Familiarity came all at once. The last of them — she’d called herself Lisa, in the street by his open car door, and under the overpass just before he’d done what he’d had to do. Three words and that was enough for him to know. Somehow she’d made it here. A shadow. Was she on the flight over? Three rows up, in a seat on the other side of the aisle, there was the dark hair, the pale skin of the legs. But again, the face out of view.
The bartender had just said something, clearly and loudly and definitely to Lewis. Except for the soft scratching whispers of the old man in Lisa’s ear, no sound competed. But still Lewis didn’t understand the words.
Before he could form a thought, Lewis searched his pockets to pay for the drink and rid himself of the bartender. His wallet was wedged beneath the chips. He scooped out as many as he could and set them on the bar, returning to his pocket to fish out the wallet.
The intervening customers, silent men he hadn’t realized were a group, paid for their drinks and left together. Now only empty space separated him from Lisa, the one girl he couldn’t read. He’d failed with her, it looked like. She was unchanged, still hooking, thousands of miles away. How many others had he failed with?
The bartender gestured and said something more, and Lewis, in fear or confusion or frustration, pushed the beer and the scattered chips toward Lisa and walked out of the bar into an indistinct chaos of noise, which was matched only by the confusion of light streaming down into the atrium at all angles, in several colors and as many intensities, freighting the air.
His father had told Lewis once about the time he saw Mike Tyson fight in this arena, with business colleagues, just a year before the boxer fell from greatness. It was not much of a fight. His British opponent’s reflexes were betraying him with age. But then, every boxer’s reflexes seemed to fail him against Tyson. The fight was over in five rounds, on a TKO. It would have been shorter still, Leo told him, had the Brit not taken to clinching from the opening bell.
But he had no thought of winning. It was a foregone conclusion that Tyson would triumph. Somehow this didn’t manage to dim the moment. The trick can’t be repeated too many times, but Tyson had only recently come to seem indomitable. For a while it was a thrill simply to see that status confirmed.
The bout turned from sport to theater, classic repertory work. There was almost sympathy for the Brit, as the only question was how, not whether, he would succumb.
Tyson seemed playful during the match, Leo said, shooting around the ring in little leaps, smiling through his mouthpiece, tossing the other man around with his forearms. All the while he was finding his timing. The opening came on a separation, the conclusion written in five punches: a double jab, a right cross, a tight left hook that sent the Brit’s mouthpiece into the front row, and an overhand right on the way down that sent his chin into his chest, making a mess of his tongue as he sprawled onto the canvas. He spat mouthfuls of blood as the victor, preordained, stood on the ropes over a turnbuckle, hopping down seconds later to congratulate the Brit on the part he’d played.
That day, decades ago now, Leo Eldern had been ringside. Today his son was in the closed circuit theater next to the arena, watching in, as if through the one-way window of an interrogation room.
Pornography awards not being prizefights, the theater was only half full, though the industry’s sex workers, hundreds of them, completely filled the auditorium itself. Lewis, who had calmed himself some since stumbling upon Lisa earlier in the day, scanned the seats right around him, but there wasn’t enough light to make anyone out. He wondered what sort of person would pay for a screening like this, assuming the ceremony was to unfold roughly as planned, that the vents in the auditorium gave nothing but chilled air. Some must be raincoaters on other nights, he thought, in other theaters, and they’d leave only after they’d made the floors sticky.
For the next three hours, he studied the screen, its glossed women and the ponytailed men, no less glossed and steroidal in appearance than the women, yet not merely of secondary interest but of hardly any at all. Their words, few though they were, and even less significant than they were few, barely caught his ears.
Most of all he monitored the master of ceremonies: a former queen of porn, now a producer and figurehead for her own adult studio. She was the ideal barometer, as she was onscreen most, and through the whole length of the ceremony. If the atmosphere was changing, it should show in her first.
But between the three-way and costume design awards, and between those and the girl-girl prize, had her skin flushed any? She’d been red to begin with, presumably from the Vegas sun outside, so it was hard to tell.
He listened carefully to her too, for botched words, names, stutters or any other struggles of the tongue. There were some, but then there were always some, even in the speech of the best. A decline is what he needed, and he couldn’t find one.
There was eye contact to assess. The auditorium was filled with the distractible. You wouldn’t arrive, and certainly not survive, in the industry if you weren’t. But was the hostess any more distractible toward the end, as the best-new-starlet award approached, than she was at the start? Did her eyes flit faster now? Did she forget the films, nominees, punch lines, and stories of the year that was in Porn Valley, only hours away in California? When she looked into the camera, did her gaze miss the lens, or the point beyond it, where the consciousness of the viewer lay?
There was her stride to attend to. She started the night with a textbook whore-strut, lightly pasteurized by the ease of Valley life. It was a carefully coordinated gait, its moving parts were many, and it could break down in any number of ways. But it didn’t seem to alter. No collapse into a lopsided swagger or a beach stroll, no retreat into a common strip-mall hustle. If there was any change at all, it was only in the direction of greater command. Whatever contempt there was in it at the beginning remained to the end, when she called up the best new starlet, Violet Skye, who trotted onto the stage with the sexualized power that five-inch heels a waxy red guaranteed.
All the while, Lewis was listening to the room itself, to the gaps between speeches and the hostess’s drivel. A presumed silence. There was always a hum, though. Was there any change in that? Was a hiss growing, and could this be picked up through the theater screen? Or did one need to be in the auditorium itself for that?
Could the hiss correspond to a draft from the vents? Could you see collars rustling, single strands, or tufts even, of bleached hair twirling, the lightest earrings swaying in it? Or was it too delicate a change for that? Could you only feel it, this cooling vapor on your neck, from inside the room, through a sense the screen couldn’t provide for?
Lewis heard nothing and saw nothing. Not even Lisa.
The curtain was falling as the hostess, still unfazed, invited everyone back for next year’s ceremony. As the cameras whirled about, the guests rose. The audience of which Lewis was a part, in the theater, mostly stayed put. They would wait to watch the sex workers file out before they did the same.
Lewis’s mind whirled like the cameras, and there were only more questions everywhere he turned. Could they be immune to the gas? Could their plastic poise not be taken from them? Were their senses beyond further derangement? Was their compass so true that nothing could disorient them? Could they not be made to sleep either? Was it unnecessary, for the deathless?
He could feel himself flushing. His mouth had already gone dry. He got to the aisle but nearly fell in the dark, his thigh crashing into armrests several times along the way toward the exit.
As he opened the doors the lobby lights overwhelmed his eyes, forcing them into the tightest squint. He opened them slowly and the world reformed, first as two men in police blue, stock-still. Four more men in the same blue materialized in front of the exits off to the side of the popcorn machines and the candy under the long glass counter. The employees of the theater, dressed in green uniforms and gathered together, were the last to take shape, on the opposite end of the lobby.