by Jay Smith
The room was never cool, yet they insisted on putting sheets and blankets over me, smiling like it was a big favor to bury me in my own heat. Whatever saline they pumped into me to keep my hydrated ended up soaking my gown and the sheets. Changing those sheets required moving me, which was like getting thrown over a jagged cliff every morning and then left alone at the bottom for hours until the lunch bag arrived with a healthy mix of chemicals added to my tubes. Hours alone, interrupted by well-intentioned visitors with no news and no hope, there to hang a bag or check the pinging machines out of my line of sight. When the docs and the oncologist stopped by the chat, they found it a one-sided conversation. Things were always "on target" and my cure was "coming along" soon.
Soon.
Soon came at the end of painful hours and torturous weeks. As bad as the days were, the nights were so much worse.
On those long, sleepless nights in my private room at the cancer wing of UPenn Hospital, I was never completely alone. Quiet hours meant dim lighting in the rooms and hallways as the staff huddled around monitors at the duty station to trade gossip between rounds. But The Shadows would always be there waiting. I could see them bending the real shadows, peeking from the umbra to see if I was finally ready to go with them. They would never beg. They would not threaten. Each night as I lay awake, alone and in pain, sinking deep into depression and exhaustion, they would come to me again.
The same routine: A chill washes over me. The light grows dim as The Shadow envelops me. The shroud numbs the pain just enough - just a taste - to prepare me for the question. As the cool gray dims toward cold black I hear the question once more:
"Are you ready to go, Winston?"
When the medicinal poison burned through me and it was agony to even flinch, I welcomed the cold darkness and embraced that moment of being numb. The longer I lay there, the darker the world became and the more I wanted to stay there. Every few nights I'd see others leave with The Shadows. Surely, there was pain for everyone left behind, but that pain was nothing compared to the hours and hours feeling red ants swarming and stinging through our insides, feeling our pulse in every inch of our bodies as the poison ravaged our bodies.
"Are you ready, Winston?"
Every night for nearly six months, I managed the strength to answer "No."
I could only lie in my bed all day and watch the real shadows creep across my, knowing that they carried in them the sleeping ushers. Every night I would see them sneak along the walls of the hospital corridor, past the doorway to my room. In the knowledge that comes in half-dreams I could see them entering each room to ask the other patients the same question. Sometimes I would see The Shadows cross back up the hall carrying another shadow along with them. Sometimes I would hear the alarm and the "quiet code blue" followed by the clop of sneakers across the polished floor. Sometimes I would hear nothing, but learn the next day of someone who didn't have the strength to resist.
As the pain worsened and the treatments burned my body from the inside out, I grew tired of fighting. I wondered what it was I was fighting for. My struggling marriage? My soul-less job? Most biting was the fact that even if healthy bone marrow returned by magic the next morning, the world waiting for me outside the hospital was not something I wanted to go back to. You might expect it to be preferable to laying in a bed shitting fire with hard plastic tubes in every natural orifice and three freshly drilled ones, but to paraphrase a great general, What price we pay to win a land of ash.
The Shadows were patient. They were polite, but ever so enticing. They seemed to really care, those faceless, formless shades: "Are you ready to go? We'll stop the pain. It can end right now. Just come with us."
"No," I answered, sometimes out of spite.
The dreams summoned a wave of carrion beetles on bridges of moonlight across my bed. They crawled under my covers and burrowed into my flesh, chewing their way into my guts, spreading me apart as they pushed through to the fresh meats. I would itch and scream and pull at my feeding tubes. Some nights I would awake in restraints, helpless as the beetles consumed my heart and stomach.
Some days I could not remember my name or how to speak, my life a tangle of half memories disrupted by a sharp pain through the center of my skull. But I remember The Shadows. I dreamed of becoming like them, helping others leave this world. But I was too scared to go.
Dave Grummon had four reasons to fight each night. I saw their smiling faces every day and envied the life waiting for him when he was finally declared "in remission."
But one night, for whatever reason, Dave Grummon chose to go with The Shadows.
If Dave gave up, what hope was there for me? At that point, my wife had not visited me - awake at least - for close to three weeks. I had no children and never would. My coworkers stopped coming after watching me vomit blood over the side of my bed that one afternoon.
That night. I waited for The Shadows to come, ready to surrender, convinced I would never have the strength to sit up, speak, or think clearly for more than a few moments ever again. I thought the pain would not stop until I surrendered.
That evening, I distracted myself from the long, lonely hours by cheering on the sunset, begging the sun to move a little faster and bring the long shadows across the room. Around five in the afternoon, when the sun started its descent on the far side of the hospital, I felt the first tingle of excitement my body could generate in months.
When The Shadow crossed over me I smiled, embracing the gray and waiting for the black, waiting for the question with the answer already on my cracked lips.
First Lieutenant Grant Eugene Parker, my best friend in the world, stood over me with that stupid grin he wore just for stupid plans and asked: "Hey, Winston. You want to go on an adventure?"
The Shadows retreated home.
But they are always there. Always waiting.
PART THREE
Las Vegas
"The unpledged tribes to the north, they see their lives as free. But all they know is war. They want the freedom to live in filth and ignorance. They fear the light that leads to true freedom!"
- General Pak, upon the Eve of the Barbarian Wars
(Aeternus Unveiled!, Bathorian Books, 2009)
Chapter Six
Vegas is built on the surface of an alien world much closer to its sun than we are our own. The city tries very hard to keep people out of the heat and within ten feet of a slot machine at all times. Space agencies could look to Vegas as a model for how to build sealed bases in hostile environments. It's like a giant habitrail from McCarran airport to the hotel. I picked up my rental sedan and didn't leave air conditioning except for a brief, EVA through a shaded hotel valet drop-off to access the lobby.
Vegas hotels are loud, bright and full of energy. The tall Korean woman who checked me in possessed the kind of unnatural, huge, and hideous, smile that would suggest someone in my line of work to a drug test. Even the custodial staff, dapper in dark blue jump suits, tipped their caps and wished everyone good luck at the tables. The elevators did not offer soft jazz or Muzak. They hammered out classical overture music on the way up to the rooms - something awesome is about to happen, can you feel it? - and powerful rock anthems - go all in and win big! - heading down to the casino.
My room was designed to be so bright and hideous that you didn't want to stay in it very long. The carpet pattern looked like a hyperactive nine-year-old with a Spirograph designed it and had it colored by someone with anger management issues. The walls looked like they were covered in lumpy mashed potatoes broken up by canvases portraying blood spray patterns. If their intent was any less subtle and they would have decorated it with live, angry tarantulas, random electric shocks, and clown portraits by John Wayne Gacy.
Every element in the hotel pulsed with a raw energy and a call to arms that suggested the highly improbable not only was probable but likely through sheer force of will.
Someone just heard the bells ring and saw the lights flash. Someone else just watched a slot ma
chine shit a load of gold coins into a bucket. Someone just turned a twenty-one on the dealer's twenty. Why can't it be you, my lucky friend? Vegas is magic. Take a card, pull the lever and toss those dice, baby. And here's a couple of free drinks to get you loosened up.
Vegas is about creating a hollow want and filling it with hope. It's in the well-trained smile of a pretty waitress in her twenties who learns your name and smiles when you finally lift your gaze from her chest to her face. It's in the generosity of the prime rib buffet, the free drinks, and the luxury freebies that make you think Vegas will give anything away. You're part of the family, now. You're a member. You're a high roller regardless of your bankroll.
Anything to keep you betting, keep you feeding the beast.
The happy clerk at the front desk handed me a message that had been waiting since I got off the phone with "The Service" back in Ebetha. "From Parker," it read.
The note read "The Pathways Bank and Trust. Box 42117. Key attached. Follow the instructions provided in the box. Good luck."
A safety deposit box. Let the games begin!
~
The Pathways Bank and Trust offered three locations convenient to my hotel, but the one with my safety deposit box anchored a row of shops four miles south of the strip. I took a cab, finally experiencing the oppressive, dry desert air and hating every instant of it.
Walking into a bank in Las Vegas feels like walking into a casino, except without the loud noise, crazy decor and psychotic carpeting. Polite men in suits patrol the floor with nothing better to do than scowl at people waiting in line for service, just like pit bosses. Tellers are quiet and efficient like cashiers.
The manager was a mix of submissive pomposity so perfectly matched I was surprised he didn't have a French accent. He led me through a brightly lit and well-polished corridor with speakers pouring out a smooth jazz version of Hotel California. This led to a room that resembled a morgue for small pets. It was freezing and sterile with a single, stainless steel table in the middle of the room. Each wall featured hundreds of vaults in various sizes. An artist had decided to play a game and mix up the sizes instead of putting them in any logical order. The resulting pattern was pretty to look at, but confusing. The Manager expected this, took me to the box, instructed me to make sure my key worked and, when it did, and excused himself to wait outside. I removed the box within the box and placed it on the central table. It had very little weight to it.
That made perfect sense when I opened it. The only thing inside it was a black, plastic disk. A poker chip. Its only marking was gold lettering indicating a 4-digit number (1850) and that it belonged to the Peppermint Hotel and Casino.
I don't know what I expected from a strongbox in Las Vegas, but it made perfect sense. At the time, I guess I expected to see more than one.
So consumed by the chip I was, I almost missed the piece of paper folded up and stuck to one side of the box. I opened and read Parker's handwriting. "Cash in. Don't cash out."
~
I walked outside to my waiting hotbox of a rental. Even in the shade, the dry heat sucked life out of my pores. Parker's note ended up in my wallet and the coin in my shoe.
Outside the bank, a tall, pale woman with messy black hair and bug-eyed sunglasses leaned against an old, yellow Dodge Charger parked along the curb. She struck a pose to be noticed, with her left arm under the shelf of what my friend Nate might call "a well-packaged rack" touching the elbow of her right arm which was upturned holding a lit cigarette. Every few seconds she's stuff the cigarette between two fat red lips to take a drag. The whole platform stood upright on long legs that looked like they could kick a hole through a barn door topped by a skirt that may as well have taken the day off. There was something familiar about her that made me miss the next two cabs that drove by.
She tapped the ash off her cigarette and wiggled her fingers at me. It was the smile that made it click.
"Carla?"
She dropped the cigarette to the sidewalk and spread her arms out wide as she approached. "Winston C, how are you, baby?"
She swooped in like an eagle and wrapped her long arms tight around my shoulders. She smelled like fruit candy in a dirty ash tray, but she felt like a kiss on the first date. My immediate recollection of her came in feelings and emotional memory. It would be a little before my brain filled in the gaps, but in the moment, I recalled memories of high school and young, unrequited lust tempered by mutual respect. "Carla G" was an actress at school. She played a role in one of my little skits for drama class. When Carla took off the sunglasses those old memories flooded back. She held up well over two decades, her big, blue eyes had turned a little gray, but otherwise she could easily be confused for someone a decade younger.
"Carla Gugino. My god, it’s been…."
"For-EVER." She beamed. "Listen, I was on my way to this thing out in Henderson and saw you coming out of the bank. I couldn’t believe it. Are you on your way somewhere? Can I give you a ride? I’d love to catch up."
I caught sight of an Irish pub up the street and pointed "I was just going to get a bite and head back to the hotel. Want to join me?"
She looked unsure for a moment, but then dove in. "Sure! Give me a minute to make a call. A girlfriend of mine is waiting on me, but it’s no big deal. Go on ahead and get a table and I’ll find you in a minute, okay? Awesome."
Carla’s legs took her off in the opposite direction of the pub. She fished into a small bag for a cell phone and I thought perhaps this was her way of getting out of lunch with me. A quick call to a "friend" and suddenly there’s an emergency, but we’ll hook up on OneWorld or Facebook sometime.
I went to the pub. It looked like someone took a Wild West theme and painted it over in forest green to call it Irish. Booths and tables circled a long central bar manned by a tall leprechaun. He looked up from his register a moment and gave me a nod. I pointed toward the restaurant half of the pub.
"Sit anywhere ya like," he shouted over the syntho-Riverdance soundtrack. "Betsy’ll be out in a sec." The red script embroidered over the pocket of his white dress shirt read "Murray".
Of course, I wondered if he had any saké behind the bar.
~
I was in a booth facing the kitchen watching Betsy pass my drink order to Murray when Carla leaned into the booth and kissed me on the cheek. She leaped around the table and into seat opposite me. "It is so good to see you!" She looked up at Murray and shouted. "Vodka tonic, please!"
"Yeah," I replied. "What are the odds? What’ve you been up to?"
She put her cell phone and box of Marlboros on the table and propped herself against the corner of the booth. Instead of skipping out, she was settling in.
"I’m Carla Baron, now, first off..."
I liked the sound of the name and repeated it slowly. "Nice. Married or professional name?"
"Both. I divorced the Baron but there's already some actress using my maiden name so that's how my union cards read."
"You're a dancer, right?"
She feigned embarrassment. "Yes, Winston. I'm a dancer. Lately, though, I interpret sexual themes through rhythmic movement using props and provocative clothing." This seemed to startle old Betsy as she delivered our drinks. Carla tipped back the vodka tonic and flashed Betsy a quick wink. "I also perform out on the strip three…four days a week."
"Good for you," I said.
I let the ice water cool my hands a bit. "Vegas must be magic if you're someone I run into right off the bat. How long have you been out here?"
"About ten years." She went through her resume for me, highlighting six months in a Cirque du Solei show and something she called "the tits and ass thing" at the casinos. I couldn’t help but wonder if the years amplified her personality or if her larger-than-life, demonstrative personality was a performance just for me. If anything, the years had stripped her of her refined, aloof quality instilled by her conservative mother, but that wasn’t surprising. We all shed the masks we wore for our parents eventually.
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She concluded with "But the work dried up on the strip, so here I am, working the Crow’s Nest a block up from Panther’s." Carla lit up another Marlboro and crossed her legs over the table. They were long and gorgeous and she meant for me to take a good, long look. She made a cloud with her pouty lips and smiled when I met her gaze again. "How you been, Winston? I heard you were sick."
I nodded. I got the idea she was stalling or just very distracted, especially when my answer about having cancer didn't register the usual boo-boo face or sad eyes I came to expect from people. As I gave her the elevator speech about it, I saw her look over my shoulder toward the entrance a few times. As the look didn't come with the jingle of the bell over the door, I expect she was looking for someone outside on the street. I figured it was her ‘girlfriend’ in a daring rescue to get her back to her regular life.
I concluded with "So that's when I decided to give myself to Jesus."
She laughed a little, hit me with a flirty, little gaze and placed a glossy, red fingernail between her collarbones. "I'm glad to hear it. Better ending than Parker's, huh?"
The casual way she said it offended me, but I played it off. "I'm not sure how to respond to that."
"Is he why you came out here?"
Suddenly sure Carla knew the answer already, I played coy. "Why would I come to Vegas for Parker?"
She folded her legs back under the table and leaned in on her elbows. The smell of cigarettes and Altoids reminded me of Claire's hair dresser. Carla looked like a cat ready to play with a trapped mouse. "You and Parker were close. I'm sure he told you about things nobody else knows." She drew closer and purred, "Like what was in the safety box."
"I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that you and me, this meeting here? Wasn't a coincidence."
She bit her bottom lip and nodded. "Winston. It's very important I get back what was in the box."
"What's in the box, Carla?"