The Mirror Thief(10)
That’s something else she said: one of her pent-up gripes. Why can’t you just admit that it’s getting to you? Okay, sure. She’s not wrong. The jumpiness and the short temper, the bad dreams and sleepless nights that he shook off after the Desert, after Mogadishu, after Kosovo—shook them off each time, shook them right off, no trouble—sure, they’ve come back a little bit. I see this at the VA all the time, Sammy D. It’s a normal thing. There’s a war coming on, and you’re not in it, and that’s gonna bother you. But it’s not the war that bothers Curtis: it’s everything else. Everything but the war bothers him. The war he knows what to do with. The war makes sense.
This favor Damon’s asking—this is not how people get jobs, Curtis. Are you even listening to yourself? Flying to Las Vegas, sneaking around casinos: this is not any kind of career track you want to get on. If you don’t want to think about your future, you can think about mine. All right? Because I goddamn sure am not gonna sit around for the next thirty–forty years to watch you cash disability checks. You hear me? This is not the way a grownup man acts. Not in the real world.
The real world: that’s the jab she’s leading with nowadays, the power halfback in her offensive pattern. She always says it like there can be no argument about what it means. But to Curtis, the stuff she talks about—cover letters and résumés, community college classes, refinancing the mortgage—it all seems about a million miles removed from what he thinks of as reality. Six thousand miles, anyway. The fact that these are ordinary concerns for every functional adult in America just makes him feel worse. Still, he can’t shake the sense that there’s something inane, something thoughtless, in worrying over stuff like this while another war is coming on. It feels babyish, inconsequential, like playacting that Curtis never took part in and has now long since outgrown.
War is a game too, of course; he knows that. But at least in war the stakes are serious, the horizon of what’s possible vastly expanded, the immediate objectives as unarguable as a white stripe across bermuda-grass. You ready yourself; you go to the war or the war comes to you; you live or you die. Curtis wonders whether he’ll ever feel so alive in this world again.
His eyes have closed; he forces them open. At the stoplight at Flamingo, a group of kids is crossing, led by a barechested boy with blue hair and vinyl pants and a cyalume glowstick that swings by a cord around his skinny neck. The boy dances and spins, the glowstick appears and disappears like a beacon, and Curtis remembers a column of flexicuffed Iraqi EPWs that he moved through a cleared minefield south of Al Burgan back in ’91: the way he felt out the safe route in the sand, searching for the bowls of cool green light in the smokeblack petroleum darkness of late afternoon. This strikes a spark off another memory: two nights ago, flying into McCarran, the way the lights came up out of the desert, out of nothing, as if the city were made of nothing but light, and all of it radiating from the Strip.
Then the cabbie is waking him, the taxi door is opening, and Curtis has stepped out into the porte-cochère of his own hotel, pinching his wallet with sleep-numb fingers as he watches the cab’s taillights dim and fade under the smug white span of the Rialto Bridge. For a while he just stands there. People step around him. He shakes his head and moves out of the way, adrift on the pavement, rotating to look at the buildings. Rows of trefoils and quatrefoils and crenellations. A gold zodiac ringing a clock’s blue face. Above the clock, the casino readerboard, flashing its loop of news down the Strip. The tinted hotel windows catching whatever news flashes back.
When Damon asked him to find Stanley, Curtis thought of this hotel right away, before the sentence had even cleared Damon’s teeth. For some reason it’s hard now to remember why he thought that. It’s like being here in the flesh is tangling him up—like the place itself is blocking the idea of the place.
Near the end of that last Vegas trip, Curtis and Stanley walked together to exactly this spot. They stood on the bridge, and they watched the gondolas pass in silhouette over the green coronas cast by underwater lights. The new moon lurked in the east, erased by the earth’s shadow, still somehow visible. Stanley kept talking, talking. Curtis was very drunk. He remembers leaning stiff-armed against one of the twin white columns by the boulevard sidewalk, sucking in deep breaths to hold his liquor down.
The Doge, he brought these two columns back from Greece. The real ones, I’m talking about. Not this fake shit here. Twelfth Century, it would have been. The Doge—this guy was like their king, see?—he brought ’em back from a campaign against the Byzantines. Disastrous campaign. He brought back the plague, too. People weren’t too happy about that, so they rose up, and they killed him. For years these two columns, they were just lying there next to the water. Every so often, somebody’d say: Hey, you think we ought to raise these things up? But they were so big, see, that nobody could figure how the hell to do it. But then this kid comes along, this engineer, and he says, sure, I’ll put these upright for you. But if I can do it, I want the go-ahead to run dice games between ’em. People said okay, and the two columns went up, right there on the Piazetta. And that is where it all began, kid. Fast-forward four hundred some-odd years, 1638. That’s when the first casino opens on the Grand Canal. I’m talking about the first modern casino, the first casino as you and I know it. The casino as a business. The casino as an institution. The institution that has fed and housed my ass for the last forty years, my whole grownup life. These other joints, these other bullshit cities they keep building on the Strip—I’m talking Paris, I’m talking New York—I look at that, and I think: what the f*ck? But this place here, this place makes some goddamn sense. It’s the holy city, kid. The gambler’s Jerusalem.