There was only one hand to play now, and that was Vegas. We’d meet at McCarran International Airport, flying in from the pins on a map, speeding towards Vegas like vectors to a coordinate. Mom coming from Minneapolis. Carly taking an early flight from New York. Me flying in from Indianapolis. Mom had scheduled the whole thing very carefully. Our arrival times coincided—no easy feat, a task three months in the making. This was a trip of tasks, actually, secret and otherwise. Mom said she needed me to perform certain odd jobs, like being a weight to balance the scales. She needed me to balance things out. Things could get top-heavy if I wasn’t there to balance things out. Besides, she implied, sisters need sisters—intermittently but intensely.

“Now, when they ask you if you’d like the window or the aisle seat, make sure you ask if there are any exit rows available,” Mom said the day before we were due in Vegas.  “Be really sweet to the airline counter people. They’ll be pleasantly surprised by it. It’s a good tack. Ask about the exit row sort of flippantly, like real off-hand. Act as if it doesn’t matter.” 

“Does it matter?”

“Are you serious, Delilah?” I didn’t answer and heard her sigh. “I thought by now you’d know the perks of asking. More leg room and if you get an aisle seat, you don’t have to temporarily sit on anyone’s lap in order to get to the bathroom.”

“Are you telling Carly to do this, too?” I asked. There was a brief silence on the other end of the line.

“Carly doesn’t like to ask things of people.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll ask about the exit row.”

“Viva Las Vegas?”

“I guess,” I said.

This was the point, and it had been well-established, if not explicitly stated, long before we arrived in Vegas: Mom had faith in the lights. She thought something about them would cure Carly. In Vegas, lights stayed on all night and they twinkled and the guys at the power grid made sure no corner in the city was left dark between the hours of seven p.m. and six a.m. Mom believed there was something salutary in this state of affairs. And who knew, maybe she was right.

As the plane flew low over the city, I imagined the 727 hovering over the tip of the Luxor Hotel’s pyramid and lowering itself on to it. Coitus altitudinus, I thought, and laughed. That was not something Carly would have found amusing. She found sex obnoxious, and suspected all endorsements of it spoken in her presence were calculated attempts to undermine her.

When I got off the plane, I saw a bank of slot machines in the waiting area. I wandered towards the whirrs and whistles and looked for a fluffy-haired head with sunglasses resting atop a slightly crooked nose and hooked around two long-lobed ears, a pair of black stretch pants, a long black shirt, and a rhinestone-studded vest. Mom wasn’t typically a participant of Midwest glam, but this was Vegas and she now felt she had an obligation to become an aging Solid Gold dancer. I spotted her at a slot machine near a window and she waved me over with her quarter cup. Success! She was even wearing dangly earrings made from tiny dice. She got up and I embraced her ferociously. I treasure this ability to honestly hug my mother. Sometimes only one or two people in a family have the gift.

“I’m already winning,” Mom said and jangled the five quarters in her cup.

“Where’s your suitcase?” I asked. She picked up a black bag bulging with clothes.

“This is it,” she said. “I’m travelin’ light.” She lowered her voice.  “I took the liberty of picking out some clothes for Carly during the spring clearance sales at the mall.”  I cringed. When my mother took the liberty of picking out outfits for Carly, my sister usually ended up with a collection of cruise-wear with elastic waistbands and dresses that looked like oversized tea cozies. It was as if my mother had made a blood pact with a Talbot’s saleswoman, swearing to pick only the most ill fitting, highest-waisted outfits in the shop. I, being the younger sister and aware of the delicacy with which someone else’s “style” had to be handled by the person who thought it substandard, did not allow my mother this kind of license. I knew where to draw the line. For Carly, style was not so high on the list of priorities. No one in the family actually knew what was on the list. That was part of the problem.

“Where is Carly?” I asked. Before my mother could answer, I spotted her myself. She was sitting in some other airline’s waiting area down three gates. I dropped my bags at Mom’s feet and ran down the hall. As I was running towards my older sister, I thought about how I wanted to appear as I approached. I wanted to look excited to see her—so excited that I could not bear to walk slowly. I wanted her to think she was a person worth running for. And I wanted to come off very casual and oblivious to any external sign of her old, inexhaustible grief. But she’d see through it and resent me for the performance. Like a trisected angle, Carly is impossible; like a scalar, she has a magnitude but no direction; like a proof, she is fixed.

“Carly is traveling tonight on a plane,” I sang. “I can see her red asslights, heading for Spay-a-a-ane. I can see Carly mooning goodbye…” Carly had turned to look at me only when I said asslights instead of tail lights. She cannot ignore verbal inaccuracies.

“Hi Deebo,” she said. No one in my family had used my nickname since I was five. “What’s new?”

“Oh will you get off your asslights and give me a hug?” Carly carefully took off her messenger bag, which she’d slung across her chest. She placed it on the seat next to her and smoothed the top of it with her open palm, making sure all the zippers were laying flat. I heard her left knee crack as she stood up.

“Good to see you, Deebo,” she said as she slapped my back like a grateful quarterback to his receiver. “Truly. You look great.” I held on to Carly very tight, pulling her so close to me that my breasts hurt from the pressure.

“Mom’s waiting,” I said. “She’s already winning.”

“So I hear,” Carly said as she put her messenger bag over her shoulder. I noticed she’d also brought along Dad’s old leather satchel.

“What’s in Dad’s purse?” I asked as we walked back towards the Delta gate where Mom was playing slots.

“Comfort,” Carly said, making an uncharacteristically unconvincing attempt at sarcasm. “How’re classes?”

“Good.”

“Taming the numbers?” she asked. She was being good-natured so I didn’t want to argue with her, but I’d told her before that the idea of taming numbers was heretical. Numbers could not be broken like a wild horse; if you found them and then halfway understood them, you were never left unawed again.

“Yup,” I said. “Me and numeros are getting on real well.”

Carly was terrified of math, even though we all agreed long ago—on dubious evidence—that she was the smartest one in the family. Her intelligence always struck me, though, because for a long time I was fooled into believing she did not need structure or the promise of logic. That wasn’t true, of course. She needed tangibles desperately.  She needed to feel the texture of life, like a threadbare blanket between her fingers. She thought she had it. Carly sped through school, graduating from high school two years early, finishing college by the age of 19, receiving her Master’s degree in Art History by the time she was 22. In her eyes, you saw where every fact she’d learned had ended up and how they coexisted there with a few carefully selected premises that she allowed to float. But it was as if she had a miniature set of scales where she weighed proofs against hypotheses. Back then, if you knew Carly, you thought she preferred to have things unsettled—open, possible, malleable. But the day her scales tipped in favor of all the unknowable things in life was the day that her life fell apart. I couldn’t understand it; weren’t all of our scales tipped towards chaos from the start? Wasn’t life just an endless attempt to ignore the scales? Otherwise you spent your whole miserable life trying to balance them out again, and any fool knew you never would.

Being the frugal old bird she is, Mom insisted upon the shuttle service from the airport. Our hotel was the last on the strip—or was at the time—and it took an hour and a half to get to The Venetian. The Venetian was an extravagant, expensive resort, but Mom had been comp’ed for some reason. She liked to put our father’s—ex-father—annual income on her credit card applications, and as a result, often made platinum status immediately.

“We need to hit T.I.,” I said as we passed Treasure Island with its playground full of pyrotechnics, ships sinking and rising from a green lagoon while underpaid pirates shivered their timbers.

“Fodor’s says that Treasure Island is a little on the shabby side these days” Mom said. “Too much Orange Fanta and not enough Sinatra.” Mom was often making these inscrutable comments, which she usually claimed to have lifted whole from reliable printed sources. From the window of the bus, the Vegas strip looked as if it were underwater, blinking behind the waves of heat rising from the street.

“It’s like these hotels aren’t built but were unearthed instead,” Carly said. “It’s like a whole city of hotels was buried in some sandstorm a long time ago and are being discovered and excavated on a daily basis.” I turned and looked at Carly. Her eyes were closed. She seemed to see worlds on the inside of her eyelids and every once in a while, if she felt so moved, she would narrate them for you as if she were Richard Attenborough.

Mom dug through her bag nervously and I noticed that her cheeks had grown quite pink. When I hissed to get her attention, she turned to look at me and I saw myself reflected in her giant sunglasses. She gestured towards her vast, yawning purse and I peered inside. Clenched between her index and middle finger was a tiny bottle of vodka she’d scored on the airplane, and between her middle finger and her ring finger was another one. She looked to see how I’d react and I saw in her sunglasses that I hadn’t managed to smile.

When we finally arrived at The Venetian, Mom assessed it with the impassive eye of a federal highway surveyor.

‘They can build anything,” she said. The Venetian was a colossal replica of an Italian palace. It was exquisite, as many of the new Las Vegas hotels were. I felt wary of what I realized was burgeoning admiration. If it had just been Mom and me, I would have blurted out that Vegas was spectacularly beautiful. But it wasn’t just Mom and me. Carly was here, too. She always said something withering to the most innocent of my notions, and even though I responded with a smart remark that I hoped was just as withering, I always lost. I braved it anyway.

“I think it’s really pretty,” I said. “It looks exactly like an Italian palazzo.” I waited for the sigh, and it arrived promptly.

“On first glance, a lot of things seem authentic, Deebo,” Carly said. “I bet it will take about fourteen seconds before you realize that everything in Vegas is hollow.” She looked at me and her eyes mapped every inch of my face in an instant. “Maybe it’ll take you a full minute. You’re idealistic like that.” 

We all walked into The Venetian in silence. I hated that Mom never stuck up for me. Carly terrified her, it was true, but her cowardice could be as damaging as Carly’s belligerence. What was Carly suggesting? That I’d idealized Las Vegas, a giant, steel and plaster ideal disguised as a city? She was wrong. I don’t idealize. I ascertain.

 “Don’t call me Deebo,” I said to Carly as Mom was checking in across the lobby.

“Fine,” Carly said.

“I’m serious, Carly.”

“Fine.”

I knew Mom had told me to be nice to Carly, but there were a few things that I knew I didn’t have to stand for. Deebo was one of them. It didn’t seem like much to ask. For years, I’d had to tiptoe around Carly. They said she couldn’t help it, that she was born without her “emotional skin”. Everything burned. There could be no perspective. Everything hurt, and if it didn’t, she made it hurt. I guess I was lucky. I had only to observe, not feel. But in the ultra-sensitized environment of our home during those early years, I was the dumping ground for everything they tried to keep out of Carly’s life. Couldn’t I be unreasonable, too?

I looked at The Venetian’s vaulted ceilings. There was a fresco stretched from one end of the lobby to the other. I listened to the tip tap of heels walking across the marble floor. I touched one of the pillars. Felt like real stone. I began believing in it. It seemed imperative that I believe in it.

 “It’s real,” a voice said while I was craning to look at the fresco on the ceiling. “They had guys in here for three weeks. There were, like, thirty of them on scaffolding. They ate their lunches up there, too.” The bellboy laughed. “Once a slimy-ass tomato slice fell on top of my fucking hat.” He turned and looked at me quickly, then looked around us to see if anyone had overheard. “Oops, sorry.”

“That’s interesting information,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Whatever. Just thought you’d like to know. It’s not some kind of press-on fresco up there.”

“See?” I said to Carly when the bellboy had left. She shrugged.

“Don’t you think it’s just about the most depressing thing in the world to think of millions of dollars being spent and thirty guys spending their lunch hours on a scaffold in order to replicate a great work of art? They’re not even creating; they’re just copying. Congrats guys.” Now I shrugged. “That’s what their families are gonna say when they finally croak, Deebo: ‘What a guy, he worked on the replica Michelangelo fresco at The Venetian in Vegas.’ And probably by that time this place will have gone under like the house in Poltergeist.”

“I think it’s pretty,” I said, hoping to sound defiant and to look pokerfaced.

“If that was my greatest claim to fame, I’d kill myself,” Carly said.

“What’s your claim to fame, Carly?” I said sweetly.

“I have no aspirations to greatness.”

“Just delusions of grandeur.”

“Girls?” Mom said as she walked over with the room cards. She was wearing her purse and her carry-on bag strapped across her chest so that she looked like a commando wearing rounds of ammunition. “Are we having fun yet?” She handed Carly a room card. “One for you,” she said. “And one for me.”

“What about me?” I asked.

“Two peas in a pod don’t need separate room cards.”

Carly turned around and began walking towards the elevators. Mom turned towards me, her face marred by worry and a deep frown.

“Oops,” she said.

Carly didn’t want to join Mom and me on our reconnaissance trip to the Strip. I started to protest, but Mom put her thumb in my back and I stopped.

“Why don’t you just lie down here in the room,” she said to Carly. “I’ll get a cool cloth and you can put it over your eyes. We’ll be back in a couple hours.” Carly nodded and disappeared into the bathroom. When she came back out, she was wearing only a ratty old t-shirt and underwear which had three holes on the left buttock, evenly spaced apart, as if three people had calmly extinguished their cigarettes on her ass. Carly crawled into bed and Mom took an impossibly white washcloth from the ice bucket where she’d placed it for a few minutes, and laid it slowly over Carly’s eyes. Carly sucked in her breath quickly, shocked by the cold. I saw her body tense and then relax.

It was two minutes before twelve and outside the sun was burning. With the lights off, I was able to see the sad details of old casinos—details that are obscured at night by the gaudy glare of neon. Sparkling lights at midnight are yellow bulbs at dawn. Vegas at night seems wet, somehow; but in the daytime, the city looks like what it is—a desert. It transforms into something dry and cracked.

“Impressed, no?” Mom asked, now that we were safe from Carly.

“Much,” I said. “But I have to say, I think I’m going to like Vegas better at night and, uh, inside.” Mom didn’t say anything. We walked towards the Aladdin hotel complex.

“She just needs some time to get acclimated,” Mom said suddenly. “I think she’ll perk up later tonight.”

“I think so,” I said. We walked a little ways. Heat did not make the air heavy here the way it did in Indiana. It was dry and the inside of my nostrils had begun shedding flakes of dried mucus. Mom seemed lighter, somehow brighter. She’d even pushed her sunglasses on top of her head, despite the fact that it was so bright outside that even I, with my black-brown eyes, was squinting. She wanted to see things as they were, it seemed, and she wasn’t afraid now to show her face.

“Mom?”

“What?”

“How come you still act so scared around Carly?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Mom.”

“I like you, Delilah,” Mom said, and that was the end of the conversation. As we passed casino after casino, I could see my mother peering into each door thrown open, with placards promising buffets and $1.99 steaks and loose slots.

“Why don’t we slip into one of ‘em?” I said.

It was as if Mom had been waiting for me to offer. She had been jonesing for the slots for a couple hours now, ever since we left the airport. I’d seen how casinos affect my mother. Back home, she hit Mystic Lake casino at least once a month. Barely won anything, of course, but once she won a thousand bucks on a Wheel of Fortune slot and ever since has offered it as justification for further slot exploration.

Carly accompanied Mom to Mystic Lake once. This was back when Carly had eyes that seemed as clear as glass and when she did not walk with the invisible cross strapped to her back. When they came back, Carly told me that immediately upon their arrival at the Indian casino, Mom had begun practicing casino metaphysics and had dragged Carly into that tunnel of space and time that turns a minute into a decade, a quarter into your child’s college tuition and back again. Carly’s verdict on Mom those days was that she was amusing. I even remember seeing Carly accept a hug from Mom during that time.

Mom and I stopped in front of a non-descript street-side casino and I ran down the list of games.

“What’s your pleasure, Mom? They got video poker, double-deck blackjack, single zero Roulette, Pai Gow Poker, Keno, Caribbean Stud, and the old standby: slots.”

“Slots,” Mom said. “I like it simple.” Mom won five bucks and the quarters came clattering into the aluminum tray.

 “Mom?”

“Hmm?”

“What’s the plan, exactly?”

“Have fun, relax, do the Vegas thing. Be with my girls.”

“Seriously.”

“I am being serious.”

In my family, your affection could not be split across the equation. Since Mom liked me, it seemed she couldn’t like Carly. Carly made it easy for her not to.

Carly can pollute a room within minutes. Maybe that’s not true. Maybe she just pollutes me. I love her so much. This is something I do not say out loud very often because we have a long history of hating each other, a history that was recently interrupted by distance. We must keep up appearances. I can’t do battle with Carly because she can easily ruin me. Sometimes I think of my life as one long reconstruction, with Carly my own personal General Sherman. Maybe it’s not fair of me to say this of her; she doesn’t do it on purpose. The long shadow cast by a talented person is a myth; when you’ve lived your whole life standing hip to hip with someone who used to shine as brightly as Carly once did, you are left with no shadow in which to hide. But the difference is that while she was illuminated, I was revealed. Carly is a vessel of continuous and shocking talent. A painter. A dancer. A photographer. A pianist. An athlete. I’ve told her before how lucky she is to be so gifted and most of the time she didn’t respond to what she imagined was a meaningless, calculated compliment but once she did by saying: “I’m desperate.”

“The term ‘loose slots’ is really disgusting, if you think about it,” I offered as I watched Carly slowly swing her legs off the bed and scoot to the edge. She held her head in her hands for a few moments.

“It’s a disgusting term even if you don’t think about it,” she said. I pulled the curtains open. “Loose is rarely a positive adjective. It conjures up all sorts of horrible images.”

I walked over to the window. In Las Vegas, you know night has come when the McDonald’s signs come to life, glittering and blinking. The shadows cast by giant hotels shrink back into the corners. Nighttime here is a battle of electrical power and slot payouts.

Mom came out of the bathroom with the happy face lacquered on for Carly’s benefit.

“Let the festivities begin,” she said, her voice pinched and scared. I noticed these things about Mom, because I’m a good friend of hers. I don’t know if Carly can tell when Mom’s voice is pinched and scared. Carly picked some sleep out of her eyes.

“Would you like to peruse the selections I made for you?” Mom asked. “All of these are clearance items, which you will find hard to believe once you see them.” Carly stood up and stretched. I could see her black pubic hair through her undies, and some stray ones on the wrinkle where her thigh met her privates. I looked away. The old Carly would never have let me see that.

“Alright,” she said. “Let’s see ‘em.” Mom pulled out a neatly folded brown dress that, when held up to Carly’s shoulders, fell heavily across the rest of Carly’s body like a potato sack.

“That one strikes me as a little on the ‘former nun turned schoolteacher’ side,” I said. Mom frowned at me.

“It’s very flattering.”

“I guess for a buck ninety-seven it has to look flattering,” Carly said, and showed me the price tag, which had several red slashes through several marked-down prices.

 “It was originally twenty-five dollars,” my mother said, with a little hurt in her voice.

“She loves it, Ma,” I said. Carly flashed Mom an exaggerated smile and disappeared into the bathroom with the potato sack folded across her forearm. When she came out, she was wearing the potato sack and had no makeup on. I grabbed her chin and she flinched at the physical contact and drew her lips into a tight, perfect line. I dabbed some of my lipstick on her parched lips and flakes of her lip skin stuck to the lipstick. I took my pot of rouge and rubbed a little into her cheeks. “Your eyes really should be played up,” I said. “You’ve got really nice eyes, Carly.”

“I’ve always said, if she pulls her hair away from her face, Grace Kelly appears,” Mom said, regurgitating the same mixed compliment she’s been paying Carly for years.

“Grace Kelly in drag, maybe,” Carly said, and Mom threw her hands up.

“You try for twenty-six years to convince a daughter of her beauty—”

“And all you get back is the same stale comeback,” I said.

“Well maybe if it wasn’t the same insincere compliment every time,” Carly said. Mom and I exchanged a meaningful look, something I knew Carly hated. It was a reminder that not that much had changed.

“Normally you should not leave the house without at least a little mascara,” I said. “But we’re late and you don’t give a shit, so let’s go.” Carly actually smiled at me when I said that, and for just that instant, I believed that her smile was the algorithm for some formerly unsolvable problem. 

When Carly was around nine or ten, Mom told her that she was so difficult that no one enjoyed being around her. Her exact words were: “No wonder nobody likes you, Carly. Even your own father wouldn’t take you with him, and you’re the only one who wanted to join him.” I remember how Carly had fallen silent when Mom said that. Through the years, Carly would offer this exchange as justification for her depression and her hatred of our mother, but no one ever believed the story. A mother would never have said such a thing, people told Carly. Maybe that’s just how it sounded to Carly—or maybe the voice that spoke such cruel words was the one inside her own head. But I knew Carly was telling the truth.

It was no secret in our family that Mom had begged Dad to take custody of Carly after the divorce. Carly had always been a serious, unusually pensive child. She adored our father, to the point where she sprayed her pillowcase with Old Spice every night and wore his underwear as part of her bedtime getup. Dad had other things to do, though, and then later, another woman’s children to raise.

When Dad left, both Carly and I had to make a decision. I chose to stay sane by surrounding myself with solutions. Mathematics is a comfort. Once I broke through the membrane that separated math homework from the vast landscape I’ve been exploring ever since, I was fine. For me—for all of us who take solace in numbers—mathematical objects are living things that we chase like children running after fireflies.

Carly needed room to hope. The answer to the question she asked me every night—when do you think Dad is coming back for me?—was simple. Never. Ambiguity was, back then, her way of coping. That was the difference between us. I fell asleep thinking of the way different sorts of numbers were a lot like the people in my family: irrational, perfect, surreal, and complex. Carly murmured Psalm 23 over and over again until she fell asleep. She didn’t believe in the shepherd or the valley, but there were crevices in those words in which to hide even if you couldn’t quite believe the words themselves were real.

We got off the bus at Fremont Street with the rest of the tourists. Lurking on the corner of Fremont and the Boulevard was architorture and $10 million dollar holes. Fremont was canopied by millions of bulbs. The old cowboy waved mechanically, sadly. Mom was immediately drawn to the window of a Wal-Mart by showgirl Barbies displayed in the window. Once inside, she ordered me to take a picture.  On further inspiration she arranged two of the dolls, their feathers and sequins meshing, and asked for another picture.

“Delilah and Carly: the sister Rockettes!” she exclaimed. Mom placed one of the dolls in Carly’s hand.

“Do you want one, Carly? I’ll buy one for you. She looks just like you.” The old Carly might have made a joke here or she might have thrown the Barbie across the room or at Mom’s chest, but now she just stood there, transfixed by the doll. She smiled slightly, but I could see the two apostrophe-shaped wrinkles just above each of her eyebrows had appeared. I took the Barbie from her hands and placed it back in its display.

“I think it’s time to donate some money to the good people of Vegas,” I said. “Mom?”

“Let the festivities begin,” she said.

“They have begun,” I murmured. Mom watched Carly peruse the souvenir shot glasses. Suddenly, she yanked me behind the shelves of plastic snowglobes featuring each of the Strip’s hotels in a tiny, contained blizzard. Mom reached into her purse and pulled out her bottle of Xanax. She took one pill out and placed it in the palm of her hand. She placed her thumbnail in the vertical indentation of the tiny pill and cut it in half. She picked one half up and pulled her bottle of water out of her purse. She grabbed my hand and placed the half-pill in it. I watched her pop the other half in her mouth and take a swig of water.

“Hold that for me,” she said.

“Why?”

“I’m trying to cut back.”

“Why do you even need it?”

“It takes the edge off,” she said as she put her sunglasses back on.

“I like my edge,” I said. Mom frowned at me, and looked towards Carly.

“We’ve got too many edges as it is.”

“How can you cut a cake into eight pieces with three movements?” I asked Carly as the cab spirited us towards Caesar’s Palace.

“Is this a question or a riddle?” Carly asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Well, do you know the answer or don’t you?”

“I do know the answer.”

“Then it’s a riddle, and I don’t traffic in riddles.”

“It’s not a riddle. It’s a problem. Has a solution.”

“Whatever,” Carly said.

“Girls,” Mom said. “Let’s make this a pleasant trip. Just relax and enjoy yourself and each other. Mom’s picking up the tab. Mom’s taking care of everything. All you have to do sit back and look pretty.”

At the Palace, women in mini togas and beehived ponytails were serving sidecars to old women who sat transfixed at quarter slots, their palms tarnished black from stacks of half-clad silver. We walked toward the Forum Shops, passing Cleopatra’s Barge, artificial mist rising off the inch of water that surrounded the vessel. 

I could tell Carly was polluting, because suddenly the landscape of the casino, with its pillars and pits, its dull-faced gamblers and its duller-faced dealers, seemed to me to exude despondency. I began trying to pinpoint causes and in that effort, everything that I’d seen in the last few hours became a reason: The short Mexican men who stood in front of the casinos, handing out pornographic fliers for escort services—handing them to me, to my mother, but never to Carly. The silence of a Keno room, like a graveyard in the middle of an amusement park. Beaten men and women waiting for numbers to be revealed in a painfully sluggish version of Bingo and all around their Keno space are dead cigarettes. The intricate and wasteful water battles between the grand hotels—the theater of war.

Just as I was falling into the pit, Carly was being raised from the dead by a friendly slot machine. Mom and Carly had found two open Wheel of Fortune slots next to each other and were feeding twenties into the machines.

“Wheel. Of. Fortune,” the machine chanted, giving the impression that a very large studio audience was cheering them on.

“Yes!’ Mom shouted. “I got a free spin!” She placed her hand above an illuminated button on the machine and waited for the sound of a timer ticking down. Once it did, she waited about three seconds, then slammed her hand down on the button. The tiny wheel of fortune to begin spinning in the console above her. Carly and I leaned forward, holding our breath. The wheel slowed and for a moment we thought it was going to stop on 1000, then 250, then 5000, then 100. It stopped on 50.

“Score!” Carly said. “Still in the black.” Mom patted Carly’s forearm and Carly allowed her. “I love the spin.”

“We love the spin,” Mom said to me. “That’s the only reason to play this game. The spin.”

“You never know what you’re going to get,” Carly said. She tugged on her watch, squinting at it, and then taking it off and holding it out towards me. “Hold on to that, will you?” she said to me. “It pinches.” As I took the watch from my sister, I saw, briefly, the scar it covered. I put the watch on my wrist.

“A watch never shows the time absolutely accurately,” I once said to Carly. “So what’s the point of wearing one?”

“You get caught up in the details, Delilah,” Carly said.

Let me ask you this,” I said. “Do you think a watch that never shows the right time is better than wearing a broken watch?”

“What?”

“Well, a watch that’s stopped will at least show the correct time twice a day. One that’s off by a few minutes will never show the right time. Which would you prefer?”

“Is the kind of question in which someone wins and someone loses?”

“It’s just a question, dude. I’m asking out of curiosity,” I said.

“I think everyone in the world would prefer to have a watch that’s off by just a few minutes, because how in the hell are you supposed to know when those two times a day are when the watch is showing the right time. At least with a watch that’s just a little off, you can estimate.”

“A ha,” I said.

“A ha, what?” Carly said.

“You’re willing to leave it at a guess.”

“Point?” she asked.

“I just like to be reminded that we make do.”

Ancient Japanese mathematicians inscribed their discoveries on tablets. They’d hang the tablets in the temples to honor their gods. The solutions were holy. Maybe heaven is furnished with answers and solutions and theorems and maybe they don’t hang from rafters and trees and maybe they’re not even inscribed on tablets but instead are written on the inside of our minds. In order to believe in God—the sublime, amused mathematician—I have to believe that we will be given all answers to all the questions that torture us. I’m tormented by what I don’t know and what I can never know, but I know I’m not the only one who walks around pretending that I’m unaware there are a trillion unproven theorems. Each one is a needle stuck in my body and I can neither pull them out nor push them all the way in so they are buried in my flesh. I’ve made my life livable by believing that life is compact, as if the whole of existence could fit inside the space of a simple equilateral triangle.  Carly can’t do that. That’s why she’s not right. It’s not a matter of trivial questions, like why Dad left, and why she feels like shit all the time. It’s just one question for Carly, a question I’ve never asked myself because I was born with the answer, forever unspoken. But Carly is one of those desperate people now who have posed the question to themselves, who have presented themselves with the problem, and she is too terrified to know the answer to the question: Why has she allowed herself to continue living? Some of us never have to ask, but some never stop asking.

The next morning, Mom pulled me aside as Carly was showering and said that she thought getting out of Vegas for the day might be good. The lights weren’t helping. Mom had gone downstairs that morning and had the concierge rent us a car. Hoover Dam was about forty-five minutes away. I told Mom I remembered our 1985 trip to the dust of non-Vegas Nevada when Dad helped me climb a butte and Carly and I applauded wildly when a pack of wild horses crossed the highway in a flash of horseflesh, horsepower. Mom said she didn’t recall.

Carly looked very small under the hotel blanket she’d taken along. Slowly the steel and glass fell behind and the road stretched out before us like a comet. It carried us out of the Basin and into the red hills of clay and cacti. Hoover Dam was buttes and wind-whipped valleys and peaks, criss-crossed by electrical poles.

“Herbert, how could you?” I said to Mom as we filed into the gift shop with the rest of the tourists.

“No rugged individualism here, right?” Carly said.

“Huh?” I said.

“Rugged individualism?”

“Point?”

“That was sort of Hoover’s motto.”

“Oh.”

Mom waited semi-patiently for us to get our fill of the Dam for ten minutes. She could only take so much natural beauty; she liked seeing Vegas light up casino by casino at evenfall.

“I’ll wait for you girls in the car,” she said.

Carly walked over to an empty corner of the viewing platform. I followed her. We stood there, looking into the cement pit.

“What’s the answer?” Carly asked.

“To what?”

“The cake thing. It’s impossible. It’s not possible.”

“Yes it is,” I said. Carly lifted her jacket above her butt and pulled a piece of folded paper out of the right back pocket of her jeans. I watched as she unfolded it. It was full of circles and rectangles with slashes through them. All of them were flat, one-dimensional geometric shapes, and her attempts to solve the problem became increasingly messy, the pen strokes darker and fiercer the further down the page she’d gone. I took the paper from her and we walked over to one of the plaques set up near the fence that described the construction of Hoover Dam.

“Look,” I said, as I drew a square. I made it three dimensional, then made an X across the top of the cake. “Now look, watch what I do.” I drew a thick line through the middle of the square, as if I were slicing off the top of the cake. “The first two cuts sliced through the entire cake. Then I slice through the middle of the cake, horizontally like this, and now there are four piece on the top of the cake and four pieces from the bottom.” I paused. “Get it?”

“Who cuts a cake like that?”

“That’s not the point,” I said, handing the sheet of paper back to Carly. She crumpled it up and pushed it through a chink in the fence. I watched it drop into the dam.

“Do you do that on purpose?” she asked.

“Do I do what?”

“Ask me inane questions like that? To be a complete ass?” She hooked her fingers through the chain link fence that had been erected to keep people from falling into the dam.

“It’s just for fun,” I said. Carly didn’t respond. To me these questions counted for something. I asked them of her because I thought they might help. These questions had answers.

Carly walked over towards the other side of the viewing platform, then turned around and walked back towards me, stopping just an inch away from my face.

“Now I’ve got one for you, baby genius. There is something the dead eat, but if the living eat it, they die,” she said. The beauty of her eyes startled me. I had always seen them when they were a stormy deep blue, but now they were light gray, two dismal, misty seas. I hesitated for a moment.

“Something equals nothing,” I said, very evenly. Immediately, Carly’s eyes filled with tears and she turned away from me. I put my arm around her and led her to the car, where Mom was sitting with her sunglasses on. She honked the horn twice and waved, thinking we couldn’t spot her. And it was true; in the wavy heat hovering over the Hoover Dam parking lot, she might have been a mirage.