The Secret History of Las Vegas

by Chris Abani

  And on and on it went, one discovery after the next; proof that human life and culture, of all races in fact, began here in Cascadia and then spread to the rest of the globe. LeBaron contended that the colonization of America by whites was simply a result of the biological imperative to return to the land of their origins and reclaim it.

  Sunil jerked back from his ruminations when Salazar pulled off the road into a gas station.

  Are you all right? You looked lost there for a while, Salazar said, killing the engine.

  I’m fine, Sunil said, yawning and stretching.

  Salazar got out and headed for the convenience store. He returned with a new bag of junk food.

  What have we got here, Sunil asked, opening the bag of food. There were more Cheetos, some Snickers, a bottle of water, a browning banana, a small Coke, and a fistful of Twinkies.

  Wasn’t sure what you wanted, so I got a bunch of stuff, Salazar said, backing out of the gas station and merging back onto the main road at seventy without a glance at his mirrors.

  You drive like an Egyptian taxi driver, Sunil said.

  I’m the police, Salazar said.

  What’s with all the junk food anyway, Sunil asked.

  Great American road-trip tradition, Salazar said. You have to eat enough junk to gain a pound a mile.

  But Twinkies?

  What are you talking about? That’s bona fide American grade-A cuisine. Guaranteed to survive a nuclear holocaust. Shit, have you even had one?

  Yes, I have, and I must say it was one of the most disappointing moments of my grown life.

  What the fuck? Come on, you’re joking, right?

  When I was a kid in Soweto, every comic book I read, from Batman to the Silver Surfer, all had amazing ads for Twinkies. It was sold literally as the food of superheroes. I could almost taste the creamy vanilla sinfulness of one of them. Oh my God, how I wanted one. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted something as bad as that, except perhaps sea monkeys. I waited thirty years, until I got here. First thing I bought when I got off the plane was a Hostess Twinkie. I couldn’t believe how awful they tasted! Like sugary petroleum jelly. I was so mad, so fucking mad.

  Salazar laughed. If it’s any consolation, they took us all in, he said.

  Agh, man, you have no idea how disappointing it is to want something since you were a child so much you begin to develop a nostalgia for it, even when you’ve never had it. And then to finally eat it, and it’s like a mouthful of rancid grease.

  Easy there, Doctor. It’s just a cake.

  But it wasn’t just a cake. Not to me.

  What about the sea monkeys? Fare any better there?

  Fuck no! Magical families of smiling creatures with nice faces and crowns that would perform underwater stunts for you and keep you entertained? A child’s best friend, instant pets, all that shit. I sent off for them but all I got was a tank of dead brine shrimp.

  Salazar was laughing so hard his eyes were watering.

  Well, at least mine were alive, he said. But I can see how disappointing it might have been if you were expecting literal miniature underwater monkeys. You know what, Doctor? I’m going to buy you real live sea monkeys when we get back to town. Hand me a Twinkie, will you?

  Thirty-two

  Still daydreaming, Salazar asked Sunil.

  They’d been driving for at least an hour in silence, punctuated only by the radio, which was on an easy rock station. It seemed to Sunil that he’d heard Boy George perform “Karma Chameleon” at least five times before Salazar shut the radio off to talk.

  A little bit, Sunil said, sipping on some water.

  We’ll be coming up to another town soon, Methuselah, I think. We can stop there for lunch and gas up again for the return trip. Apparently this town is farther out than you thought. Ghost towns, Salazar said, his tone dismissive. Can’t imagine why anyone would want to visit one, much less live out here in one.

  It’s the desert, I think, Sunil said. You have to admit there’s something supernatural about it. For some people it’s like falling down the rabbit hole. Besides, ghost towns are perfect places to be invisible in America, drop off the grid, so to speak. You can squat in a ghost town for a very long time if it’s set back far enough from the road. You would have easy access to water, electricity, and good shade from the sun, and disguise from any overhead searches by plane or helicopter. I mean, there are roads, so you wouldn’t have to build any new infrastructure. Hell, there are even enough farms within a day’s hike to poach from.

  A billboard flashed by announcing JESUS IS COMING. It wasn’t that there was a billboard in the middle of the desert announcing Jesus’s return that caught Sunil’s attention as much as the fact that someone had spray painted LOOK BUSY under it.

  Strange name for a town, Salazar said, pointing to a sign by an exit.

  Sunil read it: KING OF PRUSSIA. Again, it wasn’t the unusual name that surprised him as much as the fact that the exit looked blocked off with a sign that said NOT AN EXIT, and yet from where they were, it looked like a normal town spread out in desert-style adobe and wood-framed buildings. There was even an airstrip to one side of them.

  I’ve always wondered what it would be like to live out here in a town like that, Salazar said.

  This town, and many more like it, is part of something called the Nevada Test Site, Sunil said.

  Where they exploded nuclear bombs back in the day?

  Yes, but not just back in the day.

  I’m forty and I have never seen the mushroom cloud from a nuclear explosion, so I would say yes, back in the day.

  Of the fifteen hundred or so nuclear test explosions in Nevada, only three hundred were aboveground, so just because you’ve never seen one doesn’t mean there haven’t been any.

  That’s some Mulder and Scully shit you got going on. I never pegged you for a conspiracy nut.

  I won’t even dignify that with an answer.

  In a couple of minutes the sign for Methuselah flashed by.

  Well, here we are, Salazar said.

  I for one would love to have a burger. Best thing about America is burgers and ketchup-soaked French fries and a cold drink, Sunil said.

  Finally, something we can agree on.

  They pulled into the lone gas station, one pump under an unsteady lean-to, and filled the tank. If there was an attendant, he was nowhere around.

  Just off the road to their left was a paddock and couple of hungry horses standing listlessly around a trough full of rank water. One of the supports of the paddock was a bristlecone pine, all gnarled and twisted into a shape that belonged more in a nightmare than in the bright desert sun.

  Odd tree, Salazar said, spitting.

  Sunil wondered if that was some superstition or just bad manners.

  It’s a bristlecone, he said. Oldest living organisms on the planet, I think. In fact, there is a bristlecone pine somewhere in Nevada that is perhaps the world’s oldest tree. It’s over five thousand years old.

  No shit.

  The tree was named Methuselah. I wonder if that’s what this town is named after. The location of the tree is a well-kept secret by the parks service, but maybe it’s around here somewhere.

  What’s a Methuselah?

  I figured you would know, being a Republican and quite possibly a hardline Christian.

  Just tell me what the fuck it is, Salazar snapped.

  It’s the name of the oldest man to have lived, at least according to the Bible, Sunil said.

  Bible’s never wrong, Salazar said, walking over to the tree and peeing on it.

  Is that some animal territory-marking ritual, Sunil asked.

  Never seen a man pee on a tree before?

  Sunil opened the door of the car and slid back in. There’s a bar-cum-diner over there called Cupid’s, he said. Let’s see if we can find a burger
to fall in love with.

  Salazar shook himself at the tree, inspected his work, and, satisfied, zipped up and returned to the car.

  Thirty-three

  Eskia had been waiting two hours and was already irritated when Asia arrived at his hotel, a little breathless, at ten thirty.

  Sorry, she said as he let her in. I had to be somewhere. As always she laid out the Bible. He hurriedly stuffed some bills into it and barely let her undress before taking her roughly, bending her over the edge of the bed. He came quickly and as she straightened her clothes, he said, I’m not done yet.

  Multiple pops count as multiple visits, she said, pointing to the Bible and walking into the bathroom to freshen up.

  He walked over to his wallet and grabbed some more bills, which he stuffed into the Bible. The first time he found the ritual cute, but now it angered him. He guessed that part of Sunil’s attraction to this woman had to do with that Bible. That Asia was, in a way, a surrogate Jan. Even the Bible, that little detail, Sunil hadn’t overlooked. It wasn’t red, but one can’t have everything, Eskia mused.

  While she was gone, he thought about Jan. How brave, single-minded, and so stubbornly sure of her convictions she had been—enough to risk everything. Jan had turned away from her upbringing as a racist Afrikaner, from her training and job as a spy for the South African Security Services in deep cover in a liberal South African university, to become an informer for the ANC. Although Eskia wanted to believe it was Jan’s love for him that turned her, he knew it wasn’t. The tipping point came the day she opened her father’s Bible. Eskia was there, saw her turn pale and let the book fall to the ground. He bent to pick it up and saw that her father had crossed out the handwritten dedication from President Botha, scrawling in red capital letters across it, the word “LIAR.” He saw the look that crossed her face, as if her entire universe was folding in on itself. There was a long moment when neither of them moved or spoke. They barely breathed. And then he let her kiss him. And make love to him.

  Of course he fell, who can resist that kind of love, a love where you are needed desperately? Jan loved Eskia with a zeal he knew was driven by her fear of falling back into the old hate she’d been raised in. But in those dark times you took what comfort you could because in the end it was all grace.

  Jan’s ring, which Eskia now wore on his thumb, was now the shape of his heart, hot and weighty with despair. It was all he had left of her. He lost track of Jan when she got arrested. She was gone long enough to accept, even beyond his verbal denials, that she was dead. In a way, his search, when it began, was not to find her, but rather to let her go properly. Working in the new government’s security services was a great help. That’s how he found out about the bodies turning up around the farm at Vlakplaas, and some in the river, too.

  He had a hard time finding Vlakplaas. Trauma messes with recollection; things that never existed become part of your memory of a place, and the very things that are absolutely vital to remembering are erased. He got lost several times, stopping always to ask for directions, careful to choose only blacks or coloreds or Indians because it seemed like whites would never tell him how to get there. But everyone pretended they had never heard of it. The most feared place in South Africa, and people who were mere miles from it couldn’t remember where it was, or how to get there.

  When Eskia finally found the farm, there was a white Afrikaans family, with very young children, living there. How was it possible? Everyone knew what had happened there. The bars on the windows, bloodstains on the guardhouse, faded but still visible. All of it still there and these people bought it to grow food on? Brought children to live there?

  He saw them, a couple of slight girls, blond and sprightly, swimming in that river that had held so many rotting bodies. It was unnatural, and perhaps that was worse even than what had really gone on there.

  Farther back from the edges of the farm, up in the hills, a small group was digging for bodies, like people prospecting for treasure. They moved across the stubby grass of the hills, in bright red or black, prodding the ground with converted ski poles or sharpened sticks, feeling always for a looseness, a hollowness in the red earth, for a hint. The figures would straighten up, heads cocked into the wind, listening as though hearing their names. A couple would stop while the others moved on. Engaged in some beautiful ballet only they understood. Moving forward, slowly, but always forward. Leaving a legacy of holes behind them.

  Eskia approached and greeted them softly in Zulu, Sawbona. They paused and looked up and that was when he realized they were mostly women. They smiled and returned to their digging, stopping only when they unearthed a body, or bones, or whatever fragment of a person they found. Then they lifted the remains reverentially out of the ground and laid them on a white plastic sheet, awaiting identification. There was a tenderness in this scene, the sheer sorrow that stills anger into a river of serenity, into a clarity so cold its brittleness is more threatening, quivering before shattering into a rage that can obliterate.

  He sat on an outcrop of stone and took deep breaths, noticing for the first time the small crowd of people walking between the excavators, pausing by each set of remains, looking for something to identify a loved one, something as small as a tuft of hair or a birthmark. When someone was identified, there was a silence as the remains were gathered and carried back down the hill, past the farm to the road where cars were parked, as though any sound—a cry, a wail—would desecrate the delicate balance the excavators worked with.

  Eskia came regularly for six years, joining the silent search, until he found, among a pile of bones, Jan’s ring, with the shimmering butterfly wing. Unlike the others, he took no remains, just the ring. There would be no mourning for him, no grieving. Just a vain hate, one that had no target, no focus, until he found, on a list of names of Vlakplaas personnel, Dr. Sunil Singh.

  Asia came back into the room, startling him. With the practiced ease of a croupier, she counted the money in the Bible without seeming to look. She crossed to the middle of the room, stripped, and said: I’m ready.

  He tied her to the bedposts with the belts from the hotel robes, and he fucked her until she cried out from an orgasm, then he dozed off beside her, only to awaken half an hour later with a scream.

  Shh, she said, holding him with one arm, the other still tied.

  Absently he wondered how she’d freed herself.

  Are you okay, she asked.

  Eskia gasped, coughing, the taste of rust on his tongue as he woke from the dream. It felt like he was back in it all.

  Asia hugged Eskia from behind. Hush, she whispered, hush now.

  Eskia leaned back into her, felt her full breasts pressed into his back. God, he thought, she smells so good.

  Will it help to talk about it?

  No, he said simply, no.

  There was something in his voice that chilled Asia, made her want to recoil from him.

  He reached behind him and ran his hand down her thigh, feeling her shiver. Are you cold, he asked.

  Why?

  He wanted to say, Because you’re shivering. Instead he looked at her, noting the orgasm-softened face, her eyes tender in spite of herself, and said: What do you think Sunil would say if he knew his friend made you come?

  She scuttled back from him abruptly; face shocked as though he’d slapped her, one wrist still bound. What the fuck, she said.

  Precisely, he said.

  Fuck you, Asia said. Fuck you!

  You just did. Multiple pops, remember? Although since you also popped you should refund some of that money.

  She spat at him and struggled to untie her other wrist.

  Eskia wiped his face and looked at her for a moment. He opened his mouth as though to speak, but instead he punched her full in the face and her neck snapped back, her head hitting the headboard. He swung at her again, but she recovered quickly and moved so he only caught her a g
lancing blow to her eye. Still it puffed up shut.

  She knocked the phone from the beside table, hit the concierge button, and screamed as loud as she could. Eskia stopped midpunch. He could hear the concierge’s voice: Mr. Kent, is everything okay? Asia screamed again and passed out.

  Eskia jumped up and dressed hurriedly. He had about three to five minutes before hotel security got to his room. Las Vegas casinos didn’t fuck around with the security of their guests. Safety was imperative for business.

  He grabbed his small bag stuffed with cash and passports and walked out leisurely, heading for the elevators. In his thick glasses, he was invisible, and he only had to step aside as security guards barreled past him in the hallway headed for his room. As he stepped into the elevator he wondered why all casino security guards wore red jackets.

  Outside the casino, Eskia walked a sweat-fueled pilgrimage down the Strip. Down heat-melted sidewalks, gum-stained, dirty, littered with fliers for escorts and shows, through the crowd of overweight sunburned tourists, past the drunks and homeless, past the partly inebriated gambling veterans, ever south.

  Thirty-four

  Outsider art guarded the exterior of the bar—horses, dinosaurs, and aliens shaped in everything from scrap metal and wood to plastic, concrete, and plaster. Inside, bras in every color and every size—dirty, tattered, stained, and gray from age and wear—drooped down from the ceiling like tired flags. Even though they were higher than head level, Sunil kept ducking, afraid to find himself trailing through the years of sad, pathetic drunken moments the bras represented. A disproportioned Buddha, an odd creature neither frog nor toad, and rabbits with cold maniacal plaster eyes guarded the edges of the bar.

  The walls inside were made of wood and every surface was covered with old coasters sporting beer logos. The floor was a mix of cork, sawdust, bare concrete, and fraying rugs. Where the roof sloped at the back into what looked like an anteroom, two decrepit and rickety pool tables sat, their racked balls gathering dust in the gloom. Behind the bar, bottles of liquor struggled for ascendancy. There were two taps—Budweiser and Heineken. A small pug-faced dog squatted on the bar top drinking milk from a saucer.