It is almost too easy, like photos of kittens or a Sarah Palin interview.

My head darts around like a hummingbird. My senses are Velcro: images stick, noises collect, scents fight for airtime. Sparkle! Ringing! Flash! Cheers! It is hard to be here alone. Hard to take it all in without spewing it back out, nudging, pointing, whispering. I feel full, bursting with snapshots in no succession; a slot machine rolling, rolling, never lining up.   

It is almost too easy. I don’t need to wake up next to a tiger and missing a tooth to go searching for a story. Las Vegas is a narrative jackpot. Plot is optional. Participation is optional. I am an observer in a candy store running with scissors. 

I am here for a weekend. It is a business trip but not for my business. I am on loan. This is not my first visit. I lived here right out of college for four months. I came again much later for a wedding. This time is neither real life nor play. I wander between bullet points on an agenda. I see Vegas from a new vantage, lonely, displaced, a stop slightly longer than a layover. 

I don’t attend any shows but I see one showgirl. She is standing in front of a rental car counter at the airport. She is dressed as if posing for a postcard: sequined bathing suit, pink feathered headdress and flesh tights the same color as her flat bare stomach. I catch myself staring. She is beautiful, like a doll. 

I want macaroni and cheese so I call my brother. My brother and Vegas are lovers. I say: Where should I go? He says: Go to Serendipity, next to Caesar’s Palace. I say: I don’t know where I am and so don’t know how to get there. He says: What do you see? I say: A neon sign that says Margaritaville and a store selling Donnie and Marie t-shirts. He says: You are in The Flamingo. Walk straight by the sushi place, turn left at the blackjack tables, you will see a set of doors, go through them. I am in a Mission Impossible movie, listening for my orders in an invisible earpiece. He leads me through and around and out and across the street to a pink marble counter and cranberry mojito. Acting like I know the score, I tell the bartender to add bacon to my mac and cheese.  

I am lost in the Bellagio. I went there to see the glass flowers, but when I gravitated to the giant ant garden, put my hand in a wall of water and followed the crowds, I got lost. I read a kid’s book once where the author compared a Las Vegas hotel to the island of the lotus-eaters. Going in circles into dead end corridors, I start hoping someone shows up with tray of lulling blooms. I understand why the monorail running parallel to the strip is mostly empty. No one is meant to leave. 

I find a wax figure Elvis. His skin is stained leather and his hair is tar black against a plastic white suit. He is the only décor in a hallway of closed doors and silence. I don’t question why they have stashed this statue in a corner, I think, only in Vegas. Elvis asks me if I need help finding my way. I jump back and gasp. You are real? He must get this a lot. Yep, he says.     

I am at dinner with a group of ordinary women. Our waitress arrives and she is not ordinary. Like the showgirl, she too is a Barbie-esque creature with unnaturally long legs and delicate cameo features. We are fascinated by her dress which appears to be made of inticate layers of folded fabric. After menus and drinks, we realize that her bodice is actually multi-colored bras worn one on top of the other, graduating in coverage, the scoop neckline of her dress pulled low to show all of them at once. I look down and imagine my bra, white and covered. 

I am on a ramp that arches over a street, connecting one hotel to another. There is a gauntlet of teenagers lining the walls as tourists stream through. Some are standing next to coolers selling bottles of water for a dollar. A girl is sitting cross-legged holding a sign: “pregnant and in trouble.” A boy: “hungry and can’t get home.” And a scruffy guy: “ain’t gonna lie, want a beer.”

Taxis come and go through tunnels under the hotels. Guests are whisked away underground, below the surface. They might never see the sky except for the ceiling of the Caesar’s Palace Mall. Painted blue with puffy clouds and yet like all things Vegas, it never changes with the weather. There is no reflection of the outside world, just an eternal, ethereal horizon that gives no light.

In the restroom, the door of a stall is open and an older woman is standing in front, billowing yards of wedding dress in her arms. She is holding up the fabric as best she can and I glimpse two small heels poking out of the lace. Bridesmaids are standing around the sink area in tight green sheath dresses, one is holding a white bouquet, the other a veil.      

I buy a set of showgirl pens, postcards, a few key chains and a set of furry dice. I gamble a total of four dollars that lasts seventeen minutes.   

Finally I am at the airport sitting at my gate. A kid sinks down next to me with a dejected sigh. He is in his early twenties. He is big but his expression is very young, as if the baby scrubbed face did not keep up with his last rangy growth spurt. He is dragging some oversized, beat up duffle that probably once carried football gear. Now it looks deflated. He is puzzling over several boarding passes. He turns to me and asks if I can help him sort out what is going on. Of course he has a heavy North Carolina drawl and a slight overbite. Of course his voice is squeaky and polite and he calls me ma’am. I decide that I am now his mother. This is his first trip on an airplane, his first trip out of his state. He missed his flight by going to get a “coke.” We figure out all the paperwork and I assure him that I will direct him to the right gate for his connection when we arrive. He thanks me and pulls out a battered cell phone. He calls everyone he knows and tells them, not about Vegas where he has attended a bachelor party, but about missing his flight and how “a nice lady is helping him” and how he just wants to get home.

As we wait, a very short man approaches the gate attendant. He is wearing an ill-fitting polyester ringmaster tuxedo complete with a red silk cape and top hat. He is holding bright red snakeskin cowboy boots and walking around in purple striped stocking feet. He tells the woman he has been at the airport since three in the morning and he really needs a flight, any flight, out before tomorrow.

The kid and I exchange glances and grin.

It is almost too easy.