Claire's Head (29 page)

Would Rachel kill herself? It was impossible to know if she was running towards or away from something. What would the gambling dens, the circus shows, the pirate galleons and roller-coasters have meant to her? Surely she wasn't after such ordinary pleasures. And yet there was a kind of obliteration the place afforded. Here, the past was blown up and cast away. On the Strip, you were shielded from loss and encouraged to surrender to desire, as long as you didn't go looking for what you'd lost.

Claire crossed the walkway and made her way towards the white, vaguely Italianate heights of the Bellagio complex, drawn by the alley of olive trees that lined the ramp leading up to the hotel-casino's entrance. She wanted to see whether the olive trees were real. Convinced they were fake, she plucked a sprig and sniffed the waxy leaves: no, this was the honest thing, although she was, confusingly, no longer in Tuscany but in a North
American desert. She turned back the way she had come and set off north up the Strip, towards the Venetian, drawn, despite herself it seemed, to things Italian – pseudo-Italian. The gondoliers were warbling, warming up their vocal chords and indulging in mock races across their swimming pool of a canal.

Off the Strip, everything shrank except for the distances between things, which were clearly not meant to be traversed on foot. It was already stupefyingly hot, a dry desert heat that pressed but didn't cling like the mugginess of Toronto or New York. A few blocks east, she came to a small door in a windowed building flush against the sidewalk. The windows were hung with shabby curtains. The door caught her attention because it was so small. The word, Cybercafé, was handwritten in shaky white paint in the bottom right-hand corner of the window, closest to the door. Claire had seen no other Internet cafés since arriving, no booths for accessing e-mail in the airport, only slot machines, nothing in any of the casino hotels, no easy connections to the outer world. Maybe she'd missed them. Even Claire, not tall, had to duck as she passed through the lowered doorway. Her head throbbed like the beating of wings as she pushed on the glass of the door. She squeezed herself inside. There was no sign of anyone. Stuffing plumed from two armchairs. The dimness of this place seemed the murk of dereliction after the casinos' calculatingly artificial light. She was beginning to have trouble concentrating on external objects. The second Zomig hadn't worked. It was just after ten in the morning. How dark everything was.

A small, stooped man shambled out of the shadows. Claire asked to use one of the two computers and for something cold to drink – a juice, pineapple? She checked her mail. Nothing.
Nothing from Stefan, not that she'd expected him to write. Should she send a message to him? Apologizing, but for what, exactly? She pressed her fingertips to her clammy forehead and though she felt pain, it remained unreachable. In a search field, she entered three terms – migraine pain las vegas – and waited, bleary, sipping her pineapple juice, for a page of results to display itself.

Pro-Care Clinical Trials.
Las Vegas
: Have you suffered from the pain of migraine headaches for more than a year?

The Carter
Pain
Management Center
, W. Charleston Blvd, Las Vegas.

Migraine
Testimonials
0021 … we saw her … and she was in such pain. Her husband moved to Las Vegas.

Abstracts of the 14th Annual International Headache Symposium, April 14-16th, 2000, Alexis Park Hotel,
Las Vegas
: “evaluation of preference for naratriptan among migraine patients”; “a history of awakening with migraine pain”; “establishing a standard of speed for assessing the efficacy of serotonin 1B/1D agents (triptans) in migraine treatment”; etc.

Bull's eye. Pin in the right place. The dates fit. Her own haphazard methods had led to this. This was what must have brought Rachel to Las Vegas. And really what better place could there be to hold a conference on pain?

The Alexis Park Hotel was on Harmon, one block south of Flamingo Road, just east of the Strip, so that they must have passed within sight of it as they walked south along the Strip the night before. Yet there did not seem much point in going there
now. Rachel could have come to the symposium to gather more research for her migraine article. Claire wondered what a headache symposium would consist of, exactly. Talks on headaches, panel discussions on headaches, booths on every remedy imaginable, a mingling of doctors and anthropologists and psychics and snake-oil salesmen? What sort of freebies would you get? Maybe Rachel simply wished to commune (commune!) with fellow sufferers, or maybe she was urgently seeking some further understanding of what made her own head ache. (Wasn't there a risk that attending a headache conference would make your pain worse?)

One of the papers listed among those delivered at the symposium, “speed vs. duration in current migraine pain treatments” was by a Dr. J. T. Reza affiliated with the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, a contact which seemed worth pursuing, since there was a chance, even if it was the middle of summer, that Dr. Reza would be in town. Back in her hotel room, Claire called the university, a few blocks to the east, where the switchboard directed her to the University Medical Center, a separate number. Then she was bounced back to the main campus where Dr. Reza had a second office and where he was more likely to be reached. She left a message on his voice mail, although, given that it was a Saturday, it seemed unlikely that she would hear back before Monday at the earliest. She could not find a listing for him at home.

She fell briefly into a deep sleep and woke abruptly at 2:16 p.m., remembering with a start that today was Star's birthday party. Allison had promised Star a party, the kind with games and loot
bags that Star had desperately wanted, and was holding it two weeks after Star's actual birthday, since Allison and her family had been out of town on the day. It was past five in Toronto, which likely meant the party was over, or almost over. Allison's line rang repeatedly, and given the probable din in the house, Claire waited to be redirected to voice mail, but then the line clicked and, to her surprise, Stefan picked up.

So he'd gone to the party, presumably with the present (the little cup and saucer with Le Petit Prince on them) that she'd bought for Star in Amsterdam, without Claire even reminding him about it. She did not know whether he was doing this out of loyalty to her or in an attempt to show her up, or what he had said about her absence to Allison, or Allison to him.

“Stef, I should have called you earlier,” she said. “I'm sorry. I'm sorry I'm not there. I'm glad you went. How's Star? How are the girls?” High-pitched laughter filled the air behind him.

“Oh, they're having a great time. Claire, come home.”

“Stef, not yet.”

“You're hurting me.”

She felt helpless to respond to this. “Can I speak to Allison?”

Without another word, he set the receiver down. Moments later, Allison came on the line. “Claire, have you found anything?”

“I have a lead. A doctor out here. It looks like she was here for a conference.”

“Listen, it's fantastic you're doing all this. We're grateful, we all are, but I think it's fine, you know, if you just come home. For Stefan – We'll be all right. Star will be all right. Maybe it's better this way. Better for Star. Maybe it's Rachel's way of really letting her go.”

This took Claire aback. Since when had Allison decided that she was prepared to let Rachel slip away? Better for Star, but perhaps also better for Allison if Rachel was out of the picture. Easier to mother Star, as Allison had once thrown herself into mothering Dido, if there was no second, ambiguous mother hovering in the background.

Or perhaps Allison was pulling back as an act of self-protection, to guard herself, guard them all, against the ongoing risk of being hurt by Rachel. At this distance, it was hard to tell what was grievance and what a kind of weary acceptance – or what.

“Claire, I really don't think Rachel would kill herself.”

“But you don't know.” She had Rachel's pain diary packed in her travel bag. She couldn't get the anguished voice of Rachel's diary out of her head, or her own fear. She couldn't take anyone else's word for Rachel's state of mind. Somehow she had to find Rachel and see for herself.

There was a knock on her hotel-room door. Discombobulated, still half in Toronto, Claire rose to let Brad in. He sank onto the sofa, rubbing his hair, and told her he'd finally got hold of his friend Altha (who'd been out overnight but thought her daughter Susie would be in), and talked to Rita. The woman she'd seen was a dancer, not Rachel, but he remained convinced that he would find some trace of Rachel somewhere, if he looked hard enough. He was cheered when Claire told him about the conference and the possible proximity of Dr. Reza. She said nothing about speaking to Stefan or Allison. “I'm thinking of going for
a swim,” he said, as if, whatever his degree of concern, there was still room for a little relaxation.

“I'll stay here.”

“Do you have a headache?” It was true, as Rachel had said, that there was no judgment in his tone. His question was an observation rather than a comment that implied she was somehow failing to look after herself.

“A bit. But I don't have a bathing suit.”

He nodded. “I'll be back.” She assumed that he'd left her while he went down to the pool and so curled herself once more on the bed, but a short time later, after another knock, Brad reentered, letting himself in with the extra room key this time, and tossed a white plastic bag in front of her. Claire sat up and, from the bag, pulled a woman's bathing suit, a black, orange, and purple one-piece in a floral pattern, with fitted bra cups. Hideous. She did not know what to say.

“It was on sale. I know it's ugly but there wasn't a lot of choice. I found it in this chintzy little boutique downstairs. I hope it's the right size.”

“You didn't need to buy me a bathing suit.” No matter how hard she tried to thrust money at him, he wouldn't take any. There seemed to be no point in fighting his generosity.

And so, whether she wanted to or not, Claire changed into the suit (which sort of fit) and joined Brad, who'd brought his own black Speedo, in one of the Flamingo's five swimming pools tucked among the groves of palm trees. It was ninety-five degrees in the shade. At an outdoor bar, Brad bought himself a beer and Claire the virgin pina colada she requested, before abandoning his drink to dive into the blue water. He swam like
an eel, doing laps of front crawl while Claire lowered herself into the water, the bra cups floating like independent body parts, the odour of chlorine swelling around her strong as bleach, making her eyes sting with tears.

That night, Brad said he could get them free tickets to a show featuring girls and a midget magician but Claire said she wasn't sure she felt up to it. He did convince her to go up the half-size forty-six-storey Eiffel Tower, although as soon as they stepped into the elevator to begin their ascent, she was certain she'd made a mistake. She did not know why she'd let him talk her into it. She had never been up the real Eiffel Tower. She did not particularly want to be reminded of her last trip to Paris. Her porousness to the world, or the world's own porousness, felt stronger than ever.

They had reached the elevator from inside the casino, across a metal bridge that spanned the casino floor. Outfitted young men and women leered at them, garbling Bonjour so that it came out sounding like Bun Shewer. She had come for the view of the Strip itself, which would be nothing like that over the city of Paris, but, up in the air, the impressive scale of the casinos was lost. The whirligigs of neon appeared flattened and far away. Claire was not by nature frightened of heights but something about the stomach-lurching ascent and the metal grill beneath her feet through which was exposed the street directly below made her more woozy than she already felt, and the cool breeze (it was several degrees colder this high up) did little to lessen her wooziness. (What if it were possible to be genetically altered so that she didn't get migraines? Would Stefan prefer her this way?)

When she closed her eyes, she saw herself standing on a bridge. No, she was looking at a woman balanced precariously on the stone railing of a bridge, waving her arms.

She dropped to her knees. “Claire,” Brad was saying. “Maybe we should go back down.”

Back in the casino, they got lost in an interior maze of mall-like streets that either led to dead ends or returned them to the card tables. Brad's sense of direction was not good. In fact, it was awful. In pain and some despair, Claire's was failing her. She couldn't connect the dots. There were no clocks. It had taken her this long to notice: not only were there no windows but no clocks anywhere. Lovers flung themselves at shrieking slot machines. At the tables dealers dealt not cards at all but the white paper slips of prescriptions. Stacks of chips were not chips but mountains of multicoloured pills.

“You're a maverick,” Claire croaked to Dr. James T. Reza, who nodded wildly. Jamie Reza was how he'd introduced himself, yanking her hand so hard her brain shook. She was shocked, given that he was a doctor, by the deepness of his tan. Maybe the tan was fake. Right from his introduction, he struck her as cowboy-like: the T-shirt, jeans, trim waist, the pointy boots, the oversized gestures that swept towards her and away, as if made for a place with a far horizon.

He had surprised her by calling on the Sunday morning and agreeing to meet that afternoon. She had picked up his message
at the ranch-style bungalow of Brad's friend Altha, a sinewy fortyish woman with a former cocaine habit and a truculent late-teenage daughter who slumped silently about the house. In the morning, Brad, who had spent the night there, picked up Claire at the Flamingo and brought her out to join them. She was lying on the couch in the air-conditioned living room, her head still aching, thinking of Rachel, of Stefan. She was convinced that he was going to leave her. She tried to block out the noise of the television that Susie had turned on before sloping out of the room, while Brad and Altha strategized about Rachel in the kitchen. At three, Brad dropped Claire off at the university.