You can read the full story in Responses to Untitled (Eye With Comet) (c.1985) By Paul Thek. Pilot Press. ed. Richard Porter.
An extract:
A wishing well in a casino in Las Vegas takes the form of a fountain. Tiled in green and gold and bordered with fresh flowers, it dominates the foyer. People might throw a couple of dimes in when they pass. Some make a wish. The official line is that they donate the money to charity, but it amounts to so little that the guy who comes to clean it is told to just pocket what's there. After work, he might spend it on a McDonald's or give a dollar to each of his kids.
They had been in Vegas November of last year. They talked each other into booking the tickets one hysterical night at his. Their eyes shone bright with the blue of the laptop screen as they sat on the floor in his bedroom. H had a glass of red wine pressed against his cheek, reading out his credit card number. He shrieked as he clicked confirm.
They’d had an alright time. Looking back, the sheer impulsiveness of the trip was enough of a sign that they were drifting apart. It spoke of their desperation for some kind of excitement. Now he tells people that the diagnosis didn't have much to do with it at all. Vegas was the real wake-up call, Vegas reminded him just how finite time is. This isn't entirely true, but it makes him less sad than going into all the details. He hates describing coming to the realisation that he couldn't keep pushing his body that hard, and how for H, ultimately, it wasn't worth slowing down. He’s accepted it now, this need for a gentler kind of joy.
He's glad though that they took the final trip. From the moment they touched down in Paradise, Nevada, everything was bright, harsh, and painfully expensive. Neither of them understood much about gambling, and it turns out it's not as fun if you don’t know how Poker works. They kind of figured out the slot machines, but even these seemed sly. With so many lights flashing, he felt sure he was winning but was so distracted by the blinking neon that he couldn’t tell. H spent a lot of time talking to other tourists in the hotel. He tried to charm neighbouring tables when they went out to eat, joking and flirting with the waiting staff, and drank lavishly while asking other patrons to explain the rules of games in a beguiling manner. While H glowed under raucous attention, he became quieter, beginning to worry every time he left to go to the bathroom or fetch a drink that he might return to the sight of his lover pressed against someone else. This idea made him feel relieved, and that concerned him.
His most powerful memory from the trip is of the casino mall. He’d gone alone as H was nursing a hangover and had said something bitter about having no desire to traipse around a capitalistic Disneyland as if that wasn't the whole point of the casino. As if they hadn't been sitting at a bar last night with an honest-to-god money-themed drinks menu (He’d gone for the ‘Silver Dollar’ - a clear gin-based something which had been very nice actually, not too sweet) He’d spent the whole journey to the mall arguing the unfairness of this comment in his head. Hadn't H understood that to see “capitalistic Disneyland” was precisely why they were there? He’d imagined their presence here as a salient aside, aware of the ridiculousness of the display, but finding a peculiar honesty in this environment and its translation of money in the purest sense. He’d thought he could write an article about it.
By the time he reached the mall, he was angry. He felt stupid for thinking he was seeing some bigger picture and panicked that it had slipped away. H was now somehow a step ahead of him simply by not caring in the first place. The mall remained unchanged. It appeared just as described by the tourist sites: ostentatious with marble pillars and imitation Roman statues. The shops were sunken into faux classical-style architecture with sparkling plate glass windows. The vast domed ceiling painted like a blue sky, loomed above them. It was studded with the 215 Reach Powercore luminaires and 46 ColorBlast Powercore luminaires and performed a sunrise and sunset every day, cycling through bright cyan daytimes to navy nights. You could watch all of this without ever needing to go outside.
The mall was bustling. The closed-in warmth of its fake sky roof felt like a theme park. A Niki Minaj song played over the speakers in the indoor street. Walking into each shop immersed him in a different high-energy pop song, each with a certain BPM, H would have said, to make you spend more. He wondered what the BPM was in the bar last night When H had bought an 80-dollar round. If he was here now he might have said that made him laugh, but he couldn't figure out how to turn it into a joke for later without sounding sharp. The street was at its busiest at 5 pm. Everyone was preparing for the beginning of that day’s “sunset”. A hen party group were posing, ready for a reliable, mechanical golden hour. Next to them stood a pack of young men in clean trainers, each holding a shiny oversized smartphone, and behind them was an older couple busy getting out their digital cameras to record the spectacle. He overheard someone earnestly telling his partner a rumour that on Tuesdays and Thursdays the patterns were pinker, whereas the rest of the days it was redder, and on Fridays, sunset lasted an extra 15 minutes because there was more footfall. According to this, today would be a pink one. He stopped near a bench and looked up, fighting his embarrassment at being a lone sunset tourist.
At 4:57 the sky was still and blue as ever. He was walking towards the central fountain, constructed out of triumphal arches and marble figures when he noticed a bird drinking the chlorinated water. It looked like a sparrow although he wasn't sure if they had them in America. As he approached, the bird took off, and he stood watching as it looped over the roofs of the shops, then came to rest on a concealed light fitting, casting a shadow onto the edge of the sky. Its wings were surprisingly large against the forced perspective of the clouds. He watched as it shook out its feathers and took off again, realising with surprise that he could hear it calling above the crowd’s warm jumble of voices as it shunted against the trompe l’oeil sky. He wondered what it ate, where it slept, and how long it might live.
When it happened, he was still watching the bird. He was considering if the sunsets messed up the bird’s circadian rhythm, or whether it got dark enough for the thing to sleep, when, without a sound, the mall plunged into darkness. It happened too fast for anyone to realise what was going on. One second they were seeing, and then seeing was impossible.
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