The Voting Machine

High Rollers

"You can either get stuck where you are or keep pushing forward."

That's what Gina used to tell me when we sat next to each other in the call center. There were always people whispering behind her back. "Who does that ghetto girl think she is?" they'd mutter when she was out of earshot, cracking rude jokes in the break room over lukewarm coffee.

"Ghetto is just a state of mind," she would say. "There are always people who will try to pull you down. You either let them do it or you don't. That is life's test."

I'd never met a girl who read so many books. Her cubicle was always crammed full of them and you could tell they'd all been thumbed through. It was as if someone told her that there was a million-dollar-bill taped somewhere inside one of the titles in the library. Each book she took out on loan was like another lottery ticket. Sooner or later she would be holding the lucky number.

One day I asked her about the pile of computer books on her desk, covered with names, letters and symbols like Java, SQL and C++. A magic language I didn't understand.

"Ram Ramasamy gave them to me."

I'd seen her out to lunch with the Indian man who Marcus hired to research our credit card security problem. Maybe Ram took her to the vegetarian place on Pioneer Boulevard in Artesia, the same place he'd taken me when he told me the story about his father back in India. His family came from a caste of police officers engaged in an endless cat-and-mouse game with a caste of thieves, a game they could never entirely end for the sake of their village.

"Don't let them start up with gossip about you and Ram."

"Nothing like that happenin' between me and Ram. Indians keep to their own people, you know that."

"I am not talking about that kind of thing," I said. "I am talking about you trying to learn something, something you shouldn't know."

"That's the most important thing you should learn, Temo. Anytime, they try to hide information that's when you know it's important. You should know that better than anyone."

"But how you going to learn programming?" I asked.

"That's the future, Temo. Anyone who doesn't learn it will be worthless someday. The code and the data are the foundations of the business."

"That's not what Marcus tells us. He says it's the business is about the people. He says it's in the hearts and minds of the customers."

"The people are the data, Temo. And then the code figures out how to read their hearts and minds and write on them. The people get programmed just like computers. We get them to borrow, save or spend. That's what business is, Temo, is tellin' people what they need."

I shook my head. "I guess you're right. I wasn't made for business. I never wanted to be part of this."

"Me neither, Temo. But when you're born into the world like we were, you either stay at the bottom or you learn some hard lessons to climb up with the high rollers. There's two kinds of people: the ones who get controlled and the ones who do the controllin'. May not be much of a choice but you gotta choose."

***

After Abdul was swept away, Teresa and I trekked on for two hours, scurrying like rats through the darkness, keeping close to corners and crevices until we reached the underbelly of the freeway, about half a mile north of the sewage canal where Polk and Decatur had picked me up the day before. The casinos of the Strip glittered on the other side.

Teresa pulled a phone out of one of the pockets of her pants suit, a cheap burner model. She dialed and spoke in a quiet voice.

"It's me. How is he?" The sun rose over the Muddy Mountains in the east. "He's taking the medication right? Of course he doesn't want to take it. He's a child. That's why I pay you to make sure he does the right thing.

"You're going to see something on the news about me. Whatever they are saying, it's not true. It is part of the work I'm doing out here. Don't let Quentin know. Just keep him in the apartment. No TV. Video gamesare OK"

Teresa wiped away tears with the tattered sleeve of her suit.

"Can you put my son on?" she asked. She nodded with disappointment. "That's alright you don't have to force him." After the call was finished, she threw the phone over the freeway ramp, right into the path of an oncoming truck.

"That's your son's nanny?" I asked.

She nodded.

Teresa once told me her son was high-functioning autistic, very brilliant with numbers and machines but socially awkward. I'd met the kid a few times and never really understood why she was so concerned. Quentin some might have had some problems connecting with other people, but he was hardly the only one. Most everyone I'd ever met had this problem to some degree. They were trapped in their own point of view, unable to see the world from any pair of eyes other than their own, and that had doomed them in some way.

"Your son OK?" I asked.

"My son has never been OK"

"He's a good kid, Teresa. Nobody's perfect."

"That's not true. Some people are perfect. I was never hoping for perfect. I was just hoping for normal. And I took all these risks to make more money so my son could have more options. I dreamed that maybe if I tried hard enough, he might pass for normal one day. And now we're pretty fucking far from normal, as a far as you can possible get."

"I was never that close in the first place."

We had arrived on the Strip now. Throngs of tourists clogged the walkways that connected to the casinos and shopping centers. Teresa and I were dirty and tattered enough to pass for another pair of homeless. She took off the jacket from her pantsuit and stuffed it in her discarded plastic bag. She mussed up her hair and stained her blouse with water and cigarette ash, just to make sure she wasn't still pretty enough to catch any stares from strangers.

"Teresa I have to ask you."

"What do you have to ask me?"

"Why did you give me the gun last night?"

"I gave you the gun so you could protect yourself."

"OK."

"And if you even dare to imagine that I set you up, that I planted that weapon so that you'd take the fall for murdering the man I loved, then you are an idiot."

"I didn't say that."

"I risked my life for you back there."

"I know that."

"Then why even ask?"

"It's just so strange how it happened. Like you knew what was coming."

"No. I didn't. I guarantee you that. If I'd known I would've never gotten involved."