The Four Fingers of Death Read Online Free Page B

the time in her twenties when she should have been sleeping around or doing a lot of drugs or at least smoking copiously. Even in college, she’d told me, she’d had to hang upside down for a while in the morning, while her roommates smacked her around to get her lungs going. This, in fact, was when I met her, when I was teaching a beginning writing course at the community college. She audited one night with a friend, and brought her rolling tank with her.
Do you require an even more detailed portrait of the beloved? If I were to fashion a more complete account, its title would be “Portrait of a Disabled Gambling Enthusiast.” Which may surprise you. But after a certain age this was Tara’s daily activity. Yes, in case you were wondering, even disabled people who are slight, beautiful, and possessed of an ethereal wasting quality can be willful, short-tempered, and self-destructive. You can become a little bit impatient with them even as you are convinced you would lie down across the local freight railroad tracks to prevent them further harm.
Tara apparently began by betting on sporting events while in college. Maybe because she was no longer able to participate in sports. (She had once been a teenage gymnast—her specialty was the balance beam.) In her own account of her gambling addiction (beginning about 2016), she too began with baseball, precisely because it had a record of more than a decade of tolerance for differently abled players. She wanted to bet on players like Dave McClintock and Juan Millagro. And making use of various online gambling forums, Tara did begin to place small wagers, using especially her disability allotments from the government. On several occasions her parents, a stiff, religious couple from the Midwest, bailed her out of her debts.
When she began betting on far more unsavory things, and making use of underworld professionals for the purposes of betting, things got worse. About the time she audited my writing class, where her luminous mortality, her consumptiveness, was both terrifying and strangely alluring, she was, by her own account, also showing up at the backroom offices of local bookmakers, wheezing on her respirator, intending to bet on the outcome of World Wrestling Federation matches, cockfights, and NASCAR. She wrote a couple of short stories about the gambling demimonde, and these stories, with their colorful argot, were of the transparently autobiographical sort that I always think makes for the finest art. She probably had more talent than I. Were Tara not preoccupied with dying, inch by inch, and with chasing down her every gambling whim to the best of her motorized ability, I believe she would have made the better writer. Alas, she had little interest in preserving her autobiography. I told myself that I should have nothing to do with her, and then I fell for her—the dreamer falling for his dream.
The Futures Betting Syndicate, which became a national obsession in the teens, about the time our class ended, was effectively niche-marketed to a temperamental beauty with a life-threatening pulmonary disease and parents who would fund her. With the emergence of the FBS, Tara had found, at last, a gaming institution that had the veneer of popular acceptance. The FBS was overseen by government regulators, and a tenth of its profits were creamed off for education, entitlement programs, and servicing the trillions of our national debt.
The FBS, as you know, created the very first subsidized futures markets organized around current events, around a host of possible outcomes, such as the likelihood of Republican control of the House of Representatives, the assassination of the newly elected prime minister of Palestine, the liquidation of the remaining portion of the Greenlandish ice shelf, and so on, and while it was notoriously bad as an indicator of actual outcomes, particularly when predicting the volatility of any season’s weather, it was quite useful as a barometer of