by Daniel Mason
This is how I wound up back at the roulette. I attended simply as a spectator, not a competitor. The spectator role has never been unfamiliar to me. For most of my life I have existed not as an active participant, but as an observer.
Besides, I had no weapon to take to the game with me. In a foreign country you’ll find it difficult to get your hands on a lot of things, weapons included.
I studied the faces of the men who had gathered in the roulette hall, watching their every subtle movement. When a gun went off, I would not watch the man pulling the trigger, but instead I would focus on a member of the crowd and wait to see if they flinched at the suddenness of the explosion. Every man had his own reaction. I saw men flinch, I saw men wince in imaginary pain, I saw some open their eyes wide with terror, I saw others stare blankly as if no emotion registered with them at all.
There were a lot of Westerners gathered here and I noticed that most of them did their best to keep to themselves. More Westerners competed than Vietnamese. The Vietnamese were keen watchers and gamblers. They would often cheer at the end of a match, like fans at a football game. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were cheering the stupidity of the Western men.
I moved among the crowd unnoticed. It was necessary to have a drink at all times. I doubt whether I might have been able to handle a place like that in full sobriety. With a drink and a cigarette I could sit off to one side in the smoke and shadows and the rest of the room seemed like a hallucination, viewed through a piss-yellow filter.
To see a man blow his brains out isn’t as shocking as it might sound to some. We’ve just about all seen it before on the television. I was a child during the Vietnam War and I remember the images on my television screen and on newspaper covers. Soldiers leaping from helicopters under fire. Little peasant girls wandering naked and bloody down devastated streets. Jimi Hendrix, ‘Machine Gun’ playing over it all.
It’s hard to come to terms with the fact that the war actually happened, when all you’ve ever known it to be was images on a screen and words on a page.
Two matches down for the night and another two to go. In a way, it didn’t surprise me that eight men were willing to risk their lives in a game like this. There was money involved, of course. There’s always money. It has a habit of making the world go round.
For me, it wasn’t about the money. I’d caught a glimpse of something my first time round that I wanted to see again. It was my desire to be filled with that sensation again: watching a man die, feeling the thrill rush through your body.
I went outside for some fresh air. There was an entry fee at the door but you could get a stamp so you didn’t have to pay on re-entry, just like a nightclub. The stamp didn’t say anything legible, though, so when bodies were discovered with the stamp on their arm it made no real sense to the authorities.
The burly men standing by the double doors gave a nod and let me out into the cool night. It had rained earlier in the evening and I could still catch the wet scent in the air.
The warehouse was in a narrow street lined with uncollected trash. There had been a homeless boy here when I had arrived, scavenging for food. With the warehouse doors closed behind me it was hard to hear anything of what went on inside. The building was not soundproofed, but around us there were nothing but other empty warehouses or factories, so there was nobody to listen to the gunblasts except for the destitute.
When it came, the blast sounded like it might only have been a rock thrown into a stack of garbage cans in a nearby alley.
I lit a cigarette. The double doors opened behind me and I could hear the hiss of the crowd, and a thin man with long matted hair emerged from the haze. The doors were shut behind him and we were left alone in the moonlight. The man was nothing more than a silhouette when he approached me and asked for a cigarette. His accent was thick Australian.
‘Fuckin’ madhouse in there,’ he said. He was young, maybe no more than twenty. I watched him as he struck a match and lifted it to the cigarette that I had surrendered. His face contorted in horror as he drew on the cigarette, and he spat and said, ‘Jesus, what the fuck is this?’
‘It’s an Asian brand,’ I explained, feeling a slight stab of shame at that confession. I’d noticed that nobody smoked the Asian brand but Hayes. I couldn’t figure out why he’d lied, why he’d converted me from Western cigarettes.
The Aussie laughed and turned away. ‘You crazy cunt, nobody smokes that shit. Gonna take me ages to wash that fuckin’ taste out of my mouth.’ He followed the wall of the warehouse to a nearby downpipe where water dripped from the guttering. He stood beneath it with his mouth open, head tilted back, swallowing what water he could, moisture spilling over his forehead and into his knotted hair.
I didn’t see what he’d done with the cigarette. It seemed a perfectly good waste, to me.
The Aussie and I never exchanged names. In places like that, you’re better off nameless.
He’d been doing the Asia backpacking thing. It was what all of the young hip travel magazines told him he should do. He told me that he’d stumbled onto the roulette by accident. Another traveller introduced him to it, said it was an easy way to make some money. A week later that traveller lost his visa and shipped out. The Aussie stayed. He told me there was an attraction to the roulette that was more than the money he could win. ‘It’s the thrill of it,’ he said. ‘That knowledge of five chances at safety and one at death. The risk, it gets my blood pumping. When I play a game, I feel like I can do anything.’
He told me that he wrote poetry and showed me a notebook that he carried around in his tote bag. I read the first poem, which consisted of two lines:
A girl rings at two in the morning and she says,
I might be pregnant.
I laugh and tell her that she’s going to need a
coathanger, the malleable metal kind.
I told him that I was impressed. I said, ‘It’s very pro-choice.’
He flipped through his book looking for another snippet that he could share with me, his hair hanging in his face and the tip of his tongue sticking out between his lips.
The next one read:
A young man tells me that he’s been sentenced to two months imprisonment.
I instruct him on how best to make a noose from a bedsheet.
I read it and said, ‘Not as catchy as the first one. Doesn’t grab me.’
He said, ‘Okay. Okay, yeah.’
He flipped through his book some more, showing me tiny illustrations of mushrooms and people trapped in bubbles. Most of his characters looked as if they desperately wanted to escape the pages. I ashed my cigarette onto an open page of his book.
There was one page in his book that caught me. It showed Death in a flowing black robe, not wielding a scythe but holding a six-shooter like a cowboy, and I knew without being able to see, that there was only one bullet in that gun.
At the bottom of the page, in the shadow of Death, were scrawled the words:
I wake in the night
And I don’t know what to do
I lay in my bed
And I’m sick with the thought of you.
A week later I was at the roulette as a player. I came home with blood and brains on my shirt and told Phoebe that a bird had crashed through the window of the taxi I’d been riding in. She’d been out shopping that morning when I found the cardboard box in a cupboard in the spare room. It contained two pistols, six-shooters. I had no idea where Hayes had obtained the weapons. Their serial numbers had been filed down and neither seemed more identifiable than the next.
Just like faces in a roulette match.
When I took the second and last of my weapons to the next roulette match, the Aussie said to me, ‘Do you know how hard it is to get your hands on a weapon in this country?’
I could sympathise with him on the task. Since players were required to bring their own weapons, week after week we were struggling to find a six-shooter. I’d have been unable to play a game that nig
ht if I hadn’t found the box with the guns.
He said, ‘What do you reckon they do with all of these guns after the night?’
I said, ‘Get rid of them, I’d imagine.’ Hayes had told me that the weapons were bundled in a sack and tossed off bridges into swamps or rivers. A different place every time, just like disposing of bodies. I wondered how functional a gun might be after it had been sitting in the mud at the bottom of a river for several months. The firing pin wouldn’t work.
Across the room from us a gunshot rang out and a man hit the floor. I cursed the Aussie for distracting me. They were already dragging the body away and leaving a wet red trail.
I cracked my knuckles and fished a cigarette from the packet in my pocket.
The Aussie was still musing. ‘We should find out what they do with all of these guns.’
‘Follow them,’ I said, lighting my cigarette.
‘What?’
‘Follow the weapons. After the night is over. Watch where they go.’ It seemed pretty obvious to me. I inhaled a lungful of smoke. ‘These guys are going to get rid of the weapons as soon as the night is over. They probably drive out somewhere and throw them into a lake before they go home to their wives and their beds.’ I exhaled smoke into his face.
He said, ‘Do you have a car?’
I thought about it, and realised, as a matter of fact, I did. I’d been driving Hayes’ car, using his licence. I licked my lips, ashed onto the table, gave him a smile. ‘I do.’
That night I won my match with only one pull of the trigger from me. I lost the toss and the bullet was in the second chamber. It was like that coin was more pivotal to your survival than the empty chambers themselves. When my opponent died I felt that warm rush as his blood tapped my face and hands. His leg twitched on the floor as he lay dead.
The Aussie played a game down to the fifth chamber. Later, sitting in the dark car outside the warehouse, he said to me, ‘Man, that one was wild.’ He was animated, riding the high. ‘That’s a rush, man. Unbelievable.’ He slapped the dashboard.
I sat low in my seat and watched the exits. There were two cars parked outside the warehouse, and we were sitting further along the street away from the lights. It was nearing two in the morning. If we had coffee and doughnuts this would have been just like a stakeout.
There was a splash of light as the double doors opened and three men came out carrying boxes and bags. One stayed behind to lock the doors and the other two crossed the parking lot to the cars. The bodies had already been taken for disposal.
The Aussie said, ‘Which car do we follow?’
‘Flip a coin,’ I told him. In the darkness it was impossible to tell what the men were loading into each car.
‘Heads for the one on the left.’
‘Tails.’
We followed the car on the right, keeping our distance in an attempt to remain inconspicuous. The taillights burned into my mind.
The car slowed on a bridge under bright streetlights. There was only one occupant. He idled there, perhaps waiting for us to pass. The Aussie said to me, ‘Ram him. Let’s ram him.’
I shrugged and jammed my foot on the accelerator like a racecar driver.
We came speeding in alongside the idling car and I thrust the wheel hard toward it. The sound of rending metal and shattering glass filled my ears. The hood of our car crumpled toward us in a series of small waves. Steam rose from the engine. I stared through the window at the man next to us, fumbling with his seatbelt, his car jammed up against the bridge railing. The nose of our car pushed the frame of his own inward, pinning him in place. He was struggling to climb out through the open window.
‘What if he has a gun?’ the Aussie was asking me.
‘Shut up,’ I said. I pulled our car around and pushed open the door, leaving the engine running, listening to the car hiss and squeal. ‘Let’s get this over with,’ I said.
The Aussie was busy inspecting the damage to our car when I pulled the Vietnamese man through the window. He was babbling incoherently and I was unable to determine whether he was expressing fear or anger. I slapped him and said, ‘We just want the guns. Where are they?’ I looked over his shoulder into the car and saw nothing. Shoving him roughly aside I pulled his keys from the ignition and went to the trunk of the car. Inside there was a canvas sack containing around a dozen weapons. I slung it over my shoulder.
The Vietnamese man was cowering where I had dumped him.
The Aussie was coming up behind me, saying, ‘What do we do with him?’
I shrugged.
The Aussie said, ‘Should we kill him? Knock him out?’
‘Throw him off the bridge,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Throw him off the bridge. Hurry it up.’
The Aussie looked at me, bewildered, and he said, ‘Uh, I don’t think I’ll be strong enough.’
I said, ‘For fuck’s sake. Hold this.’ I gave him the sack and leaned in close to the Vietnamese man, who began to babble again and struggle against my grip. I said to the Aussie, ‘You’re always strong enough when the rush comes on this hard.’
I gripped the man under the armpit and by the collar, and heaved him against the bridge railing. The water twenty-five feet below gave a dull reflection of the streetlight above us. The man was kicking my shins and I slapped him again, then heaved. He clutched at my shirt and there was the sound of tearing fabric as his weight jerked me forward and he fell out into open space.
He plunged, half of my shirt waving in his hand, as he receded from my vision and then splashed.
‘Bastard,’ I muttered.
I hurried back to the car with the sack of weapons bouncing against my shoulder.
The sound of bone crunching, being shattered and grinding against other bone fragments. That’s something that sticks in my mind. I remember his hands when they were done: the disproportionate knuckles, fingers twisted at inhuman angles twitching.
Brutality is not a man blowing his brains out the side of his head. Brutality is what they do to you when you refuse to play the game. When you sign for a game, it’s a contract. Hayes forged my signature for my first game, but I didn’t know that. Even if I had gone with my first instincts to back out of that game, they wouldn’t have let me. I was bound to it.
It didn’t matter now that I was signing into my games under Hayes’ name. The names on the ledger didn’t really belong to anybody in particular, anyway. One night I played a game with James Dean, and another with Donald Duck. You weren’t your name. I was signing Hayes, and the Aussie was Aussie. All you were was a finger on a trigger, a brain about to explode.
Addiction is when you go out of your way to obtain what you need for your fix, and nothing else matters. I was in a room full of men addicted to the game. Long-term players, veterans. Survivors. They came back for their own reasons, the money or the thrill.
The Aussie had an addiction to the game, but I could see it was wearing him down.
He said to me, ‘I’m sick of the effort it takes me to get a gun in this country.’
I told him, ‘You should have some spares, surely.’
He said, ‘What? Do you think I can get my hands on more than one at a time?’ He laughed.
I said, ‘Well, we grabbed a few the other night, remember? Don’t tell me you’ve gone through them all already?’
He said, ‘What? What are you talking about?’
I couldn’t tell if he was playing dumb. I said, ‘The other night, on the bridge.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ the Aussie told me.
‘You were there.’
‘You must be thinking of somebody else,’ he said, turning away.
I shrugged. Maybe I was thinking of somebody else.
The Aussie said that he had a bad feeling about his next match and wasn’t going to go through with it. He was a man who believed strongly in ‘feelings’. He was smoking a cigarette and there was sweat at his temples in clustered beads. His hair was t
ied back with a piece of twine. He had shaved that morning and the skin at the curve of his jaw was reddened with dry irritation. He said, ‘Not this game, it doesn’t feel right. I’m out. I don’t wanna do this.’
I crunched ice from my empty glass between my teeth. I’d never seen anybody bail out of a match so far. It seemed cowardly. I told him, ‘There’s nothing to worry about. Don’t back away from death, it’s such a part of you.’
‘Nah,’ he said, pushing away from the table. ‘I’m gonna speak with someone about this.’
These nights are run by nameless officials who work for an also unnamed criminal organisation. They take care of the books, the betting, the tabs, the bullets.
The Aussie had a quiet word to one of the officials who sat at the desk. I watched frantic hand movements and frowns on faces. The official was pointing to an open book on the desk and the Aussie was shaking his head, saying no. The official gave a shrug and the Aussie turned away, swearing. I could make out the words by the movement of his lips.
Tonight the roulette was taking place in the basement of a restaurant in Binh Thanh.
I could still smell fried onions and there were traces of flour covering the floor. Most of the floor space in the basement here had been cleared. There were barrels and sacks stacked beside an industrial freezer at the far end of the room.
The Aussie returned to the table and slammed his drink down hard. Ice rattled against the glass. He exhaled over his upper lip and a loose strand of hair floated briefly upward, then settled again against his forehead and clung there to the sweat.
He said, ‘Stupid fucking gook.’
I leaned closer toward him. ‘Are you in, or are you out?’
‘I’m out, I’m not doing this.’
‘Did they agree with that?’ I asked, nodding toward the registration desk, where three of the officials had gathered and were talking furiously.