It’s eighteen hours even if you get a direct flight from Vegas. And there’s nothing much there now anyway, except some farms and red mud. Don Google-Earthed it. Once upon a time I was a little prince in a magic kingdom. I can’t remember anything before my memory of Stroheim, as if that was the thing that shook my consciousness awake. He fell out of a fig tree chasing after a blue-tailed monkey. Thump went Stroheim, and I was off and running, once upon a time—but let me tell this straight, dearest humans. You must know how it ends…. There was Mama and me and my sister, and we lived in the forest below an escarpment with about twenty others, whose names I guess I’ll have to change. I slept high up in a nest of leaves that Mama would prepare in the crook of a branch, with Victoria curled around me and Mama around her. In the mornings Mama would take us across the stream to fish for termites. Victoria would ride on her back and I would cling underneath. The water was cold and fast-flowing and pressed against me as we crossed but I always felt safe.
