2

Click. Click. Click. Scriptk.

Click. Click. Click. Scriptk.

Kachugadaching.. Kachugadaching. Ka-ching. Ka-ching.

Click. Click. Click. Scriptk.

Kachugadaching.. Kachugadaching. Ka-ching. Ka-ching.

Dahin! Dahin!

The swirl of sound and lights has come, the twirling machines that churn desperation, boredom and loneliness into fear, depression and loss. At an astounding profit. They turn, the wheels. And the human machines, the dealers that sweep the cards out one by one, they too turn by the hour, and rake in the harvest of woe.

We twisted our way through the growing thongs of people, I allowed the flicker of haggard faces to flow across my vision, picking out the runs in the stockings, the pulls in the exposed thighs form too short denim skirts, the fatigue from coffee and cigarette induced awareness on the cocktailers, dealers, patrons, and on and off duty everyone. I let Merc pull me by the hand through it, over the reek of smoke, across the carpets that sheen with the oil of their birth, twisting through the maze of polyester and rayon that clings with sweat and becomes a shroud that bags in the scents of crowded animality trapped in human bodies and a city of the damned.

And to think, once, this place was magic for me.

Merc tugs at my arm for a moment, and turns to face me.

“I’m going to visit the necessaries. I think you should too.

I nod, always a good idea before any adventure. We’ve been down here drinking coffee long enough, that it is a very good idea at this moment.
We wheel and wend our way out of the congestion and part with a short sweet kiss. I look into his eyes, flutter my eyelashes and smile. We break contact. I am into the ladies room.

I sit and thumb through my copy of Elle from my had bag. I go through the motions, stand up. Redo my lipstick, it is the only makeup I tend to wear.

By the time I walk out I feel lighter and happier. I push the door open slowly and start to look both ways, expecting him to be out there waiting for me.

Instead there is a confusion of bodies and uniforms. At first I think they are security guards, even the pistols don’t change that impression. They I realize that the two men barking orders are police officers, a third one has the men’s room door propped open, and a fourth is escorting a man out of the washroom. He is tall, very thin, gaunt of feature, with wisps of white balding hair, and a white stubble of a day old beard. His suit is far to good, and of a particular texture of woven tweed. I see him handing a business card to the officer and hear him say, “So what do you think of that?” The officer glances at the card, but keeps his face stern and intones “Over to the side. I need to ask you a few questions. After him a very young, very tall, very dark man with tight curly hair is being escorted out. He has a broad nose and his black skin shines with sweat and something else.

Merc is standing talking to another officer. It is clear something was set up, and we had walked into it. I can barely hear Merc talking.

My staring has caught the attention of an officer.

“May I see some ID, ma’am?” His voice is flat, polite and even. I don’t even have to fumble, my ID is in my just closed handbag, in a special pocket. He looks at me. Looks at the ID. Looks at me. Looks at the ID.

“Do you know anyone here?”

“Yes.” I point to Merc.

“He’s a doctor with the army. He’s on leave with me until he goes back…” I was about to say “In Country,” but I catch myself. “He’s going back to Iraq in a week.”

The officer nods. “Stay right here. I think we’d like to get you two together and out of here.”

There is a slow waltz of officers and whispers into the ear and nods. I hear a short. “You can go. But you need to give a statement later, so don’t go too far.”

“I’ll do that now then. I don’t mind.”

“We’d appreciate it if you did that later.”

By this point a collection of officers were escorting the tall older man away. The treatment of the younger man indicated, by a kind of easy familiarity, that he was an officer. They pretended to question him. But his body was too relaxed, and they were almost smirking as they talked to him.

Vice.

Someone had just been busted asking for sex.

Merc was up to me.

“I’d like to go down to their station and get the legalities out of the way.”

“What happened?”

“It seems the assistant to the junior Senator from the Great State of Nevada likes to get very personal with his boss’ male constituents. That must be why he’s against gay marriage, it would take all the fun out of gay sex.”

I look at the retreating crowd of police officers. They disappear into the swirl of bodies.

Click. Click. Click. Scriptk.

Kachugadaching.. Kachugadaching. Ka-ching. Ka-ching.

I overhear some chatter. It seems the story is spreading quickly. Questions as to who the man was, which party he was a member of. Whether it was a set up.

Merc turns to me.

“I think we can let the vice detail do their work.”

We are out the door and into the garage as quickly as the tumult of bodies allows.

But even in the garage there is no escape, a man with a microphone is there, and behind him a television mini-camera.

“Can I ask you a few questions?”

Merc scowls, but he stops.

“Sure.”

The reporter pushes the microphone into his face.

“But turn that off. What I have to say isn’t family friendly.”

The camera is duly pointed down, the microphone dropped. Some juggling of hands produces a notebook, a pencil and a card.

“First, if you do decide to talk on camera, here is my card.”

Merc glances at it, sees the large number of the television station and looks back up.

“I will say this. The man in question was soliciting to people as we walked in. I brushed it off.”

“You don’t have any problems with… you weren’t offended?”

“None of my business what he likes to do.”

“So you don’t care one way or the other?”

“I’d prefer people not ask randomly.”

“So then what happened?”

“I hit the stall, I really needed to go.”

“Did you see anything? Hear anything?”

“I heard the whole transaction. A man came in, I saw only a glimpse through the crack of the door, but I could tell he wasn’t what he seemed to be.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m a doctor with the army. You can always tell people who have training.”

The reporter nodded slowly.

“So what happened next?”

“The Senator’s aide propositioned him, the same way he did me?”

“How was that?”

“He said, and I quote. ’You deserve a break today.’”

There was a slightly muffled guffaw from the camera man, but the reporter went on. I watched the beer belly on the camera man jiggle with ripples of suppressed laughter. His black beard growth was scraggly, his hair unkempt. He was clearly enjoying his day immensely.

“And then what?”

“The undercover officer…”

“Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure. He said, and again I quote. ’Where?’ And then the tall thin man said. ’Fifty dollars in the stall.’”

There was a pause, Merc continued.

“They got into the stall, I heard some shuffling of clothes. And then from the tall man. ’Awww shit.’”

“And?”

“No more to tell, the officers came in just about then. And all I heard was. ’This is a Clark County set up! You fucking partisan hacks will never get this to stick.”

“So it was clear that he is a Republican?”

“I would guess it was pretty clear to anyone in earshot. He kept saying it over and over again how the ’Liberal media’ is out to get him.”

“And your thoughts on that.”

“If your liberal media can get us out of Iraq, I’d be much obliged. I’m sorry, I don’t have anything more to say.”

The reporter looked disappointed, perhaps hoping for a more graphic description. He seemed to think that Merc saw more than he had let on.

I was fairly sure that this was true from Merc’s face.

The door to the casino opened as the reporter and camera man waded into it.

Click. Click. Click. Scriptk.

Kachugadaching.. Kachugadaching. Ka-ching. Ka-ching.

The wheels had turned again, and someone’s luck had just run out.

By the time we were in the car, it was already on the radio. Republican Senator’s aide allegedly caught soliciting. He was also the state campaign chairman for some presidential hopeful, and the cut to a political science pointy head for commentary on what this would do to the presidential….

We were turning our way through the city streets.

“I need to return this rental car. We are going to be borrowing a friend’s BMW for the rest of the ride.”

I raise an eyebrow.

“I have my reasons.”

The traffic clears away as we drive away from the strip. The pressure on my face abates, I can feel road in front of us. And that is what I want so very badly. Road in front of us, and this shining city of sin behind us.

But Las Vegas wasn’t finished with us yet.

3

Give me light.

I was dreaming and fell through a giant face, like breaking the surface of the water. My cheeks bleed tears white and burned pressed to memory’s steel ice.

Give me light.

I fell upwards through into being awake. My eyes open and I am not awake, but only at another layer of the dream. There is white white white, and a giant screaming face. The face of the man I had seen arrested hours before, screaming out of a nightmare vision. On the white on white I see marching figures, in an endless parade. They are ghosts from some other Auden age.

His lips contort and wrap back and forth, over enunciating his words. But I hear the sounds, and they make no sense at all. He scoops and bobs his head and accents the commands. Orders from out of the nowhere, and into the here.

Give me air.

Give me light.

I drown and gasp and gulp for air. I suck in the space and cough. I feel a wave from deep in my stomach, it howls up my throat and discharges like a jet engine that has lost power and smokes into a ghastly whirring death. Yes I remember that sound, and now it is coming from within me.

The burning, appalling burn, becomes a wave of nausea.

My eyes open, truly open. I am staring a the floor of orange carpet, and turn over too look up at the mirrors at the ceiling of the room. The orange cast comes from sunrise. I remember the night. We must get ready to go soon. Our goal is Yosemite.

There is light, but it is fading. I look around, and do not see Merc. I startle and then settle. I hear him getting ready. I roll my feet slowly to the floor and begin to assemble my wits. My insides churn. I almost wish for a moment of shocking violence to bring me out of this sense of roiling helplessness. But alas, we are not in Country.

Some where in a lonely hotel room I am still there, at the moment. I can draw back my vision and see myself standing there. There is silence, but inside there is a swirling siren in my head. I feel a flash of heat that floods down my face and across my body. I feel my stomach drop about two feet. No. That’s going to happen in the future. It didn’t happen in the past.

I am spinning, having lost track of past and present, whether I am awake or falling back asleep.

My eyes open again, I am looking at the Merc’s face.

“You passed out. Are you sure you are alright?”

“I had a dream.”

“So did Martin Luther King Jr.”

“It was two dreams. The first part just came back to me. I dreamt that a plane hit the Stratosphere tower we were there. I fell through the floor and into a wave of white. And there was the face of the man they arrested today.”

“Did he remind you of anyone?”

“I don’t know.”

“No one else does.”

“It’s going to happen in the future.”

“You know I don’t believe.”

“No. I mean our child. My past doesn’t matter now. I have a reason to be. It’s going to happen in the future, the meaning of my dream.”

“You were just reliving that day.”

“No, I was pre-living something.”

“I’m confused again.”

“There is another moment coming, another collapse.”

“Shit. Anyone who has been to Baghdad can tell you that. That’s what the surge was about, because the city was spinning out of control. It wasn’t to accelerate victory, just delay defeat.”

“How closer are we?”

“To losing the war? We lost it already. We put the enemy in charge of the country.”

“So were falling spiral?”

“Destination unknown.”

“So where are we going? Why are you going? Do you have some kind of Rhett Butler complex?”

“No. I’m going back to be there at the bitter end.”

“That’s what I was seeing. There is going to be a moment. A moment when we see a shadow, and feel it splay into pink mist.”

“I already have. There was a friend, he slipped away under my fingers. I knew there was nothing that could be done. So I sat there, watching him turn back and forth against a baked beige wall.”

I see his eyes have gone million miles gone. They scream one thing:

Give me light.

“Tell me dear.”

“He was a shining light. Brilliant. Tactically, intellectually. He lead us when we had given up on finding people. He had the words. All the words I don’t know. All the words I wished I knew. All the words I wish I could say.”

“What did he say.”

“When I found him, he’d stitched a boy’s in place and restarted his heart. A sniper caught him and ripped enough of his mid section out to fill a butcher case in Chinatown. He lolled and smiled. He breathed out of half a lung. And was drowning in the other.”

“What did he say?”

“He smiled at me.”

He slipped into another voice. He gained an accent I did not know he had.

“The wings have come for me. I stand on the mountain and there is the breath of cold that shrouds my feet. These garments of flesh are not my own. I trade my life for his. Save him from this day. There is light on his face.”

“I told him nothing, I had no lies to tell.” Pause. “He bled out, still smiling. But he was right, the blood was coming back to the marine’s face.”

“And the patient lived?”

“Lived through that day. Lives to this day. Though he’s due for another tour.”

That was silence until we were hauling ourselves out. I looked back at the closing door, wishing we had found some debauchee to share what we had shared there. Not because, but because not. Because what’s the point of going to sin city without doing something you are ashamed of?

As I walked out with Merc I saw faces in the casino, pretty faces, once. Handsome faces… once.

Worn by waves of desperation. Staring into the machines. Everyone saying the same thing.

Give me light.

One moment I could feel his eyes on the seam of a long pair of black stockings. I pressed my lips to his in a dangerous flame. That shapely backside and long legged wonder turned around to reveal a haggard 50 year old face, with a long nose and the sunken cheeks of a cocaine user.

Her eyes danced, she was beyond caring. In the background, bells rang and she tossed her peroxide blasted wires back. She had found in decay a reality of happiness. She petted the hands of the patrons and giggled like a girl.

I knew from her walk that she never went to bed alone unless she wanted to.

She was the light.

I could tell that no words would pass between them, that Merc took her in his mind. I could see the tightening of his jaw, the flare in his eyes.

I remembered how the first time we were together it took ours to uncoil the tension, and then it became a fluid lucidity of motion. How once freed from what ever chains that bind him in the waking world, he was a different man. He spoken during sex, he talked to me, whispering in my ear. He recited poems, perhaps memorized in quiet rooms of his childhood. He told me about his travels, about his dreams. He did not speak so at any other time.

I remembered how he had the peculiar habit of turning his hips under my hands, and using this leverage to grind into me. It produced a wincing sensation, that shot up through my body with hot stiff intensity, almost pain, and then a flooding relaxation as the pressure ebbed away. Then that strange shift of motion and sensation, as the focus of my pleasure shuttled from high to low. That particular sensation of his outer skin dragging on my inner skin that enveloped him, and the pleasing realization in my mind that I was enveloping him. And the beatific look upon my face, and the serene smile that, in that instant, I was his world.

I felt calm, even knowing his attention, because he was looking, not at her, but what he hoped I could always be: his lady of redemption.

From what, I did not yet know.

And as he watched her, I saw his lips barely move and form shapes and syllables. But they did not add up to words. He turned away from her and focused on the flooding reality of sunlight that poured through the glass doors.

We cleared the entrance to cross the street and get coffee. The sun blazed straight down the open pavement. And there was light sweet dry light.

I could not help, I sank to me knees in prayer. To which deity I do not know.

Let there be light.

Instead there would soon be noise. That is what we had been trying to escape, but could not: Iraq.

The Kingdom of Noise.