I watched him order for us, the way he passed the kid his food without asking him what he wanted.
“You’re all brothers, aren’t you?” I asked the kid.
He stopped smacking his food and checked for a reaction from his partner up front.
“You old enough to drink?” I continued.
“Hey, man, I’ll be twenty-three in December.”
“And he’s the oldest, right? What, twenty-five?”
He looked away, chuckling like he didn’t care, and stuffed his mouth with some fries. In the rearview mirror, his brother was ignoring us, driving and chewing his food evenly.
“Behind us,” I said, gesturing at the third brother trailing us in my Chrysler, the one who had handed me the note in the parking lot. “He’s younger than you both. Looks like he got his driver’s license last week.”
The kid made a face. “Come on, man, we don’t look that much alike.”
“You don’t need to. I can still tell.”
He tried to suss out my meaning, his grin a defensive one now. He couldn’t see what I saw: the older brother’s authority, unquestioned, almost paternal. It was a right of kinship wielded by Asian siblings, whether they looked alike or not — a right I would have envied had I a brother or sister.
Hours later, as we traveled deep into the night, I was watching him sleep when he opened his eyes, like he’d only been meditating, and stared at the back of his brother’s head.
I noticed something in his hand. Before we left my apartment in Oakland, they had me call the station and leave a message for my sergeant, explaining only that I would be out of town indefinitely for a family emergency. Then they made me pack a small duffel bag and change into civilian clothing. Before we left, they took one of my credit cards and also my badge, which I could now see in the kid’s palm. He was caressing it slowly with his thumb.
He peered at me. “How many people’ve you killed, Mr. Officer?”
“I’ve lost count.”
“Come on, you ain’t young. How you be a cop in Oakland for so long and not kill nobody?”
“We don’t kill people. We defend ourselves when necessary and sometimes people die. It’s part of the job. It’s not exactly intentional.”
“Man, it’s intentional if you killing them before they kill you.”
“All right. If that’s how you want to see it.”
“So come on, how many you shot. How many you killed?”
“I’ve never killed anyone. You look disappointed.”
“No one, huh? But I bet you wanted some of them bitches to die, right?”
There was a vulgar sincerity in the way he kept nodding at me as though, despite the difference between us in age and profession, we shared some secret affinity because of the hardware we carried.
“Sure, I wanted a few assholes to not make it. Do I have to give you a number? Tell me yours.”
He looked up as if sifting through his memory. “Shit, I—”
His brother snapped at him in Vietnamese, three or four clipped words and a glare in the rearview mirror, his sudden scowl as startling as his tone. The kid fell silent and sheepishly turned to the window.
The brother glanced at me before returning his eyes to the road, as if returning to a reverie, as if the night saddened him.
IT WAS DAYLIGHT when I awoke, with the kid driving now and the brother seated next to me, facing the window. His coughing had awoken me, but the car was coasting in funereal silence. I sat up and saw that we’d arrived in Vegas, crawling along I-15 in early-morning traffic. Still following us, nearly riding our rear bumper, was the youngest brother in my Chrysler.
I yawned, and this time it was the kid glancing back in the rearview mirror.
I said, “Your baby brother been driving all night long?”
“Don’t worry, he’s a fucking vampire. He doesn’t sleep till the sun’s out. We drop you off, and his ass is going to bed.”
“And where are you dropping me off?”
“You think I know?”
Next to me, the eldest brother lit a cigarette and massaged his cropped hair as he gazed out the window, cut off in his own quiet like he was the only person in the car. I could tell that he rarely concerned himself with any of his brother’s white noise. He rolled down his window halfway and ushered in the buzz of traffic and a frigid morning breeze. It had slipped my mind that winter comes to the desert. I put on the rumpled jacket I had used as a pillow. The car was so darkly tinted that the white light from his open window looked alien to my bleary eyes, the color of emptiness.
I asked him for a cigarette and he obliged, lighting it for me without a word, without meeting my eye. The quiet ones do this. They exert control by giving nothing out, and it’s this blankness that makes them unpredictable, as dangerous as the loud ones are obvious. But this kid’s silence also made him somehow genuine. The one person so far who wasn’t trying.
I opened my window and zipped up my jacket, blew smoke into the harsh light. The one time I’d smoked since Suzy left was that last time here with Sonny Jr. But it soothed me now, as it used to in the morning, back when I’d smoke a pack and a half a day, starting with the one I’d put to my lips the moment I got out of bed: before I brushed my teeth or even looked at myself in the mirror, standing by the bedroom window and slowly waking myself in the sunlight, amid the drifting curling smoke, those five minutes like a silent prayer to prepare myself for whatever the day might bring. Suzy sometimes joined me by the window. We’d share the cigarette.
I realized now why I had quit. It wasn’t to get healthy. And it was only partially to rid myself of the nostalgia for my old habits with her. I was at work the day she left the house; she took all her clothes and only the possessions she had acquired before we met, which amounted to some Vietnamese music cassettes, a few books, and a collection of small framed watercolor paintings of Vietnam landscapes. And of course the red journal. Everything else remained: our furniture, the jewelry I’d bought her, all our photographs together, framed and unframed. I came home that evening to a fully furnished house that felt as empty as her half of the bedroom closet. To my surprise, her crucifixes still hung on the walls and her porcelain figurines — the various Jesuses and Virgin Marys and Saints this and that — still peopled the shelves, as if in knowing my resistance to religion she had purposefully left God’s presence to save me. Or mock me. I found myself sinking into the sofa and not quite believing that she’d actually gone through with it, abandoned me. I remember smoking a cigarette on the front porch that night, watching the fog amble in from the bay, and deciding that after a carton a week for three decades — since I was fourteen, for God’s sake—that cigarette would be my last one. I was quitting not because I wanted or needed to, and definitely not because I thought it would be easy. I was quitting to punish myself.
We were approaching the southern end of the Strip. As the brother lit up another cigarette, I flicked mine out the window and gazed at the mountain range of hotels that bordered the highway. At night, I remembered, amid giant digital screens flashing promises and exaltations, these same hotels towered over the city like monuments, some with mirrored walls that — as you traveled past them — trembled in the wash of glitter and dancing light, as though the city were too alive, too troubled with hope, ever to fall asleep.
But now, in the desert dawn, there was a lifelessness to the way the valley’s light fell across the Strip and to how the shadows pooled beneath the hotels like melted paint. Framed by the Martian mountains in the distance, the Strip looked like an artist’s rendering of some alien civilization, with buildings erected from every culture and time in history, every possible mood, and with no consistency save their garishness and size. In the daylight, everything looked faraway, out of reach. If people came here to lose themselves, did they ever come to find anything?