The Fading Read online

  Players. A species of which you, Noel Shaker, are not. Texas rodeo boys, riding their own bull market at the hold ’em no-limit stables. There goes another whale from Hong Kong, two hookers and a comped suite, now pick up that lollipop stuck to the carpet, you goon. Noeller Coaster, the Invisible Man himself: invisible to the high-rollers, party girls, cha-chas, flannel club dykes, biker gangs, East Hampton trust-fund ramrods, pop stars, Jack Daniels-swigging frontmen in LA leather, hair metal chicks in paisley bandanas, hip-hop posses, rising white MCs, anorexic models in crusted sunglasses, clean-cut frat boys, Young Life teens handing out brochures for Jesus, sheikhs in flowing robes, porterhouse steak men from the Midwest, rubber sandals and plaid shorts – none see him, now that he is normal. The people look through him, away from him as they check in, drop their Samsonites, chintz on another room service tab, fiz to pay-per-view porn, toss back another Seven-and-7 in the sportsbook, scratch another ticket in the keno parlor, gnaw another Cuban at the Baccarat table.

  Walking between resorts at night, feeling the hair on the back of his neck prickling with odd bursts of unwelcome intuition. Sometimes he would turn to find a non-descript sedan trailing behind him, moving too slow even for the choked traffic on the Strip. Other times there would be no car tailing him, but strangers who looked at him briefly before looking away. Once it was a tall skinny guy in a Hawaiian shirt, chinos, and oversized black sunglasses. Once it was a woman with two kids, gawking at him like a zoo exhibit. Was he being followed? Or just being paranoid? There were a lot of weirdos in Vegas. People-watching was a common pastime.

  All his hunches were forgotten amid the sensory rape. How was a working man supposed to think under the constant carnival of video game bleeping, bing-bonging family-friendly slots, the screaming children, the five hundred colors of ten bazillion blinking lights, ring-a-ding-ding, Cock-Eyed-Sammy impersonators singing from the grave, Methamped bus boys, Mexican maids, Arab deliverymen sneering over a pallet of shrimp, red-faced entertainers roasting good sport Jews, racism rampant in the no-boundaries smarm, shock and jive, 24/7 entertainment, it’s all just entertainment, stuff to fuck the minutes away until the bank account’s empty and the heart attack strikes.

  Delay of death.

  Time-suck. As in, where did it go? Shit, it’s a clockless world here at Caesars Palace, where every man is a king. There is no sun and no moon, no day, no night, only indoor time, bio-dome containment. Bars, casinos, restaurants, strip clubs, musical stages, tiger cages, pirate ship lagoons, drape-drawn rooms, morning noon and night, keep the windows sealed tight. Crush ’em with AC, comp ’em another drink.

  What’s that smell? The chemical residue of carpet shampoo and floor polish and toilet bowl cleaner a constant tincture in his clothes, his hair, his nostrils. Luiz, his boss, calling him ‘you’ or ‘kid’ or ‘skinny white boy’ and screaming at the terrified illegals, laughing as he brings them to tears, sticking him with the worst of so many awful duties. Someone left a salmon in room 525, take the chisel, Shaker. Y’heard me, a salmon. Clean it up. Clean the shitter, clean the lobby, clean the elevators – but not while anyone’s around. Stand aside, get out of the way. You don’t exist, got it? Room 786, blood on the mattress, flip it, turn it, make it go away.

  The waiting. The Waiting. THE WAITING.

  Funny he got fired here. He used to live here. Started in a Centurian Tower suite with powder-smooth pillow cases, got downgraded to the Motel 8, then to a former fuckpad guest house rental on the pawn shop and rubber dick store side of town.

  The look in Julie’s eyes.

  When? When’s it going to come back? How much longer do I have to put up with this slave grind? She had stayed sober for the first five of the impoverished months, then it was a glass of wine now and then, then she lost her job as a supervisor working the call center of a travel bureau. Landed at the Mirage as a bartender but somehow, as their mission lost focus, continued to slide into her own fishnets cocktailing at Slots-of Fun, getting ass-pinched hourly.

  He’d long ago stopped trying to convince her to find something administrative, office work, a courier, anything that did not entail hose and garters, the short ruffled skirts, serving drinks and hot dogs to weenies in knock-off Brooks Bros. Knew she was smoking weed on her breaks, on her way home after work. Knew she was drinking during her shifts, in the morning before her shifts. Knew she was lingering at the casinos for an hour, two, sometimes all night instead of home, and why might that be?

  At the three-year mark he found her art-school pipe. Tinfoil in the guest house’s bathroom trashcan. Chasing the dragon, chasing the dream.

  Because this scene, their lives, this shithole guest house in a dirt-floor backyard was too depressing to look at. You could live in it, so long as you didn’t see it. A hundred and seven degrees out, a swimming pool everywhere, just not here. Paycheck to paycheck, no one’s cooking dinner, can’t afford to go out. Room service scraps, you cut off the bite marks and put it in a styrofoam carton, microwave for one minute on HI.

  He worked nights, she worked days. Both on the Strip but not in the same building, might as well have been living on other planets. Crossing paths on the way to the bathroom, between drunks, I feel like I used to know you, don’t any more, and that hurts too much to really dwell upon, so let’s just don’t. I have to get up early and go to work. My ankles feel like hammered ore, my spine’s still twitching from the dexies and mop work. I think I’m gonna watch some more TV and get my head together, be in soon, night-night.

  Three years in, the question becomes not, how much longer can we do this? But what were we doing in the first place? Was that even real? Is this even real? Are you for real? He wished none of it was real.

  I could make, like, six hundred a night dancing. Julie said that. Just a couple months ago. She said that.

  He didn’t say anything in response.

  Now really, Noel. This had gone on longer than Julie was in college. She didn’t think it was ever going to come back. She had begun to talk of leaving, making a new plan, starting over somewhere else. Monthly road trips back to Calabasas to see her mother, she said. LA boyfriend, Noel suspected.

  Had seen her laughing in the casino one night with a guy holding her up at a blackjack table, handing her chips, whispering in her ear. Clean, conservative, black suit, good hair. A little older, stable, a man drinking a scotch, in command of the table. Double-down, baby. Go ahead, it’s only money. Come up to my room later. Maybe she went. Maybe not. But it didn’t matter. The road they were on, it was crash and burn. Or the long slow burn before the crash.

  Where was his fucking cell? Why couldn’t he trigger it? Why was it resisting him this time? Now that he wanted it, why wouldn’t it come? Was it because they had been happy or because they wanted it so bad? Did we piss off the muse of the erasure?

  The downward spiral continued. They argued, fought like middleweights, she threw a lamp at his head. Make-up sex turned to make-up fighting. He slept on the couch. Dreamed of armed robberies, Reagan and Nixon masks in lieu of a Noel mask.

  One day he said, Do you think we should buy a gun?

  No, she said, averting her eyes. I don’t think we should buy a gun.

  But maybe, he thought, I should buy a gun. Pop into one of the pawn shops, buy a piece with the serial numbskis filed off, keep it in the closet beside the bed. In case someone comes for me, for us. In case she brings one of those guys from the casinos home. Keep it under my pillow. In case I need to use a gun.

  Yeah, but. Whatever you do, don’t tell her about the gun. Don’t tell her about the need for a gun. Don’t tell her what’s eating you, that you no longer believe the bubble is coming back. That it’s over. You broke its back and there’s no longer anything whatsoever special about you, Noel Shaker. You’re just another Vegas shithead who can’t look after his girl. A pimp turning her out, turning tricks with her hopes, only there’s no money on the nightstand after she goes down on you.

  Run away. Tell her you love her, pack your
bags, and get her out of the desert.

  Save Julie. Save yourself. Get out now.

  Tonight.

  ‘Tonight,’ he said in the back of a cab that smelled like bean burritos and Pine-Sol, and for the umpteenth time he believed it.

  Turned out he was one night too late. Or four years, depending on your perspective.

  25

  The cab pulled up at the rim of the cul-de-sac. Noel tipped a buck, ignored the scowl.

  He walked around the main house where the lights were never on. It was a big Spanish villa, four or five bedrooms and a dried swamp pool, in a neighborhood of a hundred others exactly like it, owned by a video producer they had never met because the video producer, along with his wife and two children, was dead.

  At the beginning of year three, Noel and Julie had been driving around looking for cheap rentals, got lost in this better neighborhood, and happened to meet Nora, the realtor who was handling the estate sale. She’d just finished clearing the yellow band of police tape from the front door and a cleaning crew was going in with an industrial strength wet-vac and about two hundred feet of hose.

  She hurried over to Julie’s Mustang and asked them if she could help them with something, smelling desperation and a possible short-term solution to her client’s problem. Namely, that he and the family were dead, the estate was in probate and being contested by various creditors, and in this market was not likely to sell for at least a year. She needed a tenant for the guest house to justify the costs of holding the listing for such a long time. Come have a lookie-loo. Nora gave them a brief tour, offered it for five hundred a month, ‘a steal for something so secure and private in this zip code’.

  When Julie asked what the catch was, Nora mentioned as off-handedly as possible that the house was still ‘unofficially a crime scene’. The producer, who’d dabbled in straight-to-video D-list action knock-offs featuring former wrestling stars and midgets and the like, had actually earned the bulk of his income distributing ‘adult cassettes across Las Vegas’s many video and novelty emporiums’. The aspiring Zodiac’s note suggested a political nutcase who’d taken umbrage with the producer’s pervy contributions to the world and believed God had sent him to cleanse the neighborhood.

  ‘The producer was killed?’ Noel asked, more intrigued than unnerved. ‘In that house?’

  ‘He and his family, yes, a terrible tragedy.’ Nora cleared her throat. ‘I can let you have the guest house for three-fifty if you don’t stir up any problems. I know it’s not ideal, but if you help me out on this, water the grass and do a few chores, hold on for at least six months, I can upgrade you to something bigger with less of a, ahem, reputation. What do you say? I’ll throw in a free cable install.’

  It didn’t bother Julie. They’d be living in the guest house after all, not the main house. And they were broke. She wanted something that bore some resemblance to a home, not a temporary place to flop. The by-the-week motels were dangerous, filled with junkies and people knocking on the door at all the wrong hours.

  ‘We’ll take it,’ Noel told Nora the realtor, and they’d not seen her since, just mailed the rent checks to the office address she’d given. They’d never even signed a lease, and at the end of the first twelve months, he’d stopped sending the checks. No one, including Nora, had called or stopped by to evict. Noel suspected a lot of the other houses were vacant, too, thanks to the recession and high unemployment.

  It was quiet here. They’d never had a problem. Except that their entire lives had become a problem.

  Noel walked across the backyard of grass gone brown, then to dust, feeling weirdly guilty about not watering and managing the landscape as he’d promised. In lieu of barbed wire, the cinderblock wall surrounding the property was festooned with decaying cactus. Thinking of a prison pen for coyotes, he let himself into the guest house. The door was unlocked. All lights were off, except for the lamp beside the double bed in their empty bedroom.

  The air was dead.

  Everything felt dead.

  He knew before he found the note.

  He walked back to the kitchen and flicked on the stove light. He poured and then nursed a deep glass of tequila. When that was empty, he refilled the glass and went back to the bedroom. She’d left it on the night-stand they’d shared, being able to afford only the one.

  But the note is not the real news, he thought. The news is what you were afraid to tell her. That the big change has already happened. Is, in fact happening right now. This is your life, and it doesn’t matter who can see you, because you’ve missed the point and wasted so much of it.

  Noel,

  I’m sorry I didn’t wait for you to come home. I tried, but I couldn’t stay a minute longer. This place and waiting for this poisoned dream of ours to come true, it was turning me into someone I don’t like. I’m scared, Noel. I’m so scared. I have dreams about death and ghastly inhuman things coming for me, trying to swallow me. I jump at every noise, and there’s too much noise here. I carry so much guilt. For what we ran away from, for what we were planning to do. I think we used to love each other but we don’t do that much anymore. Maybe we can’t. Maybe we never did, except as a solution to each other’s problems. But that can’t be right, considering where it has led us.

  Please don’t think any of this is your fault. It was my idea and you were only trying to make me happy. But I need to be alone. I need to grow up and become someone before I can be with someone. And I think I’ve been the thing keeping you from finding yourself too. When you do, I’d really like to meet him.

  I hope you don’t stay. I hope you get far away, and find yourself somewhere else good and true.

  Love,

  J

  ‘I’d really like to meet him,’ he said to the note.

  Noel began to work in earnest on the Don Julio Silver. When only two fingers remained, he carried the bottle out onto the back patio and stared out at the dark outlines of the other houses and rooftops against the softer black sky. He walked to the side of the guest house, until he could see across the bald yard to the main house some hundred feet away. Mature palm trees that had been trucked in and planted around the winding brick path connecting the two abodes obstructed his view. A thicker line of smaller snarling things that could grow in the desert had been planted against the border fence, tracing a jagged shoulder up to the main house’s back deck. The house’s windows were as dark and lifeless as they had been for the past fourteen months.

  He thought back to the comical scene of Nora, a middle-aged realtor in her blazer and business skirt and sensible heels, extracting her agency sign from the trunk of her fancy car and trying to beat it into the hard ground. When was the last time he had seen that For Sale sign, anyway? He couldn’t remember, but he was sure it hadn’t been there tonight. Soon as someone buys the place, he thought, we will be evicted.

  Then he remembered there was no longer a we, just a me. Wouldn’t it be funny if Julie left him and he became homeless in a span of twenty-four hours? Yes, hilarious. He took another swing, emptying the bottle, and lobbed it into the weeds.

  The main house stood against the night, a shadow that did not seem real in any important way, and now a single window light was on.

  Someone had moved in, after all.

  Noel stared at the lighted window, thinking about the producer and his wife and their two children. The article he’d found in the paper, just out of a gnawing but harmless curiosity, mind you, said that Ezra, the eight-year-old boy, had been found decapitated.

  He stared at the house for a long time, then went to bed and passed out at once.

  No, we can’t stay. We’ll leave tonight, together.

  This was his first clear thought as he emerged from the placeless swamp of lurid colors and phantom images that constituted his intoxicated dreams. Emerged, like a sea creature washed up onto the shore of wakefulness by a rogue wave, only to be dragged back by the undertow of his exhausted mind and the alcohol flushing through his veins, into a shallow s
lumber.

  The front door creaked and her familiar footsteps came down the hall, into the bedroom, and he felt her.

  Oh, good. Julie came back. I should wake up now.

  He was too tired to move, but not so deep as to resist imagining her stopped in the doorway, watching him sleep, smelling booze fumes, shaking her head. This is what she had come back for? What if she wanted to talk, or better yet take him with her? She might have a speech prepared, a short apology for abandoning him. All he had to do was wake up, then they could get in her car and leave tonight, now. He would drink a quart of convenience store coffee and make the four-hour road trip to Los Angeles, and together they would wake up in the sun, at her mom’s house, and John would make them breakfast, give them both another lecture for their foolish waste of four years, but everyone would be happy they had come home. They would start over, humbled, reborn in the glowing light of family.

  But not if he continued to lie here like a besotted bum.

  Her footsteps, which were the sound of tennis shoes brushing carpet, moved closer to the bed.

  Noel shifted his legs, stretching the muscles and pushing his face into the pillow. He was trying to wake up but the process required immense reserves of concentration.

  The mattress sagged at one corner and the cheap steel bed frame squeaked. The single blanket he had dragged over himself began to slide along his bare legs, tickling. He couldn’t tell if she was pulling it down or up, if she was trying to wake him or slide in with him. Maybe she was tired too, and cold, wanting nothing more than to snuggle and be with him until the new day arrived, sober and bright.

  ‘Mmmm, sorry, baby,’ he mouthed into his pillow. He was lying on his stomach, head at a ninety-degree angle, and now his neck and lower back were stiff.

  It’s coming, she said. Her voice was so soft as to qualify as a whisper, yet was clear, close. It’s coming back soon. I want to help you with it, so we can make the most of it. It’s a gift and it shouldn’t be wasted.