Raj is walking back to the car before she’s put the phone back in its cradle.
‘What’d they say?’ he asks, swinging into the driver’s seat, putting his key in the ignition. ‘Disapprove?’
‘Yup.’
‘I know they’re your family,’ he says, veering onto the road. ‘But if they weren’t, you wouldn’t like them, either.’
They stop in a campground in Hesperia to sleep. Klara wakes to the sound of Raj’s voice. She turns over and squints at Saul’s watch: three fifteen in the morning and Raj is sitting next to Ruby’s crib. He’s peering at her through the bars, whispering about Dharavi.
Sheet metal painted bright blue. Women selling sugarcane. Houses with walls made of jute bags; enormous pipes that rise, like the backs of elephants, in the streets. He tells her about the electricity goons and the mangrove swamp, the shanty where he was born.
‘That’s Tata’s house. Half of it was demolished when I was a kid. The other half is probably gone by now, too. But we can picture it that way. Picture the half still standing,’ he says. ‘Each floor is a business. On Tata’s floor are glass bottles and plastic and metal parts. On the next floor up there are men building furniture; on the one above that, they’re making leather briefcases and handbags. On the top floor are women stitching tiny blue jeans and T-shirts, clothing for children like you.’
Ruby coos and waves a hand, bluish white in the moonlight. Raj takes it.
‘They say that your people are untouchable, worse than the ones who came from beneath Brahma’s feet. But your people are workers. Your people are shopkeepers and farmers and repairmen. In the villages, they aren’t allowed to enter temples or shrines. But Dharavi is their temple,’ he says. ‘And America is ours.’
Klara’s head is turned toward the crib, but her body is rigid. Raj has never spoken of such things to her before. When she asks him about Dharavi, or the insurgency in Kashmir, he changes the subject.
‘Your tata would be proud of you,’ Raj says. ‘And you should be proud of him.’
Raj stands. Klara presses her cheek to the pillow.
‘Don’t forget it, Ruby,’ he says, pulling the blanket up to her chin. ‘Don’t forget.’
16.
In Vegas, they stop in an RV park called King’s Row. It’s fifteen minutes from the strip and costs two hundred dollars a month, which Raj hands over resentfully, because the pool has been drained and all the laundry machines except one are broken. ‘It’s just for now,’ he tells Ruby, kissing her button mushroom nose. ‘We’ll sell this thing soon.’ While he levels the rig with electric jacks and hooks up the utilities, Klara explores the grounds. There’s a rec room with a ping-pong table and a half-empty vending machine. The RVs seem to have been anchored for months, with wooden decks on which residents have placed potted plants or American flags.
They get a long-term car rental, three months with an ’82 Pontiac Sunbird, and drive to the Strip. Klara has never seen anything like it. Waterfalls that never dry. Tropical flowers in constant bloom. The resort hotels are metallic and angular as space stations. ‘Live hot girls,’ someone hisses, and a postcard materializes in Klara’s hand. Gods parade in front of Caesars; a woman lies facedown on the side of the street, her head on a pink leather pocketbook. Showgirls and fake Elvises stand beside a live Chucky doll that waves to Klara with its knife-wielding hand.
The newest hotel rises up like an open book, two slender buildings connected at the binding. The Mirage is written on an electronic sign in curling, red capitals. It scrolls: In our first ten hours we paid the largest single jackpot in Las Vegas history! 4.6 million! Enjoy the buffet! Then the letters vanish, coy, and The Mirage reappears. A volcano in front of the hotel fires nightly, they’re told, to the sound of the Grateful Dead and the Indian tabla player Zakir Hussain. There’s an atrium with a man-made rainforest and an enclosure for real tigers. It’s exactly what Klara’s always never wanted, but she thinks of Ruby. There’s money here. They walk into the lobby, which is hung with giant chandeliers and glass petals the size of car tires. Behind the front desk, stretching from floor to ceiling, is an aquarium fifty feet wide. She hears a shrill roar, which she thinks is the waterfall or the volcano before she recognizes it for a saw: the building is still under construction.
‘Psst,’ says Raj. He points to a large banner above the front desk. It shows Siegfried and Roy, their faces pressed to either side of a white tiger. Daily at 1 and 7 p.m. It’s 1:45. They follow the signs to the theater. Since the show has already begun, there’s no ticketer. Raj slips through the door with Ruby on his hip and pulls Klara into two empty seats. Siegfried and Roy are dressed in unbuttoned silk shirts, cropped fur jackets, and leather pants with codpieces. They ride a fire-breathing mechanical dragon, whipping the ten-foot head while women in shell bikinis dance with crystal-headed staffs. At the end of the show, Roy sits on top of a white tiger that sits on top of a mirrored disco ball. Joined by Siegfried and twelve more exotic animals, they levitate into the rafters.
It’s a garbled American dream, a dream of the American dream: forty years earlier, the pair met aboard an ocean liner and fled postwar Germany with a cheetah stowed in their trunk. Now their show has a cast and crew of two hundred and fifty people.
As the men bow, Raj puts his mouth to Klara’s ear. ‘We just have to find a way in. Somebody’s gotta know somebody,’ he says.
Klara breast-feeds Ruby on the futon, keeping one eye on Simon’s watch. The same two letters appear as before: M, then E. Five minutes later, there’s a second E. The next span of time is so long – twenty minutes – that she’s worried she missed something while burping Ruby. Then she hears the noise again.
T.
‘Meet!’
Ruby shrieks. Klara’s milk is running dry.
‘What?’ calls Raj from outside. He’s belly-up under the RV, looking at the backboard.
‘Nothing,’ Klara says. Raj won’t want to hear what’s just occurred to her, which is this: If Simon is communicating with her from beyond the lip of death, then who’s to say Saul isn’t, too?
Klara clasps her nursing bra and shushes the baby, but there’s an ache in her sinuses like she might start crying. Ruby is alive, and Ruby needs her. Klara needs Simon, needs Saul, but they’re –
Dead? Perhaps. But perhaps not completely.
Raj strikes out with his contacts at the Southern California casinos, but the owner of the Lake Tahoe resort has a cousin whose wife’s brother manages the Golden Nugget. Raj goes to meet the man in his nicest outfit at a steakhouse on the Strip. When he returns, he’s jacked up, energy to burn and a wild look in his eyes like rapture.
‘Baby,’ he says. ‘I got a phone number.’
17.