When Gods Collide

Time, inside a casino, is immaterial. The architects and designers who sweat and struggle over each square foot of gambling area make sure of that. Casino lighting never changes, and there are never any windows. Doors are not that common. There is as little reminder as possible that the world outside exists at all, and if a player does chance to remember it, that memory is quickly quashed by one more free cocktail, or a suddenly ringing, paying-out slot machine.

Still, even inside a casino, there is an ebb and flow to the day. Afternoons are quieter than nights, and mornings are quieter still. Many tables are not open in the early hours, and the ones that are aren’t filled with players. There are fewer dealers working, fewer cocktail waitresses. Fewer change girls ply their little carts around between machines.

Things pick up gradually as the day wears on. As visitors weary themselves with seeing the attractions outside, or exhaust themselves out in the desert heat, or finish their business at their conventions, the casinos steadily fill till, by the time it’s dark outside, the tables are all open and the seats are all full. This is Prime Time, when the place makes its money, when the most desirable players with the longest lines of credit start to show. This is when some tables get marked “Reserved” and all the minimum bets go up. This is when the money flows, along with the cocktails. This is when the life of the casino is in full swing.

Sometime before Prime Time, during the nether-hours of afternoon, when some but not all the tables were in play, when the waitresses had just begun to shrug off their early day lethargy and inject a spring into their high-heeled step, and smile more as they went from table to table; when the sun still shone brightly outside, but not as brightly or as heatedly as it had two or three hours ago; sometime in this in-between time, on one particular, inconsequential day, Zem and Venus sat at a blackjack table.

They had not arrived together. He was playing first, then she walked up and joined him, sitting on a stool three seats around the curve. The other players stopped when she arrived– two men and another woman, all between fifty and seventy-five, all long-time gamblers who were attuned to Vegas’ unique rhythm, all of whom were inured to pretty girls or distractions during cards.

Still, there was a silence as Venus arranged herself. Not just their table was silent, but the entire area around them, in the pit, through the machines behind where she sat, among the roving waitresses and change girls, even to the players at the slots. The atmosphere itself waited for her to be settled.

That hair! Those eyes! Her breasts, so pert and lively as she sat! The men who saw her stared at her. The women looked and tried to decide whether to feel jealous or to admire. She was so exactly what the world told them to be, and lectured them to despise.

She looked at the dealer. “Well?” she questioned.

“Just in time, ma’am,” he murmured, and dealt her two cards. All around, the business of the casino resumed quietly.

“Eleven, sir,” the dealer said to Zem, who occupied the first spot to his left.

Zem smiled. “Double,” he said, and laid a short stack of chips next to his bet.

“Doubling down,” the dealer murmured. He laid a card across Zem’s first two. The Queen of Clubs smiled up at Zem. Zem smiled back.

“Very nice, sir,” the dealer said. Dealers are tutored to be polite. Their first job is to be vigilant. They barely blink. They miss nothing. They see every flick of every finger on their tables. They stand watchful for the merest hint that someone is cheating, trying to sneak a card that shouldn’t be there, trying to count the cards through a six-deck shoe, which is nearly impossible. They miss nothing– but they do it with a professional smile and they say “thank you”.

The two men next to Zem both lost. Then it was Venus’ turn. Her cards were a nine and a seven– what is known in the game as a hard sixteen. In the lore of blackjack, hard sixteens are what separate the real players from the dilettantes, the strong from the weak. To fail to hit a hard sixteen will result in twisted decks, unwinnable deals, an irremediable, disastrous, card debacle from which the players will emerge battered and impoverished, and the house will leave laughing its way to the bank.

Venus just looked at her cards with disgust.

“You’re cheating,” she accused Zem. He smiled broadly and spread his hands, palms up. I’m hiding nothing, the look and gesture said. “You never play fair,” she insisted.

“What’s it going to be, honey?” the woman sitting next to Venus asked her. “Gotta hit, you know.”

“Oh, then, go ahead already,” Venus said, and drew a ten. The dealer collected her cards and her money and continued on his way.

Zem and the woman player won. Venus pouted.

“Why are you here?” she demanded of Zem two hands later.

“I live here,” he smiled.

“That’s stupid,” she said. “You live anywhere. You’ve lived all over the world for– you can go back to... anywhere. Greece, even.”

“I visited Athens once, with my second husband,” the woman next to Venus said. “Horrible food. Great liquor. What’s it called?”

“Ouzo,” Zem informed her.

“Yeah, ouzo. You ever had that?” she asked the dealer.

“No ma’am. Sixteen.”

“Hit me. It’s powerful stuff.”

“Why don’t you go back? No one wants you here,” Venus said to Zem.

“Ah, well, we’ll see about that.”

The dealer lost, everybody who was still playing won. The woman next to Venus had busted, drawing a nine on her sixteen.

“Easy come, easy go,” she said, and pulled herself away from the table.

“Why are you still here?” Zem asked Venus as the cards were dealt again. He got a blackjack, smiled, and tipped the dealer when his winnings were pushed across to him.

She tossed her hair like a model in a shampoo commercial in the 70s and glared at him. Everybody stopped to watch. There was another silent moment at their table, and around them through the pit and among the nearby machines. “Oh! You– I don’t know why– ever since Olympus–”

“Careful, Venus,” Zem cautioned.

“Why? Why should I be? No one cares about you! No one knows. They’ve all forgotten, you horrible old man! They’ve–”

“Careful,” he repeated.

Things slowed all around them. Nothing like the players and the workers freezing in their tracks, nothing so dramatic as things stopping or breaking suddenly into slow motion. There were no splashy special effects, nothing to indicate that anything untoward was happening. But things got very quiet, in that particular region of the casino. Nothing seemed to happen for a longer time than usual. No one looked up, no one said a thing as Zem and Venus watched each other. Play was paused.

“Be careful,” he said one more time.

“I won’t be. We’ve all lived according to your rule for all this time, and it’s stupid! We did what you told us– found places for ourselves where we were happy, and never let on who we were. And what did you do? You couldn’t stay away and just disappear, could you? You couldn’t just fade off into nothingness and leave me alone! You came here, you invaded my new home. It’s not fair! I live here! I belong here! You go away!”

She was screaming by the end of it.

Zem waited till she’d got her breath back.

“You haven’t done a very good job of keeping the world from recognizing you,” he commented. “Although they do forget you as soon as you leave them, so I guess you’re technically following the rule I placed.” He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. I’m here now. And no,” he added. “I won’t go away, my dear. I like Las Vegas. I like the modern world. And it’s going to like me. Love me. Just like the ancient one did.”

“Nobody loves you,” she lashed back. “Nobody loves you and nobody cares about you, they only fear you. And you hate me and I hate you and I’m going to do whatever I can to get rid of you, old man. That’s it. That’s how it is.” And she stood up, scowling as violently as only sexy kittens can. A tiny plaything, transformed into a spinning, spitting, ball of razors.

Zem glanced at the still players and tourists and casino workers, all of whom were looking down, or looking away, not noticing. He smiled grimly. Somewhere, sounding far away, thunder rumbled. There was a sudden charge of blue-white light around them, and a crackling of lightning.

“Don’t start that,” Venus taunted. “What about the world finding out? Do you think they won’t notice if you crack the floor in half?”

“I think fear,” Zem told her, “is as good a place to start as any.”

They watched each other, then she turned away, a flounce of hair and wrists and shoulders and ankles.

“Miss? Are you out?” the dealer asked her.

“Go to hell!” Venus yelled at Zem, proud to use a modern expression she’d picked up.

“I don’t think so,” he retorted. He looked up, to where the light had returned to normal and the static discharge had faded from view.

Venus shoved herself away from the table. She shot one more glare toward Zem and then fastened on the first man passing nearby. “Come with me,” she said to him.

His name was David. He’d come to Vegas to marry his high school sweetheart. Neither one of them had ever slept with any other human being.

“Okay,” he said, and followed Venus like a love-struck puppy.

Back at the blackjack table, the dealer was just then laying out the next hand. The speed of things had recommenced, returned to normal.

“That girl seemed unhappy,” one of the players next to Zem commented. There was general agreement.

“She’s not easily satisfied,” Zem said. He smiled around at the nods of the other men.

Zem played three more hands, which he won, and then he wished the table good luck and left, too.

NEXT POST: ARRIVALS AND ENTRANCES (Monday 10/26)