Lawrence Osborne - The Ballad of a Small Player

I went to the Militar and ate some steamed clams. Then I read the papers in the bar, hoping to run into one of my friends. However, no one was there. The evening had the rhythm of an ancient pendulum clock. So much the better, I thought. One is better off alone in these dangerous moments. One is better off forlorn and isolated inside one’s gravest compulsion.

I took a cab to Taipa and entered the casino through its overbearing gates. The pits were relatively calm on a Thursday night and I was able to play at a full table without commotion or distractions. I played at table six as fast as I could. Nine all the way, regular as something machinelike. A hundred thousand in fifteen minutes and without breaking even a bead of sweat. All right , I thought, let’s attack the system outright . I laid everything down on five bets and won them all. The chip bags looked like Viking loot, but I did not walk out with them. I kept them by my side and played another three hands, with the same results. At length, the table cleared out and a lanky Chinese man in a windowpane shirt came up to me and whispered in my ear to ask if I’d like some cocaine. It was a done deal and I spent the rest of the hour in the nightclub snorting it off the back of a menu, indifferent to the effects. It was good stuff and, as usual, it made me incredibly sleepy. I never get high. I become sleepy, but I get curiously excited at the same time, as if my pulse has been slowed down while my senses have been speeded up. In this state I rolled through the various floors of the Greek Mythology unnoticed by the press and feeling as if I would like to piss all this money out of all ten fingers simultaneously. I slipped five-hundred-Hong-Kong-dollar notes into the hands of the staff, the shills who wait by the tables to lure new customers in — usually attractive young girls — or the Greeks lumbering around in their plastic armor. The look of amazement on their faces was not something that I thought I would ever see again, so I went around again and handed out thousand-dollar notes, and they still didn’t know what to say. They took the money and crammed it into their pockets until they had no more room for the next round, and it went on like this for a while, with no one knowing how to stop it. I gave away half of my earnings, then went back to the tables.

The rooms seemed underwater, the smoke static like fish milk suspended in water that isn’t moving. I remembered them from that fateful night. Instinctively, but not knowing quite why, I looked for the table where I had met Dao-Ming. The room was mobbed but I found it easily. It was table number four. As I sat there quietly, unrecognized by the staff, I played a winning hand and thought back to that night, which now seemed like a part of my distant past. I had forgotten how long ago it was. Weeks, months, it was all the same. A girl sitting quietly by a table minding her own business, and now I was playing, so to speak, with her money. Needless to say I had not sent her back the money I had taken, and the more time went by the less likely it was that I would ever do it. I was like that, but I couldn’t help it. I was like the scorpion in Aesop’s fable who stings the animal carrying him across a river. Sorry, I could say (like him), it’s just my nature. I won a hand, scooped up the usual winnings, and then just sat there lost in thought with a glass of naughty lemonade. A man in a white velvet suit was playing opposite me, losing mightily, his face red with rage. His bloodshot eyes filled with tender sadness. Where was Dao-Ming at that very minute? I was sad not to know. Was she in a room plastered with mirrors with her legs wide open and her eyes clenched shut? Was she at home making miso soup on the gas ring?

I got up and walked through the wall of smoke. I could see all the flickering numbers at once now. People losing their life savings with a smoldering fag end in one hand, a plastic cup of punch in the other. Old people who must have lived through the Cultural Revolution and its shrill stupidities, who must have known all about pointless gestures. There they were and they should have known better. They were all losing minute by minute, and around them the electronic boards showed the warp of their bad luck. I wanted to shower them with gold to make them stop. They didn’t know what they were doing. Thirty years of miserable slog and labor tossed down the maw of the casino in seven minutes. It was incredible. I went to a second table, number nine in the room, and won again, inconspicuously, picking up a nice windfall that I used to clean out a third table. I went on and on until I was at the back of the casino and the Greeks were walking about with vodka shots on trays, their crests of horsehair shining under the lamps. Here there were a lot of these old mainlander couples with their blue caps and their nylon jackets. They played with watery eyes, their veins popping out. The true proletariat from the workers’ paradise being milked dry by the capitalists of the new age. They knew it and they enjoyed it, because even being milked dry by the capitalists of the new age was more novel, more amusing than not being milked dry by them. It was freedom, and freedom is supposed to fuck you over.

The last table was number eight in the room (I was keeping track for some reason), and when I had won there I collected my chips and wandered into the next room along. The light from the chandeliers went straight into my brain and I quivered. Then I remembered the number that Dao-Ming had written on my palm and that, despite a few baths, had not washed off. It was still there, as if written in an ink that could bind permanently to human skin. As I read the numbers I began to realize that in some way they corresponded to the numbers of the tables I had been playing at. It did not, of course, seem possible, but I was increasingly sure that it was the case. A sequence of numbers that must be an irregular phone number could not at the same time be a plan of action at the tables, but I thought it all the same, even if I am not one to deny that it might well have been all in my mind, because everything was all in my mind during that time, and I knew it. And since everything was in my mind, everything was equally probable and therefore both possible and credible. I didn’t care if the idea was absurd in the extreme, that for me did not make it untrue. It was a sequence, and I was moving through it.

I stood stock-still in the middle of the floor, and I felt overwhelmed with hunger and confusion. A telephone , I thought, I need to get to a telephone . I went directly out into the vestibule and found one. I called the number in a quiet spot.

I dialed the number on my hand, and I was surprised, hearing the dial tone, that it was a phone number after all. I had nothing prepared to say to her, however. I looked up and saw the clock on the wall, with the two hands aligned on the three. My hands were wet with perspiration and I had to wipe the receiver. At last the dial tone was interrupted and I opened my mouth to speak, to launch into an apology. But no one answered. Instead there was a low susurration at the other end, like white noise, a sound of waves breaking on shingle or flowing in and out of caves. Thinking that it might be a message on voice mail, I waited for three or four minutes, but it continued. The sounds of the sea, continuous and strangely bitter, suggesting the presence of an eternal storm.

I hung up and then, as I was walking back to the tables, I wavered. On a whim, I turned and went back to the telephone and called the number a second time. This time, equally unexpectedly, a voice answered, an irritable old woman.

“Is Dao-Ming there?” I asked in Cantonese.

But they can always tell that you are a gwai lo .

“She’s out having dinner.”