Levitating Las Vegas(32)
Author: Jennifer Echols

“Oh, yeah,” Elijah said, remembering. He snapped his fingers as more came back to him. That afternoon Holly had come up to him in the employee break room in a sparkling red bikini with panels of pink transparent fabric floating around her long legs. She’d looked like a genie. She’d pressed a folded note into his palm as she swept past the lockers and disappeared into the hall.

In the note she asked whether he was okay after their adventure last night. She told him she’d passed out after a few sips of beer in high school, so she understood what had happened. She apologized for Rob trying to kill him. She’d gone out with Rob only that once, and it was over. She hoped Elijah wouldn’t have any more trouble out of him because of her. And Elijah should burn this note.

Actually, now that he thought about it, the note had been very sweet, almost as if Holly liked him. He should ask her out. Except he might get his mom fired. He’d definitely get himself fired. Or perhaps the threat from Holly’s dad and Mr. Diamond no longer applied seven years later?

“Elijah!” Shane tapped on the table. “Did it ever occur to you to try weaning yourself off that pill?”

The tapping created ripples in Elijah’s coffee cup. He watched them, mesmerized, then realized Shane had asked him something. “What?”

“I mean, you may not feel it day to day, but that’s a serious elephant tranquilizer of a drug, if you’re not supposed to drive while you’re taking it, and it makes you pass out cold after one beer and walk around like the living dead the next day.”

Elijah had a hard time following what Shane said. “What?”

“In the past few days, when you were off that drug, you seemed jumpy and anxious because you wanted to get back on the drug and you couldn’t find any. But you did not seem crazy.”

Elijah opened his mouth to protest, then closed it again. For years he’d kept his delusion that he could read minds a secret. He wasn’t about to spill it now.

Shane set his guitar case down, then touched the top of Elijah’s head. His hand bounced along Elijah’s waves and slid downward. He squeezed Elijah’s shoulder, as if comforting a younger relative, a child. He picked up his guitar and turned for the door.

“Don’t tell me that I’m not crazy,” Elijah whispered.

“I’m telling you that you don’t need to be medicated,” Shane shot back. “Oh, never mind. Do you want me to stay in tonight? I have a hot date with a UNLV cheerleader, but I can cancel.”

“No thanks,” Elijah managed.

As Shane opened and closed the door, light from the house shot across the lawn, then shrank to a sliver and disappeared, leaving Elijah in the blackness.

When he tried to recall it later, he wasn’t sure what he did for the rest of the night. After serving up a pot roast for Shane, he probably returned outside to stare at the night for an hour more, then moved inside to read for a while, then fell asleep.

But when he woke the following morning, the grogginess was gone. Thirty-six hours had passed since he’d taken Holly’s pill. He was twelve hours past his usual dose, and he felt it. Shane in the room next door lay in bed, wondering whether Kaylee liked sushi. Elijah could read Shane’s mind again. Elijah was crazy. He remembered the crazy things he’d said to Holly at Glitterati, and the crazy thought that somebody in the club had the power of mind control. He remembered that Rob had moved out, that he was possessive of Holly, that he carried a gun.

As the day wore on, Elijah made his rounds and his phone calls. His pills still hadn’t arrived at the casino pharmacy, his mom was still out of town, his doctor was still disconnected, and Elijah knew what he had to do.

8

Sunday night, Holly climbed onto the bus outside the casino, collapsed into a choice window seat, and waited to depart. Her parents had offered, as they did every night, to drop her off at her apartment in their limo, but she’d refused. She liked to get away from them sometimes, and Kaylee too, just to be independent for twenty minutes. She looked forward to the bus and her nightly routine of watching the enormous buildings and flashing signs and scantily clad workers and tourists on the Strip gradually calm into normal people, modest houses, well-kept cactus lawns like in any desert city—just as most Vegas performers hit the casino stages in their twenties but settled down to calmer jobs and families and marriages as they got older.

Holly’s life wouldn’t follow this pattern. She dwelled on this sad fact tonight because, as Elijah had predicted, she hadn’t been able to refill her prescription for Mentafixol. She was twenty-four hours off the drug now and feeling the first sparkles of insanity coming back. She had every confidence the casino pharmacy would receive a shipment of the drug tomorrow. But the pesky sparkles needled her about her disability.

She’d wondered all weekend how Elijah was doing. After missing his Friday and Saturday doses, he’d be feeling mighty funny right about now. If his delusions were like hers, he would be barely conscious of objects in his mind and suddenly, out the corner of his eye, they would move.

Uh-oh. Here was a more serious hallucination. Elijah was on her bus. She blinked several times. No, it really was Elijah, bounding down the aisle with his eyes on her. As the motor’s idling monotone grumbled into a roar and the bus pulled away from the casino, he swung around one of the poles in the center of the aisle like a seasoned bus rider, or a stripper, and slid into the seat next to her.

“Elijah!” she exclaimed.

“Hey, Holly,” he said smoothly, not the least bit surprised, as if he’d known he would find her here.

“What are you doing on my bus?”

“Oh, is this your bus?” he asked. “Like, your personal bus.” He cut his green eyes sideways at her. A few days’ growth of stubble had turned him into a movie hero two-thirds of the way through an action flick, dangerous and haggard. He could make anything seem sexy, even waiting for his crazy pills to come in at the pharmacy.

“I’m a diva,” she said. “I like to be chauffeured.” With one hand she gestured gracefully to the entirety of the bus as if it were her own magic carpet. “But that would be cool, if it were my personal bus that I didn’t have to share with other riders, and it would take me wherever I wanted to go. Actually I wouldn’t need such a big bus for this. It could be smaller and more environmentally responsible if it wasn’t built to hold all these other people.” She shot herself in the head with her fingers. “Wait, there is already a name for this incredible invention of my imagination and it is called a car.”