Vanishing and Other Stories by Deborah Willis Page A

pick up their chips and they walk out. The other kind of gambler, the kind he is becoming, sinks into the game and disappears. This gambler plays because he loves the rhythm and routine. He loves the moment—a breath—between winning and losing. To be made or broken within seconds. To live or die—the choice made each minute, by luck or some other careless god. He loves the risk, and cares little for the reward. He plays to lose.
    Â 

    Â 
    â€œ WHY DO PEOPLE SEE MAGIC SHOWS? ” He asks her this after she has torn a twenty-dollar bill in half and magically restored it. What he really wants to ask is this: Why do people touch each other? Why do they fall in love?
    â€œThat’s easy,” says Miranda. “To escape.”
    His friends and colleagues would pronounce that word differently, and it’s not just the accent, so faint it must be left over from early childhood.
Escape
. Others would emphasize the word with atone she doesn’t use. They would mean a certain kind of irresponsibility. His friends and colleagues would see his actions—gambling, associating with this woman—as irresponsible, dangerous. He’s noticed the concerned looks they give him at work. He’s noticed the way they avoid him, out of fear or sympathy.
    But his time with Miranda is as generous, as religious, as he’s ever felt. As she performs what he knows are false shuffles and crimped cards, he is himself, and he is not himself. He is her attentive audience, and he is Miranda the Conjuror. He is the pleasure she takes from her own competence and the joy she feels in revisiting her repertoire. He is the grace that lives in her hands. To let go, to disappear, to forget himself. To exist in another’s skin, and then—on the long, dark drive home—to return to himself, with another’s knowledge. To escape. It was the only way to live.
    Â 

    Â 
    HER VOICE AS SHE COUNTS OUT his chips. Her laugh, brittle from tobacco and the casino’s air. The way she smashes his watch to pieces then restores it to him as good as new. Her hands as they hold the watch in front of his face, a hypnotist’s hands. That’s what haunts him.
    He has heard of men who resign themselves to loneliness and begin to visit whores. He imagines that they often visit the same woman, perhaps every night. They grow fond of the routine. Then they grow fond of the woman.
    Inside the casino, Miranda treats him like nothing more than a customer. When he sits at her table, she doesn’t look him in theeye or use his name. When she drops cards in front of him, he can almost believe they are strangers. It reminds him of Kelly’s last weeks. He had to move her from her bed beside the window to the hospital. There, she was cordoned off from him by tubes and wires and painkillers that made her mind and speech fuzzy.
    Only once in those last days did she really look at him. She woke up and he leaned forward and took her hand. She focused on him for one or two seconds and said, “I miss the fish.”
    So even then, she could surprise him. She’d never liked the aquarium when she was healthy. She used to joke that she only liked the sea star because it matched the throw pillows. But she must have grown fond of it during her illness, when watching the fish was all she had the energy to do.
    And now, Tom stares at Miranda as though she were a fish in a tank, beautiful and trapped and not meant to be touched. He tries to stop, for his own sake as well as for hers. He tries, at least, to keep a discreet distance. He often sits at one of the slot machines and watches her, pressing and repressing the button, losing ten cents at a time.
    Â 

    Â 
    HE LETS THINGS FALL APART . The condo he shared with Kelly has become chaotic. Dishes pile up on top of the dishwasher, dust lines the electronics, the hardwood is never swept. When he needs to do a load of laundry, he drops clothes into the machine then forgets