And so it went. Sex, driblets of information extracted, more sex, the sole interlude an excursion out onto Collins Avenue and the Mynt Lounge, an exclusive club whose doorman dropped the velvet rope for Luisa, glanced suspiciously at Snow, and ushered them into a surprisingly drab room with black theater carpeting and spacious booths with Mynt green lighting and black walls painted by video projectors (at the moment they were playing what looked to be clips from the SeaWorld aquarium – manta rays and sharks and barracudas, oh my), presided over by a high priest DJ wearing robes adorned with Illuminati-type symbols, mystic eyes, ankhs, radiant objects, who spun anthemic techno at ear-bleeding levels, the dance floor jammed with cavorting models in micro-minis and drug dealers and their clients butt-shaking their way to Jesus or, more likely, the Big Red Dude, and a swank of celebrities, foremost among them in terms of personal power, a black-clad movie director named Brett (a purveyor of cinematic dog shit, in Snow’s view), the Annoying Ego-monster Incarnate with a Van Dyke that reminded him of Guillermo, who swaggered over to their table trailed by his personal assistant, a diminutive clean-shaven imp or familiar also dressed in black and bearing a bottle of designer vodka and three glasses (the imp was not permitted drink, apparently, lest he grow great with self-importance), and following an exchange of cheek kisses with Luisa, the Bearded One inquired of Snow his place in the world, a shouted conversation that evolved into a tiresome supercilious put-down once Brett ascertained that his place was lowly, though Snow wasn’t altogether sure whether or not he had fallen prey to paranoia, because Luisa had earlier that evening slipped him a large blue capsule whose contents wreaked havoc with his judgment and caused the inside of his eyeballs to itch and filled the air with lime spiders and their dark, astonishingly complex webs in which Snow could detect patterns revealing of both past and future, presenting him with the once-in-a-lifetime ability to anticipate the onset of consequential events, but that he wasted on foreseeing the approach of a model with icy eye shadow and breasts like highway emergency cones who slithered up shortly before they headed back to the Bon Temps, insisting that Brett and Luisa do jello shots off her lovely, tanned tummy, as an afterthought including Snow in the invitation, though not the imp – thoroughly disoriented at this juncture, he complied, pretending to be flattered, delighted, eager, but found the experience unpleasant, like licking puke off a still-convulsing corpse, and then lifting his head from this ghoulish feast he saw that the legion of the beautiful damned on the dance floor had broken out sparklers and were waving them around, setting fire to the webs, sending the spiders scuttling for cover, and a booming female voice exhorted everyone to ‘. . . feel free . . . while there’s time to be free!’, words to live by, advice Snow took to heart and went out into the soft warm air lit by the glowing, buzzing, neon cuneiform sign language of the Bauhaus hotels just off the strip, the noise from Collins Avenue – whooping groups of revelers, the purr and growl of muscle cars, sexy and dangerous, dripping with reflected light – a relief by contrast to the din of Mynt, and as they walked he tried to recall a clever phrase he had come up with, something about performing a glitterectomy on the nation, but removed from the environment that had bred and nurtured and defined it, the fundamental relevance of the phrase fizzled out, and Snow along with it.
Sunday evening, after a final copulation, a bouquet of tearful goodbye kisses, Luisa limo-ed off to the airport, promising to return in two weeks’ time. She had paid for the suite until Monday morning and told Snow that he should stay the night and charge whatever he wanted to the room, but cautioned him about over-tipping and, semi-playfully, advised him not to bring up any girls. The admonition was unnecessary – Snow was whipped. He ordered a thirty-dollar cheeseburger, fries, and two Cokes from room service and sat on the balcony, eating, watching combers rolling in, reduced to wavelets by the time they hit shore. Too tired to think, he lay down on the bed around eight-thirty and slept until one. South Beach would be still going strong and he briefly considered rejoining the party. Ten years before he would have, but now he went to the refrigerator and opened a bottle of water and stood at the kitchen counter, attempting to concentrate on the big issues: what next, whither, and so forth. He noticed a shadowy bulk at the end of the counter and switched on a light. A striped gift box – inside was a camp shirt he had admired in a shop window and a pill bottle containing about twenty blue capsules and a note. The note was in Spanish and read:
I can’t carry this through customs. For God’s sake, don’t take more than one at a time.
