The Coincidence Engine Page 21

  He should have been looking forward to seeing Carey but he was feeling, again, dislocated, unworthy, indecipherable. It made him panicky.

  The problem is that when I’m alone I literally cease to believe that I exist.

  He said the words to himself aloud, just to feel the air across his tongue. It was something he’d remembered from somewhere, not his own thought. He looked at his rucksack. It belonged to a stranger. He rubbed the back of his neck. His watch told him it was seven o’clock. He was probably just hungry.

  They had arranged to meet in the Golden Nugget at eight. Alex had suggested meeting her flight, but Carey said that’d be a drag. She had heard that the casino contained the world’s biggest nugget of gold. ‘Let’s meet there! Just you, me and a big gold rock. It’ll be cute.’

  Walking into the casino was like walking into an aquarium. The door – no, the entire wall – was permanently open to the outside. It gaped. The mouth of a whale. Not an aquarium. Not just an aquarium. An aquarium and its contents. A mechanical whale, trawling for human plankton. No need to suck: just leave the mouth open and let them wash in.

  Even during the heat of a cloudless day, something seemed to stop the sunshine spilling from Fremont Street into the building: a filter in the air – an invisible baleen plate. Within a couple of steps the crisp hot light bouncing off the pavement outside would be gone. There was only the indecipherable carpet, the high ceiling, and slot machines arrayed in rows and islands under the buttery artificial light. It felt like cigarettes and acid stomach and the headachy buzz you get when you pass through tiredness into the unreal underwater feeling on the other side.

  You turned round and the pleasant sunshine outside was a wall of white. Reality was oversaturated. It hurt the eyes. Safer in here. The second time you turned round you couldn’t find the opening back to the outside world at all. And now, in the evening, the inside started to colonise the outside. That border was porous, after all. But the unreality inside seeped onto the street like smoke.

  A shift in the current and you had turned round, lost your bearings. The direction you struck out in was wrong. The angles were wrong. That wall wasn’t that wall. It wasn’t even a wall at all. That bar was a different bar.

  The slots fanned and pulsed. Through alleys of fluorescent coral, portly men in T-shirts lumbered like groupers. Some grazed on the machines, bland-faced and blissful as fish. Old women perched on stools, human spider crabs, barking their yellowed foreclaws on the panels. Cocktail waitresses moved purposefully, dartingly, alertly. Clownfish.

  Alex had somehow imagined the sound in the casino would be a cacophony, but it was soothing. He had expected to hear whirring and clattering – and that was there, if you listened for it – but in aggregate it was a sort of anaesthetising white noise, like the sound of the sea.

  Over the top, the bleeps and squelches of electronic noise, snatches of tunes, here and there cataracts of imaginary money pouring into imaginary metal containers, digitally simulated. Behind, the purr of a million coins flipping, a million tumblers coming to rest and then starting in motion again, a million balls settling into sockets, a million cards burring into new configurations.

  Alex remembered seeing a documentary, once, about a casino in America where women bought buckets of coins and sat, all day and all night, feeding them into the slot machines. There was something devotional about the act: patiently, unsleepingly, as if in a trance, they fed the coins into slots and pressed the button to spin the reels.

  With every press of the button, there came a near-imperceptible tensing in the shoulders: a tiny jolt of hope. Then, as the wheels came to rest, came a readjustment. Every few spins, the machine would cough a handful of coins into its trough, and the women would look rejuvenated, freshened: hope satisfied. The coins would be swept back into the bucket, ready to be fed in.

  The machines were playing the people, rather than vice versa, it had occurred to Alex. Nearly half the time, the women would have more coins in the bucket than they had started with – but a tilt of the algorithm, the tiniest pressure of a thumb on the scales, meant that the number of coins in the bucket tended, over the long run, towards zero.

  Every small score was not a win, but a rebate: a contribution to the struggle, a prolongation of the period of time in which the player was able to believe that the impossible could happen. As they fed these coins in, whittling their chances down the long curve to zero, the same process was going on in every cell in their bodies.

  But here there were no buckets, no coins. The clatter of money was synthesised. Just as the blackjack players, on their fields of baize deeper in the casino, exchanged their cash for plastic chips, the slots players now fed dollar bills into machines. You could see them, out of cash, approaching the machines peevishly, feeding ragged cloth bucks into the machines’ mouths, having them whirr and spit back. Rubbing the dollars flat on the top of the machine, straightening out the bent corners, thumbing the face of the dead president, feeding them back in, hoping.

  If the casino gods were smiling on them, their money would disappear and stay disappeared, and the machine would politely blurt out a white paper slip. It was this that they would feed into the machine.

  Paper money was translated into electrons, which were translated into paper, which was translated into electrons, which were translated into paper, which was translated into electrons, which were translated into paper money.

  That made sense. This was a place where money – never something strongly tethered to reality – slipped anchor and became altogether imaginary. And the more imaginary it got, the more like itself it became. This was money in its purest, most contingent form – owned, in the perpetual instant of play, by nobody. It existed in a field of probabilities – between the hope of the impossible and the knowledge of the inevitable.

  Alex walked the casino floor. His dizziness subsided and a sort of calm came over him. Seven forty-five. Fifteen minutes to kill. He found the nugget glistering in a glass box. Really quite big – nuggets, as Alex had always thought of them, were no bigger than a Tic Tac. This nugget was supposed to look a bit like a hand, but it looked more like a bit of coral. It looked gaudy. It looked like a fake nugget – as if the gold had been sprayed on from a can.

  He had just sat down with a rumpled ten to worship at a nickel slot machine when a hand on his shoulder and a voice hazy with travel said: ‘Hey.’

  He turned round and stood up and there was Carey, in the old Dead Kennedys T-shirt she used to sleep in, jeans frayed at the hip, hair down, brown-armed and smiling.

  ‘Hey,’ said Alex, and felt as happy as he ever had. ‘You’re early.’

  ‘So are you,’ said Carey. Her arms were warm on his neck as he hugged her.

  He pulled back and said more or less without drawing breath: ‘It’s so good to see you. Look! Vegas! I’m playing a slot machine. What’s up? How was your flight? Enough about you, let’s talk about me. My God, I’ve had this weird road trip, I swear, every lunatic in America has tried to kill me or make friends with me. Where’s your stuff?’

  Carey lifted her pink vinyl shoulder bag by its strap. ‘Travelled light. Underwear, change of T-shirt, lipstick in case I need to go hooking to earn back what I lose at poker.’

  ‘Want to go back to my hotel and put it in the room?’

  ‘Hell no! This is Las Vegas. Let’s hit the town. Waitron! Bring me… a daiquiri.’ There was no waitress anywhere in sight. She waved her arm as if twirling an invisible baton, then shouldered Alex out of the way and slammed the palm of her hand onto the fat SPIN button in the centre of the machine’s console. It quacked and blurted, shuffled its numbers.

  ‘I win!’ said Carey.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ said Alex.

  ‘Oh,’ said Carey. ‘No, I don’t. Does it make that noise when you lose? Imagine the noise when we win. OK. Cash out. Let’s hit the town.’

  ‘Hang on,’ said Alex. He pressed the button again. The reels moved. There was a simulated cascade o
f falling coins.

  ‘Magic hands,’ said Alex, waggling his fingers.

  ‘We won,’ said Carey. ‘Jackpot!’ Three oranges. They were thirty-five cents up.

  ‘We won!’ Alex repeated. ‘Go, us. OK, let’s cash out and explore the’ – his hand moved towards the CASH/CREDIT button but Carey swiped it away – ‘town -’

  ‘Are you crazy? We’re on a streak.’

  ‘There’s only ten dollars in there…’

  ‘Shhh.’ She pressed the button again.

  An hour and a half later, having never been more than $4.85 up, and having finally gone down to zero, they left to go into town.

  Carey and Alex were doing what you do in Las Vegas. They sat at one of the bars in Circus Circus – Carey had demanded that they go in, claiming without a hint of sincerity that she had been frightened of clowns as a child and that it would be good aversion therapy – and played the video poker game embedded in the actual bar. Alex had won $100 on his first go, and Carey had then spent fifteen minutes losing it while they drank their watery screwdrivers.

  Then when they got hungry they looked for somewhere to eat and realised that everything was either a cheap chain restaurant or an expensive chain restaurant, so they went to a cheap chain restaurant and had fajitas. The restaurant was dimly lit and noisy with pop-punk music with Mexican lyrics. Teenagers with glow sticks round their necks hip-swayed between tables, taking orders as if they had trains to catch and returning to drop the food off with casual violence.

  The meat came on lethally hot metal skillets. The tortillas came in a plastic simulacrum of a wicker basket, accompanied by a plastic simulacrum of a saucer containing a plastic simulacrum of grated cheese.

  They bought long, bulbed plastic horns containing pre-mixed margaritas dispensed by a machine, which were only drinkable because they were so tooth-hurtingly cold that you couldn’t taste how sweet they were. They took the remains of them out onto the street and walked down the Strip.

  When? Not now. Not now. Not now.

  They continued to walk until their aimlessness started to become something palpable, an awkwardness between them.

  Even ordinarily, Alex would be anxious in this situation. Nothing made him more anxious than the need or expectation of having fun. Vegas was a place devoted to the idea of fun. Everyone, everywhere you looked, was trying to have fun.

  Alex had brought Carey here under the pretence of having fun. He worried he wasn’t having fun. He worried even more that Carey wasn’t having fun, or, at least, that whatever fun they were having – the food was OK, wasn’t it? They hadn’t lost all their money gambling – was deprived of sunlight and water by the enormous shadow of the fun they should have been having, by comparison with which their own meagre portion of fun was a wretched failure.

  Oh God. What was he thinking of?

  He looked over at Carey to see whether it looked like she was having fun. It was impossible to tell. She wasn’t hooting with laughter and throwing her head back. She was just sort of walking down the street looking at stuff. She had a drink in her hand, at least. Good.

  Alex had finished his own drink. Ever since he had started worrying about the aimlessness – that is, he had an aim, obviously, but the more he wound up to it the less he was able to communicate with the outside world, and until he had done so his companion would be left with the overwhelming impression of aimlessness – he had been sucking away on his margarita so as to be doing something even if he wasn’t saying something.

  It was a margarita in a brightly coloured plastic cup, a foot long. It said so on the side of the cup. Foot-long margarita. With a foot-long straw. That was fun, surely. That was drinks plus fun. Alex felt utterly adrift.

  It was probably ages since he’d said anything. Had she noticed? Was she bored?

  He knew he should say something. Say something. That was the thing. But the only thing he could think of to say was ‘Will you marry me?’ and even though that was the exact thing to say the moment was wrong. You couldn’t just come out of the blue with it, could you? Just abruptly? She’d think he was a loon. Or, worse, joking.

  Here? Not here. Not in the street. Yes. Why not? In the street. This is your life. This is your life, going by, and you’re going to look back on this moment as the moment when you didn’t take the decision that would have made you happy for the rest of your days on earth. With this American girl you love wholeheartedly.

  You know you love her wholeheartedly. You have said so to yourself, and had you a diary you would have written it in your diary. You cannot always, when called on, feel the love as a wave of emotion – not in the way you could when you watched her sleep, before you were a couple, or the way you can when she’s somewhere else and you miss her. But you know it’s there. It’s just – it’s something you take for granted. Something you’re so quietly sure of you barely examine it.

  Action. For goodness’ sake. Action. That’s all. Just do it.

  Alex thought about how he used to trick himself into jumping into swimming pools. You ran up to the edge promising yourself that this was just a practice run and that you were going to stop, and then when you got to the edge you simply kept running and took the view that you would apologise to yourself later for the white lie. Always, a great body-shocking spout of cold water to the chest and crotch, bubbles of air foaming up around the ears and neck, and limbs paddling at once, spastic with surprise.

  ‘Carey,’ said Alex. He looked past her shoulder. There was nobody there. The Strip was empty as far as the next corner and the sky above was a perspectiveless blue-black. It was warm, and away behind him he could hear the hiss and swish and flop of the fountains outside the Bellagio dancing their exhausted dance.

  ‘Mmm?’ Carey was distracted. She took another sip of her margarita and Alex admired with a little wave of desperation the way her cheek pulsed inwards as she drew on her orange straw.

  Alex felt the ring, in its square box, digging against his hip. He was on the verge of action. He felt a little dizzy. He remembered that once he had tried the swimming-pool trick, a little drunk, in the shallow end of a pool with submerged steps. He had driven the little toe of his right foot into the corner of the lowest step, and gulped a lungful of water. Saul had pulled him out in time for him not to drown. For the next fortnight, his broken toe had been so painful that simply hopping downstairs on the other foot had, with every step, sent an inertial throb of blood into the digit that had caused him to gasp.

  He went on, anyway.

  ‘You know what you said about the Elvis chapel?’ he said.

  ‘What Elvis chapel?’ said Carey, turning her eyes to his. She brought the straw back up to her lips and pursed them around it. She had a look of blank expectation. Alex looked at his feet.

  ‘Well,’ said Alex. ‘I wanted to say. Look.’

  Alex thought of getting onto one knee, here on the pavement, but he knew in this instant – with the certainty that he knew he would never climb Kilimanjaro, or emerge victorious from a fist fight, or play a significant role in the history of the human race, or be unconditionally adored by beautiful teenage girls, and with the faint, humming sadness that accompanied those certainties – that getting down on one knee in public was something he did not have the ability to do.

  ‘Carey, what I’m trying to say is -’

  And he could not meet her eye. And then he could. She was still holding her margarita, in its big pink plastic yard-of-ale tube, up in front of her chest. Her arms were slim and golden from the sun, and her big Dead Kennedys T-shirt was not quite formless enough to prevent the curve of her breasts from being visible.

  She looked beautiful. Alex felt the moment freeze-framing into a memory. He felt as if he was looking back in time to this moment, from some point in the future. But he still didn’t know what happened next. Carey slurped her margarita.

  Alex glanced nervously over her shoulder. The street was no longer empty. Three men in white suits, walking abreast, were waiting at the crossw
alk ahead. Something familiar about them.

  Alex put it aside, turned back to Carey, took a deep breath, closed his fist on the sharp-cornered parcel in his pocket, made himself look directly at her quizzical, almost slightly peevish face. A face saying: yup, what? Get on with it…

  ‘Carey. Love. Will you -’

  Carey took another big slurp of her margarita. Evidently the last. The straw made a violently diarrhoeic noise in the crushed ice. Alex gave a nervous yip, and then barked with laughter. Carey looked baffled.

  ‘What’s funny?’

  ‘Just – the noise your thing made. It’s nothing. I don’t know. Silly mood, I guess. I’m just happy being here with you. Sorry.’

  ‘Don’t apologise.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Are you OK?’ she said. ‘You’ve been acting a bit – just since we ate – a bit distant.’

  ‘Oh, no, no. Shall we walk? No, I’m fine. I was just thinking about. What do you want to do next?’

  The white-suited men were getting closer. As they approached Alex could see what was familiar about them. They were Elvis. All three of them. One fat Elvis and two thin ones. The white suits were jumpsuits. The fat one, disconcertingly, had a star-spangled V-shape from shoulders to crotch. It was hard to tell how old they were, because they were wearing identical black wigs and identical fuzzy-felt sideburns and sunglasses the size of drinks coasters. But judging by the way they were walking they were epically drunk.

  The fat Elvis lurched left, inadvertently shoulder-barging the thin Elvis in the middle, which sent him into the other thin Elvis, who pushed tetchily back.

  ‘- even listening to me?’

  ‘Yes, love, sorry. Look out. Those three drunks.’

  As the Elvises ambled up level with them, Alex grabbed Carey’s elbow and pulled her out of the way. Too late. Fat Elvis barged into the back of her. Carey’s drink tumbled from her hand and bounced on the sidewalk.

  ‘Hey!’ she exclaimed. The Elvises rolled on, oblivious.