The Secret History of Las Vegas

Praise for
The Virgin Flames

“Chris Abani is a force of nature. In the world of letters he is a luminous shattering talent, and
The Virgin of Flames
is his strangest and wildest trip yet. I don't think there's ever been a protagonist quite like Black, or an LA quite like this one.”

—Junot Díaz, author of
The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
and
This Is How You Lose Her

“Chris Abani reveals Los Angeles as we have never seen it before—magical and crumbling, a place of deserted rooftop oases and intersections where new identities are bought and sold. He has rewritten our American story and brought the world into our streets, our most private negotiations and confessions.”

—Walter Mosley, author of the Easy Rawlins mystery series

“You are bound to find yourself moved and entertained by an iridescent novel from a writer who has come through Lagos and London to take his place as one of our newest, and most gifted, native sons.”

—
The Chicago Tribune

“Ambitious and original . . . Abani's Los Angeles is at turns desolate and luminous . . . a place that is horrifying and tender and absurd in equal measure.”

—
The New York Times

“What is most arresting . . . isn't the grotesqueness Abani observes . . . but the pathos he unfailingly finds alongside it like a jewel in the muck.”

—
The Boston Globe

“With its complex characters and exquisitely imagined cityscapes,
The Virgin of Flames
is the work of a top-notch writer.”

—
Time Out New York

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE SECRET HISTORY OF LAS VEGAS

Chris Abani is the acclaimed author of
GraceLand
and
The Virgin of Flames
. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Hemingway/PEN Prize, the PEN Beyond the Margins Award, the Hurston Wright Award, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship, among many honors. Born in Nigeria, he is currently Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University. He lives in Chicago.

ALSO BY CHRIS ABANI

PROSE

Masters of the Board

Graceland

Becoming Abigail

The Virgin of Flames

Song for Night

POETRY

Kalakuta Republic

Daphne's Lot

Dog Woman

Hands Washing Water

There Are No Names for Red

Sanctificum

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) LLC

375 Hudson Street

New York, New York 10014

USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China

penguin.com

A Penguin Random House Company

First published in Penguin Books 2014

Copyright © 2014 by Chris Abani

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices,

promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized

edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning,

or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers

and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
DF

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Abani, Chris.

The secret history of Las Vegas : a novel / Chris Abani.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-14-312495-5

eBook ISBN 978-0-698-14018-9

1. Las Vegas (Nev.)—History—Fiction. 2. Secrets—Fiction. 1. Title.

PR9387.9.A23S43 2014

823'.914—dc23

2013033496

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product

of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,

living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental

For

My siblings who allow me to be a crazed animal: I love you all.

and

Sarah

Who taught me grace.

There is no refuge from memory and remorse in this world. The spirits of our foolish deeds haunt us, with or without repentance.

—GILBERT PARKER

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

—JAMES JOYCE

The popular myth is that writers create books in isolation, locked in a garret; that all novels are the product of singular work. While it may be true that the vision of a novel is singular, the best writers know that without a community of helpers, this vision will remain at best locked up in their heads. This is not an exhaustive list of those I need to thank for helping this book become a reality:

Sarah Valentine for reading multiple drafts and for generously giving me the title for this book. For reading and feedback, also: Cristina Garcia, Peter Orner, Kathleen Blackburn, Matthew Shenoda, Kwame Dawes, Colin Channer, David Mura, Traise Yamamoto, Vorris Nunley, Pumla Gqola (who cannot be blamed for the South African inaccuracies—those are all mine), Kathryn Court (best editor in the world and my champion), Benjamin George, Ellen Levine (my incredible agent), Lucy Stille (whose feedback on my screenplays helped me formulate this novel), Junot Díaz, Dave Eggers, Scott Cohen, and Brad Kessler.

Since there is no real separation between my art and my living, I must thank the following people:

Adrian Awopitan Ifabiyi Castro, who continues to help me shape the craft with which I sail into mystery: priceless.

Kolawole Oshitola, whose very life is the miracle that infuses so many, giving shape and purpose.

Percival Everett, David St. John, Viet Nguyen, Daniel Tiffany, T.C. Boyle, Carol “Trukina” Muske Dukes, Johnny Temple, David Rose, John Moser, and Eloise Klein Healy—just because.

And thank you to Tezira Nabongo for the gift of possibilities.

BRISTLECONE

 

T
his 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.