He came to at 1:40 in the afternoon in a suite he had not booked, one shoe on, two days into a trade show he had flown out for on Tuesday. On the nightstand sat $18,400 in banded hundreds, a rack of purple chips, and a host's card with a mobile number in blue pen. His phone held forty-one minutes of video he could not recall taking.

He watched eleven seconds of it, then stopped. Downstairs he tipped the valet forty dollars and told the story to a stranger at the airport gate, and it was a good story — he told it well, and the man laughed. He did not mention that he had spent the flight trying to remember the actual moment, the one where it happened, and had come up with nothing.