belinda and Sugarface, there was a Maronite computer programmer I’d once beaten at Pig; a French publisher who’d partnered me during a devastating hand at Bridge; a South African judge known as the Cribbage Assassin; and the captain. He was a puffed-up little prick in a blue brocade shirt. He was new to all of us. We realized this whole gig was his brainchild, just so he could play big.

  He named the game, of course. Texas Hold ’Em, of course. I rolled my eyes.

  The Lebanese guy was weaker than I’d remembered. The judge was cautious but smart and hard t
o read. The publisher built up slowly with sneaky bets. Sugarface played exactly like I recalled.

  Belinda was my main competition. We tore into each other.

  The captain could barely play at all but he didn’t even realize. He preened. He barked at people that it was their deal, their bet, told them what they needed to win. We all pretty much hated him. His ship, his trip, his table were the only reasons we didn’t tell him to go fuck himself.

  I was playing well but Belinda was playing better. She beat me with two pairs. Furious, I made one of my cards spin over my knuckles. The programmer toasted me and the judge applauded. Belinda smiled kindly and took several thousand dollars off me with an offhand bluff.

  Deep night and the sky was like a massive sheet of lead. We changed the cards. The captain took a new pack from a drawer and tossed them to Sugarface.

  Bicycle cards. Red-backed. Sugarface opened the packet and dealt us our two hole cards.

  Usually most serious players just keep them facedown in front of them but that night I wanted to hold mine up like in a cowboy film. Pair of Threes. Good start.

  We bet—we bet big—everyone stays in. Sugarface deals the flop: three community cards, faceup. A Six, a Ten, Jack of Clubs. I have a good feeling, then a bad feeling, then a good feeling. Sugarface winks. This round of betting we lose Mr. IT. I can read him easily and I’m not surprised.

  Fourth shared card, the turn. Hi there, Charlemagne: the King of Hearts has been shy till now but there he is. There’s some muttering and murmuring. Belinda is rock-still while she calculates, even stiller than usual, so she’s either in good shape or bad shape and I’m guessing good. The judge goes out. Publisher blows me a kiss and follows.

  Sugarface makes us wait a long time, puffing out his cheeks. In the end he joins them.

  It’s me to bet, and as I consider and see the red backs of my opponents’ hands, floating like unmanned boats into my head comes the name of a hand I’ve heard about over the years.

  They call it a Boiler-Room: a Ten; a Jack; a King; a Three; and the Four of Chimneys.

  I start to consider what that would win me. What would be the takings from this table, not just in money. And I realize that I’m thinking with a sort of calm wonder, almost wryly, Oh, this is what I’ve been waiting for.