The Goldfinch

Chapter 5 | Part 5

THE PILL WASN'T STRONG enough to knock me out, but it kept me high and happy and somersaulting in and out of air-conditioned dreams. Passengers whispered in the seats around me as a disembodied air hostess announced the results of the in-flight promotional raffle: dinner and drinks for two at Treasure Island. Her hushed promise sent me down into a dream where I swam deep in greenish-black water, some torchlit competition with Japanese children diving for a pillowcase of pink pearls. Throughout it all the plane roared bright and white and constant like the sea, though at some strange point—wrapped deep in my royal-blue blanket, dreaming somewhere high over the desert—the engines seemed to shut off and go silent and I found myself floating chest upward in zero gravity while still buckled into my chair, which had somehow drifted loose from the other seats to float freely around the cabin.
I fell back into my body with a jolt as the plane hit the runway and bounced, screaming to a stop.
"And... welcome to Lost Wages, Nevada," the pilot was saying over the intercom. "Our local time in Sin City is 11:47 a.m."
Half-blind in the glare, plate glass and reflecting surfaces, I trailed after Dad and Xandra through the terminal, stunned by the chatter and flash of slot machines and by the music blaring loud and incongruous so early in the day. The airport was like a mall-sized version of Times Square: towering palms, movie screens with fireworks and gondolas and showgirls and singers and acrobats.
It took a long time for my second bag to come off the carousel. Chewing my fingernails, I stared fixedly at a billboard of a grinning Komodo dragon, an ad for some casino attraction: "Over 2,000 reptiles await you." The baggage-claim crowd was like a group of colorful stragglers in front of some third-rate nightclub: sunburns, disco shirts, tiny

bejeweled Asian ladies with giant logo sunglasses. The belt was circling around mostly empty and my dad (itching for a cigarette, I could tell) was starting to stretch and pace and rub his knuckles against his cheek like he did when he wanted a drink when there it came, the last one, khaki canvas with the red label and the multicolored ribbon my mother had tied around the handle.
My dad, in one long step, lunged forward and grabbed it before I could get to it. "About time," he said jauntily, tossing it onto the baggage cart. "Come on, let's get the hell out of here."
Out we rolled through the automatic doors and into a wall of breathtaking heat. Miles of parked cars stretched around us in all directions, hooded and still. Rigidly I stared straight ahead—chrome knives glinting, horizon shimmering like wavy glass—as if looking back, or hesitating, might invite some uniformed party to step in front of us. Yet no one collared me or shouted at us to stop. No one even looked at us.
I was so disoriented in the glare that when my dad stopped in front of a new silver Lexus and said: "Okay, this is us," I tripped and nearly fell on the curb.
"This is yours?" I said, looking between them.
"What?" said Xandra coquettishly, clumping around to the passenger side in her high shoes as my dad beeped the lock open. "You don't like it?"
A Lexus? Every day, I was struck by all sorts of matters large and small that I urgently needed to tell my mother and as I stood dumbly watching my dad hoist the bags in the trunk my first thought was: wow, wait until she hears about this. No wonder he hadn't sent money home.
My dad threw aside his half-smoked Viceroy with a flourish. "Okay," he said, "hop in." The desert air had magnetized him. Back in New York, he had looked a bit worn-out and seedy but out in the rippling heat his white sportcoat and his cult-leader sunglasses made sense.
The car—which started with the push of a button—was so quiet that at first I didn't realize we were moving. Away we glided, into depthlessness and space. Accustomed as I was to jolting around in the backs of taxis, the smoothness and chill of the ride was sealed off, eerie: brown sand, vicious glare, trance and silence, blown trash whipping at the chain-link fence. I still felt numbed and weightless from the pill, and the crazy façades and

superstructures of the Strip, the violent shimmer where the dunes met sky, made me feel as if we had touched down on another planet.
Xandra and my dad had been talking quietly in the front seat. Now she turned to me—snapping gum, robust and sunny, her jewelry blazing in the strong light. "So, whaddaya think?" she said, exhaling a strong breath of Juicy Fruit.
"It's wild," I said—watching a pyramid sail past my window, the Eiffel Tower, too overwhelmed to take it in.
"You think it's wild now?" said my dad, tapping his fingernail on the steering wheel in a manner I associated with frayed nerves and late-night quarrels after he got home from the office. "Just wait until you see it lit up at night."
"See there—check it out," said Xandra, reaching over to point out the window on my dad's side. "There's the volcano. It really works."
"Actually, I think they're renovating it. But in theory, yeah. Hot lava. On the hour, every hour."
"Exit to the left in point two miles," said a woman's computerized voice.
Carnival colors, giant clown heads and XXX signs: the strangeness exhilarated me, and also frightened me a little. In New York, everything reminded me of my mother—every taxi, every street corner, every cloud that passed over the sun—but out in this hot mineral emptiness, it was as if she had never existed; I could not even imagine her spirit looking down on me. All trace of her seemed burned away in the thin desert air.
As we drove, the improbable skyline dwindled into a wilderness of parking lots and outlet malls, loop after faceless loop of shopping plazas, Circuit City, Toys "R" Us, supermarkets and drugstores, Open Twenty-Four Hours, no saying where it ended or began. The sky was wide and trackless, like the sky over the sea. As I fought to stay awake—blinking against the glare—I was ruminating in a dazed way over the expensive-smelling leather interior of the car and thinking of a story I'd often heard my mother tell: of how, when she and my dad were dating, he'd turned up in a Porsche he'd borrowed from a friend to impress her. Only after they were married had she learned that the car wasn't really his. She'd seemed to think this was funny—although given other, less amusing facts that came to light after their marriage (such as his arrest record, as a juvenile, on charges