I Don't Like Where This Is Going (3 page)

Those ancient Egyptians believed that a person's actions during life were judged in a ceremony in which one's heart was weighed against a feather, which represented things as they ought to be. The weighing was conducted by the jackal-headed god Anubis, and recorded by Thoth, the god of writing. Balanced scales indicated a person of “true voice,” who would then join Osiris in the Land of Vindication. Unbalanced scales revealed one to be of “diminished voice.” The measured heart was tossed to Ammit, the Swallower
of the Dead, and he of diminished voice would continue to exist, but without consciousness. What had Layla believed awaited her? Oblivion? Elysium? Deliverance? And with what certainty had she believed it? And what is belief but conjecture?

I tried to imagine her booking the room at the Luxor, having already decided against household toxins, drowning, and an overdose of prescription pills, having decided not to profane her own home. Buying the plane ticket. One-way, of course. No backing out now. How long had she been contemplating her violent death? Why had she decided to act, finally, on the day that she did? Why not the day before? What was the precipitating event? We can suffer any degree of pain, I choose to believe, no matter how lacerating, if we know it is going to end. But when we know that it cannot . . .

I pictured Layla sitting in her living room with her laptop and with a glass of fortifying white wine. Music on the Bose. Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings, perhaps. When she made the reservation, entered her credit card information, and confirmed, did she think about someone she would never see again, someone who would be startled awake in the middle of the night by a caller bearing the terrible news?

Layla, like Icarus before her, in Breugel's painting, in Auden's poem, plunged to her death while someone else was drinking a Cosmo at Liquidity or pulling a handle on a slot machine or just folding an anemic poker hand. For all the tourists at the Luxor, hers was not an important failure. The casino ran as it had to, the robotic clangs and beeps and dings of the machines droned on, and the patrons had places to go, shows to see, and games to play.

Bay said good morning. I said, “Who does that? Commits random acts of violence?”

“What are you talking about?”

“The bee guy.”

“The bee was a distraction.”

“Her name was Layla.”

“Who?”

“The suicide at the Luxor.”

He said, “We didn't necessarily see a suicide. We saw a death.”

I kept expecting to read more about Layla in the coming days, an obituary, surely, a solemn mention in a colleague's blog, an announcement of a memorial service, an acknowledgment by St. Jude's or by the crestfallen staff at the animal shelter. But I did not. The passing of Layla Davis played like notes from an unclappered bell.

2

Y
OU DON'T PLUCK
out people's eyes and then reproach them for their blindness, John Milton almost said. When your civic pride rests on the label “Sin City,” and when your official advertising slogan encourages people to engage in behaviors so censurable that they must be kept hidden from family, friends, and colleagues, then you're asking for trouble, and you should anticipate and prepare for the exploitation of women and children and the rampant abuse of substances legal and illegal. You should expect to attract the lubricious, the sociopathic, the treacherous, and the perverse.

I know, I sound like an unctuous puritan, but this ridiculous city was making me cranky. I called Patience after breakfast and asked her to fly out here as soon as she could. I told her we'd take a driving tour of the state, see the Great Basin, the country's largest desert. It'll be fun. Mining towns, ghost towns, empty highways, Area 51, red rock canyons, salt flats, cowboys, and Basques. Quiet. Nevada's the opposite of Florida, I said. It's the most mountainous state, the driest, the fastest-growing, the most urban, if you can believe it, and, perhaps, the most empty. She said she'd see what she could do.

Doctors at Sunrise Hospital had been rebuilding what was left of Ronald Conlin's face when he died on the operating table. Ronald was the man I'd seen attacked by dogs. When I walked the streets these days, I carried a can of pepper spray. I downloaded the photo of Layla I'd found on the Internet to my iPhone. I'd ask about her at the Crisis Center. Ronald moved to Vegas from Idaho after his wife had died. They'd been independent painting contractors, a husband-and-wife team, for forty-six years.

So I'd been in town just two weeks and had already witnessed two violent and improbable deaths. I had been fortunate enough not to have seen Mr. Conlin's mangled face, but I had seen Layla's, and I couldn't scrub the gruesome image from my mind, especially those adjacent eyes and the fine line of carmine blood leaking from her ear. What was less disturbing, but more bewildering, was the mystery of Loomis's lie and the puzzling silence of the media. Why wasn't everyone in town talking about the electrifying and tragic spectacle that was Layla's death?

ON THE BUS RIDE
down to the Crisis Center, I glanced through a book on optical illusions that Bay had recommended,
Seeing Is Deceiving
. I pride myself on being observant, on seeing what other people don't see. I can look at a person, at his expressions, his gestures, his clothing, his home, and his possessions, and I can tell you what the person's thinking. That's why lawyers and cops have used my consultant services in the past. Bay calls me an intuitionist. My own therapist, Thalassa Xenakis, says I have robust mirror neurons. I look, I stare, I gaze, and I pay attention to what I see. But now that I'd been out of work awhile, I worried that I was losing my empirical mojo. And the book wasn't helping. I saw a spiral where there was none, a straight line that appeared wavy, parallel
lines that seemed to be on a collision course. I stared at a blurry rectangle of color until it disappeared. I saw small gray blocks that weren't really there but were fabricated by my lying eyes.

Bay had once shown me an illusion on his iPad called the Lilac Chaser. You see twelve blurred lilac disks in a circle, like the numbers on a clock, around a small black cross on a gray background. As you stare at the arrangement, one of the disks briefly disappears, and then the next, and so on around the circle, and then you see a green disk coursing around the circle of lilac disks, and then all of the lilac disks disappear, one by one, in a clockwise sequence, and the green disk is alone, but not for long, and then there are a dozen each of lilac and green disks. What had changed? Not the picture I stared at. What had changed was the way I looked at it. I saw it differently. Was the picture making me do it? Was this unchanging image changing me?

Bay had a theory about all these visual shenanigans. Scientists know that there's a tenth-of-a-second delay between the moment that light hits the retina and the brain's translating that neural signal into visual perception. Bay believes that we've evolved to compensate for the delay by generating images of what will happen a tenth of a second into the future. Call it foresight. Call a tenth of a second the measure of an instant. Knowing the future helps us act judiciously in the present. How else, he says, could our ancestors have survived an attack by the stealthy saber-toothed tiger? How else could Miguel Cabrera hit a hundred-mile-per-hour fastball thrown from sixty feet six inches away when he has only a third of a second to react before the ball is past him? He would have to begin his swing before the ball is pitched, right? We live with premonitions of the future. You think the phone will ring, and it does. You see the doctor's needle by your arm, and you cringe because you already feel the flash of pain. We're always trying to perceive what
the world will be like in the next instant. That's what the optical illusions do—switch on our image-generating future-receptors.

And I had my own theory. What we remember may not be what we actually saw. What we saw was not all that there was to be seen. What we see is influenced by what we feel. When I saw Layla fall from heaven, I was baffled and panicked. I know what I saw, but don't know what I missed.

No one at the Crisis Center recognized Layla from my photo. No one had even heard about her death. All the talk in the coffee room was about a knife fight at a karaoke bar between two Taiwanese gangs, Posse Galore and Bamboo Rats. I looked at yesterday's logbook and didn't find an entry for a suicide call. Three people died in the karaoke bar; five others had been slashed and stabbed and were clinging to life. I handled a call from one of our chronic callers, a guy the staff referred to as Elmer the Dog Lisperer. You always knew it was Elmer because all his
l
's and
r
's were
w
's, and he always wanted to tell you about his dog. The Crisis Center kept a file on chronic callers, and we knew, somehow, that Elmer's real name was Tom, and he was a paramedic with Clark County Fire and Rescue. He'd been a constant caller for over five years.

I answered, “Crisis Center.”

Elmer said, “I just fucked my German shepherd, Bwondi. She woved it.”

“Is there a problem?”

“Why would there be a pwobwem?”

“Then why are you calling? Call back, please, when you're in crisis.”

The next call came from a woman who had to choke back tears before she could speak. She told me her husband had beaten her. I asked her if she was all right and if she wanted me to have a medical team dispatched to her house. She didn't. No, it isn't the
first time—but he always calms down and apologizes. I asked her if she feared for her life, and she sobbed. When she caught her breath, she told me the fight was over something stupid anyway. She'd brought the wrong brand of beer home from Vons. I asked her what she wanted to do about this. She said she wanted it not to happen anymore. I said, What can you do to make that so? She hesitated and said, Not be stupid anymore? I said, Excuse me? She said, When he finds out I'm pregnant he won't want to hurt the baby. I said, You're pregnant? She said, I will be soon, thanked me, and hung up.

The Crisis Center occupied a former funeral home with a drive-thru viewing window that had been converted into our coffee room. I spent most of my time in the hideous, bleak, and windowless phone room, where the peeling walls were twilight-gray, the dripping water pipes were exposed, the carpet soiled, and the flickering lights fluorescent and maddening. The ugliness was almost agonizing. Volunteers had pasted cartoons on the wall: a clown trying to kill himself with laughing gas; a suicidal slug wearing a salt-packet vest. I tried to keep my eyes closed. On the whiteboard, the staff had written their New Year's resolutions. Gretchen B. wrote that she was finally going to get her teeth straightened and her eyebrows tattooed.

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.”