Everything here is about money; when it looks like it’s not about money, then it’s definitely about money. This is the second paradox. That the money too is both fictional and real, both exhilarating and tragic, both there and not there. The town itself embodies this, glittering and triumphant, but hidden away from prying eyes in the middle of an unforgiving desert. The one truly free market in America. Free of guilt. Free of shame. We cannot think of the fire without asking ourselves what role money played, how much of the night had its roots in those silly little disks of color-coded clay. The crowds in the casino hallways. The conversations in the cocktail lounge. The deals struck in elegant offices on the highest floors. The high-stakes Texas Hold’em in the upstairs poker room. You don’t spend as many years in Las Vegas as we have, treated daily to the sight of fortunes changing hands, without learning to question the nature of these things. We can’t help it.

The days leading up to Thanksgiving became an elaborate game of domestic chess. Ray’s king, who only wanted to castle short and mind his own business in a corner, was assailed by opposing forces from both flanks. His father, a short, thin, gray-haired man whose face had developed a kind of puffiness with old age and whose eyes had narrowed to small horizontal slits, haunted both floors of the house like a slow-moving, legally blind ghost. He had a way of walking into whatever room Ray was in, hands joined against his lower back, like a Parisian flaneur (his words), that always managed to drive Ray up the cherrywood-paneled wall: he had no reason to come in and made no attempt to hide the fact, he just walked in and sort of loitered. It would have been quite better, honestly, if his father had started chopping wood right there in the room—something Ray pointed out with the disgruntled “What?” that opened most of their conversations throughout the two weeks.

[...] Unable to shake the residual sentimentality of his weeks at home, he decided to allow himself a frank assessment of his thoughts and, well, feelings on the subject of his father’s deteriorating health. Ray did not consider himself a cold person, immune to human emotion. He was just by nature very careful not to let any of it corrupt the linearity of his decision-making. But now, his decision-making being on a dismaying hiatus, bluish waves of feeling found no rational cliff to dissolve against and there he was, looking at the ocean, thinking of his dad.

He hadn’t been lying at dinner: it was true, his own personal results, however losing, had not been bad, and qualified as what mathematicians called a “statistical tie.” But that didn’t fool him. He had been there, sitting in a room where technicians who could have easily been classmates of his at Stanford looked on as he made small mistake after small mistake, one trivial human imperfection after the other accruing hand after hand to an unbridgeable gap. He couldn’t beat the bot. Not if he studied every minute of his life until the air left his lungs, he just couldn’t. He was human. He miscalculated. He misclicked. He got tired, and grew frustrated, and needed sleep.

That was his problem. It was stupid, really: the scientists at Carnegie Mellon couldn’t care less about using their software to win money in online poker. As a matter of fact, they couldn’t care less about poker in general. Poker to them was just a blank set of rules, a case study in the field of game theory, exactly like the prisoner’s dilemma or tic-tac-toe. Nothing was going to change in the world of online poker, at least for a while. And yet, getting back from Pittsburgh, Ray had found himself haunted by an inability to make the simplest decisions. A hesitation he couldn’t seem to recover from. That’s how it had begun.

His sentimentality, his flawed decision-making—all his problems were rooted in his past. There was no escaping them. They were in these bookshelves, and in the way he’d been raised. Yes, he made mistakes. Just that morning, after two weeks of failed reasoning, he had finally told his parents he would be driving to Las Vegas the next day, committing himself to the decision on an impulse. On a fucking whim. How hopelessly suboptimal.

The truth was, Ray hadn’t played ping-pong in years. Not after Stanford Table Tennis Club. Not after it turned out that the level of play he faced at home was an unreliable test of his ability with a paddle, and that the number of players who could render him a sniveling idiot in uniform-mandated short-shorts was indeed considerable, and weirdly concentrated in the Palo Alto–Menlo Park area. The realization that his years of undefeated streaks and cavalier handicap offerings had been a textbook case of the big-fish-in-small-pond scenario had not been a painless one. Despite what the Wongs would have guessed, it hadn’t involved substantial money loss in misguided bets against stronger players (the idea of putting money in a situation the EV of which was unclear and potentially wildly negative was simply incomprehensible to him), nor had it been achieved after a stage of excuse-making and self-delusion; it had been a quiet landing on an island of small sadness. Weird as it was to admit, he had been forced to accept the loss of a source of validation and self-worth he’d somehow relied on for years. A thing people liked and at which he had been unquestionably good. The best. He had soon started to overcompensate, to exaggerate his assessment of himself: when somebody asked, “Are you good?” he would now shrug and say, “Average, I think.” This was a transparent lie, and yet he felt that it would do him good to frustrate his ego in something he had really cared about. He perceived there was a lesson in it to be learned.

It’s hard to say what goes through the mind of a man who’s lived the last ten years of his life alone on a fake hill overlooking a fake sea, tormented by all-too-real sorrow. It may have been that the Positano reminded him of the happiest years of his life, when the world was like exotic clay in his Brooklyn-born hands. It may have been that he wasn’t yet ready to give up on his vision of Las Vegas, which to him had always been more than just a business but a dream come true, an idea and a hope for a better world. Some say that it was simply that Al Wiles, of all people, belonged to that rare breed of multibillionaires to whom money never really mattered, to whom love and care were the only tangible forces a man could cling to in the long, confusing project of life.

Aunt Karen looked a lot like Mary Ann’s mom, but she also didn’t. Mary Ann couldn’t help thinking that the features that had looked lovingly chiseled on her mother looked on Karen like they’d been tossed like a jacket over a bedroom chair. It was the kind of spontaneous observation that Mary Ann caught herself making, a ruthless evaluation of female aesthetics that, she realized, came from not an inflated devotion to beauty but a resigned cynicism, a veteran’s indelible awareness of the ways of the world. Karen had always looked, even younger, just some indefinable something shy of pretty. It was only when she stood next to her sister that the connection became painfully evident, like when you look at the thin, ghostly pencil lines of a sketch next to the finished painting and realize that yes, I guess that bit there did look like a horse’s leg, and oh, that’s what those weblike things were. The sad thing about it, of course, being that the finished canvas had been lost over ten years ago, and the sketch was all that was left for people to make sense of. Her and Mary Ann, who looked even more beautiful than her mom.

She wanted to be an actress, this she remembered for sure. What was the link between herself as a drama major at Ole Miss and the face looking at her from those photos, a face that would appear in Cosmopolitan, in Maxim, and then at Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital on a December night? It wasn’t that she had been voted Most Likely to Become Famous in high school in spite of marginal popularity and thankfully unrecorded displays of robot-dancing at socials. It wasn’t that she had been a prominent Ole Miss Tri-Delt despite only ever going to the House for the free black bean patties and salads she would eat by herself on the pigeon-infested patio. But somewhere along the way she must have started to want things, really want things. To want them like she was entitled. Progression: student, model, actress. In New York, she had given herself rigorous daily schedules in black Moleskine notebooks. Timetables, plans, weight goals. She’d do a photo shoot on Gansevoort in the morning, a shift at Fits to a Tea on the Upper West side in the afternoon, then ride all the way to Battery Park for acting classes and finally back to Astoria to sleep. The facts were simple enough; the feeling seemed impossible to retrace.

As with many iconic, tourist-intensive places in the world, common knowledge about Las Vegas tends to crystallize around a handful of nicknames and fixed adages. “Sin City.” “America’s Playground.” “Lost Wages.” These snippets of coagulated wisdom mostly serve as experiential guidance for travelers; they provide them with reassurance that they are enjoying the city exactly as it’s meant to be enjoyed, that they are not missing out on some crucial part of their expensive holiday fun. The most famous of these is naturally “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” a real crowd favorite despite truistic logic and, at the same time, complete inaccuracy (Las Vegas being a contender for most Instagrammed, Snapchatted, tweeted, and otherwise recorded location worldwide). What it promises is the mirage of a life away from one’s daily, boring self, an escape into an avatar whose actions, no matter how outlandish, and alcohol-fueled, and adulterous, are reliably and permanently consequence-free. It is an invite: come to Vegas, leave yourself at home.