Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

King Pole, Gallows Pole, Bottle Tree BY ELIZABETH BEAR

Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, and very nearly named after Peregrin Took. She is a recipient of the John W. Campbell, Locus, and Hugo awards, as well as a nominee for multiple British Science Fiction Association and Philip K. Dick awards. She currently lives in southern New England with a famous cat. Her hobbies include murdering inoffensive potted plants, ruining dinner, and falling off rock faces.

Her most recent books are a space opera, Chill, from Bantam Spectra, and a fantasy, The Sea Thy Mistress, from Tor.

The ghosts from the dam come in summer. The official count is ninety-six, but “industrial fatalities” does not include the men who died of carbon monoxide poisoning—they were told it was “pneumonia”—or rock dust in their lungs. I’ve met the dead, and there’s more than ninety-six. Several hundred, enough to fill a big school cafeteria. If you could get them to muster out, you could count.

One came for me on Sunday, as I sat by a black-painted wrought-iron café table—which is not such a great idea in August when the in-the-shade temperature is 118—protected from the worst of the sun by an umbrella and a chinaberry tree. A pint of pear cider rested by my hand; a nibbled ploughman’s lunch spread across a plate I’d pushed to the other side of the table. The Stilton was real, but the cheddar might as well have been Velveeta. Just like Vegas. Just like me, the genius loci of Las Vegas. It’s all this facade of the exotic over solid Topeka.

I had finished with the Sunday Review-Journal/Sun, and was using it as an underpinning for my heaps of poker chips. The top story was about Martin Powers, the grandson of the owner of the Babylon Casino, who was up on racketeering charges.

Viva Las Vegas.

I was interested in the poker chips.

You can build cantilevered structures from them, where the only things holding them together are gravity and leverage and the weight of the pieces. The heavier the chip and the wider, the better. Some of these were Stratosphere millennium-fireworks chips, and some were black-and-white dollar chips from the old Silver Slipper, which isn’t there anymore. The red edges and the black edges made a pattern like the facade on a brick Victorian.

I was engrossed in trying to match the red and black ink of the spill of card suits small as a Gila’s beaded scales sleeving my left arm and curling across my throat.

I had stopped to think about my next move while smearing blue cheese on a white roll with all the flavor and consistency of drywall—because I’m Vegas, and we can get you Wyder’s pear cider and Branston pickle, but we’re not smart enough to figure out that a ploughman’s lunch is only as good as the bread—and after a minute or two I noticed somebody watching from the railing.

I was pretty sure he was a ghost.

Nobody walks in Vegas if they can help it. One, it’s too hot. Two, we’re not real good on traffic signals and respecting the crosswalks and all that sissy East Coast stuff. Three, I saw him otherwise, not in the hard-world way. And finally, he was transparent, which was a clue. Even in the absence of apparent crushing damage.

I lifted up my eye patch and scratched under it, not-so-incidentally taking a long look with my otherwise eye while blocking it from casual view with the hand. He stared like a dog who is very politely noticing that you’re eating a steak dinner. I tipped cider onto the pavement.

The ghost brightened appreciably, but raised a hand and shook his head. More for me; I finished the pint and set the glass down so it wouldn’t tip on the latticework tabletop. The ghost turned away, looking over his shoulder. He couldn’t have said Follow me better if he was Lassie.

I pinned a twenty and a ten under my empty glass, stuffed a last piece of “cheddar” into my mouth, left the chips, and vaulted the white picket fence between the patio and the sidewalk. Painted wood scorched my palm.

Lucky the rail wasn’t iron. I blew on my palm and shook my fingers out as I followed the ghost down Tropicana toward the Strip, wheels sizzling by on my left. Each car kicked up a wave of heat and the oil stench of baking asphalt. Business owners tape towels around the handles of doors in a Vegas summer, and children blister bare feet on manhole covers. My feet baked in my Docs, the leather of my pants squeaking with every step. Up and down my left arm, the sun picked out the clubs and spades in hot pinpricks.

In the lot, I yanked on my helmet, jacket, and gloves—not necessarily in that order—and rocked the old BMW off the stand before spurring it to life. A fortuitous break in traffic put me on the road.

Ghosts keep up with motor vehicles just fine—or maybe I should say, on the bike, I could move almost as fast as the ghost wanted. My guide led me up Maryland, through the old downtown with its square land-claim grid of numbered streets, then up Las Vegas Boulevard where it turns into Fifth Street. He turned west on Carey, along a strip of California-style stucco homes with six-foot block walls interspersed with desert lots.

He stopped between MLK and Rancho, and I let the bike glide to a halt alongside. Light planes from the North Las Vegas Airport skimmed overhead, cutting across a sky with all color baked out. On my right more housing developments swelled like cactuses, only visible as sand-colored block walls and the red tile roofs rising behind them. On my left, though, the scraggy trees and scrub desert of an old ranch estate were marked by a weathered sign, the back and both sides enclosed by housing-tract walls. You couldn’t say much for the curb appeal.

BMWs don’t roar like American bikes or whine like Japanese ones. But mine rumbled as I guided it up the dirt driveway, following a serpentine course to avoid the ruts and stones. The name on the mailbox was Bukvajova, which really seemed like it ought to be familiar. Dust dulled the maroon gas tank and dimmed the chrome on the handlebars before I turned in behind a windbreak of ratty evergreens.

The house wasn’t in any better shape than the vantage from the street suggested. Mustard-colored paint peeled in scrofulous plates, shaggy as cedar bark. I might have thought it wasn’t inhabited. Abandoned structures can stand for decades in the desert, even if they aren’t built of stone, and a lot of the old Vegas houses were made of cinderblock.

Vegas is a city with no history, though. We have a conspiracy of dismemory. Tear it down, pave it over, build something new. Nothing left but the poker chips and the elephant’s graveyard of neon signs tucked away in an alleged museum that’s not even open to the public. If the historical society takes an interest in a building, six will get you ten it burns down within a season. People forget, remake themselves, come here to change their lives and their luck.

Sometimes it works.

Small branches from a moribund elm littered the house’s tar-paper roof. The tree was doomed, but not dead; Dutch elm disease kills from the crown.

I made sure the kickstand was on hard earth and walked toward the house. My ghost had vanished, though I had expected to see him under the wind chimes on the front porch.

A crystalline clinking wasn’t only from the chimes. Around the side, another nearly dead elm swayed in the breeze. Its fingerling branches had been broken off blunt, and onto each stick was thrust a colored bottle—gold, violet, emerald, Tŷ Nant ruby, Maltine amber, Ayer’s cobalt blue. They tinkled as the tree moved, and I wondered how they managed not to smash in anything like a real wind.

I was tipping up my eye patch to get a better look when my footsteps alerted someone. Which is to say, a burro in the yard behind the house started braying as if badly in need of oiling, and that was the end of my stealth.

The otherwise glow of trapped ghosts swirled inside the bottles on the dying elm. I felt I should hear them tapping, scratching at the inside of their rainbow prisons. But only the light breeze soughed across the mouths of the bottles. Some people say the sound is the evil spirits crying for release, but it’s not.

I’ve never seen the point in trapping ghosts. The ones you could catch in a bottle tree are harmless, and the ones that aren’t harmless, you couldn’t catch in a bottle tree.

I wondered where my Lassie-ghost was, and where I was supposed to find the well with Timmy in it. And as I was wondering—the burro still sawing away, no doubt infuriating the suburban neighbors—the front door banged open hard enough that my boots cleared earth. I flipped down my eye patch; no point making an innocent bystander look at a scarred socket.

Like Odin, I traded the eye for other things. Unlike Odin, it didn’t involve a gallows tree, and I didn’t expect anything in trade but a plain pine box and a hasty burial. What I got was being made the genius of Las Vegas, guardian of the Sin City and all her fallen angels.

It’s a strange old world.

The woman standing on the shaded porch was in her sixties, I thought, stoop-shouldered, yellowing gray hair tucked behind her ears. Despite the heat, she dressed in a raveling cardigan pulled lumpy over a blue-and-white star-patterned shirt that hung, untucked, to the thighs of shapeless brown slacks. She scowled through filthy glasses. “Who’s there?”

Mushy diction, as if she’d forgotten to slide her dentures in. When I turned to her, she leaned forward against one of the four-by-fours holding up the porch roof, peering through strings of hair.

“Jackie.” When I stepped from the shade of the dying elm, sun thumped my head like hot sand. There were a couple of wizened forty-foot Mexican fan palms on the property, but they cast no more shade than telephone poles.

“Jackie,” she said, and kissed air. “I think—no, I don’t remember you.”

“I don’t think we’ve met,” I said, but as I said it I wasn’t sure anymore. Her cloudy blue eyes, the shape of her nose …

Useless. If she’s lived in Vegas sixty years, I might have seen her hundreds of times. Especially back when there were only a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand people in town. But I didn’t remember her now. “Ma’am, is this your bottle tree?”

“This is private property.” She blinked sagging lids. “My bottle tree? What do you know about bottle trees?”

“They’re for catching ghosts,” I said. “Protection from evil spirits. Ms. Bukvajova? Mrs.?”

She shrugged. All the same to her.

“Do you have a lot of evil spirits here, Ms. Bukvajova?”

“A few,” she said. “Can’t you hear ’em? Singing away in there? Don’t you remember what that’s good for, Jackie?”

The breeze was enough to ruffle the fans on the palms, but its sighs and the chiming were still the only sounds rising from the bottle tree. It sounded a little like a glass armonica—Benjamin Franklin’s instrument, once thought to cause neurological damage because of its vibrations. But that might have just been lead poisoning from the paint on the crystal bowls.

“That’s just the wind,” I said. “Those ghosts are harmless, Ms. Bukvajova.”

She laughed, and came out of the shade of the porch into the sunlight. She stumped forward, hands stuffed now into the pockets of her mustard-colored cardigan. It matched her house. The sweater hung from her stooped shoulders like a yoke supporting her fists in slings. “Harmless,” she said, “but not useless.” She pushed past me, trailing unwashed sourness. Flakes of dead skin nested among the roots of her eyebrows and in her thinning hair.

She pulled a hand from her pocket to tap a metal church key against the base of an amber-colored bottle. The sighing and moaning redoubled. “Just the wind.”

She pulled the bottle off the branch and popped a champagne cork into the top, then set the corked bottle at the base of the tree.

“I’m sure I should remember you,” she said. She pulled down another bottle and corked it, but had to get a stepladder for the third. It was just leaned up under the eaves; obviously, she used it a lot.

“I’m not sure there’s anything to remember.”

She snorted. “I forget a lot these days, Jackie. It’s the price of getting old. What do you forget?”

I wasn’t too sure of the wisdom of a sixty-year-old woman climbing ladders, but it’s not a city’s job to babysit children and old people. I might have volunteered to climb up anyway, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to abet whatever she was doing with the ghosts.

Especially if one were Lassie.

Whatever I was opening my mouth to say slipped out of memory even as I was reaching to turn it into words. “So if they’re harmless but useful,” I asked instead, “what do you use them for?”

Ms. Bukvajova was halfway up the ladder. She turned stiffly, holding on to a fragile dead branch, and tapped her forehead with her free hand. “All sorts of things. Some I cook myself and some I sell. Ghosts are memories. I reckon they’ve got more uses than I recollect, even, and I recollect a few. I made sure to write ’em down.”

When she clambered down, she held a straw-yellow bottle in one hand, her thumb pressed over the neck. She shook the bottle as if shaking up a soda so it would spray, and raised it to her mouth. The gesture was deft and quick; her throat worked as if she chugged a beer; her lashes, crusted with yellow grains, brushed her cheek. I watched, fascinated, searching for any sign of change. Tatters of otherwise light blew around her, but that was all. When she lowered the bottle and belched she looked the same.

“Hits the spot, it does,” she said, and wiped moist lips on the back of her wrist.

Another man might have picked a fight, taken the bottles away, smashed the tree. But then there was the question of what good that would do and who had the right of the matter. There was no law against catching ghosts, neither man’s nor moral. They were dead already. Exploiting a lingering shade, to be honest, bothers me a damned sight less than eating bacon does. And I eat bacon.

But it made me curious. Vegas is chinks and cracks, and magic grows in some of them. I’m the sort of person who can usually be found poking around deserted lots with a field guide, so to speak, trying to decide if what I have here is really yellow wood sorrel or something else entirely. I like to know what the growing things are.

So I kept thinking about Ms. Bukvajova as I guided the BMW back through light Sunday traffic, pausing in front of the gray block, lattice-and-glass facade of St. Christopher’s on Bruce, near the North Las Vegas police station. Kids squealed in the public swimming pool down the street. Chlorine hung acrid on the air.

Children really are tougher than adults. It was enough to make me sneeze from here.

Stewart emerged after the exodus, blond hair immediately evident in the sunlight. I wondered if he had stayed inside to introduce himself to the priest. Stewart’s churchgoing, just not religious. Or just not any one religion in particular. He visits them by turns.

He’s the other half of Las Vegas—well, half is the wrong word; there’s overlap—and my city has more churches per capita than any other in America. And no, that doesn’t include wedding chapels.

Stewart sauntered up to where I stood bracing the bike and ran a hand up my arm. I handed him his helmet; he left a lip print on the glossy side of mine before strapping his own in place. Then his feet were on the pegs and we sailed into the traffic stream, sliding into the space left in front of an old man in a gold Lincoln Town Car who had hit the brakes in shock at the public display of affection.

We were already in the neighborhood, so we swung by Jerry’s Nugget to avail ourselves of the legendary eight-dollar prime rib for his first lunch and my second one. Somehow we wound up going to the Italian place instead, and Stewart stuffed garlic bread into his mouth and swallowed beer until the pizza and salad showed, like I’d been keeping him on bread and water.

Stewart wasn’t big. He was fair-haired, wiry, and he bit his thumbnail while he was thinking. I liked watching him eat. I liked his enthusiasm and flightiness and the fact that I knew it was all a pose.

“How was church?” I asked when he’d slowed down enough to answer questions.

He pushed a piece of pepperoni around with his fingertip, then licked the grease off the nail. “Boring. We need cuter priests in this town.”

“They don’t pick them for the way they fill out their trousers,” I answered complacently. I assembled a forkful of lettuce, onion, and a bite of pizza with crushed reds and parmesan, and stuffed it into my mouth. No matter how many times I did that, Stewart still looked at me in disbelief. Hey, it tasted good. “What do you want to do tonight?”

“Dunno,” he said. “Sunday night in Vegas. We could go to a movie.”

“We could go to a bar.”

“Mmmph.” Not such a bad idea, though, by the way he tilted his head and lifted an eyebrow. “What did you do today?”

I shrugged. “Hung out at the Crown and Anchor. Drove around. The ghosts are back.”

“Ah, so,” he said, and flicked beer at me. I ducked, laughing, and the waiter shot us a dirty look. Didn’t bother me: Service is always slow in there, and Stewart and I overtip. “Sounds like a thrilling day.”

I didn’t decide not to tell Stewart about Ms. Bukvajova. It just, you know—completely slipped my mind.

It turned out that what we did that night was go to the circus. I like circus folk, and I love the circus. So because Stewart loves me, we go to the circus every time it’s in town.

Well, Vegas has its own local circuses. A new Cirque du Soleil every couple of years, and we’ve seen them all, including the traveling shows. The animal acts are being phased out after what happened to Roy Horn. But it’s a big deal when an arena show comes through, and an even bigger one when it’s a tent show.

Call me old-fashioned, but it’s not really a circus without a big top.

Oestman Brothers Circus and Traveling Show had set up on the desert lot near Sahara, the one they’re always going to build a casino on any day now. We arrived an hour and a half before showtime, light still smeared across the sky, holding the dark at bay.

Not that darkness stood much chance against Vegas. Night tried to fall as we wandered the side tents—viewing fortune-tellers and caged tigers in their shaded enclosure, munching on cotton candy—and it only changed the quality of light. Neon saturated the atmosphere, heavy-hung, so I expected to see it move in swirls with each current. Stewart and I walked through it as if it were a fog. At one point he grabbed my hand and I turned to look at him and saw him crowned in ghostly radiance. I ducked down and kissed him on the grin, despite the sharp intake of breath from a scandalized matron on the far side of the candy-apple booth. I hoped the guy guessing her weight guessed high.

When I leaned back, the light was still there, and it buoyed me.

It has its own otherwise energy, that light in Vegas. It’s as much me as my skin and fingers, as much my partner as Stewart is—alien and present—so sometimes I feel it from the inside and sometimes I feel it like a caress.

Somewhere between the rigged dart game and the crocodile boy, we finished our junk food and joined the people moving inside. Under the big top, it was sawdust and lights and collapsible bleachers, and Stewart and I clomped up them to find our seats. He promptly got up again to fetch popcorn and cokes—I have no idea where he puts it—and was back before the seats finished filling up. He’s got a knack for picking the quick line. Just lucky like that.

I had my head craned back, staring up at the highest point of the big top, when he slid a bag of roasted chestnuts into my hand. “They call it the king pole,” I said. “The whole tent hangs off it. That used to be one hell of a tree.”

“Yeah,” he said. “So was the one Odin hanged himself off of. And look where that got him—overrun by Christians.”

“Blind and forgotten,” I said, and touched my eyepatch.

Stewart winked under blond bangs and stole a chestnut back.

It was a nice enough little circus. They had a couple of elephants that came on toward the end of the show, and as I sat there and ate chestnuts I wondered if they were abused. Not everybody treats their animals as well as Siegfried and Roy. Yeah, I worry more about animals than people, which is stupid. Some folks justify it by saying that animals don’t make the choices that lead to their torment and destruction, but it’s a bit facile to pretend people have any more autonomy.

In reality, the rat race is a handicap. Except the previous winners start with less weight, not as far to run, and a better knowledge of the track. And the more you fail to keep up, the more weight gets piled on.

It’s a scary business, life.

This was a three-ring circus, where there’s a big act in the center ring—that’s where the elephants were—and something smaller on either side. Because we got our tickets late, we were over by the concurrent clowns, and Stewart seemed to be watching them more than the elephants. He doesn’t like animal acts.

I like watching the ringmaster. When the elephants trouped out, I knew it had to be time for the capper. The man in the sequined red topcoat ran out to the middle of the center ring and gestured for his microphone, which glided from the bigtop to be caught with a conjuror’s flair.

Behind him, trapezes snaked from the scaffolding. Running men brought out a pedestal. The knotted shroud of the net rose and grew taut, like an emerged moth plumping chrysalis-rumpled wings, while the ringmaster’s voice rang across the stands.

“Ladies and gentlemen. Children of all ages! May I direct your attention to the center ring!?

“You have seen aerialists and acrobats. You have seen wire dancers and tumblers, funambulists and flyers. But you have never seen anything like this.

“All the way from the primeval forest of mysterious Moravia, I give you—the Flying Bukvajovas!”

“Huh,” I said, as the catcher was winched up to his trapeze and the first of the flyers began to ascend the platform. “I could swear I’ve heard that name.”

Stewart gave me a funny look. “They’ve been through town before. We saw them about ten years ago. With a different circus then. And I don’t think that was the first time. I’m pretty sure they were here when the dam was going in.…”

“Oh,” I said. “Of course.” And ate another nut. One of those multigenerational circus families.

The ringmaster’s microphone reeled back into the stratosphere. He fled the ring in a scatter of sequin reflections, something like an animate mirror ball. I shrugged off a chill.

“Jackie?”

“Somebody stepped on my grave.”

Stewart stole another nut. “Maybe the ringmaster is evil.”

I tried to steal it back, resulting in a wrestling match that scattered popcorn across the floorboards and glares across nearby patrons. Casualties of war. To add insult to injury, Stewart popped the kidnappee into his mouth before I managed to retrieve it.

“No evil ringmasters,” I said. “I won’t allow it. Screw Ray Bradbury.”

“That was a carny,” Stewart said complacently, defending what remained of his popcorn. “And anyway, Bradbury’s not my type.”

Later that night, when the city glow was creeping around the edges of the hotel-room blackout curtains brightly enough to compete with my bedside lamp, I lay staring at the ceiling. I was supposed to be reading a book. Stewart was playing a Gameboy, but the beeps were intermittent.

I let the paperback fall across my chest. “Hey, Stewart?”

“Mm?”

“Have you noticed yourself forgetting things?”

“Like my car keys?”

Smart ass. “No. Like things you used to know. Street names. Your first girlfriend’s favorite color. That sort of stuff.”

“I wonder how you’d know if you forgot something,” he said, hitting pause on his game. “I mean, really forgot it. Do you ever think about Alzheimer’s? Or a brain injury? You’d never know what you were missing, would you?”

“No,” I said, picking up my book. I hadn’t been paying enough attention to the last three pages and had to flip back until I found something I remembered reading. “Or yes, maybe. I don’t know. I mean, if you were losing time, like not making new memories, probably not. But if you were forgetting things like your husband’s or wife’s name? Then probably. And you might try to cover it up.”

He looked at me suspiciously.

“Hey,” I said. “I told you I didn’t remember where I’d heard the name.”

He stared. I stared back. He glanced down at the Gameboy with a rude noise.

“Hey,” I said, to make him throw a pillow, “what was your name again?”

Nobody sleeps in Las Vegas, and so neither do I. But if I did, I have to admit, ghosts would have a pretty good means of waking you up. Nothing like a hovering cold spot on the back of your neck to get you out of bed in a hurry.

I managed not to shriek, which was good, because Stewart was sort of curled up on my chest watching a Burt Reynolds movie—I know, but far be it from me to complain about my boyfriend’s taste—and I might have shocked him into apoplexy. Instead, I sucked in a breath and disentangled myself—over his protests—before sliding out of bed to face my molester.

The ghost looked awfully familiar, as if I had seen him somewhere before. But he was just one of the little ghosts of the dam, harmless and inoffensive. By the rocking and beckoning, he wanted something from me.

“Lassie wants something,” I said to Stewart, because the ghost’s demeanor reminded me of a worried dog.

“Shh,” Stewart said. “This is the good bit.”

“But the ghost,” I repeated, “wants something.”

“Oh, and I’m supposed to figure out what?” But he hit the mute button, sat up, and drawled, “Hello, sailor.”

I winced mostly out of habit. He wasn’t actually camping it up all that much.

“I feel like I know him,” I said, while the ghost stared at me with hemorrhage-spotted eyes.

“Jeff Soble.” Stewart stood. Of course he’d know the guy’s name. “Died on the dam. People die all the time, you know. They get unlucky. Something random and stupid goes wrong.”

“I know,” I said. We both knew. You don’t get to be a genius until you’re buried and sung over. Stewart and me, we died young.

Looking at Stewart, I realized I didn’t remember how I’d died. I opened my mouth to ask, scratching idly under my eye patch, and realized something else. That space—that hollow place of just not knowing—felt like a cold shadow had slid off my soul. Whatever had happened, it hadn’t been pretty or pleasant, and I breathed easier in its absence.

The ghost beckoned again. I caught the motion in my peripheral vision; I was still looking at Stewart. “What do we do?”

“Follow him,” Stewart said.

So we did, Stewart grabbing his keys on the way out the door.

Stewart’s mode of transportation is inevitably some terrifying old beater replete with rust spots—hard to come by here in the desert—and hard-light peeling. The Nevada sun can fade even automobile paint to creamy yellow in a decade or two. This old Corolla had been red once, about the color of tomato soup. You could still see the color around the frame when you opened the doors. The amazing thing was that it was in perfect working order, which was the other inevitability about Stewart’s old cars. He loved to tinker with them, and if you ignored small inconveniences like the lack of modern safety features, they ran like dreams. He usually wound up reselling them for 50 percent of book value to random people who needed them more than he did, and then finding another old junker to fix up the next week.

I like Stewart a lot. I mean, besides the obvious.

Anyway, I piled into the passenger seat—the desert night hadn’t actually turned chill, but by comparison with the day, the mid-eighties felt on the cool side—and turned the radio off before he got the key into the ignition. He shot me a dirty look, but trust me, Stewart’s taste in music isn’t any better than his taste in movies.

Or men.

The car started right up, though he had to thump the dash to make the headlights glow. We had been staying at the Suncoast; it’s a locals place, low-key and off the Strip. So we just headed back down the slope where the western side of the city rises toward the mountains. It’s all indistinguishable, interchangeable new construction up there, and every year the cougars come back to their winter range to find houses have sprung up where there was nothing but cactus before, and there’s nothing for them to eat but bug-eyed rat dogs.

Unfortunately for the cougars, people get upset when they behave in this perfectly understandable fashion, even though the houses reach all the way up to the canyons now.

The ghost surfed in our headlights, almost washed away by their glow and the light rising like steam from the valley. We didn’t have to descend far to lose the view; once we were on the Summerlin Parkway the city dropped out of sight, vanishing because we were now a part of it. Even this late, there was still a steady stream of cars once we reached the 95. The highways don’t really grow quiet until after three.

Decatur still had some traffic, too, but it wasn’t anything like rush hour. Our gridlock isn’t bad by West Coast standards, but people keep moving in and it keeps on getting worse. It doesn’t help that there’s a shortage of streets that go all the way through, either north-south or east-west. A lot of them end mysteriously in a desert lot or the wall of a housing development, only to pick up again as if nothing had intervened, like a relationship on the other side of a secret affair.

By the time we turned onto Carey, I had a prickly feeling, and the traffic had thinned to nothing. I could still see the cars if I leaned over and glanced in the rearview mirror; they flowed north and south on Decatur in a soft intermittent stream, red and white like signal fires. I longed to be among them.

But Stewart was driving, and the ghost was leading us into darkness. I settled back and crossed my arms over my seatbelt, wondering why I felt the urge to strike out, to escape.

“Oh, god,” I said. “Pull over. Pull over.”

When Stewart pulled off onto the crunching hardpan shoulder, I bailed out of the little car and crouched in the shadow of the door, vomiting. The ghost hovered, as if my illness concerned it. Or maybe I was slowing it down. It didn’t matter. We were here. The ghost led us down a gravel drive past a ranch sign and a mailbox adorned with the name Bukvajova in reflective letters. “I feel like I should know that name,” I said, and Stewart looked at me funny.

He stopped the car well back from the house and touched the headlights off. We opened the doors in unison, like thugs in a Tarantino movie—you ever stop to think how much Hollywood has changed the way we perceive and pattern reality?—and slid out into the warm, windy dark.

The breeze had risen. I could hear howling and chiming from the bottom of the drive. “I bet the neighbors love that,” Stewart said, locking his door.

“It’s a bottle tree,” I said.

“How do you know that?”

I checked to make sure my own door had latched. “It’s been here for years.”

“And you don’t remember where you’ve heard the name Bukvajova before?”

“Should I?”

“Oh, Jack-Jackie,” he said. “Something is definitely up.”

I should probably have understood what he was driving at, but I just wound up shaking my head. It was a funny sensation, like when you know the answer to a question, or the name of a thing you’re pointing at, and just can’t pull it forward into the conscious part of your brain.

“So who lives here?”

“A—” I started to say, and realized I didn’t know the answer to the question. “I don’t know.”

“Of course you know,” Stewart said. “What were you just about to say?”

“A hedge-witch.” The bottle tree howled torment in the meandering wind. “She’s a hedge-witch. She drinks ghosts. I was just here today.”

“Vegas forgets things,” Stewart said. “You had better not be picking up that particular power. Because I’m not going to visit you in the home.”

The words were hard, the voice fragile and tight-strung. I reached out and squeezed Stewart’s hand. You spend a hundred years with somebody, you get to know their defense mechanisms. “We’ll figure it out.”

“You’re not going to argue with me?”

I shrugged. We were close enough to the house now that the light from the kitchen window washed his face. “What would arguing get me? Something is obviously weird around here, and we have to figure it out.”

“Right,” he said. “So the hedge-witch Bukvajova lives here, and you don’t remember why you know that or why you know about her bottle tree. And the ghost of Jeff Soble is leading you.”

“Leading us.”

“Leading you,” Stewart said. “Whose ear was it blowing in?”

Touché. I let him lead me down the gravel drive to the covered patio and the door. “Are we just going to knock?”

“Are you afraid of a little hedge-witch?”

“Yes. Why are we here, Stewart?”

“Because something is happening to you. And I want to find out what it is. And make it stop. And if it doesn’t have something to do with a Bukvajova, I’ll eat the hat of your choice.”

“Any hat at all?”

“Jackie,” he said, and squeezed my arm. “Knock on the door.”

But I didn’t have to. We must have made enough noise to wake the dead, because first the interior door opened on a cascade of light, and then the security door squeaked wide. Steel doesn’t rust in the desert, really. Not for a long time. But it was pretty obvious that the hinges were full of grit and hadn’t been oiled in thirty years. I wondered if she kept meaning to get around to it and just forgot.

The spill of air-conditioning past my hands and thighs could have pushed me back a step, or maybe drawn me forward.

“I’m Jackie,” I said. “This is Stewart.”

“Of course you are, Jackie dear,” she said. She held the door for us. “Come inside.”

I hesitated, but Stewart stepped up, and I certainly wasn’t letting him dance into the spider’s web unsupervised. She shut both doors but didn’t latch them, and I wondered if she worried about home invasions this far back from the street. I set the dead bolt behind us. No use tempting fate, and I wasn’t worried about being locked in when the lock didn’t require a key.

She sat us down and made us tea, boiling water in a proper brown pot. I watched her pour it into three chipped mugs, which she brought to the table, touching and set down together. Stewart picked out the brown one. I let the hedge-witch taste hers first, and then Stewart—he’s very hard to kill—before I touched mine.

There was a tannin ring around the cup halfway down. I drank anyway, looking around the kitchen. It was a long, narrow room with a table set broadside and a clock centered on the wall. The hands were stopped. A paler ring marked the brown-and-gold wallpaper where it had been pushed askew.

“Were you married?” I asked her.

She shook her head. Her hair hung lank, the sour smell stirring around her when she moved. “I don’t know. I don’t recall.”

“I was married,” I said, and set my tea aside. “But I don’t remember her name.” Stewart gave me one of his unforthcoming looks. “Anyway, she’s dead now.”

“Lots of people are dead,” said Ms. Bukvajova. “They live in memory.”

I looked at the row of corked colorful bottles stacked on the granite pastry board and at the three or four empty ones racked up in the dish drain. Stewart raised his eyebrows.

“Sure.” I poked my spoon against the side of the sugar bowl. The bottle tree howled loud enough to be heard through closed windows, over the hum of the swamp cooler. “As long as somebody remembers. Is that what you’re doing? Remembering them?”

A tremendous clash rang from the bottle tree, like a string of glass bells violently shaken. I winced; Stewart started; Bukvajova perked up and peered out the kitchen windows. “Caught one?” Stewart asked. “What do you use them for?”

“Memories,” she said. “He can’t get them all if you keep topping it off. If you fill it up fast enough.”

“He?”

She poured herself more tea, tilting the Brown Betty teapot with the skill of a practiced hand. “He eats memories.”

Stewart leaned forward over the table and took her scaly hands. “They get … diluted, Mrs. Bukvajova?”

“You can only pour the water over the same leaves so many times and get…” She made a helpless gesture, and tapped the pot.

“Get tea?”

“Or whatever. Did you boys want something to eat? Jackie, what’s your friend’s name?”

“No, thank you,” I said. I couldn’t imagine being hungry. “Mrs. Bukvajova”—following Stewart’s lead—“why did you leave the circus?”

“There were ponies,” she said. “And a cheetah named Ralph. He was friendly, and you could play with him.” She looked down into her tea, then up at Stewart, as if he had spoken. “I’m sorry, dear, what was I saying?”

“Why you left the circus,” he said.

She shook her head—“But I was never in the circus”—and frowned, painfully. “Was I?”

Another reason I like circus folk is that they have long memories. The sorts of memories we all used to have, when we lived in villages. Which is to say, based more on an oral-history sort of consensus version of events than on what really happened, blow by blow.

It’s the folk process. When something gets passed down hand to hand, identifying details are shaved off, idiosyncrasies smoothed away, personality blurred, until what remains is a refined core of agreement. Memories get conflated, simplified.

It doesn’t start off being the truth.

But because of the way the world works, it becomes the truth before too long. Compromises become history, become something everybody knows. Bloody old ballads are the handed-down tabloid TV of the thirteenth century. It may not be what really happened. But by the end it’s what happened, after all.

As we got back into the car, the sun was starting to creep up behind Frenchman Mountain. “We need to go see the Flying Bukvajovas.”

Stewart knuckled his eyes. When he pulled his hands down, the whites were bloodshot. “Tell me it’s not an evil ringmaster.”

“Okay,” I said. “It’s not an evil ringmaster.”

“You want to ask them about their lost sheep?”

I shrugged. “I want to find out how the sheep got lost.”

“Well, I don’t want you getting lost as well.” He patted my hand. The aged Toyota grumbled to life. “I don’t suppose you know if this has just started happening?”

“No,” I said.

I didn’t remember.

Getting in to see Bartoloměj Bukvajova was easier than it should have been. The patriarch of the family was in his late fifties, hair still black as a freshly inked brush, wide shoulders rippling under his T-shirt with every gesture. He was the catcher, and I wondered how it affected the family dynamic that they really did know he wouldn’t let them fall.

There was a lot of bitterness in that thought when I thought it, and I did not know why. Whoever my father was, he’d surely been dead for most of a century by now.

I looked at Stewart and wondered if I should ask him my old man’s name, or if it would just freak him out unnecessarily. But he was looking at Bartoloměj, who had stood up from behind a folding card table in his RV to extend a hand.

“You’re the One-Eyed Jack,” he said. “And this must be the Suicide King.”

I shook, and so did Stewart. “You’ve heard of us?”

“Show folk bend our luck a lot,” he said. “It pays to know who the intermediaries are. Have you come for a tithe?”

I reached into my satchel and found a handful of thick poker chips. The Silver Slipper ones were just collectors’ items now, but the ones from the Stratosphere had intrinsic value. I laid three thousand dollars in stamped, high-impact plastic on the card table and said, “Actually, we’ve come for information. This is Stewart. Call me Jackie. Everybody else does, and I want us to be friends.”

He eyed the chips suspiciously, did not touch them, and sat back down. “Information is not something I’m generally comfortable giving out,” he said. “Especially when it commands that sort of price. Too many people think they can buy more than anybody ought to be able to buy for a couple thousand dollars.”

“Mmm,” Stewart said. “You have kids, Bartoloměj? Grandkids? They have health insurance? Take the money. It’s nothing to us. It’s useful to you.”

He eyed the stack. “Tell me what you want to know.”

I looked at Stewart. Stewart looked at me. I shrugged and did the talking. “Did you have an uncle or an older brother, maybe, who jumped ship here in Vegas some time ago and married a local girl?”

Bartoloměj did not look away from my face. But his left hand crept out, encompassed the chips, and swept them to his side of the table.

“That,” he said, “I don’t mind talking about. But you have the story backward.”

“We do?” Stewart, doing his best wide-eyed innocent. It’s amazing how people will rush to fill that perceived void.

“Absolutely,” Bartoloměj said. “You are thinking of my aunt, Branislava. My father’s oldest sister. I never knew her; she left before I was born. She was a flyer, very beautiful, I’m told.”

“I don’t think it can be,” I said. “The woman I’m thinking of is about ten years older than you, I’d guess. But not well. She looks her age.”

“Are you sure?” He raised an eyebrow. “Branka would be in her eighties. Maybe older. Of course, we do tend to live a long time in my family…”

He shrugged.

I put another thousand in chips on the table, and he raised an eyebrow. “I told you I would help.”

“I’m helping, too,” I said. When he grinned he showed a gold tooth, which made me realize he hadn’t smiled before. “What would you say if I told you your Aunt Branka was still alive and needed your help?”

“This kind of help?” He tapped the chips.

I shrugged, copying his gesture.

“I’d say we look after our own.” He sucked on his teeth and pulled his hand back. “And I’d say she left us, and it was up to her to come back and ask if she wants that changed.”

“I don’t think she can ask,” I said, and pulled out the chair across from him without actually ever being invited. “Tell me all about it, why don’t you?”

Bartoloměj gave me that look again, and I pushed the chips toward him with a fingertip. “Good faith gesture.”

He swept them to him much less tentatively. “We came through when the dam was going up, according to my father. She met a man and she married out,” he said. “I don’t know what else to tell you. We never heard from her after.”

Stewart, standing behind me, cleared his throat. “Who did she marry?”

“Some guy,” Bartoloměj answered. “I can call my dad at the home and check. He’s still pretty sharp for a guy in his eighties. He’ll remember.”

“That’d be great,” I said. “Bartoloměj, can you answer me one more question, maybe?”

“I can but try.”

“If she married out,” I asked, “why did she keep her own name?”

“She did?”

I nodded.

He let his head linger in that tilted pose for a moment before he shook his head. “I can’t say, Jackie. It wasn’t done, in those days.”

“She’s divorced,” Stewart said in the car, quite abruptly. He always was the smart one, blond or not.

“We can pull the marriage license,” I said.

Charleston Boulevard runs west all the way to Red Rock and the mountains from which it takes its name. Stewart and I go up there when we need to think, and we had planned to take our cell phones and wait for Bartoloměj Bukvajova to call. But Stewart pulled a U-turn right in the middle of Charleston, while I bent my luck hard to make sure that if there were any cops in the neighborhood, they were distracted by a flock of passing teenagers. It seemed like the least I could do.

Twenty minutes later, we had parked at a downtown casino and were crossing the street to the courthouse. Pulling the marriage license was easier than you’d expect; we’re not really big on the expectation of privacy around here, and anyway it was a matter of public record. The hardest part was figuring out the date, but it was slow—just after lunch—and we got a helpful clerk, and I made sure she got lucky.

Sure, it’s abuse of power. What’s the point in power if you can’t abuse it? Anyway, it was in a good cause. And it’s how I make my living.

You know, it’s more honest than what a lot of guys do.

She brought the photocopy to the window of a waiting room where we sat side by side in scoop-shaped plastic chairs, me slumped and Stewart kicked forward like a vulture on a bender. Stewart was on his feet first, and so he paid the fee and collected the copy. When he glanced at it, the color faded from his cheeks. He looked up at the clerk, who was regarding him with raised eyebrows, obviously waiting for some response. She smiled when she got it: “Thank you,” Stewart said automatically. Then he caught my elbow and, without explanation, steered me toward the street.

When we passed outside the courthouse door, into the wall of heat, onto fresh-mown grass dotted with sleeping vagrants and fat palm trees, I planted my feet and jerked him to a stop, because he didn’t let go of my arm. He looked at me as if startled to realize I was still there and had opinions, and then shook his head. “What?”

“Still not a mind reader,” I answered, and held out my left hand—the one he wasn’t using as a tiller. And Stewart blushed right up under his hairline and handed me the still-warm photocopy.

“Sorry?”

“S’okay.” The paper shook in my hand; the day seemed very bright. “Elijah Powers? Eli Powers? Babylon Hotel and Casino? That Eli Powers?”

“Shh,” he said. He took the paper, folded it one-handed, and tucked it into his pocket. But he was still looking at me, and when I mouthed, “She married Eli Powers,” he nodded.

Well.

Shit.

Just then, my cell rang. It was Bartoloměj Bukvajova, calling to tell us that his dad said his sister married some guy who ran a gambling hall in Block 16—the old red-light zone—when the dam was going in over in Boulder City and Vegas was where the workers came to blow money and chase skirts on weekends. He thought it had been annulled shortly after, but he never spoke to her again.

Elijah Porter, his father thought. Some Biblical name like that.

Stewart took me to the Lucky 7’s buffet at the Plaza, plunked me down in a corner, and brought me a plate before he fetched his own. I ordered him a Sprite and a glass of the house red—you try to get ginger ale in Vegas; it’s worth your life—and coffee and an ice water for me. I waited to start eating the fried shrimp until he got back the second time.

“So,” he said, settling himself behind a plate of roast beef and cornbread, “how are we going to get at Eli Powers?”

“He’s ninety years old and he owns half of Las Vegas. Why the hell would we want to get at him?” There’s something about the way breaded fried shrimp crunch that’s deeply satisfying. The battered ones just aren’t as good.

“Please tell me you’re kidding.” His cheap knife squeaked on the cheap plate as he cut his meat.

I winced. “Kidding?”

“Shit,” he said. “Oh, shit. Branislava Bukvajova? No? Nothing?”

“Bukvajova,” I said. “I swear I know that name.”

“Of course,” he said. “Who can make a city forget like the guy who runs it? Jackie, I think I know what’s going on. I think I know what the problem is.”

“Good,” I said. “Can you explain it to me?”

“Drink your coffee and I’ll try.”

But I wasn’t finished with the food yet, so I ate that and drank the ice water, smushing army-green peas between the tines of my fork. They tasted more like porridge than like a vegetable.

“Powers wasn’t anybody yet when he married Bukvajova, was he?”

“Wait,” I said. “Who did Powers marry? He’s got a wife, doesn’t he? His third one. The brunette. Used to be an actress.”

“Not a very good one,” Stewart agreed. “That’s beside the point. She’s his fourth wife, according to this. He married Branka Bukvajova in 1935. It seems like it was annulled less than a year later, but she never went back to the circus. Like she was stuck here, or she didn’t remember that she could go home.”

“Everybody forgets stuff in Vegas,” I said, and didn’t understand why Stewart would find it so troubling. It was only true. “Vegas forgets stuff. Imploded, bulldozed, blown away.”

“Yeah,” Stewart said, and stole one of my shrimp. “Almost makes you think somebody’s stealing its memory, doesn’t it? Do you want some chocolate cake, Jackie?”

“Jackie?” I said, picking up the cooling coffee in its white institutional stoneware cup. “Then who are you?”

I didn’t really believe him when he said I was Jackie—isn’t that a girl’s name?—but it didn’t bother me.

It really did bother me that I didn’t know who he was, though. That seemed really rude. Especially when he was apparently buying me dinner. “Stewart,” he said, and the strain on his voice cracked it clean across. He rose to fetch me cake, which made me feel bad that I couldn’t remember how I’d met him. Surely I wasn’t drunk? Surely I hadn’t been that drunk?

“Am I drunk?” I asked, as he put the cake down before me and waved our busser over to refill my coffee mug.

“I wish,” he answered, and patted my arm. Following the line of his motion, I realized suddenly that there was an awful lot of ink on my arm. I put down my fork, a bite of cake still speared untasted on the tines, and poked my bicep with a finger.

“Huh.”

“Eat,” he said. “You need your strength. And then we’re going back to visit Ms. Bukvajova, and we’re not leaving until we figure out what’s going on.”

I swallowed a mouthful of cake. “Who’s Ms. Bukvajova?”

The afternoon was full of light when we walked out onto a promenade covered by an arch that seemed to be made of millions of small lights hung from a lattice. The day was like a kiln. I deduced we must be in the desert. “Stewart, where are we?”

His face very still, he said, “Fremont Street.”

“Fremont Street? Isn’t that in Tombstone? Where the Earps shot up the Clantons. Familiarly called the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, as misrepresented in a Star Trek episode.”

“All right,” Stewart said. “You’re still Jackie. And we have seriously got to get this fixed.”

I should probably have been scared, standing on a strange street corner in a strange town with a strange man, unable to remember my own name. Had I ever known my name? But Stewart was a soothing presence, for all his twisted lips and wrinkled forehead.

“I don’t think this would bother me so much if you weren’t a walking encyclopedia of forgotten Las Vegas.”

“We’re in Las Vegas? Oh. Then this will all get pulled down in a couple of years anyway, won’t it? I don’t know why they even bother naming things.”

His hand was hard on my shoulder as he pulled me along. “Come on. I’m not sure how to handle this, Jackie. As long as I’ve known you—”

“—As long as you’ve known me?”

“—Whatever happens in this place, whatever falls down or gets buried or goes forgotten, you always seem to remember that it’s here, or that it was here.” He led me through crowds deftly, and I let him. He seemed to know where he was going, and I had no idea. “All that dead history never dies, in you. And now…” He shrugged.

I put my hand over his fingers on my arm, because it seemed like the thing to do, and he smiled at me, very briefly. My heart jumped. Huh. Was he my boyfriend?

I thought that over. It seemed appealing.

“Do you remember me?” he asked.

“Maybe,” I said. “A little. Are we together?”

“Yes,” he said. “Well, only for the last hundred years. But what I was trying to say was, all that time, I’ve had this idea that you were, I dunno, the memory of Las Vegas. Where all its ghosts went. Where they wound up. And now, if you can’t remember anything…”

“Do you think I’m going senile?”

“Cities don’t go senile,” he said. We ducked between an arguing couple.

“You talk like I’m somehow linked to the city—”

“Jackie, you are the city. You’re its genius. Its spirit. One of them. I’m the other one.”

And you know, that sounded right. Completely bizarre, mind you, but right. “So if I’m the city’s memory,” I said, “and I can’t remember anything.…”

“Yeah,” he said. “You see why I’m a little worried now.”

“Well then,” I said—and there was no excuse for my tone, because I’m sure he would have seen it if he wasn’t too worried to think straight—“it’s obvious what’s going on. Either somebody is using the city to get to me, or me to get to the city.”

The first thing I noticed about the battered old block house on the neglected ranch estate was a glorious bottle tree in the side yard, moaning softly in the breeze. It caught the sunlight in all colors, cobalt and ruby and amber and emerald, commonplace and lovely.

I imagine most of us never really look at glass. But there it was, sun stained through it. I felt the whimpers of the ghosts trapped inside. Felt, yes. It wasn’t exactly hearing.

I stepped away from the still-open door of the parked car, and the blond man caught my arm. “Jackie,” he said. “Don’t go too close to that.”

“It’s pretty.”

“I know,” he said, and gentled me with a hand on my hair. “Come away. We need to talk to Ms. Bukvajova.”

“You know,” I said, “I swear I’ve heard that name.”

“I know.” His voice did something funny. “I’ve heard it too.”

He lead me under the porch roof, in out of the sun—we must be somewhere in the South for there to be bottle trees, and the sun sure felt like it—and thumped on the security door because the doorbell was busted. Or if it wasn’t busted, anyway, you couldn’t hear it chime from the outside, so he knocked to be sure.

A moment later, the inside door swung open a crack, and bright cloudy eyes peered through the crevice, half obscured by strings of yellowed hair. “Boys!” the old woman said. “Stewart! Jackie! Come in. Come in. Would you like an iced tea?”

“Yes, please, Ms. Bukvajova,” the blond man said, and I gaped. But Miss Bukvajova was suddenly young, all auburn hair and sparkle and aerialist muscles, power and grace.…

The person overwhelmed by that memory was not me.

But for a moment I saw her as she had been, a short, hourglass-shaped, broad-shouldered woman with a ballerina waddle, and someone else’s grief filled up my throat. She lead us through a cluttered red-flannel living room, fussy and terrible, every surface cluttered with dusty photographs, and I could not hold her steady in my sight.

“Drink.”

My elbows propped rudely on her kitchen table, I sat in a creaking ladder-back chair with my hands cupped loosely around a cold empty glass.

“Drink,” she said, and poured more tea.

Though it tasted of cement dust and brackish water, I drank. I saw her again, and this time she swung with perfect grace on a flying trapeze, as if she were dancing there. She somersaulted through the air, and a strong man caught her. I stung my throat shouting, stung my palms clapping, felt fingers close on my wrists and pull my hands apart. Stewart—and my blood was dripping over his nails. “You idiot,” he said. “You broke the glass.”

“Stewart?”

He met my eyes, and his mouth went thin. “Jackie?”

“Sort of,” I said. I felt thin as a watercolor of myself, but I was there. He looked down quickly. Holding my hand still, he began to pick the slivers of broken glass out of the palm, leaving the ice melting on the table. “Miss Bukvajova?”

“You remember me?” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “We do.” Because it wasn’t just me remembering her. “That was Jeff Soble,” I said, and winced as Stewart picked another shard of glass from my palm. I turned away, so I wouldn’t have to watch him, and watched the sun glint off the bottle tree on the other side of the slatted blinds. “In the tea.”

“It works,” she said, and made a moue like a much-younger woman. “He was a friend of mine. He worked on the dam.”

“But you married Powers.”

She rose from the table, fetched another blocky Anchor Hocking glass from the cabinet, and plunked it to one side of the puddle of ice and broken glass. She added ice with her fingers and poured the tea from a scarred yellow Rubbermaid pitcher with a push-button top. She said, “It’s like getting dehydrated. You need more to catch up than you think you will. Keep drinking. I’ll get a towel.”

Keep drinking the memory of her friend. The one who brought me here to save her.

“You married Powers,” I said again, and drank the tea with my left hand, which was only cut a little. The cold glass stung the scrapes on my palm. “Not Jeff.”

I couldn’t call him Soble when I was drinking his memory.

“Wouldn’t you?” She poured herself a glass too, and drank. “Not that Eli was anything special then. He owned a gambling hall downtown, on Fremont Street. And you all know where that led.”

“Empire,” Stewart said, laying another piece of bloody glass in his pile. “I think that’s all of it, Jackie.”

“So the marriage didn’t work out?”

She pushed a greasy lock out of the way with a spotted hand and finished her tea. “Imploded like an outworn casino,” she said. “His other wives haven’t been so lucky.” She gestured around. “I got the marriage annulled—unmade—and he hasn’t been able to eat me up entire. The bottle tree keeps me going. Las Vegas is full of ghosts. Suicides, mostly. They taste all right.”

Stewart wrapped a paper towel around my palm to stanch the bleeding. The fluid in my glass tasted like cement and nitro, with too much sugar.

Stewart said, “So why is he coming after Jackie now?”

She shrugged. “Jackie came here? Jackie caught his attention? Jackie’s a better source of power than I ever was? I can feel my head filling back up again; I think he must be letting me alone.”

“You know the circus is in town?” It was mean of me to ask that way, just drop it in her lap and see what she did.

What she did was blanch. “They don’t want to hear from me.”

“If there was bad blood,” Stewart said softly, “I think they’ve forgotten it now. Why would all this start happening while your family is here?”

“Jeff,” she said. “I think he was waiting to bring you to me. Because I couldn’t have made much sense, unless you caught me just at the right time. You would have needed what my family could tell you. And Eli—Eli’s used so many women up.”

“Not just women,” Stewart said, with a sidelong glance at me.

I drank another swallow of sweet tea and Jeff Soble. “I wonder,” I said, “if he’s using me to get to something in particular. You wonder, if Vegas forgets stuff but I remember it—what happens to the parts of Vegas that I don’t remember?”

“Martin Powers,” Stewart said, without hesitation.

I remembered the newspaper. And nodded. “He’s trying to protect his grandson,” I said. “Martin Powers is up on racketeering charges. He’ll lose his gambling license. But Vegas is the city of second acts. We’ll forgive anything, as long as you give us half a chance to forget it.”

“And he can make the city forget,” Stewart said.

“Well,” I answered, sipping my tea, “he can make me forget. And Vegas forgets easier than I do.”

Tires crunched on the gravel drive.

Not just one set, but many.

Powers’s men surrounded the house and knocked on the door. Branka and I both gulped down the last mouthfuls of our tea before we filed out and went quietly. Every bit helps, right?

Well, maybe sometimes.

Most of the cars waiting for us were black sedans, but parked closest to the house was a limousine with Babylon Casino plates and a very polite driver who held the door wide. The implied arrogance never changes: No one can touch me here.

One of the gentlemen in black suits with an earpiece rode with us. I noticed that the bulletproof glass was up between the passenger compartment and the cab.

A long ride through rush hour followed. Vegas’s gridlock starts in the afternoon and persists into evening, and it seemed like we sat through most of it. A tractor trailer had jackknifed in the Spaghetti Bowl. I guess those effortless car rides only happen in movies.

The Tower of Babylon rose through a veil of transplanted jungle foliage and piped-in orchid scent to scrape a desert sky burned almost colorless by the Nevada sun. Visible the entire length of the Las Vegas Strip, it collapsed in fire and fury six times daily, six days a week, wind conditions permitting.

For a premium, you could ride it down.

Gold-glass ziggurats flanked it on either side. Shaded pathways led from the summer-scorched sidewalk and the broiling asphalt of the Strip through glades and grottoes, beside a bubbling piped waterfall. There was a slidewalk, for those who found the hundred meters or so under misters and date palms too far to walk in the Las Vegas heat.

The chattering monkeys caged behind “invisible” fencing on either side of the path were New World varieties, though most of the tourists could be counted on not to notice that, and the mossy ruined temples they played amongst were more Southeast Asian than Mesopotamian in character, but—authenticity aside—the “Hanging Gardens of Babylon” were a landscape designer’s masterpiece. A bare few feet from the bustle of the Strip, the plants and animals—the palm trees also teemed with brightly colored birds—and the chuckling water and the architectural sound-damping introduced a sort of mystic hush. Even the tourists walked through with lowered voices.

We didn’t. We came around the back, in the smoked-glass limousine, through a concealed gate that opened to the flash of the telemetry device clipped to the sun visor. I don’t know if it chirped: The bulletproof glass was up.

The limousine rolled silently into a tunnel jeweled with lanterns, and the gate scrolled shut behind us. Branka made a noise like one of those monkeys in distress, and Stewart squeezed her arm. I wished he’d squeeze mine, too, but not enough to whimper for attention.

When the limo rolled to a halt, I could fool myself that what I felt was relief, but really it was a cold, shallow kind of fear that sloshed over me like river water. Our silent warden—he hadn’t acknowledged anyone’s presence since he sat—reached for the door. He rose and ushered us out. We stepped onto plush carpet and stood blinking in the VIP tunnel of the Babylon Hotel and Casino.

Ornate doors paneled with mock ivory relief swung wide. Branka squeezed my hand with her salamander-damp one and drew me forward. I shook my head. I was the One-Eyed Jack, genius of Las Vegas. I could see magic and talk to ghosts. The City of Suicides was mine to protect. I didn’t need to be afraid of …

I leaned over and spoke into Stewart’s ear. “Stewart?”

“Shh,” he said, and I dropped my voice as we walked forward, escorted by more men with earpieces and dark suits.

I said, “What am I afraid of?”

The look he gave me was sad and bottomless. “Do you remember why we’re here?”

I should. I just had. I knew it was on the tip of my tongue. “Powers,” I said. “He’s making me forget.”

We three moved forward in the middle of a ring of security, as they led us along the tunnel to an elevator. I felt like a rock star on the way to the gallows.

“What are we going to do about it?” Stewart asked.

I looked down at my hands and shook my head. “Not let him?”

“Good plan,” Stewart said, as the doors chimed. “Let’s see what we can do about managing that.”

In the tiny paneled elevator, Branka’s sour sweat overpowered the piped-in aroma of gardenias and orchids, some functionary’s idea of how Babylon smelled. Were there such things as scent designers? Our ride—whisper-silent, crowded, tense—terminated in the penthouse, where, still ringed by all those refugees from The Matrix, we were herded forward onto oriental carpets, myself in the middle and Branka and Stewart one to each side.

I thought I knew what to expect. Eli Powers was as old as Las Vegas, but—in his rare television appearances—getting around under his own power, though wizened and leaning heavily on two crutches. I thought I would find an old man relying on a mechanized chair in the comfort of his own home. Instead, a man in his forties came forward to meet us, hair just graying at the temples, light eyes bright behind bifocals. He extended his hand, focusing a little behind me, and I accepted the handshake.

“Martin Powers,” he lied.

“Jackie,” I answered. “This is Stewart. Branka you already know. Tell me your right name, Mr. Powers.”

He glanced from me to Stewart, and then to the half dozen hotel-security operatives standing behind us. Whatever the gesture he made, they understood it and withdrew to the edge of the thirty-foot living room. Out of earshot but not out of range.

They wouldn’t have done it if Powers wasn’t armed.

“I will do you the honor of not pretending I don’t understand you,” Eli Powers said through his grandson’s mouth. “You’re the Genii of Las Vegas.”

“And you used to be Eli Powers,” Stewart said, and stuck his hand out.

With apparent equanimity, Powers shook it, then let his own hand fall to his side. “For my own use, later on—what gave me away?”

“Logic,” Stewart answered. He stepped forward, not close enough to impinge on Powers’s personal space but close enough to demand his attention. Making himself the spokesperson, taking the focus off me. That meant that he expected me to figure out what to do about Powers.

Did I mention that Stewart is the smart one?

He folded his hands in the small of his back, tipped his head like a saucy girl, and continued, “You’re a mnemophage. You’ve kept yourself alive all these years by eating up the memories of anyone you could trick into giving consent—and the memories of the city itself. Wives, children—you have a legal claim on them, don’t you, Eli? It’s enough to get a grip on them with sorcery. And Las Vegas itself—how much of it do you own, in your own name or through proxies?”

“Enough,” Eli said, smiling tightly. He looked interested—wouldn’t any narcissist, confronted with someone enumerating his accomplishments?—but unconcerned. I hoped that was dangerous arrogance on his part and not justified confidence.

Stewart didn’t glance at me. He took a step to the left, further dividing Eli’s attention. But I couldn’t rush him. Nothing physical would work under these circumstances; it would only earn us each a bullet.

Stewart clicked his tongue. His left hand, as if without his attention, made a dismissive flip. He said, “So did you just eat up Martin totally and move into his head like a hermit crab switching shells?”

The turn of phrase conjured up a horrible image, a pincered brain heaving itself from skull to skull, slimed with cerebrospinal fluid. I flinched, hard, and had to bite my cheek to get my face under control again. I edged my head sideways to catch Branka’s eye, hoping for inspiration, but she had her hand pressed against her mouth, gaze fixed on Powers. Her lips moved, shaping words. I don’t remember.

Eli smiled. It was a good smile—honest, interested. I would have voted for him.

“Martin made a very great sacrifice on my behalf,” he said, making it sound for all the world as if his grandson had given him a kidney or something. Branka’s hand reached out, clutched on my wrist. I can’t remember anything.

I cleared my throat, which was pretty dry right then, and said, “Let them go, Eli.”

Stewart started, so caught up in his performance he had forgotten what he was stalling for. He and Powers both swiveled. I squared my shoulders and said, “What you want from me is the city, isn’t it? You want Vegas to forget why it’s angry. You want it to remember only what’s best about you.” I breathed. “You want the love back, don’t you, Eli?”

He stared for a moment and then his lips pressed thin and he nodded. “We only want the same thing,” he said. “What’s best for Vegas. I’m glad you see that, Jackie.”

“Let them go,” I said. “And I’ll let you have it all.”

“You have my word of honor,” he said. “But you give me what I want first.”

I had to pull my hand out of Branka’s, though she clutched at my fingers like a child. Despite the air-conditioning, I rubbed slick palms on my trouser legs before I came forward to meet Powers. “Jackie,” Stewart said, “don’t—”

“Stewart. I got this. Really.”

He didn’t want to back down. Branka rocked on her heels, moaning softly, but I couldn’t help. There was no way to give her back what she’d lost, no way to make it easier for her. In the real world, there are no reset buttons, no epiphantic healings.

If I were a decent human being instead of a city, I’d have noticed her pain and done something about it years ago. But that’s not the way I operate, and I’m not sure there’s anything anyone can do to make that change.

“What’s the deal?” Powers asked.

“I give you my memories of you,” I said. “And you let my friends go.”

“He won’t stop,” Branka insisted. I put the back of my hand against her upper arm.

“No tricks,” Powers said.

“No tricks,” I answered. “I have too much to lose.”

Odin got more for his eye than I did. But I got more than I deserved.

I lifted my eye patch up.

He didn’t recoil. I guess Eli Powers had seen worse things than a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He leaned forward, staring into my eye socket.

I saw him doubled, Martin’s face overlaid by the ghost-visage of Eli in my otherwise sight. He reached out and laid fingertips against the side of my face like Mr. Spock setting up for a mind meld. Branka pulled back, two wobbling steps, and I think Stewart would have grabbed Powers’s wrist if I hadn’t stopped him with an upraised hand.

“Take it,” I said, and waited to see what would follow.

There was no sensation, except where manicured fingernails scratched my cheek and the orbit of my eye. He squinted at me, and as he did so, I thought of Eli Powers, everything I knew about him, the names of his wives and children and casinos, the racketeering charges against Martin, the rumors of infidelity and Mafia involvement, the newspaper articles and photographs, the dog he had back in the sixties with the one lop ear.

The dog.

The dog with the white patch on his head.

Whose dog was that, anyway?

And then the churn and bubble, and I felt something else slip out of me. Jeff Soble, what was left of him, jumped between us like a bridging spark. When he hit, I saw Powers jerk, start for half a second before he recovered himself and gagged Soble down. The Babylon Casino. And then unrelated things. The Mirage tigers. The Zane Floyd shooting. Endless construction. Airplanes stacked twelve deep across a fight-night sky. A Sting concert with three-hundred-dollar tickets. What’s-her-name, the one who sang the theme from Titanic.

I fed him everything, everything I was, everything I knew. Everything about Las Vegas, city at the bottom a dead Ordovician sea. More than he could withstand. More than anything mortal could withstand, knowledge I had to die to contain. A kind of metaphysical judo, using his own strength against him, until I felt him try to pull away and fail, thrash like a gaffed fish.

Eli Powers was not used to fighting anything as old and deep and nasty as himself. But holding the deed to a dragon’s cave is not the same as owning the dragon. I clutched him and fed him my city until he choked on it. I made him Las Vegas. I made him me.

I fed him more and more—a kind of spiral, scraping, dizzying—and then when he could swallow no more, I reached down into him and made a fist and dragged it all back out again.

Stewart grabbed Powers by the hair and shoved him away.

“Stewart—” I moved to jump in front of him, to get my body between the men with the bullets and Stewart’s body. Suicide by gunman might be far enough from the intent of his gift to kill him outright. And I’m the one with the faultless luck. If one of us was going to be shot, I wanted it to be me.

He grabbed my shoulder and held me still. “Shh,” he said. “Look.”

I looked.

There was a man I didn’t recognize, pushing himself off the expensive carpeting with rug burns on his hands. Branka, arms wrapped over her cardigan, was still swaying side to side.

And a whole bunch of security guys, standing in a huddle, one gesticulating while the others listened. The quarterback glanced up, cut himself off, and at his gesture, the rest broke away. They approached sternly, but a little sideways, and I realized that they didn’t know where we had come from.

“I’m sorry, sir,” the one in front of me said, “but you can’t be here.”

Another man picked the strange guy up, stared at him with furrowed brow for a moment, and said, “Excuse me, may I see some identification, please?”

We caught a taxi in the horseshoe in front of Babylon. Security escorted us out but were nice enough not to toss us so we bounced. Branka sat in the front seat beside the driver, and Stewart let me rest my head on his shoulder while the palm trees lining the driveway scrolled past on both sides like a green-screen effect. We stopped at the light at the bottom of the driveway while a flock of tourists stampeded across, and Stewart said, “You forgot about him.”

“Stewart? Forgot about who?”

He shook his head. “Never mind. I think I’d rather you didn’t remember.” He bent down and kissed the top of my head.

I wondered if I was drunk. I didn’t like the way I felt. The taxicab was spinning.

Stewart, at least, was warm and solid, even if he was raving. “I wish you were making sense.”

“I know,” he said. “I was just wondering, what do you think happens to the stuff we forget? You and me. The bits of Las Vegas even we don’t remember.”

“I’ve been forgetting things lately,” I said.

“That’s over with.”

“Does it not exist anymore, if I’ve forgotten it? Or is it still there, just nobody notices?”

He shrugged. “I bet it’s still there.”

Some guy lurched up the sidewalk outside, looking roughed up. His suit had been expensive; his tie was silk. They were both ripped now. I wondered if he’d gotten mugged, or bounced by casino security.

Nobody but me seemed to notice him.

I turned away. Not my job. Not my job to notice him or rescue him. You cannot save everyone; you’ll go mad trying. And anyway, it’s not what cities do.

I said, “Why is it that we get so invested in our history, anyway? Why do we fight to preserve those old photographs and ancient keepsakes, just so our children can throw them away when they clear the house? We could just let go, blow wide. Be clean.”

“Jackie—”

I turned my face into Stewart’s shoulder and said, “I killed myself.”

He nodded. “I know.”

I closed my eyes. “It was nice not to remember it for a little while.”

He rearranged us to put an arm around my shoulders, and I leaned into the embrace. “Memory is all we are,” Stewart said softly, and reached up to stroke my hair.