T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”
America is roulette: streets, cities, states of mind. Waiting for a hit, waiting for your number to be called. As they fly into a Midwest stopover, a voice crackles in the background like a rumour, the news at noon over a neighbour’s headset announcing a flash flood in Maine, nuclear spill in the middle dozens, earthquake with its epicentre at thirty-six red. The statistics of fate in the air: in the recirculating stink of burger and fries, sweat tang of nachos, a godawful hummus stashed away in a carry-on knapsack. They were warned there would be no food on this flight so they’ve brought it aboard. Enough to feed the Russian army, as they used to say. Enough to feed the thrombus and embolus of future coronary events. They know the risks, they know the odds — they are gamblers, junketeers after all. Later, on their way home, there will be time to analyze the action, work the numbers like a tension knot in the back of the neck, head tight as a migraine, memories ruminating and repeating like flashbacks or flatus, thinking of the down and the double-down. But that’s later. Right now it’s the play. The straight-ahead path. Going west. To Vegas.
The airplane is shadow on landscape across a patchwork of forest and field and empty places. Where you live is busy. What you see is blur. But if you gain altitude — distance, Cynthia would have called it — you gain greater perspective. A bigger picture emerges. You can see that the slow creep of events is an illusion; the landscape is rushing past silently at a thousand miles an hour. Munin tried to explain that to her once. She didn’t say anything, or nothing he can remember. Her voice even then had become part of the silence.
They’ve been in Las Vegas for an hour, barely enough time to check in and have a shower. Munin wants to relax, review his notes for the psychiatry conference, but Hughes insists, “Time to have a bit of fun. Get our feet wet. You can work later.”
Hughes is newly decked out in khakis and hibiscus-print shirt — protective colouration, he’d call it in his English way, acutely aware of his un-Americanness. The elevator is a bubble of classic music, decrescendo to the casino floor as the doors glide open and they are greeted by the crash of slots. A quick reconnaissance as Hughes searches for a table of European roulette, thirty-six numbers and a single zero. Better odds, Hughes informs him, the double-zero tables were a damn local invention to increase the house edge. They find a spot between a young Vietnamese man and an older woman in a lime-green leisure suit, face a reticule of wrinkles dusted with powder, a hint of talc and something fruity to Munin’s nose. Hughes’s mother used the same brand, if he’s not mistaken.
“How is your mother?” The sense of smell a highway to the unconscious.
Hughes is busy laying bets, but the remark makes him pause. “Odd that you should mention it. I was just thinking I should call her.”
The ball stops on two black. The older woman strews chips about the table in no apparent order, the Vietnamese man lays a C-note on red, money plays. Hughes takes a flutter on the nearest six, nickel bets on thirty-one to thirty-six. “It helps to have a system.”
Perhaps a pointed comment, but Munin lets it ride. “You seem to have a strategy.”
“Simple, really. Stick with the same six numbers — it doesn’t matter which ones. None of that pet number or anniversary nonsense.” No anniversary for Hughes to remember, birthdays now too numerous to be something to celebrate. “I should hit one of my numbers in the next six turns.”
“What if you don’t?”
“Then I’ll increase the bet.”
Everyone’s got a system: straight bets, trios, corner bets, combinations. A college kid comes up beside Munin and lays a column bet to cover the whole street for a payoff of two to one. The man beside the dealer lays stacks of differing heights at random places on the table.
Up comes twenty-three red. The Vietnamese man pockets a century chip and lets the money ride. Next is five red, and he cashes out. Then it’s seventeen black, twenty-six black, ten black, zero. Hughes is focused now, quietly determined. All of his numbers have been losers so far, but he keeps to the game plan, laying out his two rows of bets each time the table is cleared. The older woman collects her chips and moves over to the machines. The college kid’s got a short attention span and drifts away. Only Hughes is left, showing terrific concentration, or maybe he’s mesmerized by the spin. On the seventh turn of the wheel he doubles his bets. The wheel turns. The marble clatters. Another loser, a trend now starting to gain significance. A half-dozen more bets and all the money is gone.
“Maybe that’s enough for now,” says Hughes. He’s out about five hundred.
Munin doesn’t understand the attraction of the game. “They could use a random-number generator. It would have the same result.”
“Not really the same thing, though, is it?” Hughes says. “The mandala of the wheel and all that. A computer doesn’t work as an archetype — at least not yet. No romance there.”
“It’d be a lot more efficient. I’m not sure your system was working.”
“It’s not much of a working system, I admit, more of a working hypothesis,” Hughes says cheerily. “Nothing really pays off in this game. That’s the beauty of it. Different combinations and permutations, black or red, betting strategies. Analysis is quite hopeless. It’s all just randomness.”
“You seem to think that’s a good thing.”
“A bit of chaos in the system. I find it refreshing.”
They cross the casino, carpet a sublimina of silver dollars and sea horses, gold brocade and clusters of grapes, a pattern so venal and Jungian that it makes Munin’s head ache, though the real misery is the clangour of slots, the spit of metal on metal. The noise almost drowns out Hughes, but Munin catches the drift. The comment about analysis isn’t neutral; Hughes knows Munin is fond of systems. The unromance of methodology.
Munin sees in categories, patterns — keeping his eyes away from the carpet. He can detect at a glance any evidence of anxiety, the smallest compulsion, trace signs of a disturbed personality or troubled soul. That’s how he’s been trained, but there’s a talent there, as well. Someone else — even Hughes himself — would be overwhelmed by facial features, gestures, the counter-transference coinage of skin, smile and distress. We are distracted by florid narratives, wild talk, sexuality, humanity. Munin’s eye doesn’t see the spectrum, only individual colours, signs and syndromes. In his lectures he’s fond of saying that the senses aren’t meant to detect what’s out there in the world. Their purpose is to filter out the extraneous, separate chaff from wheat. There are so many things to see we end up seeing nothing. The art is in the focus, in realizing what’s important. Something as simple as a word or an image that gets to the heart of things.
Hughes imagines that focus must be a little terrifying to Munin’s patients. They must sense that their bodies — perched half-naked and on display — aren’t being seen in the normal way: no desire or disgust, nothing intimate or even complicit. They are being read. But can they trust that their doctor will interpret the signs correctly? Their bodies covered in stigmata, the tattoo of slashes or cigarette burns that spell out their grief. Munin sees parallel cuts on a forearm as a paragraph of text, the body as a book, something to be read and analyzed. And rewritten, or so Munin tells his students.
He compares the body to another text, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the secular bible of psychiatry that characterizes the features of every form of mental illness. It describes the usual age of onset, clinical course, the criteria needed for diagnosing organic syndromes, anxiety disorders, mood disorders,
