B008J4PNHE EBOK (54 page)

The campus loop hadn’t changed; the narrow road still wound in meandering circles through the college grounds. Nor was there any detectable difference in the faces of the dorms: the bloodred stone of their facades was as fresh as ever. When the car passed through the crosswalk near the cafeteria, Sam spotted the tree where the freshmen girls had hung the condoms. Today its branches were black and undecorated—or wait, was it a different tree? He wasn’t sure. There were four or five nearly identical trees in a cluster.

On the sidewalks, students walked with messenger bags slung over their shoulders and bare skin showing in spite of the cooler weather. Though it didn’t make any sense, Sam kept expecting to see someone he recognized.

“Still no black people,” observed Wesley.

“See!” Tess stabbed a finger in the direction of a group of students loitering around the steps of one of the dorms. “They’re kids!”

“You would not believe what a hard time I had getting laid here,” said Wesley.

“I might believe it,” she said.

“Hey, are these Chinese figures?” Wesley, in the backseat, had unearthed the rusty short sword that the vagrant had been wielding before Mina disarmed him and Sam squashed his balls. Wesley handed the weapon across the seat to Tess. She wasn’t impressed. “They look like bullshit runes to me. Elvish or Romulan or whatever.”

At the stop sign where the loop intersected with the drive leading
out to the front entrance, Sam craned his neck to try to see the lawn of the Film Department. Sometime since the fall of 2003, a pine tree had been planted at the corner of the lawn, and its dark green bell largely obscured the view. He supposed that the sinkhole at his former apartment complex was gone, too. Someone had surely come along with a machine, filled it with stuff, sealed it up.

“The building where I took all my classes is over there somewhere.” Sam gestured in the direction of the pine tree.

“Uh-huh,” said Tess.

A tall boy in a poncho glided by the car on a Segway.

“Check out this numbnuts,” said Wesley. “I’d like to poke him with this shitty sword.”

“Oh, wow.” Tess plastered her face against the passenger-side window in the manner of a young child. “I’ve never seen one in person. A Segway.”

When she went to college, Tess said, she had used a Trapper Keeper and written letters to her high school boyfriend, who turned out to be gay and broke her heart into a thousand tiny shards, shards that had also shattered, and so on. “I needed a Dust Buster with a special existential setting to suck up the millions of fragments of my heart, that’s how busted it was.”

She could remember hunching across the quad—on foot! in the rain! with a sinus infection!—Trapper Keeper pressed to her chest, as if to somehow hold in the trillion pulverized specks of her destroyed heart. “I was so miserable.” Tess hadn’t moved her face from the window. “And now college kids get Segways.” Steam from her breath whitened the glass.

“See? It looks like a good time, doesn’t it?” asked Sam.

The kid on the Segway glided forward. He looked like a young man with a future—a young man of the future.

“Yeah,” said Tess. “It does.”

There was a honk behind them. They were still at the stop sign. Sam began to swing the wheel left, to follow the loop past the pine tree and make a pass of the Film Department, but changed his mind. There was no reason why anyone else should care, and suddenly he wasn’t sure he cared that much, either. It was a hell of a long time ago.

So they turned right and went out through the college gate.

 ■ ■ ■ 

After two flat-out busts—a closed cemetery and a familiar place where everyone was a stranger—the only sane response was to blow the afternoon at the movies. Auspiciously, Tess had had the foresight to bring along a baggie of marijuana. In the parking lot of the multiplex in Kingston, they smoked it, using the tiny, faux crystal–encrusted pipe that was hooked to her key ring.

Sam, who loved getting high, hadn’t done it in two or three years, primarily because he had never managed to make the transition from college, where you went to the drug dealer’s dorm room and bought some schwag mixed with catnip, to city living, where the drug dealer came to your apartment door and laid out a dozen different vacuum-sealed packets from which to choose. It made getting stoned formal, like drinking fine wine, which for Sam defeated the purpose.

Tess ran the lighter’s flame over the leaves while he held the pipe. Sam made intense hypnotist eyes at her. “Less staring, more smoking,” she said.

He took a rip, his second or third, and held it until he thought he could feel the smoke crawling over the backs of his eyeballs. Sam exhaled out the top of his window, which was cracked an inch.

For privacy from any mall fuzz, the rental car was tucked in between two minivans. An ocean of parking lot lay beyond the windshield, strewn here and there with cars and shopping carts, reefed with cement islands.

“You know who you remind me of? You remind me of the Monopoly guy,” Sam said to Wesley. He handed the pipe to Tess.

“Tell me more.”

“It’s the aristocratic veneer that you share. The five-day growth of beard, the little hairs sticking from the top of your nose, the jabot with the maple syrup on it, the angry cold sore. I look at you, and what I see is a man who knows the rules of whist.”

“There is a Rockefeller-ish quality to me. It’s something I’ve never been entirely at peace with. I think you know that as well as anyone, Sam. You’ve seen me play croquet. You’ve seen me eat caviar with my own platinum cocaine spoon.”

“I’ve fed you caviar with your platinum cocaine spoon.”

Thin streams of pearl smoke emerged from Tess’s petite nostrils. Wesley
told her she was a dragon, but she didn’t respond. Her expression had become distant and frozen.

Sam asked if she was okay.

“I counted seven teddy bears.” Her speech was a near monotone. “A rhino and one kind of—I’m not sure what it was—some kind of avian—at the cemetery, and I didn’t even come close to walking the whole place. Graveyard stuffies. It was dreadful, the way they were left reclining against the headstones.”

“Were they weathered?” asked Wesley, accepting the pipe and the lighter.

“Yes. Terribly weathered. One of the bears, he was in overalls, but he was barely a bear anymore. His nap was all pilled, and his overalls were streaked, and his head was sort of sunken into his neck. Awful. Bad. Sad. Who wants to be a graveyard stuffie when they grow up, you know?”

“Was it an owl?” Sam asked Tess.

“I have no idea what you are talking about,” said Tess. Then she said, “Oh, right. Yeah. It could have been an owl.”

Wesley released a cloud of smoke. It rolled from the back of the car to the front, slowly, like a tiny bank of mist. The other two were sufficiently baked that they ceased talking in order to observe the phenomenon. Through the filter of the pot cloud, Sam met Tess’s eyes, and he grinned at her. She blinked.

They should rescue them, suggested Wesley, the graveyard animals. “Or not,” said Sam, but Tess was a “maybe.” First thing was first: she needed to see this movie about the hole that eats Las Vegas, needed to see all the fake monuments crash down. Tess felt like she needed to not think about anything for ninety minutes, not the Monopoly guy or the stuffies of the dead or whatever, not think about anything, and be peacefully stoned and eat yellow popcorn.

 ■ ■ ■ 

The Pit
was a blockbuster multistar extravaganza, the last holdover from the summer season.

The premise was that, on a random beautiful spring day, the land beneath Las Vegas abruptly craters, dropping the entire metro area eighty feet below what had been the surface. In the aftermath of the disaster, a contrasting band of survivors—a gambler on a losing streak, a teenage supermarket cashier, an IHOP hostess, an animal trainer and
her cat circus, a little moppet named Ari, and a mysterious man in a wheelchair—try to escape the burning, choking, violent wasteland that used to be America’s playground.

“Oh my God! It’s a sinkhole!” murmured Sam as the camera withdrew to a satellite view to reveal the fullness of the collapse: the acres of shining city plummeting into the cracked earth like a loaded platter falling down an elevator shaft. The image excited and thrilled him. He was awesomely high.

“Shhh,” said Tess.

The three of them had claimed the handicapped stadium seats fixed in the broad horizontal aisle at the waist of the theater. Sam was in the center.

While the reasons behind the titanic sinkhole were left devilishly unresolved (there were hints at environmental factors, at black magic, as well as at some ambiguous higher power, but nothing was definitive), the spectacle was undeniable, the action taut and astounding. Along with the expected pleasures—the screeching Eiffel Tower and the splitting Sphinx, a vicious pimp squished beneath the toppled Big Boy statue—there was a wit and a peculiarity that kept Sam’s attention from drifting.

At one point, the band of survivors walks through the shattered hall of a casino. Among the smashed tables, broken beams, and corpses, an old woman in a soiled bathrobe is blandly pumping quarters into a (miraculously operational) slot machine. She doesn’t so much as glance up as the group goes by. It was not quite profound, but it was definitely creepy.

The filmmakers also made brilliant use of the cat circus. The heroine, a trainer named Wylie, gets her circus cats to help the group out of all sorts of dastardly fixes. When they need a car to escape from a gang of end-times cultists in a cracked-up parking garage, she uses the cats’ training to get them working together to retrieve a ring of keys from the body of a dead man lying out in the open. It was tense bordering on nauseating, watching this team of intrepid cats darting out in a martial little line, bullets biting into the concrete around them. Sam wanted to hug whoever had decided to go as kooky as a cat circus for the representative element of Las Vegas entertainment instead of something typical, like a magician, or Cher.

The inevitable death of the oldest, bravest circus cat, Frank—there were five of them, each named after a member of the Rat Pack: Frank, Joey,
Sammy, Dino, and Peter—caused Sam’s eyes to blur with tears. Peeks to the left and the right revealed that his friends were weeping, too, their faces streaked in the candied screen light. Tess was sniffing and clutching her pipe. Wesley was outright bawling, lips shaking, cheeks trembling. The only other person watching was a theater attendant who had wandered in halfway through and sat down on top of a flipped bucket in the right vertical aisle. She was not crying but appeared mournful, face pressed against the pole of the mop that she held upright between her feet.

At the end of the film, the survivors escape the pit of Las Vegas by ascending a tipped missile silo that has created a perilous ramp to higher ground. The gambler, a Bogart-esque reluctant-hero sort, equal parts blasé and capable and irritably ethical, fights a militia warlord as his friends scrabble up the scary incline of the silo.

Sam imagined how silly it would look in script form—

EXT. MISSILE SILO—HIGH NOON

Captain Poul holds Carver by the front of his shirt. The drop yawns beneath his kicking feet. A flap of skin has torn away from Captain Poul’s blistered cheek, exposing the raw tissue beneath.

CPT. POUL

Degenerate!

Poul is about to throw Carver off. Carver’s hand darts into his jacket pocket.

CARVER

Joker.

The gambler riffles his lucky deck of playing cards spraying into the madman’s face. Poul staggers. Carver falls—and catches a rung. Playing cards snow through the air. Captain Poul slips over the side and falls, HOWLING.

CLOSE-UP: ON CARVER’S DANGLING HAND: WHERE HE STILL HOLDS THE DECK’S JOKER.

—but on the screen, it was gangbusters: hand-to-hand combat on top of a missile silo! The survivors reach the surface of the earth with only moments before the missile blows. When the credits roll, Wylie, the cat-circus ringmaster, her remaining cats, the moppet, and the gambler head into the sun while, behind them, the nuclear fire rises higher.

The lights came up. Sam blinked dry, gritty eyes.

It was all so inorganic—crane shots, copter shots, shots from the point of view of statuary falling on people’s screaming faces, an orchestral score that sounded like it had been written for a thousand pieces and performed by ten thousand, explosions from multiple angles, breathtaking stunts (many involving cats), actresses so beautiful, actors so cool. It was antithetical to everything that Sam recognized from life. It was totally impossible, aggressively meaningless—and, in its way, perfect. He liked it. It had been a great show. “That was fun.”

Tess smiled. “It wasn’t
E.T.,
but . . .” She leaned her head against his shoulder. “I want a circus cat so much.”

Wesley was on his feet. He adopted the Heisman pose—forearm stiff, invisible football tucked—and uncorked a thin, screechy fart that sounded like a sneaker digging for purchase against hardwood. “Double feature?”

Sam and Tess carried the motion.

Wesley hollered to the attendant, who had started to wheel away her bucket: was there a place in this theater to buy weed?

 ■ ■ ■ 

The best place, it turned out, was Farah’s locker. Farah was the theater attendant. She led them up to the roof, and they all hunched down against the tarpaper-walled rectangle that contained the upper landing of the interior stairs, taking turns with her bong.

The movie theater, which Sam had visited literally hundreds of times in the course of his childhood and adolescence, was your basic sugar cube, a cement square planted in a field of pavement. Through the years, various other boxes had sprouted up around it—a Best Buy, a Circuit City (RIP), a Lowe’s, a PetSmart, a Dollar Store, a medical group—and the vantage point of the roof was dour.

But there was a sense of home, too. Other people, he supposed, had family memories of trips to the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, the Mediterranean. Sam remembered walking with his parents, together and
separately, across the theater parking lot. It was a good memory, better than he’d ever realized.