The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (43 page)

“B
EGINNINGS,” THE VOICE
intones, and the first image appears on the screen: an empty expanse of water. Rivo Alto is just what it’s called, says the voice: a high bank in a desert of brine. The people who live there dig crabs and shellfish from the mud, and they dwell in brick cottages on stilts suspended above the brackish murk. Blocks of marble are set at random into the bricks of their houses, and the citizens of Rivo Alto tell stories about them. “We carried them over the water when we ran away from the barbarians,” they say. “They are the remnants of our former city. They remind us that we were Romans, once upon a time.” They dream that, one day, they will be again.

On the screen, the watery void dissolves into an image of empty desert, and the voice continues. Ragtown is just that: a ragged encampment set by a well in a sea of sand. Old Helen Stewart has run the place ever since Schuyler Henry shot her man dead in 1884. Her ranch house is built from the remains of the Mormon fort that used to stand there. The Mormons didn’t stay long; the heat and the Indians drove them away. Now old Helen rents out her dusty patch to prospectors. She knows that they’ll need water from her well, and she earns more from them than she’d ever make from trying to grow anything. Sitting around their campfires, they tell one another stories about where they’ve come from. They dream of going home.

Q
IAN LOOKS AT
Sheldon G. Adelson, self-made billionaire. He was, Qian already knows, once a prospector of sorts himself. Adelson’s parents had come from the Ukraine and Lithuania, and he’d started out real humble—selling newspapers on street corners, toiletry kits by mail order, deicers for windshields. He has no intention of going back to the place he came from.

Qian is dreaming of a spit of sand in the distant south of the People’s Republic. The Cotai Peninsula is empty of anyone but a few fishermen. They live in simple cottages, digging for crabs and shellfish. He knows they won’t be for long.

“C
ONSUMMATION,” THE VOICE
intones, and another image appears in the darkness. A beautiful city emerges from the dunes of water where Rivo Alto had once floated in the void.

The improbable towers and domes of La Serenissima hover like a reverie above the watery heat haze, but it is not a dream; it is Rivo Alto, eight hundred years after its first people arrived there in flight from the barbarians. The air is filled with the cries of stevedores and the clanging of church bells. Marble palaces of every describable color crowd the foaming brine, embroidered with balustrades, cornices, and castellations, fringed by the red and white candy-striped poles to which boatmen moor their craft.

La Serenissima is beautiful, but it’s also a place to get down to business. The docks in front of the doge’s palace, a gigantic block of pink marzipan dripping with icing, are piled high with the treasures of the Levant. The heads of executed criminals are displayed on richly carved pillars beside it, for the palace is both the treasure house of the republic and its seat of justice. The colorful palaces that ride the waves are the dwellings of merchants, whose galleys are fitted and armed in the Arsenale at the city’s eastern edge.

Every year the doge casts a golden ring into the water, to renew the marriage of La Serenissima with the element that has served her so well. It isn’t an empty gesture, for all her wealth has come over the
sea. Nothing in La Serenissima is an empty gesture; every part of the city performs a function and expresses that purpose with splendor. The customs house, the entrepôt of all the world’s treasures, is surmounted by four Atlases who support a globe on their shoulders. On top of the globe is a bronze image of La Serenissima herself in the guise of Fortune, twisting and turning in the sea breeze.

Up on the screen, the dunes of water around La Serenissima turn into waves of sand that lap the pleasure domes of another city—the place that used to be Ragtown.

The improbable towers and pleasure domes of Glitter Gulch wink away in the vast sea of the desert twilight. Around the corner of Tropicana and the Strip is a speeding jam of open-top cars with massive sound systems, full of cheering girls in T-shirts. It’s sixty years since the prospectors pitched their tents on Helen Stewart’s ranch. A cacophony of signs shimmers away up the Strip, neon words promising exotic escape and instant magic: Tropicana, Barbary Coast, Dunes, Desert Inn, Sahara, Hacienda, El Rancho, Stardust, Silver Slipper, Bonanza, Slots-a-Fun.

A limo pulls off the Strip under one such sign, emblazoned in a vaguely Arabic script with the single word
Sands
. The car purrs to a halt in the parking lot. The tarmac is flooded with the glow of the casino within: a formless electric twilight, dotted here and there with pools of brightness that suffuse the faces above the green baize with an anticipatory glow.

The casino floor is known as the “grind joint,” because that’s just what it is: hour after hour the slot machines and the gaming tables grind cash out of the guests. The Sands provides free meals to anyone who’ll stay at the tables long enough, and cheap all-you-can-eats to everyone else. In 1955, one man plays blackjack for twenty-seven hours and wins $77,000. He loses it again instantly, autographing hundred-dollar bills and handing them out to admiring bystanders. The hotel that towers above the casino is only there to give the poor hucksters somewhere to sleep between games. To keep everyone gambling all the time, there are roulette wheels and one-armed bandits by the swimming pool.

There’s entertainment, too. The Copa lounge is inhabited by “The Most Beautiful Girls in the World,” recruited directly from Hollywood.
Tallulah Bankhead has played there, and so have Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Nat King Cole, and Frank Sinatra.
Ocean’s Eleven
was filmed at the Sands in 1960. It’s all there to keep the ladies happy while their men are at the card tables.

Glitter Gulch is a factory of desire. It is the destination to which the road leads across the desert, the thing that all the flashing signs signify. The citizens of Glitter Gulch remember that once upon a time they were prospecting for gold, and they intend to enjoy every cent of it now.

Q
IAN’S ADVISERS HAVE
already informed him that Sheldon G. Adelson made his fortune in Glitter Gulch. He built his empire running COMDEX, an annual Las Vegas expo for computer goods. Talk about being in the right place at the right time: COMDEX was so successful in the 1980s that delegates booked all the rooms within a forty-five mile radius of the event. Sheldon G. Adelson bought himself a casino—the Sands—in 1988 and married a new wife the following year. They went to La Serenissima on their honeymoon.

Qian Qichen is daydreaming about office towers and shopping malls. He was born outside Shanghai; when he was young his parents would take him to the Bund, where they would look across the Yangtze River at empty marshland. Now Pudong bristles with skyscrapers. Qian Qichen imagines the blank sands of the Cotai Strip and wonders if one day they will look the same.

And then he remembers that he is a vice premier of China and that he has a job to do. He jerks awake and puts his hands on the desk. He eyes Adelson levelly: “Tell me about Steve Wynn.” Adelson’s round face reddens slightly, as it is apt to do when he is pricked. He coughs, and the presentation rolls on.

“D
ECADENCE,” SAYS THE
disembodied voice, and an eighteenthcentury painting by Canaletto appears in the gloom. A gilded barge floats in the water in front of a pink palace. The water around it is filled with smaller craft, and the steps of the palace are thronged with revelers in silken costumes, their faces hidden behind elaborate masks.

Carnival roisterers ride the dark waters from palace to palace in search of new pleasures. In a fresco on a ballroom wall Cleopatra dissolves a pearl in vinegar and drinks it, while on a painted ceiling the clowns of the commedia dell’arte disport themselves on swings. Lovers who pretend not to recognize one another hop through the gavotte and arrange assignations sotto voce. Later they embrace in boats plying the dark tangle of canals that lace the city, as the songs of gondoliers echo off the shuttered arcades of silent palaces.

The revelers rise late to hear Mass in the church of the Scalzi, and peer up at the gilded screen suspended on the wings of laughing cherubs. They wonder whether the beauty of the nuns hidden behind it matches that of their voices. Casanova plots his elopement with one of them. After Mass, friends go to the casino to gossip.

Once a year the doge still emerges from his pink palace and casts a ring into the waves, to remind his city that once upon a time the riches of the sea paid for the pleasures of the Carnival. They don’t anymore. Canaletto made a fortune from painting the event for the English milordi. He realizes long before anyone else does that the Carnival’s future rests not on water or trade, but on the attractive images that can be conjured out of it.

The shipyards of the Arsenale have fallen quiet, and the treasures of the Levant no longer spill onto the docks by the doge’s palace. On the last day of the city’s existence, a council is called to determine the future of the place that once was Rivo Alto and became La Serenissima. Few of the aristocratic families bother to turn up. The doge returns to his apartments and hands his glittering insignia to a servant with a wry smile. The party is over.