LEAVING LAS VEGAS
by Don Raymond
He was trying to escape, and not for the first time.
It had replaced the rising and setting of the sun, for him; a way of delineating future from past, although he knew that soon enough, even this would begin to fade. He would forget how many times he had climbed into his car and cruised past the neon lights, to search down empty avenues, only to find himself returned somehow to the place where he'd begun. It would become harder to remember each aborted attempt as its own event, and not a part of some larger destiny.
It seemed he'd been driving half the night, although the clock showed only thirty minutes had passed. He was through the heart of it now: past the casinos with their streamers of neon moving like rivers; into the suburban darkness of all-night liquor stores, bowling alleys, car dealerships. Here the roads unwound themselves and stretched infinite into the distance. He couldn't see an intersection ahead, only a point where the streetlights narrowed at the limit of his vision.
This was where it began, the turning inward once more.
He had been this way a hundred times; still, the buildings looked strange. They seemed adrift in the vacant darkness, absent of people to fill them with purpose. No turn he could take would lead him anywhere real. There would be side roads and stop signs, but these would always, eventually, end in a loading dock, or the fenced wall where a dumpster waited lonely beneath a vapor lamp. Better to stay on the expressway, though his sense of motion told him he had stopped. He saw the storefronts rush past, but it was as if they were moving, and he was sitting still.
He shook his head to clear the cobwebs. The night was making him drowsy. That was a part of it too, and he sipped his coffee and tried to stay awake as he remembered what the woman had told him, before his first failed attempt to leave.
"Souls in orbit," she had said, out of nowhere. It was early yet, but she'd clearly been drinking for hours. So had he. There was no reason not to, with nothing to do and all day to do it.
"Excuse me?"
