Mark de Silva - Square Wave

He and the blonde had been going heads up for an hour now since the others had dropped off, first the old woman with the bottomless cosmopolitan, then the young man whose unfussed boredom suggested he was a local. Lewis was left alone with the dealer, who played, as she had to, like a machine, standing and hitting by rule alone. He was ahead, on intuition.

Janice was gone. She wouldn’t answer his texts even. There was no fight, he’d been too stunned. She’d called her sister and quietly moved out of their apartment. His apartment, he had to get used to that now. The two sisters packed Janice’s things up while he lay hungover in bed, pretending he was asleep while everything was taken away. She said he’d already left her in every way that mattered. Whatever its truth, he resented her resort to a breakup cliché. They didn’t fuck. They didn’t talk, for a while now really. He’d stopped asking about her life, the kind of restaurant she dreamed of opening someday, and he didn’t answer her about his.

He’d left himself behind too, she said. That was less of a cliché, but it was also less true, he thought. Yes, he didn’t paint, didn’t work, didn’t do much but go out at night, without her. And whom was he meeting, she wanted to know. No, she didn’t really want to know. But there was no one else, if that’s what she meant.

He hadn’t left himself behind, he felt, only a promise of what he might have been that turned out wrenchingly false: that he might be one to transmute life into paint and back into life, reformed. Should he apologize for the gift he didn’t have? Maybe she would rather see him die trying, vainly trying, for what was beyond him.

Really, he’d only resuscitated an earlier version of himself, the one he’d left behind for art, after college and those Wintry seminars. He was back to politics again, and in the most straightforward way. He’d never been so practical. He was going to transmute life only into life, without the indirection of either art or theory, the Wintry and its talks, this time.

Even just before the end, though Lewis and Janice would go to bed on separate sides of the mattress, they’d wake in the morning tangled together. She would separate herself from him then, resent the false intimacy. There was nothing less false for him. It was what was left of them: the quietest, most sustaining part.

There were no more of those tangles now. She was gone. And he was gone in one way at least, the flesh and blood of him. Without her he was an abstraction, a thought-in-the-world, not a being.

It diminished him in every way but one. When the world fell away, its costs and risks did too. Bringing to life the idea he was now — even on the largest scale — suddenly seemed possible. He owed it to Janice. He’d put all but fifty grand he had into this scheme, including the money he’d earmarked for her restaurant.

He was here in Vegas alone to see his handiwork tonight. He thought he was alone, anyway. Past the humming slots discharging coins, in a cave of a bar shielded from the light, he saw the creamy shoulder blades and the dark hair nipping at them, and then just the edge of her jaw. She was facing away, toward the bar and an assemblage of bottles backlit in the color of bourbon. But her profile, the unusually sharp angles, was enough to kindle something in him, a vague displeasure, a mild sense of shame or fear, twinned to a gauzy curiosity.

She was sitting in a raised, short-backed chair, talking to a very old man in a very good suit who stood rather than sat. Going by the man’s posture and expression, the two didn’t know each other intimately but would shortly. She put her hand over his and with the other she lifted a broad martini glass to her lips. An olive looking twice its size through the vodka or gin rolled around the base of the cup.

The blonde waited for Lewis to ante up. Instead he gripped the two stacks of chips he’d won and poured them into his pockets. He left nothing for her, not even a smile. A few seconds later, though, he found himself walking back to the table, reflexively pulling chips from his pockets. He placed a few of them on the lip of the green without checking their value. Tens. She didn’t notice the chips, or perhaps pretended not to, offended by their meanness at a table with fifty for an ante. But that was luck.

The falling coins kept chiming in the slot machines as he sought a better view of that woman at the bar. But her face stayed angled away from him, so the improving image only clarified what remained beyond it.

The last row of slots receded and the noise of the casino turned mute and distant as he crossed into the cavernous bar. He moved to one side as he approached, carving around her, but just as more of her face came into view, and his memories began to stir again, she twisted away from him. He waited for her face to return, but the man was whispering in her ear now, and she was listening, and it seemed they would stay posed that way forever.

He reached the bar and ordered a drink by touching one of the beer taps. A few customers separated him from her. The old man looked at Lewis as he talked into the woman’s ear.

“Do you really?” she said, finally, just as the bartender served Lewis’s pint.

Familiarity came all at once. The last of them — she’d called herself Lisa, in the street by his open car door, and under the overpass just before he’d done what he’d had to do. Three words and that was enough for him to know. Somehow she’d made it here. A shadow. Was she on the flight over? Three rows up, in a seat on the other side of the aisle, there was the dark hair, the pale skin of the legs. But again, the face out of view.

The bartender had just said something, clearly and loudly and definitely to Lewis. Except for the soft scratching whispers of the old man in Lisa’s ear, no sound competed. But still Lewis didn’t understand the words.

Before he could form a thought, Lewis searched his pockets to pay for the drink and rid himself of the bartender. His wallet was wedged beneath the chips. He scooped out as many as he could and set them on the bar, returning to his pocket to fish out the wallet.

The intervening customers, silent men he hadn’t realized were a group, paid for their drinks and left together. Now only empty space separated him from Lisa, the one girl he couldn’t read. He’d failed with her, it looked like. She was unchanged, still hooking, thousands of miles away. How many others had he failed with?

The bartender gestured and said something more, and Lewis, in fear or confusion or frustration, pushed the beer and the scattered chips toward Lisa and walked out of the bar into an indistinct chaos of noise, which was matched only by the confusion of light streaming down into the atrium at all angles, in several colors and as many intensities, freighting the air.

His father had told Lewis once about the time he saw Mike Tyson fight in this arena, with business colleagues, just a year before the boxer fell from greatness. It was not much of a fight. His British opponent’s reflexes were betraying him with age. But then, every boxer’s reflexes seemed to fail him against Tyson. The fight was over in five rounds, on a TKO. It would have been shorter still, Leo told him, had the Brit not taken to clinching from the opening bell.

But he had no thought of winning. It was a foregone conclusion that Tyson would triumph. Somehow this didn’t manage to dim the moment. The trick can’t be repeated too many times, but Tyson had only recently come to seem indomitable. For a while it was a thrill simply to see that status confirmed.

The bout turned from sport to theater, classic repertory work. There was almost sympathy for the Brit, as the only question was how, not whether, he would succumb.