Leaving Las Vegas

Las Vegas is about a three-hour drive from my house in Lake Arrowhead, and back in the day, under the influence of alcohol, coke, or meth, I could make it in just over two. Easy. But this time, when I come to Vegas, it is with my wife and youngest son. I do not speed, at least not excessively, and I am no longer drinking or using. Instead I am here to visit my middle son who works in law enforcement. He lives in Wyoming and we don’t see each other nearly enough, but he’s taking part in counterterrorism tactical drills on the outskirts of Vegas, and this is a good opportunity to drive out and visit with him after he finishes training. We meet up with Logan and his girlfriend for dinner at seven o’clock at Cucina by Wolfgang Puck on October 1, 2017. In three hours and five minutes, the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history will occur.

There is a time, early in my sobriety, when I could not have gone to Vegas without putting myself in serious jeopardy of relapsing. But that time has passed. Alcohol no longer concerns me. I no longer fear being around it. When the hostess seats us, and the waiter comes by to take our drink orders, Nate leans in close to me. He lowers his voice.

“It won’t bother you if I have a glass of wine?”

“No,” I say. “Go right ahead.”

“You sure?”

I smile.

“You’re twenty-one,” I say.

He’s a considerate young man. All my sons are considerate and thoughtful, including Andy, my oldest, who is getting married in two weeks and could not make this trip. They have seen their father as a drunk and they have seen him as a better man. I have regained the respect I lost but only because they have allowed it, only because they have opened their hearts to me again, and keeping that respect, which is also their love, has everything to do with my sobriety.

My wife Paula, Logan, and his girlfriend also order wine. Paula rarely drinks and never when we go out for dinner alone. This is another thing I don’t understand. Why bother drinking if you don’t want to get drunk, really drunk? This, plainly, is another reason why she can safely drink and I cannot. Once I start, I have no cut-off point short of unconsciousness.

In my teens, alcohol made me silly and cheerful. I could count on having a good time. By my late twenties, however, my moods and behavior became increasingly less predictable, and if there is one person at the table who concerns me, it is Logan. I love all of my boys the same and differently, for they are each their own person. They each, in their own ways, embody both strengths and weaknesses of their parents, but Logan is too much like myself with his resolute temperament and tough exterior masking deep emotional vulnerabilities. I’ve seen him drunk before and his disposition can fluctuate widely from good-naturedness to anger without a moment’s notice. This same month last year, when I visited him in Wyoming, he participated in a fundraiser for our wounded Green Berets, Army Rangers, and their Gold Star families, and after leading a tactical unit in an urban-breach exhibition, his team bought him drinks at the bar.

He seemed fine.

He seemed like a happy drunk. But later, on the drive back to our motel, his mood turned dark. I saw too much of myself in my boy that night, and it scared me. It scares me now. A single incident like this is not necessarily indicative of alcoholism, but law enforcement and military, like writers, are notorious for their drinking and partying, and so I worry. I worry that if he is not careful he will damage what he has with the pretty young girl seated beside him, this girl named Courtney who has just moved in with him, as I damaged what I had with his mother. The same is true for Paula. She’s endured her fair share of misery from me, too, but I straightened up in time. I like to think that I learned. I like to think that together we saved what I could’ve so easily destroyed again. And I like to think that should any of my sons one day need this lesson that they learn it more thoroughly and quickly than their father.

The waiter is looking at me. I’m the last to order.

“And you?” he says.

“Diet Coke,” I say.

The waiter leaves, and it crosses my mind what reaction I would’ve gotten if I’d jokingly asked for a whiskey straight up. Or vodka with a twist. It wouldn’t have been funny. Terrifying, maybe, but not funny.

About a mile away, as we’re enjoying dinner, Stephen Paddock is locked in his suite on the thirty-second floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino. He checked in three days earlier, but he doesn’t move into this particular room until the night before the attack, which, according to a hotel source, is given to him free because he was a good customer. This one has a much better view of the Las Vegas Strip and the Route 91 Harvest, a country music festival across the street, not far from where Paula, Nate, and I are staying at the Monte Carlo. Logan and his girlfriend have a room at the nearby Circus Circus.

Obviously I have no idea what Paddock is doing in the last hours leading up to the massacre, but I can imagine. I can see him setting up the shooting tripods police later find in his room. I can see him loading the high-capacity magazines on his semiautomatic rifles, several with scopes, and I can see him jotting down numbers on a piece of paper on the coffee table. Calculations of distance and trajectory from his suite to the concert site below. He thinks he is smart. That he knows firearms and how best to use them. He is, however, disappointed that he was unable to purchase tracer ammunition at a gun show some weeks earlier. These are bullets with a pyrotechnic charge that, when fired, leave an illuminated path, and they would’ve helped him see where his shots were going in the darkness. They would’ve helped him kill more.

It’s unfortunate that he’ll have to make do without tracers, but it’s nothing more than a small setback for such a fine sharpshooter. Such a great fucking marksman, blasting into a crowd, like shooting into a barrel of fish. He feels the time is now. He feels a sense of urgency, for he has booked rooms before in two other hotels overlooking concerts, and both times he fails to follow through with his plans. Is it because he suddenly has a change of heart? Is it because, if only for a split second, he sees himself for the sick and wicked man he is?

I doubt it.

He has a penchant for prostitutes, violent sex, and rape fantasies, and brags to the women about his ex-con father, a bank robber, and how he inherited his “bad blood.” How he was “born bad.” If he means bad as in badass, then he sounds like a real tough guy to me, especially the part where he ties the women up and has them “scream for help” for six thousand dollars a night.

Now I’m outside of the room. In the hallway.

Maybe I’m a guest passing by, or a maid with her cart of linens and cleaning supplies, but I see the door open just enough for Paddock to slip his hand out. I see his hand disappear, leaving the DO NOT DISTURB placard hanging from the knob. It swings gently from side to side as the door shuts and locks behind him.

I don’t check the time. I’m only guessing. But it would have to be close to eight when we finish dinner and the waiter takes our plates. I make a mental note that nobody ordered a second drink, including Logan. If I were him at his ripe old age of twenty-eight, I’d have easily been on my fourth or fifth by now, making an ass of myself, and it encourages me that he’s able to stop at one. Then again maybe he’s holding strong because he knows I’m watching. Maybe he’s planning on hitting the bar at one of the casinos and getting smashed as soon as he escapes my attention. I’m a cynic when it comes to my sons, especially my sons. I’ve read widely on the subject of addiction and can tick off all kinds of facts, particularly the one about children of drunks being four times more susceptible to alcoholism than children whose parents are not drunks. Double that figure if the child starts drinking before the age of fourteen. My boys clearly fall into the first category, and I’m pretty sure, since none of them are exactly angels, that they also meet the criteria of the second.

Dessert arrives.

I’m skipping this course but Nate wants me to share his tiramisu with him.

“I’m stuffed,” I say.

“Me, too,” he says. “Help me out. Don’t want to waste food, right? You’re the one always bitching about not wasting food.”

He has me there.

“Wiseass,” I say. “Give me your fork.”

When they were growing up, I used to make them sit at the table until they finished their plates. I used to tell them stories about how their grandparents suffered through the Great Depression, and how, when I was a kid and my parents broke up and my mother moved me, my brother, and sister to LA, that there were a few days here and there when we didn’t have food at all. I used to tell them that by the third day your stomach stops growling and the aching stops.

As I’m helping Nate with his tiramisu, Courtney catches his eye.

“So Nate,” she asks, “are you still in college?”

“I didn’t go to college.”

Logan has a bachelor’s in criminal justice. Andy, my oldest, earned an MFA in studio art and works at a gallery in Beverly Hills. Nate is the outlier, the rebel who defied his father’s direct orders that he would and must attend college. His obstinance, however, wore me down, and eventually my commands turned to supplications, followed by weeks of brooding silence, and finally acceptance that this son has different plans. I’m fine with his decision now, yet when the question pops up in mixed company I still feel the need to defend what I assume others may see as my parental failure. Aren’t all kids supposed to go to college, and, if not, aren’t they all losers? Isn’t that how college-educated people often judge those without college degrees? Courtney has a bachelor’s in accounting.

“He’s into computers,” I say. “He’s been making good money since he was a teenager.”

It’s true. Mid-five figures at fourteen. Enough, anyway, to live well in a nice house in San Diego since he moved out at eighteen.

“Oh,” she says. “That’s great.”

But I’m not so sure she means it. It’s the sort of response people give when they realize they’ve inadvertently broached a touchy subject. So it’s Logan’s turn to step up for his little brother.

“He runs his own cybersecurity company.”

“Really?”

“It’s not just me,” he says. “I have a partner. We run it together.”

Nate is modest, and if not for his muscular build and male-model good looks, you’d never know he’s a computer geek who spends so much of his time alone in his home office that he’s become a bona fide borderline social anxiety case.

“Tell her about it,” I say.

“Not now.”

“Come on,” I say, “it’s pretty interesting stuff.”

I nudge him with my elbow. He nudges me back, but I get my way. He looks at Courtney.

“It’s not that big a deal,” he says. “We scrape the dark web and parse through the data to see if we can find any references to leaked personal information. This can be extremely important to businesses to protect their intellectual property and customer data.”

“In English, please,” Logan says.

Nate blinks.

“I guess you could just say we watch out for companies, and if they have an issue, we eliminate the threat before it becomes a problem.”

“What sort of companies?” Courtney asks.

“That I can’t talk about.”

None of us press him, and it’s just as well. We’ve finished dessert, and except for Nate, who is not the least bit interested in gambling, we’re all itching now to split up and watch our money disappear into what might as well be the dark web of computerized slot machines.

Stephen Paddock is a compulsive gambler. He is also wealthy. His game of choice is video poker, and he’s been known to play for ten hours at a stint, occasionally winning thousands on a single hand, but usually losing far more. The computerized games are set heavily in the house’s favor, and though Paddock knows this, he prefers video poker over the real thing because of his aversion to people. The machines require no human interaction. He is sixty-four years old. His attire does not suggest a man of wealth, often going unshaven, in sweatpants and flip-flops, even while playing in Vegas’s exclusive, restricted-access areas for high rollers. He is a loner. But he is a loner with a high profile among the casino bosses who reward him for his loyalty with big hotel perks. Paddock is described by personnel as quiet, perhaps standoffish, while neighbors recall Paddock’s girlfriend, Marilou Danley, as outgoing and friendly. Some say that they made a great pair. Others report frequently hearing him screaming and shouting and berating her.

An Australian acquaintance of Paddock’s refers to him as highly intelligent, conservative, guarded, methodical. A strategic, planning type of guy. Paddock’s brother, Eric, says his eldest sibling was like a dad to him. That he took him camping. That he was a good guy. But Paddock had little contact with his two other younger brothers, according to Eric, because one is a very different man and the other used to beat Stephen up when they were kids. Stephen Paddock is apparently an unforgiving, judgmental man, and yet there seems to be no ideological motivations for his heinous slaughter of innocent children, women, and men.

In Stephen Paddock’s case, I am unforgiving as well. May the bastard burn in hell.

At the time of the shooting I am playing Paddock’s favorite game at the Aria Resort and Casino. I am sitting at the bar, drinking a Coke, and actually winning on the video poker machine in front of me. Every now and then I take a break and look up at the flat-screens mounted above the bar. A football game is underway. The people around me are excited, shouting and rooting for their preferred players, their preferred teams. But I’m not interested in the game. I don’t follow football or any other sports except boxing and college wrestling. Still, I like to see people enjoy themselves, and so their boisterousness doesn’t bother me. All the bottles lined up in neat rows behind the counter don’t bother me, either. Lights shine upward from underneath the glass shelves that hold the bottles, so that the liquor inside them glows, soft amber for the whiskey and brandy, translucent crystal for the vodka and gin. Set against a backdrop of mirrors, they make an appealing presentation, and I admit that my eyes linger on the glimmering, cobalt blue bottle of Skyy. How often did I start a binge with the more expensive vodkas and end it with cheap stuff? How can the contents of these pretty bottles be so lethal to one and so harmless and pleasurable to another?

Purportedly Stephen Paddock regularly drank a constant stream of booze while he sat and played the same kind of game I’m playing now. For all I know, I could be sitting on the same stool he once sat on. He was, like myself, an alcoholic, and news reports will later suggest that his drinking contributed to his mental deterioration. Mental illness and alcoholism, however, cannot and never will, in any conceivable way, explain an act that can only be defined as evil.

I press a button.

The cards on the screen line up, four of a kind, all deuces, and the next thing I know I’m 250 dollars richer.

I’ve been at it a while, a couple hours it seems, trying to kill time while Paula plays the slots. But for once I’d like to quit while I’m ahead, and I’m about to call Paula, tell her come on, let’s get out of here, when a middle-aged man rushes up to the bar. One sleeve of his dress coat is torn at the shoulder, the corner of his lip is split and bleeding, and the side of his face is also scratched and bleeding, as if he’s been dragged across pavement or concrete. He waves to the bartender, who hurries over. The middle-aged man is Asian and speaks in broken English.

“Call the police,” he says. “Please. Four Hispanic men beat and robbed me.”

“In the casino?”

“In the parking lot. Hurry. They tried to steal my car. I don’t let them.”

Just then my cell vibrates. I look at the screen. It’s a text from Logan: Active shooter on the Strip. We’re in our room. Where are you and Paula? Where is Nate? He’s not answering his cell. He’s not answering my texts.

Initial reports state that Jesus Campos, an unarmed security guard, approaches Room 135 on the thirty-second floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino at 9:59 p.m. He is there to check on an open door near Paddock’s suite, whereupon, after hearing “drilling sounds,” he is shot through the door. About two hundred rounds are fired, one striking Campos in the leg. It is later learned that Paddock mounted security cameras in the hallway, alerting him to Campos’s arrival, shooting him several minutes before opening fire from the smashed-out windows of his suite. After pressure from Mandalay Bay owners, however, police amend the timeline, contending Campos arrives on the thirty-second floor at 9:59 p.m. but isn’t shot until closer to 10:05 p.m., about the time Paddock guns down concertgoers at a distance of approximately four hundred yards. The revised timeline could mean the difference between millions and tens of millions in payouts for the hotel’s legal defense team. Responsibility, as it translates to dollars, will likely be measured in seconds.

In Paddock’s possession are twenty-three weapons, including semiautomatic rifles replete with bump stocks that allow for more rapid fire, scopes, and no less than two thousand rounds of ammunition in .308 and .223 caliber. The .223 is nearly identical to the standard cartridge of our U.S. military while the .308 is typically associated with big game hunting.

I visualize him using multiple rifles.

I see him firing on the crowd through one window. Then I see him running down the hall of his suite to the second window and firing from there. He does not bother switching out magazines, though it would only take a couple of seconds. With so many rifles at his disposal, I suppose it might be quicker to drop an empty gun and grab a loaded one. But I’m not sure. I’m not sure about anything with this man who must hear the screams and cries of the dying and wounded every time he lets up on the trigger and the blasting momentarily stops. But how could he have ever pulled it? How could he continue to pull it, again and again, fully aware of the carnage he’s inflicting? The people are fenced in and have nowhere to go.

The news has not yet spread. People remain transfixed in front of slot machines, pulling levers and pushing buttons. Crowds still surround the tables, playing poker, craps, and roulette. It’s noisy with bells and whistles and laughter and shouting and the cocktail waitresses continue to serve drinks. Nothing seems out of the ordinary on this busy Sunday night at the Aria Resort and Casino.

I call Paula.

“We have to leave,” I say.

“What’s the matter?”

“There’s a shooter on the Strip.”

“What?”

“Just meet me at the escalators,” I say. “We have to get back to our room.”

I don’t tell her about the poor guy who got beat up and robbed, but that’s another reason I want to get out of here. Those lowlifes, or more like them, could be roaming the streets, looking for their next mark.

I text Logan after we hang up, telling him where we’re at and that we’re leaving for our hotel. The bartender is on the phone, his back to me, so I inform the guy seated next to me about the shooter.

“Oh yeah?” he says, as if it’s no big deal. “I hope they get him.”

Then he takes a drag off his cigarette and returns to his game.

On my way to the escalators, Logan texts me again. I’m on the police band but it’s a mess. They don’t know shit. Possible 3 or 4 shooters. Mandalay Bay. Tropicana. Possible car bomb outside the Luxor.

“Fuck,” I say, under my breath.

I text Nate.

Where are you?

What if after dinner, since he doesn’t gamble, he decided to sightsee the Strip and got caught in a hail of gunfire?

Paula sees me as I near the escalators.

“What’s going on?”

I tell her what Logan texted me. Her eyes grow wide.

“Shit,” she says. “It has to be terrorists.”

Like me, she is also jumping to conclusions. I take her hand and we head for the escalators.

First we feel only the slightest rumbling, like a small, hardly measurable tremor beneath our feet. But the tremor quickly grows stronger, and it’s no earthquake. Our plan is to go down the escalator or the adjoining stairway to reach the lobby, and from there ultimately the exit, but others have exactly the opposite idea, which is to say a flood of people come rushing toward us, screaming “active shooter . . . active shooter,” giving Paula and me a split second to make one of two choices. Either get trampled by the frenzied crowd or turn around and run with them. We choose the latter.

Country western music star Jason Aldean goes on stage at 9:40 p.m. and plays for about twenty-five minutes before Paddock sprays bullets on the crowd of twenty-two thousand people below him. He releases a dozen or more volleys in the next ten minutes, the firing ceasing at approximately 10:15 p.m. There are conflicting accounts, however, that the Las Vegas SWAT team, apparently acting on faulty information, first raided the Tropicana before they realized their monumental mistake and went to the Mandalay Bay. And even then, fearing Paddock had rigged his door with explosives, they failed to enter the suite until seventy minutes later. It’s reported that since the shooting had stopped by then, police felt no urgency to breach the room, and the first officers to arrive at the scene at 10:17 p.m. spent much of their time searching the floor’s other rooms and evacuating guests. It is not reported how the responding officers and SWAT team should have reacted had the shooting resumed and more lives were lost as a result of their inaction. Some believe the risk of further deaths from Paddock opening fire again merited a more aggressive response. The Las Vegas PD defends its decision not to immediately neutralize the threat and instead wager on the odds of silence, indicating that the massacre had stopped, as opposed to the possibility that Stephen Paddock had simply paused to reload. This is not a bet I would expect law enforcement to make.

When SWAT finally breaks into the room, they find Paddock dead, apparently from a self-inflicted gunshot. I imagine he shoots himself in the head, but as of this writing, even that small detail is left unanswered in the briefings and news sources I research on the internet.

We know so little.

On the one hand, it’s reported that he had no political or religious affiliations, and on the other, ISIS’s official news agency, Amaq, claims Paddock was a “soldier of the Islamic State,” contending that he converted to Islam several months before his explosion of terror. Amaq has been wrong in the past, but rarely, and it seems odd that in the years leading up to the massacre that Paddock took at least twenty cruises across the globe, including visits to Dubai and Abu Dhabi, Oman, the Jordanian port of Aqaba, Bahrain, and Qatar. All of these countries are on heightened alert for terrorist attacks. The FBI, however, is quick to conclude that Stephen Paddock has no connections to international or national terrorist organizations.

Fear is contagious. It envelops Paula and me and draws us into the stampede of people running up from the escalators and down across the game floor of the Aria Resort and Casino. Most of the gamblers at the slots and tables don’t seem to care, hardly glancing at the rushing crowd, but there are some who join us, the looks on their faces quickly changing from startlement to horror. I question my own fear. What do those at the front of this charge know that I don’t? Have they seen the shooter? Or shooters? Heard the shots or been shot at? Has a bomb gone off? Or are we caught up in the sort of mass hysteria akin to someone falsely shouting fire in a packed theater? If I were by myself, maybe I would’ve broken from the herd, reassessed, but I am with my wife and can’t afford to take any chances. She is scared, and so the thing to do is separate ourselves from the fleeing crowd and the packed casino floor. If I were a terrorist, I would fire into the largest groupings possible rather than waste time moving from floor to floor, stalking individual prey. “We have to go up,” I say. “Away from the crowd.” We spot the hotel elevators and run to them, but there are a half dozen security guards protecting the area, only allowing entrance to those with room keys.

Paula and I rush off.

Another couple is right behind us, and when Paula and I leave, they follow. The man speaks to the woman in a foreign tongue that I don’t recognize. Russian? An Eastern European language? I wonder if they think that because we’re Americans we know what we’re doing when really we’re as frantic and confused as they are.

Paula spots a staircase.

“There,” she says, pointing.

It’s cordoned off with brass looper tubes. But no one is guarding it, so we squeeze by and rush up the stairs. The couple tails us. At the top we find ourselves surrounded by restaurants and shops. All of them are closed. At first glance the hallways look empty but there are others, maybe a dozen, hiding behind pillars, crouching behind concrete planters, or huddling in the alcoves of the different stores. The shops and restaurants are dark inside. Elevator music, the Pink Panther theme, plays over hidden speakers. A security guard runs past us. Paula shouts to him.

“What’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” he says, and keeps running.

“Are we safe here?”

But he’s gone by then, disappearing around the corner. Paula glares at me.

“Great security, huh? If he doesn’t know what’s happening, who the hell does?”

The couple that followed us are now at our side. They are not, as I initially thought, Eastern European, but rather Middle Eastern. I place the man in his late twenties. The woman is about the same age. She looks up from her phone and speaks with the slight hint of an Arabic accent, telling us that it’s ISIS, all right, at least according to the breaking news.

“Daesh,” the young man says. “Pigs.”

He looks down at the floor, closes his eyes, and shakes his head. After a moment he looks back up at me and holds his hand out.

“I’m sorry, my manners. I’m Omar. This is my girlfriend, Jenny.”

We all shake hands and introduce ourselves and then agree that we shouldn’t stand there in the hallway like sitting ducks. Omar suggests we hide in a nearby stairwell until I tell him about Logan, his tactical training, and show him his most recent text. One shooter down at Mandalay Bay. Stay off casino floor. Safest at higher ground but stairwells are a trap. The next best bet, we decide, is The Roasted Bean. It’s like a Starbucks and it’s only one shop down the way. We hide there behind the counter with another couple from Australia who had the same idea and beat us to it.

About an hour later we emerge, not because we’re any the wiser for searching our phones for breaking news, or texts from Logan, but because of the slow lifting of our fear when nothing happens, no shots, no screams, just that constant drone of the Pink Panther theme over the hidden speakers, along with “Calcutta” by Lawrence Welk, and a few other elevator music tunes that seem so bizarrely out of place.

The casino floor is now eerily deserted.

The Vegas Strip and every hotel and casino within walking distance of the Mandalay Bay is on lockdown. No one, except guests, is allowed in. No one, guests or otherwise, is allowed out. Having no idea when the order will be lifted—it could be all night or longer for all we know—Omar, Jenny, Paula, and I rent rooms at the Aria. They offer us reduced rates because of the state of emergency.

The first thing Paula does, when we get to our room, is turn on the TV to the local news. The first thing I do is call Nate at the Monte Carlo. Landline to landline. Direct to his room. He answers groggily.

“Yeah?”

I am so relieved to hear his voice, just to hear his voice, that I don’t respond right away.

“Who is this?” he says.

“It’s me,” I say. “You’re in your room. That’s all that matters.”

“What’re you talking about?”

Until now it hasn’t occurred to me that Nate could possibly have slept through this entire ordeal, but apparently that’s the case.

On TV, the newscaster says that at least twenty people are confirmed dead. The ticker tape running at the bottom of the screen reports that officials found bomb-making material, ammonium nitrate, in Stephen Paddock’s car. This is the key ingredient in the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people.

“There was a horrible shooting on the Strip. Everything’s shut down. I’m just calling,” I say, “to make sure you’re all right.”

“Jesus, Dad, it’s one o’clock in the morning. I’ll call you back in a few hours.”

Then he hangs up, leaving me to wonder if he is simply too sleepy and disoriented to grasp the significance of what I told him, or if his reaction is one particular to his generation, who’ve grown up with terrorism, multiple wars abroad, Columbine-like massacres, gangland killings, civil unrest and riots, and the constant barrage of Amber Alerts on our freeway signs. Maybe, after a while, all the violence and insanity merges into a single common pool of blood that merits no special distinction.

Paula and I lie in bed and watch the news.

By 2:30 a.m., she is asleep.

By 3:30 a.m., I am still awake, and fifty people are now said to be dead, with more than two hundred injured. Around four that morning, President Trump tweets his condolences to the victims and their families, and I turn off the TV.

I try to sleep but cannot.

My medication, Seroquel, is in my suitcase at the Monte Carlo, and without it my brain speeds up. Without it, should I fall asleep, there is no telling where my head will take me. My fear of nightmares is in and of itself enough to keep me wide awake. Seroquel is an antipsychotic typically prescribed for mental illnesses ranging from schizophrenia to bipolar disorder, depression, PTSD, and aggression, and for me it’s a miracle drug, providing much-needed relief from several of these afflictions. I’ve been taking it for close to fifteen years. My system has become dependent on it, and if I miss a single dose, which I must take every evening before bed, my thoughts spin out of control. One second I’ll fixate on something that happened fifty years ago, some childhood memory, and the next I’m plotting the demise of someone who recently wronged me. My energy level rockets. I can feel my muscles tense, my arms and legs itch and tingle, and I want to move. I want to go places. Do things. Lying in bed with my eyes closed requires extraordinary concentration, and I have to tell myself repeatedly that I’m supposed to be tired, I’m supposed to rest.

The clock on the nightstand reads 5:05 a.m., and I have to fight the urge not to wake Paula and say come on, get up, let’s go to breakfast.

The last time I remember checking the clock, before I nod off, it’s 6:28 a.m. I wake up about an hour later to the smell of coffee, and, thankfully, I have no memory of any nightmares. I hear water running. Paula is in the shower. The TV is on, the sound off. The ticker tape scrolls along the bottom of the screen. The death toll has risen to fifty-eight. Over five hundred others are reported injured.

We all meet for breakfast at the Hard Rock Cafe. It’s across the street from the Monte Carlo, and in walking there I’m surprised that the Strip is already packed with tourists and locals. Young men hawk self-made hip-hop CDs. Other peddlers hand out passes to strip clubs, tickets for free drinks, and pamphlets advertising trips to the Grand Canyon. The only change from last night to now is that they are not as aggressive, cutting you off as you try to step around them, waving their goods and offers in your face. This morning a sickly pallor hangs over the Strip, and everyone seems to know, without speaking a word about it, that this is not the time or place to go about business as usual, though that is what we are trying to do. Paula, Logan, his girlfriend, Nate, and I, we all set out to have a good time in Vegas, catch up, tell stories, laugh, and now it’s as if, in a state of shock, we are just going through the motions.

Without my medication, and with so little sleep, my energy soon wanes, and I feel almost as if I had gotten drunk the night before. That I’m hungover. There’s a dull, steady pounding in my head. If not for Logan, since we see so little of each other, I would’ve returned to my room that morning, doubled up on my medication, and climbed back into bed. The beauty of Vegas hotels is that they understand the importance of darkness. No matter what time of day, when you pull the drapes shut, it might as well be the dead of night. This is ideal for around-the-clock gamblers and drunks the likes of Stephen Paddock. This is also ideal for people who miss their dose of psych meds as well as those who should be on them—like Paddock, or better yet, institutionalized long before he could act out his homicidal fantasies.

After breakfast, we stop and mingle with the crowd along a pedestrian overpass that offers a good view of the Mandalay Bay. It’s just a couple of blocks away. We can see the two windows missing from the suite on the thirty-second floor. Below, on the street, the Las Vegas Police have cordoned off the sidewalks with yellow tape. Big orange traffic barriers block the intersection and there are cruisers surrounding the entire area around the hotel. People on the overpass snap pictures with their cells. One girl with a sleeve of tats has found a site on her phone with a tinny recording of the massacre, and I can hear it, weakly, the sound of gunshots and screams. I think of the injured. I think of the dead and those who survive them. Mothers and fathers. Siblings. Family. Friends. The sorrow and torment. At night they will no longer be able to sleep. Visions will jolt them awake. The keening and cries will echo in their minds for the rest of their lives. It is irreversible, this haunting, and for me to believe that somehow the dead are more fortunate is a perversion, for there is no greater robbery than the taking of life.

While Courtney and my family continue to look at the murder scene, I look at Logan for telltale signs of alcoholism. Is his face bloated? No. Are his eyes bloodshot? No. The sun is shining hard on us, and so I look for sweat on his brow and neck, because alcoholics retain fluids, and when we overheat we sweat heavily. But he is not sweating. I think about our breakfast. Did he seem moody? Sluggish? Logan likes Western wear, cowboy boots, and the silver belt buckles he’s earned from rodeos, riding broncs and bulls, and this type, or stereotype, is well-known for alcoholic drinking.

He deals with hardcore criminals, psychotics, and sociopaths on a daily basis, so it’s not as if he doesn’t sense that I’m staring at him. Staying alive for my boy means staying alert, as does anticipating people’s worst intentions, which is to say he’s aware of his surroundings at all times.

“What’re you looking at me for?”

“I’m not looking at you,” I say.

He shakes his head at me.

“You’ve been eyeballing me this whole trip. I’m fine, okay? I got drunk with Courtney the first night I got here, after training, and then I had that one glass of wine at dinner last night. That’s it.”

“Are you guys arguing?” Paula says.

Now they all turn away from the Mandalay Bay and stare at us.

“We’re fine,” I say.

I nod to Logan and start to walk. He follows. We stop when I know they won’t be able to hear us.

“I hardly see you anymore,” I say. “I’m not being mean. I’m your dad. I worry.”

A man with a long gray ponytail, his face weathered from the sun, is taping crosses made of cardboard and painted white on the side of the overpass. We have to step back. We have to make room for him to do his work.

“I know,” Logan says. “I get it. Let me put it this way. I have a fifth of Jack in my kitchen cupboard and it’s been there since May.”

It’s a good answer but it doesn’t necessarily alleviate my concerns.

“What about my visit last year?”

“I apologized for that already. I got worked up that night, and I’m not saying it’s gone, but I definitely don’t get drunk over it anymore.”

He’s seen blood, lots of it, and he’s not good with it. But I also know he’s seen more since we last saw each other and he’s told me that it gets easier. I’d like to believe him, but I’ve experienced things, too, and I drank over them for the better part of my life, or at least I used them as an excuse to drink. I had all kinds of excuses. None of the things I wanted to blank out got easier with time, and because they didn’t, I have trouble believing that my son is telling the truth. It’s hard for me to give him or anyone the benefit of the doubt because as a drunk I lied so often, particularly to those I love most, that I stopped believing in myself.

So, rightly or wrongly, I project.

“Honestly?”

“Honestly,” he says.

“Come here,” I say.

I hug all of my boys. I make a point of telling them how proud I am of them, and when we have to say goodbye, I kiss them on the cheek. Sometimes I’ll kiss them on both cheeks. This is how my father used to say goodbye to me, but I’ll never know if his eyes started to burn, as mine sometimes do a couple hours later. This is after Logan and Courtney are gone, heading back to Wyoming.

Checkout is at eleven, and we’re in the car by then, leaving Las Vegas. We’re on the highway passing through the Mojave Desert. The land is dry and barren except for some sagebrush and tumbleweed. In the rearview mirror, I see Nate staring at his cell phone. Playing a game? Conducting business? Paula looks over at me.

“Are you crying?”

“It’s allergies,” I say. “My eyes burn.”

“You don’t have allergies.”

“The doctor said I was allergic to sagebrush. Look out there. What do you see?”

“The doctors diagnosed you with all kinds of stuff,” she says, “but not allergies.” Paula punches me in the arm. “I know you miss him, but you’ll see him again.”

I am allergic to sagebrush, but the windows are rolled up. The air conditioner is on, so I suppose a case could be made that the pollens aren’t getting into the cab. That it isn’t the cause of the watery eyes. I suppose it could also be that I’ll miss him, as any parent would his child when they go their separate ways. But of course there will be a next time. Of course there will always be a next time. It just can’t be possible that I’m taking anything for granted each time we part, the very moment I look away.