The Fading (29 page)

But no, staying was not an option.

He yanked the bathroom door open. A large bedroom, must have been the master. The carpet was stained brown in places, old
blood, except in the clean, dust-free square where the bed had been. He ran down the hall and found the stairs, moaning in
terror as new memories from the night before – this morning – returned. The little girl biting his ankle. The father pinching
the skin under his chin, twisting his head and screaming,
Look at me, look at me!
Noel ran past boxes that had not been unpacked, glanced at the yellow kettle, then he was ripping the sliding glass door
open and springing into sunlight. No one chased him, but he ran as if the entire family had woken up again and were on his
heels, swooping after him like rabid bat people.

He kicked open the guest house door and rushed to collect his wallet, shoes and a change of clothes. He needed a shower and
felt infected by them, but not here. He had to get away from this neighborhood as fast as possible.

At the nearest Wells Fargo branch, the act of opening his wallet hurt his fingers. The joints were swollen stiff, the
tips raw, as if he had been handling bricks all day without gloves. Two of his fingernails were cracked and peeled back, the
cuticles of all ringed with dried blood. He wondered how they had done this to him, but his ragged fingernails, the soreness,
suggested something far more disturbing. That they had worked on him, drove him to it, not as bodies or spirits in the world
but as demons of the mind, manipulating him, flooding his brain and jerking his body like a marionette. A family of marionettes
with the power to make him scratch himself out of his mind.

‘Next? Sir? I can help you down here.’

Noel showed his ID to the teller, a bookish young woman who turned ashen and very quiet when she saw his face up close. With
checking and savings, he had $441.29 to his name. The teller seemed relieved he was closing the accounts, taking his meager
reserves elsewhere.

Take me
, he thought.
Come on, you fucking glass egg bubble shield ultra-violet bitch curse. Take me outta here. I paid you in blood, now it’s time
for you to wave the magic wand.

Six blocks later he found the Desert Inn Motorcourt, which might have once been a clean family-friendly place to park your
RV and splurge on a room but was now a skid row of impromptu gangbang movie sets and heroin cottages. For $19.99 plus tax
he rented a room for one hour. It smelled of wet gerbil shavings. The bathroom had no soap or shampoo, so he returned to the
front desk to complain.

The clerk was a woman in the twilight of her middle years, with a purple birthmark stretching from her sun-scorched cleavage
to her right ear, wearing a UNLV tank top and polarized sun-blockers. For the bargain rate of $6.00 she sold him a bar of
soap the size of a breath mint and a bottle of shampoo made for a Smurf. At his croaking request she threw in a towel with
the texture of sandpaper, no extra charge.

The shower was only lukewarm even turned to its hottest setting, but Noel didn’t care. He used the towel as a washcloth, scrubbing
his body from head to toe three times, until the soap and shampoo were gone and he felt raw. Some of the cuts continued to
bleed, but most only turned puffy red. He shook himself as dry as possible, threw out his socks and underwear and put his
clothes back on.

The dead always found him, or he them, when he was out of the spectrum, or on his way to the departure gate. But here he was,
after spending an entire day and night with them, a solid. He had been waiting four years. He was very hungry.

For food, for an explanation, for his missing ghost.

The morning sun warming him as he trekked west on Sahara Avenue, moving closer to the center of energy. Out here at the north
end, just a few blocks off the Strip, there were no fancy hotels and casinos, no cinematic waterfalls or lush gardens. There
was, however, among the gas stations and warehouses and low ugly industrial buildings and broken glass in the gutters, a sex
museum. And a sex toy and video outlet the size of a grocery store. Around the bend were strip clubs, not much more than cinderblock
huts, their open doors revealing the darkness of ocean trenches. Noel passed such pits of vice and their lurking denizens;
he was after a vice of a different sort.

There were other stragglers like him, a small but colorful class of shattered humanity limping along the wide dirty streets,
digging in dumpsters, peeking around corners. In the past four years he’d seen the jet set, the celebrity cling-on set, the
card shark set, the bachelor party and girls’ night out set. Here was a genus he had never been able to classify but did so
now: the styrofoam coffee set. Even though it was well past noon, half the mutants on the prowl had a little cup of coffee.

The terrycloth jumpsuit and rubber sandals lady was clutching hers with both hands, the little plastic lid flap scraping her
witch nose at every sip. The shirtless but otherwise clean-cut college kid with the black eye had one in each hand, marching
with the injured pride of a legendary debauch. At yet another strip mall, a stoic Vietnamese
papasan
fishing Marlboro butts from the Photo-Mat planters was lighting and enjoying his complete cigarette in increments, one butt
and stale drag at a time, then doused each of his recovered treasures in his java receptacle. They were castaways, clinging
to the steaming life rafts of sanity even the most offensively brewed coffee afforded.

When he realized they were watching him with as
much disdain and repulsion as he experienced in his regard of them, Noel understood, for the first time in many months and
perhaps years, his place in the world. These were his brethren, this was his lot. He was
this
, like
them
, no better than
that guy
.

To wit: at the next crosswalk a man with an IV cotton ball taped on the back of each hand, a Panama hat on his sweating melon
head, was using a cane to lance imaginary cars passing by. Noel said, ‘Hello. Is there anything I can help you with?’ but
the overture went unredeemed beyond the riposte ‘Go fuck yourself’.

He stopped at a twenty-four-hour diner and ate six pancakes, three eggs, a rasher of bacon and three cups of coffee. The tab
was $3.29 and in no way a bargain. While he was sitting in his booth, waiting for the caffeine to kick in, he noticed two
men in dark suits at the counter, seated beside one another, each reading the newspaper with a slice of pie resting unmolested
on the counter. They weren’t speaking but he knew they were together, members of some organization. He waited for them to
turn and look at him, sure that they would glance his way at any moment, but nearly ten minutes passed and they never did.
Eventually, the suit on the right forked the tip of his pie into his mouth and began to chew slowly.

Noel helped himself to a complimentary toothpick on his way out. It tasted of artificial mint.

Calorie-soaked, excited now, he was ready for the tsunami to curl.

*

He crossed through a parking structure to the Strip and another mile or so to Caesars Palace. He walked past the front desk,
the sundry store with its t-shirts and novelty ceramic Caesars busts, to the cashier windows. He converted his life’s savings,
$400, into chips. The casino was slow, with a few early birds trying their luck.

He found the nearest roulette table, empty and brushed clean. He was the only mark. The croupier at attention was a woman
named Sable. She had a pleasing almond tan, clean white teeth and hay-colored hair swirled into a small Cleopatra braid. Noel
had never met her. If she found his scratched-to-hell appearance disturbing, she didn’t show it, and he respected her professionalism.
Her job was to keep patrons at the table long enough to empty their pockets, not make them feel like a freak show.

Sable smiled and said, ‘Good afternoon.’

He pretended to study the reader board atop the pole, but in truth it didn’t matter what had recently hit. He didn’t care
about winning. He’d come only to ask a question and receive an answer. The question was, Should I stay in Vegas or go look
for Julie? He pegged the possible answers this way:

Red means get out now, find her, do whatever it takes to win her back.

Black means stay in Vegas as long as it takes to disappear.

He set $300 on black. Not because he wanted black or because he felt lucky with black, merely because he had to choose one
or the other to play.

Sable nodded and nudged the polished spokes atop the wheel’s axle. The wheel gained speed. The ball raced around and around.
Sable waved her hand across the table – no more bets. Very quickly the ball got restless, dancing and pinging around the number
grooves. It flirted with red 30 before dumping into black 8.

‘Black is a winner,’ Sable said, and doubled Noel’s chips to $600.

One half of his fate had been decided. He would not go looking for Julie, yet. He would stay in Vegas until his next change.
He did not know whether it would be one day or twenty years, but Vegas was Vegas and he was going to need some money. The
more the better. Getting another job was not an option. He’d tried that and it hadn’t worked out. Also, he was never going
back to the guest house and so had no place to live. He needed a base to work from. Food, shelter, a new wardrobe. Poker was
out. Blackjack had never been his thing.

This wheel, though. He liked the randomness of it, the spinning, blurring motion. The variety of bets and contrasting colors.
It was the closest thing the casino had to a carnival game. A warmth was building inside him.

‘Excuse me, Sable,’ Noel said.

‘Sir?’ The croupier smiled.

‘Could you tell me today’s date? I forgot to check my calendar this morning.’

‘The twenty-ninth.’

This number was pleasing, why he couldn’t say. ‘Sorry, I’ve been away for a while. The twenty-ninth of …?’

‘February.’ Sable winked.

Noel’s body began to thrum. His legs nearly buckled. February the 29th was a leap day. Which meant this was also his true
birthday.

The number of times Noel had been sure of anything, absolutely dead certain about the result of a given action, could be counted
on one hand. This was one of those times. It had to do with his leap-birthday, and it had to do with the slaughtered Bagley
family that had assaulted him last night. More than this he did not understand, but he felt that, in this moment, fate was
looking out for him and wanted him to play.

‘A leap year-leap day,’ he said, beaming at Sable. ‘I guess I had better play twenty-nine, wouldn’t you say?’

‘I’m not allowed to say.’ Sable tossed him another of her practiced winks.

Noel added the original hundred to the six hundred already on the turf and slid the entire pile onto 29, which was also black.

‘Believe it or not, today is my birthday,’ he said. ‘Only comes every four years, if you want to be technical about it.’

Sable performed a little bow. ‘Is it, now? Well then, happy birthday to you, and good luck.’

He expected a pang of last-second doubt, but it didn’t come. He felt free, as if he had just been excused from detention.
His body felt lighter. His life felt lighter. Somewhere, he was sure, the dark god of his erasure was nodding down at him
proudly.

Sable, as if wanting to give him an extra moment to avoid total folly, hesitated. Other than his pile on 29, the board was
empty.

Noel forced himself to stop grinning like a maniac and waited her out.

‘29 it is.’ Sable gave the spokes a smooth shove and the wheel came alive. With an expert finger, its nail painted blood-red,
she flicked the little white ball into its polished track.
Ree-ooowwrr—ree-ooowwrr-ree-ooowwrr
… The numbers blurred and the white ball made a delicious zipping-buzz in the wooden channel.

Was it his imagination, or did Sable’s smile slip for just a moment there? As if she were concerned he had made the wrong
choice? No. Sable didn’t care whether he won or lost. She had no stake in his financial salvation, his mood, his life. She
was an hourly employee. She got paid to do her thing, nothing more.

Sable did the swami wave – no more bets.

Noel gritted his teeth.

No, she didn’t care, but he had seen
something
move across her features, tensing her brow, drawing her smile down at the corners. Fear, like an invisible crow feather that
had sailed across the table and traced a line between her eyes. Because maybe she wasn’t worried that he had chosen wrong
or bet too much, but that he had chosen exactly right and bet it all. Maybe he was weirding her out a little here, with his
cat’s cradle face and four-day stubble. Or maybe she had felt a sliver of what he felt – that something other than dumb luck
and blind chance was in the air today, a dark force flitting
about, looking for a home, and which had attached itself to this pale young man with hangover eyes.

Noel’s heart thundered. His hands clenched the beveled table.

The numbers were no longer blurring but popping with increasing clarity. He saw a 7, then a 21, then the green 00. The ball
had stopped meowing and was cruising in a continuous, lazy
zzzuuuzzzzuuuzzzzuuuzzz
…

He looked to Sable. Her eyes were locked on the wheel.

Tink-a-dink-dink
– and then the ball was hovering in the air, rotating like a tiny white moon before it plunged –
rink-a-dink-CLICK.

Stuck between gold walls while the wheel coasted, the ball sat in its cradle and above them the screen blinked.

29.

‘And a happy birthday it is,’ Sable said. She was not smiling.

‘Holy shit,’ Noel said. ‘Sorry, I mean, wow. What are the odds of that?’

He meant it rhetorically, but the croupier answered, ‘Straight up on a single number pays thirty-five to one.’ She was counting
a lot of chips.

Noel couldn’t do the math. He tried, but when she shoved the tiers across the felt he simply said, ‘How much is that?’