I Don't Like Where This Is Going

  for Cindy

  I DON’T

  LIKE

  WHERE

  THIS

  IS GOING

  1

  THAT AFTERNOON, WHEN the unthinkable happened, my friend Bay and I were enjoying cocktails in the atrium of the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas. Although, as Bay informed me, here on the Strip, we’re not technically in Vegas. We’re in Paradise.

  Bay Lettique is a nimble sleight-of-hand man and a masterful illusionist who makes a respectable living playing Texas hold ’em. That afternoon he wore a seersucker suit and looked very much the crusading Southern attorney sent over from central casting, an illusion of gentility he gladly cultivated. He wore his fine blond hair modishly, one might even say rakishly, long. His eyes that afternoon were blue, to match the suit, I suppose. Those eyes were naturally brown, but Bay owned and wore a variety of tinted lenses, sometimes a green eye and a brown eye at the same time. Said he wanted to know who was paying attention. His nose was thin, his chin cleft, and his cheeks dimpled.

  I watched the lights of an inclinator as it ascended to the apex of the thirty-story pyramid, and wondered about the four thousand rooms in the hotel and the eight thousand or so stories being played out behind their closed doors. I was a therapist in exile, and I thought, only half in jest, what a marvelous place this would be to set up shop. Right over there by the food court, maybe. I could help my clients who had just lost their life savings or their marriages, or who had behaved disgracefully, in ways so reprehensible they were paralyzed with shame and overcome with despair, help them shape their lives into narratives, so that their lives made some sense again, so they understood that the best story is a story of redemption, and that their personal story was only in its second act.

  Bay plucked a yellow primrose out of the air and set it in his highball glass. I said, “Do you think that’s wise?” And I reminded him of the several thousand video cameras in the hotel and how some uniformed security officer scarfing shrimp cocktail at his surveillance desk was certainly watching us right then, and if you really want to gamble in the casino, you might not want the house to observe your sleights of hand.

  Bay says illusions work like dreams work, and like memories or fantasies do: you see quite clearly, right there in front of you, something that is not really present. He also says that a shared illusion is a collaborative creation of the performer, who passes his hand over the three of spades, and you, the observer, who now sees in its place the ace of hearts. You are unaware of what actually happened and are unaware of your unawareness.

  On our first morning in town, I had gone for a walk in our new neighborhood, known by the oxymora Wild Haven at Desert Shores. I turned a corner a block from our house and saw an elderly man in a white boonie hat and a green short-sleeved jumpsuit clutching a trembling Chihuahua to his chest, trying to protect it from four large, terrifying, and snarling dogs. I yelled, threw up my hands, and made what I hoped were menacing but not provocative gestures. The dogs had the man pinned against a wall. I took out my phone. Two of the dogs snapped at the man’s legs, another tore at his arm. The largest dog got hold of the Chihuahua and tugged. Before I could tell the 911 operator my location, because I didn’t know it, a police squad car sped toward us and screeched to a stop. By now, three dogs were tearing at the man’s face and neck. The merciless, coal-black dog grabbed the Chihuahua and whipped its limp body back and forth in its jaws with such ferocity that the little guy’s punctured skin split and the Chihuahua deflated.

  I ran toward the scene without any idea what I could or might do. The police officer fired his service revolver and killed the largest of the dogs. I stopped dead in my tracks. The other dogs leaped in alarm, and two of them ran. The cop fired three more shots. One dog fell, another wailed, bit at the bullet in his rump, and hobbled off on three legs. It took a second shot, this one into the skull, to subdue the dog still gnawing on the poor man’s face. The paramedics arrived and set about their grim work. I sat on the sidewalk, spent. The cop wanted to know what I’d seen before he arrived. I told him. I asked about the victim. His lips and eyes are mush, the cop said. And some of the left ear is gone. He’ll be okay if he survives the shock. Okay? I thought. The dogs, he said, are feral. Former pets, most of them, pets or fighting dogs, abandoned by losers, who are either skipping town or eluding Animal Control. The dogs roam the hills out west, out beyond the Beltway, come into town when they’re starving. You got any animals, he said, keep them inside.

  Las Vegas looks the way I imagine hell would look if Lucifer had exercised his clownish sense of humor—a colossal and garish wreck of ironic architecture abandoned on the low and level Mojave sands, a city of gleefully appalling desolation, full of discordant sound and unavailing fury, a city built on a foundation of pretense and delusion. Yet there are those who find it delightful. Bay is one, so when we decided it would be prudent to leave Everglades County, Florida, for an extended vacation following a season of baleful unpleasantness, and while certain aggrieved parties settled themselves back into their respective cozy criminal routines and forgot about us, we came to Vegas. I brought my indoor cat, but left my gainfully employed sweetheart behind. Patience would be visiting soon and often. Bay leased a furnished two-story, four-bedroom, four-bath stucco house with a barrel-tile roof, attached garage, gas fireplace, and a pool, just off Lake Mead Boulevard. We bought a used Mitsubishi Mirage with just under a hundred thousand miles on it.

  We were into our second drinks when Bay made the bowl of spicy nuts vanish. When I said I was still hungry, he showed me the bowl of snacks on his iPhone. I said, “Can I eat those?” He said, “It’s easy to make things vanish, harder to bring them back.” Bay had explained the law of conservation of energy to me when I asked him how he made objects disappear. He said the object doesn’t vanish; it just becomes something else. And he lifted his brow and smiled. And then his phone played “Everybody Knows.” He put the phone to his ear and said, “Talk to me, Mikey.” Open Mike—Michael Lynch—was a sketchy but valuable friend of ours from back home in Melancholy, Florida. Mike knows where the bodies are buried, Bay says—and how deep. While Bay listened, he levitated the drink coaster and floated it around the coffee table. I shook my head like, Why don’t you ever listen to me? and he smiled.

  Mike doesn’t know what it’s like to be afraid. He can be wary, even cautious—he’s not a fool, after all—but he lacks the involuntary visceral response the rest of us feel when threatened, the response that causes us to freeze or to hide and then to flee. Mike is not afraid of snakes or spiders or heights or intimacy or death or failure or men with weapons. He’s not afraid of clowns or scalpels. He told me he had been struck by lightning when he was ten. Bolt went in through his head and out through his feet, taking his shoes with it. I wondered if he’d had his amygdala fried in the blast and with the withered limbic almond went the seeds of fear. He, himself, didn’t care to know the reason. Fear’s not the worst loss you can suffer, he said.

  Bay took the phone from his ear, shook it over an unfolded napkin, and the spicy nuts fell out. He wiped the phone on his thigh, smiled at me, picked up a walnut, popped it in his mouth, and went back to his conversation. I raised my hands like, Where’s the bowl? Bay says every illusion tells a story in three acts. Setup, buildup, payoff. Some folks call it the pledge, the turn, and the prestige. Bay prefers the verbs lure, beguile, and reveal. He also says that magic is taking an absurd amount of time and trouble learning a skill that gives the impression that something has happened that hasn’t.

  False twilight is general in Vegas hotels and casinos. What is it, I wondered, that the casinos don’t want you to see? Bay said, no, it’s the opposite; it’s what they want
you to see. In the dimness they can direct your attention, choreograph your gaze with lights. I looked across the atrium near the entrance to the casino, where a woman in a glittering gold bikini and knee-high gold lamé boots danced halfheartedly to techno Muzak beside a sleek silver luxury car on a slowly revolving turntable. Her mind, it seemed, was elsewhere, as were her grace and sense of rhythm. Behind her a banner on the wall read ALL YOU CAN EAT, ALL DAY $27.50!

  A woman in a silver tweed pantsuit pushed her white toy poodle in a large three-wheeled, canopied baby stroller. She stopped by a statue of the great and victorious Ramesses II and lifted the dog to her shoulder. She held the dog like she would a burping baby, swaying side to side, rubbing its back, and whispering into its ear. In ancient Egypt mummified dogs were often buried alongside women, archers, and dwarves.

  First I heard raised voices, and then I saw a young couple arguing. The man jabbed his finger in the woman’s face. When she looked away, he took her chin in his hand, turned her head, and stared into her eyes. The woman was a tiny thing with short black hair. She wore a simple sleeveless black dress, a strand of pearls, and ballerina flats. Her belligerent beau with his Wayfarer shades and soul patch wore a Bluetooth earpiece below his porkpie hat, a blue linen sport coat, a white oxford shirt, thin green tie, khaki cargo shorts, and blue Crocs. Yes, I judge people by their appearance. And it’s sort of my job as a therapist to examine one’s disparate physical clues and puzzle the pieces together into meaning. Look close, pay attention, read the body and its language. So I was thinking Abercrombie & Douche at the moment. The woman tried to walk away, but the man grabbed her elbow. He said, “What did you just call me?” I leaned forward. Bay held up a finger and shook his head no.

  I looked up wondering where the camera trained on the couple might be and caught a blurry shape of red and white up near the apex of the pyramid. At first I thought someone must have folded a bedspread over the balustrade, but then the shape moved away from the building and into the compassed void, where it appeared to hover a moment, floating on an updraft before descending. And then I saw arms and legs spread-eagled and realized that this spectacle was either a clever, if alarming, performance staged by the Luxor or it was some renegade BASE jumper or wingsuit flyer putting on an impromptu show, and at any rate, what seemed to be a free fall would momentarily resolve itself into a breathtaking swoop, the deployment of a small parachute, and a controlled landing.

  I heard the thud of the body on the carpeted floor a moment after it struck and shivered to stillness. The lady with the pet dog screamed. Bay told Mike he’d call him back. I ran to the body as if to prove to myself that what I thought I had witnessed had not happened. The berated woman cried into her hipster’s chest while he photographed the corpse with his smartphone, until a bald and goateed security guard tapped the hipster’s shoulder and held out his hand. Blood leaked from beneath the dead woman’s head and pooled beside the slack jaw, the shattered teeth, and the broken nose. Both amber eyes stared up from the topside of her face. One lower leg was bent forward at the knee. Her arms made a cross above her head as if she might have wanted to signal that she was drowning.

  She wore a milagro on a silver chain around her neck. Milagros I knew about from my client Maria Z. They’re religious charms used for healing purposes. Maria’s charm was a pair of disquieting eyes, which she hoped would cure her glaucoma. The dead woman’s milagro was in the shape of a young girl wearing a mantilla, a blouse, and a flared skirt. I wondered if the woman had had an ailing daughter or if her child had died, leaving her bereft and hopeless. Suddenly a swarm of security personnel descended like blowflies and drove us toward the down escalator to the lobby, and two uniformed guards covered the body with a white linen tablecloth.

  When we reached the lobby, Bay told me to follow him. We walked to a bank of elevators. Two gentlemen and a bedraggled young woman got off. The men each had short blond crew cuts and were dressed alike: teal camp shirts, black slacks, white socks, and chukka boots. My parents dressed my twin Cameron and me alike until we were five. Twins, if these two were twins, dressed alike at thirty seemed troubling and unwholesome to me. We boarded the elevator behind a guest with an access card. The guest told us he was in town for the World of Concrete National Convention. “What’s all the brouhaha?” he asked us.

  We got off at the last stop on the fifth floor, which was about as high as I wanted to go anyway. I was not getting on an inclinator going up. I’m terrified of heights. When I was a kid, I often dreamed, as we all do, of falling from some great height, and in one of those dreams, I did not wake up before hitting bottom, as we all do, but fell to the source of the gravity, and it was Hell, which was dark and cold, and I was alone and on my back screaming. My screams woke Cameron, who shook me awake. I told him the dream. He said we all get the Hell we deserve, and went back to sleep.

  Nevertheless, I was able to peek over the low balustrade and look down onto the pedestrianless atrium. The cleanup was under way. The woman’s shrouded corpse was being wheeled away on a gurney. Maintenance workers steam-cleaned the carpet. The inelegant dancer shimmied her bony shoulders at the luxury car.

  Bay said, “Was she pushed, do you think?”

  I was certain she hadn’t been. There was no scramble in the air to right herself, no flailing of arms, just a single-minded commitment to this exhilarating and gruesome task. She never wavered from her fatal and empty embrace. I couldn’t stop shaking, trying to imagine the level of despair that could have provided her with the courage to step off into nothingness.

  Bay said, “Was she alive when she was pushed?”

  On the way to our car, I asked a uniformed guard if he’d learned the name of the victim yet.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The woman who leaped to her death. Just now. Upstairs.”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir.” His name was Loomis, according to his badge. He was muscled and stocky, had a brown buzz cut, brushy white mustache, and small, thin, almost folded ears. His eyes were dark and round, like lacquered buttons, and his nose, snubbed and funneled.

  I said, “Would you like me to tell you what happened?”

  Bay took my elbow and Loomis pointed our way to the door.

  “Have a good evening, gentlemen,” Loomis said.

  I shook my arm free and looked Loomis over. I said, “Still biting your fingernails, Loomis? That’s an impulse control disorder, a problematic attribute for a man in your profession. Do you recall when this compulsion began?”

  Bay said, “Wylie!”

  I told Loomis I was a professional. I could help. “I’ll leave you my card.”

  Loomis laid a finger on my chest and said, “Listen to me and leave right now.”

  I said, “Denatonium benzoate. Ask your pharmacist.”

  Bay led me away and said, “What set you on tilt?”

  “The lying.”

  As we walked to our car down East Reno Avenue, a slim young Asian gentleman wearing a blue shirt, a white sport coat, and a black bow tie, looking like Elvis in King Creole, stopped us and asked me what I would give him in exchange for a used pack of candy cigarettes. He was charming enough, but I told him I’d given up pretending to smoke. Bay admired the gabardine blazer, ran his hand along the sleeve, nodded, and whistled his approval.

  “A paper clip,” the fellow said. “A napkin. A dime. Anything.”

  I said, “Is this an art project?”

  He smiled. I gave him a dime. He handed me the pack, bowed, and hurried on his way.

  I have a habit, a bad habit according to my ex-wife, of saving useless objects. Postcards; matchbooks; pens; every letter I’ve ever received, from back when people wrote letters; pennies; and campaign buttons. I have a plastic crate full of things I’ve found on my walks around Melancholy—a rubber lizard, baby pictures, credit cards, motel keys, doctor bills, shopping lists, barrettes, and so on. But this pack of candy cigarettes I figured I’d toss, but before I did, I opened it
and got stung on my index finger by the furious bee inside, and it wouldn’t let go. I brushed it off. My finger throbbed. The stinger was still in the skin. I eased it out. “Who the fuck does this?” I said.

  Bay said, “What?”

  I told him what had just happened. I pointed my toe at the twitching insect on the sidewalk. I looked around, but the dude was gone.

  Bay said, “I’ll tell you who did it.” He held up the little creep’s wallet. Opened it.

  I said, “You stole his wallet?” A handsome wallet of light brown leather with a red baseball stitch design.

  “Because he stole yours,” Bay said, and he produced my wallet from midair and handed it to me.

  Bay looked at the thief’s driver’s license. “His name’s Johnny Ng.” He looked at the second driver’s license. “Or Michael Ho.” Bay took the money from the cash pocket and dropped the wallet down the storm drain. He handed me the cash. “For your pain and anguish.”

  I shook my head. “Buy more vodka for the house. What if I were allergic to bees? I’d be going into anaphylactic shock right now.”

  “I got something at the house that’ll take the pain away.”

  Bay drove us toward home. I switched on the radio and scanned for local news. Lots of talk shows, Christian rock, and country stations. Nothing about the recent tragedy. We saw the Luxor hipster and his unfortunate girlfriend, his arm over her shoulders, as they passed by a shabby convenience store that seemed to be called MART BEER & WINE FILM T-SHIRT SOUVENIRS GRAND CANYON TOURS ICE ATM MAPS INFORMATION HOOVER DAM TOURS PHONE CARDS. We saw a half dozen cops busting a shirtless man outside the boarded-up and derelict Key Largo Casino and Hotel as a TV camera crew filmed the arrest for a reality show.

  DJANGO, MY OUTER-SPACE-BLACK KITTEN, was halfway up the eggshell-white living room drapes when I opened the front door. He froze, like maybe we wouldn’t see him or his unblinking golden eyes. When I said his name in my stern voice, he climbed down backward, dropped onto the back of the sofa, and sped off to the kitchen. I followed him and iced down my finger. Bay called Beach Pizza and ordered a Hang Ten and a chopped antipasto. I made drinks. Scott Beaudry texted me asking if I could cover his noon-to-three hotline shift tomorrow. I could.