by Chris Abani
But there was something so ordinary and everyday about cooking for a loved one that left her breathless with anticipation. Coffee percolating in the pot, made from fresh, rough-ground beans and distilled water; toast burning slowly, held down twice in the toaster because he loved to scrape the burned crumbs off with a knife, the sound like metal on wood; and scrambled egg whites; and for her, a quartered grapefruit and green tea with honey.
It was like a curtain being pulled back on a magic show. The quotidian nature of other people’s lives was fascinating to her. She had grown up in the cold, crowded squash of Chicago and had loved nothing more than riding the train, staring into the lit windows of other people’s lives trying to read something about them from those brief glimpses. She came to believe that those lives were better than hers, the tease of those windows proof of the fact. Breakfast was just one of the ways she pursued the lives hidden from her.
And what might make a person desire another’s life so much? Someone perhaps whose real name was Adele Kaczynski, a biracial woman born on the east side who turned out darker than her white mother could live with, and was left on the steps of the Northwestern Teaching Hospital. Someone who had grown up on the South Side moving from foster home to foster home. Someone who fell in love with her last foster father and who began dancing in strip clubs at sixteen to pay for his drug habit and who finally left him and fled to Las Vegas to pursue her dream of becoming a real dancer. Someone who changed her name first to Egypt, then Nile, before deciding they were too common, finally settling on Asia; maybe that kind of person.
She had a couple of dance auditions in the afternoon for some new shows that would open in the New Year that she was excited about. It was tough competition, though, and with each year it got tougher as she got older and her competition grew younger, a ridiculous thing for a twenty-six-year-old to be worried about, but this was Vegas.
Landing a role in a show like Zumanity would mean she could give up prostitution. It was possible to make fifty, sometimes sixty thousand a year in a show like that, minus tips. Perhaps then she could give in to Sunil, give in to her own feelings. But until then, there was breakfast.
When she’d first shared her dream with Sunil, about dancing in a big show, he’d asked: Why not just dance in one of the strip clubs until then? That way you can give up prostitution. She’d never told him about her past, but that didn’t make it hurt any less. Sunil’s impression of her was the only one she cared about, and the fact that he thought she was a prostitute through some thoughtless action on her part felt unbearable. She wanted to tell him all of this. Instead she’d said: What would we have if I weren’t a prostitute? And although she’d been happy to see the look of shame cross his face, she regretted saying it.
Today there would be no real fight, just the pretense of one, the kind that added to her fantasy of domestic ordinariness. Things like—I wish you’d take your head out of your paper and look at me once in a while. Or—Why do you always leave burned toast crumbs in the butter? Or—That’s way too much milk. You should watch your cholesterol. And he would reply in safe, predictable ways. That kind of fight turned her on and she would make sure she got one this morning.
Hey, he said, kissing her on the cheek before reaching for a cup and pouring some coffee—black, two Equals. The casual manner of that peck on her cheek turned her on, made her sticky and breathless. He sat at the table and turned on his Kindle to read the New York Times.
Sleep well, she asked, pouring the whipped egg whites into the melted butter in the pan.
Not really, he said, sipping loudly on the hot coffee. You?
I always sleep well when you hold me, she said. But the muttered words seemed stirred into the sizzling contents of the pan, drowned by the scraping of the plastic spatula on the Teflon.
He looked up briefly and then returned to the Times. The little electronic pad wasn’t the same as actual paper, but it was just as good in different ways.
Eat while it’s hot, she said. She put the eggs onto a plate, laid the toast next to it, and gave it to him.
Thank you, he said, scraping the toast slowly. The black granules of burned bread gathered in a small pile in the corner of his plate. A few black crumbs missed the pile and flecked his eggs like pepper.
She had her back to him, cutting the grapefruit, releasing a zest of citrus into the kitchen. The sun was higher now and the earlier deep-blue light was now much lighter. He studied her. Every movement she made seemed calculated—no, not calculated, deliberate. As though she was in total control of every muscle in her body.
What, she asked, blushing as she turned into his gaze. She placed the bowl of grapefruit on the table opposite him and sat. There was something in your look, she said.
There was, he asked, looking up from his toast.
Yes, she insisted, spoon poised like a snake ready to strike. He thought he’d never seen her look so beautiful. The whistle of the kettle reprieved him.
Well, she asked, and dunked a bag of green tea in the hot water. The mist reached in a thin column for her face as though in caress. He watched intently, and while part of him wanted to smile, the other felt lost. He had never felt less certain about anything than he did now. The last few days had proved unsettling. In the early years of his internship in Europe he’d had a stint as a family counselor and he always asked his clients what kind of animal their relationship would be, if it were an animal. Now he found himself thinking the same thing about him and Asia. A startled colt came to mind, a colt trying to find its way out of a paddock on a cold winter day. At once terrified and thrilled by the moment and all that it had to offer.
I don’t know what you mean, he said, and his voice trailed off as he shoved some toast into his mouth.
In any other context she would have left the comment where he had, dangling. But this was breakfast and she had made it and it was, well, it was different. This was what couples did, she thought. Fought over nothing.
It sounds like there’s something, she said.
He shoveled the last of the eggs into his mouth, swallowed some coffee. Asia always made him feel this way. Like he had done something wrong, like if he wasn’t careful, he would break this thing between them. He wanted to tell her he loved her. But she knew that. He wanted to have a different life, but he couldn’t articulate what that would be. So he said nothing, gazing into his coffee with resolve. The cup was almost empty, but he didn’t think it was a good time to push back from the table and get some more.
You say you love me, but you keep things from me, she said.
This was getting ridiculous. Might as well get more coffee, he thought, standing.
This was such a nice breakfast, she said. Her grapefruit sat untouched, the cooling green tea clutched in her fist.
I love breakfast with you, he said, pouring coffee into his cup. He returned to the table, where he stirred the fine white powder from the Equal packets into the dark cup. Some of the sweetener spilled around the cup. He thought it looked too much like top-grade heroin and wondered if that was what they used in the movies—all those scenes where actors heaped fingers of uncut heroin into their mouths to test the drug. That much uncut heroin would probably kill a person, he’d said to Asia as they sat watching The French Connection one rainy Saturday. Shh, she’d said. It’s just make-believe.
You’re not eating, he said.
Not much of an appetite, she said, and stood up. At the sink she emptied the fruit down the garbage disposal and ran the tap. He wanted to tell her that the rinds would gum up the works, but the noisy whirring made it impossible and he thought it was probably just as well. He wasn’t sure why they were fighting, not sure if it was just what he’d said or if there was something else, something he would never guess at. Psychiatry wasn’t much use in a relationship.
She turned the garbage disposal off but left the tap running, playing her fingers through the water. With h
er back to him, Sunil couldn’t see the small smile forming on her lips. She was ridiculously, unaccountably happy. She loved him, that was true, but she loved these moments more, where she got to play at being normal, fights and all. The way it felt in her body. Like an itch that released deliciously under a slow scratch.
Asia, he said. I’m sorry.
She was so happy, she thought she would cry. Don’t be, she said. I’m just being foolish.
And then his cell phone rang. He looked at the display. It was Salazar calling to tell him he’d be late.
May I ask why, Sunil said.
Another batch of dead homeless men turned up at the city dump. I would ask you to come out, but it’s just the same as all the other times.
Identical to two years ago, Sunil asked.
Sunil remembered the bodies. No particular order. No particular ritual. Just tipped out in an untidy pile. He hadn’t been bothered by the fact of the bodies, by the putrefying smell of it all, everything turning to decay so quickly in the Vegas heat. What had bothered him was deliberately misleading Salazar. He was there when Salazar found the girl, and for the briefest moment he felt bad. But he had lost so much himself that the deception was easy to live with.
Identical, Salazar said. I’ll fetch you closer to ten or eleven. I’ll bring road-trip food.
Sure, why not. If you’re chewing, you can’t be talking, Sunil said.
Charming, see you soon.
Sunil hung up.
Asia, watching intently over the brim of her teacup, was smiling.
What is it, he asked.
I was just thinking, she said.
Listen, I’ve got to go get ready. Stay as long as you like.
Do you have a photo album, she asked.
He paused at the door, surprised.
What?
A photo album, she repeated.
No, he said.
So you have no photos of your family?
Where is this coming from, he asked. I thought we weren’t allowed to discuss family, your rules.
My family, she said, not yours. And a lady always reserves the right to change her mind. Lady, she repeated as he opened his mouth to say something.
No, he said. I don’t have any photos of my family. I’m not really the family type.
Let’s change that, she said.
What’s gotten into you, he asked.
Come here, she said.
He came over and she hugged him. She lifted her phone and took a picture of them.
See?
It was cute, cheesy almost, like something a teenager would do. It surprised him to find that he liked it.
You’re in a silly mood, he said, and walked to the bathroom.
The shower was already hot and the room steamy when she joined him.
I don’t have a condom, he said.
Shh, she said.
Later as the water drummed over them, she said: Let’s change the past. Let’s do that.
Yes, he wanted to say, with something akin to abandon. Instead he soaped her back.
Thirty-one
Telephone poles lined the road like a girder of wood and wire. It seemed like they were all that kept the road in a near-straight line, desert falling away on each side. Salazar drove so fast the poles blurred alternately into one, then back into a row like a serial crucifixion, becoming more presence than fact, more blur than thing, lurking always at the edge of consciousness, but then quickly and conveniently forgotten. With each slight turn or sway in the black thread of road, the sun shifted, alternately blinding, alternately bathing everything in a halo. Rocks and hills rose out of the brown scrubland like ancestors birthed from myth. Sunil could see why deserts inspired both the belief in God and the call to seek Him here. Wasn’t Jesus tempted in a desert such as this, forty days into a fast? And didn’t the jinn inhabit the dark caverns of caves and sand dunes? And who wouldn’t believe—especially lost or camped out here, in the time before this road and electric and telephone wires everywhere and cell phones and the noise of it all—that things were supernatural? He knew it made no rational sense, but he did believe in ghosts. Who wouldn’t after what he had seen in the death camp at Vlakplaas?
All the nuclear explosions held in underground aquifers here pointed to how hollow the desert really was. Even before the bombs, there had been the endless mining expeditions during the gold rush. It was easy to see the traces on the surface—ghost towns littered the desert—but it seemed that subterranean Nevada was left to legend. These legends, of an earth populated by spirits, were so rampant that even Herbert Hoover, thirty-ninth U.S. president, himself a onetime Nevada hard-rock miner, had written about them.
Did you know that this place is rife with myth and history, Sunil said to Salazar, who was stuffing a handful of orange Cheetos into his mouth.
Nope, he said, spitting crumbs everywhere.
Dusting the shower of orange crumbs from his arm, Sunil continued. The moon landing is believed to have been faked somewhere here, he said.
Bullshit.
Well, you know it won’t be the first hoax involving science and the moon, Sunil said. In 1835, Sir John Herschel, on the front page of the New York Sun, claimed to have found intelligent life on the moon. He described vast forests, seas, and lilac-colored pyramids, even herds of bison and blue unicorns.
Sounds like he could have a job out here designing hotels and themed attractions, Salazar said.
You see these telephone poles? They are only here because of lynching, Sunil said.
That’s fucked up.
People usually are. When they were first introduced into neighborhoods, Americans hated the poles so much they chopped them down. Made the landscape ugly, they said. But when someone discovered they could lynch blacks in the middle of town using the poles, they really caught on. Doesn’t hurt that they are shaped like crosses.
Do you think anyone was lynched on one of these poles?
Hard to say, although I doubt it. These haven’t been here long enough. There is only one recorded lynching in Vegas history, which means there were probably less than a hundred actual ones. That’s racist math for you. Still, the thought of driving under them is disturbing.
Yeah, fucked up. There was awe in Salazar’s voice. Why do you like history so much if it always tells you that we’re a race doomed and full of shit?
I keep hoping to find out that we aren’t, Sunil said.
And are you guys in South Africa as fucked up as us?
At least, if not more, Sunil said.
Shit.
Yes, sir, shit.
The landscape alternated between sand and rocks, ghost buildings and dead-end exits and a barrenness that defied that particularly American notion of manifest destiny. They drove in silence for a while, each lost in thought. Sunil’s mind turned to the myths of the Nevada desert and the twins.
Everything old and telling about the human past is always buried, always submerged, in earth, in water, in language, in culture, one overlapping the other. It seemed sometimes to Sunil that humans couldn’t wait to escape the past, to escape from things no longer desired. Forgotten. Until a new generation, their wounds sufficiently blunted by time, arrives on the scene to begin excavations.
He wondered what some future generation or even an alien culture of anthropologists and archaeologists would make of the current city of Las Vegas if it became lost under the desert long enough. Would it be read as the perfect Earth culture, its acme? With representatives from all over the world building what could only be described as embassies? Each casino no longer the bizarre facade it was but rather coming together as the true United Nations? Or would it be seen as the home of world religion, each casino a representation of one group or the other? The temples were already here—pyramids, sphinxes, lions, Roman ruins, statues of liberty, all sainted icons, and the fa
mous searchlight on the Luxor some beacon to an indifferent god? It was not without precedence—many a bizarre and crazed cult of holy people had journeyed here to flower and then die in the anonymity of the desert, only the strong surviving, like the Mormons.
With the push westward, the link to the civilizing European force grew weaker, and it wasn’t long before Las Vegas and her inhabitants developed a serious self-esteem problem. Nevada governors, businessmen, and newspapermen were all in search of a truth and an ancient mythology that would validate them, make them the cultural equal of the eastern United States, prove that this land and its recent arrivals weren’t so raw, that there was an antiquity here to rival Europe.
And soon, submerged and subterranean cultures began to play a flirtatious hide-and-seek with the fevered men who so desperately wanted these myths to be true. Before Lake Mead flooded towns and even cities in the 1930s, drowning out the Mormons still lingering on the fringes of Mammon, ancient civilizations were found that would be lost again to the waters of that blue fractal—but not before they fueled the lunacy of the Cascadian theory of human evolution.
Captain Alan LeBaron, amateur archaeologist, who explored much of Nevada and Utah from 1912 to 1930, claimed that the human race began here. The evidence piled up. In 1912, LeBaron claimed to have found Egyptian hieroglyphs on a rock in Nevada that dated back to before the Egyptian civilization. In 1924, LeBaron discovered the hill of a thousand tombs, each tomb exactly two square feet and concealed under stones fitted without the use of mortar. Then Babylonian and Mesoamerican heliographs, ideographs, and glyphs were discovered. Then caves covered in Chinese script and the skull of a man believed to be seven feet tall and whose cheekbones clearly identified him as Chinese but whose hair proved he was of Caucasian origin.
