36: Nevada

“Get your claws off me, you fruit-faced iguanodont! Not in a million years!” You try to upend the table but it’s too heavy. Plan B: grab the rake and send the chips skittering like beetles around the wheel. “And that’s Dr. RD to you!”

The croupier takes your card. “Typographer, Lexicographer, Lotus-Eater, Astrologer, Numerologist, Freelance Writer,” she reads. “Well, aren’t you just a jerk-of-all-trades.”


Out at Red Rock Canyon, gray burros watch you through oversized black eyes. The prostitute mutters something from the trunk. She was more comfortable back there, she said, with the drugs.

You take a swig of Jack. Machineguns fire across the ridge. The road signs are shot to hell. You know how the people of Nevada feel. Las Vegas is Area 52. The aliens are among us.


Nearing Black Rock City, you see it. A figure with arms outstretched, burning up like Touchdown Jesus, red on black.

First the satellite images and now this: A crescent moon inside a pentagon. A beastly number somebody miscounted. A warning sign everybody missed.

One of the guards looks uncomfortably familiar. Black bug-eye shades block half of her red duck-billed face. She smiles, says: “What are the odds?”


You drive like you’re trying to set the land speed record, salt and dirt and dust kicking up to the big black empty TV-screen sky, gone.