The Secret History of Las Vegas

BRISTLECONE

This hands cannot do.

Even interlaced across a pregnant woman’s stomach, even if the will that webs the fingers desires nothing more than to protect the unborn in her — not even this is sufficient to form a barrier against the flash of light and a cloud that grows not into a mushroom, but rather into a thick tree with a dense plume; a tree to shame Odin’s, a tree to make Adam cover the inadequacies of his, a tree even Shiva would stand back from in awe.

And bright.

A constellation? No, a rogue star, a renegade sun, the very face of awe, and if there are true names for divinity, then that too.

As Selah watched the cloud mushroom up, she wondered if the babies in her womb were lit by the incandescence before her. Had they beheld all this glory? And what would it shape in them when they were born? A penetrating insight into mystery? A desire for a life untinged by the fear of death? Or eyes that see only constellations? Only truth?

But the warnings led in other directions.

The oracles spoke mostly of death. Of darkness. Of eclipse.

But could she mold even this cloud into a defiant sign? A promise of good things?

Perhaps the tone seems heavy, Old Testament — weighted, but until you have seen this power bloom in a desert, you can never fully understand the truths that made Elijah weep, or Elisha wail in despair for his people; you cannot know the terrible loneliness of Moses, the cry in Gethsemane. But sometimes simpler words can do the same work, and watching the explosion of a nuclear bomb in the Nevada desert from a spot less than two miles from its sky-obliterating epicenter, Selah said:

Shit, I’m fucked!

And she was.

Her babies were born fused, like the glass formed by the chattering of sand jinn.

We cannot operate here, the doctor said as he placed the bundle of limbs in her arms. But we could ask the doctors on the army base. They have the best minds and equipment.

The idea of it, an unspeakable insult, that those who did this should be begged to undo it, curdled the milk in her.

No, she said. No. They were born this way for a reason.

And she named one Water, for the living waters from the throne, and the other one Fire, because his very existence was the curse she would use to end them.

The boys were still young, barely seven, when the sickness began.

Leukemia.

The word itself conjured up only a deep royal blue in her mind; beautiful like a Nile lotus, which she couldn’t know because she had never seen one. But blue; like the angle of light on Lake Mead at a certain time and place on a certain summer day.

Terminal.

The word rattled like the gates of a crypt, all rust and the smell of decay, but also conjuring adventure. A train pulling into a station on an evening in Casablanca, or roaring through a dark desert, its lit carriages pulling through the night like a spell, an affirmation that it can all mean something.

Then her job at the diner, precarious as it was with the slow onset of decrepitude, which announced that their town, Gabriel, named for that indomitable angel of light, was waning into a ghost as the government moved the freeway, came to an abrupt end. Only the most adventurous tourists came through anymore. Even the steady flow of Indians from the reservation dried up like a desert creek in high summer when a Denny’s made its way resolutely, if reluctantly, onto the outskirts of the res.

The small strip of land her people had tried to grow artichokes and dates on when they moved north — because, as her father said, you came along, my love, my Selah — had failed to yield anything but more dirt. The truth was that her father was already caught in a pause, in a moment of rest, before the courage to move had come upon him. That was why he named her Selah, the Hebrew word that marks a pause in a psalm, a moment to consider the music. And so they moved north and had lived here in Gabriel since. That is, until her father was shot by a sheriff too excited to see that the gun the black man was holding was actually just a pipe he was packing with tobacco before sucking on it.

Selah had just turned four when it happened and never fully understood his death.

Her mother did her best until she died shortly after.

Heart attack was the official reason, but Selah knew it was really heartbreak.

At eighteen she got pregnant from a boy on the nearby army base who promised to marry her but who shipped off soon after her belly began to show. She never heard from him again.

Many people have come back from worse, so Selah, like everyone in the dusty town of Gabriel, soldiered on, but her leukemia, and the closing of the diner sealed everything into a premature death.

Now there was nothing left for Selah but the glass case. The display that old Dan the mechanic had built her from the scraps he could spare. It was a curious thing, this glass box more terrarium than fish tank, four feet tall and four feet wide. Glass bolted together as though by Dr. Frankenstein, with a sluggish fan, powered by a car battery, cut into the back panel, struggling to move the hot Nevada air.

Selah sat with that box every day, dressed like a carnival gypsy, under a large 7 Up beach umbrella, the terrarium by the table, a deck of tarot cards before her, offering readings for a dollar and for three dollars, the chance to look under the velvet cloth draped over the terrarium at the monster inside.

More often than not, people chose the terrarium, and she would slowly peel back the green velvet drape to reveal the conjoined seven-year-old twins, sitting or sometimes standing in the tank, one reading, the other holding court loudly until, annoyed by a particularly careless onlooker, he would crawl under his caul and hide.

That was how the years went by, she getting sicker, the twins getting bigger until Water couldn’t stand in the tank anymore but sat cross-legged at the bottom, still reading, always reading. Fire held rapid-fire philosophical debates with customers while Water read, pausing only occasionally, when prodded to engage, to look up and speak in simple facts like: cats cannot taste sweet things, or, cold water weighs more than hot.

Their fame, if one can call this fame, spread, and soon tourists were stopping over just to see them. It wasn’t long before a traveling circus came by, more sideshow than circus, truth be told. The owner, a Mr. Jacobs, paid a hundred dollars to see the twins.

It’s more than you need to pay, Selah said.

As you can see, we are alike, Mr. Jacobs said. You and I, parents to what some might call freaks but which I tend to think of as marvels of the Lord’s creativity. And in my sideshow, all the marvels are natural, he boasted. Why, that’s why we travel under that name, Jacob and the Lord’s Marvels, he explained, himself a man with what looked like lobster claws where his hands should be. And we are all like a family, he added.

We are, the midget with him said. We are a family.

Selah thought the midget had the saddest eyes she had ever seen.

Mr. Jacobs offered Selah a very good deal. To take the boys and look after them, teach them how to have a life in his show. In exchange he would pay for her to live in a hospice until she passed in her sleep. She demurred and coughed blood into a handkerchief, a clump of her hair falling out disgracefully as she did.

If you won’t have the money, what will you have?

Selah glanced at the blood in her handkerchief. The boys were twelve and Water was smarter than she would ever be.

Swear on this blood to treat them like your own, she said.

I sure will, Mr. Jacobs said, offering a lobster claw. And here is my own daughter so you may see that I am true.

And a tall girl, slender as a wisp of smoke, walked forward.

How old are you, Selah asked.

Twelve, the girl said.

And your name?

Fred.

That seemed to cement it for her. Although to confirm, Selah drew a card and laid it faceup.

The Hanged Man.

She sighed, a sound of infinite sadness.

Come by my house tomorrow, she said. It’s five miles from town, under the blue-barked bristlecone.

Mr. Jacobs nodded.

That night, through bouts of hacking coughs and much blood spat into handkerchiefs, Selah sang the boys to sleep with their favorite lullaby.

Then, kissing them on the cheek, she let herself out just before dawn, when the mist was still upon the ground and dragging a length of rope behind her, walked up the slight rise behind the house to the bristlecone tree.