I had five or six thousand dollars left in my account. I shrugged.

“That’s fifty thousand,” he said.

I choked. He said absently, moving over behind a player whose chip stack was running out, “You can get down for ten dollars at roulette. Hundred minimum for most of the others. Oh, there’s a ten-dollar slot machine around somewhere, I think.” He dived for the open chair and that was the last I saw of him.

I watched for a moment and realized that the black-eyebrowed girl was at the same table, busy studying her cards. She didn’t look up.

I could see I wasn’t going to be able to afford much gambling here. At that point I realized I couldn’t really afford all the drinks I’d been buying, either, and then my interior sensory system began to make me realize just how many of those drinks I had had. The last thing I realized was that I had to get back to my room, pretty fast.

Chapter 7

I am on the mat, and I am not very comfortable. Physically, I mean. I have had an operation not long ago and probably the stitches aren’t yet absorbed.

Sigfrid says, “We were talking about your job, Rob.”

That’s dull enough. But safe enough. I say, “I hated my job. Who wouldn’t hate the food mines?”

“But you kept it, Rob. You never even tried to get on anywhere else. You could have switched to sea-farming, maybe. And you dropped out of school.”

“You’re saying I stuck myself in a rut?”

“I’m not saying anything, Rob. I’m asking you what you feel.”

“Well. I guess in a sense I did do that. I thought about making some kind of a change. I thought about it a lot,” I say, remembering how it was in those bright early days with Sylvia. I remember sitting with her in the cockpit of a parked sailplane on a January night — we had no other place to go — and talking about the future. What we would do. How we would beat the odds. There’s nothing there for Sigfrid, as far as I can see. I’ve told Sigfrid all about Sylvia, who married a stockholder in the long run. But we’d broken up long before that. “I suppose,” I say, pulling myself up short and trying to get my money’s worth out of this session, “that I had a kind of death wish.”

“I prefer that you don’t use psychiatric terms, Rob.”

“Well, you understand what I mean. I knew time was going by. The longer I stayed in the mines the harder it would be to get out. But nothing else looked any better. And there were compensations. My girlfriend, Sylvia. My mother, while she was alive. Friends. Even some fun things. Sailplaning. It is great over the hills, and when you’re up high enough Wyoming doesn’t look so bad and you can hardly smell the oil.”

“You mentioned your girlfriend, Sylvia. Did you get along with her?”

I hesitated, rubbing at my belly. I have almost half a meter of new intestine in there now. They cost fearfully, those things, and sometimes you get the feeling the previous owner wants them back. You wonder who he was. Or she. How he died. Or did he die? Could he still be alive, so poor that he sells off parts of himself, the way I’ve heard of pretty girls doing with a well-shaped breast or ear?

“Did you make friends with girls easily, Rob?”

“I do now, all right.”

“Not now, Rob. I think you said you didn’t make friends easily as a child.”

“Does anyone?”

“If I understand that question, Robbie, you are asking if anyone remembers childhood as a perfectly happy and easy experience, and of course the answer is ’no.’ But some people seem to carry the effects of it over into their lives more than others.”

“Yeah. I guess, thinking back, that I was a little afraid of my peer group — sorry about that, Sigfrid! I mean the other kids. They all seemed to know each other. They had things to say to each other all the time. Secrets. Shared experiences. Interests. I was a loner.”

“You were an only child, Robbie?”

“You know I was. Yeah. Maybe that was it. Both my parents worked. And they didn’t like me playing near the mines. Dangerous. Well, it really was dangerous for kids. You can get hurt around those machines, or even if there’s a slide in the tailings or an outgassing. I stayed at home a lot, watching shows, playing cassettes. Eating. I was a fat kid, Sigfrid. I loved all the starchy, sugary stuff with all the calories. They spoiled me, buying me more food than I needed.”

I still like to be spoiled. Now I get a higher class of diet, not as fattening, about a thousand times as expensive. I’ve had real caviar. Often. It gets flown in from the aquarium at Galveston. I have real champagne, and butter… “I remember lying in bed,” I say, “I guess I was very small, maybe about three. I had a teddytalker. I took it to bed with me, and it told me little stories, and I stuck pencils into it and tried to pull its ears off. I loved that thing, Sigfrid.”

I stop, and Sigfrid picks up immediately. “Why are you crying, Robbie?”

“I don’t know!” I bawl, tears running down my face, and I look at my watch, the skipping green numerals rippling through the tears. “Oh,” I say, very conversationally, and sit up, the tears still rolling down my face but the fountain turned off, “I’ve really got to go now, Sigfrid. I’ve got a date. Her name’s Tania. Beautiful girl. The Houston Symphony. She loves Mendelssohn and roses, and I want to see if I can pick up some of those dark-blue hybrids that will go with her eyes.”

“Rob, we’ve got nearly ten minutes left.”

“I’ll make it up another time.” I know he can’t do that, so I add quickly, “May I use your bathroom? I need to.”

“Are you going to excrete your feelings, Rob?”

“Oh, don’t be smart. I know what you’re saying. I know this looks like a typical displacement mechanism—”

“Rob.”

“-all right, I mean, it looks like I’m copping out. But I honestly do have to go. To the bathroom, I mean. And to the florist’s, too. Tani is pretty special. She’s a fine person. I’m not talking about sex, but that’s great, too. She can g- She can—”

“Rob? What are you trying to say?”

I take a breath and manage to say: “She’s great at oral sex, Sigfrid.”

“Rob?”

I recognize that tone. Sigfrid’s repertory of vocal modes is quite large, but parts of it I have learned to identify. He thinks he is on the track of something.

“What?”

“Rob, what do you call it when a woman gives you oral sex?”

“Oh, Christ, Sigfrid, what kind of dumb game is this one?”

“What do you call it, Rob?”

“Ah! You know as well as I do.”

“Please tell me what you call it, Rob.”

“They say, like, ’She eats me.’”

“What other expression, Rob?”

“Lots of them! ’Giving head,’ that’s one. I guess I’ve heard a thousand terms for it.”

“What other, Rob?”

I have been building up to rage and pain and it suddenly boils over. “Don’t play these fucking games with me, Sigfrid!” My gut aches, and I am afraid I am going to mess my pants; it is lIke being a baby again. “Jesus, Sigfrid! When I was a little kid I used to talk to my teddy. Now I’m forty-five and I’m still talking to a stupid machine as if it was alive!”