Breathless

beyond the shadowed porch, the burning moon seemed to have dusted the yard and the trees with its phosphorescent ashes. The night lay as still as if it were airless.
    Then something moved in the moonlight: quick, lithe, on all fours, white. Two of them.

Sixteen

T he most expensive of the hotel-casino’s five restaurants had a large holding bar that featured a black-marble floor with small diamond-shaped inlays of gold onyx. The walls were clad in the same marble but without the diamonds. A highly dimensional black-marble ceiling glowed with panels of backlit translucent gold onyx at the bottom of each coffer. Instead of a mirror behind the black-marble bar, huge panels of backlit onyx were inlaid with the silhouettes of Art Deco wolves perpetually leaping.
    If Dracula had moonlighted as an interior designer, he might have created a room like this.
    Sitting at the bar, Lamar Woolsey ordered his only alcoholic beverage of the evening: a bottle of Elephant Beer, a Danish import.
    Some people at the cocktail tables were waiting to be told by the maître d’ that their dinner tables were ready, but those at the bar had not come for dinner. They were mostly men, but whether men or women, they fled the casino for a respite from self-destruction.
    Their moods ranged between forced gaiety and somber reflection,but the impression they all made on Lamar was of desperation.
    They had come to the games of chance with hope. Emily Dickinson, the poet, had written that “Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul …” But if your hope was hope for the wrong thing, it could be a sharp-beaked hawk that ravaged the soul and the heart.
    In his easy way, Lamar chatted up six fugitives from cards and dice, as they came and went. Eventually, in each conversation, he briefly waxed philosophical, and then said, “Don’t think, just answer. What’s the first word comes into your mind when I say
hope?”
    As he nursed his beer, he didn’t know what answer he would find appealing, but it wasn’t among the first five:
luck, money, money, change, none
.
    The sixth of these brief companions, Eugene O’Malley, appeared to be in his late twenties. He had such an innocent face and such a humble manner that beard stubble and bloodshot eyes didn’t make him appear dissolute, only harried.
    Both arms on the bar, hands around a bottle of Dos Equis, he replied “Home,” in response to Lamar’s question.
    “Where’s home, Mr. O’Malley?”
    “Call me Gene. Home’s just down the road in Henderson.”
    “What’s at home that gives you hope?”
    “Lianne. She’s my wife.”
    “She’s a good wife, is she?”
    “Lianne’s the best.”
    “So why’re you here, O’Malley?”
    “Supposed to be at work. Night-shift construction foreman.”
    Lamar said, “I don’t see anyone constructing anything around here except hangovers.”
    “In this economy, who needs a night shift? Lost my job a week ago, can’t bring myself to tell Lianne.”
    “But my dear O’Malley, if she’s a good woman …”
    “She was fired in July. We’ve got a baby coming in six weeks.”
    “So you figured your luck had to turn.”
    “Figured wrong, Ed.”
    Lamar had introduced himself as Edward Lorenz. Now he asked, “You lose a lot?”
    “Anything is a lot right now. I dropped fourteen hundred, half my severance pay. Don’t know what happened, sort of lost my mind.”
    After finishing his bottle of Elephant Beer, Lamar said, “You aren’t fighting Irish, are you, O’Malley? Don’t take a poke at an old man just because he asks a rude question.”
    “You’re not that old, and I can’t see you being rude.”
    “No lie—are you a degenerate gambler or just a damn fool?”
    Gene laughed softly. “You have a way about you, Ed. I’m a damn fool who doesn’t ever want to see the inside of a casino again.”
    “I guess I’ll believe you. Never known an O’Malley to lie.”
    “Have you known a lot of O’Malleys?”
    “You’re the first one. O’Malley, do you know who Sir Isaac Newton was?”
    “A scientist or somebody.”
    “Both somebody and a scientist. For centuries, Newtonian physics gave science the tools it needed to build the modern world. Newton’s theories and methods still work, but we now know that many of them are incomplete or even wrong.”
    “How can they work if they’re wrong?”
    “It has to do with reductionist observation and the power of approximation in the reliability of short-term