The Four Fingers of Death Read Online Free PDF Page A

opinion. As the popularity of the FBS increased, and as its revenues began to help the government work its way out of gargantuan funding obligations, its no-holds-barred laissez-faire market expanded into some rather odd directions. This was where Tara particularly liked to concentrate her attention. When we were dating she used to tell me these things: in one rather grisly period, in her account, she made several thousand dollars betting on the possibility that the secretary of federal gambling enterprises (titular head of the FBS) would be badly beaten in his own home. It was unclear who had first created this particular market, and the secretary’s detail of Secret Service agents was unable to stop the attack. Tara then bid on the likelihood of Israel’s use of a nuclear weapon on one of her neighbors. Again, Tara’s certainty was well-founded, as you know.
Her talk was of upticks, bid quantities, micro-reversals in numbers of casualties in tribal conflicts, and, almost quaintly now, of sports. I was, in this period, uncertain if living with her, as I was longing to do, was going to be easy under the circumstances. True, any good sufferer of gambling para-addiction syndrome with socially unacceptable perspiration feature (see the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—Eighth Edition , or DSM-VIII ) will confess to having given the FBS a try occasionally. I tried it later myself, mainly when Tara was asleep, which was during the day, because she liked to draw the blinds and stay up all night by herself. Thus, during the day, I attempted a few stray bids, based on a single betting strategy that I referred to as radical positivity . I bet only on really splendid things taking place in the world. I bet that the Fifty Years Insurgency in Sri Lanka would end within the month. I bet that doctors would find a cure for hantavirus. I bet that the greenhouse effect would suddenly be reversed, that Russia and Ukraine would stop all the carnage. In this way, I lost most of my IRA.
I quit teaching and reduced my other professional responsibilities partly because it became imperative to keep an eye on Tara’s physical condition, but also because she came to see the necessity of a complete screen detoxification , which she was hoping I would consent to supervise. I had been failing to show up for work every time Tara’s breathing took a turn for the worse. The shipping concern, they didn’t give a fig if my wife’s lungs and pancreas glistened with heavy phlegm. The bottom was falling out of their container anyway.
The first thing we did was remove all the wall devices in the living room, which were just showing digital reproductions from picture postcards of the 1950s. (We found these strangely calming.) Then we removed Tara’s subcutaneous personal digital assistant (which at that time was a crude version of what they are attempting to market now, but which had similar capabilities, photo and music storage, web uplink, video cam, videoconferencing, and so on), and then we went into the bedroom and trashed anything with a standby light. The music file redeemer, the auto-massager, the drying tree, the humidifier. The replacement for all this contemporary distraction was to be some old-fashioned books. So I went down to Arachnids and loaded up on graphic novels, German philosophy, self-help, and a few American classics. These I set in a heap by Tara’s oxygen tank. She also asked for sleeping medication, hoping that a couple days of snoring might cure her of the whole business.
When she woke on the second day, she was in a white fury, and this was a sad and frightening thing to behold in a woman who was sick enough that she could not get across the room without a major effort. Apparently, in her detoxified state, she had enough physical strength left to wipe out a stack of books that I had paid good money for.
“Get these things out of here!”
“But… you asked for books,” I said.
“You and your books