The Fading (43 page)

Into the bathroom, to reappear, so that he might dine in peace.

He killed an hour at the breakfast buffet, most of it spent chewing and swallowing and groaning with
pleasure. He could not remember the last time he had eaten. When he had his fill of bacon and waffles and two bagels stacked
with onions and lox, he blinded the mall workers and patrons inside the Forum Shops, which were now open.

He exited Caesars Palace a little more than an hour later to find more than a dozen police officers clustered around the front
desk, running back and forth between the lobby and the hallway leading to the spa. Several were plain-clothes detectives,
taking notes, eyeing the lobby coolly. Others were checking IDs and taping off doors to control the crowd flow. No one entered
or exited without being carded. If the police had been able to see him, they would have stopped the man dressed in a new indigo-colored
Emporio Armani suit, the white tapered dress shirt, gold silk boxers, $2000- TAG Heuer timepiece, and crocodile-skin loafers,
but the matching crocodile-skin Armani billfold in his breast pocket would have revealed no ID, only a thick fold of cash.

Noel repopped in the cab queue and five minutes later was stepping into an orange and white minivan that smelled of roasted
almonds and stale air-conditioning. The driver was a kind-faced woman of sixty or so, unseasonably bundled in a thick plaid
hunting thermal and a red UNLV baseball cap.

‘Where to?’ she asked.

‘McCarran International.’

‘On your way home?’

‘Yep.’

‘Had enough fun for one weekend?’

‘Or a lifetime.’

A cardboard can tinkled as the woman fist-popped almonds en route. When the rental car lots came into view, he thought how
much more practical it would be to drive. Safer, with a few hours of cruising through the desert to clear his mind and think
about what he was going to say to her when he got to Calabasas.

But the truth was, he was anxious to see Julie, to tell her everything was going to be all right – he had control of it now.
Not to mention he’d never been on an airplane before and he really wanted to know what it was like to fly.

It must have been a Monday, occasion for the exodus from Sin City. The line of three or four hundred people waiting to get
through security stretched down the mezzanine and around a corner. After using the restroom to drop out and secure his bag
with Julie’s toys he confronted the line and thought,
a tunnel, a tunnel over all of you
.

He walked to the cordoned area where the long single line fed into six chutes with their luggage scanners and metal detectors.
He ducked under the rope and walked through an empty lane not currently in service. A grating beeping sound erupted overhead.
One of the toys must have triggered the metal detector. Many heads turned but no eyes found. He kept walking.

An hour and forty minutes later he had found what he was looking for, in the terminal for Southwest flights. Judging by the
number of people waiting at the gate,
this would be a light load heading for Los Angeles. He counted just twenty-three passengers and boarded last. On the plane
were more than sixty open seats and nine unoccupied rows from the tail up.

Twice he got halfway down the aisle before having to double back as someone got up to dig out a newspaper or a book from luggage
that had already been stowed, and a third time to avoid a flight attendant who turned abruptly from the rear galley and came
marching forward with a fresh stack of pillows. A female passenger in a brown velour tracksuit chose the wrong moment to lean
across the aisle and whisper something to her friend, making contact with him. Fortunately it was only the back of her elbow
and when she turned to say excuse me and saw no one hovering behind her seat, she only paused in confusion, shook her head
and went on with her gossiping.

Planes are crowded, anonymous, he reminded himself. They are all too busy nervously suppressing their frail mortality to worry
about the invisible shoulder bump, the coughing empty seat.

To be safe, Noel stepped into the galley storage bay beside one of the rear lavatories and killed another ten minutes, until
everyone was seated and buckled in. No point in sitting down, only to get boxed in or sat upon by some last-minute straggler.
When it was obvious no one else would be boarding, he chose the third to last row, which – along with the two behind him and
six in front – he had all to himself. He chose the window seat, for the view.

Another flight attendant went through the safety announcement and, this being his first time, Noel paid her his full attention.

Then the turbines were winding up, the plane lurched back from the jetway, and they taxied around to the main runway. The
engines began to roar and Noel felt the need to tighten his apparently floating seat belt as the nose lifted and his body
made a transparent depression into the seat back. Aloft, he stared through the window and watched Las Vegas become another
kind of Adventure People play set, with its plastic model buildings, twinkling lights stabbing into the merciless desert glare,
and seeing the traffic coasting silently up and down the Strip he could not help but think of the Matchbox cars he used to
play with in his tree house, watching them vanish in his innocent young hands.

Goodbye, Las Vegas. If you ever saw me, you won’t ever again.

Despite his inner warnings not to succumb, Noel nodded off before the beverage service began. The hum of the jets and gentle
bobbing of the flight lulled him down inside himself, into a maze of corridors and hotel rooms where he was frantic, searching
for Julie, knowing that her life depended on him finding her before it was too late.

Something evil was coming for her, something infinitely worse than Theodore Dalton, and only he had the power to stop it.
The building – a sort of mutated,
nightmarish version of Caesars Palace with black stone walls and floors wet with blood and long filaments of black algae that
bore a strong resemblance to Julie’s hair – trembled as the entity pursued her. Noel followed, shouting after her. She turned
and looked back, hearing his voice, but could not find him, could not see him. There was a howling noise beneath him and the
deep, undiluted anger of the beast reverberating through the floor bounced him off his feet. He was thrown over a stone ledge,
falling down the center of an endless stairwell that spiraled into the abyss, passing porthole windows lighted with flickering
candles inside rooms where people from his life – his mother, his father, Lisa, his friend Trevor and the short goblin Dimples
– suffered individual agonies as he fell. Then he was slammed into a chair, strapped down, and he could not breathe through
the clouds of steam choking his lungs.

A bell dinged loudly from the overhead speaker and Noel woke to discern the source of his dream. A flashing seat belt sign.
Turbulence. The jet was jostling and rocking severely. Sitting so far back, he felt the tail of the plane swinging in greasy,
rudderless abandon as the pilots fought to stabilize it. Though he had never flown before, he was pretty sure this was not
normal, and this suspicion was confirmed a moment later when a broad plank of air seemed to slap the plane’s belly, throwing
them high and slamming them back into their seats with teeth-clacking force. At least three women screamed and the contents
of several purses and carry-ons
launched around the cabin as if they were all trapped inside the guts of a donkey pinata under assault.

All of this happened before he’d even had time to check himself and make sure the veil had held. It had, even while he slept.

The nose pitched down and Noel’s stomach sprang up into his chest as they began to lose altitude with the velocity of a dropped
bomb. Yellow oxygen masks on their clear plastic cords plunged from the ceiling trapdoors like an armada of spiders. The captain
was stating matters of some importance over the public address and the flight attendants were clutching the tops of the seats
as they staggered down the aisle, pantomime-ordering the passengers to bring their seat backs up, install the masks over their
faces, put away all sharp objects. Desperate conversations, mouths opening and closing, but Noel couldn’t understand a word
being spoken.

Under the shrieking of the plane’s descent and the blood rushing behind his ears, he couldn’t hear a thing.

Noel resisted the urge to follow the herd and don his oxygen mask. He didn’t want to black out or suffocate, but pulling the
mask over his head would force him to reveal himself. This might not be a problem given the current panic, with everyone so
distracted even the flight crew might figure they had simply overlooked the well-dressed man who suddenly appeared in the
back, or that he’d been seated in another row and moved during the chaos. But if all of this resulted in some sort of emergency
landing where people would be cataloged, medically examined and identified, he did not want to give himself up until it was
absolutely necessary.

Of course, if they were really going down, not in the conventional ‘emergency landing’ sense but to crash, then staying unmasked
(in both senses) would be a wasted effort. It wouldn’t matter who he was or what he had done – he’d simply be dead.

Did he need the mask? He felt light-headed, and, for that matter, light-bodied, but probably everyone felt this way now. The
plane was still traveling at a disturbing downward angle and the fuselage was quaking and
Noel wondered, if he kept himself faded through the termination of the flight and its passengers, what would the rescue teams
and clean-up crews find? Would they stumble onto an invisible corpse? Or would he lose control of it at the moment of his
collapsed mortality, the way Dalton had?

He reached for the mask, fumbled the flimsy elastic straps, debated and debated, but decided to let it go. Another minute,
just another minute, and then if things are still looking like doomsday, I’ll put it on. Because deep down he really did not
believe he was going to die. Not here, not now. Not after all he had survived. Surely fate couldn’t be so moronically cheap
as to let him get this far only to end his journey by way of a random airplane disaster. Could it? No, of course not. But
this, too, was probably something the rest of them were thinking. This can’t be happening to me. It’s not my time.

Maybe it is our time. Maybe it will never feel like our time, even when it is.

He flashed back to his big win at the roulette table, on his birthday. When he had felt the universe, or at least his own
small bubble in it, buckle under the exploding pressure of his oncoming ten-week blow-out. His life had flashed before his
eyes then, and it did so now, in a capsule of that capsule moment, returning him to the vision he had experienced then now
as a hastily edited rerun. He had seen his past episodes, the worst moments, the turning points, and then the eye of his mind
had cast itself into the future, allowing him a glimpse of the life he would lead.

It might have been out of order then, and it was definitely out of order now, but somewhere in the flurry of images, impressions
and touchstones to come he had seen himself wealthy in New York, hosting a cocktail party in a penthouse apartment. He had
seen the liquid waterfall of green on a financial services terminal, where as a witness to privileged information he stood
to make a fortune. And before or after those things he had experienced this moment, this life-threatening now, himself trapped
on an airplane, the world on the verge of turning upside down just outside his window while passengers screamed and—

But would you look at
this
. They
weren’t
screaming now. The plane was groaning and shaking in its descent, but in all other ways the cabin had gone quiet. The other
passengers seated ahead of him were not making a sound. Their heads were bowed, the tubes of their masks stretched down tautly,
supplying them with oxygen. But no one was moving, looking around, phoning loved ones.

He thought he must be mistaken, but when he unfastened his seat belt to rise up and get a better view of them, he saw that
he wasn’t. A chill rippled through him as he surveyed the cabin, the passengers, the flight attendant in her jump seat at
the front of the plane. She was halfway out of view behind the bulkhead, but he could see her legs folded loosely, one knee
fallen open despite the fact she was wearing a skirt, and her head lolling limply with the plane’s rocking, chin against her
chest, the yellow mask crooked around her mouth but hiding her nose.

She was out, they were all passed out.

So why wasn’t he?

Noel sat down and rubbed his hands over his face, knuckling his eyes, trying to keep himself awake. He was awake, yes? Alert?
Not sleepy? Yes, he was fine. Scared shitless but otherwise fine.

The next thing he noticed was that the plane had begun to level off. The endless shuddering had lessened, and over the next
minute stopped altogether, the sky suddenly as smooth as a down feather bed. The side-to-side pitching of the tail had ceased.
Noel looked around hopefully, skeptical but already hurrying into relief. Maybe we’re not going to die! It’s under control,
the captain has control of the plane!

But no one said so. No one else was celebrating, talking, raising their heads. The flight attendant up in the jump seat was
still zonked. Neither the captain nor his co-pilots provided an update over the PA.

The plane was just flying smoothly, level and steady on its course, and everyone was asleep. Oh, Jesus, this was wrong. What
if the pilot and his crew were sleeping, too?

No, no. Don’t think about that. Everyone else panicked, the blood rushed to their feet, they went under from lack of oxygen,
that’s all. They’re going to wake up any moment now. The captain will apologize for the scare any moment now.

But several minutes passed and no one woke up.

The flight crew made no announcement.

Noel unbuckled his seat belt again and stood, looking
over his shoulder before wading into the aisle. No one was behind him, and everyone ahead of him appeared to have been euthanized.
A strong urge to shake one of them came over him, if only to make sure they weren’t dead. What in the name of God was this?
What was he supposed to do? How long was he supposed to stand there and watch this before he started screaming at them, pounding
on the cockpit door?