Last Call (Last Call 1)

Mavranos had dropped out of high school when his fiancée had got pregnant, and for nearly twenty years he had made a pretty good living by buying cars from the Huntington Beach police impound yard and fixing them up and selling them for a profit. Only last April had he started studying science and math and myth.

April is the cruellest month, he thought.

Last April he had gone to a doctor because he was getting tired all the time, and had no appetite anymore, and had a lump under his left ear.

"What seems to be the problem?" the doctor had asked cheerfully.

What had turned out to be the problem was lymphoma, cancer of the lymphatic system.

The doctor had explained it to some extent, and Mavranos had done a lot of reading on his own. He had learned about the random nature of cancer cells, and had then studied randomness—and he had begun to discern the patterns that underlay true randomness: the branchings, the repeating patterns, the fat man in the complex plane.

A car turned down Main from Seventeenth, but it wasn't Crane's Torino.

If you were to decide to measure the coastline of California, it would be of little use simply to lay a ruler across a page of an atlas and then determine the length of the roughly ten degrees of longitude it spanned. But it would be of even less value to walk the length of the coastline with a one-inch stick, taking into account every open tide pool and shoe-size peninsula; if you measured too finely, in fact, your answer could approach infinity. Every little pool, if you measured finely enough, had a virtually infinite coastline.

You had to approach such things differently.

You had to back off just far enough.

Turbulence in a water pipe or disorder in the signals to the nerves of the heart—or the cellular hysteria called cancer—were effects of randomness. And if you could … find the patterns in randomness, maybe you could manipulate them. Change them, restore the order.

Spit in the palm of your hand and whack it, he thought.

And he had found this neighborhood, this house, Scott Crane.

Crane never washed his Torino, and Mavranos had noticed patterns in the dew-streaked dust and the splashing of bird shit on the car body—circles, and straight lines and right angles on a sloping surface, and once a spatter of little wailing faces like that Munch picture—and once, when Crane had been standing on the porch, blearily going through his pocket change for a quarter to buy a newspaper, he had dropped a handful of dimes and quarters and pennies—Mavranos had helped pick them up, and had noticed that every coin had landed heads side up; and any watch Crane wore would run too fast.

And animals died around this house. Mavranos had once noticed dead ants in a line that pointed to a forgotten third of a cheeseburger on the porch, and a neighbor's cat that frequently used to sleep on Crane's roof had died; Mavranos had gone over to the woman's house, ostensibly to commiserate, and had learned that the veterinarian had diagnosed cancer as the cause of death.

And throughout the whole block fruit juices fermented abnormally fast, as though some god of wine visited this Santa Ana street and breathed on the houses, very late at night when he'd be seen by no one but the furtive youths out to steal car stereos and batteries.

Since it was randomness that was out to kill him, Archimedes Mavranos had decided to find out where it lived, find its castle, its perilous chapel. And so a year ago he had withdrawn five thousand dollars in twenties and put it in his pocket, told his wife and two daughters that he would be back when he had retaken his health, and had walked away down the street. At the corner he had spit in his hand and punched it with his fist, and then started away in the indicated direction.

He had walked for two full days, eating beef jerky he bought in liquor stores and pissing behind bushes and not shaving or changing his clothes or sleeping at all. Eventually he had found himself circling this block, and when he saw a house for rent, he had called the number on the sign out front and given the landlord fifteen hundred dollars in cash. And then he had devoted his efforts to fine-tuning.

He had come to suspect early on that Scott Crane was the major local signpost to the castle of randomness—but only tonight, when Crane had mentioned having been a professional Poker player, had he found any reason to be confident. Gambling was the place where statistics and profound human consequences met most nakedly, after all, and cards, even more than dice or the numbers on a roulette wheel, seemed able to define and perhaps even dictate a player's … luck.

Crane's living-room window was open behind the screen, and Mavranos now sensed someone standing inside, behind him. He shifted around in the chair.

"Scott?" came a whisper. "Come to bed."

"It's me, Susan, Arky," said Mavranos, embarrassed. "Scott's still off at his … whatever he's doing."