I should have been a mathematician. Numbers pour through my head like raindrops. Sometimes, they’re a summer storm, brilliant and ferocious, lasting only moments but leaving me drenched in their wake. At other times, the numbers in my head are a slow trickle, preventing me from falling asleep. For no apparent reason I find myself performing complicated mental equations, attempting to figure out the odds of random things, like being born on a Thursday morning in a year divisible by three. Sometimes I just can’t stop counting. I count plane trips I’ve made, and cities I’ve been to. I count women I find attractive. I examine the numbers on license plates of cars passing by, making up games for myself involving their combinations.

            I know I have a compulsive counting disorder, but it doesn’t bother me anymore. Most people who know me – or knew me – consider me a freak, someone lost in his own head all the time, someone incapable of carrying on a conversation because all I can focus on are things like how many times someone uses a particular word in regular speech. Once a girlfriend broke up with me because I told her she used “like” an average of every 14^th word, and I felt that was too frequent. She screamed at me that I was an insensitive loser and was not the first woman to slam her door on me on the way out. She could not understand that every time she said “like” it was as if she were banging a gong inside my head.

It has made me unpopular and friendless, but I have found one way to use my problem to my advantage. I count cards. I am sitting at the blackjack table in Circus Circus, a past-its-prime casino far from more glamorous places like Luxor and Belaggio. Here they haven’t replaced the carpets in years. Cigarette burns pock the floor like divots left by thoughtless golfers. Each burn mark – I count 43 between the entrance and my table – is a souvenir left behind by some unlucky fool stupid enough to think he could walk in here and win. The place is a swampy soup of manmade odors, and no matter how much oxygen they pump in, the air hangs heavy over me. I swim in it, and I swim in my numbers. There are no clocks here, and even though I do not wear a watch, I know it is precisely 5:27 in the morning. I have been playing all night.

            The dealer’s hands fly around the red felt table, cards flipping and flapping, a swirl of hearts and spades, kings and queens. I like watching her hands. Her fingers are long and nimble, nails tastefully painted. No ring. I glance at her nametag. Tammy Bowling, Green KY. I’d like to ponder her, to think about what brought her out to Las Vegas. But the cards keep coming, and I have to focus.

She has burned through more than three-quarters of the six deck shoe in front of her, and I know exactly how many of each card remains. She passes me a six and a jack, while she shows a five. Everyone at the table assumes she’s hiding a face card, that she has fifteen. The fat man to my left is happy with his nineteen, figuring she will be forced to hit, and she will bust. The drunk college kids on my right are too stupid to know what to do with their hands. But I have been counting, and I know that her five is only the fourth we have seen, meaning there are still twenty left in the 75 cards remaining.

            “Hit me,” the kid to my right slurs after his friend goes bust. He’s got a thirteen showing, and when she passes him a five, I click off another number in my internal counter. The odds are still in my favor. I can feel another five just under her hand. She is looking at me now, I know, though I refuse to make eye contact with her. I tap the table, and she slides me my five. I have 21. The fat man sticks, and she flips over her hidden card to reveal a smart-looking queen, then turns over the deciding card: yet another five. Her twenty beats his 19 and frat boy’s 18. She passes me four green chips, and the next round starts.

            I win the last four rounds of the shoe. I’m up a thousand on the night, and it’s time to cash out before her pit boss figures out what I’ve been doing. I toss the dealer $25, enough for her to be happy, not too much that she’ll remember me, I think, and I head to the cage.

I’m counting my winnings at the cage when I receive a tap on the shoulder. I turn around to face what I know is coming. I must have played one shoe too many. It’s a big man with a brush cut and a brown mustache. He wears a flimsy black vest and a nametag. Brock, Chicago IL.

“Sir, I’d like to ask you to leave the casino immediately,” he whispers. Pit bosses don’t like to cause a scene. But they will if they have to. I have been caught counting cards enough in the past to know there’s no need to argue. I nod and head for the exit. It is the twentieth time I have been booted out, and I always go quietly. Two beefy security agents follow three paces behind me, past the rows of flashing, beeping slot machines and their blue-haired and balding clients. Eighty-four slot machines, 37 unoccupied. I do not acknowledge the guards as I step back out into the remnants of a cool desert night, heading south on the Strip.

“That was some nice counting back there.”

It is a female voice from behind me. I don’t turn around. I try to ignore, keep walking, but then there’s a tap on my back.

“You didn’t hear me? Should I say it louder?”

Annoyed, I wheel around and come face to face with the dealer from my last table. Tammy, Bowling Green KY.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “Your secret’s safe with me.”

I mumble thanks and turn to go. She follows. I ask her what she wants from me.

“How about a coffee.”

Five minutes later we’re in a café at the Stardust. She has removed her nametag. “You’re too obvious, you know. I could tell from when you sat down that you were counting cards.”

I sip a beer and look around. Thirteen women in the bar, not counting the servers. Twenty-eight men, not counting the bartenders. “Thanks. I’ll try harder next time.”

“What’s your name?”

“Look, I’m sorry,” I say. “I’ve actually got to go. Enjoy your drink.”

But she won’t let me go. “Twenty-seven.”

I turn back. “What?”

“You leave, there’ll be twenty-seven men left in the bar. Not counting the bartenders. That’s over a two-to-one ratio for me. I gotta admit, I like those odds.”

She smiles. I see now. She is like me.

“I didn’t turn you in, you know. Brock was watching you all night.”

“It’s alright. I’ve been kicked out before. It’ll happen again.”

I am long resigned to my fate, driving a highway stretching to infinity, a number I can never reach but must inexorably count my way towards. She senses my pain, sees it in the seven permanent furrows already scrawled across my forehead.

“Doesn’t have to be that way, you know. I can help you. We can help each other.”

“You could lose your job just for talking with me. You know that, right?”

But she says she does not care about her job, because if she wanted to, she could make a lot more money doing what I do. Lots of people count cards, she says, but most just analyze the hand dealt. They don’t remember the past and don’t think about what’s coming next. They only see the present. They get this glazed look over their eyes, and they bore her. She could see that I was counting every single card, that I knew what had been played, and what was to come. She tells me I have vision.

“Then why,” I say, “do I have no idea what’s going to happen next?”

“Because life isn’t just numbers, darlin’.”

The sun has come up and I am tired but don’t want to sleep. Neither does she. We find her car, a ’67 GTO, and she hands me the keys.

I give her a quizzical look.

“Just drive.”

We speed out of town, and we are in the desert, counting cacti and clouds instead of cards. An infinite stretch of land and sky blankets us, and I realize I’ll never be able to count everything, but none of that matters anymore. All I need now is to count to two.