Chris Abani - The Secret History of Las Vegas

All the nuclear explosions held in underground aquifers here pointed to how hollow the desert really was. Even before the bombs, there had been the endless mining expeditions during the gold rush. It was easy to see the traces on the surface — ghost towns littered the desert — but it seemed that subterranean Nevada was left to legend. These legends, of an earth populated by spirits, were so rampant that even Herbert Hoover, thirty-ninth U.S. president, himself a onetime Nevada hard-rock miner, had written about them.

Did you know that this place is rife with myth and history, Sunil said to Salazar, who was stuffing a handful of orange Cheetos into his mouth.

Nope, he said, spitting crumbs everywhere.

Dusting the shower of orange crumbs from his arm, Sunil continued. The moon landing is believed to have been faked somewhere here, he said.

Bullshit.

Well, you know it won’t be the first hoax involving science and the moon, Sunil said. In 1835, Sir John Herschel, on the front page of the New York Sun, claimed to have found intelligent life on the moon. He described vast forests, seas, and lilac-colored pyramids, even herds of bison and blue unicorns.

Sounds like he could have a job out here designing hotels and themed attractions, Salazar said.

You see these telephone poles? They are only here because of lynching, Sunil said.

That’s fucked up.

People usually are. When they were first introduced into neighborhoods, Americans hated the poles so much they chopped them down. Made the landscape ugly, they said. But when someone discovered they could lynch blacks in the middle of town using the poles, they really caught on. Doesn’t hurt that they are shaped like crosses.

Do you think anyone was lynched on one of these poles?

Hard to say, although I doubt it. These haven’t been here long enough. There is only one recorded lynching in Vegas history, which means there were probably less than a hundred actual ones. That’s racist math for you. Still, the thought of driving under them is disturbing.

Yeah, fucked up. There was awe in Salazar’s voice. Why do you like history so much if it always tells you that we’re a race doomed and full of shit?

I keep hoping to find out that we aren’t, Sunil said.

And are you guys in South Africa as fucked up as us?

At least, if not more, Sunil said.

Shit.

Yes, sir, shit.

The landscape alternated between sand and rocks, ghost buildings and dead-end exits and a barrenness that defied that particularly American notion of manifest destiny. They drove in silence for a while, each lost in thought. Sunil’s mind turned to the myths of the Nevada desert and the twins.

Everything old and telling about the human past is always buried, always submerged, in earth, in water, in language, in culture, one overlapping the other. It seemed sometimes to Sunil that humans couldn’t wait to escape the past, to escape from things no longer desired. Forgotten. Until a new generation, their wounds sufficiently blunted by time, arrives on the scene to begin excavations.

He wondered what some future generation or even an alien culture of anthropologists and archaeologists would make of the current city of Las Vegas if it became lost under the desert long enough. Would it be read as the perfect Earth culture, its acme? With representatives from all over the world building what could only be described as embassies? Each casino no longer the bizarre facade it was but rather coming together as the true United Nations? Or would it be seen as the home of world religion, each casino a representation of one group or the other? The temples were already here — pyramids, sphinxes, lions, Roman ruins, statues of liberty, all sainted icons, and the famous searchlight on the Luxor some beacon to an indifferent god? It was not without precedence — many a bizarre and crazed cult of holy people had journeyed here to flower and then die in the anonymity of the desert, only the strong surviving, like the Mormons.

With the push westward, the link to the civilizing European force grew weaker, and it wasn’t long before Las Vegas and her inhabitants developed a serious self-esteem problem. Nevada governors, businessmen, and newspapermen were all in search of a truth and an ancient mythology that would validate them, make them the cultural equal of the eastern United States, prove that this land and its recent arrivals weren’t so raw, that there was an antiquity here to rival Europe.

And soon, submerged and subterranean cultures began to play a flirtatious hide-and-seek with the fevered men who so desperately wanted these myths to be true. Before Lake Mead flooded towns and even cities in the 1930s, drowning out the Mormons still lingering on the fringes of Mammon, ancient civilizations were found that would be lost again to the waters of that blue fractal — but not before they fueled the lunacy of the Cascadian theory of human evolution.

Captain Alan LeBaron, amateur archaeologist, who explored much of Nevada and Utah from 1912 to 1930, claimed that the human race began here. The evidence piled up. In 1912, LeBaron claimed to have found Egyptian hieroglyphs on a rock in Nevada that dated back to before the Egyptian civilization. In 1924, LeBaron discovered the hill of a thousand tombs, each tomb exactly two square feet and concealed under stones fitted without the use of mortar. Then Babylonian and Mesoamerican heliographs, ideographs, and glyphs were discovered. Then caves covered in Chinese script and the skull of a man believed to be seven feet tall and whose cheekbones clearly identified him as Chinese but whose hair proved he was of Caucasian origin.

And on and on it went, one discovery after the next; proof that human life and culture, of all races in fact, began here in Cascadia and then spread to the rest of the globe. LeBaron contended that the colonization of America by whites was simply a result of the biological imperative to return to the land of their origins and reclaim it.

Sunil jerked back from his ruminations when Salazar pulled off the road into a gas station.

Are you all right? You looked lost there for a while, Salazar said, killing the engine.

I’m fine, Sunil said, yawning and stretching.

Salazar got out and headed for the convenience store. He returned with a new bag of junk food.

What have we got here, Sunil asked, opening the bag of food. There were more Cheetos, some Snickers, a bottle of water, a browning banana, a small Coke, and a fistful of Twinkies.

Wasn’t sure what you wanted, so I got a bunch of stuff, Salazar said, backing out of the gas station and merging back onto the main road at seventy without a glance at his mirrors.

You drive like an Egyptian taxi driver, Sunil said.

I’m the police, Salazar said.

What’s with all the junk food anyway, Sunil asked.

Great American road-trip tradition, Salazar said. You have to eat enough junk to gain a pound a mile.

But Twinkies?

What are you talking about? That’s bona fide American grade-A cuisine. Guaranteed to survive a nuclear holocaust. Shit, have you even had one?

Yes, I have, and I must say it was one of the most disappointing moments of my grown life.

What the fuck? Come on, you’re joking, right?

When I was a kid in Soweto, every comic book I read, from Batman to the Silver Surfer, all had amazing ads for Twinkies. It was sold literally as the food of superheroes. I could almost taste the creamy vanilla sinfulness of one of them. Oh my God, how I wanted one. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted something as bad as that, except perhaps sea monkeys. I waited thirty years, until I got here. First thing I bought when I got off the plane was a Hostess Twinkie. I couldn’t believe how awful they tasted! Like sugary petroleum jelly. I was so mad, so fucking mad.