ONE

It must have been a malfunction, a breaker failing to interrupt the powerful current of his self-loathing, that had produced such a dark and unnatural state. Even now, as he washed down the last of the Xanax with a deep swallow of Jack Daniels, Seth could not ignore the relentless and magnetic pull of survival. It seemed to originate from all bearings, but most noticeably from the direction of the car door, which he imagined was speaking to him. Open me, the door seemed to whisper. Don’t be selfish.

But as powerful as it was, the instinct to survive was being overridden by an even mightier force: compulsion. For as long as he could remember, Seth had been ruled by the desire to satisfy whatever cravings were most insistent at any moment in time, no matter the cost to himself or those he loved. It was probably ironic how the same compulsion that had driven him into this dark place would now stop him from saving himself, but Seth was not the kind of thinker who could place his actions into a broader context. He was beholden, simply, uncritically, to his impulses.

Seth had always been ashamed of this weakness and had long waited for the moment when his moral debt would be called in. Even as a child he carried dread around with him the way other children carried blankets or pillows. He sucked his thumb during the day and at night curled under the covers, resigned to nightmares as eventual as the rising sun. The problem wasn’t that he committed shameful acts. The problem was he couldn’t stop committing them.

In high school people were amused by the gambling. The Texas 5-A state football playoffs began with 64 teams, and during his freshman year Seth decided to track the bracket on a rectangle of white poster board. His construction was meticulous. He drew it with drafting tools. And once he’d inscribed all the school names in their proper places, Seth showed it to one of his buddies.

Who remarked, innocently enough, Hey, we could use that to bet with.

To that point he’d never been a popular kid, but when word got out about the bracket it seemed like everyone knew Seth’s name. Coaches played, teachers played, and what seemed like half the student body. The success of this gambling operation even impressed his father, which was more rewarding than newfound fame at school. Smaller and less accomplished than his older brother, not pretty like his little sister, Seth felt unspecial and largely ignored. The rare smile on his father’s face was an endorsement Seth never expected but was ecstatic to have earned…even if that smile was now a distant memory.

Had there been any way out of this despair, any lever to pull, he would have done it. Every night he prayed and begged for forgiveness. Every day he imagined a miraculous, last-minute reprieve from his suffering, from the burden of his debt. He pictured this absolution as a lightning bolt from the sky, as divine intervention, but his prayers went unanswered. Seth was down to his last chip. He’d placed it on the table.

And now he waited, terrified, for the dealer to collect his bet.

* * *

Over the years Seth had become an expert at masking the electronic trail of his gambling exploits. After Natalie climbed into bed, he pretended to pay bills and review their investment portfolio, but his real business was to research players and coaches and stadiums, to manage bets and record final scores. He tracked the family’s actual revenues and expenditures in a secret clone of their Quicken account, and at the end of every research session he surgically erased all evidence of these maneuvers from his Internet browsing history. Despite this vigilance, Seth lived in fear of being exposed, and when it finally happened the scene was worse than he ever imagined.

Was it already five days? Almost a week since Natalie sent the boys to bed and sat down with a bottle of wine to watch The Hunger Games? In predictable fashion, Seth had misinterpreted her intentions, especially when she opened a second bottle and disappeared in the direction of the bedroom. Eventually he followed her, expecting Natalie to be waiting for him under the covers, but the only visible light in that end of the house was shining in their office. He found her half-empty bottle of wine standing next to the glowing white rectangle of the computer, and whether she had forgotten to close her email or intentionally left it for him to find, Seth didn’t know. The important thing was life as he understood it was over.

Natalie,

You’ve got to tell him what happened. I know this isn’t easy but the longer you let it fester the worse you’re going to feel. By now I’m sure he can tell something is bothering you.

Let me know how it goes.

-T

For a moment Seth stood there, unmoving, as if the reality of this message had sewn him to the floor. The idea of Natalie cheating on him after all the sacrifices he’d made for her and the boys was impossible to accept. Still, You’ve got to confront him and Just tell him what happened left little room for doubt about her behavior. Possibly worse than those damning phrases was the way her lover had signed his message. A single initial conveyed familiarity. Confidence. Intimacy.

Seth ground his teeth with such force he could hear them screeching. His pulse throbbed in his eyes. How could Natalie do this to him? He loved every atom in that woman’s body! He loved her hiccuppy laugh and her cobalt blue eyes and the way she cried in front of the closet when she couldn’t find anything to wear. He had sacrificed everything for her. Everything!

According to the message header, the sender was some jerk named Thomas Phillips. And it was obvious Natalie had attempted to hide her correspondence with him, because there were no other messages from Thomas in her inbox. Eventually Seth reopened the offending email and scrolled farther down, where he discovered a note from Natalie that had prompted Thomas’ response. Sent two days earlier, it read:

Thomas,

Seth is “away on business” again, so I drank a bottle of white wine and finally got the nerve to call JJ. Figured Seth would be there with her, but no one answered, and there wasn’t even a greeting on her voicemail. I just can’t believe he would hide money from me to spend on her! It makes me so angry I can’t see straight!

Nat

Seth read this message three times before he finally accepted what the text seemed to imply: Natalie believed he was cheating, that he’d been with a woman named JJ two days prior. But two days before this he’d been in New Orleans, trying desperately to assemble a winning streak at the craps table. He’d gotten so drunk that night he couldn’t remember how he made it back to his suite.

And JJ wasn’t a woman. He was a bookie, and Seth owed him more than two hundred thousand dollars.

The automatic response was to lash out at Natalie, to accuse her of retaliating against infidelity that had never happened. But just because he wasn’t sleeping with someone else didn’t mean she was wrong about him. Only instead of falling into the arms of another woman, Seth had betrayed his wife by gambling away an inconceivable amount of money. Any day now Seth was going to open his door and find one of Jimmy’s strong-armed friends standing there, or else the bank would show up and lock the doors to their house. He’d gambled away his family’s security like so many poker chips and there was nothing more he could do to get it back.

Even if he confessed his shameful addiction, and even if Natalie somehow forgave him, the next step would be to extricate the family from financial ruin. But how? Austerity wouldn’t help, not when much of the debt was owed was to a man unburdened by collection laws, so Natalie would suggest they borrow money from his father. The elder Black had retired a millionaire three times over, incurred few expenditures, and carried no liens of any kind.

But even this live-saving option was unavailable. Partly because his father was a stingy bastard, but mainly because Seth had already taken what he should have asked for long ago.

The first time he borrowed from his father’s retirement account, Seth swore he would put the money back. The old man kept his passwords handy on a sticky note glued to the monitor, and one afternoon last summer, while his father napped in front of the television, Seth crept into his office and logged into the computer. In minutes he had liquidated enough stock to replenish the twins’ college savings accounts and stake himself for another run. With that money he planned to win enough to pay back his father’s unknowing investment and quit gambling forever.

But that’s not what happened. What happened was he lost the borrowed money and was forced to take more. By now the evidence was impossible to hide, and eventually his father would discover he had unwittingly loaned his second son $704,525. Combined with his debt to Jimmy and the various credit cards that were maxed to their limits, Seth’s total burden had grown to more than a million dollars.

He understood how impossible his actions would seem to someone who wasn’t him. There was no possible way to convey the darkness he’d carried for as long as he could remember, or that the only way he knew to neutralize his pain was to risk the love and security of those he loved most in all the world.

He was a broken human being. Worthless. He didn’t deserve Natalie’s forgiveness, and anyway she didn’t deserve to be asked for it.

* * *

It seemed obvious insurance wouldn’t pay if you took your own life, but in the fine print of his policy he discovered a surprise: the suicide clause. As long as Seth didn’t kill himself during the first two years of coverage, the policy paid no matter how he died. By now he was well past the time limit, and the benefit would be nearly $600,000. Even if this wasn’t enough to cover all his debts, it was enough to pay Jimmy and satisfy their mortgage. And he didn’t think his father would come after Natalie once Seth was gone. The old man could be a real jerk, but he was a lot friendlier if you weren’t his middle child.

Still, what if some hotshot adjuster trying to make bonus found a way to deny Seth’s claim? If he wanted to truly insulate his wife, Seth required insurance against his insurance, and that’s where Thomas Phillips entered the picture. Surely a jackass brazen enough to fuck another man’s wife would be compelled by guilt to shield her from the claws of a small-time mobster.

Eventually the only step left in his grand plan was the suicide itself. And because he was too frightened to use a gun, or jump from a great height, Seth was left with poison. But an overdose of prescription pills might leave him brain damaged but alive. And after watching a YouTube video of a criminal investment banker writhing in agony on a courtroom floor, the idea of death by cyanide went out the window as well.

That left him carbon monoxide, which was easy to arrange once he learned how to disable his Acura’s catalytic converter. You could learn all sorts of interesting things on YouTube if you knew where to look.

So here Seth was, on a sunny Friday morning, hands resting on his soft beer gut, thumbing through pictures of Ben and Brandon and Natalie on his phone, ears listening to the low rumble of his damaged engine exhaust. He’d chosen to die in a Dallas Cowboys T-shirt and a pair of khaki cargo shorts, and every so often he took another drink of whiskey. Drugging himself was the only way he would get through this, and even then he wasn’t sure he would make it. He wanted to drive to the daycare and see his boys in person, hug them again, hold them tight and promise nothing bad would ever happen to them. He wanted to kiss Natalie one more time.

Over and over Seth had watched the video of Michael Marin swallowing capsules of cyanide when his guilty verdict was announced. Drowning in debt, Marin had been caught trying to burn down his own house to generate an insurance payout, and courtroom cameras happened to capture his response. Sometimes Seth watched the video one frame at a time to better scrutinize a face that was flush with the reality of impending doom. Marin had contemplated darkness while monotone voices orchestrated the minutiae of a prison sentence that would never be carried out, and the look in his eyes still haunted Seth. It was the gaze of a man who had stepped into the infinity of nothing, who was forced to endure moment after horrifying moment as poison strangled cells by the billions. In all, seven long minutes elapsed before Marin’s body finally succumbed to the cyanide, and Seth had a pretty good idea what had been going through the guy’s mind:

Nothing in death could be worse than a wasted life.