After M & S left, Susan and I were feeling antsy -- like a couple people who haven't had time to fill with nothing in a long while. So we jumped in the car and started touring the West Virginia countryside. Nearby was a town with not one but two racetracks: one for cars and one for horses. Nearby hotels sported eyepiercing amounts of neon and advertised the size of their sirloin steaks on the placards over the "Vacancy" sign. It looked to be about as close to Branson, Missouri as one could get on this side of the Mississippi.

Although we saw no activity on the horserace track as we drove past, we soon noted a great deal of traffic coursing in and out of its parking lot, and went in to investigate. It turns out that the soul of this small town's economy is Betting on Games of Chance, also known as the Devil's Dice. Streams of human traffic throbbed through the gleaming glass and neon entrance, which shone in the night like the gates of Hell itself. Clearly we had embarked upon a field trip into a den of iniquity.

I turned to Susan before we even got out of the car. "Darling," I said, "I can think of no greater tragedy than that I might someday go to heaven and have to look mournfully down upon you suffering in Hell. Or, God forbid, vice versa. Let us promise right now that we will bet no money on these games of chance." Naturally, she agreed.

We walked past a begging amputee into the cool, carpeted atrium. This was a kind of glassine box with bulletproof exchange windows on either side for the betting denizens to change their money for the coin of this nether-realm, the substitute lucre with which they bartered for their immortal souls. We continued through the gates and into the gaming room itself, a dark place lit by the evil lights of countless video screens. It was my first visit to a casino, and it was not what I expected. This wasn't even a place where humans pitted themselves in competition with "the house" in games of cards or roulette; all the games were electronic. Each person was fixated upon a machine, feeding its rumbling, beeping, chirping need for more tokens and receiving in turn little snippets of hope for a better life.

As we strolled about, Susan and I discussed what we knew about the immense body of psychological research and sociometrics that now informs the construction of casinos. (Because of the immense sums of money involved, people's responses to subtle variations in a betting environment may be the most well-funded and intensely studied human behavior.) The layout is designed to facilitate movement inward but make exit more confusing and difficult. There are no clocks, windows, or other potential indicators of time. Visual imagery is carefully linked to cultural references of riches, implying that the participants are already winners, already the privileged few.

Black suited, short skirted waitresses with amazingly exposed and unusually bouncy cleavage smoothed through the crowds, lubing the gamers up with their drinks of choice.

The collective noise produced by the hundreds of bleeping machines made communication almost impossible. Nonetheless, Susan and I toured the whole glimmering facility, all the way to the second floor corners where one stricken man frantically tried to elicit more money from an unsympathetic ATM. After a while, we began to notice that we were attracting attention from our fellow patrons. Apparently it is not kosher to observe other people's painful and perpetual losses at games which they know full well to be designed to take their money.

Despite our analysis of the lurid psychological warfare being directed towards the unlucky patrons, we both admitted to feeling a certain tug, the tentative what if? sentiment that is the bread and butter of the casino. I could get lucky. I could beat the system. I'm supposed to lose, but I can't accept that. It is a wonderfully American addiction.

It was the noise that drove us out -- desperate, insistent, like a child crying. Out past the silent, pleading amputee and into the streams of cars exiting the place, out past the many more cars bearing in on tonight's serving of chance, and onto the highway past the other racetrack to a certain freedom from such temptations.

The next day we were speeding down a country road, feeling the twinge of zero gravity at the tops of little hills and the press of lateral acceleration on the turns. Approaching a blind hill, we saw another driver crest and come across the road straight at us. There was not enough time to think. I yanked the wheel over to the right, where the car skidded in the gravel at the edge of the road. A line of telephone poles followed the right margin of the lane, and by mere accident we happened to slide into a space between two of them. Then, in a rush, the other car was past and we were bumping back onto the roadway.

I took a moment for the full potential we had just encountered to unfold before us. We marveled at the hellish turn our lives nearly took moments ago. We could be trapped together in the wreckage of our car. But no, we had been lucky.