Halfway through the meal, Michael said, over his Filet-o-Fish, "Las Vegas is perhaps about the constant attempt of humans to decomplexify complex systems."

"Huh?"

"Las Vegas was once seedy, but it has now evolved into a Disney version of itself-which is probably less fun, but certainly more lucrative, and certainly necessary for the city to survive as an entity in the 1990s. Disneyland presupposes a universe of noncompetitive species-food chains hypersimplified into sterility by a middle-class fear of entropy: animals who will not eat each other and who irrationally enjoy human company; plant life consisting of lawns sprinkled on the fringes with colorful, sterile flowers."

"Oh."

"Nonetheless, chaos will ultimately prevail, just as one day, all of this will be dust, rubble, and sagebrush once more."

"Oh."

"But you know, the good chaos."

I felt like my IQ had shrunk to one digit.

Amy and Michael began making out right there next to the McDonald's-world play station.

Oop!, I might add, is going to be a hit. I think this has been lost on everybody in the Las Vegan blur, but it would appear that we're all still employed, and that our risk has become solid equity, but you know what? All I care about is that we're all still together as friends, that we're not enemies, and that we can continue to do cool stuff together. I thought the money would mean something, but it doesn't. It's there, but it's not emotional. It's simply there.

After dark Karla revealed to me that she, too, was fascinated by the laser beam, so we told everybody we were returning to the Hacienda next door, and instead drove our rented Altima sedan northeastward on Highway 15, to see how far away we could drive and still see the pyramid's laser beam. I had heard that air pilots reported seeing it from LAX. I wondered if astronauts could see the beam from outer space.

It was an overcast night. We drove and drove, and at forty miles out we realized that we hadn't been paying attention, and the laser beam was gone. We stopped in at a diner for hamburgers and video poker, and we won $2.25, so we were "a cheeseburger ahead for the evening."

We then got back into the car and drove back toward Las Vegas, and around twenty-six miles outside of Las Vegas we were able to see the

Luxor's beam of light up in the sky again. We pulled the car over onto the highway shoulder and gazed at it. It was awe-inspiring and romantic.

I felt so close to her.

Later, back at the hotel, I was PowerBooking my journal entry and I could feel Karla watching me, and I got a little self-concious. I said, "I guess it's sort of futile trying to keep a backup file of my personal memories . . ."

She said, "Not at all ... because we use so many machines, it's not surprising we should store memories there, as well as in our bodies. The one thing that differentiates human beings from all other creatures on Earth is the externalization of subjective memory-first through notches in trees, then through cave paintings, then through the written word and now, through databases of almost otherworldly storage and retrieval power."

Karla said that as our memory multiplies itself seemingly logarithmically, history's pace feels faster, it is "accelerating" at an oddly distorted rate, and will only continue to do so faster and faster. "Soon enough all human knowledge will be squished into small nubbins the size of pencil erasers that you can pea-shoot at the stars."

I asked, "And . . . what then-when the entire memory of the species is as cheap and easily available as pebbles at the beach?"

She said that this is not a frightening question. "It is a question full of awe and wonder and respect. And people being people, they will probably, I imagine, use these new memory pebbles to build new paths." Like I said ... it was romantic.

SUNDAY

What happened was this: I was looking out the window and Todd was fighting with his parents out on the Strip, down below the Hacienda's sign. How long was this going to go on? I decided I had to help Todd and so I went down to see if I could '"Stop the Insanity!" Just as I joined them, Karla came running out. We all turned, and I saw her coming, and I could tell something was very, very wrong.

She collected her breath and said, "Dan, I'm really sorry to have to tell you this, but there's been an accident."

I said, "An accident?"

She said that she had just spoken with Ethan in Palo Alto. Mom had had a stroke at her swim class, that she was paralyzed, and no one knew what would happen next.

Right there and then, Todd and his parents fell down on their knees and prayed on the Strip, and I wondered if they had scraped their knees in their fall, and I wondered what it was to pray, because it was something I have never learned to do, and all I remember is falling, something I have talked about, and something I was now doing.

plane window towers telephone lines

green squares

lights

baggage

The New World dream

The extended arm

The caravan traversing a million mites of prairie

Cross the uncrossable

Make that journey and build the road along the way.

You succeeded at memory-creation beyond all wildest dreams.

Two Weeks Later

TUESDAY, JANUARY 17,1995

Hanshin Expressway

Stephen Hawking walking through quiet rooms pointing out things you've never seen before.

Mitsukoshi department store, Kobe, Japan, at a 45-degree angle, its contents smashed against walls

Western Washington State, minus Seattle's metro region, is assigned a new area code, 360, effective January 15, 1995

thin blood Nirvana Unplugged what I wanted Nikkei Index Cerebrovascular event

R U Japanese?

rear-view mirror

Hawaii

what really happened

Embolus

Mot her maker System-beater Sharkprincess Sky walker

Possible reversibility

Monsterbreaker

Kidnapper Codebreaker Keypadburner dot

Godseeker

Braineater

This is the day of days, and so the telling begins.

Karla massaged Mom's back in Mom's new room beside the kitchen, a room that we filled with her rocks and photos and potpourri and Misty. Misty, buffered by dumbness, unaware of the traffic jams in the blood flow of her master's brain: carbon freeways of cracked cement and flattened Camrys and Isuzus and F-lOOs; neural survivors as well as those neural victims, all as yet unretrieved from within the overpasses of her Self. Mom's brain is crashed and inert, her limbs as stationary as lemon tree branches on an August afternoon, occasionally twitching limbs appended by a wedding ring and a Chyx wristband from Amy. Images of a crashed Japan on every channel, the newscaster's voice floating in the background. At least Japan can be rebuilt.

Karla spent the morning massaging the lax folds of Mom's skin. I wonder, is she there! It is what I... we have lived with for weeks, we who look into Mom's eyes and say, Hello in there, thinking, We are here. Where are you, Mom? Where did you go? How did you disappear? How did the world steal you? How did you vanish?

Actually, Karla was the first to cross the frontier between words and skin; speech and flesh.

Karla invaded Mom's body. Last week Karla removed her Nikes, took a plastic squeeze bottle of mineral oil from the bathroom, cut it with sesame oil, and crawled atop Mom's prone form on the foldaway rental bed. She told Dad to watch, told him that he was next, and so Dad watched.

Karla dug and sculpted into my mom's body, stretching it as only she knows how to do, willing sensation into her flesh, into her rhomboids, her triceps, her rotor cuffs and spaces where probing generated no reaction; Karla, laser-beaming her faith into the body of this woman.

Last week was the beginning, the Confusion, when everything seemed lost, the image of Mom lying frozen and starved of oxygen in the Palo Alto Municipal Swimming Pool haunting us. Ethan meeting us at the hospital, his own skin the color of white fatty bacon embedded with an IV drip; Dusty and Lindsay, Dusty sucking in her breath with fear, and turning her head from ours, then returning her gaze and offering us Lindsay as consolation.