by Rick Moody
“They came this way,” Ranjeet says. “They came here, believing that they were going to be a part of the historic rush for the nuggets of gold.” He picks up a hunk of rose quartz and studies it as if no other piece of rose quartz has ever been found. “I believe I am seeing flecks of gold here. Come quickly and look.”
“The gold rush was later.”
“Fool’s gold is perfectly serviceable. It matters only that I have re-created the anguished journey of Antonio Armijo and his band of sixty, men bent on the promise of the Pacific Ocean, about which they have heard so many things. They have heard of palm trees and coconuts, salacious women, they have heard of the vast western ocean, but here in the desert, they can see none of it. They can find only these glimmering minerals. They can read in the patterns of the rocks their own fates.”
“Aren’t you worried about snakes?”
“The water,” Ranjeet says, “is beneath the floor of the desert. And that is where Rafael Rivera emerges into the story. He is the diviner of rivers and he is an all-important member of the posse of Antonio Armijo. He comes from the ancient family of diviners, which stretches backward through time. Rafael is the finest scout in the history of the Spanish territories, but even so, no one believes he can find water in this parched region. No one knows exactly how he does it, as he has never allowed anyone to see him in the practice of his craft.”
It goes on like this, only more elaborately. Jeanine admires Ranjeet’s hard work and the way he remains kneeling in the sand. Here she is standing by the car, like the women of cinema, who are always to be found with their behinds against the passenger door, perfect hair blowing in the desert winds, each of these women wondering if she’s getting paid enough to offset the inevitable disappointment of life. In any road movie, you can be certain the actress would rather be back in the car than standing outdoors. Everyone would rather be back in the car, moving past the motels and the towns that are no more than a gas station and a general store and a few rusted pickup trucks.
“You could kiss me,” she says, advancing one tiny step away from the car, away from the eight cylinders and the mediocre gas mileage. “That was one of the reasons I came.”
Ranjeet looks up from his hunk of quartz. “I am a Sikh. According to my faith, I regard another man’s daughter as my own daughter and regard another man’s wife as my mother. I have coition with my wife alone. However, we will have a hotel room, to which we are entitled as contractors working for a large television network. In a flush of entitlement, we will embrace, even though I am a married man.”
“Do you have to keep bringing that part up?”
When she kissed Ranjeet by the subway after that uncomfortable dinner, because she was weeping over his son’s beauty and innocence, wasn’t it already apparent that she’d made a big mistake? Hadn’t she made a big mistake when she asked him to take off the turban? Hadn’t she made a mistake when she told her roommate that she’d found a man of honor who probably could do his own laundry and cook fabulous Indian cuisine? Hadn’t she made a mistake by forgetting the good advice about mixing the professional and the personal? Of course the real mistake is to spend five minutes in the condition of longing, because the minute you desire a thing, you and it are lost.
Ranjeet, dusting off his hands, rises, comes to her side, and holds open the car door for her.
The desert ends almost as if there’s a dotted border where the despoilation begins. There’s the desert, and then there are the cookie-cutter ranch houses of the greater metropolitan area and the billboards advertising the local spectacles: a pair of magicians with white tigers, topless dancers, the lowest interest rate of any pawnshop in the city. Jeanine can see the pox of the city in the distance. She can see the cartoon exaggerations of the casinos from here. The sun has dipped its fingertips in the wading pool beyond the horizon, and the chill of desert evening in early winter begins to overcome her. She can feel Ranjeet getting swept up into the gigantic con of the place. The strophes begin anew.
“What Benjamin Siegel recognized,” Ranjeet says, “was the great energy potential. What Benjamin Siegel knew was that every single citizen was either part of the spectacle or part of the audience. There are the two categories of persons, the entertainers and the entertained. According to Benjamin Siegel, his organized-crime syndicate needed to control the entertainment. Indeed, the spectacle must extend outward from a theatrical space until it engulfs the city surrounding! There must be a Strip! Benjamin Siegel came into this place after the right to gamble was secured, which is of course enshrined in your law, and he saw that there had to be spectacle. He did whatever he had to do to find the capital resources necessary to realize his dream, though to do so he lost himself, lost his fantasy to women and beverages which overflowed the very containers in which they were housed.” Then some more about mobsters and about Del Webb, former owner of the New York Yankees, who learned everything he needed to know from the hustle and vigor of the game of baseball.
They’re staying at the Luxor because the Luxor, with its pyramid and its sphinx, is designed to resemble the legal-tender dollar bill of the United States of America. The hotel is large enough to hold an army, and it is full, and people are ambling everywhere in the stunned thrall of casino visitors. It is impossible to feel that one belongs in a place like this, a place that is a giant toilet for flushing away the discernment of consumers. No matter where you go in this city, you pass the pit, and then you must hear the sound of the slot machines, that hypnotic tolling, promising the undeliverable, flushing you away.
The receptionist has a face like a gambler’s dream. Jeanine looks down the long console of the check-in desk, and there are ten or twelve of these women, all of them ripe with erotic promise or fiscal promise, at least until they graduate to the next echelon of global entertainment and power.
“We are here as guests of the Universal Beverages Corporation and, specifically, we are guests of Jeffrey Maiser, the head of network programming for the UBC network. I believe that the Universal Beverages Corporation owns a portion of this hotel, and therefore it is necessary that the luxury suite is to be complimentary for us, and that there will be complimentary chips for gaming purposes, and we are very grateful to accept this honor.”
The model/ actress scarcely blinks because she has heard it all before, every plea, every story. She has welcomed people of extreme penury, as well as arms traders and Saharan warlords. She excuses herself and goes down the line to speak to a manager, who stands by in a rakish suit. The two of them hover over a console, and then the model or actress returns. She brings the bad news. “We’re very sorry for the confusion, but we have no notification from Mr. Maiser or from anyone at Universal Beverages Corporation that your expenses are being taken care of. However, by way of apology, we’re willing to give you a room now, and some complimentary chips, to tide you over while we attempt to straighten out the situation. In the meantime, we’ll just need a credit card to secure the room. We’ll credit your account, of course, once we get the direct-billing issues resolved.”
Ranjeet writhes with discomfort.
“But we were told by one of Mr. Maiser’s staff people that we would be able to —”
“That may be true, of course, but we’ll need a major credit card, at least for the time being.”
Ranjeet looks at Jeanine, as if to plead, Don’t ruin my illusion. And yet Jeanine pretends not to understand this request, just so that she’s not a pushover. Then from her handbag she pulls the Means of Production corporate credit card. Ranjeet seizes the card, presents it to the hotel employee. The hurdle is hurdled, and they are off to the elevators.
“It was very nice of them to present us with these complimentary chips,” Ranjeet says in the elevator. “Have I mentioned to you that I am a very good gambler?”
“You haven’t.”
“Your embraces will create in me the desire to gamble. I’ll order champagne and food for the room, and then you’ll bathe, and I’ll watch you bathe, and
there will be a gentle and spiritual embracing, and these things will make me want to gamble.”
“What kind of gambling do you do?”
“Please guess. If you should guess correctly, you will receive a deluge of embraces.”
“I guess blackjack.”
“Exactly correct.”
The elevator launches them onto their floor, and they make their way down an endless corridor in search of the correct numerical digits. This is the storage bin of the desperate, and, should they open the door to their room, it’s as if an agreement has been reached. Their last chance to resist the spectacle will have evaporated.
The room is sweet and quiet, and in it there’s no hint of the madness that lies below, except perhaps in the oxygen-rich air. Jeanine is feeling a little better, though every minute alone in a room with Ranjeet reinforces the fact that he is avoiding making love with her. While she doesn’t exactly think that a married man should be making love with her, he did embrace her by the subway station, and she did stay late in the office with him watching television that one night, and she could feel that he was aroused then, that she caused a stirring in him and does still, so why should there be this unanswered question? He seems to want to make love sometimes, and then other times he seems not to want to, and this is how it goes again, when he starts the water for her and pours the capful of bubble bath under the open tap. He says that he is going to telephone for champagne and he closes her into the bathroom.
After she has taken off most of her clothes, she makes the decision to entice Ranjeet, in her lingerie, and this is perhaps more evidence of the oxygen-rich delirium of the place. She’s a woman covered with burn scars, and she is in her lingerie, and she’s hypnotized into believing that this is the moment when she will be known in her complexity as a woman who is loyal and a woman who is covered with scars, a woman who is a little turned on, a woman who wants to make love at least once in a while in the arms of someone enthusiastic and caring, in the arms of someone who wants her in return, and who, in wanting her, creates the same in herself, the condition of wanting, which is who she thought Ranjeet was when he first appeared in the office, when he first began unreeling his strophes as though they were written on scrolls. This is the moment, and Ranjeet can make what he wants out of it, and what he makes out of it will be an indicator of the state of play, and the water is thundering in the tub, and the water turns her on a little bit, actually, she has occasionally used it in the project of self-satisfaction, and she looks at herself in the mirror, which is beginning to steam up, and she determines that she is not fat, that she is genuinely attractive, if not perfectly beautiful, and any guy would be lucky to have her, and she determines that yes, she is going to go out and seduce him, because that’s the kind of place this is.
The door to the bathroom eases shut behind her, and the rush of the bathwater recedes. She finds that her Indian lover is sitting on the edge of the bed in nothing but his socks, and he is attempting to touch himself in impure ways, and this might be good, this might be part of the contagious sin of Las Vegas, except there’s a problem. If he were aroused, he might be touching himself with abandon and delighting in it, and she might think it was okay, even with the socks, because he was maybe planning on sneaking into the bathroom or something, leaning her over the sink, but here he is, trouble twice over, because he’s not sneaking into the bathroom, and he can’t seem to get himself aroused at all, and also he is crying; Ranjeet is trying to masturbate, and he’s wearing only black socks, which is the biggest fashion faux pas ever, and he’s saying something about praying to God and that the true Sikh shall make “an honest living by lawful work,” and he is saying that “all food and water are, in principle, clean, for these life-sustaining substances are provided by Him,” and he’s saying that love is the state of a “single soul in two bodies” and that the woman should “ever harbor for her husband a deferential solicitude and regard him as the lord and master of her love.” And after saying all these devotional things, he adds, “Please tell me what it is we are doing here.”
Jeanine kneels by the side of the bed, against his leg, looking up at him. And what happens is that he sees the scars, the scars that he, like everyone else, seems to forget about, because of the long sleeves, and he grabs her arm roughly and he looks at the scars. “You are a woman who has been injured. I have another woman at home who is injured, and that woman is devoted to me, for her I performed matrimonial circumambulations, and I have not honored the marriage that I said I was going to honor. Now what is to become of me?” But instead of pushing her away or telling her that she must dress, he begins to kiss the scars and he says, “I must kiss these scars, because if I kiss the scars then I will have paid back what I have plundered.” And he begins to kiss the scars, and she lets him kiss the scars for a while, and it’s okay, although sometimes when people kiss the scars it reminds her of the burn ward.
In the long run, nothing is going to happen just from the kissing of the scars. He has to kiss her somewhere besides the scars. She pushes Ranjeet back on the bed, and she removes the socks from his feet, and she now gazes upon what turn out to be his incredibly beautiful feet. Most guys have bits of sock fuzz nestled between the toes, and most guys don’t clip their toenails enough, or their toenails are mottled with fungus. But Ranjeet’s feet look as though he’s spent his life walking on pillows. How could he have worn socks over feet so beautiful?
“I’m going to . . . let me . . .”
Ranjeet says no, no, no, but he’s still lying on his back, covering his eyes, and she takes the little shriveled thing into her mouth, as if it’s string cheese, and she tries to make something happen, and the minutes pass, and she gives it all the determination she can give it, but maybe she’s just not so good at this kind of thing or maybe he’s thinking of his wife. She has heard that adultery is meant to be electrifying, but it turns out to be tawdry and dull, like life in a casino, and so she just kisses him once softly on the thigh and then gets up and retreats to the bathroom.
By now, the bubbles are halfway up the wall. It’s a big tub and it still hasn’t filled. All of this romantic failure is revenge for her foolishness. Her foolishness for coming out here, for driving eight hours across the desert, like all the other people who came across this desert, believing there was anything genuine here. The people who came to enrich Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano or their heirs. The people who came because a flamingo is good luck or who came because Frank Sinatra performed here and bullied a dealer who dealt from a shoe. She’s more foolish, because she knows better.
She leans back in the tub and steadies herself with one hand, and she walks her feet up the wall a little bit, trying not to eat any soap bubbles, until the tap is trickling down upon her, and she’s in some grotto of moisture and disillusionment, where she belongs, for all her foolishness, and if she comes, she’ll just feel worse about it, but that seems like what she deserves. When the door opens, she doesn’t turn to look, she just lets the tap do what the tap will do, and she lets her fingers knead her, and so there are two of them there, with their dashed hopes, in some casino out in the middle of nowhere, trying to come up with a story that they can sell to the television executives in Los Angeles, and the two of them can’t even get an arm around each other where it means anything, she thinks, feeling her legs trembling, but she shouldn’t think about it at all, she should concentrate on thinking about nothing, she should concentrate on the sound of water, if she thinks about him, she’ll just get distracted, so she just keeps at it, and she thinks that there’s nothing to look forward to at all and that the whole story is built on lies and misrepresentations, the miniseries, and the office in New York, and her friendships there. She hasn’t made a good decision in three months. She thought she was being prudent, and it turns out she wasn’t prudent even once. She was always getting ready to do what she is doing right now, which is to blow everything in such a spectacular way, and this is when she hears Ranjeet at the sink, saying her name, blessin
g her a thousand times and promising all kinds of crazy things, saying that she is the One Timeless Being, promising that he will give her a half dozen children and that he will jump into a fire for her, and what he’s saying sets off some kind of chain reaction in her head, and when that part is over, she flings herself backward into the bubble bath, so that her feet are periscopes and the rest of her is immersed.
After dinner, Ranjeet and Jeanine head for the gaming pit.
There’s a whole method to selecting a proper table at which to play blackjack, according to Ranjeet, and this method involves divination. The first requirement is that there can be no other player at the table. As they are in Las Vegas on a Wednesday night, and as they have arrived at the pit with little left to say to each other, they go in search of the table that has no players, where the cards are fanned out in front of the dealer like plumage. However, Ranjeet can’t find a dealer whom he likes. He doesn’t want to reckon with a white dealer because, he observes, in a strophe of remarkable bile, the white dealers have contempt for immigrants. “There are a billion of us from India in the world,” he says, “and there are more than a billion of the Chinese persons. Do these salaried employees not think that we are going to come here and overrun this land? We are coming to overrun it, and we are going to remake it in our image, with our beliefs, our ethics. Why do you think there are so many Japanese here in the casino? And so many Chinese? Here in the casino? Because we are coming for your country. We will dispossess you because it pleases us to do so.” And he’s right; the rest of America, those who are not in a private suite with Mercurio or Lacey, looks like the rest of the globe. Ranjeet walks nervously around the tables reserved for blackjack until he finds the one African American dealer, the dealer avoided by the rest of the players, the dealer with the gleaming skull made perfect with some waxy stuff, and then Ranjeet sits in the fifth seat and he lays down the complimentary chips, failing to offer even a single chip to Jeanine. They wait for the dealer to finish his ritual of shuffling.