by Dan Chaon
The outward wall of his hotel room was a single window, and with the drapes pulled open he could stand there at the very lip of the building like a swimmer on a diving board.
“Hello?” Jay said, and Ryan paused.
“Hey,” Ryan said.
“Hey,” Jay said. And then there was an expectant pause. Ryan wasn’t supposed to call unless it was urgent, but it seemed like Jay was too mellow—probably too stoned—to take Ryan’s concerns seriously. Sometimes it was strange to think that Jay was actually his father, strange to think that Jay was only fifteen when he was born, and even now he didn’t look like he could be old enough to have a twenty-year-old son. He didn’t look much older than thirty. It made more sense, Ryan often thought, to think of him as an uncle.
“So …,” Jay said. “What’s up?”
“I was just calling to check in,” Ryan said. He shifted the phone to his other ear. “Listen,” he said, “did you just IM me?”
“Um,” Jay said. “I don’t think so.”
“Oh,” Ryan said.
He could hear the gurgling sound of a bong as Jay drew in smoke, and then the arrhythmic clicking percussion of Jay’s keyboard as he typed.
“So what do you think of Las Vegas?” Jay said after a pause.
“Good,” Ryan said. “Good, so far.”
“It’s pretty magnificent, isn’t it?” said Jay.
“It is,” Ryan said, and he looked down into the dusky expanse of the city. Below him a line of taxis was slowly nudging its bovine way up toward the front entrance, the pylon sign that flanked the building with its giant LED screen playing images of singers and comedians flickering above the necklace of headlights along Las Vegas Boulevard—
“It’s—” he said.
—and in the other direction, if you faced away from the strip, there was the airport just beyond an old boarded-up courtyard motel across the street; there was a tract of bare desert earth and some strip malls and houses that ran in sheer planes toward the mountains.
“It’s great,” he said.
“Can you see the Statue of Liberty?” Jay said. “Can you see the Stratosphere tower?”
“Yeah,” Ryan said. He was aware of his reflection standing just beyond the edge of the window, hovering in the air.
“I love Vegas,” Jay said, and then he paused, reflectively. Perhaps he was thinking of the instructions he and Ryan had gone over together, perhaps wondering if he needed to repeat them—but he just cleared his throat.
“The main thing,” Jay said. “I want you to have a good time. Get laid a couple of times, okay?”
“Okay,” Ryan said.
Behind him, on the bed, he had laid out his stacks of plastic ATM cards, rubber-banded together in groups of ten.
“I mean it,” Jay said. “You could use some—”
“Yeah,” he said. “I hear you.”
It was April. Months had passed since Ryan’s death, and he was doing okay with that. He had basically worked through his Kübler-Ross stages, he guessed. There actually hadn’t been much denial or bargaining involved, and the anger he experienced felt kind of good. There was a pleasure in stealing, a warm flush as he moved money from one fake bank account to another, as another credit card arrived in the mail.
In the bathroom, he applied adhesive to his bare scalp and arranged his shaggy blond Kasimir Czernewski wig. He shaved and dried his upper lip and then brushed on some spirit gum so that he could attach his mustache. He had to admit that it was fun to put on a disguise, that instant in the mirror when a new face looked back at him.
He had been traveling away from himself for a long time now, he thought—for years and years, maybe, he had been trying to imagine ways to escape—and now he was actually doing it. It even felt glamorous, in a bathroom such as this: the wall-length mirror and beautiful porcelain sinks, the sunken Jacuzzi tub, the standing shower with its frosted glass door, the commode separate in its own little room, with a telephone on the wall next to the toilet paper dispenser. It was all very sophisticated, he thought, and he adjusted his black Kasimir Czernewski glasses and brushed his teeth.
Get laid a couple of times, Jay had said.
And he thought: Okay. Maybe I will.
The last time Ryan had sex, he was a junior in high school, and it had turned out to be very problematic.
The girl’s name was Pixie—that was what she went by—and she had moved from Chicago to Council Bluffs with her father, and even though she was fifteen, two years younger than he, she was a real city girl—a lot more worldly than Ryan.
She had a lip piercing and an eyebrow piercing and dyed white-blond hair with some strands of pink, and her eyes were traced with black liner. She was just barely five feet tall—thus “Pixie” instead of her real name, Penelope—and she had a body like a cherub or a curvaceous teddy bear, smooth perfect olive skin and large breasts and a full mouth, and even before the end of the first week of school people were referring to her as Goth Hobbit, and Ryan had laughed with everyone else.
So he’d never exactly known what she’d seen in him, except that she sat behind him in period six band. He was a trombonist and she was a drummer, and if he turned his head, he could watch her out of the corner of his eye, and the first thing he noticed about her was this expression, a focused and blissful attention to her page of music, the way her lips parted, the way the sticks moved in her hands as if she weren’t even thinking of them, the graceful looseness of her wrists and forearms. And, yes, the slight vibration of her breasts when she gave the drumhead a decisive stroke.
And so he couldn’t keep from glancing at her from time to time surreptitiously until one day as he was breaking down his trombone after class and lubricating the hand slide, and she stood there staring at him with her head cocked to one side. He had arranged the pieces in the velvet indentations of his instrument case, and at last he looked up at her.
“Can I help you?” he said, and she raised one eyebrow—the one with the thin metal ring in it.
“I doubt it,” she said. “I was just trying to figure out if there was some reason you keep staring at me, or if you’re just autistic or whatever.”
He was not that popular; he was used to being made fun of by various people, and so he tightened his lips and inserted his cleaning brush into the mouth of his slide. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
And she shrugged. “Okay, then, Archie,” she said.
Archie. He didn’t know what that was supposed to mean, but he didn’t like it. “My name is Ryan,” he said.
“Okay, Thurston,” she said, and appraised him once more, dubiously. “Can I ask you a question?” she said, and when he continued to pack up his instrument, she smiled, puckering her lips out in a wry, challenging way. “Does your mom buy your clothes for you, or do you honestly intend to dress like that?”
Ryan looked up from his trombone case, fixing her with a look that he thought of as particularly icy. “May I help you?” he said.
And Pixie evaluated this, as if it were a real offer. “Maybe,” she said. “I just wanted to tell you that if you did something with yourself, you could probably actually be fuckable.” And then she gave him that smile again, lopsided, a gangster smirk.
“I just thought you’d want to know,” she said.
He thought about this as he rode down the elevator, and then he pushed it into the back of his mind again, back to the nearly subconscious place where Pixie had been lingering for the past few years.
In the elevator, a miniature LED screen was blaring scenes of some Broadway-style musical entertainment, and the girl standing in front of him shifted her weight from foot to foot as she watched the video. She had a very short skirt and incredibly long bare legs—they seemed to go all the way up to her rib cage, beautiful downy brown legs—and Ryan observed them silently. The skirt ended just slightly below the slope of her buttocks, and he let his eyes run down the back of her thighs to her calves and ankles and sandaled pink-soled feet.
He watched as she got off the elevator, and the man beside him made a low sound in his throat.
“Mm, mm,” the man said. “Did you see that?” He was a black man, perhaps fifty years old, wearing a pink polo shirt and kelly green pants and carrying a bag of golf clubs. “That was a sight to see.”
“Yes,” Ryan said, and the man shook his head in exaggerated wonder.
“Damn,” the man said. “Are you single?”
“Yeah,” Ryan said, “I guess I am.” And the man shook his head again.
“I sure do envy you,” the man said—and then, before he could say more, the elevator doors opened and three more beautiful teenage girls entered their enclosure.
What if he did meet a girl, he thought. That was what people did in Vegas, that was what a lot of people came here for. All over town, he supposed, they were hooking up, seducing their way into one-night stands or stumbling drunkenly into liaisons with strangers. He himself had never picked up someone at a bar, or a casino, though obviously it was possible. You saw it on TV all the time: a man approached an attractive woman; there was some flirtation or suggestive small talk; and shortly thereafter, the couple was having sex. It should be fairly simple to accomplish. If he could get a 2200 on the SAT, he should be able to get laid in Vegas.
But standing there on the main floor of the casino, the very idea of “meeting someone” seemed heartbreakingly complex. How would you even talk to another person in such a place? He peered out at what appeared to be an enormous video arcade, rows upon rows of glowing neon games and slot machines, stretching as far as he could see, hundreds and hundreds of people feeding their individual screens, which showed playing cards or rolling numbers or animated cartoon characters, and he found himself thinking of the photographs he’d seen of sweatshops—cavernous factory lofts, columns of workers sewing seams into blouses or riveting eyelets into shoes, a hive in which each worker was submerged in a constant, lonely activity. Meanwhile, all around him people wandered the aisles and walkways, with that peculiar blankness tourists had as they moved through the paces of being entertained, an aimless shuffle that people took on in shopping malls and national monuments and so forth.
At last, Ryan fell into the flow of foot traffic around the circumference of the main gaming area. In front of him, a pair of blond women in matching capri pants spoke to each other in Dutch or Norwegian or some other language. Up ahead, a mild bottleneck was forming as people paused to watch an elderly man in a cowboy hat and flowered Western shirt performing a card trick. The man held up the ten of spades to show the crowd, and there was a spatter of applause. The magician gave a small, gracious bow, and the blond women stopped and craned to see what was going on.
But Ryan moved past, feeling again in his pockets for his stack of ATM cards, which was almost as thick as a deck of playing cards.
There was a lot of cash that needed to be withdrawn before the night was over.
It was annoying to find himself thinking of Pixie again.
In the past few years, he had been pretty successful at keeping her out of his conscious thoughts, and it was disturbing to find her lingering there now. There was a certain way she would press her nose and lips to his neck, just under the line of his jaw; a way she would slide her hand down on his arm, as if she were trying to make his skin adhere to her palm.
It was not as if he had been in love with her. That was what his mother said later.
“It’s just ordinary lust, but at your age you can’t tell the difference.”
And probably his mother was right. Pixie was not what he had thought of when he’d imagined “falling in love”—and in fact, he couldn’t remember if the word “love” had ever been mentioned. It wasn’t the type of thing Pixie would have said.
“Fucking”—that was more in line with Pixie’s vocabulary, and that was what they were doing within a few weeks of that first conversation in the band room, fucking first in a motel on a band trip to Des Moines, and then fucking after school at Pixie’s house while her dad was at work, and then fucking in the school building, in a storage closet in the basement near the boiler room, fucking on top of boxes of industrial paper towels.
“You know what’s funny?” Pixie said. “My dad totally thinks I’m this innocent virgin. He’s like a zombie since my mom died, poor guy. I don’t think he realizes that I’m not twelve anymore.”
“Geez,” Ryan said. “Your mom died?” He had never known anyone who had experienced that kind of tragedy, and it made him feel even more awkward to be naked in her room, with her girly pink bedspread and her collection of Beanie Babies staring down at them from their shelf.
“She had some deal with her lungs,” Pixie said, and she uncovered a pack of Marlboros from a hiding space behind a Harry Potter novel on her bookcase. “Bronchiolitis obliterans, it’s called. They don’t know how she got it. They thought she could have been exposed to toxic fumes of some sort, or it could have been brought on by a virus. But no one knew what she had. The doctors thought she had asthma or whatever.” She looked at him, cryptically, and he watched as she withdrew a cigarette and lit it. She put her face near the open window and exhaled.
“That’s awful,” Ryan said. Uncertain. What was he supposed to say? “I’m really sorry,” he said.
But she only shrugged. “I used to think about killing myself,” she said. And she blew a stream of gray-blue smoke through the screen, into the backyard. She peered at him, matter-of-factly. “But then I decided that it wasn’t worth it. It’s too angsty and whiny, I think. Or maybe …,” she said. “Maybe I’m just too beyond caring to bother.” She leaned back, kneading the crumple of sheet and blanket with her bare foot, and he watched her toes as they clenched and unclenched. He was a little stunned by such talk.
“Listen,” he said. “You shouldn’t think about killing yourself. There are a lot of people who—care about you, and …”
“Shut up,” she said, but not unkindly. “Don’t be a nerd, Ryan.”
And so he didn’t say anything more.
Instead of going back to school after lunch that day, they stayed at her house and watched movies that Pixie was obsessed with. Fourth period: here was The Killers, with Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson. Fifth period: Something Wild with Jeff Daniels and Melanie Griffith. Sixth period: fucking again.
I am actually doing this, he thought. I am really, really, really doing this—
The hotels were interconnected. He passed through one casino cavern and boarded an escalator and a series of moving walkways that rivered past mall-like hallways lined with souvenir shops, and then he found himself in a replica of an Egyptian tomb, and then inside another warehouse-size casino floor, and there were a few more ATM machines to attend to, and then there was the Excalibur, which was themed to look like a medieval castle, and people were lined up to dine at the Round Table buffet, and he made a couple more withdrawals.
And then, at last, after winding his way through the corridors of the Luxor and the Excalibur, he emerged into the outdoors, into the open air, and he had about ten grand in his backpack. That was the thing about Vegas—you could withdraw five hundred dollars, one thousand, three thousand from an ATM and it was not that unusual, though he knew that he would have to retire Kasimir Czernewski after this trip. Which was sad, in a way. He had spent a lot of time building up Kasimir’s life in his mind, trying to conceptualize what it would be like to be a foreigner, a young man starting with nothing and working his way toward the American dream. Kasimir: essentially easygoing, but also crafty in some ways, determined, taking night school classes and struggling to establish his little private investigator business. You could make a television series about Kasimir Czernewski, a kind of comedy-drama, he imagined.
Outside, people were moving down the sidewalk in groups of five or ten or twenty, and the flow had grown more purposeful, more like the movement of big-city people down a street. On one side, car traffic was dragging slowly past, and on the other, hawkers stood and handed out cards to passe
rsby. They were primarily Mexican men, and they would draw attention by slapping their handouts against their forearms—clap, clap, clap—and then flicking out a single card and extending it.
“Thank you,” Ryan said, and he had gathered about twenty of them before he began to say, “I’m set.” “No thanks.” “Sorry.”
The cards were advertisements for various escort services, pictures of girls, naked, airbrushed, with colorful stars printed over their nipples. Sometimes the letters of their names covered their privates. Fantasie, Roxan, Natasha. Beautiful Exotic Dancer in the privacy of your own room! the card said. Only $39! And there was the phone number to call.
He was lingering on the street, looking at his collection of escort girls—imagining what it might be like to actually call one of them—when he heard the Russian men approaching.
At least he thought they were Russian. Or they were speaking in some other Eastern European language. Lithuanian? Serbian? Czech? But in any case, they were talking loudly in their native tongue—Zatruxa something something. Baruxa! Ha, ha, ha—and Ryan looked up, startled, as they approached. There was a bald one, and one with his blond hair moussed into stiff hedgehog-like spikes, and another with a checkered cabbie golf cap. All of them wearing colorful Hawaiian shirts.
They were all three carrying those enormous souvenir drink glasses that were so popular on the strip, containers that looked like vases, or bongs—round, bulbous bases with long, piped necks that eventually opened into a tuliped rim. He assumed that these glasses had been engineered so that they were hard to spill, and yet held the maximum amount of alcoholic beverage allowed.
They came toward him, noisily joking in whatever Slavic language they were speaking, and he couldn’t help it. He froze there, staring at them.
Back when he was a freshman at Northwestern, his roommate, Walcott, used to scold him.
“Why do you always stare at people?” Walcott said, one night, when they were walking down Rush Street in Chicago, looking for bars that might take their cheap fake IDs. “Is that, like, an Iowa thing?” Walcott said critically. “Because you know, in cities, it’s not cool to gape at people.”