I feel we should write science fiction about this.
At the north end of the Las Vegas strip, one steps out of the taxi to a cluttered and disjointed replica of another world, a Palazzo of cement etched with remarkable precision into a facsimile of old Europe. Even the space between street and entrance is labyrinthine, a disorienting landscape designed for cars and very specific lines of sight. One finds the porté-cochere eventually and steps through the crowd of tourists into the hotel’s lobby, whose ennoblement seems inversely proportional to its gradiose scale. From here one proceeds down vast hallways, as massive as anything this side of Byzantium and decorated at even greater expense.
Then there is the cavernous, maddening casino. Beyond this, deeper into the bowels of this place, there is a mall, as enormous and gilded as any on earth. Past this there are banqueting places and ballrooms, each half the size of a football pitch, and here the tourists are gone, and you are in the calmer, more Ballardian world of conferencing support, of abandoned projectors and a million neatly-stacked chairs and acrylic carpet that will feed postaocyalptic bacteria for millenia.
Then there are the endless mazes of hallways, the stairs down. Then the pine-scented yet dusty places where the hotel and casino staff work the unseen magic that makes the complex run. In the distance, the sound of a truly magnificent catering operation, clattering and murmuring away. Down another level, in an elevator large enough to accommodate a small helicopter, one is in a suddenly bustling place full of security guards and mysterious laborers. I am not supposed to be here and am challenged.
“Oh, next level down,” he checks my credentials. “I’ll escort you.”
And even there the place is massive, though the lights are slightly dimmer and the walls and fittings reduced to standard business America, 40 feet beneath the glamor and garishness of the hotel proper.
My destination is a walk around inexplicable corners, in quiet silence. A certain electrical gloom sets in. This is a place into which few go. We are met by a handsome, graying man. Three piece suit. C-Suite.
“Glad to see you found your way down here. We had someone meeting you but you musta walked right past them.” From the voice you know it’s Davison. “Glad to see you ran into Scott here.”
Scott nods at Davison and heads back toward the elevator. Davison smiles and beckons me into the room beyond.
I already know what it is. The scent of silicone and phalates reaches beyond the door. It’s what I’m here to deal with.
The legendary ball pit of the Venetian
