Last Call (Last Call 1)

Link the yin and yang, she thought, the yoni and the lingam. Other cabdrivers had told her she wasn't the only one getting a disproportionate number of solo fares to the chapels in the last two weeks. All sorts of people wanted to go to the places, and when they got there, they just stood around in the little offices, staring in a lost way at the ELOPED and HITCHED and WED 90 license plates on the walls and reading the laminated Marriage Creed plaques.

It was as if there were a slowly increasing vibration in the sky and the land, something that had to do with a combining of maleness and femaleness, and on some subconscious level these people felt it. No doubt the bar joints and parlor houses out along the 95 and the 93 and the 80 highways were also getting more visitors than usual.

But that thought brought back memories of DuLac's outside Tonopah, and of her brother, and of the room with twenty-two paintings on the walls—and she stomped the accelerator and made a left against the light, speeding down Main to Bridger.

"Jesus," said her fare, "I'm not in a hurry."

"Some of us are," she told him.

Only one side of Snayheever's license plate was screwed down, so it was easy to swing the plate aside and fit the head of the crank through the hole cast in the bumper.

He spread his feet on the pavement and whirled the crank, leaning into it. The engine didn't start, though the back seam of his old corduroy coat, the one he thought of as his James Dean coat, tore a little more. At least he didn't seem to be having any of his involuntary twitches; his tardive dyskinesia was quiet tonight.

Cars were honking behind him, and he knew that meant that the drivers were angry, but the people on the sidewalk seemed to be cheerful. "Lookit the guy with the wind up car!" yelled one. "Careful you don't break the spring!"

"I'd hate to wind up a car," said a woman with him, laughing.

On the second spin the car started. Snayheever got back in, clanked it into first gear, and drove across Sixth Street toward the El Cortez. He had been driving around the downtown area for nearly an hour before he stalled, and he still wasn't having any luck in tracking the place where the moon lived.

But the half-moon was still up, though low in the west, and he watched for clouds and paid attention to the wind and any debris it might carry.

Snayheever knew why he had not ever become a great Poker player. Great Poker players had a number of qualities: knowledge of the chances, stamina and patience, courage and "heart" … and, maybe most important of all, the ability to put themselves inside the heads of their opponents, to be able to tell when the opponent was chasing losses, or letting injured ego do the playing, or faking loose or tight play.

Snayheever couldn't put himself into their heads.

The men Snayheever had played with had all seemed to be … atoms. That is, indistinguishable from one another, and emitting things—atoms emitted photons, and players emitted … passes and checks and bets and raises—without any pattern or system or predictability. Sometimes, Snayheever thought as he drove across Freemont, atoms emitted beta particles, and sometimes players emitted all-in raises or turned up Straight Flushes. All you could do was retreat and lick your wounds.

It was different when he was dealing with things—river and highway patterns, and the arrangement of mismatched jigsaw puzzle pieces, and the postures and motions of clouds. He was sure he'd be able to read tea leaves if he were ever faced with a cup of them, and he felt he understood the Greeks—or whoever it had been—who had foretold the future by looking at animal entrails.

Sometimes the people he met seemed like the recorded ladies who spoke to him on the telephone when he needed to know what time it was. But things had a real voice, albeit a far and faint one, like what comes through a telephone if someone has unscrewed the earpiece and taken out the diaphragm disk.

There was someone at home behind the constantly shifting arrangements of things. And who else could his mother be?

He hoped that reincarnation was true, and that after he died as an unconnected human, he might come back as one of the infinity of connected things. He thought of what the woman on the sidewalk had said when he'd been cranking the car's motor: I'd hate to wind up a car.

You could, he thought now as he turned left to zigzag through the downtown section again, do a lot worse than to wind up a car.

Half a mile southwest of Snayheever, the gray Jaguar was tooling east on Sahara Avenue.

Skinny man waiting to get out.

Vaughan Trumbill's mouth turned down at the pouchy corners as he remembered the remark. The young woman had had something to do with physical fitness; she guided people in exercises, he believed.

In the back seat of the Jaguar the old Doctor Leaky body mumbled something.