PLOT

An excerpt from "The Swing" chapter.

She understood why the West had sent little old Las Vegas off to sit by itself way out in a desert corner. If there was a place she'd never expected to experience to her core, in every cell's nucleus, a truth about life and the universe, it was Las Vegas, and it shook her. For good reason, one didn't want Las Vegas and its 24 hour wedding chapels within easy walking distance of the rules and regulations that kept civilization on a short leash. Las Vegas was not an affront against nature, no, it grew as naturally out of it as a succulent prickled cactus; but was life concentrated, reduced to fit on the head of a fruit fly. The skyscrapers and trappings hide it now but in the old days the air of Las Vegas was filled with eagles in various stages of descent and ascent, mice plucked from the streets dangling in talons, and those mice which had just managed to escape breeding like crazy in order to maintain the balance.

Perhaps the fault of all those houlette wheels generating a whirlpool effect, that was why life and death cycled so swiftly there.

Chance sat and watched the strippers dance and watching the strippers dance, trying to get in sync with Las Vegas, Chance decided it was time to convince herself that sex wasn't such a big deal after all, despite the fact that people paid good money for it, which should have clued her in. She watched the dancers and the people for whom they were dancing, which now included her, and she thought really this is all there is to it, the universe as pimp ever compelling nature to desire, in oreder to keep the food chain oiled and running, don't make anything more of it than it is. When a stripper offered herself for a lap dance, Chance, drunk, nodded sure why not, the stripper was just working her place in the food chain, following the commandment of the universe to generate desire and in turn be able to feed herself. She watched with detachment the circular teasing gyrations, thought of spiral galaxies, and started to cry because she was drunk and it suddenly struck her as gruesome, the lengths to which the universe went in order to sell itself, to whip up desire, to keep the wheel turning, the stripper's high heels and lace garter and waxed pelvis and ultimately the stripper herself all dreamed up by the candyman butcher to fuel the desire that turned the wheel that kept food on the plate. And when the world wearied of 3 inch black high heels, the candyman butcher would set out 4 inch stainless steel high heels and smile hopeful, waiting, eager for spark of desire and the inability to resist that would keep the wheel churning, mice balling, eagles plucking, bones falling from the sky. Which wasn't working with Chance, the heels and the lace garter and the shaved pelvis of the stripper, else she'd not be crying, thinking the revelation of the mysteries of the universe wasn't worth the journey. When you wanted poetry it gave you porn.

A crying customer was not good business, not on the surface of things. Chance didn't desire the stripper one bit, yet as she stumbled back outside, the candyman butcher licked his lips with satisfaction over a successful business transaction, because when Chance left the club she was resolute to get off her high horse and join the free-for-all on the wheel. A glimpse of the mechanics behind the curtain was enough to convince her sensation was the universe's one true language, anything else was mutant static developed by the candyman butcher as a need for ever and more novel forms of stimulus evolved, and out of pity for herself and everyone else it was best just to get with the program.