I Don't Like Where This Is Going Read online

  I was on the phone for two and a half hours with a man who had a shotgun on his kitchen table and was considering putting the barrel against his throat and squeezing the trigger. He racked a round so I’d know he was serious. The caller ID was blocked, and I suspected he was calling on a disposable phone, so we couldn’t trace his location very quickly. He told me his name was Konnor with a K. He catalogued his miseries starting with a cheating wife, estranged children, an asswipe boss, and bills he couldn’t pay in a million years. At the top of his list was the emphysema that was slowly, inexorably taking him out anyway. He spoke in a monotone that suggested this was a story he’d told too many times already, and he was bored with it. I realized that in order to choose to live, Konnor would need some hope to cling to, even if all he had was what he saw as the shambles of his life. Clinging to the wreckage might keep him afloat long enough to get rescued. Then he said he was going down with the ship, like he had read my mind, and he thanked me for listening, thanked me for my concern and my efforts, said I shouldn’t blame myself, and he hung up, and I listened to hear the blast of the shotgun, which I imagined would drown out every other sound in Las Vegas.

  What I heard instead was a girl weeping in the conference room. My shift was over. I wanted a drink. I tried to imagine Konnor in his kitchen, staring at the shotgun, thinking about how he was going to be late for work if he didn’t get his ass in gear. If I could picture the scene clearly, maybe it could happen.

  I peeked into the conference room and saw a girl who looked to be about fourteen wearing one of the center’s EVERY DAY I MAKE A DIFFERENCE T-shirts over her floral-print dress. The left side of her face was swollen and bruised. Helen Lozoraitis, our director, comforted her. A volunteer I hadn’t met introduced himself. “I’m Gene. Woodling.”

  “Wylie.”

  “Like the coyote?”

  “But not spelled that way.”

  Gene told me that the cops had just brought the girl in. They found her crying her eyes out in Angel Park. She told them she’d run away from a brothel.

  I said, “What happens now?”

  “We’re trying to reach her mom in Kansas. Meantime, we’ll take her to Refuge House.”

  The girl held her head between her knees and wept. Helen hugged her. We protect our money in this country with more vigilance than we do our children. I showed Gene Layla’s photo, but he didn’t recognize her. “All right,” I said, “I’m out of here.”

  “Adios, Coyote.”

  THERE ARE, I HAD read, over three hundred Elvis impersonators in Las Vegas, so I was not surprised when one of them, a Hefty Presley, boarded the monorail with me at the Sahara Station. He unbuttoned his gold-lined cape and folded it on his lap when he sat. I took the seat across the aisle and asked him how he liked his job. He looked at me over his gold aviator shades and told me he was living a dream. Not everyone gets to wear a white jumpsuit with sequined comets to work every day. He told me he’d just played a real estate open house in Centennial Hills and was on his way to a bachelorette party in a banquet room at the South Point Hotel. I asked if he had a Colonel Parker impersonator doing his bookings. He laughed and said, ”I’m going to use that.”

  At the Quad Station we were instructed to exit the monorail and proceed to the station. Service had been temporarily suspended. The exit to Las Vegas Boulevard was closed. I walked down Koval Lane and found out what the problem was a few minutes later. They were making a movie at Flamingo and the Strip. One vehicle seemed to have exploded, and the flames shot an implausible thirty feet in the air. I saw several cars on their sides and another wrapped around a light pole. The movie cops were holding the gawkers away from the shoot, and I imagined the hero calmly walking away from the mayhem he’d created, having saved our great and sovereign nation from ignominy.

  I walked through the atrium at the Luxor and stopped beside the spot where Layla had died. I stepped back and looked around. Anyone at the Starbucks yesterday could have witnessed the fall. And anyone over at the wedding chapel. I asked the barista at Starbucks if he’d been working yesterday.

  He said, “Noon to six.”

  “Then you saw the woman who fell?”

  He wiped his hands on his apron. “The who that what?”

  “A young woman leaped to her death”—I pointed—“right there. At five-ten.”

  He shook his head. “I’d know about something like that if it happened.”

  “It did happen. I was here.”

  “If you say so.”

  I took the walkway to Mandalay Bay and passed a heavyset woman in large turquoise hair curlers and gray sweats, dragging her reluctant child by the arm, telling him he was so getting his flippers bleached. I was meeting Bay for a drink at the Border Grill. Suddenly there were fussy and excitable children everywhere, many of them tanned and dressed the way I imagined their parents thought that adults should dress—like characters in movie musicals, not like shoppers at Walmart. I heard a mother say, “Do your duck face, Crystal,” and little Crystal raised her eyebrows and lifted her flamingo-pink lips up and out in a kind of half pout, half pucker. And then I saw the poster that explained it all: the Little Miss and Mr. Nevada Glitz Pageant was going on this week at the resort. It did not, however, explain bleached flippers.

  I was escorted to a table adjacent to one occupied by a boy and girl, each around seven, I guessed, who were obviously pageant contestants and who were dining without parents or chaperones. I ordered a Bloody Mary made with bacon-infused vodka. Bay texted that he was stuck in traffic trying to exit the 15. The girl was blonde, wore a white taffeta dress, and called the boy Colt. She described the cupcake dress she was going to wear in the competition: “Short to here, off the shoulder, sleeveless, beaded organza. It’s lemony yellow,” she said. “I’ll look good enough to eat.”

  Colt told Mylie—I’d been thinking Lindsay—she was a lock to win Grand Supreme. And then there was a snarky exchange about an eight-year-old princess from Longview, Texas, named Evah, who’d won the title last year and the year before that. A woman walked by with her leather purse draped over the stub of her missing forearm. Colt said he would forgo his customary black tux this year in favor of a black-and-white silk cowboy outfit with a thoroughly butch black Stetson. He told the waitress he’d like the rest of his crab nachos boxed, please and thank you.

  Mylie checked her face in her compact mirror, liked what she saw, and asked Colt if he thought the two of them would eventually get married.

  Colt shrugged. “I might end up being the girl that Mom’s always wanted.”

  “Cool!”

  “You could teach me your sassy walk.”

  I turned to watch Colt and Mylie leave the restaurant and wondered how I would find out tomorrow if they’d won and wondered as well if every pedophile in Clark County would be in the audience at the pageant. When I turned back, Bay was sitting across from me in his blue linen suit and his magnolia-white silk shirt. He was trying to quit smoking but had an electronic cigarette in his hand. He took a puff and put the e-cig in his jacket pocket. He asked me what I was drinking, and I let him have a sip. He nodded his approval. I said the person who came up with the idea to infuse vodka with bacon should win the Nobel Prize.

  Bay said, “They gave the Nobel Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger, a murderer and a war criminal.”

  “I mean the James Beard Award.”

  Bay ordered lemonade. He didn’t drink spirits before playing poker. He’d been finding the competition in Vegas more formidable than he’d been used to in South Florida. Everyone plays like they can afford to lose. He was ahead a few thousand, but his game had been inconsistent.

  I told him about the movie shoot I’d happened on. He said it wasn’t a movie. I said I saw it.

  He said, “Two guys in a black Hummer pulled alongside a silver Lexus and opened fire. The passengers in the Lexus returned fire. Both cars then headed north on the Strip at considerable speed. The driver of the Lexus took a bullet, lost control of the car, sl
ammed into a taxi, and then there was a whole chain-reaction pileup. The taxi exploded. Four people dead. The Hummer got away.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “It’s all over the news.” He asked me if I’d learned anything about Layla.

  I told him about St. Jude’s and about my dead end online.

  He said, “I know a PI in Memphis. I’ll give her a call.”

  POKERTOX, A COSMETIC and dissembling procedure, may not have been anything new, but it was news to me. Botox for card players—an attempt to disguise the signs of facial tells. My thinking was if you needed an injection of potent neurotoxins to elevate your game, you must not have been very skillful to begin with, and you were unlikely to benefit greatly from the immobilizing therapy. You felt vulnerable and exposed, and you questioned your cleverness at the table. You were leaking critical information through your unconstrained countenance. You got the dermatologic fix. But what you didn’t realize was that even with your face as vacant as the Bates Motel, you betray your weakness in other ways. The face is not our only expresser of emotions, but it is the easiest to mask. Just smile with your eyes.

  The tell is in the behavior, not the expression. Is he holding his breath or breathing rapidly? Are his hands still or busy with the chips? Is he chatty or quiet? Rude or cordial? Is he slumped in his seat or leaning forward? Is he putting on a show? If he’s rubbing his forehead, you know he’s struggling with something. If he’s steepling his hands, you know he’s holding wired eights or better.

  There were two Pokertoxics at Bay’s table. The older one, Bart, had also plumped his lips with collagen. His hair was as thin and white as finely spun glass, but his eyebrows were black. He wore ironically large glasses with metal frames, but he seemed unable to blink. The other fellow was Clifford, and he didn’t have much of a face to start with: weak chin, a small and slightly celestial nose, tiny spectral-blue eyes, just a trace of blond eyebrows, and meager lips. His was the idea of a face more than a face, a first draft of a face, a sketch.

  When I suggested to Bay a while back that not playing every hand would make the game boring, he smiled and said he counted on people like me sitting down at his table and opening our wallets. “Poker’s like baseball. The most intense moments happen between pitches when nothing seems to be going on. The fielders, the batter, and the base runners all have to consider the infinity of possibilities that might ensue with the next pitch and prepare themselves for each contingency. When there is no apparent drama on stage, the imagination fires on all cylinders.”

  Poker isn’t gambling, Bay was fond of saying. But it is luck. And good luck is understanding that you can’t control randomness—the cards can’t tell the difference between Amarillo Slim and Slim Pickens—but you can control whom you sit next to, and whom you bluff, and whom you call. “When I see a dude pull out his card-guard coin with a four-leaf clover on it, it warms my heart, and I know I’m going to bleed him dry. Poker is applied math and behavioral psychology.” Bay says you play poker as if you can see your opponents’ cards, and you can—in their behavior.

  I took a seat by the poker table, ordered a martini from a waitress named Sincere Lee, at least that’s what her name tag claimed, was served a Manhattan, which I took with a smile—apparently I’ll drink anything—tipped her, and watched Bay go to work. He won a small pot and then folded on three straight hands. The joker next to him wore a gray hoodie and white shades, chewed a toothpick, grunted once in a while, and laughed at other players’ failures. Watching him, I could tell what he was like away from the table, an excruciating asshole on whom therapy would be wasted because he didn’t think anything was wrong with him. When he walks into a room, he’s already smirking. I took my drink and went for a walk before he pissed me off even more. Only later did it occur to me that maybe this miserable, narcissistic piece-of-shit persona of his was an act designed to rile his tablemates so they couldn’t think straight. Me, I would have flipped out five minutes into the game.

  I took a stroll through Slotsville. I’d once heard on the BBC that American casinos pump oxygen through their AC systems to keep the gamblers alert and eager, and to mitigate the asphyxiating effect of the lowering clouds of cigarette smoke—so much oxygen that if there were a substantial fire, a casino would explode like Krakatoa. I didn’t know about that, but I did know that there was not enough oxygen for a woman I saw playing a Seven League slot machine. She had an oxygen tank attached to her mobility scooter, an oxygen cannula in her nose, a cigarette in her mouth; she had a drink in one hand, a cup of coins in the other; she hit the spin button with her elbow.

  I thought a walk outside might clear my head and focus my thinking. As I approached the exit to West Hacienda, I saw a young man entering the casino with a ring-tailed lemur on his shoulder. He was stopped by a uniformed guard. The lemur wore a service-animal mesh vest, had her elegant tail draped over her shoulders like a shawl, and was eating a pomegranate. When the guard touched the young man’s elbow, I worried that the lemur would sink her prosimian teeth into his fleshy face. Instead, she wailed like a slowly closing screen door. I wondered what would happen to her if she got loose in the city. Could she survive an attack by a pack of feral dogs? She could climb a tree, of course, if she could find one.

  I walked east toward the university trying to attend to the confusion I felt about Layla, about her death, and about what I thought of as a conspiracy to deny that death, and in so doing, deny her life. What I knew was that Layla Davis was dead. What I didn’t know was why she was dead. And if you don’t have the why, you don’t have the story, and if you don’t have the story, you don’t know the life. I wanted to know the story. And the story might also explain the covenant of silence.

  I had wanted to know my brother’s story and never did. Cam, so bright, so charming, so brilliant—a polyglot who spoke four languages at age ten, a musician who taught himself piano and violin and played Mozart’s Sonata in F Minor after hearing it once when he was seven. Cam, the happiest child I’ve ever known, got his neurological wires crossed at puberty and became a wretched adult who spent the next twenty years trying to kill himself with prescription opiates, and who eventually succeeded in having one of his playmates bludgeon him to death.

  I’ve treated many suicidal patients over the years. Some I was able to help. One of those was Donny L. Donny’s is the saddest story I know. His ten-year-old son, Max, checked into Everglades General for a tonsillectomy and died of a bacterial infection he likely acquired at the hospital, a superbug, the papers called it. When Donny first came to see me, he looked like he had never slept. But he assured me he had—one nightmare at a time. He told me about Max with his head lowered and his eyes closed. Then he said, “Tell me why I should go on.”

  I said, “Your wife needs you.”

  But as it happened, she did not. She left him for his best friend, Royal Hunter. Royal’s forsaken wife, Claire, blamed Donny for her own divorce. And then he was out of a job. He took a buyout from the Journal-Gazette that ended his seventeen-year career as an investigative reporter. He was now a citizen journalist, which is what the online news outlets call you when they don’t pay you for your content. And he still had his aging parents to worry about.

  His dad, Al, was eighty-three and running on empty. He had Parkinson’s, diabetes, prostate cancer, high blood pressure, and arthritis. Gwen, Donny’s mom, was blind and had suffered two strokes and one heart attack. Their house in Melancholy was a demoralizing disarray of clutter and filth, but they refused to engage a cleaning service on the pretense that none of the ladies in the Maid Brigade spoke English. They would not accept Meals on Wheels deliveries because they did not take handouts. They wouldn’t allow the visiting nurses into the house, and they screamed bloody murder whenever Donny mentioned an assisted living facility.

  Every Saturday morning Donny took his mother food-shopping at Winn-Dixie and then took his dad for lunch at Svensen’s Buffeteria. And then he’d sit at the kitchen table while his parents
napped in their separate bedrooms and do the sorting and the splitting of pills. He’d fill each of their morning and afternoon color-coded seven-day pill organizers with the appropriate meds and hope that they would remember to take them.

  Then one Saturday morning, no one answered his knock, so he let himself in. He found his mother dead on her bedroom floor soaked in blood. Her left arm had been severed below the elbow. The severing machete lay on the unmade bed. He found his father sitting on the Barcalounger in the den with blood on his hands and face. He seemed bewildered. He said, “That is not your mother in there.” Al spent his remaining days at the Florida State Hospital up in Chattahoochee.

  Before our recent troubles sent me packing for Vegas, Donny and I had settled into a comfortable routine. No more sessions. Instead, we met for oysters and beers every other Wednesday at Slappy’s Wonderland on the beach. The last time we got together, Donny’s dad had just died in the prison infirmary. Donny blamed himself for not being a firmer parent to his mom and dad and forcing them to go to a continuing care facility, dragging them kicking and screaming if he had to. They would have gotten used to it, would have thrived in their consenescence, would not have had to live in filth, and would have thanked him. We both understood the fear underlying their resistance—the fear of slipping away unnoticed in a geriatric warehouse. They were holding on to what they had loved, to what had sustained them—their home, their past, and their independence. Donny found no solace in his understanding.

  Why had Donny been able to go on when Cam and Layla could not? Cam had been variously diagnosed as bipolar, as borderline schizophrenic, as having delusional disorder symptoms and substance dependence. I could see that he was often anxious and more often depressed. He was unable to get outside himself. The pain demanded all of his attention. Donny had some interest in and curiosity about the world outside himself and that saved him, I think. He understood he was not alone. Had Layla been depressed? Anxious? Had she come to feel helpless? Maybe there were some clues among her personal affects. If I could only get to them.