Writ of Execution Read online

  He couldn’t live without the City of Gold to work on, to play with, to believe in. For three years he had built it, slaved over it like Ramses’ architect, every moment since he had graduated from M.I.T.’s master’s program in computer science. The City would never exist. He would never have a better idea, never again have the passion and strength he had put into the City.

  “Having a good time?” the girl said to him.

  “Uh.”

  She gave him a sympathetic look. “It’s just for fun.”

  “Fun. Yeah.”

  The cocktail waitress came around again and gave Kenny his Budweiser. The girl in the wheelchair was such a nice girl, a quiet girl, with a friendly mouth that would never say the cruel things he deserved. He felt a sudden urgent desire to spill his guts to this girl who unwittingly represented all humanity to him at this moment, but she was at it again, eyes stapled to her machine, so he slurped down some of the Bud instead. No sense ruining her night.

  He was on beer three, and while successive beers did not taste better, the alcohol tingled through his arms and legs. Because he gave her five dollars each time she appeared with a fresh glass, the waitress kept him sharp on her radar. She hovered nearby, off to the right, ready to dip toward him at a nod. He angled his peripheral vision to include her black stockings.

  He had hoped drinking copious amounts would dull the fear that lanced his stomach every time he thought about what he was going to do, but it had the opposite effect. His senses became hyperacute. Sounds shrilled. The fabric of his jacket scratched. The colored lights pierced his optic nerves. The alley of shiny machines he sat in resonated with deep meanings, alluring and significant, all heaven and hell present in its seated figures.

  The guy with the white hair on his right hit something, not a big hit, but the light above his machine flashed and twirled. Three gold bars—thirty credits with three dollars in.

  “All right!” Kenny said, desperate for distraction.

  The man showed no sign of pleasure. He hadn’t even looked at the Credits Won display. He was watching the numbers gyrate on the marquee above them as people in four states pumped dollar tokens into Greed Machines. Kenny saw that he had whipped out a notepad in which he wrote with a freckled hand. He tucked it back into his shirt, snarling, “What are you lookin’ at?”

  Kenny felt a stupid smile form. He tried to stop it, but he had the habit of being inoffensive. He turned away, back to the business of rocketing toward oblivion. The man would be as flat as he was soon enough. The odds of winning on a slot machine were ridiculously low, especially on a progressive.

  Suicidal odds.

  Time passed and Kenny’s world compressed. He was immune to the seductions that had been built into the slot machine, the bright logos flashing by, the ringing on occasional hits. His whole body vibrated with a fierce, growing fright as he punched the button, watched the reels spin much too quickly, saw them slam to a stop on— nothing, over and over. He tried not to calculate the speed at which he was losing, the percentage of the return, but he had the calculation habit, and the numbers marched through his head.

  He ignored his watch. The machine would let him live as long as his destiny allowed. Then, one moment soon, he would reach into his pocket and find it empty. It would be time to go upstairs.

  He considered burial arrangements. He would leave a note with instructions. His father was a Presbyterian, his mother a Buddhist. Go with the Buddhists, he decided. Better chance postmortem with them. No nonsense about hell, just another rebirth. Maybe he would come back as a roach. A large, insensitive, unkillable, hard-carapaced cockroach like the ones in his dorm in Cambridge, scuttling at midnight around his PC, ignorant that the warm machine was imagining a new universe . . .

  At least he would not experience again the humiliation of being a Chinese-American whiz kid flunking out of Silicon Valley.

  Yeah, go with the Buddhists. He already felt like a cockroach anyway.

  Kenny gulped down another Bud and motioned to the waitress. He wasn’t a good drinker. The room swirled slightly, but the lights and the numbers sharpened as the acuity of his vision steadily improved. His neighbor on the right was also drinking beer, playing mechanically, cheekbones jutting like Ping-Pong balls above the long angular slope of jaw, big white flipper-fingers jabbing at the button. His eyelashes were colorless, as if they had been attacked by some toxic plant mold. When he won a small payout, instead of seeming pleased, he waited impatiently until he could push the button again. He was a character out of an Ingmar Bergman film, emaciated and driven.

  The girl on Kenny’s left drank bourbon and soda, laughing to herself as her bell jangled. Thirty credits! When she saw Kenny had noticed, she gave him a wink and a thumbs-up.

  At least they all had a buzz on. He liked her attitude. Too bad he couldn’t be like her, playing for fun, without a care in the world. . . .

  The absurdity of that thought hit him hard. She couldn’t walk. And then a bruising thump of fear brought him back to his own situation as he took out a bill and his hand registered the sinister thinness of his bankroll.

  He was spending the last two thousand of his parents’ life savings. His failure had to be absolute.

  The biker boyfriend came back. The smiles back and forth were tentative now, a little ritualized. Like, we are having a good time, aren’t we? This time he didn’t seem to have any money to give the girl. They consulted, heads together, his goateed chin bent over her.

  She nodded and pressed the cashout button, but nothing clanked into the bin. Her friend appeared much older than she was, from what Kenny could discern under the baseball cap, and had to be sweating in the zipped leather motorcycle jacket.

  Kenny groped around in his pocket. He had two of the hundred-dollar bills left.

  The biker got behind her wheelchair and started pushing the girl away, but he looked back one more time, toward Flipper-fingers, who had just hit bar bar bar, giving him two hundred thirty dollars’ credit.

  “I’ll be watching you,” he said to Flipper-fingers.

  “Good-bye,” Kenny said, but the girl was rolled away before she could answer. Kenny watched her go, and now he felt an overarching drunken Buddhist compassion for all of them, all the dreamers and schemers and six-time losers on a wheel of life that crushed so many and took so few to the heights.

  “Hey, mate,” Flipper-fingers said suddenly. “Wanna make some fast money?”

  2

  NEAR MIDNIGHT, INSIDE his shadowy sixteenth-floor hotel room at Caesars, Nina dropped her coat onto the rug and stood in front of Paul, naked.

  Mountain silhouettes and a crescent moon filled the window. The remains of Paul’s dinner littered the table under it. The rumpled bed told her that he had jumped out of it to answer the door.

  She had come late. She wanted to surprise him.

  Paul stared at her breasts, which caused her to pull back her shoulders, which made them stick out just a little bit more. She pulled in her stomach, raised her chin. Let him stare.

  He swallowed.

  A Mexican standoff. They were both pointed at each other, so to speak.

  Nina said not a word. Many months had passed since she had been with Paul, and she wanted to make this memorable. She owed Paul her life, her son’s life, even her love, at least for tonight. A grateful, mindless impulse had driven her here. She wanted to be with him and only him.

  The bedside light barely touched them as they stood by the table and her empty glass. Her chest was warm with the whiskey. Her cheeks flamed. She felt reckless and brave. Sexy.

  A few moments passed. Nina wet her lips.

  Without taking his eyes off her, Paul put his drink on the table. He squinted as though the view was too much.

  She put her hands on her hips and grinned at him. When even that didn’t jolt Paul out of his paralysis, she stuck her tongue out at him, widened her eyes, and made a face.

  “Why, you wanton little minx,” Paul said. He bounded over like a lion a
nd seized her by the shoulders. She looked into his eyes and knew he was off balance. She liked that. She wanted him unsure and hot as hell.

  Then he pulled her to him hard and she felt his whole strong length against her, the hardness and the heat.

  They fell back onto the bed, she on top, lips locked to his. Paul’s kisses were devouring, overwhelming. He was much larger and stronger than she remembered, a physical animal now hugely aroused.

  She reached for the waistband of his shorts and his right hand moved down her back and began caressing her rear. Now she had the shorts halfway down and she let her fingers move in on him. No underwear, he hadn’t had time. . . .

  “Ah,” he said, his eyes closing as she touched him.

  He rolled her over onto her back, jumped off the bed, and dropped the shorts. He was hairy for a blond man, muscular. His haunches were hollowed at the hip joints. His skin glowed like gold. He breathed hard, as if he had been chasing something for a long, long time. . . .

  “You are going to get it good for surprising me like that,” he said. “Right now.”

  She bit her lip. “That’s the plan.”

  He sat down beside her and ran his hand along her body, stopping here and there to squeeze or rub. He smoothed his fingers over the curve of her hip. She reached for him.

  “No,” he said, putting her arm down by her side. “You wait.”

  She reached again and he held her arm.

  “No,” he said again. “You’re mine now. You came to me. I do what I want with you.”

  Then he was kissing her neck, her shoulders, her breasts, her belly, and Nina started to moan in pleasure, and she put her hands in his hair and ruffled it and slid her hands to his biceps. No thinking, no complications, just pleasure . . . luxe, calme, et volupté . . . she repeated the phrase over and over in her mind as all the shivering tangled fibers in her body unwound, easing into complete surrender. . . .

  3

  BUT KENNY WAS busy now, hurtling toward his own death. The reels spun and he rushed closer, closer, fascinated. . . .

  “I’m talking to you.” A finger jabbed Kenny. He registered the strong English accent.

  “Bite me,” Kenny said. To hell with propriety, to hell with your big fist, my friend, for tonight, I die. It matters not whether I die drunk, sober, physically intact, or beaten to a pulp.

  He waited to get knocked off his stool, but nothing happened. He was being reevaluated.

  “I have to go to the loo. Do me a bloody favor here.” The tone was slightly more civil.

  Kenny just looked at him. The long peremptory finger came up and poked his shoulder, hard.

  “You shitfaced?”

  “Trying.”

  “Listen. Don’t let anybody sit here. Nobody, nohow. Got that?” He pressed the cashout button and the light flashed and the bell rang so everybody would think he’d hit it big. He glared at his machine until the noises stopped, then swept the tokens into his white plastic bucket. “You got that?” he said again.

  “Hold the seat?”

  “Hold my bloody seat.”

  “I can’t promise to do that.”

  “Huh? You’re sitting here. How hard can it be?”

  “I may not be here long. I have a prior commitment.”

  “Your commitment is on hold until I get back. Understand? You go anywhere, I find you and break your legs.”

  “Oh. Is that so.”

  The pale-eyelashed man sat back, surprised at Kenny’s shrug. His menacing attitude mutated into a grimace of brotherly goodwill. “Look, friend, this is my machine. I’ve just lost almost three thousand bucks in it. You know how that feels?”

  Kenny nodded.

  “I’m gonna piss all over this stool if I don’t go right now. So, you’ll help me out, won’t you?”

  Kenny folded his arms and thought about this.

  “Two minutes,” the man said. “Two friggin’ minutes.” He fidgeted on the stool. “I’ll give you a hundred bucks when I get back.”

  Kenny’s mind went through rapid-fire computations. Maybe ten more minutes, landing like a bar bar bar. “First say the magic word.”

  The man stared at him, a palpable, pupilless, uncomprehending stare. Then he raised his hand to grab Kenny’s jacket. Kenny moved his eyes upward to the Eye in the Sky, the one-way security mirrors in the ceiling through which guards always watched the action on the floor.

  “Fuck!”

  “No. That’s not it. Good try. Try again. The magic word.”

  The man cleared his throat. “Please.”

  “I didn’t quite catch that.”

  “Please! Bloody hell!”

  “Well. In that case.”

  “So?”

  “Okay.”

  The man slid off his stool and jogged away, looking back over his shoulder once and almost colliding with Kenny’s friendly waitress. She had a smile and a fresh Bud for him. Kenny chugged it.

  Hardly a half minute later, he watched his first two reels hit bank bank, and the third bank hesitated for a millisecond on the middle line, then slithered right past it and stopped just below. In spite of everything Kenny was analyzing the play. Intriguing how the machines pandered to your hopes like that, advanced programming stuff, although come to think of it, weren’t these things supposed to be random? Still, the psychology behind a close miss, how it made him reach so eagerly for the next tokens, well, that was interesting.

  A woman slid onto the man’s seat. She flicked a cigarette butt from the coin bin onto the floor, took out a paper roll of silver dollar tokens, and broke it on the edge of the bin. She had three tokens in before Kenny could open his mouth.

  “Excuse me,” Kenny said.

  She turned a face like the moon to him, all trembling lower lip and radiant black eyes, her skin poreless and burnished, and whatever he had been thinking of saying died like a sloppy theorem under the elegant proof of her beauty.

  He froze, staring at her.

  He knew her. She was one of his avatars, a woman he had created to live in the City of Gold in his computer, the same soft brown skin and black shining bangs hanging over limitless eyes.

  Joya. He had designed her and clothed her and made her move. Sometimes, in fact, he had made Joya move in ways that now, remembering, fired up a heat flash in him that caused sweat to break out on his forehead.

  After swiveling quickly on her stool, giving the room a once-over, she turned, head bent so that all he could see was her profile, the straight nose and chiseled lips. She was healthy and athletic, with strong shoulders. Her machine began to whir, and Kenny remembered the man with the big fists, who would be right back.

  “I’m afraid that—that someone wants this seat,” he said. It sounded lame and halfhearted. “A British guy asked me to hold his seat.”

  “Tough,” she said. “I like this seat.”

  If she liked it so much, Kenny wondered, why did she hunch over like that? Why did she turn her face away when people walked nearby?

  “He had a lot of money in.”

  “His problem,” she said. She huddled herself over the machine and dropped a few more coins, then looked around again, her lips twisting with what looked like worry to Kenny, who was an expert.

  Kenny shifted around on his stool and pressed the button again. His hip brushed her hip, scorching him like a mouthful of pepper oil meeting a capsaicin receptor in the brain. She was wearing a black sweater and jeans and scuffed cowboy boots. He could smell soap, Ivory or something else plain and clean.

  For a minute or so they both played with self-conscious concentration. He knew that she knew that he was watching her from the corner of his eye. He knew he made her uncomfortable. In a second she would get up and stomp away, as numerous women of his acquaintance had done throughout his life.

  But for some reason she didn’t leave, just drew up her shoulders and leaned forward as if she were trying to meld with the machine, her back to the aisle and her elbows held high, hiding the glorious breasts of wh
ich he had had only a glimpse.

  “My name is Kenneth Leung. I live in Mountain View,” Kenny ventured. The extra hundred bucks were not to be. C’est la vie, he thought, or should it be le mort?

  She played Max Credits and hit a cherry. Three dollars lost, only two back, but the ringer went off in a short burst as though she’d won.

  He opened his mouth again. “Although I’m from Tahoe originally. I’m a virtual architect,” he said.

  Only a slight tensing of the shoulders indicated that she might have heard him.

  “I developed a GUI—that’s a user interface—based around the metaphor of a beautiful city, in contrast to the tedious desktop metaphor we have all been stuck with. You know, folders and files and pages. Windows. The whole life-sucking business office metaphor. Do you use a computer?”

  She looked around again, stopped at his face, and frowned.

  “You boot up the hard drive, and my City of Gold comes up on the monitor with towers and turrets and marble columns and houses on cliffs. You have a home in this City, what you call a home page now. But this home and this City, they’re 3-D. Your home is furnished however you want, grand or simple. And you can be whoever you choose. You design your own avatar, sort of an alter ego, with this nifty subprogram I developed. You can be a goddess, a gnome, an animal, a changeling. . . .” He took a Bud from the waitress and she faded away. “What about you? Are you up from the Bay Area? You use a PC? A Mac?”

  She had gone back to her machine, but this time she shook her head. She really didn’t want to talk. But she was the last person who would ever hear about the City of Gold. He needed her to listen.

  “I made it work with both platforms, and also with Linux. But it’s so much more than the usual graphic eye fodder—it’s more of an alternate universe. It’s full of avatars who are really help programs and who take your avatar to the different markets and neighborhoods. You can fly overhead, looking down at the Bazaar.”