Shya Scanlon - The Guild of Saint Cooper

“He’s playing blackjack,” said Mitch, pointing.

Cooper was no longer dressed in the red plaid of a backwater woodsman. He was wearing a tuxedo. His pale complexion glowed and his slick hair glistened, and I had the distinct sense that this was somehow closer to how I’d known him, or how I knew him, or how he was supposed to be. He was standing on the far side of the table as we approached, and Mitch led us around and out of view to stand beside the Honey Pot, a slot machine featuring dancing bears. The machine was occupied by an old woman on a respirator, and she looked up at us nervously, respirated, and then continued on with her big red button.

“So what do we do now?” I asked.

“We wait.”

Though Cooper looked natural in this setting, he also seemed oddly detached. While others cheered for big wins or offered condolences for big losses at the table, he was not invested in the group. He placed his chips easily, nonchalant. He took his losses in stride — though none seemed to be large — and his wins with a slight nod to the dealer, then a tip. It was as though betting were a smooth muscle movement, something like breathing at rest and not the wind sprint it was for everyone else. He took out a small compact to check his tie.

“Did you read that article?” I said. “I forget where it was. Something about how people learn addiction as one of the earliest experiences of their lives?”

“Shhh.”

“Harper’s?”

“Seriously.”

Apparently, mothers taught a kind of learned helplessness to their children through the subconscious withholding of breast milk. Sometimes you cry and get it, sometimes you cry and don’t — exactly the unpredictable reinforcement pattern at the root of a gambling addiction.

Mitch stopped a waitress and asked her for a glass of water, giving her a five-dollar bill for her trouble. A thin man with bifocals stopped beside us and watched the old woman pressing her button, then moved on when he realized there was nothing to see.

Why then, I wondered, were there not more gambling addicts in the world? Perhaps this trait expressed itself differently depending on circumstance. After all, gambling is highly regulated and has a serious stigma attached to it in most circles. Gambling could take more innocuous forms in such cases — like ill-informed consumer behavior, say. Or unprotected sex.

By now I was thinking about my mother. I’d never known anyone who’d had a mastectomy. A woman I’d known in college had found a lump once, but it had turned out to be a benign cyst. Her name was Kari. Or Carey. I remembered sitting with her and some friends in a common area of my dorm the day she’d had her biopsy. She’d seemed to be in shock: staring into the near distance, quiet and unresponsive to the flurry of forced activity around her. A football player named Doug kept offering her a candy bar and ended up in an argument with the hall monitor, Stacey, who claimed that candy was a carcinogen. “What were you thinking?” she’d said again and again. Eventually Kari or Carey ate the candy just to shut them up.

Mitch leaned in close and told me he was going to run to the bathroom, that he’d be back in two minutes, and to keep out of sight. I redoubled my efforts to focus on the matter at hand. Cooper was standing before a sizable stack of chips, but he seemed to be playing an even game, so it was impossible to say whether he’d begun with more or started with less. To my surprise, I’d begun to normalize his presence. The feeling I’d had initially was long gone — itself a memory I couldn’t quite summon — and had been replaced by a sense that Cooper and I had something in common. In fact, it was becoming apparent to me that I was not watching a stranger at all. What that made him was difficult for me to say, but I tried to give this new experience room to emerge more completely. For time, I supposed, to build painlessly around me.

I felt a tug at my shirt, and looked down to see the slot woman gasping up at me with wide eyes. I followed a crooked, pointing finger to the screen before her, where three golden bears were lined up across the center, and as it dawned on me that she’d won a jackpot, the clatter and whoop of her machine rose above the cacophony around it and began to draw passersby. The old woman looked stricken, and I thought for a terrible moment that she was going to have a heart attack. People were now gathering and cheering, and I leapt behind a nearby column hoping to avoid the spectacle, and Cooper’s attention. I looked toward the men’s room door, but Mitch was nowhere in sight. The radius of well-wishers expanded, engulfing me even ten feet from the woman’s machine, and I poked my head around the column, thinking the crowd would provide cover. There, however, staring straight at me from the far side of the blackjack table was a distinctly peeved-looking Cooper, and as I watched, held by his gaze, he gathered his chips and moved quickly across the room.

I had no time to make a good decision, so I followed. As I shot through aisles of slot machines, I determined that Mitch would call me upon returning to find me, and his subject, gone. But by then the rationale was nearly irrelevant. I was in pursuit. I knocked against the same waitress who’d brought Mitch water and she nearly spilled her tray.

“ Arschloch ,” she said.

“ Gesundheit ,” I said back.

I followed Cooper to a door marked Hotel Staff Only and through it into a short hallway, the walls of which were cluttered with posted rules, safety posters, bulletin boards, and a large gray timecard machine. People brushed by me, unconcerned, and though Cooper was nowhere in sight I saw a swinging door swing beside a Missing Persons poster of a young girl named Beth. I ran to catch it.

The adjoining room was a cafeteria, empty but for two men on ladders hanging a banner above the main doors. Only half the lights were lit, and they shone in rows across the ceiling, reflecting in big black picture windows that, I imagined, looked out across the Falls. One of the men turned to me after adjusting his end of the sign.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

The banner read: Welcome, Weyerhaeuser Investment Summit!

“Did a man come in here? Tuxedo, slick hair, arms full of poker chips?”

The first man looked over at the other, who, without turning around, spoke slowly.

“This area of the hotel is reserved,” he said, “for a private party.”

I stood there for a moment, not knowing what to do. Mitch must surely have returned by now, and there’d be no shame in heading back to the casino floor to explain what had happened. Who could blame me for losing Cooper? But a greater part of me felt compelled to see this through, to locate the man before reporting back. To have an idea, at least, where he’d gone.

Large round tables adorned with green tablecloths and triangular paper trees filled the cafeteria.

“Is this the Weyerhaeuser from Seattle? Weyerhaeuser Weyerhaeuser?”

“Hey, what did I say?” the second man said, turning around.

He hung his banner corner from a hook and began to climb down the ladder. I took a step back, only a few feet now from the swinging door behind me, close enough to hear the staff hurrying about their errands in the hall.

“Look, just a yes or no is all I’m asking. If he didn’t come in here, great. He’s not part of the event either, so maybe you told him to leave too. Did he go out through the front door?”

Why wasn’t Mitch calling, I wondered. The man began walking toward me from across the room. He had curly red hair, and it strobed slowly as he moved beneath the lights. I took out my cell to see if I’d missed a call, but its screen was dark — I’d turned it off” the night before. I pressed the power button and the screen lit up, but it would take a minute to boot and find a signal. I didn’t have a minute. The man came closer, and I stepped back again, until I could feel the cool metal door against my shoulders. I noticed the first man, still on the ladder, was speaking quietly into a small radio, and I heard it click on and off as he sent and received. Surely calling Security. But then why the aggressive posturing? Was I about to be physically removed from the room? I decided to save him the trouble and pushed back against the door — if he wanted me to leave, fine, but there was no cause for altercation — but the door did not open. I looked back through the head-high window to the hallway beyond, the hallway I’d just come in from, and found it dark. There was no activity, there was no staff, and the red-haired man was closing in.