There's Something I Want You to Do

By morning, he had acquired an atom-smashing headache. His brain was a particle accelerator, throwing off broken pieces of thought. He emptied the savings account meant to pay off his student loans, transporting the cash out of the bank in a brown grocery bag he’d brought with him. The oversaturated sunlight blazed down on his hair, and his car’s interior smelled like a bakery oven. Back at home, cash in hand, he wrote a letter to the dean of admissions of the architecture school he had planned to attend in September, saying that he would not be arriving this fall, or ever. Then he called Dennis.

“Nan broke up with me,” he announced.

“No kidding. How come?” his friend asked.

“This guy. She says she…I dunno. She fell in love with him or something. Law school guy. Love bloomed in the lecture hall. His name’s Thor, if you can believe it.”

“Too bad.”

“Also he’s a triathlete.”

“A triple threat. How could you possibly compete with that?”

“Couldn’t,” Benny said. “I’m going to take all my money and gamble it away.”

“That’s a really good idea. An excellent idea. Where you going?”

“Phelps Lake. One of those Indian casinos. Hey, you want me to visit you first? This morning? How’re you feeling?” Benny hadn’t been over to the hospital for two days now.

“Naw. Go up to the casino and gamble all your money away and then call me or just come down here and give me the full rundown about how you’re totally broke and ruined.”

Benny’s idea is that he’s keeping his friend alive by sending out stories from the battlefield. Before he got sick, Dennis was a real player. In any particular room, if Dennis hadn’t made a pass at an attractive woman, it was just an oversight. He had coached Benny in the complicated norms of seduction, separation, and betrayal.

Accordingly, Benny had loaded himself and his life savings into his rusting and dented Corolla and driven eighty-seven miles north on the interstate, past the antiabortion billboards and the federal prison in Sandstone, and now here he is, wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and sandals, a recent college grad playing blackjack at a casino staffed by Native Americans. He’s bleary and hungover and soul-sick. The trouble is, he’s on a lucky streak and has won three hundred dollars, and he just keeps winning. A curse is on him: he cannot lose. More people are gathering around to watch this desperate, bloodshot young man, and they’re stupefied by his behavior. What they regard as a blessing, he believes is a catastrophe: look at the expression of dismay on his face as his winnings accumulate! Once in a while, the gates of the City of Ruination are closed to visitors. He knocks; he cannot get in.

—

Behind him, the casino zombies are living it up. Air thick with cigarette smoke and fetid hopelessness circulates dully around him, and the blinging electronic music from slot machines projects a kind of hypnotically induced amusement-park ruckus. Having won again on a double down, Benny backs up from the blackjack table and decides to survey the main floor. He will call Dennis later.

Ghouls smoking cigarettes drop tokens into the slots. The machines continue to sing their manic little robot ditties. Here and there, officials survey the operation, pretending that they are merely there to help. It’s a low-rent casino, and the patrons are more humble than you might expect — shabbily dressed, glowering, half-mad with unrecoverable losses. An old couple, holding on to each other for stability, newly broke, shuffle past Benny and nod in a stubbornly friendly way to him, this being Minnesota. She’s wearing a cap that says SAY HI TO GRANDMA! and his cap says GONE FISHIN’! A red-haired middle-aged woman at a slot machine to Benny’s right labors away at losing money, and on her T-shirt are the words WHOA IS ME!

Behind him, a man speaks to a woman, probably his wife. They’re both wearing wedding rings. “He looked like a faggot undertaker,” the man says in a thick Minnesota accent, “and I know I’m half-right.”

That does it. The spell breaks. The romance of self-destruction can only go on for so long, and it can’t go on here among these politely unpleasant people. This isn’t Las Vegas, a professionally designed entryway to Hell, where experienced Technicolor devils have been in comfortable residence for decades tossing Mom and Pop down into the pit. It’s just lowly Phelps Lake, where small lives become slightly smaller. Time for Benny to go back to his life, to return to the cities, and drop in on Dennis.

He seems to have sobered up. His headache has gone away. He checks his watch.