We Live in Water (12 page)

Dina said, “It makes some men feel better to know what it’s like.”

“Oh no,” I said, “I don’t want that.” Then I looked closely at the girl on the couch, her brown hair and eyes, her high cheekbones. I reached out, tilted her chin up. “You know that’s not Marci,” I said.

“Of course it is.”

“No, it’s not even close. This girl’s ten years younger than Marci . . . at least three inches shorter.”

“Marci,” Dina said, and the zombie on the couch looked up at me.

“See. It’s her.”

The zombie girl looked back down again.

“Joe,” I said, and the girl on the couch looked up again.

Dina looked upset with me. She turned to face me, cocked her head, and took me in with those clear, translucent eyes. There was a hum to her, a vibration—like a dropped guitar. “What is it you want?”

“I told you. I want to find my girlfriend.”

She smiled patiently. She reached out and took my hand again in hers. “No. What do you
want
?”

“What?” My throat felt raw from the radiation. “I just want to talk to her.”

“About what?”

“I’m sick,” I said, and at that moment, the burning in my chest was overwhelming. “Cancer. I just found out a few weeks ago. Ozone sickness. Third stage. My application for gene therapy was turned down so they don’t know how much time . . . I wanted to see Marci and . . .” I couldn’t continue.

Dina stroked my hand with her slick white hand. “Apologize,” she said.

“What?” I felt the air go out of me.

“You wanted to apologize? It’s been two years and this is the first time you’ve come here,” the black-haired woman said. And as she said it I knew it was true, and I wasn’t sure anymore that the burning in my chest was coming from the radiation.

“You didn’t even look for her,” Dina continued, her voice entirely without judgment. “In fact, when she left, you were sort of . . . relieved. Weren’t you? Relieved that she left before it got bad.”

I tried to say no, but I couldn’t speak.

“You would never have said it out loud, but you knew where it was going and you didn’t know if you could do it. Take care of someone so . . . sick.”

The room swirled as the pale woman spoke.

“Your anger was useful. You told yourself that she
wanted this
; that she
chose
this; that she
chose
to throw her life away.”

I nodded weakly.

“But now you know . . . don’t you?”

I could barely see her through my teary eyes.

“Now . . . you know what we know.” Her voice went even lower. “That nobody
chooses
. That we’re all sick. We’re all here.”

“I . . .” I looked at the ground. “I just wanted to tell her . . .”

“Tell her what?” Dina asked patiently.

I wept into my hands.

“Tell her what?” Dina whispered as she rubbed my shoulder. Finally, she turned to the other girl, sitting on the couch. “Marci?”

The zombie girl stood and grabbed the drugs off the table. “Tell her what?” Dina whispered.

“I’m here,” I managed to say to the short-haired girl.

Dina nodded and smiled at me. Then she gently took my hand and pressed it into the other girl’s pale hand. And Marci led me away.

The New Frontier

I’M ON MY WAY
to Vegas with my friend Bobby Rausch to rescue his stepsister from a life of prostitution.

It’s August 2003: two weeks since I found out I failed the bar exam, six months since I got divorced, a year since I caught my wife with another man, eighteen months since she caught me cheating.

I’m on quite a streak.

Bobby’s active duty in the air force, stationed at Fairchild; he gets us a lift on a transport out of Spokane. They strap us into jump seats in this flying boxcar and the thing lurches and rumbles and finally leaves the earth, Bobby giving a thumbs-up. I yell over the rumble of the plane,
Are you scared?

In three weeks Bobby leaves for Iraq.

Scared?
He flips up his sunglasses and grins at me. Bobby and I played football together at Mead High School, where we had one of those classic little-guy, big-guy friendships. But we hadn’t seen each other in years when I bumped into him at a bar in Spokane. Bobby teaches at the air force survival school. It’s the same thing he’ll do in Iraq: teach airmen how to live on lice and tree bark, how to withstand torture if they’re captured.

You know the only thing that scares me?
Bobby says.
Going my whole life without getting the chance to prove myself.

This is not the answer I would give.

Two hours after we take off, our plane crests the pocked red and tan bluffs and we bank hard over a baked floodplain, the desert blooming with shrimp-curled cul-de-sacs, a sprawl of earth-tone houses with swimming pools, and beyond, the glittering lights of Vegas.

That’s when I throw up.

BOBBY’S PLAN
in Vegas is to stay one step ahead of the wrecking ball—Sahara, Imperial Palace, New Frontier—
Goin’ old strip
, Bobby Rausch calls it. It’s also incredibly cheap, staying in hotels that are slated for demolition.

Bobby wanted me to come to Vegas because he thought he might need a lawyer. I keep telling him that I haven’t actually passed the bar.
Oh if I know my old buddy Nick,
Bobby says,
he ain’t gonna let that stop him from bein’ a lawyer.

Actually
, I say,
failing the bar is
precisely
what stops you from being a lawyer
.

Well you can still give legal advice, right
? he asks. ’
Cause I might need some.
Then he adds, apropos of nothing,
Per se
.

What
kind
of legal advice
? I ask.
Per se
.

Well, like whether or not I can kill this shithead who turned my sister into a whore.

I think about it for a minute. Then I tell Bobby my advice is to
not
kill the shithead who turned his stepsister into a whore.

See
, he says.

ON THE STRIP
, Rausch takes huge strides. I have to throw in a skip now and then just to keep up. At each hotel, he asks for the active-military discount. At each hotel, I lean over his shoulder and add: Two double beds, please.

Bobby’s dream was to stay at the Sands and the Dunes, but those hotels have been torn down already, replaced by themed mega-resorts: Paris and the Venetian. So we stay at whatever old strip hotels
haven’t
been blown up, like the New Frontier, which—according to the brochure—opened as a roadhouse in ’42, reopened as the cowboy-themed Last Frontier in ’55, became the space-themed New Frontier after Kennedy’s 1960 convention speech (
We stand at the edge of a New Frontier—the frontier of unfulfilled hopes and dreams
), hosted Elvis’s first Vegas performance in ’69, and went back to being a cowboy place in the ’70s.

Today, the New Frontier is a paint-chipped, dirty old shell of a building that takes up an entire block. Its eighty-foot sign advertises
BIKINI BULL RIDING
,
$8.75 STEAK AND SHRIMP
, and
MUD WRESTLING
along with
COLD BEER AND DIRTY GIRLS.
The hotel is scheduled to be demolished in a few months but the guests at the New Frontier don’t look like they’ll make it that long. Everywhere there are canes and walkers, oxygen machines and motorized wheelchairs. Even the
healthy
people move in clouds of cigarette smoke, women straining polyester, men in raggedy cutoffs slathering mayonnaise on foot-long hot dogs. It’s as if the hotel were hosting a conference on adult onset diabetes.

Bobby goes to the room to shower, and I kill some time at a blackjack table. I sit between a man with one arm and a woman hooked to an oxygen machine. I look around to make sure we haven’t checked into a VA hospital by mistake. Still, I win my first five hands, including two blackjacks. Then, on the sixth hand, I get a seventeen with the dealer showing a king. I hit, pull a four, and get twenty-one.

Wow, somebody’s hot
, says the woman next to me. Then she takes a hit from her oxygen machine.

THIS WHOLE TIME
, I’m thinking, I really should tell Bobby why I decided to come on this trip.

EVERY NIGHT
in Vegas, thousands of Mexican and Honduran immigrants stand along the street, handing out little playing cards with pictures of naked women on them. They snap the cards to get your attention. If you take a card and call the phone number on it, a stripper comes
direct to your hotel room
. Or a van picks you up and takes you to a brothel in the desert. Alongside the sexy women the cards feature some of the worst ad copy you’ve ever seen:
Nothing BUTT the best for you
and
Why not CUM see me tonight
—

It’s hard for me to imagine a human being stupid enough to need those nasty puns capitalized, but I suppose they’re out there.

These snapper cards are the reason Bobby and I have come. Six weeks ago, one of Rausch’s fellow air force instructors returned from Vegas with a handful of these cards; on one of them was a photo of Bobby’s stepsister, Lisa. Bobby called the number on the card, but that particular company was out of business.

I was dubious that it was Lisa until I saw the photo. It’s her all right. In the picture, she wears a white thong and is bending forward, bare-chested, little stars covering her nipples. Her card reads:
Want me in your room in 30 minutes?
Like a pizza. You could just see, on her hip, a little Panther tattoo. Our high school mascot. I remember when she got that tattoo. Rausch and I were seniors; she was a sophomore. Rausch punched his locker when he heard about it. Then he punched the poor kid who’d seen her hip tattoo.

Rausch’s dad divorced Lisa’s mom a year after that, but Bobby continued to call Lisa his sister. He’d heard that she moved to Las Vegas and that she was dating
a porno photographer
. She told her family she was in real estate.

There has been a downturn in housing prices
, I offer helpfully.

I FIRST
met Lisa when I was a junior in high school and she was a freshman. I’d gone to Bobby’s house to see if he wanted to hang out. The Rausches were a big blended family, one kid on each side when the parents got married, and two babies between them. That day Lisa was in a lawn chair on the porch, wearing the tiniest pair of shorts, reading a magazine, and flipping a sandal up and down with her toe.
I sure like your Camaro, Nick
, she called down from the porch.

I told her it was a Cavalier.

Really?
She smiled.
Why so cavalier, Nick?

I could not think of a thing to say. So often around Lisa I couldn’t think of a thing to say.

Bobby’s not here
, she said.
I’m the only one home.
She flipped a sandal up and caught it with her toes.
Still feeling cavalier . . . Nick?
The way she hung on my name (
Nick-ah
) I swear it was the sexiest thing I’d ever heard.

Lisa was my first. There was something teasing and irresistible about her. We had to sneak around because she was so young and because Bobby was so overprotective. She’d leave the basement window open at night, and I’d crawl in, lower myself onto the air-hockey table, and go into her bedroom. She always kept her socks on for some reason. The sex was amazing, although, to be fair, I was seventeen and sex was pretty much amazing by definition. Still, this thing between us only lasted a couple of months. She was the one to end it; I think she got bored.

Rausch knows none of this.

A FEW WEEKS
before we graduated from high school, I heard a rumor from my sister’s friend: that Lisa Rausch had gotten an abortion. It was quite a while after we finished sleeping together. So it probably wasn’t mine. She was fifteen. I never said a word to her about it. This is another thing Bobby knows nothing about.

IN VEGAS
, Bobby insists that we
stick and move, stick and move.
When I ask why, he says,
Because when you’re asking the kinds of questions we’re asking, it’s not long before the people you’re looking for . . . start looking for you.

I can’t imagine the questions we’re asking causing anyone to look for us. In fact, for the first three days, we only ask the one question:
Have you seen this girl?
We stagger up and down the strip asking our one question, collecting nudie cards from snappers.

Sometimes Bobby wears his flight jacket. People come up to him and thank him for his service.

How’s the war going over there?
people will ask.

About to get a lot better
, Bobby will say. Then he’ll wink.

One day, out of nowhere, Rausch starts calling us the Dream Team.

The Dream Team’s days begin at 5:30
A.M.
It doesn’t matter what time we go to bed, Rausch wakes me at 5:30, yelling,
Let’s go, Little Buddy.
We go to breakfast, I gamble a little (I’m still on my strange winning streak.) while Bobby hangs out in the room, then we walk to a new hotel, take a nap, start drinking, gamble some more, eat at a buffet, and spend the night collecting snapper cards, looking through the pictures of strippers until, well after midnight, we stagger back to our room. This is when Rausch becomes philosophical.
Ain’t no one I’d rather have at my side, you know that, Little Buddy? You and me, we’re the Dream Team, last of the heroes.

It’s August. During the day the temperature hits 110; at night it drops into the high 90s. We move in an endless stream of drunken losers from casino to casino, past the snappers wearing their Day-Glo Tshirts advertising
GIRLS DIRECT TO YOUR ROOM
and
TWO GIRLS FOR THE PRICE OF ONE
. Rausch takes a card from each one and rifles through them, looking for Lisa. Every once in a while he shows the snappers the old card with Lisa’s picture on it.
You seen this girl?