Breathless

Estelle.
    He dreamed of a casino so vast that he could not see as far as any wall. From the gold-leafed ceiling depended an infinite number of perfectly aligned chandeliers swagged with symmetrical ropes of crystal beads, each great lamp icicled with exactly the same number of crystal pendants in precisely the same arrangement.
    Under this exquisitely ordered ceiling, he sat at a blackjack table with three other players: a one-eyed woman, a one-armed man, and a nine-year-old boy with one missing front tooth.
    The woman wore a low-cut dress and repeatedly withdrew black hundred-dollar chips from between her ample breasts. Each time that she put them on the table, they transformed into black beetles and scurried across the green felt, much to the dealer’s annoyance.
    Every time the one-armed man received a card, he looked at it and in disgust threw it angrily at the dealer, who then dealt it to the boy. The boy didn’t know the rules of the game and kept asking,“Has anyone seen my sister? Does anyone know where she’s gone?”
    The six-deck shoe contained ordinary playing cards but also tarot cards and picture cards from a children’s game. Regardless of what Lamar drew, he won. A six of diamonds and a rabbit holding an umbrella: winner. The tarot hangman and an eight of hearts: winner.
    When Lamar’s winnings had grown sizeable, the one-eyed woman said, “There’s the Pipp boy.”
    Glancing at the gap-toothed child who sat farther around the elliptical table, Lamar said, “That’s not Marcus. Not him at all.”
    “Over there,” she said, “at the roulette wheel.”
    The roulette game lay behind them, not in their line of sight. Turning on his stool, Lamar saw Marcus Pipp where she said he was.
    Lamar left the table with his winnings in a chip rack, intending to give everything to Marcus. By the time he got to the roulette game, Marcus had gone.
    The roulette table was one in an infinite row of them. Surveying the casino, Lamar saw Marcus four tables away and hurried toward him.
    Rotors spun, balls danced and clattered, and croupiers called the results, which suddenly were the same: “Double zero … double zero … double zero … double zero. …”
    The dream didn’t descend into a full-blown nightmare, but it became a drama of fleeting promise and enduring frustration. Table after table, Lamar pursued Marcus but couldn’t reach him or catch his attention. Later, glimpsing him in the slot-machine maze, Lamar sought to intercept him without success. Later still, he spotted Marcus at a craps table, then at others, but Marcus drifted away.
    Dead in reality, alive in the dream, Marcus Pipp was in both cases outward bound and beyond contact.

Thirty-four

D uring the walk into town, Tom Bigger worked up an appetite.
    At a convenience store that offered prepackaged deli creations, he bought a submarine sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a sixteen-ounce bottle of Coke.
    A couple of customers shied away from him. The clerk had served him before, however; she took some of his panhandled money and gave him change without saying a word to him, without glancing at his face.
    In a nearby park, under an old iron lamppost that provided more atmosphere than light, Tom sat on a bench that looked out onto the street. He watched the passing traffic as he ate.
    Behind the bench rose an enormous phoenix palm. During the lulls in traffic, he could hear rats agitating one another in their nest high in the crown of the tree.
    Tom didn’t have much overhead, but panhandling alone couldn’tpay for his needs. Every other month, he took a bus to the nearest city and, working at night, stole enough to cover his expenses.
    Primarily, he burglarized suburban homes where a lack of lights and a few days’ of newspapers scattered on the driveway suggested he would not risk coming face-to-face with a homeowner.
    If he found a likely target walking alone on a lonely street, he robbed him at gunpoint. Tom’s face and the pistol turned even strapping young men into situational pacifists.
    The gun wasn’t loaded. He didn’t trust himself with cartridges.
    He never worried that in a frenzy of self-hatred he might kill himself. Suicide required either more courage than he possessed or more despair than afflicted him.
    His hatred was directed inward, his rage outward. With bullets in the weapon, he would sooner or later kill somebody.
    From experience, he knew that once he indulged in a vice, that indulgence became a habit, then an