Betting Against the Storm

Piotr gripped his cheap aluminum doorknob, shaped like an eagle’s claw and painted to resemble weathered bronze. Just as he was about to turn it, he realized he wouldn’t need the all-weather coat he’d arrived in. He turned back into his hotel room, shrugged off the snug relic of where he’d come from, and hung it on the rail in his makeshift lodgings. He had a fleeting thought: if only he had a rail of widgets from which he could hang these theft-proof coat hangers, he’d never have to waste time in home stores again. It wasn’t a profound observation, nor was it true— Piotr seldom traveled, and he had to be dragged kicking and screaming to a home store.

He certainly hoped never again to find himself in the position where he had to hastily book a week at a casino hotel in the midst of a summer thunderstorm, much less one so garishly modeled after Monte Carlo at the tip of Africa. This was, after all, just the beginning of big things for him.

We, the ever-present, welcome each new arrival. With our indulgent grins and empty glasses. Their whimsies and frivolities that were once our own. These are kaleidoscopic omens, lies we told ourselves before surrendering to the truth. They grip dice with white knuckles, mistaking the pulse of chance for something divine, when all it is— all it has ever been— is motion.

As he made his way down the hallway, staring at a ceiling painted to look like a Mediterranean sky, absentmindedly and inexpertly hollowing his cheeks and blowing over his dry tongue, Piotr glanced at his wrist and realized that he had left his smartwatch charging on the kitchen counter next to Jacques’s. Maybe it was a trick of the frequency of the fluorescent tubes or his eyes taking a second to adjust as he raised his head, but he could have sworn that he saw silver and gray flickering at the edge of the brilliant puffball clouds painted above him. He placed his fingers on the bridge of his nose, squeezed his eyes shut, and uttered a frustrated curse before setting off jauntily again, whistling quite a plausible version of Pink Floyd’s "Shine On You Crazy Diamond." Jacques had, after all, been the only friend he’d had on the app that came with the watch, and Piotr was hardly troubled by the fact that on Monday, when the step challenge results were published, he’d miss his 78th digital trophy. He knew it was just a meaningless icon that blipped onto the screen of the smartphone.

He had left that smartphone charging next to the crisply laundered bed in room 304 - in a place like this, it wasn’t really necessary to know the time here.

Yes, we make small sacrifices and meager losses. They don’t mean anything. The panic is fleeting. It is quickly absorbed in soft baby blue. We watch the serene sky above us, perfectly dappled by brilliant popcorn cloud, perfectly still, and it reminds us of what we are meant to be— untroubled, unquestioning, unrelenting in our progress. Even when skipping through a serene meadow, one may encounter carrion. We skip ahead and leave it to the worms.

Piotr hadn’t felt her arms wrap around his shoulders, or her lips against his cheek. It was only when the flashing light of six cherries caught the face of Isabel’s Bvlgari wristwatch and flashed into his eyes that he began to squirm out of her grasp. Pushing his way past delicately balanced trays of cocktails, shuffling patrons, and blinking bulbs, he reached a bathroom stall to act as a flimsy barricade between himself and the casino. With the deadbolt in place, he stared at his clasped, sweaty hands. A single thought reverberated in his head: "How long?" He searched his pockets. Where was his phone? Was there a receipt with a date stamp or even a trinket he’d brought from home? All he found there were a few coins and two small sticks at the bottom of a pack of gum. Nauseous, clammy, and confined to his stall, Piotr began a labored, heaving effort of memory. He hoped to piece together the events of the last week, the last day, even just the last few minutes. Under the ceiling of bright blue sky, he had felt safe. He had mistaken its static calm for his inexorable progress.

One detail remained in Piotr’s panic: he knew why he had come here. He had wanted to move in great bounding strides. To shape his destiny. He had run out to his Uber when he’d left the apartment he shared with his oldest friend Jacques —not because he could not bear another night there , followed by a morning in the crowded office, an evening playing DotA 2, and then another identical morning and another identical day in seeming perpetuity—but because he knew that he would be something more imminently significant. He had gone to Jacques with a wild glint in his eyes, tried to convince him to come with— they could run a store, they could sell T-shirts or comic books and enter tournaments with the profit, win them and turn the winnings into Bitcoin, and stop wasting their talents on insignificant day jobs at their marketing firms. With luminous adventure in the pit of his pupils, he had shed his dependance on the sun and could see the gleaming future clearly even in the dim fluorescence.

This is how we arrive: after bursting out into the portentous storm and leaving them all behind. We yearn for novelty, chaos, hope. and All that has been promised by this unchanging mural sky engulfs and enriches us. The sky that was here before us, that will outlast us. Under diamond clouds that never break to drench us, our hearts set like concrete, fixing in their centers the imperfect flecks that drove us from our homes and now unite us.

It might have been months later when Piotr woke from uneasy sleep. Isabel had pulled their duvet away from him and huddled it around herself. He rubbed the strange dregs of part-remembered faces from his eyes. He remembered clearly their dinner last night, on the plaza in the synthetic Monaco midday. Her staring at him. His plaintive objection: “What?”

“Oh… nothing,” she had said. Her serene disinterest, counting its steps back along the long-slackened lines that tethered him to himself. He knew that he wanted nothing from her either. He’d known it when he arrived and she had straightened the collar of his coat and brushed the paint chips he’d missed off of his shoulder without saying a word. They started walking back to the room, and he felt something shift in his coat pocket and pulled out his old Casio, forgotten after the Garmin upgrade. He put it on. Glanced down at the familiar, failsafe display. It was about a quarter past eleven. He leaned over and whispered into her ear:

“Would you look at that…” gesturing with his wrist, “we had better get to bed.”

This we cannot abide. If there is ever nothing—no bet to place, no urgent trail to blaze—our mission fails. Under the fixed dome we must spin with ever increasing vigor. If we ever stop moving, we remember the storm, we remember the rain, we are lost to ourselves forever.