Exit, Stage Right

Imagine a space, with the essential stillness of a late night.

An enormous space — an immeasurable volume of air contained in… what? It might have been a cavern, the hollow at the center of the earth, around which the whole human world spun, unawares. It might have been an airship hangar, a dim shell so hugely empty that the imagination boggled at thoughts of what could fill it. It might have been a vacant cathedral, scoured of every frill and decoration, emptied of statuary, chapels, stained glass, and wonder. It might have been the belly of that whale Jonah lived in. There was space for an army of Old Testament prophets to rattle around and never even see each other.

It might have been anything– any space dim and undefined, shadowy in its recesses, unclear as to its identity or use or intent, blank as to its history.

It was the stage of the Extravaganza! Theater.

Airships could have docked there– they had done so, or appeared to, in Extravaganza! I, in the third number, a period piece culminating with the Hindenburg disaster. It could have been an underground kingdom, a huge, primordial space hosting troglodytes in heavy armor plotting the overthrow of those who lived above– that number had not been staged, yet, but it had been considered for Extravaganza! II. The space might have hosted a displaced Mount Sinai– Biblical epics were once quite popular in Vegas production shows, the Old Testament being so handily replete with spectacle, disaster, and opportunities for toplessness.

It might have been anything. It might have been anywhere. At the moment, hours after the show, with the atmosphere so still that the air, like the sets and costumes, seemed to have been put away, out of reach, made unavailable till it was needed again for tomorrow’s first show, the stage was Nowhere in a very official sense. It was a blank palette, it was a generic empty room waiting for furniture. It was Nothing, Nowhere, No Man’s Land.

In spite of all the emptiness, moving through the space– simply walking across the stage, for instance– was difficult. All that absence didn’t welcome movement. The stage was a place outside of time, Nowhen as much as Nowhere. The silence swallowed sound, sucked it up into the highest corners of the roof, which was so far above that its very presence, not to mention its location, could only be surmised, not observed. The ceiling was hidden, anyway, by drapes that might have been older than the whole city, by bits of hanging setpieces no one recognized or had ever used. A theater takes on history, from the first moment it’s built. Even the newest theaters have legends, myths swirling through them, ghosts and tommyknockers. When the shows are over and the casts and audiences go home, done with their mutual masturbation for another night, those spirits are all that’s left to peer down at the cleared floor. They don’t move, they don’t disturb the air. They are part of the stillness, the timelessness. But they watch.

Rachel and Testy had walked in through the audience, past the lines of booths known in the business as Queen’s Row (for good tippers) and King’s Row (for V.I.P.s) and into the Pit, where long cocktail tables jutted out from the stage, and chairs crowded in between them. There were more chairs than could really fit, more places to sit than there was room at the skinny tables. The Pit was the low-rent district, steerage for those who had neither the budget nor the sense to pay for a booth higher up. The Pit was for voyeurs, the men who dreamed of catching a droplet of sweat from a beautiful girl’s spinning torso, the bachelor parties, the trashy gawkers.

Rachel and Testy stopped in the Pit and stood with their eyes on a level with the stage. Their breathing was muffled by the quilt of heavy air around them. Testy thought they might as well have been mummified, for all the sound they made, for all the movement that felt possible.

“Are you going to go up?” she asked Rachel. The words wanted to hang back, hiding inside her lips like scared children facing the bus on their first day of school. The theater air was full of bullies who would hold them down and pound on them and steal their lunch money.

“I don’t know,” the showgirl murmured. Testy wasn’t sure, herself, whether she heard the words or whether she read Rachel’s lips. The meaning was clear, though.

“Go on,” she pushed.

Rachel took a step forward. To call it “hesitant” would have been generous. It might not even have been a step, really. She might have stumbled, fallen as she stood perfectly still there, and just caught herself. She might have merely readjusted her stance. But she moved half her body weight one foot closer to the stage, so Testy counted it as an intentional step. A hesitant one.

“Go on,” Testy repeated.

Rachel took a breath. Testy could hear her, even through the wads of cotton that the theater atmosphere had balled up and stuffed into her ears. That breath was significant, was singular. Every breath in here felt like an effort, like breathing in that cotton, like breathing through water to get to the air on the other side. But Rachel’s breath was more than that. She was breathing in her past, her history, her thoughts about her future, her misgivings, and her choices.

They were heavy, those inhalations. They were thick.

Somewhere behind them, outside the theater and down the short corridor that provided its anteroom, where lines of gaudily-framed photos displayed girls and feathers and the wonders to be found inside, the sounds of the casino rang. The Grand Hotel casino sang and roared and belched, the world’s largest, most self-satisfied calliope screaming out its entire repertoire at once, demanding every ounce of everyone’s attention. Rachel and Testy, shielded by a small distance and a pair of heavy, carved doors, not to mention a gulf in era, in style, ignored the cacophony, could barely hear it even if they strained. They stood enveloped by the muffling cotton air inside the doors, wrapped and embraced by the dull silence of the world’s largest vacant stage.

“If I go up on stage,” she said to Testy, “then I have to come down. And if I come down,” Rachel said, “I know I’m never going to get to go back up again.”

Testy had been talking to her for the last three days. She’d been talking endlessly, it seemed to Rachel, over dinner in between shows, and over beers after second show, and on the phone between those times, during the day, which was extremely unusual, since Testy Lesbiana almost never phoned anyone at all, declaring that if her own grand presence couldn’t be present, the voice alone was just a waste. And what Testy had suggested to Rachel, over and over, was that the time had come to leave Extrav! Extrav! didn’t love Rachel, Testy reminded her, and it would, through the person of Honoré, cheerily dump her at its first chance, which was coming up quickly at contract change.

Testy had told Rachel she was leaving, leaving now, before the contract ended, heading out on a personal mission that she’d share, if Rachel wanted. She would take the showgirl with her, if Rachel would make the break and go. She should want to go, Testy had told her, over dinner and over beer and over the phone between those times. She should make her break now from the tits and feathers wonderland while the getting was good. She should leave on her terms, not Honoré’s, and disappear into the night. That way, she’d be a legend: The Great Showgirl Who Disappeared. Testy believed in legends, and she told Rachel this was her best and maybe only chance to be one.

“Do it, hon,” she urged. “Come with me. Don’t condemn your Aunty Testy to the wilds of Middle America all by herself!”

So Testy Lesbiana had brought Rachel Ferguson, who’d dreamed of dancing topless on the stage since she was twelve, and had achieved that dream at nineteen, and plumbed its depths for the next eighteen years, back to the Extrav! audience, at the very foot of the stage, to face the place whence had issued her own siren’s song, the boards and air that comprised her own personal Holy Grail. The two of them stood there and looked up at the stage’s blank, flattened-out, eerily empty and immeasurable stretches, and felt the air muffling their ears, and thought of the flash and dazzle they were used to seeing there. And Rachel sighed, as a way of breaking the silence– which refused to break, but did bend for her, this one time, generously, because the theater perhaps recognized one of its own or felt her bittersweet mood, and relaxed enough to allow her to push it over with her sigh.

“It’s not as if this is even that great a show,” she said. “It’s so stupid–” she was taking her first steps through the mob of chairs jumbled between the narrow tables. There were stairs that led onto the stage, that were used every night by the comedian who did the first act when he came out to the audience and asked the people questions. The stairs were used again by the magician, in the final act, when he ran halfway down to release a flock of doves– a whole flock, dozens of them, swirling and flapping right over the heads of the audience, appearing out of nowhere practically in their faces. It was shocking, like a scene from Hitchcock, and it always got lots of applause. Before the advent of the comedian, there’d been no stairs and the magician had simply stood at center stage and let his doves go. The audience had oohed, usually, but they’d never clapped. Those stairs had made the magician famous.

Rachel took a step up, and then paused to look around again. “I mean, Space Cowgirls,” she said, “How dumb is that? And that pas de deux? That’s not really dancing– it’s so ugly, and we stick our butts out at the audience. In g-strings!” She climbed up two more steps. “Big Bows is just walking. The only thing that even pretends to be a dance number is Hot Streak, at the end of the Opening. And then we’re wearing all those big, red feathers– the audience can’t see anything, and the girls who do it on the stairs can’t really dance, anyway. There’s no room.” She stepped up the rest of the way and stood on the wooden floor– on the boards, as they say. “I was so excited when I got moved down to the floor in that number. I thought, ‘Now I’m going to get to really dance!’ But with all those feathers, and the heels, and the whole cast on stage at once–” she shrugged, “It’s useless. Have you ever looked out from here, Testy?”

Testy Lesbiana said nothing, but clumped up the eight stairs to join her. She, too, turned and looked out at the audience.

“What are you seeing?” she asked.

“I don’t know. There’s just so many tables. I mean, look way back there–” she pointed to one far back corner of the room, “that table way back there. It’s up almost as high as the top of the curtain. And it’s miles back. How can they see us? Do the waiters give them binoculars?”

Testy chuckled. “Yes, dear, very tasteful little opera glasses while they sip their Champagne and clap ever-so genteelly after every number. Just like the races at Ascot.”

“I don’t know what that is,” Rachel mumbled. “But they’re a mile away. How did I ever think that any of these people could see me? All they could see was... spectacle,” she shrugged.

“You are a spectacle, hon,” Testy said, then frowned. “That didn’t sound right. But they saw you, I promise you, baby.”

Rachel sighed again. The air, having thinned and leaned down, itself, to hear their conversation, didn’t remember to put up any resistance. “I don’t know, Testy,” the reputedly-spectacular and soon-to-be-legendary Showgirl said. “I feel like maybe I’ve been fooling myself all these years.”

Testy Lesbiana reached her arm around Rachel’s waist and hugged her. “No you weren’t,” she reassured her. “You’re gorgeous, you can dance the shit out of any number any show can throw at you, and you’ve had eighteen years of men drooling at you all over the world to prove it. Now don’t get down on me– just get out with me. You ready?”

Rachel twisted around. She looked away from the audience at the high back wall against which the staircase in Opening was anchored. She looked at the black curtains hanging two floors up, which she had to push aside to make her entrance in Finale Disco on an elevated platform. She looked off, into the wings, where bits and pieces of a spaceship and a turn of the century gazebo and unrecognizable building blocks that turned into that disco and that staircase and a hundred other venues for display and staging purposes, were broken down and stored. She turned full circle. She stared straight up, at the lights like a dulled rainbow hanging overhead. She dropped her eyes to the splintery wooden floor, which all the dancers complained about nightly. She looked out, again, and pictured all the thousands of people who had sat in those seats during her years dancing Extravaganza! and she pictured what she’d looked like to them.

She looked down at Testy.

“I guess I’m ready,” she said. “Let’s go.”

The ghost of Bugsy hung back and watched them from the farthest corner of the showroom. He hadn’t expected Testy to take along a sidekick. As far as he was concerned, she was the sidekick, his and Venus’. He’d thought she understood that, and would just go on her merry way after the big meeting without taking this extra time or making these other arrangements.

Still... it was done now, and he couldn’t foresee any particular problems. So long as she was on her way, dragging a showgirl along shouldn’t make a difference.

Should it? He wasn’t sure what she wanted with Rachel.

But he didn’t care. They’d be out of town by morning, if they followed their plans, and out of his sight for good or ill. He’d have to trust that she’d do her job, bring back her friend as promised, and provide them all with their one chance at beating down that damn god.

His lip curled as he thought of Zem, who wanted to pervert Vegas and all it stood for. But then he shook his head, breaking the shadow that fell from his hat and scattering it in all directions like a dog shaking off water.

He needed Venus to distract him. After they’d... celebrated in the wake of winning Testy Lesbiana, she’d taken to wandering again. Sometimes she was with him, sometimes not. When she was, she looked at him as if he were the only man in the whole world, and that made the other times, when she was gone... much worse. Much, much worse.

He tugged the brim of his fedora lower, and leaned back into the shadows. He didn’t want to go searching for her again. He didn’t want to find her, out with someone else or laughing it up with a whole crowd around her, or chattering to the Sphinx about her latest adventures, or...

He could imagine far too many things she might be doing.

If he had been the real Ben, if he’d been alive and his business associates had been there to see him, they would have shook their heads, clucked their tongues, and said to one another, he’s got it bad. He sneered at the thought.

He looked up to see the two figures onstage make their exit. The short, round one had her arm around the tall, pretty one’s waist. They disappeared through the stage door. Miles of emptiness made them look tiny, figures seen through the wrong end of a telescope. Then he heard the distant door slam, and the showroom was empty again, and still.

Too still. He separated himself from its dim corner and moved toward the main entrance. There was life out there, and light and fun and people laughing. Just the things he loved. He’d go surround himself with the nighttime life of Vegas, his natural habitat, and maybe he’d see...

Don’t even think about it, he told himself. He couldn’t bring himself to say her as he thought it.

NEXT POST: THE SECOND STORY (Friday 10/2)

A Simply Divine Commission

“I have one question,” Magnolia asked. “Will this wear off?”

“Of course,” Zem told her. “I didn’t make it permanent. That would be useless.”
spoke up as she and Zem made their way out through the Galaxy Casino.

He sounded surprised, as if only an idiot would have metamorphosed these two men into herd animals once and for all, and by her question she was suggesting he was not quite bright. Magnolia pondered, as best she was equipped to, the ways and means of divine beings, and went to answer another knock on the door. She’d spent three hours, so far, running interference between the boys and their staff, making up lies as to why they couldn’t be seen, not even for a moment, while she, Las Vegas’ mayor, was somehow available to answer doors and phone calls and send people away.

Meanwhile, inside the office, the two casino bosses baa-ed and bumped around the office and ate paperwork Magnolia was sure they’d miss later.

“I have one more question,” she said sometime later, as she and Zem made their way out through the casino, after the boys were transformed back and Zem had lectured them severely about how quickly he’d do it all over again if they annoyed him, and to meanwhile stop munching on phone cords.

“What’s the question?” Zem asked. He sounded amused, this time. A good day’s work, well done, his smile seemed to say.

“Where have you been all this time? I mean, have you been going around for generations, turning men into farm animals when they pissed you off, and the world’s just never heard of it? How do you hide things like that?”

She’d been wondering this for quite awhile.

“I’ve been sleeping a lot,” he answered.

Magnolia turned to stare at him while they walked. Ahead of them, her small detail of security guards and assistants, four men and two women with headsets, dedicated to clearing her path wherever she went and keeping her in touch with city hall, should they need her for anything, smoothly moved gamblers out of the way so she and Zem could get through the Galaxy unimpeded. Magnolia spared a brief moment to smile to right and left, and marveled at the way she’d been neglecting her public image since Zem’s appearance in her office.

He shrugged. An elderly gambler stepped slowly, eager to let him pass but unable to move quickly enough, and he smiled at her and steadied her elbow. She beamed at him, every steel-gray hair and liver spot glowing. Magnolia looked around at the other faces, and saw awe everywhere. Even without trying to show off, Zem was the center of attention.

“Sleeping?” she prompted.

“More or less,” he agreed. He smiled vaguely off into the crowd that was gathering as they went. Magnolia had seen it happen every time they walked in public. “I don’t exactly need to sleep,” he went on, “but sometimes years pass and there’s no reason to go out into the world. I can retreat, and ignore things if I want.”

“How useful,” she murmured.

He shrugged again. “The world gets boring, sometimes.”

“When it’s not worshiping you?” she suggested. She quirked a smile to suggest she meant it playfully.

He didn’t answer. They reached a side door, and with one last, unfocused glance at his fans, he led the way out.

“I hope that’s the last one,” he said.

“The Boy Scouts? Almost. I’d like to introduce you to a couple of the Downtown guys,” she told him, “But we’ve seen the most important people already. Now it’s time to get the plan together. Nail down the details, how it’s going to work. We’ve discussed a lot of possibilities, so we’ll need firm decisions now. Mostly, what attractions will go where. Then each property can figure out what new construction is needed. That sort of thing. And we don’t have much time.” Zem’s new New Vegas was slated to open for business New Year’s Eve, 2000. They had only slightly more than eight months to get it ready. Usually, these things took years to plan and implement.

“You do that,” he said offhandedly.

Magnolia watched him as he walked beside her. Her driver was wilted with waiting and boredom from his long, eventless day. “Really?” she questioned.

“Yes. I don’t like details. You know what we need.” He waved a hand negligently. “Just design what you want, and I’ll bless it so it’ll work.”

Magnolia’s thoughts tried to race but couldn’t get in gear. “But– don’t we need anything special? I mean, we talked about a temple of healing at the Foursquare– wouldn’t that need some facilities for medical care or examinations, at least? And blessings– do we need storage, or is there some holy mechanism for giving the supplicants what they ask for?” She walked around the car and fumbled for the door handle.

“No. Just make each place look good. My blessing will take care of everything. You’re thinking like a human,” he said as they both slid onto the hot seat. One of the mayor’s pledges in the last election was that she wouldn’t waste the citizens’ money by having her car run its air conditioning all day and night when she wasn’t in it. She’d deal with the heat just like a normal person. She’d regretted that grandstanding as soon as an unseasonable hot spell hit the next April. She’d been through three drivers already.

“Think like a god,” Zem told her. “The temples aren’t practical. They’re just marketing. It’s about style. It’s about appearance.”

“So I shouldn’t worry about functionality at all?”

“Functionality?” He asked as if the very word were beneath his notice, a cockroach scuttling through the Palace of Versailles, far too ignoble to merit outright attention.

Magnolia slid down till the top of her blond head rested on the sticky vinyl, her favorite position for thinking. “Hm...” she chewed her lip. “How did miracles work, two thousand years ago? I mean,” she squinted at Zem, “What did your worshipers actually have to do, to earn your indulgence?”

He was looking out the window. She’d noticed him doing that before, how he’d fasten on the passers-by and watch them. His face would be blank, but she thought of his look as hungry. Without turning, he shrugged. “Usually,” he answered, “life for them was so short, and there was so much action among the lower gods, that anybody who even got to the temple to ask for a favor merited attention. It didn’t happen that often. People weren’t so demanding of their gods, then.”

“I’ll bet,” Magnolia agreed. She, too, stared out the window on her side. “So we’ll just have to make them prove their worth,” she muttered. A smile began to spread across her face. “We’ll make them do a few tricks.”

She slid down farther in the seat, till she was looking almost straight up at the hotel towers and big facades they drove past. A scheme was beginning to form in her head. A network of temples, a web of holy places pulling the pilgrims all through Vegas and back where they’d started...

She grinned to herself. “The world won’t know what hit it,” she said.

On his side of the car, Zem regarded her.

No, it won’t, he didn’t say.

NEXT POST: GO EAST, YOUNG SHOWGIRL! (Monday 9/28)

For We Like Sheep

Zem and Magnolia’s only bad moment came at the Galaxy, when its twin Associate Presidents refused to budge.

It was a ridiculous fact that the Galaxy had two men to do the job accomplished everywhere else by one. Magnolia knew that family connections– convenient marriages to daughters of industrialists who wanted shares in casinos but didn’t want any public involvement with gambling– had gotten these two young men where they were. Around town, in the executive suites of other hotels, they were referred to as the boy scouts.

They were 29 and 33, twenty years younger than any of their peers, and Magnolia and all the other bosses knew they understood almost nothing of their job, in spite of their matching Harvard MBAs. Their consistent business strategy was simply to scorn all the other properties up and down the Strip and do the opposite, whatever that meant to them at the time. Luck and the Galaxy’s astoundingly loyal clientele had kept them in the black for their first year, but there was a not-too secret pool among hotel executives in town on their demise. Buy-in cost: an even grand.

Still, the Galaxy was one of the Strip’s oldest hotels, and it boasted the biggest and most profitable sports book in town, so Magnolia couldn’t skip it on the Grand Zem Tour. Besides, it had financial ties to three leading Downtown casinos, a whole different breed from the Strip titans, so it was important as a tool in bringing them in line. Once the Galaxy signed onto Zem’s plan (which it would, Magnolia knew, by whatever means proved necessary) all of Fremont Street would neatly follow.

Magnolia had postponed meeting the boys scouts as long as she could. She’d been reading a little mythology in her free hours, the few she had, and she had been imagining the boy scouts turning into oak trees (a new symbol of stubbornness) or wild boars (crashing through the casino and wrecking it) or something even weirder. The idea was repellent, yet somehow... enticing. Their appointment with the boy scouts drew her like a ten car pileup, and she was just as horrified at her own thirst for violence as she was at the prospect of whatever scout bloodshed Zem might wreak.

“Vegas is in trouble,” he’d begun, just as he always did.

“We know that. You can save your breath. We’re not falling into the same traps, and we’re not suffering.”

“Ah, but you will,” Zem told them smoothly. He’d been interrupted before.

“No, we don’t intend to,” the other associate president– the intellectual one this time, as opposed to the hot-headed one. They were like a pair of a Ken dolls, two clean-cut, thin, slightly-harried suburban boys. But one wore glasses and had dark hair, while the other got his thick locks streaked blond and drove sports cars. They were named Dan and Sam, respectively. “The Galaxy’s profits are up,” Dan continued, “Our customer counts are consistent, and our sports book brings in enough money to run the whole place if we need it to.”

“Yes, I’ve heard about your famous sports book.” Zem looked over at Magnolia, and she guessed– she was beginning to think she could read a few of his moods, although he revealed very little, which drove her crazy– that she saw impatience. She tensed, or would have if she hadn’t already been sitting straight up with every muscle tighter than it had been since her last time swinging on a pole. “That sports book has quite a loyal following, doesn’t it?” Zem asked them.

He looked back and forth from Dan to Sam. One had to. They sat on opposite sides of an antique partner desk that more than filled their office, a one-time hotel room in the Galaxy’s motor-lodge-like building. Behind them a wall of glass revealed the pool two stories down. The aqua shag carpeting had not been changed since sometime in the early seventies, and just about matched the pool through the window.

Zem looked back and forth again. All meetings with the rulers of the Galaxy were like table tennis matches. “Someone told me that you get many of the same customers who came here twenty or thirty years ago. They’ve been coming here longer than you two have been alive, some of them. They’re still making jokes about the hotel’s last remodel.”

“That’s right–” Sam, the daredevil, blurted, “We get all our loyal customers. So what do we need with any new ‘new Vegas’? All the other places can go to hell, we’ll still be here raking in the cash.”

“Those loyal customers must be getting old,” Zem said.

The boys looked at each other. Magnolia waited, knowing this was their Achilles heel, and knowing also that they knew it. The Galaxy, aside from having the most money-making sports book and the most out-of-date carpet, drew by far the oldest demographic of any property in Vegas.

“Gamblers don’t live forever,” Zem continued. “In fact, they have shorter life expectancies than anyone except for coal miners. It’s amazing you still have enough customers to require a full staff to serve them, if you’re relying on the people who first came here in the Sixties and Seventies.”

“And besides,” he continued, “What happens when the rest of the town goes bust all around you? Or goes in a new direction, all at once and all together? Do you have a brilliant plan for that eventuality?”

Magnolia was a little disappointed. Zem’s argument was a good one, and she knew that Dan and Sam had no answer, but they’d also heard it endless times before. They’d been questioned this way by competitors and union bosses and high school journalists, for god’s sake. Magnolia looked at her new lord and master and waited. He’d better have something more convincing up his sleeve.

“We exist in a different arc of the spectrum from most other properties–” Dan was saying.

Magnolia caught Zem’s eye. She looked at him, glanced at her watch, then looked back at the two rebellious mini-executives facing them.

He frowned. She seemed to be waiting for some big performance from him. Lightning bolts or thunderstorms or turning himself into a huge, horrifying monster to eat everybody in sight.

Well, he’d done those things, of course. But it had been awhile.

“The ‘New Vegas’ can do whatever it wants, Mr. Zem, we here at the Galaxy don’t need gimmicks or...” Dan was still talking. Zem had never met someone so young who was so long-winded. With so very little to say.

Zem looked at Magnolia again. She was watching the boy scouts, then glancing at him sidelong. He sighed.

He wished she wouldn’t expect so much. That was one difference in the modern world he’d noticed– godly terrors and miracles were so in demand. A deity never got the chance to strike without warning, these days. Everything had been pre-planned, requested and prepared before he even got involved.

Still... perhaps Magnolia deserved her big show from him. And perhaps it would inspire her as well as these two nincompoops.

He was growing tired, anyway. Dan and Sam clearly weren’t going to surrender before logic. Dan was saying something about demographics and marketing objectives, and Sam was interrupting regularly with barbs and insults about their competitors, which Dan would then backpeddle and try to mitigate. Pure MBA-speak, the whole performance. He tuned in enough to hear:

“...the bottom line, Mr. Zem, is that we’re not sheep here at the Galaxy. We won’t be herded–”

“Ah ha!” Zem exploded in his turn, and stood. “That’ll do it,” he said to Magnolia.

The two associate presidents had stood up, too. Sam raised his fists like a schoolyard tough guy. Zem didn’t notice. He just looked at them, and Magnolia got the big dramatic moment she’d been looking for.

The Boy Scouts shrank. And changed. They fell forward, their hands clumping back down on their desk and their heads flopping. Their bodies grew rounder. And softer. They sprouted wool, it curled all over them. Their semi-good suits– high priced, but bought at middling department stores, hardly first rate– fell apart and fell away, and more wool popped out. Their faces lengthened and horns grew from their temples, then migrated up their heads farther. Their eyes became hard like pebbles. Their ears disappeared, and new, much bigger ones, sprouted.

After perhaps a minute, the transformation was complete, and Zem and Magnolia were across the partner desk from two black and white goats, each standing with its front hooves on the desk, slipping on the polished surface and looking alarmed. As much as goats can look alarmed.

“They’re not sheep,” Zem said.

One of the goats said, “Meeeeh.”

NEXT POST: A DIVINE COMMISSION (Friday 9/25)

The End of the Beginning of the End

Testy Lesbiana finished it, with barely a struggle.

“How much longer do you think you’ll do this, honey?” she asked Rachel one night when the other girls on the row had gone and only the two of them still sat on their dressing row. Testy was mending fishnets, pulling and tugging and then filling in the spaces where the tights had snagged on rhinestones or zippers or hooks and eyes. Rachel was sitting and staring at herself in the mirror, occasionally running her fingers through her hair or picking up a blush brush but mostly just sitting, silent, not getting up to go home yet.

“What?”

“Well…” Testy never looked up from her handiwork, “How much longer? One year? Ten years? Until they throw you out on your perky ass with the garbage?”

“If my ass is still so perky, why would they throw it out?” Rachel mumbled.

“Maybe they won’t. But you know how Honoré is. I just wouldn’t want you to get caught unawares, doll-face. And you know, there’s a whole ‘nother world out there. Lots of things a smart, hot chick like yourself could do to make a living.”

A heavy sigh. “But this is all I’ve ever wanted.”

A shrug. “Maybe that’s because you don’t know of any alternatives.”

“Maybe. Maybe— oh Testy, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know how—”

“Don’t start that, now. No moaning. Nobody knows anything, in my experience. And I’ve had a lot of experience, Miss Thing, so you can accept my authority on the subject. Nobody knows what the hell they’re doing when they do it. All those investors on Wall Street just take their best guess. All the producers in Hollywood just do what gets their own rocks off, or what their wives pussy-whip ‘em into. Nobody knows, and especially nobody knows better than you do, right now. Take a chance, darlin’. You can always change your mind. You can even come back.”

“Testy… are you trying to talk me into something?”

Her dresser looked up and smiled.

“Oh yes.”

NEXT POST: FOR WE LIKE SHEEP (Monday 9/21)

Without A Good Excuse to Wear a Dress

The moon raced through the night, but Testy Lesbiana raced faster.

Rachel was posing quite a problem. Ten minutes after she’d crept off tonight, Testy had thrown down her mending, reached under her work table, and pulled out her own private treasure chest. It had begun life as a cheap toolbox, a plain, black rectangle with a simple chrome hasp. It might have cost ten dollars. Now it was dented, banged up, scratched, and as near and dear to Testy’s heart as her car or her favorite stiletto heels. It held her make up, her eyelashes, her curlers and crimpers and, folded up and kept clean in a plastic baggie, her emergency breasts.

She’d plunked the box down on her work table, peered at herself in the mirror, and set to work. Sometimes, a girl needed to break free. To get dolled up and outrageous, and go spin a little chaos in the desert. She had just the dress for it hidden away, kept here at work for just such an occasion. She had shoes, and the box, and her massive, flip-top mobile behemoth out in the parking lot just waiting to roar down some empty roads. Testy’s car was officially christened the Queen of the Road. And the time had come, she’d decided, for a royal invasion.

Now, she sailed on a wave of bass and Bassey, cruised with the crooning of Horne, and steered with her fingertips. The scorpions hung by, silent; the lizards held their breaths to hear. And Testy Lesbiana wondered to herself, What the hell am I doing?

She’d known that her time in Vegas was ending. She’d known it for a long time. But like homeowners who refuse to see the nibble marks on their cereal boxes in the pantry, she’d ignored the warnings till they came right out and beaned her, till she ran rammed her own head against their dead-end wall with its big, screaming letter left their by some lunatic therapist: GO!

Testy knew about exits. She’d pulled up stakes more times in her life than she cared to count anymore. This was just one more carefully staged Fade Into the Sunset. The only problem this time, the only roadblock on that trail heading into the great big, blobby, orange egg yolk of a sun hitting the horizon, overflowing its bounds and leaving a sticky, lecithin mess all over the pristine kitchen counter of the sky, was Rachel.

That would teach her to get close to someone, she thought.

“Oh hell!” she said aloud, and swung her car onto the shoulder and stopped.

Testy had never dealt with stowaways. When she’d picked up and gone, she’d gone, with nary a backward look or memento to weigh her down. But here she was, large as life and feeling twice as antsy, and this plucky, sweet, on-the-edge-of-overage little gamine looked after her with eyes big and pitiful enough to belong to a kitten doing advertisements for humane society donations.

Vegas winked at her through her rear-view mirror, glaring as beadily as an acid-tripping crows.

“Oh, fuck you,” she glared back.

She hauled herself out of the driver’s seat and stroked her sequins down once or twice. Then she pulled her heels out of the gravel and stepped onto the blacktop, humming Stormy Weather tunelessly. Her dangling handbag swung in time.

What does a drag queen carry in her bag? The basics, like the Queen of England has in hers. Lipstick, powder, and a condom. The Queen perhaps trades in the condom for an extra pair of gloves, or maybe cab fare in case she gets separated from her party (imagine the Queen hailing a cab and saying “To the Palace!” as she settles in the back seat. Would she know how to do it? Does she understand the very mechanics of hailing and directing a cab? Does she know what a cab is? Maybe there are classes, Queen Classes, to help her should she lose her way.) But a drag queen comes prepared, so to speak, and has ways and means of getting by without any money. So Testy Lesbiana swung her handbag loosely (but always in rhythm) as she made her way across the narrow highway, and then through the gravel on its other side, and so into the desert itself.

Even the greatest drag queen has to pee, sometimes. Some girls might have barely stepped outside their cars to pull their skirts up, but Testy Lesbiana was from an era that recognized a lady when it saw one, and peeing on the road was simply tacky. She walked a good distance into the desert, looking back to see that the piles of sagebrush around her provided at least minimal screening from the road.

She stopped. “Welcome to the dollhouse,” she muttered, and proceeded. The little bush in front of her seemed excited to be feeling moisture, at first, though it retracted a little a second later, uncertain what this liquid was that sparkled like moonlight but then pooled and sank into the sand like a mirage, bitter as an empty promise of water to a lost hiker without a canteen.

Testy raised her perfectly penciled eyebrows at the bush. “You’re welcome,” she told it. She rearranged her clothes, bottom layers to top, working her way outwards. Peeing en costume, as it were, was not an easy business.

When she was finished, she took a moment to survey the spot she’d chosen. Like all the Mojave, it was sand and sage, in its endless variation.

“Just like me,” she told it. “A little drift of sand, a little tumbleweed passing by—”

She broke off, suddenly inspired. Could she, she wondered, find a good, dead sagebrush, the classic tumbleweed, and fashion it into a fab wig? Spraypaint it silver, perhaps, and throw some glitter on, then drape herself in something sandy and gossamer, a gold mesh, maybe, and call herself the Queen of the Desert? She might put together a whole new act, resurrect Wonder?Boys! in some new guise, start all over right here—

She sighed. She shook her head, just to make it official. “No, you big, huge, desperate queen,” she lectured. “Time to get out. Pack up the kid and drive away. Don’t you fall back and get stuck, and don’t you let her, either.”

Another sigh, and an echo from the sandy, still air.

“That’s right,” Testy Lesbiana told it.

She turned and started back to her car.

And then something happened.

Not much happens, ordinarily, in the middle of the Mojave. There is a good reason that the words deserted and desertion come from desert, and also a good reason why the Mojave outside of Vegas is commonly referred to with words like wasteland, wilderness, and goddamn-it’s-empty-out-here. There is, in other words, a whole lotta nuthin’ out in the Mojave, and a whole lotta nothin’ doin’.

So, when you, a solitary traveler, stop to pee at some unseemly hour after midnight, all alone on a two-land state road forty minutes from Vegas, in the middle of the unmoving sea of sand and sagebrush, under the silvered sky before the jagged backdrop mountains, why, then you will also be quite surprised to hear a voice behind you.

Particularly if that voice is louder than the loudest loudspeakers in the Extravaganza! Theater, if it booms and shakes the sagebrush, if it shatters the still of the desert (no longer deserted) night as abruptly and effectively as Jehovah’s own well-known cameo in another desert, with flaming flora.

“LISTEN TO ME, TESTY LESBIANA,” came the voice.

“SHIT!” Testy Lesbiana screamed.

NEXT POST: THE END OF THE BEGINNING OF THE END (Friday 9/18)

The Beginning of the End

Miss Honoré started it, when Rachel came in one night, soaked and running late.

It had been a rainy year, as has been mentioned. Rachel had actually purchased an umbrella, after the third storm in a row hit precisely as she parked her car in the last free spot in the Grand Hotel’s employee parking lot, from which one could, on clear days, actually see the employees’ entrance shining mirage-like on the horizon. Her $25, super-compact, guaranteed to survive a hurricane purchase broke the moment she tested it out in her living room. Her roommate, Helgi, a six-foot-two Amazon whom the rain would never, ever dare to dampen, had laughed and suggested she lean it by the front door, where she’d be sure to remember to take it back and exchange it. Three weeks later, the broken umbrella was still leaning there, and aside from tripping over it as she rushed out of the door each night, Rachel had had no more contact with it.

Tonight, as she leaned over Miss Honoré’s desk to sign in, simultaneously tilting her head back so her hair wouldn’t drip onto Miss Honoré ’s papers and also leaning sideways so her bag wouldn’t slip off her left shoulder and thump into the side of the desk, her boss looked up at her with a gleam in her eye.

“Rachel,” she said, stretching out her hand to tap, tap, tap her cigarette against the enormous marble ashtray that weighed down one side of her desk, “I was looking through your file today.”

Rachel had learned long ago not to speak when she came to the office. Miss Honoré usually didn’t. She didn’t, in fact, generally acknowledge her dancers in any way, unless she were handing out critiques.

“You— were?” Rachel stumbled.

“We were cleaning out old files, Gina and I,” Honoré told her with the barest of nods toward her assistant, sitting at her own tiny desk in the office’s darkest corner. Gina stared up like a scared cave creature from the shadows. “Just came across it,” Honoré went on. “I’d forgotten how long you’d been with us.”

Her words rang and echoed. Old files. How long. How loooooooooong. They twisted through the air in the office.

Rachel and Miss Honoré looked at each other. Miss Honoré smiled, slightly, and a tiny wisp of smoke trickled from her lips, the twitching tail-tip of a struggling rat she’d swallowed. Rachel felt definitively turned to stone, caught in Medusa’s gaze on the stained and threadbare carpet.

“It’s been five years,” she mumbled.

“Yes, seems like no time, doesn’t it? Contracts go by like nothing, when you’ve been around awhile. It’s the same old story.” Miss Honoré smirked, or grinned, or anyway stretched her lips at Rachel.

Old. There was that word again. “I guess.”

Miss Honoré nodded, and after waiting for a frozen eternity, Rachel realized the conversation had ended. She fled. Gina’s cave-creature eyes followed her, but Honoré had moved on to other things.

NEXT POST: A HOT QUEEN IN THE DESERT (Monday 9/14)

Tea and Lunacy

“Vegas is going nowhere,” Zem told the President of Bombay. “You corporate guys don’t have any idea what you’re doing here. All those mini-amusement parks and water worlds are the laughing stock of your industry, and you can’t think of an alternative. None of you wants to sink any money into entertainment or real services anymore, like the Mob did. But you all have to outdo each other. You all just keep trying these tourist attractions, fountains and volcanoes and bigger and better pool areas, because you don’t have any real ideas. And how long can it go on, Errol? Is there any sugar for this tea?”

“Maybe we should back up a bit,” Magnolia suggested.

“What? Why?” Zem asked. He took a sip of the hot liquid and grimaced.

“Excuse me,” The President of Bombay said, and took a call.

Remember that this all took place in an earlier era, when Las Vegas was still enamored of families, before it figured out that its best selling points were the anti-family ones. Vegas in those days thought that casinos and drinking and cocktail waitresses with their breasts cantilevered to within an inch of their chin made for a perfect family outing. Call them naïve, but at least they were creative. Kids and tits! That’s thinking outside the box, that is!

Oh, silly Vegas.

Shortly thereafter, of course, they discovered what anybody could have guessed: that no one really wants to stay out boozing and losing until three in the morning when there’s a hotel room full of snotnose brats waiting and crying for them upstairs. No, gambling palaces are for those who can appreciate them, for grownups who can enjoy the cards, and the stakes, not to mention the tits, the way God intended.

Some god, anyway.

But back to our tale. While Errol talked into his phone, and Zem gazed aimlessly around the room, taking in the crown molding, the ceiling fan sending breezes over the papers on Errol’s desk, the shuttered doors, Magnolia frowned, poured milk into her tea, and stirred it rapidly.

When Zem had left her office Friday night the week before, she’d had plenty to think about over the weekend. Not just her appearances at a Little League baseball game and a grand opening at a desert garden meant to teach the residents how to xeriscape their yards, and not just what she’d say to the reporter who was scheduled to interview her Monday morning for a Sunday feature in the paper, and not even about her upcoming battles with the city council regarding Fletch’s zoning change and the approvals she wanted for three new resorts and their attendant planned communities on the outskirts of the city. She had a lot to think about from Zem’s conversation.
Although it had not been a conversation so much as a proposal. And not a proposal so much as simple dictation. Zem had a vision for Las Vegas. He, himself, stood at the center of it, and he promised great benefits to anyone who signed on and served him. But that was the sticking point, to Mayor Magnolia Conner. There was a lot of serving involved.

In fact, the very point of Zem’s new plan was serving. And the other point was... it wasn’t optional. Magnolia wasn’t certain what would have happened if she’d told him no, she wouldn’t take him around to meet the movers and shakers, no, she wouldn’t help convince them, no, she wouldn’t dictate terms to the council and rebuild her city and its image in his image, but she feared it wasn’t good. She felt quite certain that he wouldn’t simply disappear and leave her to pursue her plans, running her city and maybe moving on to senator after her next term, or maybe governor. She feared that she wouldn’t be permitted to continue at all, in terms of living and breathing. And Magnolia, always practical, wasn’t ready to quit doing any of that, yet.

“Oh, one more thing,” Zem had said as he’d walked toward the door of her office to leave (though why he bothered, she couldn’t imagine, when he’d so manifestly gotten in without doing anything mundane like turning doorknobs or checking in with reception). “You realize, I’m telling you this as a courtesy. It’s easier if I work through you. But this will happen. I’m not just some crackpot.”

And then he’d smiled down at her, across the room where she sat, still at her desk, as if this were a normal meeting. And something had happened.

Looking back, Magnolia had a hard time describing, even to herself, exactly what it was. She couldn’t find words to accurately pin down just what she’d seen. Or sensed. Or experienced. She had no way to describe it. Nothing in her famously infamous life had prepared her for what he’d shown her in her own office at 6:45 on Friday.

There had been darkness. It had streamed out from him as if it were light, as if he were standing right on top of some blinding spotlight beaming its eye in her direction. The coils of it had reached out, and surrounded her. In darkness. And then there’d been a screaming, whistling something rushing past her head. She’d seen his face, staring at him as the world went mad, but then that melted. Or grew and expanded, till he was too vast to be seen, impossible for her eyes or her thoughts to grasp. She couldn’t see him, she couldn’t see anything. But she had felt... something. A grip. A clench that could have crushed the whole earth, crumbled it like sand at a beach to be washed away with the next tide. She felt the clutch at her heart, at her lungs, and at her thoughts, too, and she thought she heard laughter, or something like laughter, the idea of laughter at her expense. How does a being large as the universe show mirth? What happens to the thing it laughs at?

Magnolia came to gasping, and found her office in darkness, cold and empty. She’d crawled to her chair from where she’d been, lying collapsed against her desk with her cheek pressed into Fletch’s forgotten fountain pen. She’d felt that bruise, the impression of the pen’s length and breadth, clearly all evening. She clung to that perception, to the simple pain that had an object, a clear cause, a reason. And she’d thought about the things she’d seen.

She wanted to be able to describe it. She wanted to tell other people, Fletch and Errol and the other CEO’s and presidents and bosses, not to mention, down the road, her team at City Hall, her aides and bodyguards, the representatives elected to the privilege of fighting with her day after day. She wanted to let them know she hadn’t rolled over without a qualm. She hadn’t given up her city and her job, hadn’t handed over all the reigns of power, without a second thought, as if they meant nothing to her, to this man who’d just appeared out of nowhere (literally!) in her office on a Friday afternoon. She’d had reason, she’d been convinced.

Or convicted. Like a convert to a new religion, whether they’re looking for a revelation or not. She’d listened to him, she’d had his vision impressed on her mind, then when she might have doubted after he was gone, he had turned back and said what he’d said– “I’m telling you this as a courtesy, it will happen”– and she’d seen the light. Or, if not the light, exactly... well, she’d seen something.

And she was left with a horrible, undeniable conviction that all he’d said was word-for-word true, and he would take Vegas and make of it just what he wanted, and her only choice was serve and follow or get out of his way– or no, honestly, get swept out of his way if she didn’t.

So now, on the next Tuesday, having stumbled and stuttered her way through the weekend’s personal appearances and Monday’s interview (God alone knew how that article would come out– or maybe not God alone!) Magnolia sat with Zem in the first of the many meetings he’d requested. Or, not so much requested as ordered.

Politely. So far, he’d been very cordial.

They’d started at Bombay, and here they were, in audience with its president, who’d had tea ready for his good friend the mayor and her new associate, who’d called his proper British secretary in to serve it as if they’d stepped, not just from the already-warm March weather outside into the cool, air-conditioned environs of this carved and dark-wood-porticoed mini-enclave where he worked, but all the way across the world and back through time into the old British colony on the subcontinent.

The secretary had presented the tea in its silver service beautifully, then left, just like the good servant she was. Magnolia spared a moment from her anxiety to wonder whether Zem had noticed and whether he would find that kind of obsequiousness useful or attractive in his master plan. Would that middle-aged expatriate soon find herself in some position of great power while Magnolia, once mayor and local star, would be reduced to anonymity or worse? She scalded her tongue on the tea and her frown grew ever deeper.

The President of Bombay frowned, too. He was a corpulent, fifty-ish white man who now looked impatient and displeased as he hung up his phone.

“I’m afraid I can’t give you very much more time, Magnolia,” he informed them. “Really packed day– you know how it is.”

The brush-off. Zem smiled at him.

“Just listen for another minute or so,” he said. He looked the President of Bombay in the eye. Errol waited. His hand, which he’d already raised to lift the phone again, stopped and stayed motionless.

Magnolia waited. Errol was not known for his kindness or willingness to suffer fools.

“This is a decent place you run here,” Zem began. “But it’s in trouble.”

Bombay had plunked itself down in the middle of the Strip two years before, like the Taj Mahal’s obese cousin, the one whom nobody wanted to sit next to at family holidays because he picked his nose and ate the snot at dinner. The overwhelming fact of Bombay, physically, was how overwhelming it was. The casino floor alone could have served as an airplane hangar for a fleet of jets. It towered over its nearest neighbors and its facade stretched farther than an approaching tourist could see all at once. It hulked dozens of stories tall, featuring an enormous central onion dome and surrounding minarets just like the original Taj Mahal, but on a scale that would have sent that relatively tasteful building running for the hills in terror.

The Taj, as it turned out, was one of the few historical structures in the world whose basic geometry really lent itself to the modern hotel/casino industry. But of course, if one wanted a mega-resort with rooms and suites numbered in the thousands, a certain expansion was in order. Bombay’s designers had stayed true to their inspiration. The place was both surrounded by and filled with fountains, gardens, marble archways and alcoves, geometric planters and domed bird cages and women in lovely, flowing, pastel robes. It was already referred to as one of the New Wonders of the New Las Vegas. It was all just terrifyingly enormous.

A few people had been heard to point out that the real Taj Mahal was in Agra, not Bombay, but they were ignored.

Zem said, “Now, Errol, I know you know the economics of your business here. You lay out these huge costs to entice the public through the doors, all the overhead involved with this place and all its features and attractions and staff and treats, just to get people to walk in. Then, you have to hope that they’ll lose enough, on average, in the slot machines or on the tables, or maybe spend enough at the restaurants– though that’s almost impossible, I’ll bet– to pay for the efforts you made to get them to come here rather than pass you by and go to the Desert Oasis or Gotham or the Grand. Isn’t that how it works?”

“More or less,” Errol agreed. He still hadn’t moved. His hand still hovered, his eyes were still locked on Zem’s.

“Yes, I thought so. And you think, since you’ve got the best attractions at the moment, that your path is clear, that tourists will keep flocking here forever. Or at least for as long as you’re in charge, right? But what about when the next mega-hotel opens? Its attractions will be newer, they’ll be even more spectacular, more advanced, more state-of-the-art. I’ve heard there’s a company considering some space north of you for a place called 3001. They’re building a giant spaceship that’s going to feature dealers dressed as aliens, a totally computerized front desk, and a ride to simulate a weightless space walk. It’s very convincing, I’m told. Or Hiroshima, the property they’re breaking ground for right across the street. Its hotel tower will be in the shape of a giant mushroom cloud, and inside the casino there will be intermittent flashes of blinding light to freeze people’s shadows against the walls for five minutes at a time. They’re going to offer real geishas instead of a concierge for the higher-priced rooms. What will you do when those two places open, Errol? Will your gardens– which are very pretty, don’t get me wrong, they’re very pretty and peaceful, a nice break from all the jangling of the slot machines– will your gardens be able to compete with that?”

Errol’s eyes had been getting rounder as he listened. Now he glanced at Magnolia, looking for confirmation or perhaps some sort of reassurance. She said nothing, and he turned back.

“I suppose we’ll have to respond,” he said. “Perhaps some new construction–”

“A-ha!” Zem pounced. “That’s it exactly! That’s exactly what you’d do, isn’t it? New construction. Try to outdo the new guys at their own game, just the same way that the Galaxy built their new Fifties wing and Mob tower to coincide with your opening, and the Grand put in that lighted floor throughout their casino when Gotham opened down the street.”

“That lighted floor is a waste,” Errol muttered. “Shows all the trash, the panels have to be replaced all the time, looks like a disco from twenty years ago.”

“I agree,” Zem nodded. “But you can’t blame them, right? And who’s to say you won’t find yourself signing off on something just as dumb when Hiroshima opens? Just to compete, just to stay in the game, keep pulling Ma and Pa Tourist in each day. You’ve got to clear– what?– two million a day to keep this place plugged in? Two million five? Hiroshima will have even bigger overhead, and 3001, too. How many new visitors will Vegas have to attract in five years to cover their expenses, and still keep you in rupees too? It’s a losing rat race, Errol. Somebody, sometime is going to hit the wall and go under, and if you’re not all careful, every one of you will follow.” He took the last swig from his teacup and reached over to the gleaming, ornate pot for more. “Really needs sugar,” he muttered.

Errol Manoff had slumped. He looked at Magnolia.

“I didn’t want to hear him say it either, Errol,” she said. “But we all know it’s true. We’ve all known it for a long time. Ever since the Oasis opened with that hourly typhoon in its lake out front. The tourists loved it, we got world press, but how was anybody going to top it? Then Gotham built an entire comic strip version of New York City, all those crazy, leaning towers and primary colors, and the tourists loved that too, and then the Nile Hotel, with the monoliths and the mummy costumes for the dealers... where is it going to end? We’ve got lots of desert to build people’s big ideas, but there’s only so much money in the world. And only so many tourist dollars, realistically, to keep it going.”

Errol looked back at Zem.

“I’m bringing you the new New Las Vegas,” Zem grinned at him, swirling his cup slightly. He’d thrown one knee over the other. “Better, less expensive,” he continued, “and the big attractions won’t cost you a dime. At least, once you build them, they won’t. To run,” he clarified. “Want to hear how? You know–” he added slyly, glancing down into his cup, “that all your competitors will be listening, over the next week or two.”

His grin stretched wider, and his gray eyes ignited with little pinpoints of light, fiery reflections bouncing off the high polish of Errol’s desk between them.

His teeth sparkled, too. His cheeks stretched to accommodate his grin. He had a lot of teeth to fit in there. Thoughts of sharks, or vipers who unhinge their jaws to swallow prey, might have occurred to someone who knew him.

“Tell me,” Errol Manoff said.

Zem grinned. Magnolia, who had carefully schooled not only her face but her whole body to hide her tension, relaxed slightly.

The heavens, which had looked down on this city since its beginnings, and on Zem for more time than they would admit to, might have rolled their eyes if they’d been watching. But no one in Las Vegas paid attention to the heavens, anyway.

NEXT POST: THE BEGINNING OF THE END (Friday 9/11)

Suitor

He arrived as a suitor, and Venus had always delighted in suitors.

“I’ve been noticing you,” he told her. Of course he had. He noticed everything. That was his job. He’d been noticing this woman for a long, long time.

She gave him a smile, just passed it out with as little thought as if it were a leaflet advertising strippers and escorts and he were just the last pedestrian who had walked by her with an open hand.

He smiled back, looked squarely at her — just like a tourist, who are known the world over for mindless smiling, even, if they’re not paying attention, when someone hands them pornography.

“I like what I see,” he said, and she threw him a dimple to go with the smile, the way Gypsy Rose Lee might have tossed a barrette from her hair to the guy in the front row who’d caught her glove and sat holding it, staring, starry-eyed, at her while the rest of her audience watched and chuckled at the schmoe who thought he’d connected with her.

“I’ve been here for a long time,” she said. “What took you so long?”

He grinned, all his teeth lining up in his mouth, like good, loyal foot soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder, ready to do battle. The original Bugsy was known for his shark-smile. “You can’t approach a lady without preparing for it,” his ghost told the goddess. He pulled out a bunch of roses from behind his back.

“Oh,” Venus breathed as she took them. She’d always enjoyed this kind of offering best.

They were in a dark and empty place. Around them lay the black, dulled glitter of a grand showroom after the curtain had come down, after the crowds had left, after the cleanup crews had finished. Venus and her suitor stood in the very center of the booths and tables and draperies and faced one another as the scent of his flowers rose and billowed like incense. Around them, the empty air stirred with echoes of past decades, earlier intimacies, fabled sparks of romance. Marilyn and Joe might have sat in the booth in front of them. Priscilla, underage, might have clung to Elvis at the door. Memories of a hundred thousand couples on their way to the wedding chapel or on their first night together, or ten feet away from each other, just about to meet and fall in love, filled all the empty space of that room, wall to wall and floor to ceiling.

“You men knew ways to woo women, a few decades ago,” Venus commented.

“We did. I do,” he said. He slipped his arm around her waist. “I still remember.”

“What do you want with me?” she asked.

He kept his arm where it was, kept pulling her close against his side, but his expression turned more serious. “There’s someone here, in town. I think you know something about him.”

She looked away. “I know.”

“I’m sorry to bring this up, right when we’re just meeting and things are going so nicely. But I think he has to be... dealt with.”

It was a line from another era. All the memories of the lovers around them might have suddenly donned dark suits and cocked their fedoras low over one eye. The girls might have pushed their chests and hips out farther, gazing at the world with an arrogant challenge.

The ghost had learned much, in the last few days. He’d stood at a distance and watched this new guy operate, watched him pinball from blonde to brunette, and watched him watch the city, watch its players, look over its pickings.

Zem looked at these people the way a lion looks at a wildebeest herd. Not that the ghost knew those things or would recognize a wildebeest herd if it thundered down Las Vegas Boulevard in front of his eyes. But he knew Zem’s look. That, he’d seen before.

“Do you know how...” Venus started, then she looked him up and down. “No. You don’t know. You don’t know him.”

He never blinked, never stopped softly stroking the small of her back with his thumb, so conveniently lying right there. “No,” he told her. “I don’t know how. I don’t know enough about him. But I think you do. And I know… everybody. You tell me the how, baby. I’ll find the who.”

This was classic god stuff. Deities never do their own work, dirty or honorable. Didn’t you know that? The gods are toolmasters, puppeteers. We are all just felt animals with their hands up our asses.

“We need a champion,” Venus said.

He reached up to touch the flowers she was holding. Pale yellow buds, with their petals just beginning to open. Rare in the desert, and perfect for her— simple and fresh. Other women, trying to look like Venus, laid it on thick, had to use pounds of paint, but the original was untouched, herself, uncomplicated.

“I know people, kiddo,” he said. “I know everybody. Your friend–”

She drew back. “Not my friend.”

“Forgive me.” He nuzzled his chin against her clouds of hair. “I can see you hate him. He only wants to rule people. No temptation. No fun. It’s not how we do things here.” He smiled, sweeping his eyes around the crowded, empty showroom. “This town is honest, baby. We don’t have to lie to get the people in. And I can think of one or two… characters who might be able to help us get him out of here.” His lips turned up as his look and his voice stroked every pore in her skin. She shivered at the thrill. “Tell me what we need, angel,” he growled, “Tell me what’ll do the trick with this guy, and I’ll tell you where to find it.”

She looked up and stared into his eyes. If they’d been in a movie, the music would have begun to come up slowly. “And then what?”

The gods are inveterate bargainers.

A grin broke the surface of the ghost’s lips and spread slowly but inexorably, like a submarine surfacing till it was all she could see. “Oh yeah,” he said. “Let’s go somewhere.” The air, squeezed out from between them, danced all around their pressed bodies, electrified. If someone had been watching, some cleaning woman who remembered glimmerings of romance and mystery, she might have seen a sparkle erupt and fountain.

“We’ll talk,” he promised.

“Take me,” she invited, and the ghost pulled Venus, the eternally most beautiful woman in the world, inexorably from the room.

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