Homeland Elegies(90)

Back in my room, I sat down at the desk and pulled out my computer. After my habitual twenty-minute distraction on Twitter and Facebook, I spent the next two hours making notes about the day. The technique I used for this sort of recall owed much to my years of noting dreams. I dispensed with chronology and stuck to detail. The more vivid the fragment, the sound, the image—and the more exhaustively elaborated through language—the richer the associated cluster of recollections it spawned. The process was counterintuitive, akin to restoring the incidental sedimentary layers on a piece of extracted ore. The mind recalled the essence and discarded the dross, but the dross was what swarmed with generative life. That night, as I wrote, wherever recollection alighted led me back to the teeming soil of Corinne Hollander on the witness stand.

It was almost midnight when I stopped. I turned on the TV. Colbert was talking about Trump. So was Fallon. Trump was on Nightline, Fox, CNN, CNBC. We were a nation in thrall to our own stupidity. What passed for politics now was just dramaturgy. Sow conflict, promise consequence. Perhaps Plato wasn’t wrong to warn us about a city overrun with storytellers.

I did what everyone else did. I watched. And kept watching.

At some point, I decided to check in on my father. I found his key where I’d left it, on the dresser. Down the hall, I slipped it into the lock. As I nudged the door open, I saw that his lights were on. Both beds were empty. The bathroom door was ajar—empty, too. I tried calling his cell phone.

It went straight to voice mail.

Downstairs, he still wasn’t in the hotel bar. I described him to the bartender, a woman with two platinum pigtails and a rash of blue-green tattoos along her neck and arm. “Doesn’t ring a bell,” she said as she chopped at a block of congealed ice cubes. At the front desk, neither of the attendants had seen him.

I wandered the halls downstairs that led to the meeting rooms. I checked the bathrooms. I checked the bar again, then loitered in the lobby and stared out the front window into the parking lot. Above a row of factory lofts lining the river was a billboard with an array of silly characters dressed up as a deck of cards.

My heart sank with a dispiriting thought.

I marched back to the front desk and asked one of the attendants how far it was to the casino on the billboard outside. “Oh, it’s only twenty-five minutes on the interstate,” she offered happily. “We have a shuttle, but…Brynne?” She turned to her coworker, who was already tapping at a keyboard.

“Looks like it’s not back this way for another hour or so,” the other attendant said.

“How late does it stay open?” I asked.

“Twenty-four hours.”

“Jesus,” I muttered, provoking an offended look from the one called Brynne. “Sorry,” I said. She looked away, leaving me to her colleague. “Would you mind calling me a cab?” I asked.

“Sure. Usually takes around three minutes,” the first attendant said, reaching for the phone. “You can wait out front,” she added blankly.

The cab took longer than three minutes to show up (and would take longer than twenty-five to get to the casino). It was a mud-spattered orange minivan with a graying and surly driver. I got in; he tilted his head toward me to wait for my destination. “The casino,” I said. In the rearview mirror, I could barely make out his face; the brim of his dark cap was lowered, and a thick, yellowing walrus mustache covered much of his lower face. As we merged onto the highway along the Mississippi—whose wide, winding surface glimmered a calm, glassy black in the moonlight—he finally spoke: “What’s your game? Slots, cards, dice?”

“I’m not a gambler, actually,” I said.

After that, he didn’t say another word to me.

It was 1:15 a.m. by the time we pulled into the parking lot of a warehouse-size prefab take on a timbered hunting lodge, and just beyond it, a four-story concrete hotel tower. HEADWATERS RESORT AND GAMES was the name on the flashing marquee. A staggering footprint, I thought, for a casino in these parts. I paid the driver and offered him an extra twenty to stick around and wait. “No need. Tons of rides out here,” he said.

I gave him the twenty anyway.

“Good luck!” he shouted through the open window as he drove off.

Inside, slot machines blinked and chimed, beckoning with soft, cheery sounds. They lined the entry, defined a path through the main room, formed an enclosure around the gaming pit; the slots were everywhere, though most of the stools before them were empty at this late hour. I passed an elderly couple with two canes and a bucket of coins between them, their inert faces aglow with neon blue as they inserted and depressed, watched the whirring wheels. Farther on, a man in a hunting jacket was slouched at a machine with a slot handle in his grip, snoring.

Down in the pit, the roulette and baccarat games were closed, but there were a handful of blackjack players at two tables; none was Father. Farther on, behind a worn velvet rope, four white men and a brown lady sat around a poker table, assessing the handful of flopped cards before them. Father wasn’t there, either. I checked the restrooms, then found another, smaller room filled with slots. No luck. I tried his cell phone again. Straight to voice mail.

As I emerged back into the main room, I found a striking older man with sun-worn skin standing in the hallway, staring at me. His hair was long and black, gathered into a tail down his back; his hands—covered in clear plastic gloves—clutched the handles of a trash can on wheels. “You looking for someone?” he asked.