The bookstore is in the desert.

It's the reason nobody comes to Vegas, but there it is: one of the most beautiful bookstores I've ever seen. The trellis on the ceiling holds back a burgeoning tide of peonies above the cardboard cut-out head of James Baldwin. The bird clock tells off the hour around two islands of light: little studios for a captive writer to work in. This shop is built into an apartment complex: retail space on the bottom and dwellings on the top. Some of them are apartments to house visiting writers as part of their residency in Las Vegas. 

I went because a friend, the writer Alex Jennings, was in one of these residency spaces. We wandered around Fremont Street, trying to get a sense of post-pandemic merrymaking. Bouncers and barkers stood at every door, hawking free play for anyone who would try their luck at the tables, and sternly mandating mask usage for anyone who thought they might gamble with other people's lungs. It was as bizarre a scene as I thought I could sidle into. Then I sat and had fish eat the dead skin off my feet inside their tank. I asked the fishkeeper whether it was the strangest job she had ever had. She nodded, eyes sober above her mask and her eyebrow intentionally notched into a dotted line above that. "Yes," she told me. "Two weeks and it's already the strangest by far."
 

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But I kept searching for stranger. I showed my vax card to get into a basement comedy show and marveled at how it felt to share indoor space again, how cagey and furtive people were around one another. I drank in the streets and ate dinner indoors, trying to regain a sense of ease in travel. That sense did not come. I was just a few days past my 39th birthday, and a thousand years older than I had been the year before lockdown. I felt like I was both very young and also perilously close to death. I avoided the pockmarked and scarred city of the daytime and waited for her to glow up at night, dodging the 95 degree mornings for the desert spring of balmy nights and the unnatural sound of pools and fountains. The sound of kids in casino hallways. The sound of my keyboard growing still, stiller, stillest. 

Meow Wolf's OmegaMart show is an immersive experience of the weird, leaning on all that is surreal about retail and depending on the curiosity of the customer-- Do you have any more in the back? In the back there are refuge-tunnels built by employee/survivors, populated with their glitter lipgloss and their science fiction paperbacks. Half a narrative is presented: are these employees disappearing? Are aliens at the heart of it all? But there's no solution, no room to escape. At the heart of it all is a twisty slide down from the third floor. Paper covers over my shoes and you returrn to the ground floor of art with my skirt ridden up. I am still not feeling inspired. 

Days of dehydration and forgetting the calendar, but not in the slipstream way that slid over me last summer. This is something else, something more like the way time passes in Neverland, Faerieland, in a dream that wakes me with the panicky feeling that I'm already late. I stopped all my alarms and swam through it, swam through the blazing blue of the rooftop pool on the top of my hotel. I set a timer for fifteen minutes to keep from getting burned. It never went off. My skin did not change color. 

Coming home, I felt as though I'd stepped outside of my life, outside of real life, into some pocket universe in which I could not write or track my true self. Tired and dried-out, I caught my flight home. We took off in brutal winds, battered around the sky and clinging to the armrests, listening to the strident coterie of an itinerant preacher explaining that we would be fine because god was with us (and with no other plane.)

I came home to the fat, sweet air of my city by the sea. To my house full of cardboard boxes and my roommates counting the days until they can move out and leave me to my own office for the first time in my life. I came home to the knowledge that I will never love the desert, and that my city by the sea will never love me. 

It's the reason nobody comes home; because everything is always changing here and not one part of it can be counted on. But there it is: I have the keys and they know me here. And when I sit down at my desk, the words flow right back in and get typed out. I wrote about my old tech job. I wrote about Frankenstein and the girls who never make it home. I wrote more of the book that draws the last few grains of sand of my own desert out of the crevices in my heart. 

The bookstore is in the desert. And the desert is still in me. I take it wherever I go. 

Dryly, 

Meg