The Secret History of Las Vegas by Chris Abani

light-skinned non-whites who were a mix of races, and the Indians), made them guest workers in their own country.
    Isaac stepped back onto the pavement. The policemen moved on. Isaac trotted over to the taxi rank and got aboard a taxi bus headed back to Soweto. If he got caught now, he would go to prison for bomb-making, having never made his first bomb. But it was his lucky day.
    It was also the last day he built bombs himself, from then on restricting himself to teaching others. But it wasn’t enough for him. A veteran of the Second World War, he missed the rust of blood. So he began hunting for Boer, as he put it, laughing at the pun. His old Lee-Enfield rifle was his weapon of choice. And with time, Eskia became its constant companion.
    Eskia pulled up to the hospital and studied the façade. Sunil would be in there for much of the night. Eskia hacked into the hospital records. His fingers moved fast over the keyboard of his laptop. Thank God for broadband Internet cards; it made spying such a breeze these days. He didn’t know the names of the twins, but it would be easy searching under “conjoined.” How many could there be? Sure enough, their record popped up—it was still pretty blank. It had their names and the date. Even their vitals hadn’t been added. Eskia was bored.
    There was nothing interesting happening here, so he decided he would break into Sunil’s office tonight and steal his hard drives. All Sunil’s research should be on them and he could sell that for a lot of money. Or at the very least the research could be used as a bargaining chip. What for was not clear yet, but then he’d only arrived a few days ago, plenty of time to get into trouble. He started his car. The only question was whether to stop by his hotel first, so he flipped a coin.
    Eskia pulled out of the hospital parking lot, headed back to his hotel: New York, New York. Why was it that Vegas had to wring every last gag out of things? Everything here was a pun on a pun, so many times removed that it was not clear what the original joke had been, or if there had even been one in the first place. As he drove past the ziggurat of the MGM, black and polished, like an ancient Aztec temple cleaned up for a visitation by aliens, he thought of ways to hurt Sunil. He knew just the thing.
    Smiling, he turned on his phone and used the voice-dialing function.
    Call Asia, he said.
    The phone rang.
    Hello, Asia said on the second ring.

Eleven
    S unil’s drive over to County was slow, and he played with the idea of taking the Strip. Natives always avoided that route, so taking it seemed like a good idea. Going up West Flamingo Drive, he made a right onto Las Vegas Boulevard. As he’d guessed, there was less traffic, although the sidewalks were packed with people.
    The Halloween crowds poured up and down the Strip like a thick sludge. Fireworks, set off by the Bellagio, fired straight up and out of its fountains, filling the sky with mushrooms of dazzle. Sunil was reminded of the old bomb parties the casinos used to host back in the ’50s, when the U.S. government set off nukes in the nearby desert, sometimes as close as six miles from the city. The casinos sold package tours to see U.S. history in the making: the end of the Commies and the death of the Red Threat. People flocked by the thousands to the dawn parties to watch the mushroom clouds. Minutes after the display, they would return to gambling or turn in to catch some much-needed sleep. Seats on the terrace, where one could watch the explosions while sipping on a cocktail, were fought over. Those unable to afford the parties or terraces drove out to ground zero and hiked as close as possible. The Atomic Energy Commission never turned them away, even when there were families with children.
    Sunil watched the light show across his windshield, fireworks ceding to electricity. The radiance gave the impression that the city was a mirage. At a stoplight,