OCR Text |
Show 92 ceiling mirrors. Hunt imagines an enormous gridwork of I-beams. They are all wired with closed-circuit cameras which angle down; staff people adjusting the cameras from a catwalk that is part of the grid. But Hall is in the monitor room, studying images that the various working cameras sweep, pan and rotate across, zooms so close to that they can read the printout on a player's digital watch, pick up dirt underneath fingernails, wrist hair, lipstick cracks, loose threads on buttons of a blouse. And though Leah would never imagine herself as Jewel, Hall, nevertheless, feels his flight from Jewel accutely. He tries to waylay his feeling. Finesse it. For twenty months, he tries to minimize, analyze, laugh at, forget it. But then Hall's migrains return. And as at home as he is in this glass city, with his remove, his distance, his monitoring through the video images and the one-way glass, Hall feels that equilibrium begin to slip again. And Hunt feels it too. Solitude. Remoteness. But what does Hunt imagine Hall can do? Hall sends Jewel a package! Hall sends Jewel a package with the label typed, so that she can have no notion who it is from. In the package is an airline ticket a.nd confirmed prepaid reservations to Hall's hotel. Hall reserves one of the rooms the hotel keeps for high rollers. It is a room with the same glass ceiling of the casino, with the same mounted cameras in the glass. The casino likes to know just where high-rollers are. So, because Hall wants to see Jewel, he sends a package, hoping that she might come, that he might watch her, that he could bring at least the camera close to her skin, her body again. Hall knows that Jewel, being Jewel, will probably toss the whole package in a trash barrel. Still, if Hall can see |