Chapter 14 Summary
There are sounds everywhere around him, and Keith works hard to hear each of them. The sound of chips being played and stacked and counted, like a cacophony of insect friction. He has to break his own habit of not listening so he can hear. The clink of chips, the “toss and scatter,” dealers and players, a persistent ringing that no one else hears.
Here, at the poker table, he fits in like nowhere else. In his off hours he chats with the dealers and almost becomes one of them. Sometimes, in the middle of a game, he gets the urge to walk out of the room and get on a plane, pull down the shade, and fall asleep. By the time a fresh deck of cards appears, however, he is again ready to play.
There is no fitness center in the hotel, but he finds one nearby and visits regularly. No one seems to use the rowing machine, and Keith does not particularly like it, either; however, he often feels the need to pull and strain until he is exhausted. He sets the resistance level high. He works hard and then showers in the mildewed locker rooms. He stays away for a while and then returns, setting the resistance level even higher.
One day Keith rents a car and drives into the desert. When he returns home in the evening, he looks down on the “feverish sprawl of light” and finds it hard to believe he is part of it, in the middle of it. That is because he lives inside rooms. He just now realizes how “strange a life” he is living—but only from out here. From the inside, everything feels perfectly normal to him. In fact, to him nothing seems more normal.
Right now he is avoiding Terry Cheng. He does not want to talk to him, listen to him, look at him, or watch his cigarette burn to nothing in front of him. He does not want to talk to the reinvented Terry Cheng, the man who converses easily three years after the planes.
Keith used to think about Florence Givens every day; he still does, most days, though he has never considered going back to her, crossing the park to spend time in her apartment. He thinks about her as he does a childhood home—nostalgic, thinking it would be nice to visit but knowing it is something he will never do. He never told Lianne about his visits to Florence, those four or five encounters over several weeks.
In the end is who he is that counts, not luck or skill. It is strength of mind, mental skill, and something more—the narrowness of need or “how a man’s character shapes his sight”—that make him win. He wins, but not so much that he becomes someone else. The money matters but not as much as the chips do. He plays for the chips, the discs, the colors, the stacking. It is a “dance of hand and eye,” and that is who he is.
One night Keith is in his room doing the old exercises, flexing and bending to rehabilitate his wrist. It is after midnight and room service is closed for the night. “He is not lost or bored or crazy.” There are no days or times except for the tournament schedule. Hands are played, roulette wheels are clicking in the aisles, and women in miniskirts are serving drinks. As a point of practicality, he is not making enough money to justify this life; however, there is no such need. Perhaps there should have been, but...
(This entire section contains 1493 words.)
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there is not; and that is the point. He folds six hands and then goes all in, hoping to make all the losers bleed. These are
the days after and now the years, a thousand heaving dreams, the trapped man, the fixed limbs, the dream of paralysis, the gasping man, the dream of asphyxiation, the dream of helplessness.
A fresh deck arrives at the tabletop. “Fortune favors the brave,” he thinks, regretting that he does not know the original Latin adage. He has always lacked “that edge of unexpected learning.”
When Lianne was a girl, her father had let her add a twist of lemon to his drink, giving her detailed and comical instructions. On this night, he talked about the existence of something beyond base human existence, a being who “was and is and ever shall be.” That had sounded like poetry to her then, and it still does. She thinks of it now, over her morning coffee, the truth that resonates in the idea of “was and is.”
People she knows are reading the Koran, looking for something that might help them understand Islam and its teachings. A doctor recites the first line of the Koran at his office: “This Book is not to be doubted.” Lianne has doubts about many things. She walks toward East Harlem, missing her group and how the room used to get silent as they began to write. She is looking for something, a church near the community center, perhaps the church Rosellen used to attend. She misses their faces and their voices, their voices that “dwindled into whisper.” According to current thinking, Lianne is an infidel; she wants to disbelieve. Her father, an artist and an architect, infused God into everything that existed, into time and space, made the stars give light. He was a sad man, constantly yearning for something he could not touch, something “intangible and vast” that would have given meaning to his meager existence. But stars make their own light, and the sun is a star.
Others are reading the Koran, but Lianne is going to church. Two or three times a week she takes a taxi uptown and sits in a nearly empty church. She observes the rituals but does not believe them, though she does believe something. She arrives at church early to feel the calm and be alone for a while. She feels the dead in churches, all churches, and it is not morbid but comforting. Is a comfort to her to feel the presence of those she loved and the faceless others who have filled a thousand churches. It is the world that brings people closer to God: terror, beauty, grief, a stunning panorama or a piece of music. Others help bring one closer to God; churches with their stained glass windows do the same. When she can, Lianne walks home from church; she still does not ride the subway and always notices the cement barricades denoting possible targets.
Lianne thinks of Keith with a nameless call girl in his hotel room. She thinks of him and then he calls, telling her he will be home for a few days in a week or so, and she is glad.
In the mornings, before her son gets up, Lianne runs along the river and contemplates training for a marathon, not this year but next, as a spiritual effort. She showers when she gets home from running and is afraid God will consume her—“de-create” her—and she will be too small and too tame to resist Him. This is why she resists. Once she believes in God, she cannot escape, cannot avoid the power of it, the “is and was and ever shall be.”
She finds gray in her hair and decides she will not dye it. Her mother had a “white mane of hair” at the end of her life. When Nina’s body was broken and she was “drifting into spirit life,” shrunken in her bed, that white hair, beautiful in the sunlight, framed what was left of her.
Keith sits next to the table and does his wrist exercises. This is the tenth day in which he has done the complete exercises twice a day, religiously every morning and every night when he returns. He does each step meticulously, counting every repetition.
Nine people are at mass today. Lianne does what they do but does not respond as they do during the priest’s recitation and the response. She believes the presence of God creates the soul’s loneliness and doubt; God is also the omnipresent being who can resolve this doubt: “God is the voice that says, ‘I am not here.’” When she argues with herself, it is really just noise the brain makes.
She is normal, and one day as she takes off her shirt she smells not sweat but her body, “just her.” It is herself, inside and out, “identity and memory and human heat.” She knows it more than smells it, and it is something she has always known. It is the child and the girl who wishes she were other people and obscure, unnamable things. It is a small moment, already fading. She is ready to be alone with her son in “reliable calm,” just as they were before the planes appeared on that day.
