Free The Rescuer by Joyce Carol Oates Page B

aspects of the text in which the author’s meaning was less clear. I was beginning to see that the ancient text contained another, secret text inside it. The surface text was just a patina, the truth lay beneath.
    “Girl, put that shit away—it Friday night in ’Lantic City not some crappy ol’ schoolroom.”
    Maralena and Salaman caught me squinting at the manuscript pages and slapped them out of my hand.
    As the hours passed, the crowd in the casino increased. Roaming men appeared to be circling us like rogue-male animals. Some of them offered to buy us drinks, dinner. What principle my companions had for coldly dismissing such invitations, or warmly accepting them, I could not determine for all the men looked about equally attractive, or unattractive, to me.
    Yet: how happy I was! Not knowing where I was.
    The alcohol had gone to my head. I didn’t know what one of the men had bought me—vodka? I heard myself laughing gaily.
    “Are you these girls’— teacher ? But what’re you doing here, ’Lantic City on a Friday night?”
    In the Taj my friends returned to blackjack. It was 10:20 P.M.
    Separated from them by other players, I could only see their backs—the backs of their heads. I felt a thrill of panic—I would lose them, they would be lost to me. Was I not responsible for them, driving them to Atlantic City in my car? For each girl had now a male companion, to buy her drinks and lend her precious tokens. I wondered what Leander would think of his sexy cousin’s behavior. I wanted to think that Leander would disapprove, and sic Dargo on any predatory male.
    I wasn’t jealous. (I don’t think so.) I wasn’t envious. But maybe I was beginning to be concerned for Maralena, Salaman, Mercedes whom I would be driving back to Trenton that night, as we had planned.
    Why was I here? Where was this place? A swirl of mad music, strobe lighting, heart-quickening cries and laughter. Some distance away at the slots one of the manic machines had erupted in victory, spewing lights, marching music, tokens. You had to wonder who’d won—had he/she won big , or, more likely, won small.
    Most wins were small. Just enough to keep the machine going.
    Most players were losers, in fact. Otherwise, how could a casino keep in business?
    I’d known, from a Trenton newspaper, that most of the Atlantic City casino-hotels, like those in the more prestigious Las Vegas, had had a very bad year. They were hemorrhaging money. Several had filed for bankruptcy. The very Taj Mahal, a landmark on the Boardwalk, was deeply in debt.
    Yet, the party continued. The gaiety continued. The gamblers had no sense of the casino as a business enterprise out to exploit their naïveté, no more than they had of fate. It was sobering to me to realize how each day, each night, indistinguishable from one another in the windowless casino in which no clocks were ever displayed, individuals placed themselves at the slot machines, at the blackjack tables, riveted to their immediate transient fates. They were like entranced spirits of Hades—nothing could wake them from their trance except a sudden win . It was yet more sobering to see that so many were elderly, walking with difficulty, with canes, or walkers; yet grimly determined to play the slots, to yank the levers, peer at the whirling fruits through bifocal glasses. So many were African-American, a surprise to me. And Asian-American, another surprise.
    What a joke! My brother and I squandering what remained of our youth in research into arcane “religious” subjects. How could we imagine that anyone cared, that we could make a serious contribution to our culture that was a fevered casino-culture obsessed with big wins ?
    The pages they’d slapped from my fingers were on the floor, beneath my feet. My fingers groped for them but couldn’t pick them up. How scale walls of Hades ?—the question came unbidden.
    I’d had a drink—I’d begun a second drink—confused, that the drinks tasted