Spaceland Read online

  The waitress came back with a new drink for me. This time it was ginger ale and vodka. I complained again.

  “What is wrong with me tonight?” she said, laughing and leaning way down so I could see her breasts. “Can’t you just be a good boy and drink this one up? I’m gonna get in trouble if I keep taking drinks back.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Dude’s a lightweight,” said skinny Gus. I almost went for the challenge, but then I remembered something Jena had told me on the plane. The further I got ahead, the more the casino would mess with me. Gus was a hired shill whose sole purpose was to screw up my concentration.

  “I don’t drink like a fish,” I told Gus, tossing a thousand-dollar tip to the dealer. “But I play like a whale.” Clever line, Joe. I was feeling pretty cool. I wished Jena was there to hear me. I shouldn’t have been so harsh with her.

  Just to teach the shill a lesson, I put down twenty thousand for my next bet. If I lost, I’d still have the seventeen I started with. Sixteen, minus the tip. The dealer gave me a look, and the pit boss walked over. A handsome, muscular guy with a good tan. The kind of casino heavy I was scared of. His name tag said Sante Machado.

  “Pardon me, Mr. Cube,” he said. “We’re gonna have to close down this table. Come on over here; we’ve got a fresh table and dealer all set for you.”

  I tried to think if I’d told anyone my name. I’d had to show ID and give my name at the Hog Heaven, but I hadn’t mentioned it to anyone at Nero’s, had I? Oh yeah, come to think of it, Gus the shill had gotten a business card out of me. He’d mentioned COMDEX and out of reflex I’d given him a Kencom card. I guess he’d passed it up the chain. Gus stayed right on me as we switched to the new table.

  The new dealer was a black guy with a shaved head. “Let’s keep it going now,” he said to me encouragingly. “Don’t let up, Joe. Break the bank.” The dealer always acted like your friend. I set down my twenty-thousand dollar bet again.

  The dealer drew a nine face up and a jack for his hidden hole card. Nineteen. I got a five and a three. Tuning out Gus’s manic chatter, I focused my subtle vision on the cards in the shoe. A king was next. “Hit me.” Eighteen. Not enough to beat nineteen. The obvious strategy was to stand pat, but my subtle vision showed me that the card face-down on the top of the deck was a two. “Hit me,” I said again. Twenty. Home free.

  “The guy’s got brass balls!” shouted Gus, slapping me on the back. Gus busted his hand, the dealer flipped his hole card to show his nineteen and now I was forty thousand dollars ahead.

  “You’re lucky!” said Sante the pit boss, looking me over once again.

  “Clean living,” I said, my heart pounding in my chest.

  The waitress was at my elbow again with a rum and ginger ale. “Could you just get me a large coffee?” I asked her. “And a hamburger?” I gave her a hundred dollar bill for encouragement. She patted the inside of my leg. Frisking me some more, no doubt. This was all so unreal.

  By the time I’d finished my burger I was up a hundred thousand dollars. Time for a break. I gave the dealer a chip and put the rest of the chips in a little cloth sack he gave me. I walked around in the dizzying noise, peering through things to look for Jena.

  I found her and Spazz in a bar off the main room, deep in conversation. Their hearts going pitter-pat.

  “Hi guys,” I said. “It’s the Vegas whale.”

  “How much have you won?” asked Jena, not smiling at me. She’d had a few drinks by now. She looked unhappy.

  “A hundred large,” I said.

  This didn’t seem to impress her as much as I’d thought it would. Again I lost my temper, again in front of Spazz.

  “Are you still mad at me, Jena? Coming here was your idea in the first place, so for Christ’s sake you ought to be happy.”

  “You called me a bitch and said I was bad luck,” said Jena, staring down at her margarita. She began chewing on her thumbnail, “Fine. I’m staying away from you. I don’t want to be hurt again. I’m sick of being your keeper and your scapegoat.”

  “I’m sorry I snapped at you, Jena. was uptight. Maybe woe should call it a night.”

  Spazz interrupted with a loud cough. “I thought you said you were going to win a million,” he insisted. “Jena needs that much for the PR campaign.”

  “The what?” I was losing track of why we were doing this. Gambling wasn’t fun, it was just some kind of weird and stressful work. And meanwhile this freak was doing his best to get it on with may wife.

  “Let me talk to him alone,” said Jena, still not looking up, still nibbling her nails.

  “I’ll be back,” said Spazz in the Terminator voice, and headed for the bathroom.

  “Show me the chips,” said Jena with a flicker of interest.

  I see my little Nero’s carrying sack on the bar next to Jena’s drink and she peered into it. “Not nearly enough for a house,” said Jena after a minute. “With a million, we’d have enough for a decent house and a little left over for the PR campaign. I think you should win a million tonight. We can keep most of it.”

  “Careful,” I said. “Momo’s probably watching us. This might be some kind of test.”

  “Who cares?” said Jena. “It’s our money. We’re the ones who live here. You and me, Joe, chained together.”

  “Not chained, Jen,” I snapped. “If you’re sick of me, you’re free to leave. And vice versa.” Why was I talking like this? I rubbed my face and took a deep breath. “This is all messed up, Jena. I hate it here. Let’s go home.”

  She looked up for the first time. She touched my cheek with her hand, her clear hazel eyes searching my face. Like she was saying good-bye. “Win the million, Joe. We’ve come this far. No matter what happens, a million’s a good thing to have. Do you promise to split it with me? Fifty-fifty?”

  “All right,” I said, hoping to see her smile. Why was this turning into such a bummer? Here came Spazz walking back across the room, fingering his nose ring. “Don’t get too tight with him,” I cautioned Jena.

  “I like Spazz. He makes me feel young again. Can I come watch you play?”

  “Well—better not. I think maybe you really are bad luck. If I’m gonna do this, I have to focus. Will you wait here?”

  A long pause. “I guess so,” said Jena finally. “If you don’t see me later on, that means I got tired and went back to the room. Give me the key just in case.”

  Back to work. By midnight I had two hundred thousand dollars; I’d switched over to ten-thousand-dollar chips. They changed the dealer and table two more times on me, but pretty soon I had eight hundred thousand. There was a big crowd of people standing behind me watching me play. I was still drinking coffee. Gus had gone to take a leak, and for the moment it was just the dealer and me—which was great, as now I could look ahead into the deck and really see what was coming so I could tune the sizes of my bets accordingly. I was wired like you wouldn’t believe.

  Here came my chance to reach a million. I bet two hundred thousand dollars. The dealer had a ten in the hole and a ten showing. I started out with an ace and a five, which was sixteen, counting the ace as eleven. I drew a four, and that made twenty, which still wasn’t enough to beat the dealer—they didn’t pay you for a tie. But my subtle vision had already told me I could do better. “Hit me.” A king, which still gave me twenty, now counting my ace as one. A step back? Not really, for now I had the chance to take one last hit and get that second ace waiting down there. Twenty-one. I had my million.

  “That’s gotta be your last hand, sir,” said Sante the pit boss, tapping me on the shoulder none too lightly. His eyebrows were angled in this weird, stagy way. He looked like a weary, pissed off Dean Martin. “Nero’s can’t handle no more losses tonight.”

  I took my chips to the cashier and got paid in honest-to-God cash. A hundred packs of a hundred hundred-dollar bills each. Whoops, not quite a hundred packs. Seventy-two packs.

  “Where’s the rest of my money?” I demanded.


  “Federal withholding, Mr. Cube,” said the cashier. “Twenty-eight percent. We’ve filled out the form for you. just sign here.”

  They already had my social security number written onto the form. I guess they’d been busy checking me out.

  “My wife told me there’s no tax on blackjack!” I protested.

  “There is if you win more than five thousand dollars, Mr. Cube,” said the cashier in a bored tone. “You could look it up. Section 3402 of the tax code. Paragraph Q.”

  To finish the transaction off, they sold me a shiny metal Halli burton Zero attaché case for nine hundred dollars.

  I was a big winner. But meanwhile my wife was nowhere in sight. While I’d been playing, she’d swung by my table once or twice to peek at me, each time looking more desperate. But I’d kept shooing her away. Who needed that noise? Being in a fight with her was ruining the joy of my big score! And now she was gone.

  I got a cab back down the Strip to the Hog; I didn’t want to be walking around this time of night with a million bucks in an attache case, minus taxes. But a million just the same! I was riding high. When I got out behind the Hog, I realized Did know our room number. I could have looked for a desk clerk, but I felt like I remembered well enough where the room was.

  I walked around in the maze of the motel streets for half an hour, getting thoroughly disoriented. Finally I thought of using my subtle vision to peek into the rooms and look for Jena. A lot of people were still awake, doing all sorts of sleazy Vegas type stuff. Sex. booze, drugs, you name it. One memorable thing I saw was a male stripper wearing nothing but a starched little bib-and-tucker thing and a red silk bow tie. He was closeted with a bachelorette party of three lumpy women from Wyoming. His dancing was over, but he was still at work, earning the little stack of twenty-dollar bills sitting on the TV.

  Jena was nowhere to be seen in any of the rooms near where I thought we’d stayed. And then I realized I’d been looking in she wrong alley. I went down to the next one. still no Jena, and then finally, with my regular vision, I spotted my Lincoln Navigator parked by our rooms. I used my subtle vision to peek inside.

  Jena was awake. She and Spazz had opened the door between our rooms, and Jena was in Spazz’s bed, naked, her eyes squeezed into lustful slits, her arms wrapped tight around him.

  Of course.

  I stood there on the asphalt watching for two or three minutes, struck dumb, filled with sick fascination. With my subtle vision, I was right in the room with them. It was hot. I’d never seen Jena so excited before in my life. I was, like, hypnotized. But when they paused to switch positions, I pulled my attention away.

  Much more than being a turn-on, this was like getting punched in the stomach. I felt cringing and hollow, sadder than sad. Jena and Spazz—it knocked the wind out of my sails. I felt like lying down on the sidewalk and crying. Oh Jena. And now the anger came up too. I wanted to kill Spazz.

  What to do? Pound on the door and confront them? Shouting, violence, the cops? That’s what my low-rent relatives back in Matthewsboro would have done. But I was educated, civilized. Should I slink away and come back when they were done? Pretend that nothing had happened? It sickened me to imagine lying down next to Jena right after Spazz.

  Someone tapped me on the shoulder. A mugger! I whirled, clutching the case of money to my chest. Nobody there—or—wait, yes—it was Momo’s hand.

  One of her womanlike cross sections swelled up and stood on the pavement beside me. “I see that you’re upset about your wife, Joe Cube.”

  “You got me into this,” I said. “Tell me what to do.”

  “Would you like to get away from here?”

  “Yes.” That was the best answer for now. Leave.

  “I’ll take you back to your house.”

  Momo, stepped towards me and gave me a hug. God knows I needed a hug about then. It felt good. Her flesh flowed all the way around me and I felt pressure in every part of my body: in my stomach, in my chest, all down my arms and legs. There was that weird rotating sensation again, and everything got bright. We were outside of Spaceland, just like we’d been when Momo carried me through the wall of my house, floating in the funny higher space that Momo lived in. The All.

  The fourth dimension still didn’t make much sense to me, but, thanks to having been augmented, I could see in it better than before. There was four-dimensional pink stuff squeezed around most of my body: Momo’s flesh. I was kind of sticking out of her like a baby bird in a nest. By leaning out and looking down, I could see that Momo was perched on her shiny little flying saucer. I turned my head and looked up above us.

  We were in some kind of immense cave with, I guessed, four-dimensional walls. The walls had a way of morphing their shapes as my head moved. The cave was lit up like the inside of a fluorescent light tube. Evidently there was some kind of air, as I could still breathe. But my main interest was our own world, spread out next to me. My regular eyes could only see cross sections of things—slices taken parallel to the ground, more or less like floor plans. But my third eye could see everything, just like I’d seen into all of our townhouse back home.

  “Behold your Spaceland,” said Momo.

  Right beside us was the Hog Heaven parking lot with the asphalt and my Lincoln Navigator. I wasn’t looking at a view of the lot, I was looking at the actual lot itself. And it wasn’t like an aerial view, either. Relative to the people in Spaceland, I wasn’t above the lot, I was vout from it. Off in the universe next door, you might say. Our motel rooms were open to my view, with, ugh, Spazz and Jena still going at it. I wished I was dead.

  I looked past those two at the Texas Texas casino next door; I could scan through every room of it. The gaming tables, the restaurant, the strip show, the offices, a woman smoking a cigarette and counting money in a back room, two cooks in the kitchen joking around, one of them putting his fingers up by his head and imitating a bull. Focusing in on the cooks did me good; it took my mind off Jena. But now the casino was moving past us. Momo was heading for Los Perros.

  The Strip went flying past, but not like we were over it, more like we were next to it. It was a little like being in a theater with a big screen showing a drive through Las Vegas. Several times it looked like we were going to ram a car, and I’d wince, but then we’d breeze right past it, me and Momo on her little chrome saucer.

  We roared through downtown Vegas with all its lights, and then we were blasting past the desert. When we hit the Sierras, Momo didn’t rise up over them. We flew right through them. But not really through them of course, as we were a few yards removed from our regular world.

  Like I said, there was four-dimensional light all around, and it even lit up the insides of the mountains. I’d always enjoyed hiking in the Rockies as a boy, and it was pretty amazing to see what mountains looked like inside. They’re more interesting than you might expect, with lots of big, muscular bends and folds, not to mention the occasional tubes of quartz, the fanned-out mineral growths and now and then a ragged, secret cavern. Not that I could concentrate very well. Every beat of my heart was saying, “Jena.” To cover the pain I did my best to look around and notice things.

  We raced across the Central Valley, Momo’s little flying saucer buzzing steadily beneath us. The surfaces of things were lit by the moon, and their insides were lit by the higher light of the All. The beauty of it was soothing to me. We passed barns, farmhouses, rivers, freeways, and 7-Elevens. And then we were following Route 101 into the south side of San Jose, with a fair amount of traffic even at this ungodly hour—what was it now, three AM on Sunday morning? Pitiful early risers out to beat the morning rush, and there was a rush, even on Sundays.

  I could see each and every passenger in each and every car, and each person in every bed in every house of the suburban developments rushing by. All the little lives, as pointless as my own.

  Finally, we were closing in on the friendly interior of my home, lit up by the heartbreaking kitchen light that Jena had left on. Momo plowed on in there
and then shoved me over into regular space. I was home. Me and a metal case with a million dollars in it. I would have given every bit of that money to roll the clock back a few hours. I’d been a fool to yell at Jena. I started crying.

  “You are weary,” said Momo, a crooked cross section of her head peering into my living-dining room.

  “Just go away. Don’t ask me for anything more.”

  Momo left and I got in the shower and stayed there till the crying stopped. And then put the case with the million. next to the bed and lay down. I was feeling calmer. I’d say it was all my fault. That I’d driven Jena away. Tomorrow I could fix things. I’d get her back. And then I’d get even with Spazz. I fell asleep.

  5

  A Dream Of Flatland

  In the night I had a memorable dream. I was flying beside a huge vertical plane with something like a painting on it. The flat round image showed a full-size cross section of planet—glowing red in the center, and with mountains and shallow seas on its rind. I flew towards the disk’s top border, driven by an urgent feeling that there was something I had to do.

  I stopped just short of the plane, which was more like a soap film than a canvas. Looking over at the rim of the disk, I saw movements. It wasn’t a painting, it was a world of life. A Flatland. It had the East/West and up/down directions, but it was missing what we’d call North/South.

  The top rim of the disk was a strip of land with two-dimensional building piled on it, making up a town Somehow thought of as my hometown of Matthewsboro, Colorado. It was like a cross section of Matthewsboro, a jumble of stuff set upon the line of a flat planet’s gently curved rim. The town wasn’t flat like an aerial view, it was flat like a vertical slice of a city. A cartoon skyline, with the insides of the buildings open to my views. It had dirt below, sky above, a row of buildings with little pieces of street between them and flat people everywhere.

  The people of Flat Matthewsboro were nearly as tall as me. Each had two arms, two legs, and a head; they were like silhouettes, like animated Egyptian hieroglyphs. Their heads had an eye on either side and the slit of a mouth on top. The eyes were flat gleaming triangles, and the fronts of their eyes bulged. Their flat skins wrapped around their edges like rinds on slices of salami. Their clothes were stringy wrappers outside their skins, like threads of icing on the rims of gingerbread men and women.