Page 23

23

A Vampire in Vegas

Dodi

Jake twists the urn in his hands.

The fountain display has ended and the Flamingo Squad has stampeded off in search of other shenanigans, leaving us quite alone. A warm desert breeze buffets a light mist over us as the lights of the display dim, leaving us lit in a green, phosphorescent glow, and it’s eerily, strangely beautiful for a split second as the two timelines of my life touch.

Neil, meet Jake. Jake, this is Neil.

Jake raises his eyes to mine. “How do we do this?” he asks, lifting the urn slightly.

I let out a shaky breath. “I have no fucking clue. That’s your wheelhouse. But I have to do something else first.”

I show him the silver token still in my fist. I’ve carried it everywhere with me for the past seven years. “He always brought home a chip from his trips, or a token,” I explain. “He’d hang on to it until he could go back, and then he’d pick up at the casino where he left off. He gave it to me to bring back.” I look at the fountain next to us. Coins litter the bottom like sparkling fish scales. It would be easy to dispose of it here.

Jake’s hand closes around mine before I throw it. “He wanted you to place his last bet for him, then,” he says, and I know he’s right. He takes it from me and squints to read the tiny words:

CIRCUS

CIRCUS

Jake consults his phone. “Circus Circus is three and a half kilometers from here.”

He takes my hand again and leads me to the curb, where he hails a taxi. I squeeze tight. My nails probably bite into the skin on the back of his hand, but he doesn’t mind. He shoos me into the cab, and we peel up the Strip, Neil sitting on his knee, the silver token pressed between my palms.

We spill out in front of Circus Circus fifteen minutes later. Inside, the casino is cold and bright and loud. It feels like one of those sleep experiments. Will humans follow a normal circadian rhythm on their own in the absence of diurnal light signals? No. Absolutely not. We will drink and gamble and chase that next burst of dopamine until we drop dead from exhaustion.

Jake takes it all in with a dispassionate glance and looks to me. “What now?”

“I don’t know,” I say automatically.

“It’s just a token for the slots, isn’t it?” Jake says.

I know it’s for the damn slots. Jake tilts his head, and I follow his line of sight: an old-fashioned machine with a crank handle and real barrels for the reels, with Dolly Parton’s busty figure emblazoned on it. As a bonus, it’s Dolly from 9 to 5 .

A part of me had thought that maybe I would wander around until I felt drawn to a slot machine— the slot machine, the one my husband played. There are only so many of the old-fashioned token slots left here. But instead, Jake’s picked out a slot machine that winks at the two of us and our inside jokes.

It’s no matter. I have to lose this token and get this part of the evening over with. I slide it into the slot…and I don’t have to pull the crank, do I? I got rid of it. I’ve stashed my bad luck away in a game of chance, and someone else is welcome to it. It’s the cursed artifact in a horror film, and the bad mojo can go home from Las Vegas with them, not me.

“You forgot to pull the crank,” Jake says as I step away from the machine. Before I can stop him, he does it for me.

“I was going to leave it,” I say as the reels begin to spin.

“Why?”

“I was never much of a gambler.” Not like Neil. If Neil were here, he’d be able to tell me the house odds of every single bet at every single game.

Beyond Jake’s shoulder, one Dolly head rolls into place.

“It’s just a slot machine,” he says. “You put a token in, and if you win—”

Unbelievable. “I know how a slot machine works. I know how to play every game of chance here. Neil made sure of that.”

Beyond him, the second reel rolls to a halt. There’s something wrong with this machine.

Two Dolly heads.

“Do you?” Jake looks at me like he’s spotted a new and glamorous facet in me. He pans around the room, taking in the games around us. “Why don’t you like gambling?”

“Because gambling is fucking stupid. The system’s rigged. You can’t beat the house,” I say. It was all about getting the better of the house, for Neil.

You know how to beat the house, Neil? I said to him once. By not playing. That’s the only way to beat the house. I didn’t win more games than Neil, but I lost fewer at least.

Beyond Jake, the third reel slows. I close my eyes, and I must imagine it, but I feel another warm desert breeze—

The ringing starts, and when I open my eyes, I see three Dolly heads. Tokens spill out like oversized wedding confetti.

I cash out at the cage, robotically, where the cashier counts out the tokens and slides a single greasy hundred-dollar bill across the counter to me, the dirtiest transaction I’ve ever been involved in. I lead the way outside, and we’re off, into the crawling, sparkling night. I breathe deeply, huffing the night air, heart racing.

A little silver token of love from a dead man, carried in purse and pocket for seven years, finally flung out into this noisy, ugly wishing well of a city where the strangest things come true. Definitely not the wish you asked for. I miss the token. But I’m so relieved it’s gone. It’s the same feeling I had when Neil finally passed. I missed him, more than anything, and I was so relieved —nobody ever talks about the relief. All the suspense and dread of an unpromising prognosis gone, and just pure, simple grief ever after.

“What do we do with his ashes?” I ask Jake.

“Not yet,” Jake says.

“What do you mean, not yet?”

“It’s not time.”

It’s not time. I stop in the middle of the sidewalk, and the world twists around me and past me on an invisible current of fun and life and pleasure that spat me out years ago. I haven’t been able to find my way back to it. I’ve been twirling in an eddy on the fringes looking in ever since, like a ghost shut out by the living. I could scream at the top of my lungs and no one would hear me. I’m ready to rejoin the living.

It’s not time.

“He wanted one last night on the town,” Jake says. I can read the subtext. He’s protective of a fellow dying person’s last wish. He stands there, mirroring me, like he too is a ghost the liquid nightlife slips around and through.

“But he isn’t here,” I say. That’s the tragedy of it. He isn’t anywhere anymore.

Jake considers me. “Why did you come all the way to Las Vegas?”

“He wanted me to bring him here.”

“I think he wanted to bring you here. He wanted you to have his last night on the town,” he says.

Around me, people laugh and shriek and take photos. Neil loved all this insanity. Loved it. And I know Jake is right. The token, the ashes—this wasn’t some gesture Neil wanted for himself. He wanted it for me.

He wanted me to come here when I was ready and lose it all. I have to keep playing until it’s all gone—until every penny and every speck of dust has been cleared out. Riches to rags. Rebirth on the Las Vegas Strip.

It won’t take long, and Jake’s here to help me do it. He holds out his hand experimentally, and when I take it, it feels like we’re shaking on something.

Inside the Wynn, Jake says, “What about crabs?” He sounds so casual.

“You mean craps?”

Are his cheeks pink, or am I imagining it?

“Yes,” he says. “What did you think I said?”

I fucking hate craps, and as it happens, I’m pretty good at it. Good enough to know how to make a bad bet. When the dealer flips the marker to Off , instead of asking for tens or fives or something I can play for a while, I ask for a single black chip. I place it on twelve, the worst bet on the table, and in my head I can hear Neil wailing over house edge.

The stick man pushes the dice over to us, and I let Jake do the honors.

“Take two!” the stick man shouts when Jake mistakenly picks up all five, and he drops three back onto the green, which the stick man hooks back in. Jake rattles the dice like this is Gambling Clichés 101, and he sends them shooting across the green. They bounce off the far wall of the table where I can’t see them and settle. People hoot and mutter and groan, and the stick man and the two dealers throw themselves over the table, scooping away lost bets, moving chips, stacking fresh chips next to winning bets. Clack, clack, clack . The other players start tossing new chips on the table and calling new bets. I tug Jake’s sleeve to go.

“Wait,” he says. “Your winnings.”

For some incomprehensible reason, the dealer nearest us groups stacks of chips from his bank together—a few thousand dollars, at least—and then slides it across the green…over to us.

My problem has grown thirty times larger in as many seconds.

“Take down our bet,” I shout. “I want you to take down our bet.”

We cash out again. Outside it’s cooling off, and I shiver and walk faster, and Jake places his coat on my shoulders. My heart pounds in my chest.

“You have good luck tonight,” he says.

“There’s no such thing as luck,” I say contemptuously. Whether you’re playing dice or fighting cancer or losing the genetic lottery to a neurodegenerative disease. Gamblers are superstitious idiots. They spout maxims and philosophies that sound snappy in a fortune cookie, things like In order to win, you must be willing to lose everything . I was willing to lose my husband, for his sake. I won nothing.

Jake shrugs, that small, asymmetrical smile appearing. “Surely we both believe in bad luck.”

Just inside the door of the Venetian, we stop in our tracks to take in a giant spinning wheel of fortune. Gambling for kindergartners. Neil would have despised this. I hand the cash to the dealer, who does a double take and spares a pitying glance for the idiot tourists blowing their money. He spins the wheel, and it’s so big it fills my whole field of vision. I feel nauseous watching it. I close my eyes. Twenty-four percent house edge, I remember. It drifts up out of nowhere. And when I open my eyes, the wheel has stopped, and Jake is staring at me like I’m a magician. The dealer, too.

I watch Jake collect from the dealer, handsome dark head bent, taking the cash with those hands I’d recognize anywhere now. My winning streak won’t extend to him. I won’t win anything in this game with Jake.

My head throbs. I’m feeling frantic and vicious and hurtful.

At Caesar’s Palace, I search out a roulette table with a high minimum bet just in time to hear the ball rattle into its groove. The dealer calls out “Five black even!” and everyone around the table groans or sighs or laughs as he wipes the surface clear. I exchange my cash for several neat stacks of purple chips.

The other players have left yellow, orange, and green chips all over the table. Some sit inside the numbered boxes; some sit on the outlines. There are little heaps in the boxes marked Even and Odd .

“Put it on one,” I tell Jake without looking at him. It’s the best way I know to lose it all in one go. I embrace the terrible odds. I prostrate myself before the house. Take it all.

And as I think this, an achingly familiar voice drifts up.

You can’t beat the house by not playing, Dodi, Neil had said with a smile—his last smile. We weren’t talking about craps or roulette. We lost this hand, but someday you’ll meet someone who will make you want to play again.

Like I ask him to, Jake takes our chips and slides them all into the box marked 1, the loneliest number, and the spinning starts.

The wheel spins and spins, and an age goes by, and finally the ball starts to skip and hop across the ribs of the wheel, looking for a place to land, and—

I don’t know why I need to say it, except that grief latches onto to silly things like numbers to hold its place in your brain, and one is a pet number of mine.

“December first is when my husband died.”