I Don't Like Where This Is Going

by John Dufresne

  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?

  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 beli
eved 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

  YOU 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.