A Trip to the Stars by Nicholas Christopher

Author:Nicholas Christopher [Christopher, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780307799883
Google: OTvXatkvQ28C
Amazon: B005OCYRO4
Publisher: The Dial Press
Published: 1999-10-12T07:00:00+00:00

13

The Stardust

In Las Vegas, “the crossroads of limbo,” my tutor Labusi used to call it, it sometimes felt as if everyone was lost, or in the process of losing something or someone, or of losing themselves in the end. Perhaps that was the real reason—as much pragmatic as esoteric—Samax had settled there and filled up his hotel with people looking for lost things. At that moment, crossing the parking lot of The Stardust Casino behind Dalia, I felt I was about to lose something with her—and it wasn’t going to be as pleasurable as losing my virginity. Suddenly she wheeled around, her eyes flashing in the moonlight, and raised her hand to slap me across the face. When she had tried to slap me in the casino not thirty minutes earlier, I had caught her wrist in midair, infuriating her even more. This time she stopped herself at the last instant, and curling her fingers into a fist, waved it at the sky.

“Don’t tell me what I can and cannot do,” she said spitting out the words as if they were hot on her tongue. “Not tonight. Not when I’ve found out that back home I’ve lost everything.”

“Dalia, I wasn’t telling you what to do.”

“Bullshit!” she shouted.

When we reached my car, she opened and slammed shut the passenger-side door, then, hands on hips, began pacing rapidly up and down and kicking at the loose gravel with her red pumps.

I slid behind the wheel and turned the key in the ignition. The car was a black 1959 Ford Galaxie convertible that Samax had given me on my eighteenth birthday—exactly a year ago, I thought, watching the luminous minute hand on the dashboard clock inch past midnight. Her red dress flaring in front of the headlights, Dalia circled the car a half dozen times, broke a heel, flung her shoes across the parking lot, and stopped abruptly to light a cigarette which she smoked with her back to me, red neon from the casino’s sign setting her mane of hair on fire. The top was down on the car and I gazed away from the moon, away from Dalia, toward the mountains, where the stars were brightest and the night was still.

On the Strip, between the human and mechanical traffic, things were anything but peaceful. Even at this hour—especially at this hour—the Seventh Day Adventists in their street-corner booths were bringing their message to the sinners. They warned that Las Vegas, like Nineveh in seventh-century B.C. Babylon—teeming with erotic dancers and courtesans, gamesters and conjurers—would soon be swallowed up by the desert sands. In addition to the city’s round-the-clock frenzy, the nearby (almost suburban) testing of atomic bombs only encouraged such speculation. Nevertheless, in my nine years there, Las Vegas had nearly doubled in both size and population.

The act in the lounge that Dalia and I had begun to watch would have fit in at one of Nineveh’s nocturnal bazaars. I was sorry to be torn away just as I began observing

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