Vegas, 4:17 a.m. In the room, the air tastes like stale cigarettes, disinfectant, and the hollow sweetness of industrial air freshener. The glow from the ice machine sign filters through the window, green and sickly, projecting the word ICE backwards across the bedspread where I’ve been sweating through my shirt since midnight. I haven’t slept. I can’t remember when I last wanted to.
There’s a couple in the next room fighting—maybe lovers, maybe not. I listen to muffled accusations, breaking glass, then silence that feels somehow louder. Down in the parking lot, a woman in a sequined dress and bare feet screams at a man who ignores her and flicks ashes from his cigarette into a puddle of engine oil. A siren wails somewhere beyond the neon.
I scroll, pointlessly. Social feeds filled with lives that look both impossibly distant and violently irrelevant. I check my bank app again. The red numbers don’t change. I get a notification from my ex: a thumbs-up emoji. For a moment, the urge to throw my phone out the window feels logical, even kind.
The carpet here is sticky. A brown stain shaped like Australia sprawls under the chair. I step over it and instantly regret being barefoot. In the bathroom, the mirror is cracked, warped so my face splits into thirds—forehead, eyes, mouth—all disconnected. A cockroach runs along the tile, then disappears under a newspaper with the headline: SHOOTING ON THE STRIP—THREE DEAD.
I take the elevator down, sharing the ride with a man dressed as a medieval knight and a woman dressed as Harley Quinn. They don’t acknowledge me. No one does. The lobby is an aquarium for sadness: gamblers nursing drinks at dawn, a woman asleep in a vinyl booth clutching a bag of fast food, a pit boss reading a paperback with bloodshot eyes. In the casino, I watch a guy lose four hundred dollars on blackjack in thirty seconds and not even blink. He sips his drink and stares at the blinking digital display, waiting for instructions from a god that never arrives.
The breakfast buffet opens at 6 a.m. There’s a line. People shovel eggs and burnt bacon onto paper plates, eyes glazed, jaws working methodically. Someone drops a glass; nobody reacts. A toddler screams; a woman with a face tattoo laughs too loudly at something that wasn’t a joke. I eat half a cold waffle and think about all the hands that have touched this plastic fork.
I wander Fremont Street. The sidewalk is littered with cards for escorts and coupons for pawn shops. I step over a homeless man curled up under a “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” t-shirt, his feet bare and raw. A rat scurries across the gutter. The smell out here is somehow worse—urine, spilled beer, the sharp metallic tang of blood from a nosebleed someone tried to wipe away.
Under a dead streetlight, a trio of prostitutes huddle together, not talking, just scrolling on their phones, faces blue-lit and bored. One of them is crying quietly, mascara smudged into a bruise around her left eye. Another is eating fries out of a paper bag, dropping one and not bothering to pick it up. The third adjusts her jacket and stares off into the distance, not watching anything in particular. Their heels dangle from their hands instead of their feet; all of them look tired in the way that means something has been scraped away and isn’t coming back. I catch one of their eyes—blank, half a challenge, half a plea. She looks right through me, like she’s forgotten how to see people who aren’t buying or selling something.
A guy in a Spiderman suit—mask off, cigarette dangling—leans against a dumpster, scrolling through his phone, red paint smeared across his cheek like a wound. “Don’t look at me,” he says, voice flat, eyes dead. I keep walking.
By sunrise, everything feels old and unfinished. Sunlight turns the neon pale, then meaningless. It’s already hot. My wallet is empty. My phone is dead. I find a payphone in a puddle of piss and for a minute, think about calling someone—anyone. But I can’t remember any numbers.
I stare at my reflection in a dark shop window, eyes red, mouth slack. I look like someone who’s forgotten the beginning of his own story, waiting for a plot twist that never comes. Vegas hums behind me, hungry, indifferent, eternal. And it’s possible I’ve always been here, waiting for nothing, with nothing left to lose.