Encounters: Six Short Stories

By Brett Andrew Strange

Encounters is a curated collection of six contemporary short stories set across three continents. The stories reflect disparate adventures in a globalized, rapidly changing world: a young couple discovers the luxurious allure of Monte Carlo’s Grand Casino, a woman from San Francisco reveals an inspirational uncle’s secrets, a Bangkok expatriate lives out a night of excess, and a Russian immigrant navigates her unique New World voyage. Each story shines a different, up-close perspective on a lived moment in a certain place and time.

Unmoored from the familiar past, these characters embark on borderless journeys that draw the reader into a range of vivid scenes and pivotal choices. Combining a subtle mix of character psychology, keenly observed settings, and dramatic, surprising decisions, Encounters brings to life the universal thrill of new love and the heartache of departure and loss.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Nov 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781665712705

Brett Andrew Strange

Brett Andrew Strange started his career as a CIA intelligence officer based in Langley, Virginia. Brett worked more than a decade overseas in Southeast Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. This is his first novel exploring themes related to his prior intelligence work and the men and women he encountered. For more information on available fictions please visit www.brettandrewstrange.com

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Copyright © 2021 Brett Andrew Strange.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Archway Publishing

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-6657-1269-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-1271-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-1270-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021919614

Archway Publishing rev. date: 10/20/2021

CONTENTS

Introduction

The Grand Casino

Dinner with Strangers

Manhattan in the Rain

The Golden State

Night Elsewhere

A Traveler’s Notebook

INTRODUCTION

The six short stories gathered here are fictions that sprang from disparate adventures on three continents. The voices emerged sometimes in fragments from chance encounters, occasionally in plain sight, and often orthogonal to my own experience. Each voice embodied a viewpoint, a personality, and an intriguing conflict I felt worthy of dramatizing. I looked back to certain past masters of the genre for guidance—Maupassant, Chekov, and Joyce stand out.

Places also served as vessels for discovery. Monaco, San Francisco, Washington, DC, Manhattan, and Bangkok offered up their own personalities and possibilities. These narratives are as much about these conflicted, magnificent cities as they are about the travelers who passed through their gates.

More industrialized fiction surrounds us now than any single person can possibly consume. Our narrative diversions are loud, incessant, and endless. Media today largely consists of massively budgeted productions, formulaic plots, and fantastic, computerized graphics. Corporations deliver their fully advertised content to guide our dreams en masse, often into preposterous fantasy realms. By comparison to the scale of such corporatized imagination, any character realized in mere ink by a single author seems a very cerebral, tiny affair. Whether or not writing itself retains its command to reveal life’s luminosity is left in the author’s fallible hands and with you.

Amid today’s noisy, cluttered, confusing media swirl, I invite you to repose a moment in a quiet corner. In these pages, you will encounter a few curious specimens in their natural habitats. You might recognize the elements of high adventure: a laugh, a sigh, a taste, and a kiss. You may find more than you anticipate, perhaps in the form a half-remembered dream waiting patiently, furtively, in the shadows of a warm, moonlit night somewhere else, beyond each false frontier, still undiscovered, naked and alone upon a distant shore.

—San Francisco, August 2021

THE GRAND CASINO

THE GRAND CASINO

A DRIEN BELIEVED himself unlucky. He had labored hard in the past decade but had yet to achieve glory, fame, fortune, or true happiness. He was always missing the mark by just a slight fraction, edged out by a canny competitor or an unknowable system with tilted odds. The sheer, vast complexity of an indifferent world stymied him in fundamental ways, always.

It started off badly, tracing back to the womb. Rather than deliver his uniquely radiant human potential into the home of a film celebrity or industry titan, fortune had handed him a nondescript start in the vast, undifferentiated American middle. Dad lived an average, uninspiring life, one of the tens of millions with a Ford SUV, a mortgage, and an HDTV but nothing unique or heroic forged upon the family crest. His father lost interest in his son’s future after the messy divorce and missed alimony payments soon after. Adrien spoke occasionally with the broken old man, but these were at best awkward pleasantries exchanged during the holiday season. His mother loved him, he knew, but could neither help nor truly understand.

During his most lonely moments of intense dissatisfaction, Adrien took some comfort that it could be worse. Wasn’t modern America the land of plenty? Food was everywhere, and everyone had a chance of making it, even if a four-year college degree set the starting point beneath a hulking debt load. Adrien had a string of jobs: the manager job with the two-hour commute, the internet commerce business idea that fizzled because he was too late with the concept, the sales position with the self-absorbed, difficult boss. Nothing worked. Magic didn’t happen in the crowded middle of the bell curve. Magic was for the outliers. It was too damn hard. He was unlucky.

His worst fortune was with women. What terrible luck to have met Denise, who was so obviously far out of his league. He had been entranced by her shiny chestnut hair and that calm, self-assured, Boston Brahmin glamour. He had worked hard to charm her, ignored the countless naysayers, and thus wasted nearly five years chasing a mirage. If he had only been able to read her cards correctly, he would have folded his hand much sooner. The last he heard, she had moved to Los Angeles and was married to a successful investment manager with a high six-figure income.

After Denise, he avoided real relationships. Adrien’s trips to Vegas started as a way to break the monotony. Vegas offered glamour in the smoky rooms, stiff drinks, all-night pool parties, and other transient pleasures. At the gaming tables, each player was lifted from singular obscurity and equalized by the spin of the wheel, the flip of the next card, the dice toss. His rational mind knew the power of the house, but he controlled when he sat down and when he stood up. The dispersion of outcomes allowed him to feed off his tactical victories, forget the losses, and take pleasure in the journey’s drama—those precious moments that affirmed his otherwise purposeless existence.

Under the glittering casino lights, fortune herself sometimes seemed to manifest in bodily form. She played directly against him, and through his passionate belief and some marginal skill in poker, he flirted with this charmed but fickle goddess. On some lucky nights, her alluring, wet red lips parted in a whisper to him as he left the blackjack table with a stack of colored chips. The beautiful, fertile goddess whispered to him then, Yes, my dearest love, Adrien, tonight I belong to you. Tonight, you are a winner.

◆

Kate endured her real estate sales job because she needed the money. She could rely on only her personal energy and inherent optimism to overcome what were otherwise difficult circumstances with no easy solution. As a new agent in a middling brokerage firm, her supervisor never gave her the premium properties but instead let her sell the lingering, smaller apartments. She made ends meet with threshold sales transaction flow, but her bank account always hovered dangerously low. Clients liked her, but she lacked real aggression to close more deals and didn’t have a knack for spinning the truth in her favor.

Several people in her office and some clients had called Kate beautiful. She never fully believed those remarks and felt they were always offered like alms to compensate for her economic travails. Many evenings, she would stare at the mirror, questioning her destiny: her eyes were bright, but her nose was just slightly too wide and her lips too thin for the type of beauty she would have preferred. The absolute unacceptable aspect of her selfhood was her narrow, shapeless calves that she strove to hide with boots and long pants.

Relationships with men had been a struggle, and Adrien was no different. She didn’t feel much connection to him yet and didn’t trust him. He was the needy type who preferred a woman on his arm but didn’t really see her true self. Most likely, he thought of her as a diversion. She compared her life plight to that of an average coat in an average department store: one of hundreds in the bin. Where could she meet the right partner with whom she could at last reveal her dreams and life goals?

Nonetheless, when Adrien walked into the restaurant, his eyes flashing with a certain determination, Kate was glad to see him. He did seem dashing at the moment of his entrance.

They drank their dirty martinis, and the conversation drifted as usual to the affairs of the day. He was more wistful today, and soon they began to speak of travel as a remedy for mundane routines. Adrien had flashes of charm like this, albeit based on a naive hope that a temporary change in geography could change their fundamental course. She wanted him to dream, but his focus on impractical matters disappointed her somewhat.

The name Monte Carlo had virtually no associations in Kate’s mind. She had heard it referenced in a few movies and perhaps had seen it on an Art Deco poster hanging in the restaurant where she had once worked. The name sounded rich, vaguely Italian.

We can spend the long weekend there, Adrien suggested. That was interesting, she thought. His desire to travel with her was a positive relationship sign.

But why not Cancun? she asked, having been there once as a child with her mother. She retained fond memories of the sandy beaches and a mariachi band playing at the dinner table.

Been there. It doesn’t hold the magic for me, he said. "No. I have a better plan. You must come with me to Monaco. We must play cards at the Grand Casino."

I don’t gamble, Kate said, never having been to a casino.

Nothing?

Zero.

Come for the experience, all expenses covered. It is an amazing place, he declared with confidence, although he had never been to the French Rivera. For Adrien, Monte Carlo’s Grand Casino was but an idea that had slowly taken shape in his imagination.

Masking her curiosity and excitement, they discussed timing. Adrien pulled out his mobile phone, logged on to a travel app, and then after a short time, their tickets to Nice were booked. The mobile app moved them quickly from idea to reality. The cost was more than Vegas, he realized, but he could