Chris Abani - The Secret History of Las Vegas

Could you push our car out of the mud, Fire asked.

Tow truck’s coming, Salazar threw over his shoulder. Your car’s headed for impound.

This is a shakedown, Fire said. We are Americans.

Uh-huh, Salazar said. Keep talking and I’ll arrest you.

For what, Fire asked.

You know, I’ll get a camera from my trunk, Green said, wanting to put some distance between himself, the twins, and Salazar, whom he found abrasive.

Knock yourself out, Salazar said, continuing to his cruiser.

Green retrieved the camera and walked to the twins’ sedan. Approaching from the rear, he noticed that the grass to the left was soaked in blood. He examined the spread of blood and found it coming from a plastic five-gallon drum lying on its side. The leak was slow, the blood coagulating. From what Green could make out, the drum was still about half full.

Detective, he called.

Yes, Salazar yelled back from his cruiser. He was about to settle himself into it and boot up the computer.

I think there’s blood.

What?

Blood.

Salazar ran to the sedan. He took in the drum of blood quickly.

No body, he asked Green.

Green shook his head and turned to puke in the grass.

Don’t fuck up my crime scene, Salazar growled at him. Turning to the twins, he said: I knew you freaks were up to something.

He had his gun trained on them.

Isn’t that overkill, Fire asked. We haven’t moved in a while.

You shut the fuck up, Salazar said, reaching for his radio.

Thirty apes shot in the head with a butcher’s bolt gun is not promising by any standards.

Sunil stared at the phrase used for the executions: “humane endpoint.” A contradiction in terms, surely. The cost of sacrifice, the weight of absolution, or something more mundane and necessary — the killing of nonviable laboratory test subjects. The term had no doubt been coined by an ethically challenged researcher, or worse, an administrator. Sunil wasn’t skilled in the delicacy of finding the right language for obscuring the intersection of death and scientific distance, and he had a grudging respect for those who were. At least it was nearly five, and while the institute didn’t run regular hours, it was still close to the end of the day.

He sighed and rubbed his eyes, staring at the results of the tests graphing neatly across the squared paper in blue, green, and red hills. He willed them to change, to be different, to have the data reevaluate itself. But this was the beauty of science — most times the evidence was irrefutable, especially if the tests had been run with the kind of strict controls that he had implemented. Doubly so if they had been repeated as often as these had.

Such a waste, Sunil muttered, thinking not only in terms of lives and resources but also in terms of time. He looked over the termination order that was attached to the data, grateful that he wouldn’t have to deal with the tedious task of drafting the paperwork.

He hadn’t authorized this test, which meant that his boss, Brewster, must have. No one else had the authority. The last test that Sunil authorized used capuchins, but these test subjects were apes, bonobos to be exact, and they were more than 99 percent genetically similar to humans. That seemed like a significant line, not one Sunil would have crossed lightly. He was no stranger to experiments with lower primates and would never authorize a test that could result in this many deaths unless he was sure that it would be worth it.

There had been many such experiments when he worked in South Africa, in Vlakplaas, a notorious apartheid death camp. To test the limits of endurance, they would put a female baboon and her baby in a cage. Then they would start a fire under the metal floor, slowly turning up the heat, calculating how long the mother would endure the pain before putting the baby down and standing on it. It never took that long, usually less than thirty minutes. Sunil never told anyone at Vlakplaas, especially not his boss Eugene, that the screams of the dying infant kept him up at night. He couldn’t show that kind of weakness, so instead he stuffed his ears with cotton wool while the experiments were being conducted. That sound, a muffled gurgle, like a distant brook, became the soundtrack of his denial, a white noise that successfully obliterated every last bit of conscience when he needed it. In this way he was no different from any South African: they all had their soundtracks.

The problem with primate tests was that sooner or later, apes weren’t enough. The first human trial at Vlakplaas of the heat test was a woman called Beatrice. No last name. Her baby didn’t even get a name in the file. Just Baby.

Flicking through these results, he found nothing remarkable in them; nothing he didn’t already know, and, by extension, since he shared everything he knew with him, nothing that Brewster didn’t know either. So why had Brewster authorized this, and why was he hijacking Sunil’s experiments when he had access to all his data? Of course, the bigger question was what else had Brewster done behind his back?

Sunil had three labs, and each one was under video surveillance, and the footage fed live to his laptop and was stored on a hard drive he took everywhere. But there was no evidence of the test anywhere in the footage. Sunil cross-checked the time stamps. All in order, so it wasn’t that. There was only one other explanation: the tests were not conducted in any of his labs. So why was Brewster keen for him to sign these papers? Why not one of the interns? Why was it being brought to his attention? What was going on? Fuck, Sunil thought. His best move was to sign the form and say nothing to Brewster.

He held his pen over the paper, nib poised, hesitating, unable to shake the feeling that beyond the mere fact of his signature, beyond this moment, everything would change. It was a clammy feeling, but feelings have no place in science, in the rational, and that was perhaps the real problem — that beyond his denial, he knew exactly where this feeling was coming from. He knew the power of saying the wrong thing, of taking the truth on a detour.

Fuck, Sunil muttered, I have become more American than I thought.

He too, it seemed, had come to believe that he could somehow escape history. That it was possible, and even desirable, to live in a perpetual present. When had that happened? He hadn’t been here long enough, it seemed, a mere seven years, and yet like the almost imperceptible, if inevitable, creep of sand in the desert, it had happened.

With a sigh he scratched his signature across the form and crossed the room to the coffee machine. Through the window behind him the sun was beginning to dim on Las Vegas.

Less than twenty minutes after Salazar called it in, the lakeside was crawling with police cars and an ambulance. Crime scene investigators were in everything, taking samples and photographing, and cataloging and sniffing.

Terry Jones, the CSI shift leader, stood next to Salazar and scratched his head.

So, no body, huh, he said.

No, Salazar said.

But you went ahead and called us all in, Terry said, indicating the uniforms with a sweep of his coffee cup.

Already a team of divers had arrived to look for the body in the lake.

I mean, it’s almost six thirty, Terry said. Shift change is at seven. You couldn’t wait?

What the fuck are you implying, Salazar asked. That I’m wasting your time?

You’re too close to this case, he said. Maybe you’re not thinking straight.

Fuck you, Salazar said.

Yeah, well, Terry said.

Yeah, well, fucking find the body, Salazar said.

If this is connected to the case from two years ago, shouldn’t there be more bodies, Terry asked.