by KUBOA
He will come back to this table. He will say hello.
He will sit back down in his seat which is still warm.
He will look at me just in the eye, and ask me how much longer I will be staying.
He will ask me this, and I will tell him that I was just about to leave, and he will suggest that we leave together, and I will go.
And I will go with him.
And we will walk toward the stairs.
We will talk together, smiling awkwardly, and alternately looking at each other, and down at the ground. And he will have his hands in his pockets, and I will have my arms folded around me. And I will shift my purse strap on my shoulder. And he will fix his lapel. And I will see the shine in his shoes, and then the detail of his eyeglasses.
And we will continue to walk, and we will talk about how annoyed the croupier seemed at that man who came and went so quickly, and we will be sad together when we recall the man who lost thousands.
And we will then recall the highlights of our evenings, when we were up, and then when we were down, and that joke the croupier made that was genuinely clever.
We will wonder if the croupier is surviving the crowd that has rushed the table at this odd hour.
And then we will find someplace to sit, sit for a long time, and tell each other about our jobs and our families and all those other things that one must know ahead of time or must know to really feel as if one has made a friend.
***
I hear my son call out mommy. In that way he has of extending each vowel sound until he’s almost out of breath.
I hear the clatter of his toys.
I hear him now.
And yet I see, still, only this table in front of me.
Why am I here? Why have I been sitting here all night long while my son is sleeping?
Why am I here sitting looking at felt and people and holding these chips in my hand acting as if my entire universe has not just slipped away somehow.
And why this obsession?
I need to take a step back here and remember why I sat down here in the first place. Why I need to sit here for hours.
Not for the money, certainly.
Not for pleasure.
Not for compulsion.
Not even for a way to pass the time.
It is something else entirely that calls me here.
A mode of thought that cannot exist elsewhere.
A feel in the air that at once allows me to move but at once circumscribes me in its heaviness.
And there is black.
And red adjacent.
Red and black.
Red and black.
They are side by side.
They exist there together, touching and not touching.
Forever and each day with a thin line only separating them from each other.
The black so black.
The red, bright, like bloodshot eyes.
The black, thick night.
The red, menacing, or joyful, depending on one’s frame of mind.
These two, counterparts in this vicious and pure and beautiful allegory of all that is profound and reasonable. An allegory of union, of opposites, of the communion between that which is true and that which is untrue. Paradox, I believe they call it sometimes. Two alternative realities, competing realities, each one absolute truth.
The red is enclosed within boundaries.
The black is also enclosed.
Shut in. All sides bound. No escape for them, ever.
They will, until this table is destroyed, they will exist encased in that tomb of border, not a speck of color will ever creep over or escape.
***
Coffee. I need to stay awake. Coffee never really helps though. It always feels like it should help, like it will jolt me into awareness at least for a short time, but it never actually does.
It makes me wonder if everyone is just full of shit about this.
Caffeine and just the psychological effect of knowing one is drinking coffee. When one is tired, truly fatigued, exhausted, coffee will never ease that kind of weariness.
Yes, weariness.
I feel weary.
This now is an interesting word. It implies not only a physical but also a mental and emotional end of the line, the moment at which one has been defeated.
I am not defeated.
I am just tired.
What could defeat me here? The gods have been here, on my side for the most part.
These gods, but what are they really?
Figments of my imagination. My stupid imagination that must create largesse out of dearth. These gods do not exist and I know that they do not and yet I succumb to them each evening when I sit down and I convince myself that there is some spirit or wind or some other fucking voice out there who might hear my thoughts when I have them. Who might look down or even look up or all around wherever they are and see me sitting here and say to themselves that woman there will need our help tonight.
That woman is worth our efforts.
She is worth notice, consideration, worth us keeping an eye on the wheel from time to time on her behalf.
She is worth judging.
She is worth even our presence around here even if we are only of her own invention, her own creation of the world around her.
These gods and I always forget to say goddesses too these gods I must come to terms with, or I must at this point in the early hours of the morning I must convince myself that there is still something, anything at all, that truly exists.
***
I’m making terrible mistakes now. Tired mistakes. For example, I just decided to go in all on the inside, chose a few number, but the croupier had to remind me, me! to place the full bet. How embarrassing. As if I were a novice.
I am a novice of sorts.
I am fairly new to this game.
Fairly new, that is, in the scope of the wheel itself, which has been turning for an eternity.
I am new to this table, new to this strange world, new, but then what of this.
I have been here for years.
I’ve been here as long as the wheel itself.
Sitting here with my back aching and my side about to split from tension, I have been here for days, for hours, for centuries, as if I were in a Tolstoy novel, so long ago yet the consciousness expressed so perfectly fits me here today and now, here today with the wheel, this same wheel that The Gambler staked his hopes on, and the same wheel in that one movie I saw, the name is escaping me. What was the name of that film? An old film, I know it perhaps had some fantastic old actor in it, like Cary Grant or Gary Cooper or one of those guys. Cool. Just stepping by and looking at the wheel spinning, or perhaps it wasn’t that old, perhaps it was just the other day that I saw that movie.
I’m losing all track of time.
Time itself cannot exist here because I don’t even know if it is light or dark outside. I still don’t know, though I should know just based on the time on my watch.
But I have been here for years.
And I have been here for minutes.
It is all the same.
It doesn’t matter.
It will never end, and yet will last only a moment.
The croupier will go home for the day, to sleep, to dream, hopefully not of this table and not of this wheel. These people sitting around will leave the table to go and sleep presumably as well. And then they will rise the next day to move on with things, with work and worries and wives and daughters and brothers and sons and grandparents perhaps.
These people will all rise from this table, and I will rise one day too.
I will leave this table one day to find myself among family, among friends, among worries that will consume my mind for a time.
But now, this table.
And I must embrace it, just for these last few minutes, until I cannot stand it any longer and I must leave this chair for good.
***
This thinking is killing me. All the time thinking. One bit of minutia running in to the next until it all bleeds together. That is what is killing me tonight. The thinking is what is destroying my sense of good will, my sense of propriety, my sense of dignity, my understanding of what is important and what, truly, is not.
And now I will think some more. Because it is what I do.
It is what I do sitting here night after night at this table, I sit for hours and I wonder this and then I fantasize about this other thing, and really every night is the same. Every evening the same thoughts. The same needing to urinate or needing to shift or needing to stand or needing to think carefully about what the croupier is wearing.
Every night it is this chair, and the way it feels on my ass, and the way it makes my side ache, and every night it is this felt this green felt which every night I wonder if will just fade a bit while I am sitting here, if perhaps tonight will be the night that it will turn the slightest bit lighter in color from me having brushed my hand along it for so long.
Every night I find the same people obtrusive and the same people boring and the same people intriguing.
Every night the same people are here, the different people but who are really all the same because I am aware fully that they exist only in my imagination. That I invent them. That the world around me, this universe as I call it each night, is entirely of my own creation.
It does not exist. I do not exist, except perhaps how others imagine me.
And this frightens me because am I really the only one who feels this? Am I the only one sitting at any of these tables who understands that we are all here alone, that we are all playacting out the whims of our fantasies having nothing to do with the actualities of the way this person tips his hat or the way that woman scolds her child?
This is sitting here with these people.
I am alone, and they are alone, and the croupier is the most alone because to her, we are probably indeed all of the realities of her life, the stories she tells that are based in absolute truth. The way she can see things in us that we cannot see for ourselves.
***
It is time to be bold. Well at this time of the night it cannot be called bold. It is more a giving up. Or in my case, a letting go.
I will start placing larger bets, in the center, perhaps even rather large stacks all on one number.
And to make it worse, the numbers will mean something to me.
I will choose, for example, my son’s birth month, or the date I was married. Some number that has some significance because that is a sure way to determine that I will not come out ahead.
In fact, it is the time in the night when I desire to walk away with nothing.
I am not here for money.
I am not here for the love of the game.
I am not here because I like the smells or the sounds or even the way this place looks.
I am here to experiment. Yet I cannot even say that to be the truth.
I am here to be alone. This is true.
I am here to see what fate and all the gods have in store for me because I realize that they too are true and real and beyond doubt, and yet they are at the same time unseen and unknowable.
I come here, in fact, I realize perhaps just tonight, I come here for faith. I am here to be faithful to something beyond myself. I am here to place my belief in that which I cannot see, which I have often heard is the definition of the word faith.
I am here for the reversal of fortune that tragic heroes experience in Greek and Shakespearean drama. I am here for the downfall, that epic twist of fate that will leave me penniless, blind, wandering the fields around the city, an exile, at that point in absolute solitude and despair.
I come here for despair, to be put in that frame of mind which saddens me but which I find so beautiful and which I cannot live without.
My life otherwise is much too happy. Too happy to be true. Too happy to last. I cannot bear the fact that outside the boundaries of this table, I am, in the truest sense, content, full of joy. I come to take part in the tragedy of human experience, the faith in unseen forces that are entirely bent on destruction.
I come for balance, for equilibrium, for peace.
***
I just want this night to end now. But I’ve had a bit of bad luck. It hit on eighteen, just when I had several rather valuable chips placed there.
So now I’m up all this money and I can’t walk away.
I should walk away.
I should stand just in that line over there, I can see a man in line there now, he’s wearing jeans and an ungodly large belt buckle, the kind that surely must be painful, must sour the impression a bit because everyone knows the suffering involved in wearing one of those.
And here is what I should do. I should take these chips and stand right there, where the man stood before me after he foolishly walked away, right there where he must have stood directly after leaving me here.
I should leave with these chips instead of placing them on one more number. On one more square. Watch the hand move again to place chips down again and again.
I should leave now but I do not.
I do not leave because I am in a run of bad luck and one should never leave when the gods are looking down in disapproval. One must first gain their favor, first please them and then when the time finally comes to leave then you will go off with good will on your side.
But all of this is shit.
I know it is.
I should take this money and put it in the bank for my son. That is what I should do. Save it for him, for something, for his future or some such thing.
But I am much too selfish.
The table is absorbed in its own universe and I am undoubtedly sucked in as well, a void of dark nothing that renders anything of meaning as null, as not even just insignificant but as nonexistent.
I need to leave this table so I can resume moving about in a world that makes some sort of sense. A world outside these gods and powers that I invent to give this place weight and meaning.
I need to go stand in that line and walk out the door to see if it is yet dawn.
***
I imagine myself now sitting in bed, in my own bed, the need for sleep so heavy in my eyes, but I cannot yet fall asleep so I pull down some novel, perhaps I want to read Gide tonight, The Immoralist just to make myself feel better. Just for some of that French abstract intrigue that makes the mind explode with the joy of thought.
Perhaps I will sit there in my bed, reading this wonderful little volume that I found one day by accident, I happened upon it in a little bookstore, an old, faded copy, the cover pink and yellow, that shade that immediately identifies a book as having been printed in the sixties, the faded colors in truth are faded because so many fingers have run across its edges, so many hands have opened in wonder and amusement, or even in trepidation when it comes to Gide.
The faded book, this faded table, my faded mind now after all this time.
I will put it all to rest in my own bed, with my son down the hall, with the lamp on beside me and the book in my hands, and I will read perhaps a few words until my eyes close involuntarily, and then I will shut the light and I will close my eyes, again, and I will lay my head down and sleep.
Rest.
Think no longer of this place or these people or these chips which now quite thankfully are dwindling.
I will no longer remember this croupier’s face.
I will no longer remember the man who sat here for so long and tormented me and then snidely walked away without so much as a word after all of that.
I will no longer think of fat hands or jeweled hands or of any hands at
all except my own rubbing my eyes in fatigue and petting the soft fur of my cat who will sleep beside me.
***
I can hear some girl’s laugh in the distance. She is loud. Too loud for this place at this time in the morning. She is inappropriate here, looking for attention, which she will no doubt receive from some other annoyance of a person. They will go off together and spend a night feeling each other’s bodies and then they will see each other in the morning, perhaps have breakfast, but then disappear from each other’s lives.
This is what happens in this place.
One arrives.
And one experiences some moment or moments of joy, and then some moments of despair, and then a few more moments of sublime desperation, until in the end one is left with a series of realizations.
Nothing profound. Nothing sublime in the realizations, you see.
The realizations are only felt, like right now I feel distracted, I am away from this table now even as I place my chips, in what I hope will be my final series of motions here.
I am away, my mind is home, my mind is with my cat and my son and my bed and the lamp that is too far away from my bed to turn off without having to get out of bed, and that always annoys me but I do nothing to fix it.
My mind is there, but my body is here, my hands are here.
I am alone at this table with a pile of chips which must be gotten rid of once and for all.
I want to no part of them any longer.
They have become ugly to me, taunting me, teasing me out of time and out of spirit and out of joy and out of sleep.
They taunt me by continuing to multiply, just when I want them all to be forever pulled against their will into that void of darkness under the table from where they will never again see the light.
I want to them to disappear like I have disappeared tonight.
I want the croupier and her hands to disappear from here like I have disappeared tonight from my son and his sweet voice.
I want the lights of this casino to come crashing down all around this table just to solidify, to codify, to seal the destruction of that which has destroyed something in me.