He confessed to her, “I’d like to gamble here but I don’t know how.” She led him to the roulette wheel, but he didn’t like it, because it was pure chance and the odds were unashamedly in the house’s favor. At the blackjack tables, he won because the game was a problem in mathematics, and most people, stupidly optimistic, tried to improve their hands with one more hit: the house counted on that. He most enjoyed the machines, the impersonal slots, gaudy and solemn both, their melting colors and the silky tug of the handles, the soft leveraging within, and the gush of their occasional jackpot spitting Kennedy half-dollars into the battered trough.

In his room high above the Strip she showed him something else—a line of white powder on the glass coffee table. He knelt on the carpeted floor as he had with Jacqueline in quite another city, in another hotel room. Mirabella, her broad face shining and smiling, guided him in rolling up a twenty-dollar bill and inhaling the powder as best he could. He had never been good at blowing out candles on a birthday cake, either. He disliked the tickly sensation, like loose hair across his lips except that this was deeper into his head. The powder that eluded his nostrils she scraped up quickly, neatly, with a one-edged Treet razor blade, and inhaled herself, making afterwards an ingratiating child’s grimace. She was an angel, Mirabella, with something Slavic in the shine and breadth of her face.

Owen distrusted drugs because he needed his brain cells, but this was a slow icicle to the brain that awoke that gray organ to its potential, gave it the precision and speed immortal spirits must know. His body, too: he had never wanted to fuck so much, and been so good at it, so hard and controlled, a man of iron, desire rising in him throughout the night like hydraulic pressure and always being greeted willingly by the marvellous Mirabella, her body as thick and resilient as a peasant woman’s, her breasts thoroughly brown and a ghost of non-tan around her trimmed pubes smaller than a doily. She reminded him of Alissa except that she was firmer-bodied and younger and didn’t want a baby. Her back viewed from above as he humped her was less touching, less articulate in its muffled spine. Her back was blank. Her cunt became full of him, so soppy he felt less and less friction, and she confessed toward dawn that he was hurting her with his cock. He apologized and kissed her all over tenderly, including the vertebra just above the sallow cleft of her ass, but in fact he was not sorry, he enjoyed the idea of hurting her with just himself.

She said she wanted to show him something beautiful and suggested he rent a car. He said it was six in the morning and no rental agencies would be open.