Tim Weaver - Vanished

The city limits emerged from the darkness about twenty minutes later: to start with just small, single-storey satellite towns, street lights flickering in the shadows either side of the Interstate; then, as the 15 carved its way through the Southern Highlands, a brighter, more persistent glow. Housing estates, strip malls and vast tracts of undeveloped land, illuminated by billboards and the orange tang of sodium lights; and then the neon: casinos, motels and diners, unfurling beyond the freeway. Finally, as I came off the Interstate and joined West Hacienda, I saw the Strip for the first time, its dazzling, monolithic structures rising out of the flatness of the desert, like a star going supernova.

Even a quarter of a mile short of its parking garage, I knew the Mandalay Bay would be a step up from the last time I’d stayed in Las Vegas. On my first trip to the city five years before, the newspaper had taken care of the booking and left me to rot in a downtown grind joint called The George. ‘George’, I later found out, was casino lingo for a good tipper. Except the only people doing the gambling at The George were the homeless, placing 25c minimum bets on the blackjack tables out front so they could scrape together enough for a bottle of something strong. This time, as I nosed the hired Dodge Stratus into a space on a huge rooftop car park, I passed eight-storey signs advertising a televised UFC fight at the hotel in January, and I knew I’d made the right decision to book it myself: last time out, the only fighting I’d seen anywhere close to The George was of the fully drunk kind.

I turned off the ignition and as the engine and radio died, the sound of the Las Vegas Freeway filled the car: a low, unbroken hum, like the rumble of an approaching storm. Further off, disguised against the sky except for the metronomic wink of its tail light, was a plane making its final approach into McCarran. As I sat there, a feeling of familiarity washed over me, of being in this city, of hearing these same sounds, five years before. I remembered a lot from that trip, but mostly I just remembered the noise and the lights.

I opened the door of the Dodge and got out.

The night was cool, but not unpleasant. Popping the trunk, I grabbed my overnight bag and headed across the lot. Inside, the hotel was just as loud, the cars and planes and video screens replaced by the incessant ding, ding, ding of slot machines. I waited in line for the front desk, watching as a young couple in their twenties started arguing with one another. By the time I was handed my room card, I was ready for silence – or as close as I could get.

I showered, changed and raided the minibar, then called Derryn to let her know I’d arrived okay. We chatted for a while. She’d found it hard to adapt to our new life on the West Coast initially: we had no friends here, she had no job, and in our Santa Monica apartment block our neighbours operated a hermetically sealed clique. Gradually, though, things were changing. Back home, she’d been an A&E nurse for twelve years before giving it up to come out to the States with me, and that experience had landed her a short-term contract at a surgery a block from where we lived. She was only taking blood and helping doctors patch up wounds – much more sedate than the work she had been doing back in London – but she loved it. It got her out meeting people, and it brought in a little money, plus she got weekends off too, which meant she could go to the beach.

‘You going to spend all our money, Raker?’ she asked after a while.

‘Not tonight. Maybe tomorrow.’

‘Do you even know how to play cards?’

‘I know how to play Snap.’

I could tell she was smiling. ‘I’d love to be a fly on the wall when you sidle up to the blackjack table pretending you know what you’re doing.’

‘I do know what I’m doing.’

‘You can’t even play Monopoly.’

‘My biggest fan talks me up again.’

She laughed. ‘You’ll have to take me with you next time.’

‘I will.’

‘I’d love to see Vegas.’

I turned on the bed and looked out through the window. Millions of lights winked back through the glass. ‘I know. I’ll bring you here one day, I promise.’

Except I would never get the chance.

Because, two years later, she’d be dead.

At one-thirty, I was still awake, even if I didn’t understand why. I’d been up until four the previous night filing a story, was fried after the five-hour drive down from LA – but I just couldn’t drop off. Eventually, I gave up trying, got dressed and headed downstairs.

When the elevator doors opened, it was like time had stood still: the foyer, the sounds of the slots, the music being piped through speakers, it was all exactly the same as I’d left it. The only thing missing was the couple screaming at one another. This was the reason casinos didn’t put clocks up: day, night, it was all the same, like being in stasis. You came in and your body clock disengaged. I looked at my watch again and saw it was closing in on two – but it may as well have been mid-morning. Men and women were wandering around in tracksuits and shorts like they’d just come from the tennis courts.

I headed to a bar next to the hotel lobby. Even at one-fifty in the morning I had plenty of company: a couple in their sixties, a woman talking on her phone in a booth, a guy leaning over a laptop, and a group of five men sitting at one of the tables, laughing raucously at something one of them had said. Sliding in at the stools, I ordered a beer, picked at a bowl of nuts and flicked through a copy of the Las Vegas Sun that had been left behind. The front-page story neatly echoed the one I’d been sent down to follow up: Las Vegas, the bulletproof city. While some analysts were predicting a recession inside the next twelve months, America’s gaming capital was set to make a record $8 billion.

About ten minutes later, as I got to the sports pages, a guy sat down beside me at the bar and ordered another round of drinks. I looked up, he looked back at me, and then he disappeared back to his table with a tray full of shots. A couple of seconds later, a faint memory surfaced, and – as I tried to grasp at it – a feeling of recognition washed over me: I knew him. I turned on my stool and glanced back over my shoulder. The man placed the tray down on the table – and then looked back at me. He knows me too . There was a moment of hesitation for both of us, paused at either end of the room – but then it seemed to click for him, a smile broke out and he returned to me.

‘David?’

As soon as he spoke, the memory became fully formed: Lee Wilkins. We’d grown up together, lived in the same village, gone to the same school – and we’d left the same sixth-form college and never spoken since. Now, almost twenty years later, here he was: different from how I remembered, but not that different. More weight around his face and middle, hair shaved, dark stubble lining his jaw, but otherwise the same guy: five-ten, stocky, a scar to the left of his nose where he’d fallen out of a tree we’d been climbing.

‘Lee?’

‘Yes!’ An even bigger smile spread across his face and we shook hands. ‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘I thought when I saw you, “He looks familiar,” but I just never figured …’

‘Are you on holiday here?’

‘No,’ he said, perching himself on the stool next to me. ‘I live here now. Been in Vegas for two years; been in the States for seven.’

‘Doing what?’

‘You remember I wanted to be an actor?’

‘I remember that, yeah.’

He stopped; smiled. ‘Well, it didn’t work out.’

‘Oh.’

‘No, I mean it didn’t work out in the way I thought it would. I spent five years in LA trying to catch a break, waiting tables and turning up at auditions. Got some minor roles here and there but nothing anyone would have seen me in. Then I started compèring at this comedy club in West Hollywood, and things got a little crazy. Ended up going down so well, I became the act. Couple of years later, I got offered a support-act slot by a guy I know who runs the entertainment in the MGM hotels, so I travel between here, the Luxor, New York, the Mirage, the Grand, all of them. It’s just sort of grown from there.’