Sherry and Clark arrive in Las Vegas under a crescent moon: they notice it between the neon signs and remark upon it. They find a small motel in a relatively run-down area. Sherry goes and checks out the room, declaring it better than any at the Honey Route. They pay a week up front. Let’s hurry and go see my Argentinian friend, he says to her while she showers. But where did the two of you meet? asks Sherry, shampoo bubbles running over her lips. Clark doesn’t answer. Following some directions scribbled on a soft-drink company delivery stub that he kept from the Honey Route, and after several wrong turns and many more questions, they arrive at Salsa’s Club, but a doorman in a tuxedo tells them that Jorge Rodolfo hasn’t shown up for work in at least a month, that they don’t know what’s going on with him, and provides Sherry and Clark with his address, writing it on the back of the same delivery stub. On their way back to the motel they decide to put the visit off until the following day. That night, for the first time, Clark asks: Will you let me have a taste? And Sherry, with no further ado, opens her legs, whispering, Go straight for the foie gras. This sends them into fits of laughter, and it’s in this moment that they both understand they’re all each other will ever need, that the two of them alone have enough to get by. After this they focus on finding a job as far removed as possible from prostitution for Sherry, and as far removed as possible from drinks distribution for Clark, but in the month they spend looking, Sherry only manages to find work selling herself in a club in the Venice City complex, and Clark as a soft-drink deliveryman for the bottling firm Las Vegas Castle, on the industrial estate. She has a better salary and garners better tips than at the Honey Route, but he fails to bring in any more than on his previous job, which, far from generating tensions between them, brings them closer together: Clark pushes himself so he can provide Sherry with a better future, and she, for the first time in her life, experiences the pride of being head of the family. They often go back to Salsa’s Club, first to see if Jorge Rodolfo has returned [he doesn’t], and in time just to dance and for the shows. On one of these nights they are there with a few of the regulars watching a ventriloquist who works three puppets simultaneously [one with each hand, the other, according to him, being him], and Clark orders a Gordon’s gin with orangeade—both of which he delivers to the club on a weekly basis. He begins feeling ill, and soon starts throwing up, his skin turning the greenish white of an abandoned garden wall. The ambulance comes quickly, and on the way to the hospital Sherry holds his hand, though words fail her. The medical report calls it a “partial halt of vital signs due to the ingestion of toxic substances traced to bottled orangeade,” and Las Vegas Castle has all its consignments confiscated, consignments that later end up being sold somewhere in Central America. After a monthlong coma, Clark wakes and begins telling Sherry about a kind of enlightenment he has experienced several times during the period he’s spent as good as dead: it has something to do with a castle, one that appeared very large at a distance but which as he came closer shrank in size, and whose walls were made of soft-drink bottles, but empty bottles containing only air, and the air they contained was the exact amount he had left to breathe before he died, and that it had been so clear to him that he would go north now, to the mountains, where he could enjoy this precious remaining manna in solitude. She tries to convince him to stay, but she is a stranger in his eyes now. He leaves everything he owns behind in the room. The only thing Sherry keeps of Clark’s is the delivery stub bearing the scribbled directions that brought them here to begin with.