the sky used to be blue
Story and illustrations by Tiffany Lin.
By Tiffany Lin
When Kathleen first approached me about contributing to the Humanities Heart to Heart series, there wasn’t anything noteworthy I wanted to share about my personal quarantine routine. The days all begin by tuning into the radio for a dose of fresh hell while I try to enjoy coffee and eggs. Rising infection rates. S&P Dow Jones up by, down by. Teeth gnashing politicians. November 3. I turn off the station in time to recalibrate my mind from doomsday-clairvoyant to hopeful-educator and prepare my lecture notes for class via Zoom. Meanwhile, the California fires of yestermonth smolder but leave behind Martian skies imprinted on our collective memory. After reading Abrahm Lustgarten’s New York Times Magazine essay The Great Climate Migration, I tried to think about a post-COVID future and the implications of climate change. I write hoping this will never come to pass. -TL
Edith leaves work promptly at five and heads to the Flamingo Hotel. I’m going to miss this place, she thinks, adjusting her hair as she boards the BART train. The citywide demolition is scheduled for next week. After months of widely publicized deliberation, debate, and futile protest, the Governor officially announced the evacuation order. Las Vegas, one of the last cities of the Old World, will be no more.
The train screeches forward and Edith looks out through the dust-covered window, westward toward the Pacific. It’s high tide today. She hasn’t the heart to leave; she is Mojave through and through. She counts herself lucky. Her parents made the decision early on to relocate from Los Angeles to Las Vegas and invested in property there, sparing them the financial fallout of the Fifth Exodus. Edith was born and raised in Vegas, even received her major in Applied Mathematics and Engineering at the local university. Except for a brief stint on the East Coast in St. Louis, she had lived in Las Vegas her whole life. She knew the Sixth would come, but not so soon.
The crackle of the operator’s announcement breaks her reverie.
Now approaching The Strip, Las Vegas Boulevard. All passengers heading toward New San Francisco, please exit and cross the platform to board the Northbound train. The Northbound train will be arriving in five minutes.
Edith fusses with her hair one last time. Although she showers twice daily at the OxyGen corporate campus where she works as an Airware Engineer and Technician, the ash still clings to her hair and scalp. Hopefully they won’t notice… She is attending a farewell party for Naomi and Lottie, who are evacuating to Minneapolis tomorrow. She knows they will beg her to join.
As Edith descends the station escalator and fumbles for her phone, she nearly flips over at the turnstile blockades.
INSUFFICIENT FUNDS the screen reads, scanning her retina.
Crap, she mutters, turning back toward the fare machine.
“Excuse me, miss,” drifts a voice on her left. A disheveled gentleman, skin worn by a hard life spent outdoors, extends an open palm. “Can you spare any change?”
The man looks like her father, who passed last year. Despite their strained relationship and his devolving alcoholism, she still thinks of him tenderly. She hesitates for a moment before reaching into her bag to retrieve a wrinkled twenty-dollar bill, and gingerly places it into the man’s hand.
“That’s it? Oh, couldn’t you spare a little more miss, the cheapest evacuation ticket is $10,000.”
“That’s all I can afford, sir. I’m choosing to stay so I have to save as much as possible. I’m sorry,” she murmurs, avoiding his gaze.
“I see… God help you, child. Good luck.”
Edith settles out her fare at the vending machine, flustered by his pity. She doesn’t personally know anyone who is staying, just a few mom-and-pop grocers and gun shops. She can’t imagine living anywhere else. Most of the casinos and resorts already extracted their wares – the machines, tables, and glittering wheels of fortune – shipping them further inland, forecasting the Seventh Exodus in 60 years, giving management time to strategize an international move.
As she exits the station, she catches her reflection in a window display for Alien Anne’s, the pretzel chain specializing in extraterrestrial baked goods, cheese-flavored plasma, and an out-of-this-world lemon-drink. The neon green display showcases their latest specials, then quickly flashes to text, a scrolling marquee that reads,
“SEE YOU IN EL PASO!!! 👽”
~
The Flamingo, Las Vegas Boulevard, the entire city, wasn’t always so decrepit and sad. Textbooks and period piece films remind the world’s remaining citizens that Las Vegas used to be the entertainment capital of the world with enough lights, liquor, and vices to even beguile the Pope. The brightly colored formica exteriors have long faded but the glitched-out light displays remain, preservation efforts stewarded by the local Neon Museum. The Flamingo’s lights fan out before Edith in swooping arcs and flourishes. Edith identifies the form as a flower, not that she’s ever seen one in person before.
Edith enters the Flamingo and finds Naomi and Lottie seated at a booth in the Bird Bar. The bar smells of sweat, mangoes, and cigarette smoke, the humidifiers competing with the HVAC system to facilitate their tropical experience. Cages stocked with molting taxidermied birds sway gently from the ceiling. Two roaches crawl across a bar stool. The place is a dump.
“Edith! How are you?” Lottie leaps up from her seat and wraps Edith in an embrace, her unusual habit of greeting that has long since fallen out of favor in the New World. Naomi raises a hand and ekes out a smile. “Hi, Edith.”
“Hey Lottie, hey Naomi…” Edith says, awkwardly patting Lottie’s shoulder. “What are y’all having? My treat.”
“Oh, we already ordered. We got one for you too!” Lottie points toward a pink elixir in a highball glass topped with a skewer of assorted fruits. Edith only recognizes the durian.
“You shouldn’t have.” Edith has never had a sweet tooth; she hopes the durian will offset the artificial syrup and synthetic fruit. Durian reminds her of her mother, who grew up in the tropics. She would hack a durian open every weekend with a machete, singing in Neue-Creole while its wondrous stench filled their house.
They settle into the booth and exchange a few ritual niceties.
“How’s your love life?” Lottie asks.
“I’ve given up on that.”
“Why? There are so many shrimp in the sea,” Lottie squeals.
“Everyone here is… for lack of a better word, an idiot.”
“Aren’t you being a bit harsh?” Naomi asks, sipping from her glass.
“Hey, remember when Edith called Job an imbecile?” Lottie enjoys reminding Edith of the failed double date in which they tried to set her up with Naomi’s brother.
“Lottie… he thought the sky used to be blue. What kind of idiot believes that?”
Naomi’s eyes widen. “Edith, it really was blue.”
Edith dislikes arguing about conspiracy theories and changes the topic of conversation. “Well, it’s not really an ideal time to be dating, during an Exodus and all.”
The table falls quiet. They had been avoiding the topic all evening, trying to maintain a veneer of normalcy. Edith recalled long-ago childhood weekends spent with Lottie – they attended the Seventh-day Adventist Church housed at the Luxor, a casino turned House of Worship further down the Strip. They would spend Sundays sneaking out of Bible Study and climb up the historical monuments, reciting names from the Old World.
“NEW YORK, NEW YORK!”
“VENEZIA!”
“LONDON!”
“ROMA!”
“PARIS!”
“It’s pronounced Peh-ree.”
“What? No way, you’re stupid!”
They’d run up and down the Luxor escalators, then pretend to gamble on the historical coin slot machines on display, marveling at the Old World’s heavy metal currency. Edith remembers pocketing a silver coin with a man’s profile on one side. She was enamored with the image on the flip side, a bramble of tangled lines in relief, like veins in a body reaching upward in sublimation. It was labeled “THE CHARTER OAK” and “CONNECTICUT,” a name she vaguely recalls from Old World History in high school. She keeps the coin in the drawer of her night stand.
Lottie grabs Edith’s hand. “There’s enough room in our van. Please come with us.”
“I really appreciate it, but no. My entire life is here - ”
“But there won’t be any here here by next week!”
Lottie’s outburst echoes through the bar. The bartender behind the counter stirs and glances in their direction.
“Edith, remember what happened to Death Valley? Every compound destroyed by wind and fire, nothing salvageable. Three million dead and they couldn’t even claim the bodies after the tsunami. Did anyone even survive? Come to Minneapolis, engineers are needed everywhere, it won’t be hard for you to find a job – ”
“The answer is no. Whether I live or die, it will be here in Las Vegas.”
Lottie begins to cry. The room falls silent again, save for the lilting voice of the blind seer St. Andrea coming from the speakers overhead –
Con te partirò
su navi per mari
Che, io lo so
No, no, non esistono più…
~
Edith gets home around nine. She lives in a yellow-paneled single story three bedroom, two bathroom home nestled in a cul-de-sac off of Tropicana. A bright red X colors her doorway; the city must have stopped by earlier since she submitted her stand-your-ground papers last week. The house will be spared with her inside it. Edith scrawls a quick reminder to herself to stock up on shelf-stable food, water, oxygen, and ammunition.
As the alcohol wears off, she notices her stomach growling. Her refrigerator houses a lonely, moldering onion and a few Completo-Meal Shakes. She digs around her cabinet and finds a Cup Noodle and puts the kettle on to boil. She removes the cardboard packaging and shrink wrap, peels it open halfway and waits.
The kettle whistles and she pours water into the cup, hot droplets splattering on the counter. Edith grabs a pair of chopsticks, her styrofoamed meal, and makes her way to the enclosed porch. She waits the suggested three minutes, eyes the peas, carrots, and corn kernels bobbing at the surface, then looks out toward the street, taking in the view - the Stratosphere Monument punctuating the skyline, foregrounded by low-slung houses and aridity-adapted palms.
The crickets are quiet this evening, Edith thinks to herself, and she realizes she is unafraid.
Photo/Tiffany Lin.
Tiffany Lin is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. When she’s not stewing in doom and gloom, she draws cartoons. You can view her work at tlinart.com.
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