The Museum of Intangible Things

by Wendy Wunder

  We search for Zoe.

  The only way to distinguish the whores from the bachelorettes, bingeing on their last night of freedom, is that the whores can walk properly in their seven-inch Jimmy Choos. The others stumble around twisting their ankles, boobs falling out of their halter tops, lips stained red from too much cheap red wine. It’s ugly. Their drunken bridesmaids stumble after them, wearing some kind of uniform trinket on their heads. I didn’t realize until now that I had such strong feelings about bachelorette parties. They just represent everything that’s wrong with this country. The shameless exhibitionism, the complete inability to embrace moderation.

  It’s because we’re sort of looking for Zoe that we keep finding more whores and bachelorettes. Maybe we wouldn’t notice them as much if we weren’t looking for a young woman.

  We also notice the homeless kids. Vegas is a runaway mecca because it’s so easy to get lost here. Which is strange because these kids are not inconspicuous. They seem bent on attracting attention, actually, with their neon-colored hair and silver studs everywhere, begging passersby for $6.99 to take advantage of the cheap casino prime rib special. I stare at a doughy, green-haired white girl in a men’s vest. She’s slumped against a storefront playing some kind of game, trying to toss the coins she’s collected into a plastic cup. I try to imagine how different she must look from her yearbook photo.

  “Look, the ‘World’s Biggest Gift Shop,’” I say, changing gears.

  “Look, ‘Skintight 2000: A Spectacular Revue for Mature Audiences.’”

  “That counts us out,” I say.

  “You said it,” Danny replies, and then, “There!”

  “Where?” I ask and I follow his pointing finger.

  A young woman in silver lamé leggings, a purple leather studded halter that stops way before her belly, and six-inch hot-pink heels sits on the curb, with her perfect legs bent up on either side of her. She looks like David Bowie from Ziggy Stardust, but with a darker complexion and straight American teeth. She holds her silver head in her hands, and I’m praying she’s not looking into a pool of her own vomit.

  “Zoe!” we both scream out the passenger-side window. I look for a place to pull over, and the closest thing is the beginning of the circular driveway of the Venetian, a monstrous resort that is almost the size of Venice itself. The tower is so big it looks like another wonder of the world, like the Hoover Dam or the Great Wall of China. It is definitely visible from space.

  We clamber out of the vehicle and rush toward her.

  “Zoe!” I say. “Thank god!”

  “Guyz,” she says, looking up at us with red-rimmed eyes and severely dilated pupils. She stares at us blankly and seems confused about where she is and what she is doing here. She is trying to sit still but can’t help moving back and forth in a slow swaying motion.

  “What are you doing?” I ask her.

  “Jus takin a res,” she slurs, about to lie down on the sidewalk.

  “No, Zoe. Not there.”

  “Where can I take a res?” she asks.

  “She’s drunk,” I say. “I’ve never seen her drunk.”

  “No. Not drunk. Just in diabetic shock,” Zoe corrects me.

  “You’re not a diabetic.”

  “Okay,” she says, giggling, “then I’m drunk.”

  “I’m not surprised. You haven’t been eating enough to tolerate any alcohol at all,” I say, sitting down next to her.

  “Here,” Zoe says pointing emphatically to the ground, “in this place, there is alwaysz a party.”

  “Do you know where ‘here’ is?” Danny asks.

  “Of course. Las Vegas, Nevada. Oooo. Les get tattoooos.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. Tattoos. Now,” she says, pouting a little like a toddler. “Either we get tattoos, or you two,” she clumsily points at us, “get married.”

  “No tattoos tonight. I’m putting my man-foot down,” Danny says.

  “Man-foot.” Zoe laughs. “You have to be a man to have a man-foot. Are you going to let him talk to me like that?” she asks me.

  Danny helps me hoist her to her feet, where she towers over both of us in the outrageous heels. Her belly is completely bare, and she has the corn-pollen pouch from Rosemarie slung across her body. It is bulging and heavily weighted with what’s left of her coins.

  “I’m the tallest. I get to say what we do. Les get tattooz,” she says, spitting a little with the t’s.

  “We are doing nothing until I get a shower,” I say.

  “Yeah,” Zoe says, looking me over. “Good idea.”

  “I don’t think we can afford this place, though,” Danny says, pointing at the Venetian.

  “You’d be surprised,” I tell him. I’d rescued my father from enough Atlantic City casinos to know that hotel rooms here are cheap. They just lure you in, so you’ll blow your cash gambling. They could give hotel rooms away for free. It’s the gambling that sustains them.

  We left the pickup truck running because we didn’t want to have to hot-wire it again to restart it. When we get to the car, with Zoe hobbling next to me, leaning on my shoulder, Danny and I both realize the same thing at the same time. We can’t valet park the Samuel Rodriguez pickup. What would we do when they ask for a key? So we try to find the only meter in Vegas and stumble upon it right across the street from the Venetian.

  “See, we’re lucky already,” I say.

  We walk back up the Venetian driveway, carrying nothing but the jackelope we bought for Zoe. I don’t know where she left the rest of her things—her big coat, her turtle backpack with the weather radio and Taser in it—and I don’t think she does either. I have a feeling she traded them for her current ensemble.

  “They have Italy here,” Zoe slurs as she points to the network of turquoise chlorinated canals around the entrance. “I think they bought it.”

  “Yes,” I say. God, she’s losing brain cells quickly, I think.

  The inside is filled with Titianesque fresco paintings of Roman warriors and the backs of plump, naked ladies. It is so ornately decorated with golden architectural details, I don’t know where to look.

  “It’z so opulent,” Zoe says.

  “If by ‘opulent’ you mean ‘gaudy,’” Danny answers. His Jersey accent comes out a little on the word gaudy, and it gives me a little tingle. He has taste, I think, which many people don’t realize is a different thing than having money.

  “It looks like Donald Trump threw up in here,” I say. “And where is the front desk?”

  The whole first floor is basically a shopping mall surrounding the indoor shallow pools, which I refuse to keep calling “canals.”

  “I didn’t know Venice was a mall,” I joke. “Or that the canals were so blue.”

  “Let’z go for a ride on the long boat thing.” Zoe points across the shallow pool to where the motorized gondolas are covered and parked for the evening.

  “It’s closed, Zoe,” I say.

  “This place,” she says, pointing again emphatically to the ground, “this place never closes.”

  She uses her long silver legs to climb over a railing in a single bound and then splashes into the water. She begins wading toward the gondolas.

  “Zoeee!” I whisper-yell. “Zoe, get out of there.”

  “See,” Zoe is saying. “Iss not closed. Iss just self-service after midnight.”

  “Danny,” I say, looking desperately in his direction, and he vaults the railing, wades out to Zoe, and sweeps her into his arms in one fell swoop. Zoe kicks her feet a little, but she doesn’t put up too much of a fight as he carries her back to land.

  We dry her off with Danny’s barn jacket and drag her to the front desk. A kind, short-haired man named Amand awaits. You can tell he was taught to be patient with folks like us at his hospitality college.

  “Good morning, folks. How
can I help you?” he says as Zoe slams the jackelope down on the front desk and pets it on top of the head.

  “We need a room for the night,” Danny answers.

  “Sure thing. Can I interest you in our Romance Package? For just fifty dollars extra, you get two gondola rides and two tickets to the wax museum.”

  Zoe is leaning with one elbow on the front desk and says, “We need three.” She points clumsily at all three of us. “She loves him, and I love her, so we want three tickets in the Romance Package.”

  “Um, it comes with two,” the polite man says.

  “But there are all kinds of love, and you can’t diszcriminate. Three tickets.”

  Danny says, “It’s okay, Zoe. You can have my ticket to the museum.”

  “No, Danny. It’z the prinziple. They shouldn’t put our love”—again she drunkenly points to the three of us—“in a box.”

  The clerk points at me. “Is your love for her romantic?” he asks.

  Zoe takes a moment to consider this. “No,” she says. “But that doesn’t matter. I love her. So I should get a ticket too.”

  “It’s called the ‘Romance’ Package.”

  “Well, what kind of package do you have for our kind of relationship? If you don’t have one that suits us, then you are discriminating against our love.”

  “Sir, I’m sorry,” I say. “Zoe, just let him do his job.”

  “I’ll just give you three tickets,” the clerk says. “It’s okay.”

  “See,” Zoe says. “The squeaky wheel . . .” She turns around and leans on the desk with her shoulder blades while she examines her fingernails, and the clerk hands us our keys.

  Our hotel room is a standard one with two beds and stripey polyester maroon bedspreads. The cheaply framed prints on the wall depict abstract ink drawings of gondoliers. Zoe flops on the bed face first and spread-eagle while Danny jumps in the shower.

  Her face is buried in the nasty Las Vegas hotel comforter, and I begin to slide it out from under her so at least she is plastered into a clean sheet.

  “You are protecting me from the spermatozoa,” she says into the bed.

  “Among other things,” I say.

  “Stop protecting me.”

  “It’s what I do. I like protecting you.”

  She rolls over and looks at the spiky spackled ceiling as if she’s finding shapes in the clouds. So I lie perpendicular to her, with my head resting on her stomach.

  “I see a mermaid,” I say.

  “Where?”

  “There. See the tail?”

  Zoe snaps a picture of it with her Polaroid that she had placed on the nightstand. “Remember when you thought you saw a sea monster in the lake?” she asks.

  “I could have sworn . . . But I guess it was just a piece of driftwood.”

  “And you set up video cameras at the end of the dock. You were so determined.”

  “Part of me still thinks it was a sea monster . . . Remember when you lived for twenty-four hours inside that squirrel hole in the big tree?”

  “I didn’t want them to cut it down.”

  “I think I do know what I want, Zo. From life. I’m afraid if I tell you, though, it will jinx the whole thing.”

  “Then keep it to yourself. But write it down somewhere. Make it real in some small way.”

  “Okay,” I say, and I draw a little heart on the inside of her wrist with the pen I found next to the Gideon Bible in the nightstand.

  LUCK

  At noon the next day, Zoe is much better, and we eat the breakfast included in our Romance Package for three. Then we head downstairs to the casino. Zoe doesn’t want the jackelope to suffocate, so she carries him in a plastic laundry bag with his head sticking out of it. The convenient shopping mall in our hotel has allowed us to find her some more-appropriate travel clothes: some black leggings and a big LAS VEGAS sweatshirt. I am still wearing my ensemble from the Walmart in Ohio but have sprung for some clean underwear, and I wear them out of the dressing room at Victoria’s Secret and hand the tag to the cashier.

  Apparently I am not the first person to have done this, because she is completely unfazed and tells me to have a nice day.

  “Okay, time to go, folks,” I say, swinging my dirty underwear back and forth in my pink VS shopping bag. “Let’s get back to the East Coast.”

  The two of them stop in their tracks and stare at me like I’m insane.

  “What?”

  “What do you mean, ‘what’? We’re in Vegas.”

  They’re both practically panting at me like they’re two little pugs and I’m holding a pork chop.

  “Two hours,” I say. I need to get Zoe strapped into a seat belt in Samuel Rodriguez’s pickup before she takes off again.

  The two of them practically jump up and down and head to the casino.

  I thought I was going to have a seizure from the noise and the lights, but somehow all the clinking and clanging begins to morph into white noise, and you stop noticing it after a while.

  Danny climbs behind me on my stool in front of a slot machine. He is straddled behind me, and I feel the heat of him penetrating my body in electric waves. I help him make his bets and push the buttons while Zoe works the machine next to us. When we win, he kisses me on the neck. We gamble away the $157 in coins that Zoe brought with her from Yellowstone. It is amazing how quickly we go through it and how energized we are from the extra oxygen they pump into the room to keep you awake.

  When we get to our last token, Danny holds it up, we all kiss it, and . . .

  We win the jackpot!

  Lights, sirens, bells, and whistles go off as the quarters keep clanking into the metal tray in front of us. A heavy, glorious, silver rain.

  “I told you you were lucky,” Danny whispers in my ear, kissing it.

  We win $650.

  “Just enough for tattoos,” Zoe says. “To symbolize and memorialize our good fortune!”

  “No, Zo. I thought you let go of that idea.”

  “Nope. We get tattoos, or you two get married. Because we’re in Vegas, and we should do something wild. What have I taught you about audacity and saying yes?”

  Maybe it’s the extra oxygen in the air, but I do say yes, on the condition that she agrees to come home with us as soon as the ink is dry.

  • • •

  It doesn’t hurt as much as I thought it would. You just have to get used to the perpetual scratching sensation.

  We get tiny lucky horseshoe tattoos on the back of our right upper hips. So we can hide them if we want or show them with some low-rise jeans or in a bathing suit. “It’s good to have options,” Zeke, our ink master, tells us. He has no options left, it seems, because his entire body is covered. He even has a goddess on the back of his arm who gets pregnant when he bends his elbow.

  The horseshoes are cute, and Danny likes it too. It will remind me of our journey west, stealing horses and making friends with cowboys.

  Zoe snaps some photos of my ink. I’m actually happy we did it, although it felt a little like deciding to get pregnant. Like, once the needle touched my skin, there was no turning back. There are very few irreversible decisions in this life, and getting a tattoo is one of them. Semi-irreversible, anyway. And that was the eeriest part about it.

  Danny opts out of getting inked himself, which I’m happy about. I like him just the way he is. We go to Madame Tussaud’s then, and aside from the faux celebrities’ flat, matte complexions, the likenesses are astounding. We show our tattoos to wax Leonardo DiCaprio, wax Will Smith, wax Zac Efron, and wax Michael Jackson.

  “Blue Man Group?” Zoe asks when we’re done. “They’re playing in this hotel.”

  “I don’t like art for the sake of art,” Danny says, and I’m surprised and thrilled that he has opinions about art at all. “Art should say something, or move people or a
t least demonstrate some kind of special skill of the artist. That show is just guys in blue makeup spitting bananas at the audience.”

  “Well, maybe some people are moved by spit bananas,” Zoe says.

  “Maybe. I’m not going, though.” Danny takes his share of the jackpot to try to win some more in the casino while Zoe and I sit in the replica of San Marco Piazza.

  “The real one has pigeons,” I tell Zoe.

  “It’s probably unsanitary to do that here.”

  “But I think that’s the coolest thing about the Piazza. The pigeons and how you can feed them. And how they land on your head. Without pigeons, it’s just a big flat space.”

  We realize we are both leaning to the left to avoid sitting on the now-sore tattooed side of our butts, and we crack up. We move the left sides of our chairs together so we can lean into each other and have a conversation.

  “Why did you do that to yourself last night?” I ask her.

  “I was trying to forget.”

  “Forget what?”

  “That you don’t believe me. And that I have nothing to go home to. I don’t even have a home anymore.”

  “You do, Zo. You have your mom and Noah. They love you. They need you, Zoe.”

  “But don’t you get it? You are my home, Hannah. And if I don’t have you, I have nowhere to go.”

  “You have me.”

  “No I don’t.”

  “You do. What do you mean? I’m right here, leaning next to you on my left butt cheek.”

  “I was abducted by aliens, and they want to travel through the lightning and take me with them.”

  “I know that’s what you believe.”

  “But if you don’t believe it, that means you think I’m crazy. And I can’t live with that.”

  “Zo. Crazy is the wrong word. What if you just tried the lithium? Just to see how it made you feel? To see if it evened you out.”

  “I can’t believe you don’t believe me.”