Itching, itching. Skin on fire. Nausea and splitting headache. The more...

Itching, itching. Skin on fire. Nausea and splitting headache. The more sumptuous the dope, the deeper the anguish-mental and physical-when it wore off. I was back to the chunk spewing out of Martin's forehead only on a more intimate level, inside it almost, every pulse and spurt, and-even worse, a deeper freezing point entirely-the painting, gone. Bloodstained coat, the feet of the running-away kid. Blackout. Disaster. For humans-trapped in biology-there was no mercy: we lived a while, we fussed around for a bit and died, we rotted in the ground like garbage. Time destroyed us all soon enough. But to destroy, or lose, a deathless thing-to break bonds stronger than the temporal-was a metaphysical uncoupling all its own, a startling new flavor of despair.
My dad at the baccarat table, in the air-conditioned midnight. There's always more to things, a hidden level. Luck in its darker moods and manifestations. Consulting the stars, waiting to make the big bets when Mercury was in retrograde, reaching for a knowledge just beyond the known. Black his lucky color, nine his lucky number. Hit me again pal. There's a pattern and we're a part of it. Yet if you scratched very deep at that idea of pattern {which apparently he had never taken the trouble to do}, you hit an emptiness so dark that it destroyed, categorically, anything you'd ever looked at or thought of as light.