Triadic Tales - Caught - Short Story (Part Three)

Triadic Tales - Caught - Short Story (Part Three)
Sterling jumped back as if he had seen a ghost. "Go away," he cried.
Christy stood and walked toward him, reaching out, not speaking.
Sterling could not tell if she was mad or in some loving mode. Christie wrapped her arms around him. He was trembling. 
"Why are you here," he said. But it came out wrong. He meant it to be one way, not this way.
"I can't let you go," she said. "I don't care what you do or say."
"No," Sterling cried. He wanted to run down the hill to the street and lose himself in the enfolding darkness. "I don't need anyone. Please."
It wasn't right. That is what Sterling knew deep inside. Just because someone loves you does not mean you are right for that someone. It does not mean that you fit. He had flagellated himself for walking away, but now that he was away he could not go back.
Thus it was that the two separated once again, this time for good. 
Sterling soon lost his keep. He was unable to sustain that free lance thing. He sold the computer. He was unable to keep his car. 
But he was where he wanted to be, alone. Caught. A rat. In a trap of his own making, There was no bitterness. No anger. Nothing.
He got a night job down at the Gold Strike. Just sitting there from midnight to six in the morning. He could have a small room there for free. And get his meals. Without a car, he was pretty much there all the time.
He treated his family in the same way he treated Christy. And he was strangely happy. Happier than ever, he thought. Life was drifting toward nothing. And as the song said, nothing is free. 
For Sterling, being a nay-sayer worked. Others might save the world. But he lacked the stomach for it. Others might have babies and ply seas of commerce. But he saw no reason to do so.
He began to take long walks around the block - by which he meant through the Gold Strike parking lot, past the odiferous device which processed sewage and then around a small hill along a the path overlooking the Lake, the man-made lake that supplied Las Vegas with water. 
Sterling occupied himself daily with the configuration of stones in a tiny spot along the pathway. If someone had walked on that spot the configuration would change. Sometimes a whole week passed and the stones were unmoved.
Once in a long while, there would come a heavy pelting rain for a few minutes. Then the pebbles that were Sterling's daily encounter would disappear. 
Sterling thought that death was that way.     Stephen's Remarkable Kindle Store



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Triadic Tales - Caught - Short Story (Part Two)

THE LAKE
Sterling had never gambled before save one time in France at Divonne. There he won about $100 playing roulette at a table well stocked with people either richer than hell or doing a good job of dissembling. 
The Gold Strike down the hill from Boulder City, Nevada, was more to Sterling's liking. Seedy. One lonely craps table. And a coffee shop sort of place with a buffet in back. There he could sit as long as he liked with his back to the wall, which he also liked.  He conceived the idea of being a pro gambler. Like many such souls, he automatically assumed no one had ever done the elementary math needed to render casinos powerless in the face of invincible minds. If the stated casino edge varied from a few to many percentage points, that was doubtless a lie put out for the general public. 
It is a redemptive fact that Sterling was not inclined to be really stupid, only a little so. Where someone might plunge in, he would dip a toe. Where someone might be incinerated, he would put his finger quickly through a tiny flame.
He turned out to be not half bad at craps and to be almost sage at the black-jack table. He drove down to Binions in Las Vegas and managed to attract a reasonable amount of attention even though he was betting only a few dollars. 
More than once, when parked somewhere with his notebook, he would be addressed as professor.
 This was in the days when the stars were still visible over Las Vegas. Everything seemed to work. Sterling neither won much nor lost much. He could play or not play. No compulsion. 
When he was asked why he gambled, he said it appealed to him more than getting a summer cottage somewhere. Discretionary income.
Amid all this tip-toeing, Sterling was entirely unprepared, several months into his new life, to return to his Boulder City Motel and find Christy sitting in front of his little room in a folding metal chair. 
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Triadic Tales - Caught - Short Story (Part One)

Triadic Tales - Caught - Short Story (Part One)
Sterling stood upon the edge of the very last flat wall surrounding the top of the Empire State Building, thinking the wind might blow him off before he had a chance to decide whether to jump. It was all a dream. A pertinent dream. Sterling worked in that building in a small ad agency. Lucky to have the job at all. But feeling as caught as if  he had been one of the yo-yos in Mad Men, had there been a Mad Men then.
He turned in the bed and felt Christy there. She was three chapters away from completing her graduate thesis in philosophy. Sterling fancied Christy's education, having himself taken the standard advice to do science and math. He got into the ad agency by sheer luck. A classmate worked there and was sympathetic to Sterling's lack of interest in the professions for which he was qualified. It helped that some of the firm's business came from the precincts of math and science. Sadly, Sterling was no happier with this choice than with most others he had made. Save Christy.
He lay in bed thinking of her. He pictured Christy. slim, willowy, intelligent, in some bucolic college town teaching pragmatism and logic. While he held down a dismal job in the college's development office. The words fucked up rolled across the screen of Sterling's addled mind.
Christy did end up in in a college town,  husband-less. The unfortunate Sterling was simultaneously subsisting in an eighty dollar a week  motel in Boulder City, Nevada, two thousand miles from the best decision he ever walked away from.
Sterling's reaction to his descent was hardly encouraging. He had lately taken walks in the desert and found himself in situations from which extrication was almost impossible. In the desert south of Boulder City, he was almost thrown down a steep v-shaped valley of sand and rock and lost amid the detritus of the 20th century, countless decaying fragments of cars that had ruled the world. Wreckage peered peremptorily from the hard sand all around him. How did it get there? He finally got out. Scared. 
The one bright spot in Sterling's existence was the little computer he bought with income earned from some free-lance science writing. It was an Epson HX 20. The first laptop. The year was 1982. Sterling printed out his literary efforts on cash register paper and viewed his prose in progress on a screen smaller than a playing card. 
Evenings Sterling drove down to the Gold Strike Casino. There were times when the sheer beauty of things around these parts overwhelmed him. He looked out over the lake, tasted the wind and exulted somewhere deep inside. 
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