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.