I Don't Like Where This Is Going (2 page)

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.

I didn't gamble. I didn't enjoy the spectacles that passed for entertainment in Vegas, so I had time on my hands. I read like crazy, took long walks, and volunteered at a crisis intervention center doing phone counseling and some short-term face-to-face work with walk-ins and runaways. I spoke with lots of abused wives, some potential suicides, and not a few destitute and homeless people, sometimes whole families of them. And in this way I got to put some of my clinical training to good use. Some callers needed to express their pain to a person otherwise uninvolved. Others were so confused they couldn't make sense of their emotional turmoil. Listening to their stories kept me sane and feeling useful.

The young woman who delivered our pizza said she wasn't allowed to step inside the house. I took the boxes from her, asked her if she was sure she didn't want to take a martini break. We could sit by the pool. She had a pierced nose and a tattoo of a gray fox on her upper arm. Her spirit animal, she said. Cunning,
playful, and quick. Just like her. She smiled. She said, What's that humming? I said, You hear it, too? She said, You got a semi idling in the backyard? Bay pulled thirty dollars of pain-and-anguish money out of the air and handed it to her. Told her to keep the change. She told us that she once delivered ten Maui Wowee pizzas to Carrot Top's house and got a five-dollar tip. I kid you not! She told us her name was Kit and said good night.

Bay and I ate at the coffee table in the den. I turned on the TV news, hoping for a story on the Luxor. Bay fed me the news from home. According to Open Mike, Jack Malacoda, K Street lobbyist and prominent GOP fund-raiser, had been indicted by an Everglades County grand jury on charges of fraud, corruption, and conspiracy to bribe public officials. My cleaning lady, whose Easter sunrise wedding on the beach had been interrupted by a fusillade of gunfire and at which Bay and I made our last public appearance in Melancholy, was still in the hospital, recovering from multiple gunshot wounds, but was expected to recover. I tried Channel 8 and got an investigative report on the staggering suicide rate for military veterans in Nevada. More than double the national average.

You have a fifty percent higher risk of killing yourself if you live in or visit Las Vegas than you do anywhere else in the country. Just crossing the Clark County line—a visit to a brothel in Pahrump, in Nye County, say—makes you safer from your lethiferous self. I knew the grim statistics from my work at the Crisis Center. I also knew that sixty to eighty people go missing every weekend in Las Vegas—up to seventeen hundred in a month. Some number of those, of course, come here expressly to get lost. Some people don't arrive in Vegas and then kill themselves; they arrive in Vegas
to
kill themselves. I asked Bay if he'd ever felt the urge to take his own life. He hadn't, he said. I asked him if there were any circumstances under which he might consider it.

He said, “Alzheimer's.”

I said, “Me, too. And ALS.”

Bay said, “I'd do it in private. Try not to leave a mess. Pills.”

My mother, Biruté, who as a child in Lithuania had escaped the Rainiai Massacre near Telšiai in 1941, killed herself with an overdose of fentanyl. My father found her beneath their bed, dressed for Mass, or for her coffin, clutching her amber rosary beads, photographs of her slaughtered parents and siblings on the floor beside her. Most suicides kill themselves without an audience and quite often in hotel or motel rooms, knowing that their bodies will be discovered by strangers, saving the loved ones additional trauma.

Django sat on the arm of the sofa and stared a hole in the pizza. The news segment on TV was about this guy at the Bellagio who hit eleven reds in a row in roulette and then let it all ride on black because black was overdue. He lost every penny. Bay said, “Roulette wheels don't have memories.”

UNLESS YOU'RE A CELEBRITY
in Vegas—and you're not—you're an anonymous and expendable commodity. The only thing about you that matters at all to anyone here is the money you will leave behind at casinos, restaurants, wedding chapels, massage parlors, and hotels. Gamblers lose more than six billion dollars every year in Vegas. Visitors spend thirty-five billion more. Greed is the gravity that keeps the city from flying apart and showering the galaxy with its gaudy shrapnel. There are wealthy people in Vegas, but you will never see them. You will see the many more who yearn to be wealthy, but will settle for pretending to be for a long weekend, and others who seem content to kill what little time they have left slumping for hours in front of machines that are more animated
than they are. And you will see the working poor everywhere you look—the half million underpaid service workers whose business it is to see that your stay is both exhilarating and untroubled.

Django crept to the corner of the coffee table, stretched out his front leg until his paw was a breath away from the crust, and looked at me like,
I'm not touching it, Wylie; what's your problem?
When I think of public suicide, I associate it with sending a message, often a political one, like the self-immolating Tibetan monks in China these days. Other times the message is personal:
Look what you did to me!
I wondered what kind of message the Luxor jumper might have been sending, and to whom. Maybe her suicide was a protest against her perceived anonymity, and anywhere else it might have guaranteed her a moment of lamentable notoriety. But I'd have to wait till the morning to find out.

I WOKE WHEN DJANGO
took the earplug out of my ear and licked my earlobe. My bee-stung finger throbbed. I got up. I heard Bay in his room talking in his sleep. I brewed coffee, fetched the paper from the driveway, and sat on the sofa. I turned on a news-radio station and the local news on the muted TV. Nothing in the paper. Nothing on the radio.

Then on TV, a shot of the Luxor. I turned up the volume. A police spokesman told the reporter, “We have no idea who she is at this time, and we don't know why she jumped.” But the reporter, who must have bothered to ask at the reception desk, knew the woman's identity. She was Layla Davis from Memphis, Tennessee. She'd checked into the hotel earlier that day, ordered a meal from room service: Australian lobster tail, strawberry cheesecake, and bottled sparkling water. The reporter had also learned from the room service waiter that Ms. Davis's suitcase had not yet been
unpacked when he delivered the meal. I went to the Internet to learn what I could about the late Layla Davis.

Not much. Layla Jean Davis worked on proton therapy research at St. Jude's Hospital in Memphis. She was single, lived in a one-bedroom condo on Mud Island, had done her graduate work at Indiana University, and volunteered at the Shelby County Animal Rescue Shelter. From her office window, she could have looked out at the world's sixth-largest pyramid three blocks away on the river. In her photo on the St. Jude's website, Layla looked to be in her early to mid-thirties. She wore square-framed wire-rim glasses, a powder-blue blouse under her white lab coat, and an unfelt smile. Her brown hair was cut short. Her hands were folded on her uncluttered desk. No mention of a child. Did any of her colleagues suspect her pain? Was she ill? Depressed? Was that affected smile meant to mask her hopelessness?

Saint Jude is the patron saint of lost causes. The pyramid out her window was not a funerary monument, but was, absurdly, a Bass Pro Shop. Memphis is named for the capital city of Egypt's Middle Kingdom, whose local god Ptah, the patron of craftsmen, created humans through the power of his heart and his speech. The name Layla comes from the Egyptian and means
night
. Layla had no Facebook page, no blog, no Twitter account that I could find. To whom would they ship her body? Was it still in the morgue?