The Immortalists(47)
The newest hotel rises up like an open book, two slender buildings connected at the binding. The Mirage is written on an electronic sign in curling, red capitals. It scrolls: In our first ten hours we paid the largest single jackpot in Las Vegas history! 4.6 million! Enjoy the buffet! Then the letters vanish, coy, and The Mirage reappears. A volcano in front of the hotel fires nightly, they’re told, to the sound of the Grateful Dead and the Indian tabla player Zakir Hussain. There’s an atrium with a man-made rainforest and an enclosure for real tigers. It’s exactly what Klara’s always never wanted, but she thinks of Ruby. There’s money here. They walk into the lobby, which is hung with giant chandeliers and glass petals the size of car tires. Behind the front desk, stretching from floor to ceiling, is an aquarium fifty feet wide. She hears a shrill roar, which she thinks is the waterfall or the volcano before she recognizes it for a saw: the building is still under construction.
‘Psst,’ says Raj. He points to a large banner above the front desk. It shows Siegfried and Roy, their faces pressed to either side of a white tiger. Daily at 1 and 7 p.m. It’s 1:45. They follow the signs to the theater. Since the show has already begun, there’s no ticketer. Raj slips through the door with Ruby on his hip and pulls Klara into two empty seats. Siegfried and Roy are dressed in unbuttoned silk shirts, cropped fur jackets, and leather pants with codpieces. They ride a fire-breathing mechanical dragon, whipping the ten-foot head while women in shell bikinis dance with crystal-headed staffs. At the end of the show, Roy sits on top of a white tiger that sits on top of a mirrored disco ball. Joined by Siegfried and twelve more exotic animals, they levitate into the rafters.
It’s a garbled American dream, a dream of the American dream: forty years earlier, the pair met aboard an ocean liner and fled postwar Germany with a cheetah stowed in their trunk. Now their show has a cast and crew of two hundred and fifty people.
As the men bow, Raj puts his mouth to Klara’s ear. ‘We just have to find a way in. Somebody’s gotta know somebody,’ he says.
Klara breast-feeds Ruby on the futon, keeping one eye on Simon’s watch. The same two letters appear as before: M, then E. Five minutes later, there’s a second E. The next span of time is so long – twenty minutes – that she’s worried she missed something while burping Ruby. Then she hears the noise again.
T.
‘Meet!’
Ruby shrieks. Klara’s milk is running dry.
‘What?’ calls Raj from outside. He’s belly-up under the RV, looking at the backboard.
‘Nothing,’ Klara says. Raj won’t want to hear what’s just occurred to her, which is this: If Simon is communicating with her from beyond the lip of death, then who’s to say Saul isn’t, too?
Klara clasps her nursing bra and shushes the baby, but there’s an ache in her sinuses like she might start crying. Ruby is alive, and Ruby needs her. Klara needs Simon, needs Saul, but they’re –
Dead? Perhaps. But perhaps not completely.
Raj strikes out with his contacts at the Southern California casinos, but the owner of the Lake Tahoe resort has a cousin whose wife’s brother manages the Golden Nugget. Raj goes to meet the man in his nicest outfit at a steakhouse on the Strip. When he returns, he’s jacked up, energy to burn and a wild look in his eyes like rapture.
‘Baby,’ he says. ‘I got a phone number.’
17.
Klara has never performed anywhere like the Mirage’s proscenium theater. The battens stand thirty feet above the floor; there are two moving platforms, five stage lifts, twenty spotlights, and two thousand seats. The ascension rope has been set, and the Proteus cabinet waits on wheels backstage. Three Mirage executives sit in the front row.
During Raj’s opening monologue, Klara stands in the wings, sweat shimmying down the sides of her sequined dress. For the first time, Ruby is in day care, a service on the seventeenth floor for the children of hotel employees. Klara’s stomach is clenched. She tries to focus, for Ruby’s sake. Shake out your hands. Swallow. Smile, goddammit. She steps, in gold heels, onstage.
Light. Heat. She can’t tell the executives apart, with their untucked dress shirts and their faces in shadow. They fidget through the Proteus cabinet. One leaves during the Vanishing Birdcage, citing a conference call. The remaining two perk up during Second Sight, but Klara times the Breakaway incorrectly and must lift her knees to avoid hitting the stage too soon. When she opens her eyes, one of the men is looking at his pager. The other clears his throat.
‘That it?’ he calls.
A stagehand flicks the house lights on, and Raj walks out from the wings. He’s smiling his salesman smile, but anger comes off him like heat. For a fraction of a second, the enormity of this opportunity – the enormity of their failure – knocks the air out of Klara. In the RV refrigerator, there are three jars of Ruby’s food. She and Raj have been eating fast food, and she can feel it in her body, the combination of glut and lack. They have sixty-four dollars in a locked box in the glove compartment. If they don’t get another gig, what will they do?
Klara thinks of Ilya, her mentor. He was the one who taught her that magic tricks are created for men: the pockets in suit jackets are perfectly sized to hold steel cups, and palming is easier with large hands. Then he taught her how to reinvent them. Klara uses compression-friendly foam balls, and she learned to work seamlessly with the drawer in a card table. But there was no way to get around the size of her palms, and when it came to sleight-of-hand magic, she could only rely on technique. ‘You’ve gotta get as good as the best men in magic,’ Ilya told her, drilling her in one-handed cuts until her fingers throbbed with pain. ‘And then you’ve gotta get better.’