In the Midnight Hour

You took your chances with the zeroes but the clear lucite column crests two chips on the 15 and you've had enough. A guy waiting behind you, having watched your chips dwindle with gambler's schadenfreude, seizes your seat and you thread your way through the formless, flowing mass: cadaverous matrons with skinny brown cigarettes, grizzled, hollow-eyed guys sincerely trucker-capped, the gaggle of collegians toting foot-long margaritas, the gent slumped on a personal mobility scooter. As you step from the cindery funk and polytonal blare, the neon dies around you.

It's midnight on Fremont Street and the Experience is about to begin, again.

The barrel vault erupts in a blaze of acidic tinctures, shapeless and shifting forms sweeping along its length, verging and vectoring, at times resolving into slithering snakes or leaping treefrogs, a tropical riot of Henri Rousseau channeled by Peter Max. The ponderous morph of musics condenses at last into the too-familiar strains of Thus Spake Strauss, and for some reason you look down and askance. A Krispy Kreme arch crowns a view into Fitzgerald's, an altar-panel window disclosing a Visitation scene, only here two like-a-virgins, blond and clubwear-clad, wriggle languidly in harsh glare. Lean slightly and you make out a combo, frets and horns, elevated a little, blowing spiritedly but unheard in the din.

Then dim. And silent, a second. Neon leaps alive, and the cadences of That Old Time Rock-and-Roll reach you. The colloidal suspension of flesh, denser further down the arcade, stirs again; gazes level. A young, haggard woman briskly twists a baby stroller through the dodge-'em course of teens and tourists like a TV contestant—"the first to get the baby to Neonopolis, unhurt and without hitting any Ohioans, moves on to the next round ..." Her obstacles slowly turn and follow.

Two cars pull up to the UMC emergency room, looks like some kind of '90s-model sedan, and an '80s-era Mustang. From the parking lot, it's mostly blinking tail lights and the frantic swinging of car doors—two male figures pull a smaller person out of the sedan, a woman runs beside them, they rush the limp body toward the ER's automatic doors. They pass a hospital worker on the curb, leaving her shift—"That didn't look good," she says in their wake, keeps walking, blue medic uniform, fat purse over shoulder, cigarette. Inside, the men—Hispanic, 30s—set a small woman on a chair at the intake desk. It's hard to get a glimpse—they're huddling around her—but her arm sticks out from the chair, from the huddle—it's a small-boned hand, tender, milky brown, blood under the fingernails, caked on the knuckles, some dark and dried, stained, some fresh red on top of that, running—her arm quivering, convulsing. The men shuffle around, holding her on the chair. There she is—a glimpse: Her gray sweatshirt is soaked in blood, her chin, her neck. Has she been shot? What has happened? There is broken, desperate Spanish between the woman who has come with her and a male nurse—a big, white man with a military haircut and blonde moustache. He leaves to get a wheelchair; the patient teeters on the wooden intake chair. Her friends hold her up. She has shoulder-length wavy hair, sweat-dampened, her eyes are closed. Her name is Martha. She's 26. The girlfriend holds a bloodstained towel up to Martha's mouth.

The nurse returns with a wheelchair. The men pick her up and lower her into it. Her head hangs to the side. The nurse begins taking her blood pressure.

The nurse asks in English: "How long ago did she have the tooth extracted?"

The larger of the two men who have brought Martha in says, "Six hours. She has lost a lot of blood. A lot."

The nurse tries to hold her shaking arm still.

Martha has just returned from a road trip to Tijuana, Mexico, where she went to have a tooth pulled.

At midnight, UMC's adult emergency waiting room is packed. There is now a line behind Martha: a thin old man in gray sweats and bombadier jacket, hunched over, his balding head hanging so heavy it seems his sagging jowls will cause him to topple as he waits—he leans a shoulder against the wall; a woman with a kitchen towel wrapped around her foot and jammed inside a bedroom slipper hops, balances, winces.

Eames-ish wooden chairs are filled with slumping, slouching, half-lying figures, 30 or more, African-American and Hispanic mostly, a few white. Each is wearing a sticker on his or her breast, a bright blue-and-white rectangle that looks like it should say, "Hi, My Name Is ..." but instead says, "Visitor Medic Number ..." Some people are wrapped in blankets from home, one woman has a white hospital bedsheet over her shoulders. There's a lone brown shoe—a man's, old, worn, left in the aisle, no takers. Coughing, quiet whining, and an occasional groan slip out from first this body, then that one. Overhead, a couple of TVs offer weak distraction from the wait: One is showing a rebroadcast of a Virginia Tech football game; the other, the History Channel—cowboys and horses. But the sick and injured watch the clock on the wall more: They will wait, and wait, and wait.

Martha's blood pressure is not so dangerously low that she can go ahead of the others here, despite her bloodied clothes and barely responsive state. Her amiga, with long braids highlighted blond and tight jeans with lacy panties rising well above the waist, scowls, rat-tat-tats off a Spanish dressing down of the nurse, who calmly tells her "she'll have to wait like everybody else." It's a phrase you know he's said a thousand times in the faces of the fearful and angry, the panicked.

Reluctantly, they roll Martha to a corner, under the History Channel. Her male friend is hesitant to give details. Does she work? No. How long has she lived Vegas? No se. Is she insured? No se. Are these family or friends? Neighbors. Where do you all live? Umm ... Eastside. Why did she go to Tijuana? She called dentist here. He said she wait two weeks to get in. But she had pain. Bad pain. Couldn't wait.

At 12:25 a.m., Martha is still waiting. The men are sitting dumbfounded, fixated on the clock, on the long, absurd nothingness between emergency and resolution. The woman friend has acquired one surgical glove, and wipes Martha's bloody chin with paper towels, which she tears one after another from a roll, setting each bloodied one in the chair next to her until the pile grows grotesque, at which time she carries them to the garbage can, returns, and starts the routine over.

"It's scary here," a man says. Of course it is; this is the Clark County Clerk's Office, where people who want a spontaneous Vegas wedding can get a license all night long. In a land of passing pleasures and what-happens-here-stays-here, this is the place where events can start to follow you home.

"This is forever," the man says. He seems lost. There are ghosts here, no doubt about it. Oh, if these walls could talk: Britney touched me, they might say, and even a bathroom stall here could perhaps chime in, a lesser Hilton sister puked here.

But whatever the man is thinking, his bride is ready for some attention and so is someone else. "No," she says. She gives him the hand of the toddler they arrived with. "Here is forever."

If you are opposite-gendered, can pay the $55 fee in cash, old enough, single and can pass for sober, that's all you need to get a marriage license. Just fill out the application—you don't even need an ID. "Today's Date" is the one item on the form that almost every man who comes in on this night needs help with. It turns out to be a nasty question in a revealing sort of way, because it irritates the applicant brides, who—of course—always know their wedding date and now suspect that this midnight Vegas wedding may not be the first step to a life of thoughtful anniversary gifts.

It is a slow night. When Becky, 23, and Eric, 25, from Orlando come in wearing beads from the Rio, there is only one other couple ahead of them. They exchange club gossip with the other couple until their conversation is interrupted when the bride has to go to the ATM on premises to get the fee for the state sanctioning of her eternal union, while the love of her life falls silent in line and looks sleepily about.

Becky and Eric hug a little bit and exchange a private smile. Eric was the only groom to nicely handle the today's-date pitfall on the application. They look happy together, and so I interrupt them. They have lived together three years, and though they weren't engaged when their plane landed, they came on this vacation knowing that sometimes weddings just happen in Las Vegas.

"Yeah, though this one is going to have to stay a secret," Becky says. "My mom is very religious, and while she'd love for us to get married, she would freak if we got married in Las Vegas. So we are just going to say we got engaged."

A few minutes later they exit the clerk's office holding their official marriage license from the State of Nevada, and Mom is none the wiser.

"Hey," Becky says, "What club would you recommend? We need to stop back at the chapel and then I need to get really drunk."

As Eric and Becky leave, a County employee says, "Best wishes." They say that to every couple.

You pass the Seven Seas right before you get to the top of the hill on Lake Mead Boulevard—and it's easy to pass, being a windowless, single-story concrete building without the high-watt signage typical of our fair city. One side of the building houses the Seven Seas restaurant and lounge, the other contains the Jesus Name Apostolitic Church, meaning that you can go in one door Saturday night and the other Sunday morning.

I sit at the far corner of the bar inside. "That wall's concrete. That's good if there's a shooting," someone says, although that safe wall behind me has floor-to-ceiling mirrors. There's also a mirrored wall behind the dance floor at the other end of the room; that's all the décor the Seven Seas has or needs, aside from a dormant jukebox, the remains of a buffet and a poster-painted banner reading "Happy Birthday Capt. Green!" The room is far from full, though a steady stream of people, mostly African-American, trickles in, ranging in age from 25 to 65. While women of all ages favor weaves and stretch pants, the men pay homage to the Four Tops' suits, Jay-Z's sweats and several sartorial eras in between.

A large man in a yellow tracksuit faces the mirror and shuffles slowly back and forth, absorbed in admiring his glide. Two women, one in lavender velour, the other in black spandex, do the rump-shake challenge. Velour holds the lead for dimension and control, but Spandex plays the cards she's got and displays a swath of pink G-string to the bar. An agile lady of about 60 throws herself into the competition, polka-dot scarf flying.

Another woman of about the same age sits at the bar, impeccable in a dark suit, fedora tipped just so, makeup flawless, diamonds and manicure flashing bluish in the video poker screen's glow. She has a glass of white wine at her elbow, puffs on a gold-filtered cigarette and is reminiscent of my awe-inspiring friend Miss Ellen, who was a young beauty on the make in Sinatra-era Vegas before settling into her current role as Empress of Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard. I imagine them sharing a nightcap at the Moulin Rouge, comparing presents and hooting over the peccadilloes of senators and standup comics.

I leave after my second drink and head across the parking lot. A man dressed in cartoon catburglar black disappears down the street of shadowy bungalows and squat trees. A woman, an ancient Mexican in a baggy sweater with a pink plastic comb in her hair, squints at her hand and counts in her head as she heads for the sidewalk. At the bottom of the hill, the spread-out glitter of Vegas gleams like the Milky Way, though electric and not quite as far.

Walking into Bonanza Gifts approaching midnight on Saturday. Plenty of parking available right in front.

Greeted by a tall security guard in a 10-gallon hat. He's got a microphone strapped to his ear, and he offers welcome.

A girl wearing several strands of beads peruses the necklace selection. Doesn't she have enough neckwear yet?

Bonanza has the best action figures: Shakespeare, Poe, Freud, Jesus, a male nurse, a crazy cat lady.

At 11:35, the 20-minute warning sounds. Please bring your purchases to the center cashiers.

So many people walk around with shopping baskets. How many souvenirs do you really need?

A dapper old man in a suit buys a deck of cards. Will he be playing alone?

At 11:39, the 15-minute warning sounds just as a party of four women rushes into the store. They all grab baskets.

An employee asks one of the women if she needs any help. "I'm looking frantically for souvenirs," the woman says, as if she's buying bandages for a gushing wound.

A couple speaks Spanish impatiently in the gambling accessories section.

At 11:45, the 10-minute warning sounds. Please bring your purchases to the center cashiers.

A man attempts to pay for his items with rolls of coins. The cashier stops him. She doesn't have time for that; the store is closing.

The frantic woman thanks an employee profusely. She's found the right souvenir, and now she'll live.

At 11:50, the five-minute warning sounds. Please bring your purchases to the center cashiers.

A guy with sagging pants buys a belt and tries to put it on before leaving. He's stopped and told that he must exit the store with the belt in his bag. "Even if my pants are falling down?" Yes.

For the last 20 minutes, a nebbishy-looking man has been scouring the pen racks. He's up at the counter, having finally found the perfect pen.

At 11:55, the final warning sounds. Thank you for shopping at Bonanza, the world's largest gift shop.

You can practically smell the sex. It's out there. Billowing through the glowing skyline, wafting through the luscious neon.

But you can absolutely feel the loneliness. It's in here. Disquieting in its stillness, permeating every crack in the concrete of this Great Big Empty.

Such is the split persona of McCarran International Airport, 'round midnight, on the sexiest, loneliest night of the week.

Gazing out at a hedonist's playground, from golden Mandalay to jutting Stratosphere, imagining its cacophony of carnal pleasures from the ledge of one of McCarran's open-air, upper-level parking areas, it strikes me as sad, this self-denial of Vegas delights. Proverbially speaking, the airport's nose is pressed up against the window pane, the refracted rainbow of colors from that candyland skyscape dancing off its placid facade and eerily untrampled rampways below.

Oh, it's not exactly deserted, this global artery, even if its lifeblood is pumping elsewhere this minute.

Two women stroll into long-term parking underneath, then stop, searching for their vehicle in the dim light. Below, a line of taxi-vans, their well-lit rooftop billboards lending them the look of flashing humpbacks, crawls toward the odd luggage-toting passenger emerging from baggage claim.

Back up here, cars are parked in bunches like some motorized tribal ritual, a reflexive response to few people in vast spaces. Park alone in the unguarded openness—you hear footsteps?—at your peril. I've piloted my Ford Focus to short-term parking; Aisle J, Excalibur section, Second Mezzanine.

There is the occasional chatter, the isolated bumpity-bump of rolling luggage, the harsh, sudden SLAM! of a car trunk that startles the hush, the lone ignition turnover gunning into the night. Parking meters in metallic bouquets of four are plopped atop concrete stumps. A lousy 10 minutes per quarter, burning up the singles you slide into those clunky change machines that spit out a clanking of coinage. Topped by those rotating green arcade lights, it only looks like a slot machine, with its jackpot allure.

Cough it up, Mac. All you've bought is time.

Down the elevator—am I heading toward baggage, ticketing, a dark, deserted runway, you're never quite sure—and deposited, thankfully, across from baggage claim, where lolling security guards and a taxi-guiding traffic cop outnumber civilian stragglers striding down the rolling walkway. (Doesn't that defeat the purpose?)

A glance up at the flight-schedule monitor confirms the hour's downward dip—more like a plunge. EVERY FLIGHT'S ON TIME! Hell, it's worth showing up just to witness what, to those of us who don't work at McCarran, feels like history. America West Flight 374 from Boston just arrived at gate B-11, no doubt expelling a handful of tired passengers. Flight 557 from Miami is next door at B-10. Don't sweat it: American Flight 441 from St. Louis is estimated for on-time arrival at D-7.

But wait, what's this? A flight from Fort Lauderdale is now expected two hours, 20 minutes late when it finally de-planes at D-36. And all is right with the world once more.

At the rental-car receptacle, there are more clerks than customers dotting Avis and Thrifty, Dollar and Budget. A few folks idle, some restfully, some restlessly, some sleepily, on those half-rigid/half-relaxing leather chairs.

Approaching baggage claim and ... BINGO! Live, flesh-and-blood people. One of them, hopefully, about to deliver himself to a driver holding a sign: "Las Vegas Transportation welcomes Del Cristo." And if baggage claim isn't quite bustling, it's at least loping along, passengers crowded around a pair of carousels giving their luggage a merry-go-round ride.

Noise! ... action! ... pickups ... dimming ... dimming ... dimming ... dimmed.

Temporarily breathless, McCarran now exhales.

While some stores and bars—Borders, Don Alejandro's Tex-Mex Grill—remain open, hosting a smattering of patrons, several shopkeepers unleash a rattle of gates, finishing up for the night. (Hope you've got clean underwear: Mr. Boxer's is closed.)

I stop in at the Candy Shoppe and buy a piece of fudge, the gate clanked shut behind me. There's just something about being the last customer of the night at an international airport. Something ... cool.

Baggage claim has turned spooky. Bracketed by jumbo screens called Vidiad, lined by lengthy show billboards and peppered with revolving, 6-foot come-ons, it's a modern-day marketing miracle. Up on the screen, Paul Anka tears into "My Way," the Amazing Johnathan saws through his bloody forearm, Zumanity writhes to lascivious music and David Brenner kibitzes to canned hysteria.

Headliners playing to no one.

The echoe of emptiness is defeaning.

Which begs an eternal question: If commercials blare in the airport and there's no customers to hear them, do they make a sale?

Little has changed as I make my way back to the nearly deserted parking garage, Aisle J, Excalibur section, Second Mezzanine.

It's 'round midnight on the sexiest, loneliest night of the week. Gazing over the edge a final time at that street ablaze with light and alive with sin, I can practically smell the sex.

And feel the loneliness.

My eyelids are heavy. I'm not alone. Except for a heavily mustachioed man reading the sports pages and an older gentleman in an "All Star Security" jacket, grooving to his Walkman, we're a pretty somnolent bunch. When the Number 202 CAT bus leaves the junction of Flamingo and Pecos, headed toward the Strip, it's just past the witching hour and things are pretty desultory.

The initial silence on the bus tends to be broken only by the stop announcements made by the driver, in sultry tones that would befit an after-hours jazz DJ. Earlier, he had accepted my fare with supreme indifference, but a short, vivacious female passenger soon enlivens him. They seem to know each other, and the rest of us get to hear his half of the conversation over the open PA system.

"Beware of pickpockets" warns an overhead placard. I learned that lesson the hard way my first year here.

We may be heading into the graveyard shift but, except for the security man, everybody on board appears to be at the fag end of the day. There's scarcely enough energy among the 14 of us to power a 40-watt bulb. Las Vegas may be a round-the-clock town, but in the wee, small hours it can feel more like the Land of Walking Zombies.

At first the streets are mostly empty and we make good time. Our passengers multiply with each stop, and they're anything but predictable. One Asian woman comes aboard with three little kids, of seemingly as many discrete ethnicities. We're a mobile Melting Pot, and the ethnic mix would give nightmares to that knuckle-dragging Review-Journal columnist who deplored the "browning of Las Vegas" a few years ago. (He's not there anymore; I wonder why. Is racism finally uncool?)

Outside, islets of extreme brightness alternate with acres of Stygian gloom. UNLV is somewhere in the void, but you have to take it on faith, especially compared to the high-noon blaze of electricity put out by Terrible's and the Key Largo. Off in the distance, a disembodied neon "Wynn" floats in a black void above the Strip, just as the eponymous developer has haunted every conversation about the future of Las Vegas for the past 15 years.

We draw near the Strip, crawling the last few blocks through the usual gridlock. Some things never change, regardless of the hour. A sweet, smoky scent—not unlike marijuana—wafts through the bus. They're having a high old time down here, where it could as easily be 8:20 p.m. as 12:20 a.m. Flotillas of cabs scud about, tourists roam in packs and the long "fallopian tube" leading into Bally's glows a dull orange.

As I exit the bus, the stench of diesel fumes and trash cans is cloacal. A Target shopping cart sits tucked under the Bellagio-Caesars Palace pedestrian bridge, literally miles from home. A woman in a black sweater importunes her significant other, "Honey! Do the thong song." What happens here stays here. Lucky us.

At 11:59 p.m.—two hours before they will face an inescapable guillotine—Justin, Hubert and Joshua sit alone in a room that looks like it had been hit by an August monsoon, and they have been too busy trying to be good to clean it. All three of them slouch under an impenetrable silence, and take a deep breath

But before that:

The other editors came and went, leaving behind their sections—news, A&E and sports—to be polished for publication. They had arrived before noon on that Saturday with a fresh crop of stories, ideas and anxieties.

All day, under the indefensible pressure of deadline, they scurried through their stylebooks and hammered away at their computers and telephoned their sources on land lines while putting their writers on hold on cell phones—pausing only to blink, breathe and let loose an occasional scream so loud that the hallways echoed their frustration for hours on end—with only one objective in mind: to get their job done on time.

Which they did.

And so, by a quarter to midnight, there were only three left.

Justin Chomintra, a veteran journalist with a fighter's build and the facial breadth of his people, the Filipinos, had just struggled to walk back into the Ivory Tower at UNLV, climb up one flight of stairs and re-enter the newsroom. He had gone home hours earlier, oppressed with a virus that was forcing him to cough up not only the very fibers of his lungs but also the remnants of his morale. But now, at 11:55 p.m., he once again works from the chair reserved for the editor in chief.

Across from him, Managing Editor Hubert Hensen, a tall young man with a loose tongue but tense posture, perfects the details of the paper, for he above all is intolerant of even the most millimetric errors. During the next two hours Hubert suppresses his trademark, an eternal flow of humor, beneath the sober air with which his responsibilities exist.

And putting the final period to much of the critical prose is the features editor, Joshua Longobardy: a gluttonous reader whose unrest comes from above—in the form of small yet tyrannical pictures, on the wall adjacent to his desk, of his most unmerciful critics: Emerson, Faulkner and Garcia Marquez.

At 1:29 a.m., as the minute hand of their misery moves within 30 ticks of deadline, the time to learn their craft from books and the mouths of the elders is far gone; now, they must perfect the tools of their trade on the job, with press time, far more terrifying than death (as its arrival can be foreseen), fast approaching.

If they were possessed by glory or profit or lust or status or professional ambition, then perhaps it would be easier: Maybe the air in the newsroom would not be as reticent, as musty—as tense. But they are simply driven to do their best; to allow themselves no rest until they have spent enough time and energy, spilled enough blood and tears, that at 1:58 a.m., one minute before going to press and far beyond the hour to repent, they can take one final look at their product and say: Yes; that is good.

And then they can exhale.

It's 11:50 p.m. on a Saturday night and we're stuck in traffic on the roof of Caesars' parking garage, staring at the back end of a yellow Mazda Protege from San Bernadino. The traffic was just as bad when we arrived here about an hour ago. My guess is Elton John. Normally, this wouldn't be anything but a mild annoyance, but I'm supposed to be at the 24-hour Kinko's in Green Valley 20 minutes ago, to spend the witching hour in what will undoubtedly be a catacomb of sleeping copiers and dozing computers. Never mind why I'm here and not there; the important thing is that I'm not there.

Do I lie to my editor? Lie to the Reader? With media folks already rated lower on the trust scale than used-car salesmen, it's a tough choice. An SUV with out-of-state plates is doing something stupid in front of us.

"California! For Pete's sake, buy a gosh-darned map," Biana yells, honking the horn.

At 11:57, the Scintas and Penn and Teller are smiling down at us as we wait for a break in Flamingo traffic. The Scintas look as if they believe we can make the 12 miles in three minutes. Penn and Teller look smug and condenscending, telling us there's no way. We merge onto Flamingo, headed for the I-15, and George Wallace gives us an encouraging wink. Thirteen minutes later, we're there. A little late, but not to worry: The 12 o'clock hour has only just begun.

The store is empty but for a white-haired man in a neat suit seated at a computer and John, the FedEx Kinko's guardian. John has got some dance-club music going as I take a self-conducted tour. The work stations (all but one) are idle. At a common table in the store's center is a black leather satchel, stuffed full with multicolored folders, and an umbrella, just in case, and a 20-ounce bottle of RC Cola. The service counter John works behind is illustrated with geometric circles and lines—tangents, lines brushing one another and parting.

Biana wanders off and returns with a copy of 101 Great Answers to The Toughest Interview Questions and we settle in across from the sole customer's belongings (as the hour ticks by, I'll decide to call him Willie). It was his late-model Cadillac outside, crammed with boxes of files and suits in their dry-cleaning sleeves, a torn T-shirt pulled over the driver's seat.

Twenty minutes pass. Willie is sitting with us now, his papers, most relating to Marriott time-shares, spread out in two parallel lines in front of him. A man and woman enter and go to the service counter. He is Indian and I can detect the sing-song, English-school-education accent from my seat. She is pale, with what might be Pacific Islander blood. Willie is about as Protestant-white as they come. John is of Asian descent, but likely a couple of generations removed from those lands across the Pacific.

In five minutes, the couple is gone.

This, then, is Kinko's at midnight on a Saturday in the world's party capital, the epitome of free enterprise, different cultures coming together to get work done, to make money, to better their positions in the world. The people are tangents, coming into this 24-hour oasis of florescence, plying their trades, and leaving back into the Nevada night, following their own trade routes in the sand.

It's 10 p.m. and I'm heading from one Summerlin home (a friend's) to another (mine). Nary a soul is on the road, which is good since my judgment might (or might not, if my mom, law enforcement or God is reading) have been compromised by some tippling to celebrate my friend's fiancée's 10th anniversary of her 21st birthday. She's 31.

First a confession: I had ulterior motives for visiting Ron's house. Damn thing's a mansion amid a sea of milllion-dollar palaces off Sahara Avenue and Buffalo Road, probably worth three generations of Hodge family paychecks. When I'm there, I feel like a baller. While I'm being truthful, another confession: My fridge is as barren as the tundra, and Ron can cook his ass off, a black Wolfgang Puck if you ask me. His paella is magnifique. I've become bilingual since hanging with Ron. You call it using, I call it broadening my horizons—on someone else's dime. (Ron, if you're reading this, I was writing under the influence, so nothing I say should be held against me.)

So I'm driving home and everything's eerily quiet. Best-selling master-planned community in the history of whole wide world universe galaxy multiverse, which includes Mars, Summerlin is as dead as UNLV football's bowl hopes on this night. No action at the Village Square complex on Fort Apache and Sahara. Smith's appears to be doing OK, a dozen cars in the parking lot. A few folks gassing up vehicles at Town Center Drive and Charleston Boulevard. A boring night in Mayberry.

Home, finally, and bed. I wake at 11:30 p.m. and all's quiet on the homefront, save for my computer's low-intensity hum. Next time I open my eyes, the sun greets me. Not that I missed much. My place makes Mayberry look like the Strip.

"We haven't quite mastered the transition," says Joe, not the real name of this bartender, nodding toward the empty room. When you're a wordpecker hunting material, and a barkeep hands you a perfect thesis statement along with a damn fine gin and tonic, you smile agreeably, tip well and slip the sentence into your pocket. That sucker will come in handy later, when I need a metaphor to lash this business together. It certainly beats the metaphor I had been working with: the guy out on Fremont who'd dug his pinkie into his nose—up to the second knuckle!—then removed it and casually examined what he'd quarried. Here's where the metaphor came in: His two friends didn't react at all. Now that says something.

Where I am: Upstairs in Jillian's, cornerstone of Neonopolis. Although tombstone is more like it—there are fewer living souls here than in your average Stephen King story. Only two of the bowling lanes behind me are in use. Music throbs from the DJ station and the colored lights spin, but no one's dancing. Elsewhere, out on Fremont Street and beyond, under the bright dome of the Vegas night, another late Saturday is unfolding. Not here.

"Where is everyone?" I ask Joe.

"We had a concert tonight, four or five rock bands," he says. "There were 300, 400 people. When they left, it cleared out, and the others haven't come in." That's when he said it: "We haven't quite mastered the transition yet."

Well, there you go, four paragraphs in and the bartender has pretty much summed up the problem with much of Downtown, Neonopolis, the Democratic party and most of the human condition. I can go home now.

Out on Fremont Street, it's the usual mix of red-staters in full gawk; locals getting their kicks; twentysomething hipsters doing their best to live fast, die young and leave an empty trust fund; and freelance weirdos picking their noses. Where Casino Center cuts across Fremont, a group of vacationers has devolved into a bunch of people standing around griping about what must be the night's umpteenth unmastered transition: "We just need to separate," says a bald guy trying to be the alpha male. "This isn't working. We all need to do our own thing."

"I was just talking to [name garbled]," one of the women says, "and I said, 'We're on vacation,' and he told me it sounds more like a bunch of people standing around griping.'" Over at the Saloon, a band is playing "Carwash" to maybe six people. Next door, chrome chairs gleam in the brightly lit food court, now closed—the lights are on but nobody's home. Jesus, this place just throws the symbolism at you! Downstairs at Jillian's, a quartet of non-revelers shoves off, bored shitless. "Maybe we can get some drinks and go to your place," one says. Upstairs, a squat bouncer deflects a group of under-agers. "I should have just walked in," one of them declares with after-the-fact bravado. Don't kid yourself, kid.

Which circles us back to me, hoisting my cocktail in a bar where 300 or 400 people had recently found no reason to linger—not because it's an uncool place (it's cool enough) or because there is better fun to be had elsewhere—but because it hasn't mastered the transition. Here's to you, Joe, and to Downtown, to all of us and the ability to kid ourselves. To my left, the dance floor is still throbbing and flashing in the belief that someone will finally show up.