24
The answer, to my sorrow, was 6:00 a.m.
I went back upstairs to the small hell of the casino and watched people die by the increments of a quarter or a buck. Around four o'clock a breeze came up, and things got really strange. The people playing slots were sitting in tall chairs with casters on the legs. When they pulled the handle, their momentum, added to the rocking of the boat, sent them rolling downhill through the haze of cigarettes to the far side of the cabin. Sometimes they slammed into a bulkhead. When the boat tipped back the other way, they hurtled once again toward their machine to see that they had lost. Now and then a slot spit forth a rain of coins at a trajectory like someone throwing up.
I stepped outside to get some air. The moon was near the zenith, but the sky was soggy and there was a lack of conviction in the way it shone. Something awfully melancholy too—the humble sorrow of the perennial warm-up act, doing its best but doomed to be outdone, erased, by the gaudier talents of the headliner, the sun. Still, I watched awhile. The wind raised a light chop on the sea; moonlight put a milky gleam in the topmost curls of the wavelets. Now and then a green-gold arc of phosphorescence tracked the passing of an unseen ray. The drone of the casino was muted by the walls and windows and scattered by the breeze, spread thin till it could almost pass for quiet.
Or it could until a different sound intruded. The sound was far away, and hard to locate in the wind, but it gradually resolved into the high nattering buzz of small engines—more than one of them, I thought. Early fishermen, probably, drinking coffee from thermoses and staking out their portions of the reef for dawn. I scanned the horizon but saw nothing. The engine sounds got closer, now taking on the rise and drop in pitch that went with little bounces in the chop. And finally, maybe a mile off and faintly mauve in the listless moonlight, I thought I saw a pair of misty rooster tails of the kind that were shot skyward not by boats but Jet Skis. I squinted toward these phantoms, trying to assure myself that they were really there, that they really were connected to the engine sounds.
Then another detail barged in on the night. A cone of light flashed forth on the water underneath me. I couldn't see the source of the light, but it could only have come from our boat. It stayed on for some fraction of a second, switched off, and then switched on again.
When the former dimness had returned, the motor sounds no longer seemed to be getting closer. I squinted toward where I thought I'd seen the rooster tails but saw only a featureless swath of predawn ocean. Gradually, the whine of engines fell away, restoring the flawed quiet of the background hum. The breeze dropped, the surface of the water healed itself; it was as if nothing whatsoever had occurred.
Perplexed, exhausted, doubting my eyes, I tried and failed to make some sense of the dim vague episode. Then my brain shut down and, passive as a plant, I waited for first light.
It came at last as an undramatic paling of the eastern sky, a lazy snuffing out of stars, then exploded in yellow slashes that sliced through lavender slabs of cloud, and seared the retina, and briefly made the ocean red as blood before turning it turquoise.
It was already hot when The Lucky Duck groaned against its pilings and was made fast to the dock. I didn't see Veale or Cruz before I disembarked.
———
In principle, I'm all for decadence. Crazy hours; the edgy desperate drive that peels the skin off life and pushes your face into the tart and pulpy stuff inside—why the hell not?
I just don't seem to have the constitution for it. Up all night, I felt like shit. I'd never quite gotten drunk and I didn't have a hangover. I just felt dull and itchy and disoriented. The morning sunshine embarrassed me; I saw myself as an affront to the day. I craved sleep, but when I'd reclaimed my bicycle from its lockup near the dock, the moving desperate drive that air slapped some semblance of alertness into me and I wasn't sleepy anymore.
Suddenly I wanted pancakes.
Don't ask me why; I don't even like pancakes. But I rode downtown through empty streets and went to a place that opened early and served banana pancakes in an open courtyard full of cats and chickens. Drinking coffee, mopping syrup, glancing around at the other grubby souls who hadn't been to bed yet and whose tortured shirttails had long ago given up on staying in their pants, I wondered, with only minor anxiety, if this was what a nervous breakdown would be like: You still had a self, you still went through the motions of a life, but the life you were living no longer seemed congruent with the person living it. At forty-seven I knew who I was. I was a guy who hit the sack around eleven and woke up to an austere and wholesome bowl of cereal and fruit, a bonanza of vitamins and fiber. So who was this unshaven red-eyed impostor poking sodden pancakes with a slightly trembling fork?