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“It was,” I murmured, and then I recounted for him where I was and what I recalled. Some of it, he knew. But not all of it.
I told him that I was performing the night of the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival massacre. I was new to the scene, but I had my gig at the BP. A shooter opened fire from the thirty-second floor of the Mandalay Bay, murdering fifty-eight people and wounding more than 850. I was still onstage on Sunday nights back then, and I had just the one show each evening. It started at ten p.m. because, at the time, the BP still had a British comedian in the showroom with an eight o’clock gig. So, I had just gone on when people’s phones started vibrating. The assassin started shooting at five minutes after ten.
I was singing “A Sign of the Times”—a horrific, oddly ominous coincidence, which is why I pulled the song from the show after that night—when Bud McDonald hopped onto my stage and pulled the mic from my hands and announced, “Everyone, take cover! Now! There is an active shooter on or near the strip!” It was twelve minutes after ten. None of us, including Bud, had an inkling whether the shooter—or shooters—was just outside the BP and about to come inside, and so my audience crouched down between the rows of seats or curled up in balls on the floor. At the time, it was just me and a pianist in the show, and we both crawled under his piano. At first, the people in my audience were calm; I could see some checking their phones, understanding now why the devices had been buzzing in their pockets. But within minutes, we heard screaming outside the theater, lots of screaming, and I began to hear whimpering from behind the rows of seats before me.
The theater entrance and box office opened up onto the lobby above the casino floor, and people were running from the strip into whatever casino was closest. So, although people inside the showroom didn’t hear the pops from the AR-15 or the thousand-plus rounds the murderer discharged, they heard the shrieks and the panicked crowd assembling outside the doors. None of us had any idea if this was a lone gunman firing from the Luxor or the Mandalay Bay or some other spot high in the sky, or part of a well-coordinated terrorist attack on multiple casinos. And then dozens of the people who had sought refuge in the BP lobby were escorted into the theater for an added layer of safety, and many of them had blood on their clothing and faces and hands. We could see it vividly on anyone wearing white, and I told Nigel of the two young women in ivory T-shirts, one sleeveless, and how a theater usher was sure they were shot so badly they should be rushed to the ER, but neither had a scratch on her. The pair had no idea of the names of the people whose blood had saturated their clothing and coated their hair like gel. They were in shock, sobbing and scared, and grateful they were alive. Apparently, they had just run and run when the shooting had started, and weren’t sure how or why they had been herded into the Buckingham Palace as they’d been part of the crush that had raced north, away from the barrel where the humans were the fish. There was the round girl with the cherubic face—was she even as old as my niece was now?—whose father had one arm around her, while his other flopped at his side or swung wildly like a scarecrow’s when he turned to look back at the doors, and it was only then that I noticed the eerily circular, deep claret stain on the shoulder of his rugby shirt.
The BP had us shelter in place, where we stayed until almost one in the morning. Some members of the crowd were distraught that they couldn’t reach people they knew who had been at the music festival, and I saw others—in addition to that father—who were wounded and should have been on their way to the ER. I saw folks texting frantically and scouring Facebook and Twitter and news apps for any information that was out there. Even the most stoic in the showroom were beginning to find the claustrophobia as unnerving as the reality that we had no idea how bad this already was or was going to be. The unknown is both a correlative to concrete horror and an aftershock. Dread. Anxiety. The devil you know…
I learned later that some of the other casinos had set up metal detectors in their ballrooms or convention centers to make sure that they knew who had guns and who didn’t, and because they weren’t completely sure there had only been that one shooter. But the BP didn’t do that. When the lockdown was lifted, I wandered down to the casino floor. It was surreal. Most of the machines were empty, the swiveling chairs perfectly still. The pit bosses had cleared the tables. But the video slots were continuing to issue their mechanical come-ons, the ones based on movies and TV shows and NASCAR and singers—country and heavy metal—as loud as ever. Louder, in fact, because their cackles and cries were no longer muffled by the ambient noise of human chatter and human bodies in motion.
The next morning, the area gun stores were packed. At least that’s what people told me. I had no intention of buying one.
But for days, I was shell-shocked and grieving. We all were. As common as mass shootings are in America, for anyone who experiences one or lives in the shadow of one, there remains a semblance of singularity. How could this have happened? We must be unique to have shared this cataclysm. I was mourning people I’d never met, but the utter senselessness of their deaths left me broken. Monday the theater was dark, but we canceled the show scheduled for Tuesday. Even Wednesday seemed too soon, but the casino wanted me to return and I began the show that night with the single lit candle that would become a staple of the act: Diana’s face emerging from behind the flame of one long, white taper. But that night, it was for a moment of silence and a light in the darkness.
And, yes, the theater was full. The BP’s guests were back at the tables and the slots.
But for weeks all any of us who worked and lived in the city could talk about was the utter horror of what had unfolded that Sunday night. Soon, the “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign became an impromptu memorial. People were leaving photos of the dead and flowers for the dead, and notes that were heartbreaking. It was reminiscent of the memorials that sprung up around lower Manhattan after 9/11: it was smaller, of course, but it still left me weeping whenever I went there.
And I went there often.
I’d see people who were inconsolable because they had known someone who had been killed in the massacre. I’d see people who had been wounded and were paying tribute to those who hadn’t escaped.
I never told anyone, but those days I relapsed as badly as I had at any point since I was auditioning in New York City, and there were moments when the purging was almost gratuitous: it was as if I wanted to punish myself for simply surviving. I would eat until I was in pain. I didn’t have the suite yet; I had a room, but the toilet was white and the bathroom was small, and I would curl up on the floor, savoring my own debasement in the steady accretion of stink and stain.
“Sometimes, Las Vegas is more small town than big city,” Nigel said when I was done. He shook his head ruefully. “Just devastating.”
“But people really did live in this emotional space where, even after all that, they were still drawn back to the tables and slots. I heard so many stories of people who survived and thought their living was a testimony to their good luck. So, the next day or the day after that, they expected to win big. Of course, most didn’t.”
“No. Most never do,” he agreed. For a long while we sat in silence. It was morose, but companionable. I squeezed his hand. He knew me far better than people who had been in my life far longer, and I had come to depend on his equanimity. Maybe my sister and my mother had been right, and someday—if I survived whatever unnatural disaster was coming—I should put the bellows to that spark and see what happened. Finally, he said, “Well, if you change your mind about a gun, please don’t be shy. I can help. I can teach you.”
Guns. The world had too many guns. Las Vegas had too many guns. Those maniacs from Futurium had too many guns. I swallowed the last of the ice in my drink and popped one of the little yellow pills that would mix well with the gin and tonic. My stomach was empty and I planned to have room service send something to my room, but, in the meantime, I wanted as little food as possible between me and what I supposed would be my afternoon sleep-away.
When Frankie drove me to his house, he was distracted, but he said Betsy was helping Rory and Damon, and Ayobami was working, and so everyone figured I should go to his place and hang out at the pool. He had a bathing suit waiting for me.
The first clue I got that something was wrong was this: the Wi-Fi wasn’t working on my tablet. Frankie said, yeah, the router was a mess and someone was coming with a new one. I asked him about resetting it and told him the trick I had learned in coding class: you stick a pen or paperclip into the reset button in the back, and the router will return to the factory settings. Then you just punch back in the password and user name. He said he’d tried that. I said okay.
So, I went up to the guest room where my backpack was to get my phone. And it was gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Betsy
As she and Frankie agreed, she hadn’t gone to work that Monday. (Had they agreed? Or had she simply dug in her feet and said no that morning? As the hours passed, she grew unsure precisely how it had all come apart and why she was home.) She would be at the apartment when Marisa hopped off the school bus a half block from the complex. She expected to see her at the front door at three fifteen.
She called Futurium and their young receptionist, Derrick, planning to tell him that he was working for criminals, but hung up when she heard his voice. He might say something to Rory and get himself killed. Maybe her, too. Twice she had gotten as far as punching in all but the last digit of the phone number for the police, but there was the shadow of the dead man out at Red Rocks, and the fact she had been there yesterday.
And so she had spent most of Monday stewing, her mind racing between scenarios with happy endings, and ones that left her shaking with anger and fear, because in those versions she and Marisa were homeless. Frankie stopped paying the rent on her apartment, Futurium fired her, and she and her daughter were living in the car. Or at a shelter.
No, it would never come to that. Ayobami would help her. And she had her crypto.
But then she recalled Tony Lombardo’s laughter when he had told her over lunch that he was the one who had “found” a guy in L.A.’s crypto seed phrase.
A little after noon, she envisioned Frankie and Damon and Rory and Lara having a Bacchanalian feast at one of the casinos on the strip, and she was surprised that she hadn’t heard from the man who was or had been her boyfriend. She considered packing two bags, one for Marisa and one for her, and leaving Las Vegas. They could go back to Vermont—home to Vermont—without Frankie.
And so, just in case, she left the apartment to fill up the tank of her car and do some grocery shopping. She bought lots of nonperishables so if she and Marisa decided to leave, they’d have road food. She held out hope that any minute she’d hear from Frankie, and he’d tell her they were sorry they had tried to pressure her into going to the meet and greet that night as her sister. They had a Plan B that didn’t involve either her or Crissy. And then she and Marisa could ignite whatever ludic youthfulness remained in her soul and do something fun that afternoon. After school. Marisa would be surprised that she was home, rather than at Futurium, but Betsy would put a good face on it. The girl might see through her, but she’d try to shield the child from her anxiety.
No, that wasn’t going to happen. She was kidding herself if she thought this was over.
