With some rough calculations, I gather that there is about $2000 between the men that play the game. The $2000 more or less shifts between players, though the bulk of it sits between two men: Caleb and Sebastian. The rest of us are used to losing a little every night- ten bucks here, twenty bucks on a rough couple of rounds. Sometimes we even come out on top, but the longer I watch, the more I see the money sliding across the table to those two.
Nobody seems to mind.
Eddie stands outside my motel room, his lanky silhouette framed by the open door, breath emerging in a fog. He worries about the woman next door- it’s been a long time since I’ve heard her pacing. He tells me how Sebastian created the game:
‘Sebastian worked night shifts at some shithole gas station, right? Some place way out on the highway, out where there isn’t any light but headlights and the fucking stars. Not the sort of place where people come twice, caters mostly to truckers and families on holiday and people on the run. Thing is, he says he started seeing patterns in the folk that came around for gas and jerky.
A guy comes in looking for scissors, says he can’t get the package of his new earbuds open without’em. Guy comes in a month later- different guy, same story. Another guy’s always looking for some flavor of chips they quit making. A woman comes in to buy gardening gloves every three weeks. Who buys gardening gloves at a gas station? Who needs’em in the middle of the night?
So these people are all different but they’re all fulfilling roles. They’re acting out parts. He starts to see the whole thing like some sort of TV drama, starts to know what to expect. He writes’em down, doodles little pictures of’em. So the Scissor Man, like, the card, you know? The Scissor Man is pretty regular so there’s a few of him in the deck. And he’s not tied to the moon so the card’s black. The Chip Eater only came around when the moon was, you know, getting bigger. So the card’s yellow, like the moon off the highway. And he never finds what he’s looking for so he’s a losing card.
Sebastian says he near offed himself when, all said and done, he figured there were really only 48 types of people that ever came in off the highway. Said the same about people in the daytime, too. We’re all just a Scissor Man or a Dusty Shade or a Gas Guzzler. All of us just fit into those 48 slots and some of us are so common as to be around every corner or so useless that nobody wants us shitting on their hand and eating up their chips.
Only thing that kept him sane was getting away from that gas station and making it all like some game he gets to play with dudes at the end of the day. Makes it about money again which, I suspect, we all kinda think it’s about, really. Play some cards, make some money, right? You in for this Friday? I’ve got a good feeling.’
I have seen Sebastian eyeing me across the table and, before I could take it personally, I’ve found him eyeing the others. He sees us in the cards and he plays us like his hand, pegging each man at the table with his gas-station archetype.
Friday comes along and I flip a hand of Amorphous Children, one of each suit. It’s impressive, maybe the best hand I’ve played in my time at the table, and it wins me several hundred dollars in chips and a few stinging back slaps. Not unexpectedly, I begin to lose again. Sebastian knows the ins-and-outs of the game and of the men. It would take years of play before I was able to win against him consistently. Instead, I try to lose in a very specific way, conceding round after round to Caleb, even when I may have otherwise held out.
Suddenly, Sebastian’s eyes are on Caleb. He understands something has happened, but not what. Maybe Caleb is a Gibbous Dusty Shade. Maybe he’s the Walking Drunk. Sebastian tries to reconcile the change with the archetype and he fails. By the end of the night, his system has begun to crumble. He makes violent, clumsy plays that ruin Caleb and allow other men to win. He pays no mind to me.
I wonder if he would tell me my card and, at the same time, I dread knowing.
-traveler
