On the Tuesday he had walked twenty-six community-college students through why a coin has no memory, drawing the tree diagram twice because the back row wasn't following. By Friday he was standing at the roulette pit under a results board reading black eleven times running, and he could feel the shape of it coming the way a man feels weather.

Four hundred on red, then six, then what was in his wallet, and the wheel went on not owing him anything. Driving home he worked out that the board above the table existed precisely to be read, and that he had read it beautifully. Monday he taught the same unit to the eleven o'clock section. At forty-seven he did not feel like a hypocrite, only tired.