Levitating Las Vegas

11




Elijah woke up sweltering. Beside him in the hotel bed, Holly drowned in dark dreams of zombies with gray clothes and gray faces, bony and gaunt, chained to a ballet barre, crouching in endless pliés. The details of her dream were so quirky, he wanted to laugh. But he couldn’t laugh with such pervasive sorrow and depression driving her imagination. He tried to go back to sleep. His swirling thoughts, her dark dreams, and the heat of the room threatened to smother him.

Carefully he rolled off the bed, watching her to make sure her eyelids hadn’t fluttered open, then checked the thermostat on the wall. It was set at a comfortable temperature, and he didn’t want to freeze her. The discomfort was all his. He snagged his wallet and the ice bucket and quietly left the room.

The bright sunlight in the hallway surprised him. It was midday.

He didn’t mean to read the minds of other hotel guests as he passed their rooms. Their minds reached out to his. Here was a rodeo queen trying to rest up before the parade, but worrying about her excitable horse out in the town stables. Here was an overweight man struggling into a gorilla costume that had fit perfectly last year. Here was a happy family of three road-tripping through the mountains. They’d had a big brunch, then returned to the hotel for the small child’s nap. When he woke, they would find a good spot to watch the parade.

The child’s dreams were happy, of the child himself and angels and kittens leaping from cloud to cloud, chasing a birthday cupcake that zipped along just out of their reach, but then—the child caught it! And it magically divided into just enough cupcakes for everyone. The child had learned the story of five loaves and two fishes in church. The child and the kittens and angels giggled and ate. The cupcakes were delicious, vanilla with white icing. Elijah’s mouth watered, and the pure sugar rushed through his blood. The child considered dividing the cupcake again so that everyone could have two cupcakes instead of one. He thought he could get away with it since his mom was not in this dream. Elijah agreed it was worth a try. Finally Elijah trudged on down the hall to retrieve his ice. On his way back, he paused next to this door again to share a few more seconds of a child’s fantasy.

At his own door he slipped his wallet from his back pocket, then put both arms around the ice bucket while he fumbled to draw out the room key card—and nearly dropped the bucket as a wave of emotion and desire washed over him.

Holly was dreaming of him.

Holly was dreaming of making love with him, and—

Crunch. Elijah realized he was squeezing the ice bucket with both arms. He blinked, backing away from the door.

But no, he needed to go forward, toward the door, inside the room. To Holly.

He paused again with his key card in the slot. He couldn’t really read minds. He only thought he could read minds because he was crazy. He shouldn’t burst into the room and give Holly the rudest possible awakening by touching her when she didn’t want to be touched, just because he’d thought he sensed her dream about him while he stood outside the door. That was how crazy people got accused of sexual battery and ended up in the state pen rather than the mental institution.

But if he woke her gently, and she seemed receptive, fair was fair.

He opened the door, illuminating the dark room with a wedge of light from the hallway.

A hotel notepad, a pen, a bottle of lotion, a glass of water—every object that had sat on the bedside table—circled slowly in the air above her head.

Elijah backed into the hall and slammed the door. In the craziest depths of his crazy evening that caused him to be medicated when he was fourteen, he’d never suffered a hallucination like this: objects tumbling in midair, glinting realistically in the light as if his insanity were the most carefully crafted Pixar cartoon.

He took a deep breath and collected himself, returning to the normalcy of the bright hotel hallway. He would get his Mentafixol that afternoon. The visions would go away. In the meantime, he had to quit freaking out before somebody got wise and carted him off. He steeled himself and opened the door.

Holly sat up in bed, the pad and pen and bottle of lotion and empty glass in her lap, blinking water out of her eyes.

She laughed nervously. “Was I snoring? Did you throw water on me?”

He backed against the door to close it, then gave her the sort of excuse he kept giving himself to explain away his own power. “No, you must have knocked your glass off the bedside table.” His voice sounded hollow, as if he didn’t quite believe it. In the bathroom he made them each a glass of ice water and grabbed a hand towel off the rack. He stopped at the edge of the bed and handed the towel to her. “Here.”

She wrinkled her brow at the towel and took it slowly, as if he’d offered her something apropos of nothing, like a combination wrench or a pneumatic nailer. Finally she wiped her face with it. He waited until she was dry(er), then handed her the fresh glass.

She sipped the cold water. He could feel it in his throat. He was cooler already. He eased onto the bed again and drank from his own glass, the whole thing, down to the ice. He could see himself through her eyes. She watched his throat move as he swallowed.

He slid the glass of ice across his brow. “When you first got mental adolescent dysfunction,” he said, “before you started taking Mentafixol, what were your symptoms? Did you think you had magical power?”

She nodded. Her curls bounced. “That’s one of the most common symptoms. In my case, I thought I could move stuff with my mind.”

Elijah shook the dregs of his glass into his mouth, swallowed. “Do you feel like you have this power now?”

“No. I haven’t been off Mentafixol long enough. Probably in the next few hours, though. I feel it coming on. I have this urge to nudge things, even though right now I’m still sane enough to know I can’t.”

Elijah wasn’t so sure she couldn’t. He remembered the gun in his jeans, and the way his foot had seemed to hit an invisible wall preventing him from connecting with the door of the candy store that morning.

She took a few swallows of her own ice water. “How about you? Do you feel like you can levitate things?”

“No, I feel like I can read minds.”

Her heart sped up as her suspicions bloomed. “Do you feel like that now?”

“Yes.”

“Can you read my mind?”

He laughed shortly. “Yes.”

“What am I thinking?” In her imagination she slid her arms around him and pressed her lips to his.

He said sharply, “Don’t think that unless you’re going to put your money where your . . .”

She gaped at him.

“. . . mouth is,” he finished weakly.

She was horrified that he could see into her mind. And not exactly turned off.

But of course this was all his imagination. He could feel himself blushing. “Holly, I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m saying. I haven’t gotten enough sleep.”

“Well.” Trying to gloss over it, she glanced at the clock on the bedside table. “The parade won’t start for another three hours. Lie back down, if you can dodge the wet spots.”

He was embarrassed at her unintentional double entendre, and he could feel she was embarrassed, but how could he really feel this? It was enough to know that they both looked down and avoided meeting each other’s eyes in the flickering light of the TV as he sank onto the bed beside her. Facing her would seem like he assumed too much after his comment about her mouth, so he flipped onto his other side.

She wasn’t touching him, but he felt her warmth.

And thought her thoughts.

That she wanted him.

That she was not thinking straight.

And then he felt her hands in his hair. At first she only ran her fingers along the ends of the outermost strands, testing. He probably couldn’t have felt this physically. He knew she was doing it only because in his mind he could see her seeing it in the sunlight filtering weakly around the edges of the curtains. He felt more pressure as she plunged her fingers deeper into his hair, letting the waves slide between her carefully polished long nails, marveling at the way some strands blended into the dark while others glinted in the dimmest light.

When he didn’t shy from her touch, soon she was massaging his scalp, running the nails of both hands through it and gently scratching. He let his head fall back into her hands in tacit approval of her touch.

Her thoughts of kissing him were gone. Now she thought of his hair, the way it glinted in the light, like tiny grains of sand in every color on the shores of Lake Mead, which she’d visited often with her parents when she was a child on languid Mondays, her parents’ one day off from the casino. She thought of water, and sunshine, and a comfortable sleep.



“What the hell!” Holly cried.

Elijah shook the nightmares out of his head and sat up on his elbows in bed, casting about in his mind for what had prompted Holly to sit bolt upright and curse. He didn’t need to read her mind to figure this out. Some horrible creature howled in the street outside the hotel, joined by another howl and another. After a minute they fell into roughly the same two-part chord. Bagpipes.

“The parade!” Holly scrambled from the sheets and made a long-legged leap off the bed, landing at the window and tearing back the curtains. She leaned over, forearms on the windowsill, and watched the commotion in the street. “You’re missing it,” she called.

He was not. He saw it all through her eyes. A line of bagpipers in kilts stretched across the street and led the parade. Next came a line of people in gorilla suits. Holly had never seen that many people in gorilla suits in one place, not even in Vegas. Then came big pickup trucks hauling flatbed trailers. People in shorts and T-shirts sat on the trailers and waved. Holly assumed the people would wear costumes and would get around to decorating the trailers before St. Patrick’s Day, and then the trailers would be called floats. The horses brought up the rear: rodeo horses dashing about, Tennessee walking horses stomping a strange gait, Native American horses decked out in beaded harnesses, all producing copious amounts of poo. Elijah didn’t need to look out the window to see this. Mind reading could make a guy lazy.

She looked over her shoulder at him, curls cascading down her bare arm. Her attention shifted from the parade to him. Because she’d been so tired before, she hadn’t even attempted to take advantage of the fact they were sharing a king bed. Only now was she realizing she’d just spent the last few hours in bed with Elijah Brown. He’d been a gentleman. She wished he’d been less of one. Tangled up in the covers, his hair a riot, dark circles under his eyes, he’d never looked sexier.

She asked, voice husky, “Are you coming?”

He rolled out of bed and crossed the room to her. She turned back to the window, but she held her breath, anticipating his touch.

Past her glossy brown hair, the parade marched on, a colorful blur. Elijah focused on her smooth bare back. He touched her sleep-warmed skin with his fingers.

An unseen hand grasped his hand. He flinched, but the pressure was unrelenting. The invisible force moved his hand up her back, toward her shoulders. Her mind told him she wanted to be kneaded there.

He did what she asked. Under the gentle but steady pressure, he had no choice. He reached forward, placed both hands just below her neck, and circled his thumbs.

She rolled her shoulders, welcoming his touch. And he was bathed in warm and tingling pleasure: the delicious sensation he always got when he used his power, and the additional heady feeling she got using hers. It was all he could do to keep massaging her shoulders and pretending he touched gorgeous girls this way in hotel rooms every day of the week.

“Of all the powers to imagine we have, why these?” she chirped, trying to act as casual as he was acting. “Dr. Gray said I was jealous of my dad—”

“You went to Dr. Gray?” Elijah asked, hands stopping on her back. Of course she did, if they had the same . . . disorder. He was beginning to wonder.

“—and that makes sense, I suppose,” she went on. “But if you have MAD, couldn’t you imagine a better superpower than that? Why can’t I imagine I have the power to eat all the cookies I want without getting fat?”

“You’re really into the sugar high,” Elijah commented. Kneading her back, losing himself in the tingling sensation she was giving him, he inhaled the oleander scent of her hair.

“Oh, no, it’s over,” she exclaimed.

His heart sank, thinking she wanted him to stop touching her. Then he leaned even farther forward to look around her shoulders, and he realized she meant the parade was over. It had reached the end of the street that ran up against the side of the orange mountain, near the candy store. Faintly he heard the participants cheering for themselves as they pumped their fists in the air. The lines of people and trucks and horses curled back on themselves and melted into a disorganized crowd.

She looked over her shoulder at him, sunlight glinting in her dark hair, her eyes dark, her lips curled into the smallest secret smile. “What superpower do you wish you imagined you had?”

“Reading minds,” he said.

“How lucky. You’re satisfied with your delusion.”

“Very.”

Deliberately she kept her eyes focused on his, but she thought about kissing him.

Automatically he raised one hand to his tingling lips.

Her chest was so tight, she could hardly breathe. “We need to talk.” She led him by the hand to the bed. They sat facing each other. The curtains were still open a foot, and the afternoon sunlight slanted across the room, drawing a broad line between them.

“If you can read minds . . .” she reasoned slowly.

“Mm-hmm,” he prompted her.

“. . . but you think it’s a delusion caused by MAD . . .”

“Mm-hmm?”

“Are you ever right about what people are thinking? And if you’re right, how do you explain that?”

“Most of the time, I can’t tell whether I’m right or not,” he said. “Sometimes the person will say something or do something that lets me know I’m right. In those cases, I figure I’m really reading their body language or making an educated guess. I’m pretty good at that. I didn’t major in psychology for nothing. And my brain is interpreting that information as mind reading because I am mentally diseased.”

“Right,” Holly said. She wasn’t listening to him, though. She was thinking about her own magical power. She was thinking Elijah’s was hard to prove real, but hers wasn’t.

“Then do it,” he said.

Holly jumped. She watched him warily. “Do what?”

“Show me your power,” he said. His heart was full of dread. How awful, if she thought she was making the pillows sail through the air, and he could clearly see she wasn’t. He liked to picture her as a telekinetic force of womanhood, not a fragile and deluded beauty. But they needed closure. “Make something move.”

“My power isn’t as strong as it was when I was fourteen,” she apologized. “It’s stronger every hour, but not that strong.”

“Because you haven’t been off Mentafixol as long as I have,” Elijah said. “Show me what you’ve got.”

She focused on him. Without taking her eyes off him, she thought about the TV remote on the bedside table behind him. In her mind she fingered the switch.

The TV clicked off.

She thought about the light switch just inside the door in the bathroom.

The light extinguished.

She thought about the curtains.

They raked shut. Slivers of light careened around the room as the curtains swung, but slowly the fabric settled straight down, erasing the line of light between her and Elijah. The darkness was complete.

Elijah’s mind raced. He should do something. He should feel something. All he could feel was Holly. She was hyperaware of the pitch dark and her heart pounding so hard in her chest that it hurt. If she had magical power, that meant she wasn’t crazy. But if she wasn’t crazy, her parents had lied to her. Her whole life was built on a lie, and she had no life left.

“Stop.” He couldn’t see her at all in the dark, but he needed to touch her and stop her. He put his hand on what he thought was her bare knee.

Her thoughts did stop, or rather, rebooted, redirected. Now she was thinking about Elijah’s hot hand on her skin. Or Elijah was thinking this. Or they both were, their separate thoughts intertwining in his head until he couldn’t tell the difference.

He slid his hand off her knee and felt around on the bedside table next to him until he found the lamp. He switched it on. In the sudden light, she blinked long brown lashes at him. She had magical power, she was hot for him, and she was real.

“We have to make sure,” he said. “We have to know why. The candy store is open by now.” He stood and held out his hand to her. “Let’s go.”



She had to shower first.

“No, you don’t,” Elijah called from the bedroom. “We’re just going up the street to change our lives forever. No need to get fancy.”

Holly had no intention of getting fancy. She was in as big a hurry as he was. But now that she and Elijah had turned this corner, she felt more self-conscious. She wasn’t sure whether to be mortified that he’d heard her every lustful thought about him, or turned on. But as long as she was freshly showered and wore her false lashes, she could do anything. It wasn’t really her.

Though . . . she cupped her spangled boobs in her hands and turned to the side to examine herself in the mirror. This outfit might be a little much for Icarus. Or a little little. She would stand out, to say the least, and that might not be desirable while she and Elijah were hanging around the candy company, casing the joint. Maybe she should stop at one of the gift shops and buy herself whatever people wore up here. Dungarees. She wasn’t sure what dungarees were.

“I think you should wear what you’ve got,” Elijah called. “That way, if anything strange happens, we can shrug and explain that we’re from Vegas.” He opened the door and hung on the frame with his arms over his head, showing her those muscular triceps beneath his T-shirt sleeves. “I wish you could read my mind. You look so gorgeous exactly like that.”

She watched her bare cheeks redden in the mirror and her mouth widen into a grin. “You can take the girl out of Vegas, but you can’t take Vegas out of the girl.” She dug in her purse for her false eyelash glue.

He exhaled his impatience through his nose. Even with everything else spinning through her head, she was able to appreciate the beauty of this man hanging on the door frame. She swept on her cosmetics while he watched her darkly.

They cruised up the street in Shane’s car and parked in front of the candy company again. The difference this time was that the storefronts, the sidewalks, and even the streets were filled with pedestrians. Mounting the brick steps to the store, they passed someone going down, a gorilla wearing a metallic green leprechaun hat.

“Wait,” Holly said, spinning to follow the gorilla with her eyes. “I thought we left Vegas.” Now that she was about to discover the truth, she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear it.

Elijah could read her mind and wouldn’t let her stall. He took her hand and hauled her the rest of the way up the steps. He pulled her through the door of the store and didn’t let her go until they stood in front of the candy case, the café tables around them filled with more gorillas and cowgirls and a few pirates nibbling bonbons.

“What can I do ya for?” asked the portly, white-haired man in a plaid shirt and overalls who manned the old-fashioned metal cash register.

“We would like some Mentafixol,” Elijah said.

“And a half pound of those chocolate-covered seafoam candies,” Holly added.

“Mentafixol!” the candy man exclaimed. He shook open a small bag.

Holly was afraid he would say he’d never heard of the stuff, but Elijah flexed his hand down by his side, signaling her to wait.

“Nobody’s ever come in and asked for it before,” the man went on, scooping candies into the bag. Holly watched him carefully to make sure he was scooping from the seafoam tray and not the nut chew tray next to it.

She remembered their mission and prompted the man, “But you do make Mentafixol?”

“Oh, yeah, we make it.” The man placed the bag on a scale. “It’s the only pill we make. We manufacture it in small batches on special order for one clinic in Las Vegas that treats a very rare condition called MAD, which stands for mental addled dysphoria.”

“Mental adolescent dysfunction,” Holly and Elijah said together. They were careful not to look at each other, and Holly hoped the candy man hadn’t noticed their enthusiasm.

“Why do you make it up here?” Holly asked. “You’re a long way from Vegas. Is the clinic that asks for it trying to keep it a secret?”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” said the man. “We’re just convenient. We have the altitude necessary for the chemical reaction. We have the molybdenum. Did you know that the town of Icarus was founded in the nineteenth century as a molybdenum mining camp?” He leaned forward, bushy white brows high, and shook the bag at Holly.

She took the bag from him and popped a candy into her mouth.

“All of us in town work as molybdenum miners when you tourists go home,” the man said. “Here in the shop, we make the molybdenum cores of Mentafixol. Then we just dump them into the coating drum for a hard candy shell and a nice paraffin polish.”

Holly glanced over at Elijah for direction. He watched the candy man with an intense look in his green eyes—an expression Holly had come to recognize over the past day without even knowing she was recognizing it, his mind-reading expression. “Don’t you think it’s kind of unusual for a candy company to be asked to make a prescription drug?” he asked. “Don’t you ever get inspected by the FDA?”

“I have had that thought.” The man pointed at Elijah. “I don’t want you to think I haven’t. I’ve even called the clinic to ask them about it. And every time I do, they send somebody all the way up here to discuss it with me right away. Lately it’s been a little blond girl. Something in the way she describes it to me makes so much sense that I change my mind about complaining.”

Elijah nodded like it was all becoming clear. “Here’s the thing,” he said. “We’re here for the parade.”

“I can see that,” the candy man said, eyeing Holly. “You were with the gorillas.”

“Yes,” Holly lied, cheering him with a flourish of the piece of candy in her fingers. She put it in her mouth.

“But while we’re here,” Elijah said, “we wanted to check on the Mentafixol. We have friends at the clinic, and the clinic has run out of medicine.”

“You don’t say!” the man said. “Let me go look at that ticket.” He turned and moved to the shelves behind him.

Elijah leaned down to Holly and whispered, “The blonde is Kaylee.”

“The blonde is . . .” Holly repeated with her mouth full, not understanding. Then, slowly, she understood. Kaylee was the “little blond girl” who kept the candy company from asking too many questions about Mentafixol. The chocolate turned to sand in Holly’s mouth. She swallowed the dry mouthful. “How do you know?”

“I can see her in his mind.” Elijah straightened and resumed his intense look as the man returned to the register.

“Yep, the clinic asked us to halt shipment,” the man said. “And I can’t give you any. It has to go through the clinic. But you know who else in Vegas would have some?”

“Who?” Elijah asked in a tone that told Holly he already knew.

“That blonde,” the man said. “She always takes boxes and boxes back with her, plus we make her a few big horse pills and even some injectables out of the same stuff. God knows what she does with those. You want me to dig up her card?”

Elijah squinted at the man. Now Holly did wish she could read Elijah’s mind, because she had no idea what the next step in his plan was. If he’d been fishing for a way to get the man to fork over some Mentafixol, he’d run out of options.

She concentrated on the box that the man had turned to stare at on the shelves behind the counter a moment before. She thought about sliding it out from the boxes around it.

It moved into midair.

Elijah blinked. “You’ve been so helpful,” he said quickly to the man. “Let me pay you for”—he cut his eyes sideways at Holly’s bag of candy—“that.”

Holly floated the box of Mentafixol up to the ceiling.

As the man bent to peer at the cash register, Elijah widened his eyes at Holly, then gestured with his head at the crowded café tables, warning her to cut out the levitation or they would get caught.

Holly didn’t understand how anybody who happened to see what she was doing could possibly link her with a floating box of pharmaceuticals. She shrugged. “I’m a magician.”

Elijah paid, and Holly took him by the hand. She led him across the shop, then opened the door by backing him against it. “Thank you for the candy,” she whispered. She stood on her tiptoes and kissed him on the lips. Electricity shot through her, but for once she wasn’t fully vested in the attentions of Elijah. She let her lips linger on his while she coaxed the box a few feet downward, under the doorjamb, and outdoors. Then she rubbed the tip of her nose against Elijah’s and pulled him free of the shop, down the sidewalk, to Shane’s car, with the neat white box floating in the air in front of them all the way.