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Bares its teeth. Luther is smiling. Luther wants to tell Jimmy something right away. He motions with his hand
:
Mama came to me a few days ago. She said it wasn’t time yet.
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    One time, Luther’s Mama woke up in the middle of the night and there was this old man sitting on her bed. You go away, she said to the old man.
    Weren’t you scared, Mama?
    No, not especially, but I didn’t like it.
    Maybe you were asleep.
    No, sir, I wasn’t.
    Well, what’d he do?
    He just sat there staring at the floor like he was waiting for further instructions. You go away right now, I told him; I clapped my hands at him like I was a cross little schoolteacher, and I pulled the covers up over my head and said my prayers.
    Who was it, Mama?
    I don’t know who it was; I pulled up the covers and said my prayers. He went away and he never came back.
    Mama died more than ten years ago.
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    The desk clerk at the Bellagio upgrades us to a suite—large, but not as commodious as Luther’s room at the Nathan Adelson Hospice on North Buffalo Drive. The view from Luther’s room is of the parking lot of a small business park. A placard on the wall next to the window cautions hospice visitors to park only in designated slots.
    At the Bellagio, our room overlooks the hotel’s six-acre lake, an allusion to Lago di Como. The Bellagio’s lake has an advantage over its inspiration: At fifteen-minute intervals, jets of water are witched up into the air by a Frank Sinatra–Billy May rendition of Frank Loesser’s “Luck Be a Lady.” The jets shimmy, they fan, they collapse with a splat when the hydraulic pressure deserts them. Beyond Lago di Como, we can just see the tip of the Eiffel Tower.
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    In 1955 the management of Wilbur Clark’s Desert Inn invited Nöel Coward, the British playwright and composer, to perform a cabaret act in Las Vegas.
    Coward rather imagined he might end up tap-dancing to tommy-gun fire, so prevalent was the Vegas association with gangland. But he was agog at the money offered—thirty grand a week—at a time when his career was in a slump. (Coward had been superseded on the London stage by a new generation of playwrights; there wasn’t much call in the West End or on Broadway for brittle drollery.) But then, Nöel Coward was a legend, and Las Vegas, because it was on the make, preferred legends.
    Stars who might be on the downward slope of Hollywood or New York can achieve tenure in Las Vegas if they deliver what is remembered. Coward fit the bill. Frank Sinatra, Wayne Newton, Liberace, Cher, Debbie Reynolds, Tom Jones, Charo, Mitzi Gaynor,Céline Dion, Bette Midler, Patti Page—the golden legends of the Strip are as odd as you please, but Las Vegas audiences (as used to be the case in London and Paris, and perhaps still is) have long, fond memories.
    Upon his arrival, Coward wrote colleagues in London: “The gangsters who run the places are all urbane and charming.” During the course of Coward’s run,
Life
magazine photographer Loomis Dean rented a Cadillac limousine, stocked it with ice and liquor, and drove Coward fifteen miles into the desert to photograph him taking a cup of tea in the wilderness, attired in what Coward described as “deep evening dress.” The photographer used the desert as the geographical equivalent of a straight man. The famous photographs perfectly captured the incongruous equipoise that describes the Vegas aesthetic.
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    Forty years ago, more than forty years, my friend Marilyn announced she was going to Las Vegas to see Elvis Presley. “Come,” she said. “You have to see Las Vegas at least once before you die,” she said.
    We drove through a summer night. Sheet lightning blinked in the eastern sky. I listened as Marilyn