He drove up to the top of town, and pulled into the stacked lot of one of the older-looking, shabbier-looking hotels on Fremont Street. He parked the car and an elevator took him to the lobby. There was an old guy wearing an honest-to-goodness cowboy hat leaning on the desk, staring past the waistcoated clerk at nothing. His face was a pained squint, and red thread veins pooled at the hinge of his jaw. Nobody was attending to him. His jaw tightened and relaxed.
Alex checked in. His room was on the eighth floor – it was shabby and small and brown everywhere and it smelled of old smoke. A double-glazed sliding window in a metal frame looked out onto a stained concrete wall gridded with identical windows, the other wing of the H-shaped hotel. Past that, the view towards the north – simmering low-rise, ribboned with tan overpasses.
He felt, at that moment, exhausted. It was another four hours before he was meeting Carey. He lay down on the coverlet of the bed, and fell asleep there without even taking his shoes off.
He woke up with a feeling close to fright. The air conditioner was roaring. His mouth was gummy, his head sore and sweat had chilled on his skin. The light outside was metallic, now, and when he went to the window the facing wall of the hotel was the colour of dirty brass in the old sun.
He should have been looking forward to seeing Carey but he was feeling, again, dislocated, unworthy, indecipherable. It made him panicky.
The problem is that when I’m alone I literally cease to believe that I exist.
He said the words to himself aloud, just to feel the air across his tongue. It was something he’d remembered from somewhere, not his own thought. He looked at his rucksack. It belonged to a stranger. He rubbed the back of his neck. His watch told him it was seven o’clock. He was probably just hungry.
They had arranged to meet in the Golden Nugget at eight. Alex had suggested meeting her flight, but Carey said that’d be a drag. She had heard that the casino contained the world’s biggest nugget of gold. ‘Let’s meet there! Just you, me and a big gold rock. It’ll be cute.’
Walking into the casino was like walking into an aquarium. The door – no, the entire wall – was permanently open to the outside. It gaped. The mouth of a whale. Not an aquarium. Not just an aquarium. An aquarium and its contents. A mechanical whale, trawling for human plankton. No need to suck: just leave the mouth open and let them wash in.
Even during the heat of a cloudless day, something seemed to stop the sunshine spilling from Fremont Street into the building: a filter in the air – an invisible baleen plate. Within a couple of steps the crisp hot light bouncing off the pavement outside would be gone. There was only the indecipherable carpet, the high ceiling, and slot machines arrayed in rows and islands under the buttery artificial light. It felt like cigarettes and acid stomach and the headachy buzz you get when you pass through tiredness into the unreal underwater feeling on the other side.
You turned round and the pleasant sunshine outside was a wall of white. Reality was oversaturated. It hurt the eyes. Safer in here. The second time you turned round you couldn’t find the opening back to the outside world at all. And now, in the evening, the inside started to colonise the outside. That border was porous, after all. But the unreality inside seeped onto the street like smoke.
A shift in the current and you had turned round, lost your bearings. The direction you struck out in was wrong. The angles were wrong. That wall wasn’t that wall. It wasn’t even a wall at all. That bar was a different bar.
The slots fanned and pulsed. Through alleys of fluorescent coral, portly men in T-shirts lumbered like groupers. Some grazed on the machines, bland-faced and blissful as fish. Old women perched on stools, human spider crabs, barking their yellowed foreclaws on the panels. Cocktail waitresses moved purposefully, dartingly, alertly. Clownfish.
Alex had somehow imagined the sound in the casino would be a cacophony, but it was soothing. He had expected to hear whirring and clattering – and that was there, if you listened for it – but in aggregate it was a sort of anaesthetising white noise, like the sound of the sea.
Over the top, the bleeps and squelches of electronic noise, snatches of tunes, here and there cataracts of imaginary money pouring into imaginary metal containers, digitally simulated. Behind, the purr of a million coins flipping, a million tumblers coming to rest and then starting in motion again, a million balls settling into sockets, a million cards burring into new configurations.
Alex remembered seeing a documentary, once, about a casino in America where women bought buckets of coins and sat, all day and all night, feeding them into the slot machines. There was something devotional about the act: patiently, unsleepingly, as if in a trance, they fed the coins into slots and pressed the button to spin the reels.
With every press of the button, there came a near-imperceptible tensing in the shoulders: a tiny jolt of hope. Then, as the wheels came to rest, came a readjustment. Every few spins, the machine would cough a handful of coins into its trough, and the women would look rejuvenated, freshened: hope satisfied. The coins would be swept back into the bucket, ready to be fed in.
The machines were playing the people, rather than vice versa, it had occurred to Alex. Nearly half the time, the women would have more coins in the bucket than they had started with – but a tilt of the algorithm, the tiniest pressure of a thumb on the scales, meant that the number of coins in the bucket tended, over the long run, towards zero.
Every small score was not a win, but a rebate: a contribution to the struggle, a prolongation of the period of time in which the player was able to believe that the impossible could happen. As they fed these coins in, whittling their chances down the long curve to zero, the same process was going on in every cell in their bodies.
But here there were no buckets, no coins. The clatter of money was synthesised. Just as the blackjack players, on their fields of baize deeper in the casino, exchanged their cash for plastic chips, the slots players now fed dollar bills into machines. You could see them, out of cash, approaching the machines peevishly, feeding ragged cloth bucks into the machines’ mouths, having them whirr and spit back. Rubbing the dollars flat on the top of the machine, straightening out the bent corners, thumbing the face of the dead president, feeding them back in, hoping.
If the casino gods were smiling on them, their money would disappear and stay disappeared, and the machine would politely blurt out a white paper slip. It was this that they would feed into the machine.
Paper money was translated into electrons, which were translated into paper, which was translated into electrons, which were translated into paper, which was translated into electrons, which were translated into paper money.
That made sense. This was a place where money – never something strongly tethered to reality – slipped anchor and became altogether imaginary. And the more imaginary it got, the more like itself it became. This was money in its purest, most contingent form – owned, in the perpetual instant of play, by nobody. It existed in a field of probabilities – between the hope of the impossible and the knowledge of the inevitable.
Alex walked the casino floor. His dizziness subsided and a sort of calm came over him. Seven forty-five. Fifteen minutes to kill. He found the nugget glistering in a glass box. Really quite big – nuggets, as Alex had always thought of them, were no bigger than a Tic Tac. This nugget was supposed to look a bit like a hand, but it looked more like a bit of coral. It looked gaudy. It looked like a fake nugget – as if the gold had been sprayed on from a can.