Rush

by Daniel Mason

  ‘No,’ he replied quietly, and if I hadn’t known what he was going to say before he said it, I’d have had to ask him to repeat himself over the din surrounding us. Full house tonight, a lot of people packed into a small room. A lot of body heat and sweat and blood and brains ready to take a bullet. He said, ‘I’m so tired.’

  ‘How long have you been playing this game for?’ I asked him.

  He shrugged. ‘Couple of weeks. Not long. My visa runs out soon.’

  ‘Have you ever seen anybody back out of a game?’

  ‘No. You?’

  ‘Nope.’ There had been a cigarette sitting behind my ear and I removed it and placed the filtered end against my lips. There can be upwards of thirty-seven thousand different chemicals in a single cigarette. Smoking when pregnant may harm your unborn child. Smoking when pregnant may enhance your surging tumour.

  The Aussie said, ‘So you don’t know what these guys do if you decide to back out?’

  Across the room another player was already seated for the impending match. Walking toward us were two officials, looking a little more than slightly pissed off. They might have been twins wearing the same suits and expressions.

  I said, ‘I have a feeling we’re about to find out. Just a hunch.’

  They pointed to the Aussie and they said, ‘You.’

  The Aussie looked up at them with a frown, as if they were interrupting an important conversation, and he said, ‘I told you I’m not playing this one.’ He reminded me of a sulking child, arms folded protectively around his drink.

  ‘You play,’ the officials said. Their faces might have been carved from wood.

  The Aussie shook his head firmly and did not look them in the eye. One of the men turned and he waved to somebody near the entrance, a quick flick of the wrist. The Aussie didn’t seem to notice this swift exchange. I tugged uncomfortably at the collar of Hayes’ tattered jacket that I had taken to wearing.

  Casually, I said, ‘It’s getting hot in here.’

  One of the officials turned his stony gaze toward me. I nodded and smiled and puffed on my cigarette. He turned away.

  Two large men appeared beside the officials as they repeated, ‘You play.’

  The Aussie looked over the two cumbersome newcomers and shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘You sign. You play.’ They produced the registration book and waved it as evidence, as if it were a binding legal contract.

  ‘I don’t care,’ the Aussie said. ‘I take that signature back. I don’t want to play anymore.’ It showed in his face that he knew that signature sealed his fate.

  The lead official gave the signal and the two large men leaned in. They placed a hand on each of the Aussie’s shoulders, and he flinched backward as they each took an arm with the other hand and jerked him to his feet. He struggled, though not fiercely, and said, ‘Don’t touch me.’

  He was dragged to the middle of the room, to the gaming table. He began to struggle with more ferocity as he neared the table, kicking and protesting. He was forced roughly into a chair. By now most of the other faces in the room were turned to this spectacle. I watched without getting up, sitting at the edge of my seat and smoking my cigarette, warily glancing at one of the officials who stood beside me anticipating a move. Our eyes met, I smiled and said, ‘Hello.’

  I looked to the gaming table, and there was the one-eyed fat man from the Rex Hotel talking with one of the officials. The Aussie sat there defeated, held in place by a larger official. The one-eyed man was waving his hands in the air, and then he seemed to shrug and lean in over the Aussie.

  I remembered what Hayes had told me about the man owning several gas stations and running underground boxing rackets. The one-eyed man held a commanding presence.

  He was also holding a hammer.

  The room fell silent as one official held the struggling Aussie’s hand by the wrist and placed it shaking against his resistance on the surface of the table. The Aussie tried to ball his fist but the way his wrist was held seemed to pressure a nerve that splayed his fingers. He was trying to pull himself away from the table but another man held him in place. The one-eyed man loomed with the hammer, and he was saying, ‘You no wan’ play? You no play?’

  The Aussie was twitching with fear. He mumbled, ‘I’ll play, I’ll play.’

  The one-eyed man chuckled. ‘You play, aw’ight. You play.’

  The hammer came down and the crowd collectively winced and the Aussie howled. I cracked a broad smile. The hammer came up again, and down. Snap, crackle, pop. I wanted to laugh and at the same time I just wanted to be sick. Over the noise of the crowd I could hear the flesh being pounded, the bones beneath turning to dust.

  It might have gone on for a minute, or maybe two. I was focused solely on the horrific scene at the centre of the room before me. When it was over I felt myself draw breath.

  The Aussie collapsed sideways in his chair when they let him go. He clutched at his shattered hand, trembling and sweating, eyes glazed with pain.

  But they weren’t finished with him. The one-eyed man dropped the hammer and then reached for the pistol held by one of the nearby officials. He flipped open the chamber and fumbled in the pocket of his pants, the sound of loose bullets like rattling change. He selected a bullet and pressed it into the weapon, spun the chamber, and then held the gun to the whimpering head of the Aussie.

  He pulled the trigger.

  The one-eyed fat man from the Rex Hotel who owned several gas stations and liked to use hammers to coerce people against their will, was called Tien Van Son, and he was a gangster who took a bullet the week after he held a gun to the Aussie’s head. The Aussie wasn’t seen again. I presume his visa ran out after all.

  Tien Van Son was shot in an Interpol raid that shut down the Russian roulette racket. They stormed us one night in an empty factory and arrested most of the men there. Turns out they had been onto the operation for several months, following a lead involving the death of a young British tourist named Richie.

  Character profile: Richie. Dark curly hair, cockney accent, nose like a boxer. Now Richie had a problem with cards, which also meant that he had a problem with money. He dealt with this in two ways, the first of which was relatively simple—he lied. Sometimes he could even get away with it, but most of the time he came out with bruises on his face. Debt hung around his neck like some kind of noose, just waiting to yank him off his feet. The handsome face of his youth was scarred—a bent nose and a sloping eye, signs of abuse at the hands of debt collectors. The way that Richie figured it, nobody was going to kill him. They needed his money, and he always paid up eventually anyway.

  The second way that he dealt with his problems was to steal, and sometimes that was a bigger problem than the gambling and the debt put together. On more than one occasion it had led to a beating worse than any debt collector could ever give. When his mother asked about the cuts and bruises which so often marked him, Richie would tell her that he got into a fight. That’s all there ever was to say.

  His father had been a card man, and lost his job when he kept skipping work for games. The money was bigger in cards anyway, Jerome used to tell his wife. Who needs that job? Richie could always tell when his old man had won, because the cupboards were stocked high with food and there was a roast in the oven that night. But there were plenty of nights when they went hungry, too. His mother didn’t like it, but she never once complained when the money was good, either. The luck fluctuates, Jerome used to say. You have your good days, you have your bad. He was always contradicting himself. For as long as Richie could remember, his father had sworn that cards weren’t about luck. It was all about skill.

  Jerome Young had his son playing hearts at age seven, just to pass the time. Richie had all the tricks down by age ten, and he could play with the best of sharks by age twelve. Jerome died of a heart attack when Richie was just fourteen, dropping dead in the living room after dinner one cold night.

  So for the next three years Richie made a livin
g off his father’s game, and he got himself into a lot of trouble. Richie’s problem was cards, and he liked to bet high. He liked to gamble with people who lost their temper when they didn’t get paid. Dangerous men play dangerous games, and poker can be dangerous under the right circumstances. Richie knew this and then he wound up dead, because of his debts.

  He made some bets he couldn’t keep. The boys he’d been betting with were the kind of guys who’d tear out your fingernails and cut off your balls before they killed you, just for the fun of it. So Richie figured, either way, he was a dead man. He had a week to pay up, and he’d already been beaten shitless. He skipped out of town with some money he’d borrowed, not much, left London behind him, telling his girlfriend he’d be hiding out in Asia for about six months, and that he would contact her from there. And Richie found himself in Vietnam, and he heard about a game that could get him the money he needed to clear himself. A game for all-comers, the only requirement being that you bring an umarked gun.

  He entered himself in a competition and bet heavily with all the money left to his name.

  Richie wound up with a bullet in the head, and that’s about as much as I know of the kid. I know that, and I know that he spoiled my fun. His ghost. He came back to haunt when Interpol found his body and traced it back to the roulette competition with enough evidence to close it down for good.

  Fuck you, Richie.

  Interpol raided during the first match that night. Before the body of a player could hit the floor, doors were kicked in and windows shattered. The men who stormed the building were all wearing kevlar vests and protective helmets. They held their firearms up high, their lines of sight fixed along the barrels. A voice boomed and told everybody to remain still, keep your hands where we can see them, put your weapons down.

  The voice was in English and then repeated in Vietnamese.

  The doormen were armed and they took a round each and went down firing. I saw this from the factory office, where I had gone to sign the registration book. I was standing there in front of big double interior windows, staring across the factory floor as they started arresting people.

  Outside there were the sounds of sirens and helicopters booming in the night. Shots were fired as warnings to deliberately miss the men who tried to run. Tien Van Son, the gangster, started firing madly before he was shot. He hit two agents before he went down.

  In the office, I went unnoticed with one of the roulette officials. He whispered to me in Vietnamese and I couldn’t understand him. He was prying open the window at the far side of the room. We were on the second floor and he didn’t seem to mind risking the jump.

  I watched as he leapt from the window and landed below on loose gravel. He rolled and came to his feet running, didn’t look back.

  I went to the desk and found the drawer filled with weapons. There were eighteen six-shooters sitting there, unmarked, unidentifiable. I stroked them for a second, then took off my jacket, laying it flat and open on the desk. I hurriedly grabbed the weapons, piling them onto my jacket, and then bundled them up, tying the sleeves tightly around them. I stuffed a box of bullets into my pocket and they rattled against my thigh as I went to the window.

  Behind me there were footsteps like thunder on the stairs.

  I took a deep breath, and jumped. I held the jacket full of weapons above my head as I fell. For a brief moment there was nothing. Nothing but emptiness all around me. I rolled upon landing and stumbled to my feet. I looked back up at the window, a glowing rectangle in the night above me, and I felt a brief desire to do that jump again. I ran into the night.

  Without the roulette I began to feel much less alive. Robbed of purpose. Drained. Slow moving, weak, and dying. Days passed slowly like dreams. All I did was think of the game as I sat watching television. I didn’t have much else to do. Unless I felt like being a tourist. My visa had expired anyway, and you can’t be a tourist without a visa. It’s illegal.

  It was back to that routine of aimlessness, looking for the road again, unable to find it.

  Phoebe would talk a lot, sitting there as I focused on the television, watching my imaginary roulette competition. I smoked cigarettes and blew the smoke into her face as she leaned over me, talking endlessly. She would say, ‘Hayes, why don’t we go to Hanoi for the day?’ Between blasts of my smoke, she would say, ‘Do you think these shoes match my skirt? Do you think they missed a spot in this dye job?’

  Sometimes it was all too much and I’d go to the airport bar and listen to flight announcements and order drinks on Hayes’ tab. What I tried to do was watch the tourists and see in them what Hayes saw in me. But to my eyes there were nothing but tired faces and slouching shoulders. I’d sit there for hours and smoke until my mouth went numb.

  I was using Hayes’ identification and living in his apartment with his girlfriend and wearing his clothes, and one day there was a knock at the door and Phoebe had gone shopping again, so I answered it. There was a white man in a suit with a Russian accent standing in the doorway.

  He said, ‘Are you Hayes?’

  I said, ‘Yes,’ and he broke my nose.

  I collapsed in the doorway holding my bleeding nose, my tumour flaring.

  I said, ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ It sounded like, ‘Whad da fud ib wong ib oo?’

  Looming over me, the Russian said, ‘I’ve come for the money.’

  I coughed a thick wad of blood into my cupped palms. ‘What money?’

  The Russian knelt and grabbed me by the collar of Hayes’ shirt. ‘Van Son may be dead, but you still owe us the money. We don’t forget debts and death won’t cancel them.’

  I said the oldest line in the book, and how true it was. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  The Russian jerked me to my feet. ‘You owe us money, Hayes. It’s overdue. This is your only warning.’ He let me go and I fell back to the floor, bleeding, head pounding, eyes watering. I could taste the blood running down the back of my throat now.

  ‘Who are you?’

  The Russian smirked. ‘Associates of Van Son. Your debt to him is a debt to us. Pay within the week, or you’ll regret it.’

  I said, ‘I’m already beginning to regret it.’

  ‘Nothing personal,’ he said, kneeling beside me. ‘The business I’m in is all about economics. I cancel debts. You pay us what you owe, and I take out the interest on your body. A finger, maybe two. Maybe a kneecap, da? But you don’t want to push me into the heavy numbers. You don’t pay up and I trade a bullet for a human life. Your life. You understand?’

  Then he was gone.

  I crawled back into the apartment with the door wide open, still bleeding. I leaned back against a wall and lit a cigarette, leaving bloody fingerprints on the thin white-papered roll. I experienced difficulty in drawing breath enough to inhale the smoke.

  After the cigarette I wandered dazed to the bedroom and rifled through a drawer until I found what I was looking for. The syringes came in packets, the actual needle separate from the tube. You had to tear open the two separate packets and attach the two pieces. Hayes kept the testosterone gel in the bathroom. It’s prescription stuff, very expensive.

  I stood hunched over the sink in the bathroom, looking at my bloodied face in the mirror. My eyes were bloodshot, teeth pink, nose purple.

  I reached for the gel.

  I hooked myself up with a spike.

  The rush comes inside of a minute and it hits you like you’re sitting on train tracks. You’re one of those damsels in distress tied to the railway line, only this time the train hits you and it sweeps you off your feet. No, it’s like the train itself is coursing through your veins. No, it’s like you are the train and the world is a tunnel you’re shooting through.

  No, it’s like—

  It’s like, wow.

  That scene at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, it’s like that. It’s an awakening.

  Okay, it’s true that too much testosterone can cause liver damage and prostate trouble
, but it isn’t like those are major concerns to me when I’ll be dead before they kick in. It’s also true that it’s an addictive substance. I told myself if I was riding a testosterone high I could have beaten that Russian to a pulp inside of a minute. After a week I told myself I was not addicted to this high, and it worried me all the same that the prescription was going to run out pretty soon at the rate I took to using.

  In the spare room Hayes kept a set of weights and I started pumping iron during the high, which was all the time. The sensation of my muscles rippling and the testosterone pumping through my blood was like bliss. I increased the weight to dangerous levels and never had a problem lifting the bar. At times I contemplated pressing one-handed.

  Phoebe told me it was called an Adonis complex. She read a lot of books and talked about them all the time. Her rationalisation was, or at least the books said, that in the modern world, women could do anything just as well as men. The workplace isn’t gender restrictive anymore; men aren’t the sole breadwinners. Men aren’t necessarily the dominant species anymore. She said that the only way a man could try and be dominant was physically. Pump iron, build a stronger body than that which a woman can have. Women can’t support a strong body in the same way that a man can, she said.

  This seemed to make sense, but I decided that I didn’t need a reason to lift weights. All that I needed was the energy. All that I needed was the high, and when I was lifting weights I could feel the high like sweet kisses in my ears and the crook of my neck.

  Hayes had managed to balance one addiction with another. When his cycle wore down and the testosterone fix left him weak and depressed, he played roulette to maintain the rush.

  Without the competition at my disposal, I had no means of obtaining the roulette rush. I could run, I could box. I could drive fast cars. I could get in fights at nightclubs. Maybe I could jump out of windows. But nothing matched that death rush of roulette. Or, at least, nothing I could think of at the time.