Real Gone.

Real Gone is a small book--a short story of 3,000 words or so. It takes place in Las Vegas. The day I was reading it--I was almost exactly halfway through--a friend phoned up at 4:30 on a Friday afternoon from the Mirage Hotel, Las Vegas, 1,400 miles south from where I was, and shouted the words "Reality check--help!" into my ears.

My friend had reached the point, 48 hours into any Las Vegas visit, when the city's shimmering discontinuity ceases to amuse, when its distortions of scale no longer titillate, and when its possibilities for extreme experience reach the point of diminishing returns. ("We did handguns at the test range today; tomorrow it's machine guns; then what?") The Luxor pyramid apparently wasn't nearly as fun on the inside as it appeared from the outside; Sigfried and Roy tickets were hard to come by; a day trip into the desert had been cut short when it was realized just how nowhere a place the Nevada desert actually is. One imagines Las Vegas travel agencies daily deluged by phone calls from the dazed middle class, rubbing their pink eyes with Tommy Hilfiger sweaters stained by amyl nitrate: Get me the hell out of here as soon as you can. Faster. Sooner.

It was merely a coincidence that my friend called. I believe that coincidences exist only to point out that coincidences exist: they are hermetic, tautological--whatever. But I do note his phone call here.

Real Gone is a short story about people who have remained in Las Vegas past that magic 48-hour mark, the point after which merely being there makes one feel slightly dirty. Real Gone's characters aren't staying in Las Vegas, mind you, but they're around it long enough to sense the dread that underlies pleasure without conscience, spectacle without history. The book is written in the form of a letter, in the first person, very linear, very chronological, piece by piece. It is punctuated throughout with color photographs by Jack Pierson.

For reasons too numerous to go into, Las Vegas has figured prominently in my own personal cosmology. I mention this only to loan some sort of credence to the observation that I don't think I've ever encountered a work that captures so utterly, with almost molecular purity, that city's essence: its atomization, its mood of narrative accidentally lost or jettisoned, its willful insolence toward any form of critical voice. Las Vegas is a living laboratory for researching, far in advance, the lives of the citizens of the 21st century. The process began decades ago, with Howard Hughes:

he used to live here, locked up on the top floor of one of the hotels, in a madness of boredom and bitterness. He would sleep all day and stay up all night, with the covers pulled over his chest and the shades drawn over the windows to shut out the lights, reading biographies of great men and buying up city lots. Hollywood hadn't loved him, insistent, humorless man that he was, pushing dull starlets into bad movies and riding his wealth. So he went wandering around the world, to London, to the Bahamas, and finally to Las Vegas, like some incorporated Flying Dutchman. In the end, all that was left was a hoarse voice at the end of a long distance phone call.

Hmmm.

I think many of us believe in the possibility of a unified theory of culture: we believe our culture can be made, calculuslike--if only briefly--to exist as a pristine, intact equation. And we perhaps believe that this equation can be built up incrementally, Joan Didion-like, from methodical personal and mechanical observations--from small bits of information, not necessarily transcendent by themselves, but revealing some greater whole when strung in an elegant line. These strung-together bits or chunks needn't be either entirely verbal or entirely visual; the hunt for cultural leptons and bosons may require new bevatrons to collide narratives and pictures together, as in Real Gone, to powerful effect.

Pierson's photos are spare: casino carpets and purple-flowering succulent groundcovers, municipally standardized cinderblock walls and a forlorn and forgotten imitation-Mies stool, milk trucks and Ralph's-grocery-store 18-wheelers on Interstate 15. These images capture the spirit of Las Vegas circa 1994 more elegantly than any Day-in-the-Life-of-type effort ever could. Lewis' equally spare tale involves a sequence of experiences that force the narrator to witness Las Vegas' revulsion at confronting even its own tiny, fragmentary history. This, in turn, forces him to reevaluate and establish links to his own memories.

Double or Nothing, meaningless noise. Gambling is not a sport and it's not a pastime: it makes people into conduits of money, and the money is made to rattle so tangibly that it ceases to matter. That look you see on their faces as they feed the slots or consult their cards, the blank, tense stare: it's the trance for someone for whom a world is missing, the world of real, common exchange.

Real Gone starts out with a dispassionate, modernist voice but ends up feeling, of all things, dizzy and sentimental--drunk--as though the story were a slot game and the game had been won. On the final page there's a feeling of dollar coins tumbling into a slot's trough, a ritual of moot reward; the book ends with that brief payoff all good art provides, where one senses that the cultural equation, if only briefly, can indeed exist.

Douglas Coupland's books include Generation X: Tales of an Accelerated Culture (St. Martin's, 1991). Life After God (Pocket) was published this February.