Secrets of the Great Pyramid

Essay by Michael Sykes

We drove down through Beatty and into Las Vegas, cruising The Strip all the way to the end. We checked into the Luxor, the mad sphinx glaring into the mid-day heat from the front of the enormous black pyramid, throngs of tourists from all over the world photographing everything in sight. At night a giant laser beam shoots straight into the stars from the apex of the pyramid while inside the cavernous interior, night or day, visitors and guests choose from a variety of entertainments, restaurants and gambling venues. All vaguely pathetic and sad, overtly phony and calculated by corporate enterprise to wring money out of wallets and purses and bank accounts and credit cards like a giant sponge cleaning dead skin from the surface of the earth, a kind of all-purpose corporate loofa that slinks out from behind a giant wall of visual and aural confusion and non-stop kitsch and scrubs down the poor trodding sightseers for all they're worth.

This isn't a bad thing, but a good thing, because it's needed and expected and longed for in a world where so many have too much of nothing and not enough something, something missing, a large vacant emptiness where the soul wanders aimlessly like a lost child far from home, in a strange city. An empty interior that masks itself with a tacky facade built to dissolve like sugar in the rain, like frescos crumbling under polluted skies, in a Mayan city in the jungles of Guatemala or a strip mall in the desert. Which is all Las Vegas ever said it was or wanted to be.

Would I ever voluntarily enter this world for purposes of my own? Well, yes, I would and did, several times. The most recent being a UFO convention that was held at the Showboat Hotel and Casino in the fall of 1993, where you could mingle with people from other planets who wandered the hotel wearing metal pyramids on their heads, enter elevators filled with abductees on their way to tell-all seminars dressed unobtrusively in their midwestern clothes but carrying dark secrets inside like sharks with bellies full of license plates and old tires. As well as all the documented and undocumented aliens who were cleverly disguised in menial positions in the service sector, pretending to make beds and bus tables while closely observing and recording the exotic human behavior all around them.

This time inside the pyramid it was the elevator that caught my eye, again. Elevators anytime, anywhere. Something about them. Not really of this world, not really a human enterprise but a transition between worlds, shuttling the soul from one appointment to another: the doors open and close, you may be alone, with friends, strangers, weirdos who stare at parts of your body as they peel off clothes and dissolve them on the way down, up, or across as they do at the Luxor, diagonally, following the angles of the all four corners and converging out of sight in the vanishing point of the apex above.

It was in one of these elevators that I had the experience I want to tell you about. A brief vignette from the land of illusion and plastic dreams, a flimsy, transparent encounter that crossed an open space in my 72-hour limbo of research and reconnaissance in the belly of the beast. If not the belly then some obscure, remnant organ that still produced secretions that affected something, somewhere were digested, absorbed and finally eliminated as we passed along, rising and falling through the fabricated air. I was in an elevator with a small group of other guests when we stopped at one of the floors and the doors slid open and two hospital orderlies or paramedics or health custodians, dressed in white uniforms, stepped inside and turned their backs to the rest of us and faced the open doors onto the floor where I could see a gurney piled with stained sheets and gauze and plastic and rubber debris from a recent medical calamity, the gurney standing alone in the middle of the hallway and -- was it my imagination? -- also containing a few littered trays from room service orders, coffee cups and egg-stained plates, napkins and spoons.

We all stood in the elevator for an eternity, the doors open, the gurney and the white backs of the orderlies in sight. One was an older man with long bushy sideburns, tall, lean, angular and red-faced, the other thirty-something, firefighter-handsome with his dark hair and mustache and buffed-out short powerful body ready to pounce. We all stood there looking at the mess on the gurney while the two men carried on a brief exchange, looking out, looking down and finally looking at each other. "It don't always work, do it?" said the tall, raw-boned country-and-western type. "Not for him it didn't," replied the Burt Reynolds look-alike. "Not for him it didn't," I thought as the door noiselessly closed and we angled downward in our descent. We were up in the air wondering about the secrets of the great pyramid, whatever it was that happened to him: Too much to eat or drink? Too much kinky sex with one of the pharaoh's call girls? Too much monkey business of whatever kind? We all got out on the bottom floor and went our separate ways, but I was left with these burning questions and wandered aimlessly between time machines, super-hero photo booths where you could have your head photographed on Arnold Schwarzeneg-gar's body or the buxom torso of some curvaceous surfer-chick, Mediterranean buffets and roulette wheels, wandering and wondering what to do next, what it was that didn't work and might have happened to him.

Finally I went up to the security guard at his podium in front of the elevators on the bottom floor where I'd disembarked, showed him my room key/coded card -- you can't get into an elevator and go up without showing your card -- and asked him what happened to the man on the tenth floor. "We're not allowed to discuss hotel business with the guests," he said. "Why not," I said, stupidly. "Management policy," he replied. "It must've been bad," I said, fishing.

The security guard simply looked at me without saying a word, without changing his expression or blinking his eyes, and I walked away, nodding to myself as if I'd learned something important, but I hadn't really, nothing at all. Not unless you consider any reminder of the vastness of universe, its deep mystery and prevalent secrets that surround and confound us at every turn, that are never answered satisfactorily, never wrapped up in a neat little package and delivered on the doorsteps of our minds. Not even by scientists or metaphysicians, theologians or mystics, certainly not by security guards at the Luxor in Las Vegas, but only by ourselves when the veil lifts for a moment, the elevator door slides open and we're given the briefest glimpse, the characters appear on stage, a vignette surfaces and plays itself out before our eyes and then vanishes into thin air, the stale recirculated air inside the great pyramid whose myriad faces turn back the sun and moon and stars.

Michael Sykes runs Great Basin Books in Cedarville, Calif.