The Boy Kings

if I could tell the difference between observer and observed.
    The view of the strip as we entered the penthouse suite the engineers had reserved for the party was breathtakingly bright and dark at the same time. Floor-to-ceiling windows gave onto an endless desert night punctuated by glittering signs that barely penetrated the blackness. The penthouse was entirely covered in marble, so it was like walking in a mausoleum. Sam and Iretreated to the bathroom and took photographs of ourselves splayed suggestively against the tub. When we would get back to Palo Alto we would post them to the Facebook group we had made devoted to homegrown Erotic Photo Hunt pictures, as in the bar game where you look at two pictures of a lightly clothed person and try to find five differences. We created pictures for the group by first posing for a picture, then taking another picture in the exact same pose, but with a piece of fabric slightly moved, making a game of teasing the viewer. These tame Erotic Photo Hunt pictures were the premeditated, ironic version of the suggestive party photos that our colleagues posted on Face-book at the end of every weekend.
    The mirrors lining all the walls of the bathroom multiplied everything, extending us to infinity, adding to the hallucinatory feeling that all of Las Vegas is designed to trigger. When we emerged from the bathroom, the penthouse had filled with friends, or rather coworkers, preparing for the party, dressed uniformly in collared shirts and skinny blazers. People brought bottles of liquor and lined them on the bar, like a movie about a birthday party in a suite in Las Vegas.
    Everyone left for dinner except Sam and me, who remained in the suite like kids at an emptied-out grown-ups’ party. The boys were going someplace expensive that I couldn’t afford and, like the good friend he is, Sam skipped dinner and stayed behind with me. We turned the radio up loud and blasted the Cure, singing aloud to the sky and the lights twinkling for miles in the distance. “Love cats,” we sang, tiptoeing around on the marble, spinning in circles until we were dizzy and collapsed on the lacquered sofas with a view to the Mirage’s pools thirty floors below.
    Eventually we descended the elevators to the casino with the intention of finding the boys, but were distracted by everything else: the lights, the tinkling of coins in the slots, the crowds thronging the casino, going to and fro as if orchestrated by machines. Disoriented, we walked outside to breathe in the arid desert air, and kept walking, down the strip, farther and farther from the Mirage. We came to a towering old-time neon sign for the New Frontier Casino. “Closing night, July 14” it read. That was the next night. We had to go in.
    The New Frontier was in a sorry state, barely hanging on until its slated demolition. The slot machines continued their relentless beat, tinkling and singing with the sound of fake coins, but the air was heavy with smoke and dread. We toured the casino floor and put a few dollars in the machines. A waitress, soon to be unemployed, brought us white Russians made of the harshest of vodkas. We chatted with a few security guards near the cage, where all the money was dispensed, who told us the casino would be demolished in a few days. I decided that I already missed the place even though it wasn’t gone yet. As we were leaving to walk back toward the Mirage, I took a picture of the New Frontier’s neon sign, which read, “Thanks for the good times.”
    By the time we got close to Caesars’ Pure nightclub, where the others were, we could barely walk, not because we were half drunk, but because our feet were worn out from trekking down a few miles of Las Vegas concrete. I checked my phone and realized that the others had been texting us all night. Their texts grew less grammatical as, I imagine, they grew increasingly drunk. “Where are you?” they asked, and Sam and I texted back that we were outside Caesars, collapsed on a patch of grass nextto a barely clothed Roman statue that gazed seductively at the Imperial Palace casino across the street. “Come, we need you” they texted, over and over. What did they mean, they need us? I wondered. They never said that. They had never needed us so badly before. They never needed anyone. As far as I could tell, our entire lives at Facebook and within the site itself were being reconstructed so that no one ever really needed each other, as all our needs for