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)