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“With its human face, yes, Carpaccio’s ambivalent smile, the Porta della Carta, so forth, all artists’ whim, I fear…Unless you mean what the Being saw when it looked at me?”

“How would you know what it saw when it-”

“What was given me to understand. To become as they’d say out here aptotic, uninflected, unable, sometimes, to tell subject from object. While remaining myself, I was also the winged Lion – I felt the extra weight at my shoulder blades, the muscular obligations unforeseen.”

In the desert it’s over a hundred degrees even after sunset. It’s hot enough that the hoary old quip, “At least it’s a dry heat,” completely breaks down into dry coughs and raspy splutters. And don’t look to the wind for relief; gusts come at you like someone blowing a hair-dryer on your face.

We come into Vegas after dark. Neither of us has ever been here before. We’re trying to find our hotel, dodging construction along streets with no visible demarcation of lanery. I’m trying not to be distracted by huge displays that cost millions of dollars and are explicitly and psychologically intended to distract me. It hits me that if ever there was a city entirely built on our sense of communal navel-gazing, Vegas is it. This is most vividly brought home by the massive screen just over the street portraying a woman’s navel and groinal area gyrating amid falling dollars signs and gold coins. And occasionally a roller coaster car flies over the street, littering the area with screams.

I try not to dwell on that Hunter Thompson quote, something like, “This is what the whole world would be doing on Friday night if the Third Reich had won the war.”

The casinos are certainly grand. It is immediately apparent that very few expenses were spared in their construction. And looking around, seeing people pumping money into the slot machines, it seems like a pretty negligible up-front cost for such an overwhelming, 24-hour-a-day return. I think that a casino on the strip in Vegas may be the greatest business plan of all time, if money is your object. People have told me that the casinos pump oxygen into the gambling floors to keep the patrons invigorated, keep them excited. Keep them high. It’s always seemed plausible, and my own experience is not contradicting the hypothesis. Although my eyes feel like they are open to thrice their normal capacity, and I’m sort of stumbling around like a bumpkin in Times Square, I’m feeling really good.

Walking out on the strip, in sur-100-degree heat, bathed in blinks and strobes, is a harrowing endeavor. A mobile bill-board rolls past, “Babes to you!”, adorned with naked women arrayed in improbable positions and giving seductive glares indiscriminately. Teenagers, probably working their summer jobs, stand in groups and push business cards on passers-by, business cards that fit the most analytic definition of pornography and provide the proper phone number for an impressive selection of sexual tastes and tendencies. The teenagers, the guys passing these cards out, do this little snapping thing with the cards too, as they hand them out, and it makes it difficult to ignore them. I get the feeling that, to survive in Vegas, every thing must have its hook.

I enjoy games, and I’m competitive, but I’m really no gambler. I play some slots, and I win some and lose some, though mostly I lose some, and pretty soon I’m bored. There’s just this moment where I realize that I can keep putting my money into this machine, a machine that is designed and realized to grant a sizable return to the owner, for the chance to press a button over and over, or I could just keep my money, and live with not being able to press the button over and over. I don’t have enough money to really go play cards, and so we wander around some more, breathing the hyper-oxygenated air.

And there are kids everywhere. It’s after midnight in the casino, and families are still out there, playing slots and cards and dice, children in tow. It’s a strange juxtaposition, because the casino in many ways is like some giant, twisted dive bar. Here we’ve got a couple walking around with matching four-foot plastic tubes of piña colada, a Marlboro Menthol 100 hanging from each maw, while over here are six- and eight-year-old brother and sister, up way past any reasonable bedtime, but assuredly juiced on oxygen and sensory stimulation. I know that Vegas has been pushing a PR campaign to stress the Family Fun aspect, and it looks like it’s working out for them, if only in a blithely disingenuous sort of way.

After a couple hours in the menagerie I notice an unease building. It’s hard to label at first, and its instigators are small enough by themselves. One of the escalators at the hotel is broken. The handle on one of the grandiose entry doors is loose. Some of the ashtrays are full and spilling over and the carpet is filthy. The waitresses, despite their low-cut and rather glam apparel, are older than in the movies’ version of Vegas, and most have unmistakably sad eyes. It’s sort of like the veneer, the whole “thing” of Vegas in its over-the-top appeal to the senses and appetites, begins to show its seams. And once I notice it, I start seeing it everywhere. Now it’s not only the waitresses, but everyone who looks unhappy. I mean, they’re smiling, and laughing, but there seems to be something forced about it. Like it’s what one is supposed to do, and so why not do it? I begin to wonder what I look like, but I can’t find a mirror, so I have to guess by observing everyone else and admitting that I am mostly like them.

In the morning, with the full heat of the sun scorching the desiccated landscape, Vegas becomes Las Vegas, desert city and tourist destination. The Vegas of last night becomes a stark reproduction, devoid of the special effects and suspension of disbelief that made it what it was. It’s sort of like going back and visiting your elementary school and being completely underwhelmed by how small it is, how bleak and boring the geometry of its rooms and halls are, how stripped of hazy sentiment the whole experience is.

So we’re out and fighting our way through traffic and construction, out past the airport and the university, past strip malls with chain stores that are just like everywhere else. I steal a phrase from David Foster Wallace, and dub Vegas a supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again. And we head east out over the desert.