Await Your Reply (16 page)

In the elevator, a miniature LED screen was blaring scenes of some Broadway-style musical entertainment, and the girl standing in front of him shifted her weight from foot to foot as she watched the video. She had a very short skirt and incredibly long bare legs—they seemed to go all the way up to her rib cage, beautiful downy brown legs—and Ryan observed them silently. The skirt ended just slightly below the slope of her buttocks, and he let his eyes run
down the back of her thighs to her calves and ankles and sandaled pink-soled feet. He watched as she got off the elevator, and the man beside him made a low sound in his throat.

“Mm, mm,” the man said. “Did you see that?” He was a black man, perhaps fifty years old, wearing a pink polo shirt and kelly green pants and carrying a bag of golf clubs. “That was a sight to see.”

“Yes,” Ryan said, and the man shook his head in exaggerated wonder.

“Damn,
” the man said. “Are you single?”

“Yeah,” Ryan said, “I guess I am.” And the man shook his head again.

“I sure do envy you,” the man said—and then, before he could say more, the elevator doors opened and three more beautiful teenage girls entered their enclosure.

What if he
did
meet a girl, he thought. That was what people did in Vegas, that was what a lot of people came here for. All over town, he supposed, they were hooking up, seducing their way into one-night stands or stumbling drunkenly into liaisons with strangers. He himself had never picked up someone at a bar, or a casino, though obviously it was possible. You saw it on TV all the time: a man approached an attractive woman; there was some flirtation or suggestive small talk; and shortly thereafter, the couple was having sex. It should be fairly simple to accomplish. If he could get a 2200 on the SAT, he should be able to get laid in Vegas.

But standing there on the main floor of the casino, the very idea of “meeting someone” seemed heartbreakingly complex. How would you even talk to another person in such a place? He peered out at what appeared to be an enormous video arcade, rows upon rows of glowing neon games and slot machines, stretching as far as he could see, hundreds and hundreds of people feeding their individual screens, which showed playing cards or rolling numbers or animated cartoon characters, and he found himself thinking of
the photographs he’d seen of sweatshops—cavernous factory lofts, columns of workers sewing seams into blouses or riveting eyelets into shoes, a hive in which each worker was submerged in a constant, lonely activity. Meanwhile, all around him people wandered the aisles and walkways, with that peculiar blankness tourists had as they moved through the paces of being entertained, an aimless shuffle that people took on in shopping malls and national monuments and so forth.

At last, Ryan fell into the flow of foot traffic around the circumference of the main gaming area. In front of him, a pair of blond women in matching capri pants spoke to each other in Dutch or Norwegian or some other language. Up ahead, a mild bottleneck was forming as people paused to watch an elderly man in a cowboy hat and flowered Western shirt performing a card trick. The man held up the ten of spades to show the crowd, and there was a spatter of applause. The magician gave a small, gracious bow, and the blond women stopped and craned to see what was going on.

But Ryan moved past, feeling again in his pockets for his stack of ATM cards, which was almost as thick as a deck of playing cards.

There was a lot of cash that needed to be withdrawn before the night was over.

It was annoying to find himself thinking of Pixie again.

In the past few years, he had been pretty successful at keeping her out of his conscious thoughts, and it was disturbing to find her lingering there now. There was a certain way she would press her nose and lips to his neck, just under the line of his jaw; a way she would slide her hand down on his arm, as if she were trying to make his skin adhere to her palm.

It was not as if he had been in love with her. That was what his mother said later.

“It’s just ordinary lust, but at your age you can’t tell the difference.”

And probably his mother was right. Pixie was not what he had thought of when he’d imagined “falling in love”—and in fact, he couldn’t remember if the word “love” had ever been mentioned. It wasn’t the type of thing Pixie would have said.

“Fucking”—that was more in line with Pixie’s vocabulary, and that was what they were doing within a few weeks of that first conversation in the band room, fucking first in a motel on a band trip to Des Moines, and then fucking after school at Pixie’s house while her dad was at work, and then fucking in the school building, in a storage closet in the basement near the boiler room, fucking on top of boxes of industrial paper towels.

“You know what’s funny?” Pixie said. “My dad totally thinks I’m this innocent virgin. He’s like a zombie since my mom died, poor guy. I don’t think he realizes that I’m not twelve anymore.”

“Geez,” Ryan said. “Your mom died?” He had never known anyone who had experienced that kind of tragedy, and it made him feel even more awkward to be naked in her room, with her girly pink bedspread and her collection of Beanie Babies staring down at them from their shelf.

“She had some deal with her lungs,” Pixie said, and she uncovered a pack of Marlboros from a hiding space behind a Harry Potter novel on her bookcase. “Bronchiolitis obliterans, it’s called. They don’t know how she got it. They thought she could have been exposed to toxic fumes of some sort, or it could have been brought on by a virus. But no one knew what she had. The doctors thought she had asthma or whatever.” She looked at him, cryptically, and he watched as she withdrew a cigarette and lit it. She put her face near the open window and exhaled.

“That’s awful,” Ryan said. Uncertain. What was he supposed to say? “I’m really sorry,” he said.

But she only shrugged. “I used to think about killing myself,” she said. And she blew a stream of gray-blue smoke through the screen, into the backyard. She peered at him, matter-of-factly. “But then I decided that it wasn’t worth it. It’s too angsty and whiny, I think. Or
maybe …,” she said. “Maybe I’m just too beyond caring to bother.” She leaned back, kneading the crumple of sheet and blanket with her bare foot, and he watched her toes as they clenched and unclenched. He was a little stunned by such talk.

“Listen,” he said. “You shouldn’t think about killing yourself. There are a lot of people who—care about you, and …”

“Shut up,” she said, but not unkindly. “Don’t be a nerd, Ryan.”

And so he didn’t say anything more.

Instead of going back to school after lunch that day, they stayed at her house and watched movies that Pixie was obsessed with. Fourth period: here was
The Killers
, with Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson. Fifth period:
Something Wild
with Jeff Daniels and Melanie Griffith. Sixth period: fucking again.

I am actually doing this
, he thought.
I am really, really, really doing this—

The hotels were interconnected. He passed through one casino cavern and boarded an escalator and a series of moving walkways that rivered past mall-like hallways lined with souvenir shops, and then he found himself in a replica of an Egyptian tomb, and then inside another warehouse-size casino floor, and there were a few more ATM machines to attend to, and then there was the Excalibur, which was themed to look like a medieval castle, and people were lined up to dine at the Round Table buffet, and he made a couple more withdrawals.

And then, at last, after winding his way through the corridors of the Luxor and the Excalibur, he emerged into the outdoors, into the open air, and he had about ten grand in his backpack. That was the thing about Vegas—you could withdraw five hundred dollars, one thousand, three thousand from an ATM and it was not that unusual, though he knew that he would have to retire Kasimir Czernewski after this trip. Which was sad, in a way. He had spent a lot of time building up Kasimir’s life in his mind, trying to conceptualize what it
would be like to be a foreigner, a young man starting with nothing and working his way toward the American dream. Kasimir: essentially easygoing, but also crafty in some ways, determined, taking night school classes and struggling to establish his little private investigator business. You could make a television series about Kasimir Czernewski, a kind of comedy-drama, he imagined.

Outside, people were moving down the sidewalk in groups of five or ten or twenty, and the flow had grown more purposeful, more like the movement of big-city people down a street. On one side, car traffic was dragging slowly past, and on the other, hawkers stood and handed out cards to passersby. They were primarily Mexican men, and they would draw attention by slapping their handouts against their forearms
—clap, clap, clap—
and then flicking out a single card and extending it.

“Thank you,” Ryan said, and he had gathered about twenty of them before he began to say, “I’m set.” “No thanks.” “Sorry.”

The cards were advertisements for various escort services, pictures of girls, naked, airbrushed, with colorful stars printed over their nipples. Sometimes the letters of their names covered their privates. Fantasie, Roxan, Natasha.
Beautiful Exotic Dancer in the privacy of your own room!
the card said.
Only $39!
And there was the phone number to call.

He was lingering on the street, looking at his collection of escort girls—imagining what it might be like to actually call one of them—when he heard the Russian men approaching.

At least he thought they were Russian. Or they were speaking in some other Eastern European language. Lithuanian? Serbian? Czech? But in any case, they were talking loudly in their native tongue
—Zatruxa
something something.
Baruxa! Ha, ha, ha—
and Ryan looked up, startled, as they approached. There was a bald one, and one with his blond hair moussed into stiff hedgehog-like spikes, and another with a checkered cabbie golf cap. All of them wearing colorful Hawaiian shirts.

They were all three carrying those enormous souvenir drink
glasses that were so popular on the strip, containers that looked like vases, or bongs—round, bulbous bases with long, piped necks that eventually opened into a tuliped rim. He assumed that these glasses had been engineered so that they were hard to spill, and yet held the maximum amount of alcoholic beverage allowed.

They came toward him, noisily joking in whatever Slavic language they were speaking, and he couldn’t help it. He froze there, staring at them.

Back when he was a freshman at Northwestern, his roommate, Walcott, used to scold him.

“Why do you always stare at people?” Walcott said, one night, when they were walking down Rush Street in Chicago, looking for bars that might take their cheap fake IDs. “Is that, like, an Iowa thing?” Walcott said critically. “Because you know, in cities, it’s not cool to gape at people.”

Walcott was actually from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, which wasn’t a city, but he had spent a lot of time in Boston and New York, and so believed himself an expert on such things. He also had a lot of opinions about what people from Iowa were like, though he had never been there, either.

“Look,” Walcott said, “let me give you some advice. Don’t look at people directly in the face. Never—let me reiterate—Never,
never, NEVER
make eye contact with a homeless person, or a drunk, or anyone who looks like they are a tourist. It’s a super-easy rule to remember: do not look at them.”

“Hmm,” Ryan said, and Walcott patted him on the back.

“What would you do without me?” Walcott said.

“I don’t know,” Ryan said. He looked down at his feet, which were weaving along the dirty sidewalk as if by remote control.

He never would have chosen Walcott as a friend, but they had been thrown together by fate, by the administrative offices, and
they’d spent an enormous amount of time together that first year, so Walcott’s voice was still ingrained in his head.

But now it was too late. He stood, making eye contact, staring, and the bald Russian had noticed him. The bald man’s eyes lit up, as if Ryan were holding up a sign with his name on it.

“Hey there, my main man,” the bald Russian said, in a thick but surprisingly slangy English—as if he’d learned the language by listening to rap music. “Hey, how you doing?”

And this was the thing Walcott had warned him about. This was the problem with being from Iowa, because he had been trained, for years and years, to be polite and friendly, and he couldn’t help himself.

“Hello,” Ryan said, as the three men came toward him, grinning as they clustered around him. A bit
too
close, and he stiffened uncomfortably, though he found himself putting on his pleasant, welcoming Midwestern expression.

The man with the spiked hair let out a burst of unrecognizable Russian syllables, and the men all laughed.

“We …,” said the spike-haired man, and struggled a moment, trying to think of words. “We—tree—alkonauts! We—” he said. “We come with peace!”

They all found this uproarious, and Ryan smiled uncertainly. He shifted his shoulder, the backpack with his heavy laptop and about ten thousand dollars in cash tucked into one of the pockets. Stay calm. He was at the edge of the curb, and tourists and partygoers and other walkers were moving around them with glazed, bedazzled expressions. Not making eye contact.

He was trying to decide how nervous he should be. They were out in the open, he thought. They couldn’t do anything to him right here in the middle of the street—

Though, he remembered a movie he’d seen where an assassin
had expertly severed the saphenous vein in his victim’s thigh, and the victim had bled to death right there on a busy street.

The men had formed a circle around him, and he could feel the flow of traffic on Las Vegas Boulevard at his back. He took a step, but the men just gathered closer, as if following his lead.

“You like the cards?” said the bald one. “You like the cards, my main man?”

And Ryan was certain he’d been caught. His hand went automatically to his pocket, where he had his stack of ATM cards. He rested his palm against his thigh, thinking again of the saphenous vein.