And then his cell phone rang. He looked at the display. It was Salazar calling to tell him he’d be late.
May I ask why, Sunil said.
Another batch of dead homeless men turned up at the city dump. I would ask you to come out, but it’s just the same as all the other times.
Identical to two years ago, Sunil asked.
Sunil remembered the bodies. No particular order. No particular ritual. Just tipped out in an untidy pile. He hadn’t been bothered by the fact of the bodies, by the putrefying smell of it all, everything turning to decay so quickly in the Vegas heat. What had bothered him was deliberately misleading Salazar. He was there when Salazar found the girl, and for the briefest moment he felt bad. But he had lost so much himself that the deception was easy to live with.
Identical, Salazar said. I’ll fetch you closer to ten or eleven. I’ll bring road-trip food.
Sure, why not. If you’re chewing, you can’t be talking, Sunil said.
Charming, see you soon.
Sunil hung up.
Asia, watching intently over the brim of her teacup, was smiling.
What is it, he asked.
I was just thinking, she said.
Listen, I’ve got to go get ready. Stay as long as you like.
Do you have a photo album, she asked.
He paused at the door, surprised.
What?
A photo album, she repeated.
No, he said.
So you have no photos of your family?
Where is this coming from, he asked. I thought we weren’t allowed to discuss family, your rules.
My family, she said, not yours. And a lady always reserves the right to change her mind. Lady, she repeated as he opened his mouth to say something.
No, he said. I don’t have any photos of my family. I’m not really the family type.
Let’s change that, she said.
What’s gotten into you, he asked.
Come here, she said.
He came over and she hugged him. She lifted her phone and took a picture of them.
See?
It was cute, cheesy almost, like something a teenager would do. It surprised him to find that he liked it.
You’re in a silly mood, he said, and walked to the bathroom.
The shower was already hot and the room steamy when she joined him.
I don’t have a condom, he said.
Shh, she said.
Later as the water drummed over them, she said: Let’s change the past. Let’s do that.
Yes, he wanted to say, with something akin to abandon. Instead he soaped her back.
Thirty-one
Telephone poles lined the road like a girder of wood and wire. It seemed like they were all that kept the road in a near-straight line, desert falling away on each side. Salazar drove so fast the poles blurred alternately into one, then back into a row like a serial crucifixion, becoming more presence than fact, more blur than thing, lurking always at the edge of consciousness, but then quickly and conveniently forgotten. With each slight turn or sway in the black thread of road, the sun shifted, alternately blinding, alternately bathing everything in a halo. Rocks and hills rose out of the brown scrubland like ancestors birthed from myth. Sunil could see why deserts inspired both the belief in God and the call to seek Him here. Wasn’t Jesus tempted in a desert such as this, forty days into a fast? And didn’t the jinn inhabit the dark caverns of caves and sand dunes? And who wouldn’t believe — especially lost or camped out here, in the time before this road and electric and telephone wires everywhere and cell phones and the noise of it all — that things were supernatural? He knew it made no rational sense, but he did believe in ghosts. Who wouldn’t after what he had seen in the death camp at Vlakplaas?
All the nuclear explosions held in underground aquifers here pointed to how hollow the desert really was. Even before the bombs, there had been the endless mining expeditions during the gold rush. It was easy to see the traces on the surface — ghost towns littered the desert — but it seemed that subterranean Nevada was left to legend. These legends, of an earth populated by spirits, were so rampant that even Herbert Hoover, thirty-ninth U.S. president, himself a onetime Nevada hard-rock miner, had written about them.
Did you know that this place is rife with myth and history, Sunil said to Salazar, who was stuffing a handful of orange Cheetos into his mouth.
Nope, he said, spitting crumbs everywhere.
Dusting the shower of orange crumbs from his arm, Sunil continued. The moon landing is believed to have been faked somewhere here, he said.
Bullshit.
Well, you know it won’t be the first hoax involving science and the moon, Sunil said. In 1835, Sir John Herschel, on the front page of the New York Sun, claimed to have found intelligent life on the moon. He described vast forests, seas, and lilac-colored pyramids, even herds of bison and blue unicorns.
Sounds like he could have a job out here designing hotels and themed attractions, Salazar said.
You see these telephone poles? They are only here because of lynching, Sunil said.
That’s fucked up.
People usually are. When they were first introduced into neighborhoods, Americans hated the poles so much they chopped them down. Made the landscape ugly, they said. But when someone discovered they could lynch blacks in the middle of town using the poles, they really caught on. Doesn’t hurt that they are shaped like crosses.
Do you think anyone was lynched on one of these poles?
Hard to say, although I doubt it. These haven’t been here long enough. There is only one recorded lynching in Vegas history, which means there were probably less than a hundred actual ones. That’s racist math for you. Still, the thought of driving under them is disturbing.
Yeah, fucked up. There was awe in Salazar’s voice. Why do you like history so much if it always tells you that we’re a race doomed and full of shit?
I keep hoping to find out that we aren’t, Sunil said.
And are you guys in South Africa as fucked up as us?
At least, if not more, Sunil said.
Shit.
Yes, sir, shit.
The landscape alternated between sand and rocks, ghost buildings and dead-end exits and a barrenness that defied that particularly American notion of manifest destiny. They drove in silence for a while, each lost in thought. Sunil’s mind turned to the myths of the Nevada desert and the twins.
Everything old and telling about the human past is always buried, always submerged, in earth, in water, in language, in culture, one overlapping the other. It seemed sometimes to Sunil that humans couldn’t wait to escape the past, to escape from things no longer desired. Forgotten. Until a new generation, their wounds sufficiently blunted by time, arrives on the scene to begin excavations.
He wondered what some future generation or even an alien culture of anthropologists and archaeologists would make of the current city of Las Vegas if it became lost under the desert long enough. Would it be read as the perfect Earth culture, its acme? With representatives from all over the world building what could only be described as embassies? Each casino no longer the bizarre facade it was but rather coming together as the true United Nations? Or would it be seen as the home of world religion, each casino a representation of one group or the other? The temples were already here — pyramids, sphinxes, lions, Roman ruins, statues of liberty, all sainted icons, and the famous searchlight on the Luxor some beacon to an indifferent god? It was not without precedence — many a bizarre and crazed cult of holy people had journeyed here to flower and then die in the anonymity of the desert, only the strong surviving, like the Mormons.