ah, Christ, how he missed it now.
Sunglasses helped, and ear plugs, and the poker game itself. But smells got him, too, and he could hardly go around with a plug on his nose. He was used to being stared at, but even he had his limits.
He could have endured the sensory overload, if that had been all it was, but the overload came from inside, too. Emotions blazed through him, leaving charred trails in their wake. He wasn’t equipped to handle such violent endocrinal activity, after years of floating numbness.
Still, he preferred to call this state emotional overload rather than bugfuck insanity. Not that he could really quantify the difference.
All day, he surfed waves of rage and free-floating terror. When those eased down, aching melancholy awaited him, interspersed with jittery euphoria. And the lust was through the ceiling. He’d steeled himself to ask Bruno about that, and Bruno solemnly informed him that constant sexual awareness was more or less normal for a healthy guy, and welcome to the club, already. According to Bruno, normal guys thought about sex constantly. All night and all day, porn footage unspooled in their heads. How normal guys managed to get through their days without totally humiliating themselves was a mystery to him.
At night, if he slept at all, his dreams were turbo-charged nightmares that spat him into waking consciousness flash-fried on adrenaline. He was taking a protracted break from sleep. He couldn’t take the stress anymore. All-night poker was more restful.
If he could keep his mind on it, that is. He yanked his attention back to see Laker limp in with 200. Kev raised 600, three times the big blind, breathing with his mouth so as not to smell the guy’s aftershave.
He’d been in this unenviable state since he’d woken from the second coma, the one following the stress flashback. The one which had necessitated reconstructive surgery upon the face of Dr. Prateek Patil, Kev’s neurosurgeon. Embarrassing, considering how hard the guy had worked on Kev’s fucked-up brain. Patil hadn’t deserved to get pounded all to shit for his trouble. But life was seldom fair.
He doubted that same fit would come over him if he should see Patil again, but nobody wanted to experiment with that hypothesis, least of all Patil himself. The guy had a restraining order out on him.
On the button, Stevens cold called $600. Kev wrenched his mind back into focus. Stevens’s hand couldn’t be that great. His normal pattern was to re-raise big hands, get the blinds to fold, and eliminate random hands that could flop big and crush a high-percentage hand.
Pay attention. Hard to calculate what kind of hand Stevens would be playing with, his head pounding like this. Moriarty folded. His $100 blind went into the pot. Chilikers squeezed his cards and studied them again before he called $400 more. He’d been an early winner, after he got the stake from Kev. He’d even gotten ahead by about thirty thousand for a while, but for the last hour he’d been taking beat after beat. He’d gotten more sullen with each one.
Laker, the limper, called. He was getting pot odds for any two cards. That left four for the flop. Laker, Chilikers, Stevens, and himself.
Chilikers was staring at him again as the dealer burned the top card and flipped up the board. Queen of diamonds, jack of diamonds, two of clubs. Coordinated board. Sucked, for him. Anyone with two diamonds only needed one more to win, or any two connecting cards for a five card straight. His head throbbed sickeningly. He stuck his hand in his pocket, clutching the prescription bottle, but the pills would be useless now. He’d waited too long, hadn’t wanted to dull his edge. He was so nauseous now, he wouldn’t be able to digest them. So there was no way out of this shitty headache now but straight through it.
Besides. Seemed stupid to zonk himself into deliberate dullness after years of spending a fortune on extreme sports just to prove to himself that he had a fucking pulse.
Man, he felt that pulse now. Every heartbeat a meat mallet blow to his frontal lobe, thudding against the swelling, the scar tissue, the knitting bones of his skull. The healing process would be slow, though the doctors had assured him that the situation would improve. The pain, nausea, dizziness, the disorientation would diminish over time. And they had. He’d already gotten off the antiseizure meds. He might even regain some lost memories, they had hopefully hypothesized.
Though it was clear none of them wanted to be anywhere near him when that happened.
But Christ, it hurt. Every beat of his heart. Sometimes he wished that organ would give it a rest. Just stop, and leave him the fuck alone.
Concentrate, goddamnit. Stop whining. Self-pity is not useful.
That would be a lot easier if that bastard would stop staring.
It didn’t usually bother him, but the disgust, the veiled hostility on Chilikers face bothered him a lot, in his current state. Kev met his eyes straight on, and silently invited him to state his fucking problem.
Chiliker’s eyes flicked away. He checked. Stevens, too.
Kev bet $1,500. Stevens called. Chilikers, too, then Laker. The pot was up to $8,500. And Chilikers was glaring again.
Ignore the fucker. He funneled his mind by brute force into the calm detachment that he craved. He played for the express purpose of concentration, detachment, serenity. And he was blowing it because some greedy asshole was giving him the hairy eyeball? Unacceptable.
The dealer burned, and flipped the turn. Ace of diamonds.
Ah. Now that was a problem. His mind seized on to it hungrily, rejoicing in the new slew of calculations to make. He had a set, yeah, but a bunch of possible hands could beat a set of aces. His brain churned out the list, examining probabilities in a blinding inner stream of data that gave him sweet relief. As long as he could keep it up.
He’d happened upon this new coping mechanism by chance. Bruno had brought him a laptop to keep him from going nuts in the hospital, after they’d taken the restraints off. He’d discovered online poker while fucking around with it. It had taken serious effort to get those restraints removed, and convince the hospital staff that he was not going to wig out and attack them. He winced, just thinking about it.
Online poker was the first thing he found that helped. It chilled him, just that crucial bit that kept him halfway sane. He needed dark glasses to stare into the computer, and even so, the glow of the screen intensified his headaches badly, but it was better than a padded cell.
He’d played for days on end, until the doctors started talking about taking the computer away. He’d made it clear that wasn’t an option, and shortly afterward found himself discharged, much sooner than hospital protocol dictated. The staff was scared shitless of him.
He didn’t blame them. Christ, he scared himself these days.
As soon as he could stagger out on crutches, he’d sought out some real poker games. High-level play. Seasoned, talented players. The more layers of complexity, the better the trick worked for him. Those guys played for real money, though. They’d kicked his ass for a while. It had been an expensive coping tool while he made the adjustment.
Not anymore, though. He won, now. Almost always. He cycled through a big circuit of clubs, so that no one got too tired of that fact.
Not that he gave a shit about winning. The money in his pocket when he walked out was a byproduct. It was the process he craved. The stream of calculations in his head, blotting out the jangle of emotional overload. The game as he played it was painkiller, anxiolytic, and sleep substitute. After hours
