When I began winning competitions, I began dreaming big. What if I could win enough for a deposit on a house? Gray and I could have our own home. And he’d be proud of me. Telling Gray that I’d scored a job at a city restaurant, I headed to the big poker tournaments.
But then I stepped from the casino poker rooms to the roulette table.
That was my downfall.
I quickly fell in over my head, into a pit of debt.
But now I’d been given another chance.
Just one week, and I’d be home again. If everything went to plan, Gray would never know where I really went or why.
2. I, Inside The Walls
THE LAST ONE OF THEM HAS arrived now in the monastery. Her face so pale and anxious.
In six days she’ll be dead. Just like all the rest of them.
I would steal around now, if I had my way, and cut their throats one by one while they sleep. But I am constantly watched. The others will not allow me to steal their quarry from them.
Inside these walls, I wait.
The deaths are inevitable, one way or the other. Everything in the vast, cold universe is calculated. The numbers explain the existence of every last insignificant insect or the rings around Saturn that could be pieces of broken moons. Energy and time. Space and matter. Love and hate. Everything we feel is just calculations compressed and shaped into soft entities we call emotions.
Pythagoras knew. There are gods and demons in the numbers.
3. Gray
THE LAST THING I THOUGHT I’D be doing today was telling Evie I’d lost my job.
My stinking, worthless job.
Turning off the highway, I drove into the narrow, graffitied set of laneways that were a shortcut to my street. The laneways always reminded me of clogged arteries, choking everyone who passed through. I’d thought it’d rain, but the dark clouds dried out and stuck fast to the winter sky like old spitballs.
I’d stayed overnight in the city after attending my cousin’s bucks party, and the Saturday traffic was just as busy as any weekday. Cousin Dayle was a law student with a city sneer in his upper lip and a Svengali-like devotion to his own bad jokes. But after getting unceremoniously dumped from my job on Friday afternoon, I’d headed straight from work to get blind drunk with him and the collection of jackasses he called his mates.
I’d slept in a hotel room until midday today, my eyes gritty and a twisting feeling in my gut.
I tried calling Evie again. I hadn’t been able to get her on the phone yesterday or today. Could she be angry with me? It’d been Evie who’d insisted that I go last night with Dayle. She’d pointed out that I didn’t have much family left in this world. Which was true. Both of my parents died young—drug overdoses—and I had no siblings.
But I’d been in two minds about going, right up to Friday afternoon.
I needed music—something fast, heavy and destructive. Rifling through my music discs, I took out a CD and pushed it into the player.
The angry, thrashing riff of Pantera’s Walk pounded from the speakers.
I turned it up louder.
Louder.
But the music opened a valve that was only going to snap shut the second I had to walk in the door and tell Evie I’d lost my job. I knew her. My usually talk-underwater wife would go quiet, and I’d have to watch her struggle to hide that she was spinning out. The rent, the bills, the groceries—all of these things teetered on the edge of disaster every single week.
I needed something to make telling her easier.
Stopping sharply, I reversed and drove back around the corner, then swung the car around and parked outside Joe’s. Inhaling a gasp of chilled air, I ran into his house for a $20 bag of pot.
Pot was something Evie and I did once every couple of months. Put the kids to bed, watch a movie, have a smoke. Kick back.
I’d kicked cigarettes five months and two days ago. Pot and alcohol were my last refuges. I convinced myself that those two things were a world away from the hard drugs that’d ended my parents’ lives.
Later tonight, I’d pull out the weed, and once I was sure Evie was calm and sleepy, I’d drop the news.
When I walked into Joe’s living room, he and his wife were sitting watching a reality TV rerun, their faces as worn and disintegrating as the fake leather of their armchairs. You could tell that whatever they’d been hitting in their lives—drugs, alcohol and cigarettes—they’d hit them hard. Both in their early seventies, they sold dope to supplement their pensions.
They tried to get me to stay and have a smoke with them. Sometimes I did. Today I didn’t. Every time I’d sit down with them, they’d recycle the same old stories, in deep, smoke-burned voices.