by John D'Agata
“But the problem,” Fritz explained, “is that he made too many assumptions. And that’s the basic problem with any ‘universal language.’ In order for Swadesh’s theory to pan out, every language would need to change at exactly the same rate. But just like two societies that exist across the globe from one another, languages evolve at vastly different paces. It just isn’t possible to prescribe a universal rate of decay for every world language and then plug that into a formula to determine their origins. It’s more complicated than that. There’s really no way of determining what happened to a language over the past ten thousand years because we don’t have any languages that have lasted that long. So how are we supposed to predict what’ll happen to a language ten thousand years from now?”
“This is not a place of honor,” reads a warning that was drafted by the Expert Judgement Panel, a message that is written in simple declarative sentences in an attempt to improve linguistically its chances for survival:
“No esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing of value is buried here. This place is a message, and part of a system of messages. Pay attention. We are serious. Sending this message was significant for us. Ours was considered an important culture.”
Fritz grabbed a napkin from a basket on the table. Did some math. Made a graph. Leaned across the peel of the banana splayed between us.
“What’s the likelihood that this message will make it to the other side?”
As Fritz explained, if Modern English—the language in which Shakespeare wrote—is generally thought to be comprehensible to the average American high school student, and if Middle English—in which Chaucer wrote—is generally thought to be comprehensible to American college students, and if Old English—in which Beowulf was written, about a thousand years ago—is usually comprehensible to English scholars only, then it’s likely that the use of contemporary English in the warning marker’s message would appear to average readers a thousand years from now—
“Nis weorðful stow. Nis last mære dæde na. Her nis naht geweorðes bebyrged. Þeos stow bið ærend ond dæl ærendworuldes. GiemaÞ wel! We sindon eornost! Þeos ærendgiefu wæs niedmicel us. Hit Þuhte us Þæt we wæron formicel cynn”
—as illegible as Old English appears to average readers today. And even its translation to those same average readers—
“This is not an honorable place. It is not the marker of a glorious deed. Here is nothing at all of worth buried. This place is a message and a portion of a message-world. Pay attention well. We are earnest. This message-giving was great for us. It seemed to us that we were a very great people”
—would probably seem at best like an innocuous threat.
As Fritz explained, we tend to lose one word out of every five over the course of a millennium in English, a rate of decay that averages out to about 20 percent. Over the span of ten millennia, however, that rate of decay would increase to a loss of 89 percent.
So, by the end of the warning marker’s life span at Yucca, the English in the message would only have retained 11 percent of its significance, and therefore of its meaning, and therefore of its ability—
—to say anything at all.
WHY
It’s estimated that only 40 percent of suicides are the result of chemical imbalance, while the remaining 60 percent are caused by “undetermined” factors.
We know that people are ten times more likely to kill themselves in a city than other kinds of environments.
We also know, however, that rural can be bad.
As are the hours between noon and six.
Or May.
Or winter.
Or if you don’t drink coffee your chances of suicide are three times higher than if you did.
Ditto if you are a woman who uses the pill instead of a diaphragm, are a man with tattoos on his neck or lower arms, are a child with green eyes, have any silver fillings.
If you were born under the signs of Aries, Gemini, or Leo: that is bad.
You are more likely to want to kill yourself during a new moon than a full one. More if you don’t have pets, more if you own a gun, more if you earn between $32,000 and $58,000 a year.
More if you’re male.
More if you’re white.
More if you’re over sixty-five.
It helps if you live anywhere in the United States other than Nevada, Wyoming, Alaska, or Montana, although the experts so far can’t figure out why.
Nor have they figured out why Native Americans once tended to kill themselves more often than any other group, but then, fifteen years ago, stopped killing themselves significantly.
They do not know why, generally speaking, white suicide victims tend to shoot themselves, while black suicide victims tend to poison themselves, Hispanics tend to hang themselves, and teens to cut themselves.
Recently, Dr. John Fildes of the University of Nevada’s College of Medicine received $1.5 million from the federal government in order to study the issue of suicide in Las Vegas, which is why, after the death of that boy at the Stratosphere Hotel, his office was the first I called for information about local suicides.
By the time I finally met Dr. Fildes in person, however, our appointment had been rescheduled four times in eight months, his federal grant had long expired, and all that we had learned about this problem in Las Vegas is that it still is a very big problem.
It was to Sergeant Tirso Dominguez, therefore, an officer at the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s Office of Public Information, that I turned for information about Las Vegas suicides. But “I don’t want to be a part of anything like that,” was how Sergeant Dominguez responded to my request for information.
It was from Reporting on Suicide: Recommendations for the Media and Public Officials, a pamphlet of guidelines developed by the Centers for Disease Control, that I learned that “‘no comment’ is not a productive response to media requests for information about local suicides.”
It was Eric Darensburg, assignments editor at KLAS Channel 8 in Las Vegas, who told me that his station had a policy against recording footage of suicide scenes when I asked to see the footage that his station had recorded of the scene outside the Stratosphere on the evening that boy died. And it was Eric Darensburg who also said, when I provided him with the date on which his station aired that footage, that their film librarian was out of town, that their library was currently very messy, that he wasn’t going to be able to track any footage down.
It was from Bob Gerye, principal of the Las Vegas Academy of International Studies and Performing and Visual Arts, where that boy was a student for two years before he died, that I received no comment in response to my request for his insights about the effect of suicide on his school. But it was Bob Gerye who did say, in response to the teachers and parents and students who requested that a memorial be held at their school, “No.”
And it was an eyewitness to that death at the Stratosphere Hotel—a man who’d made a statement to the police about that night, plus several informal statements to various TV stations, one online local blogger, and a weekly tabloid paper—who said to me, “Fuck off,” when I asked him for a comment.
“This,” said the man, “is a private matter.”
Yet more people kill themselves in Las Vegas every year than any other place in America.
They kill themselves in Las Vegas so often, in fact, that you have a better chance of killing yourself if you live in Las Vegas than you do of being killed there, despite the fact that Vegas is one of the most dangerous places in which to live, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report. In Las Vegas, more people kill themselves than die in car accidents, die of AIDS, die of pneumonia, cirrhosis, or diabetes. Statistically speaking, the only things more likely to kill you in Las Vegas are heart disease, stroke, and a few types of cancer.
Otherwise, in Las Vegas, you’re going to kill yourself.
Maybe this is why the city also has the highest number of smokers per capita in the country. Or the highest rate of drug use
among teenagers in the country. The highest number of American arrests for driving under the influence.
The highest high school dropout rate.
Highest household bankruptcy rate.
And the highest number of divorces nationwide, every year.
According to the executive director of Westcare, the city’s only full-time mental health care facility, an average of 500 residents seek psychiatric treatment every month in Vegas, but an estimated 49 percent of them never receive that treatment. Indeed, in a nation in which an average of thirty-three hospital beds out of every 100,000 are typically devoted to psychiatric care, Las Vegas devotes just four out of 100,000 beds to mental illness.
Some speculate that this shortage of treatment for local mental illness has contributed to spikes in the city’s homelessness. According to a 2000 report in the Las Vegas Sun, the homeless rate in Las Vegas quadrupled in the nineties—from 2,000 people in 1989 to 8,000 people in 1999—an increase that motivated voters in Las Vegas to pass new “quality of life” laws through which dozens of downtown sweeps have since been conducted, citing “jaywalking, sidewalk obstructing, and other violations as an excuse to arrest homeless residents and clean up problem areas,” thus leading the National Coalition for the Homeless to call Las Vegas in 2003 “the meanest city in America.”
And yet Time magazine has named Las Vegas “The New All-American City.”
Retirement Places Rated said it’s “the nation’s most desirable retirement community.”
And Fortune magazine called Las Vegas “the best all-around city in the United States,” the same year in which a study entitled Social Stress in the U.S. ranked Las Vegas the single most stressful city in which to live.
“The only real problem Las Vegas faces,” said cultural critic Hal Rothman, chair of the Department of History at the University of Nevada, “is people like you who come from other places who don’t know shit about this town but want to write about it.”
The “people like you” to whom Rothman was speaking when he said this were fifteen young journalists from Berkeley, California, who had come to Las Vegas, as Rothman suspected, in order to write a series of essays about the place, a project that resulted in a book entitled The Real Las Vegas: Life Beyond the Strip, a collection of hard-hitting cultural criticism that has since been called one of the most insightful portraits of the city since Learning from Las Vegas. It was published around the same time as Rothman’s own study, Neon Metropolis: How Las Vegas Shed Its Stigma to Become the First City of the Twenty-first Century, a book of conspicuously aggressive boosterism for a work of supposed criticism, a combination of cultural pandering and pro-business rallying from an author who seems never to have met a corporate shark he didn’t like.
Indeed, that “shit about this town” which Rothman insists only locals like himself are allowed to write is seldom actually written about by Las Vegas locals.
“Another sign of how much America’s fastest growing city has become hostage to the corporate lords of gambling,” Sally Denton and Roger Morris wrote in a December 2000 article in the Columbia Journalism Review. “This situation seems borne out by the number of local reporters who, like elected politicians and public officials, tend to end up on the public relations staffs of Las Vegas casinos.”
In 1983, for example, when Las Vegas casino owner Steve Wynn decided to apply for a gaming license in Britain, The Independent of London reported that an investigation by Scotland Yard drew links between Wynn and the Genovese crime family, an investigation that subsequently was referred to in advertisements by the publisher of a new book about Steve Wynn, Running Scared: The Life and Treacherous Times of Las Vegas Casino King Steve Wynn. However, even though The Independent’s report was never challenged, Wynn still sued the publisher of Running Scared for what he considered “libelous statements,” winning $3 million in a Nevada state court, bankrupting the publisher of the biography in question, and somehow winning support from Las Vegas journalists, such that the allegations that initiated his suit were covered by the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal—arguably the most influential paper in the state—for only one day, in only one article, on page 5, section B, under the quarter-inch-high headline “Wynn Sues Local Writer.”
In contrast, the Las Vegas Review-Journal provided several weeks’ worth of coverage for Las Vegas mayor Oscar Goodman when he sued a writer named Jim McManus, an Illinois reporter whose popular memoir, Positively Fifth Street, alleged the mayor’s participation in planning the assassination of a local judge:
“With Jimmy Chagra on trial in Texas for heroin trafficking, Jack, Ted, and Benny Binion convened in booth no. 1 of the Horseshoe Coffee Shop with Oscar Goodman, the hyperaggressive young attorney representing the accused. The upshot of that meeting was a $50,000 contract for Charles Harrelson, actor Woody’s father, to assassinate U.S. District Judge John Wood—or so the lore has had it.”
That “lore” surrounding Las Vegas mayor Oscar Goodman has always had it that actor Woody’s father was indeed once hired, that Judge John Wood was indeed once murdered, that Mayor Oscar Goodman did indeed defend Chagra, and indeed that his defense of those figures in Las Vegas whom residents widely recognize as members of the mob were the kind of close relationships that helped get Goodman elected, but that meeting at the Horseshoe as described by McManus could not be proven as anything but “lore,” which is why, as the Las Vegas Review-Journal wrote about his suit, “the Mayor took offense at this besmirching of his name,” and which is why, as the Las Vegas Review-Journal also later wrote, “Mayor Oscar Goodman may have defended reputed mobsters, but that doesn’t mean he is one,” and which is why, as the Las Vegas Review-Journal also later wrote, “ironies abound in Mayor Goodman’s life, for here is a man who fiercely defends his acquaintance with casino Black Book members and crime family capos…and here also is a man who demands respect,” and which is why, as the Las Vegas Review-Journal finally explained, “not only was the allegation that Goodman was included in a criminal conspiracy without factual basis, it wasn’t the only error in that paragraph of the book. The dominant subject of that paragraph, Jimmy Chagra, was called a heroin trafficker…but in reality Chagra only worked with cocaine.”
In the end, this was local coverage that so triumphantly succeeded for Mayor Oscar Goodman that within a few weeks, in the New York Times Book Review, a full-page ad appeared with a letter of apology addressed to Mayor Goodman, signed by the publisher of McManus’s book. It was accompanied by a photograph featuring Mayor Goodman, arms folded, face smiling, legs spread and firmly braced beneath the shiny glass hull of the Stratosphere Hotel.
“We don’t want anything in our city that might upset the tourist,” state senator Dina Titus has said about her district, the 7th precinct of Clark County, Las Vegas, Nevada. “So if it’s a touch of reality that isn’t pretty, then we want to get rid of it. You don’t want to come in contact with reality when you’re here for a fantasy.”
This is perhaps why, back in 1995, the Nevada Motion Picture Division refused the request of director Mike Figgis to film his Oscar-winning movie Leaving Las Vegas within the city’s limits. The film depicts an alcoholic executive from Los Angeles who moves to Las Vegas to drink himself to death.
“No one wanted to be associated with that kind of script,” the president of the Nevada Motion Picture Division said, the same president who granted permission for the filming of Casino, Martin Scorsese’s movie about the mob in Las Vegas, and the same president who gave permission for the filming of Showgirls, a movie about the underworld of Las Vegas prostitution.
“Well of course people are paranoid about suicide here,” Ron Flud explained in the County Coroner’s Office. “I mean, it’s in business, it needs tourists. Every resident’s bread and butter is based on this city’s image. And suicide doesn’t sell.”
Indeed, Ron Flud was the only official in greater Las Vegas who agreed to talk about suicide.
“I’m a finder of facts,” he said, “that’s my job,
it’s what I do. I don’t see the point of concealing information.”
The Coroner’s Office in Las Vegas is tan and stuccoed and flat-roofed and small and wedged within a district of attorneys’ offices and accountants’ offices and psychiatrists’ offices and banks. Inside it are no blood-spotted sheets covering bodies in the lobby or tumblers lying around full of cloudy yellow liquids, no people in the hallways wearing black rubber aprons or walking to and fro wielding shiny silver tools. In fact, the only indications that his office is responsible for determining the cause of death of everyone in Vegas is a small sign in the lobby—ATTENTION FUNERAL DIRECTORS—a plaque from Nellis Air Force Base—IN GRATITUDE FOR YOUR SERVICE—and someone’s remark to a secretary as he passed her in a rush—“Thank you for the chocolate coffin, Pam.”
“I think everyone’s a lot more comfortable,” Ron said, “if we keep a low profile here. Suicide is the most threatening thing that we can encounter as a culture. It’s a manifestation of doubt, the ultimate unknowable. A suicide by someone we know—or even by someone we don’t know—is an ugly reminder that none of us has the answers. So apply that to a city with the nation’s most frequent suicides and you might start to understand this city’s reluctance to talk about it.”
In the year 533, at the second Council of Orléans, Catholic cardinals actually voted to “outlaw” suicide.
The Talmud forbids even mourning its victims.
And before one can ponder Islam’s ancient question—“What ought one think of suicide?”—the Koran quickly answers: “It is much worse than homicide.”
Hindus condemn it, the Buddha always forbade it, and in Zurich there was an ordinance once on the city’s books that condemned all suicides to burials beneath a mountain.
“So that their souls,” read the law, “may eternally be suppressed.”
