EXCERPT FROM POKER
The first event was Limited Texas Hold’em with a maximum bet of a hundred. Listlessly Connor nodded to the other players. Rogues, shades—they were little more to him than the burned crust of a coffee mug.
The one next to him was a red-stripped sports coat puffed with feathers that couldn’t have been muscles. Across from him were gold cufflinks in the shape of wine corks, a still life of poker chips stacked imperfect, a smoking woman that was like him—a black, brooding, reticent gargoyle observing the game from the highest steeple of the Ulm Münster.
The cards were dealt and the four players worked in harmony. The woman was pitch-perfect in her tossing of chips and patient manners, though he couldn’t see her face. Together they chimed the words of a familiar chorus—“bet”, “check”, “raise”, “call”, “fold.” Their instruments were the slot machine bells and the knock knock of fists on wood.
“Want a light?” The black figure asked. She had seen him sucking on the back of an unlit cigarette, exhaling out a stream of imaginary smoke.
“Nah.” he said, having successfully quit smoking months ago, though he could not quit the action.
He was pleased to have her attention and tried to form an image of her face but was denied by what still lurked in his cerebral cortex. Since he was sixteen, he had never been able to see faces. Prosopagnosia—it was a rare mental disorder that came to him after hitting an overly-durable streetlamp in his mother’s car. A disruption of the fusiform gyrus, disorder of face perception, aperceptive, his parents were to him only manikins with associative clues. From the day of his accident, his mother only dressed in dark red so he couldn’t lose her in a crowd, and then one day he did anyway.
As difficult as the condition was to live with, there were times of tragicomic entertainment: being able to date any girl he wanted, isolating her body, “accidentally” making out with his girlfriend’s best friend, being totally unaffected by the charisma of others, and of course, the sustained, disquieting and sometimes underestimated tendencies toward suicide. The misfortune was only to a man’s advantage at two times in his life: when killing another man without being dissuaded by facial pleas for mercy, and Las Vegas poker.
Poker especially was a facile pursuit.
With no faces to pity, the players around him were little more than a set of dangling ornaments, inexpressive puppets, abstract manikins on display for his sale, rent, trade and usurpation, and during the twenty or so rounds of Texas Hold’em he bought them all, clearing the table of the distraught statues, returning them to dust.
