“How’s your night going?” the man asked.
Mary looked into his eyes—his deep brown eyes, beautiful by all objective standards—and knew they were the eyes of a liar. He didn’t mean “Having a good night?” or even “Having a horrible night?”; he meant, “Are you willing to tolerate my attention, and thus sustain my sexual fantasies about you, for the duration of this elevator ride?”
“Amazing,” Mary answered. She wasn’t leading him on; she was setting him up.
He grinned, falling into her trap. “Oh? You on a winning streak?”
“No, but my boyfriend is.”
There it was, as if on cue: the shift of his eyebrows, twitch of his lips, barely perceptible.
She went on. She had to. She’d played this game a million times, knew all the rules. “He’s a poker player. Competing in the tournament right now.”
“I guess he’s good, then.”
“Oh, real good.”
The elevator doors opened. A woman hauling seven bags sans bellhop appeared. “I’ll take the next one,” she said. She was middle-aged, plain-faced, so there was no protest; they descended without her.
“It must be nice,” the man went on. “Traveling the globe with him. Spending all his money. Not having anything to worry about, ’cause you don’t have a fucking life of your own.”
She didn’t have a comeback, so she said, “Yes, it is.”
Mary hadn’t been bluffing. As the man scurried off in the direction of the resort’s dayclub—titled VEXX, for some reason—she strode toward the ballroom, where the World Series of Poker was underway.
Her boyfriend was Nathan Ness. His thousand-yard stare struck fear into the hearts of rookies and pros alike. When they’d matched on Raya about a year ago, his name had meant nothing to her. Once she finally thought to type it into Google, the Earth shifted on its axis. Nathan was not merely rich or famous, but lucky—and Mary knew that luck, even more so than wealth or institutional regard, was on the decline. A few dates later, she was living the life she had manifested—well, almost.
It was true that Nathan brought her along on trips, but they were hardly romantic getaways. His tournament schedule kept him occupied for hours on end. Often, he’d grind well past midnight.
Mary was the angel of the ballroom, bringing him water and snacks as needed. She had the free time—she was entering her sixth month of unemployment, just booted from a graphic design job. His attempts to encourage her—You gotta lose some to win some, babe!—were met with tactical kisses. She had no desire to return to work; if she acted like a high-value woman, he would honor her as one, said just about every influencer she admired.
When her friends traded relationship woes, she framed her dissatisfaction in a way they’d understand. He stayed out for so long. What if he was cheating on her? What if he accidentally got a hard-on from a casino masseuse and started having untoward thoughts?
These concerns were totally fabricated. Mary knew exactly how he was spending his evenings: playing poker. It was her inability to fill her own evenings with any rewarding activities that bothered her.
The ballroom lobby was crowded with bros, nerds, and geezers. Nathan decidedly belonged to the first category, but he didn’t square his shoulders like some of the other boys. One wave from Mary, and he was bounding across the room, wrapping her in a bear hug.
“Big news, babe!”
She smooched him. “You’re up?”
“Yeah, doubled my stack. Big whoop. This is about you.”
News? What new developments could possibly be occurring in her world? She had entered a sweepstakes to win a purple Corvette, but she couldn’t imagine why the contest organizers would contact Nathan instead of her. Maybe they had wanted to surprise her.
“I met this guy Guillermo. Runs a poker blog, one of the biggest on the web. He needs a new site layout, and I told him I had just the girl for the job.” His mouth turned up at the corner, the same way it did when he was on a heater. “He said, ‘When can she start?’”
Mary’s heart dropped.
“You shouldn’t have,” she said, forgetting the colloquial meaning of the expression.
Nathan held her even tighter. “You’re gonna kill it. I’ll connect you with him ASAP.”
“Wait, Nathan…”
His phone alarm buzzed. “Break’s almost over. See you soon, OK?”
Mary lingered in the lobby after he was gone. Silently, spitefully, she willed him to bust out, if only so he could reemerge from the void and be reminded of the present that was her presence. Not every Raya baddie would wait for him like this. Why didn’t he see her waiting for what it was—a gift worth more than the whole prize pool put together?
Another woman, nearly the spitting image of Mary’s favorite vlogger, strutted toward the ballroom doors in four-inch heels. Her hair glistened effortlessly; her face shone with the elegance of those who wanted for nothing. Now this was exactly who Mary wanted to be.
She thought about striking up a conversation to glean some of her secrets. There was absolutely no way this model, this goddess, had paid for anything she was wearing—or anything in her entire adult life. But before she could, the woman sat down at a poker table—Nathan’s poker table, in fact.
Mary put on the AI glasses Nathan had given her for her birthday and identified her as one of the top players in the nation.
An hour later, Mary was camped out in the food court with her laptop. It might as well have been a child’s toy computer. She was fiddling with InDesign just to see what she remembered; the controls were no longer intuitive to her.
“Hey. Hey.”
An old man was tapping on her table. On principle, she seldom took out her headphones for strangers, but this guy’s expression seemed especially urgent. If he were having a stroke and she ignored him, she might face karmic justice—so she caved.
“Did ya win?”
Oh, so that’s what was going on. She studied his face. Most of the elders who hit on her were silver fox types, eternal bachelors. This man’s skin was too wrinkled, his teeth too craggy, to earn him that distinction. Maybe his wallet was the source of his arrogance. Or maybe it was the twinkle in his eyes, which might have been attractive once, she conceded. She wished he were ugly so she could write him off faster.
She shook her head. “I’m not a gambler.”
The term was a slight dig at Nathan; poker players hated to be called gamblers, although she didn’t know why.
“Then what brings you here?”
“My boyfriend.”
He huffed out a laugh. “I’ll get my ass out of here.”
There was something pathetic about his tone. Normally, it would have irked her. Today, it sparked pity. Lacking a boyfriend, she might have kept chatting, if only to make his day.
When he left, she imagined a phantom version of herself trailing after him. He couldn’t have expected me to fall for him, she told herself. He must have been punishing himself, the sad sack. If I proved him wrong, I’d own his bones.
She stood up in a rush, nearly leaving her laptop behind. When she found him at a blackjack table, she said, “I hope it isn’t too late.”
He turned his back on the dealer and took her by the arm.
At first, she told herself, she was just having fun. She would see how many perks she could squeeze out of this dude—if he was hanging around a casino, he was probably willing to part with a few Benjamins—and skedaddle after scoring sufficiently. With every step, however, her skepticism heightened. She didn’t mind the glares of frat boys and aging women; they were easy enough to chalk up to jealousy. (Sorry you’re broke, Brandon! Suck it, Grandma!) Rather, the smiley-faced greetings of suit-clad supervisors and corseted cocktail waitresses got under her skin. Why were they so nonchalant? Didn’t they understand something special and strange was happening right under their noses?
Somewhere along the way, he told her his name was Harry. She took the rhyme as a sign—of what, she wasn’t aware yet.
He ushered her into the same elevator she had taken earlier. This time, she noticed that the developers had failed to skip the 13th floor and imagined catastrophe. What would the South Florida version of 9/11 look like? Maybe a biplane would crash into the hotel’s guitar-shaped tower, a tangled WILL YOU MARRY ME banner trailing behind. The wreckage would fall into the pool below, traumatizing those tourists who survived.
Harry mumbled something. The words came out as static to her. When she asked him to repeat himself, he chuckled. As the doors parted, he called her a “daydream believer and a homecoming queen.” It felt like a compliment, so she squeezed his hand, which she hadn’t noticed she’d been holding.
His room was identical to Nathan’s, except that the furniture was inverted. Mary sat down in the armchair and kicked her feet onto the futon without thinking. When Harry bent down to peel off her socks, knees a-popping, she knew she was in deep. His eagerness—not just to touch her, but to revel in the grotesquerie of the scenario, inhaling her scent and running his rough thumb over her one ingrown toenail—was absurd above all else. Sure, she felt repulsed, but only casually, as if she were watching a Discovery Channel documentary on spiders. Some sunny, faraway day, when she could tell her friends this story as an aside rather than a confession, she would describe the interaction as “entertaining.”
He massaged her soles as he spoke. She wondered whether he had relied on this tactic for decades or simply felt emboldened by his proximity to death.
“I suppose you’d be willing to do your new friend a favor.”
This wasn’t a question, but a statement. She wasn’t offended; his confidence comforted her. There was no problem for her to work out; Harry had already done the thinking on her behalf. She didn’t even have to speak; her serene expression was agreement enough.
He took out his phone, hit record. Again, Mary was relieved. She didn’t have to grant or deny permission. All she had to do was look beautiful—and she certainly did, in this ancient being’s eyes. I bet his wife just died, speckled and decrepit. He hasn’t seen anything like me since the ’70s. I am new and nubile and NOW. I am the jackpot he has brought home.
Through the window, a cloud moved. A ray of light shone against her skin. Goosebumps glistened. Relief became pleasure.
“I want you to repeat after me,” he said. She wondered why he was already filming. Maybe the awkwardness of this exchange was itself alluring to him; maybe he wanted to see her in both her raw and rehearsed forms. “My name is Mary. I’m trapped in Harry’s phone and I can’t get out.”
Time stopped. In the hallway, a bell dinged. The faint melody of a Top 40 rock song floated her way.
But she was there, and her reflection was slender and sexy in the floor-to-ceiling mirror behind the bed, and she was the best fucking thing he would ever have; she would prove it, she would prove it. She said those stupid sentences, using a voice she had only tried on Nathan once. “Stop it,” he had told her, good-naturedly. “It sounds like you’re about to pee yourself.” Harry, though, was a fan.
“That’s perfect,” he said, as if he had been measuring her performance against some private rubric the whole time.
The production of this video, it turned out, was not foreplay but the main event. Afterward, Harry excused himself to the bathroom to “freshen up.” When he emerged, he was wearing the hotel’s terrycloth robe. He retreated to bed with no intent other than to rest.
“Join me when you want, honey. But before I forget…”
He handed her $500.
Mary chose to interpret the cash as a token of generosity rather than payment. After all, he hadn’t kicked her out. If anything, he might have hoped to lure her into sticking around longer. Of course, longer couldn’t be very long, considering. How bad would it be to spend the next five years reciting Harry’s lines? Her role, it seemed, was already written out for her. She’d walk away with particularly soft feet and perhaps several million dollars. She didn’t see many flashy belongings in his quarters—no designer clothes or fancy watches. But she had read the magazine articles; she knew about quiet luxury. His sweater was probably spun with the finest wool. His shoes, ergonomic and logoless, likely cost five thousand dollars.
Once his eyes were shut, she slipped under the covers on the far side of the bed—just as an experiment, just to see if she would rouse him. He kept snoring.
As he slept, moonbeams smoothed out his features. Void of intent or sentiment, he didn’t seem difficult to like—maybe even love.
She recalled the roleplay he had solicited. The emotion it stirred in her now was something akin to affection. It must be nice, she thought, to harbor such a specific desire.
She actually slept, too, head pressed against her elbow at a weird angle. When she woke up and saw Harry’s face, her heart pounded. For just a second, she thought Nathan had fallen under some evil curse, causing him to age forty years in a night—or perhaps she had been stuck in a coma for the better part of a century, tended to by hospice nurses while her Hall-of-Famer looked over her near-lifeless, near-loveless body.
She inhaled, exhaled. Harry did the same next to her, wheezing a bit. His iPhone, resting on the bedside table, caught the light.
She had never been one to breach her partners’ privacy, but the memory of the video ate at her. She could send it to herself or she could delete it. She didn’t quite know what her plan was, just that she needed to have one.
He didn’t have a passcode. It was almost like the universe wanted her to snoop.
She opened his camera roll and saw dozens of videos of hot girls.
She had to be misinterpreting the visions before her. Surely they were AI-generated, or maybe a closer look would expose them as decaying hags—but not so. When she tapped on each square, a similarly young, similarly gorgeous woman stared back at her. So many beauties, all of them trapped in Harry’s phone. The second-to-last video was time-stamped with yesterday’s date.
He stirred in his sleep. If he wakes up now, I might kill him, she thought. Then her stomach lurched. It wasn’t the thought of putting her hands on him that paralyzed her so much as the expanse of dread and doom that would follow such an act. Could she handle life as a murderer—even if she got away with the crime?
She pulled on her socks and departed.
She couldn’t go back to Nathan—not yet, at least—so she wandered the casino floor. Tobacco smoke swirled around her, clinging to her hair, her wrinkled dress. She had always resisted its attempts at seduction, but what did she have to lose now?
She asked a portly dad type for a cigarette. He shook his head. “I just quit, honey.”
There was that word again, sticky enough to coat her throat. She walked away before she could say “Fuck you.”
She considered killing time at one of the resort’s many 24-hour bars—could she get away with charging a drink to Harry’s room? To Nathan’s?—but alcohol would only depress her more. She could go to VEXX—but what if she ran into her old foe, or a similarly sinister clone?
The sound of cheers, distinctly feminine cheers, stirred her from her daze.
She turned in the direction of the din. A gaggle of blondes was gathered around a slot machine, jumping and giggling. She recognized the tallest, most striking of the bunch as one of Harry’s concubines.
“What’s going on, girls?” she asked.
They pulled her into their circle without hesitation. Their beauty spoke a different language than hers, all highlight and fillers and plump, glossy pouts—and still, they saw her as one of their own. Any jealousy or bitterness dissolved; at last, she was in the right place.
“Katie won $20,000,” one of the women panted.
Mary addressed them collectively; they all looked so happy, she couldn’t even tell who Katie was. “What are you going to do now?”
“We’ve got to keep playing,” the girl from Harry’s phone said. “We’re all winning tonight!”
The we, as she understood it, extended to her. And thus she was indoctrinated into their cult. A waitress brought them cocktails. They clinked their cups together and drank in unison. Then they took turns at the machine. The ritual required participation from all of them. As one girl pulled the lever, the rest would “ooh” and “ahh,” watching the pictures flicker past. Their affirmation, they believed, would be enough to tilt the odds in their favor.
When Mary was ushered forward, she fed the machine all her crisp new bills. When she lost money, she didn’t sigh; the next spin, or the next, or the next, would be her salvation. If she lost the $500, she’d dig around in her purse. The flashing lights were the color of the future—her future. She could see no alternate reality.
Brittany Menjivar was born in the DMV; she now works and plays in the City of Angels. Her poetry and prose collection PARASOCIALITE has been praised by the likes of NYLON, OFFICE, and the LA REVIEW OF BOOKS. As a screenwriter, she is represented by Untitled Entertainment; she has multiple features in pre-production, including an adaptation of Alex Kazemi’s novel NEW MILLENNIUM BOYZ. Follow her on Insta @BrittMenjivar if you know what’s good for you.