Mission Drift

The Team

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781783195244
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

Mission Drift is a pioneering journey across the USA in pursuit of the soul of American capitalism, created in the blazing heat of a Las Vegas June. Told through atomic blasts, lizard ballet, and original music that fuses Las Vegas glitz with Western ballads and Southern blues, it features two interweaving love stories: the epic saga of an immortal teenage Dutch couple as they travel west from Amsterdam to New Amsterdam in 1624, all the way to modern-day financially devastated Las Vegas, and the intimate portrait of a cocktail waitress and a cowboy grappling with the 2008 recession and their crumbling American dreams. Over it all reigns Miss Atomic, a seductive storyteller/singer inspired by the 1950s beauty pageants celebrating the bombs tested in the Nevada desert. She is the symbol of creation and destruction, bankruptcy and bonanza, and this profoundly unique American city.

Act One

MISS ATOMIC in her lair over the stage. Nighttime in Vegas. She is looking out over the valley.

MISS ATOMIC: (On mic.) Good evening, pagans, Vegans, insomniacs, gorgeous lizards, hospitality peddlers, sweethearts, assassins.

Grab your drink baby, we’re gonna be here for a while.

No seriously, grab your drink, it’s dry out here.

We are desert people. We make our homes in impossibility. We hallucinate regularly. We might have magic lamps, or we may be the type, myself included, to play the genies. Let me illustrate. If you will, a little snap-er-oo.

She snaps.

VICKI: WELCOME TO LAS VEGAS.

MISS ATOMIC: Welcome to fabulous Las Vegas! Las Meadows. A resting stop for Mexican traders, for Mormon missionaries, for folks looking to start over get a leg up, find a way out. Our oasis in the desert.

There’s a story round these parts. I know it from the inside. Before time there were two twin brothers. Mythic, beast brothers. Big scale. They slept between mountains with their legs in separate valleys. Their names were Love and Wrestling. I’m not being poetic. Those were their names.

Wrestling liked heavy things. He set records and broke them. Lifting hurling pushing pulling dragging pieces of world across the continent as dead weights. What use is a god, after all, unless he’s strong.

Love had the soul of an artist, and kept mostly to himself. The Mojave was his secret sandbox. And he was wild with his work.

Now Wrestling, as the firstborn, had inherited the land from their giant beast father. And over time Love grew angry. What good is force without talent? “Fuck sand,” he said. He turned to limestone. Sandstone. Shale. Granite. Erecting elaborate countries that baked under the sun. Big as a continent. Sharp and bright and complicated.

So late one night while hurling boulders Wrestling discovered his brother’s work. A secret country carved in his brother’s hand. And it pushed him into the red.

“Fuck you Love,” he thinks.

And he hurls a rock, blasts the tops of Love’s castles. He bowls. Makes gullies and forks. Sits on pyramids. Splits and tears and shakes the earth with belly flops.

Love awoke the next morning.

And saw what his brother had done.

Family is funny.

Sometimes it’s just not possible to work shit out.

So the two brothers call it Splitsville. Separate ways. Rivals.

Love did everything he could to build up the fucking land: dams, canals, hotels, high rises, casinos. And Wrestling did everything he could to raze the fuckers down. Tornados, earthquakes, explosions, whatever. And on they went, until ONE day, Love realized, “What the hell? Why don’t I get these fucking humans to do my work?” So Love put the lust for improvement and development and expansion… and expansion into the hearts of humans, and claimed his Lazy-boy throne in the sky.

And then he changed his name.

To Steve Wynn.

Smiles.

Fucking bastard…

Everybody’s heart has two houses. Two brothers living inside…

A snap-er-oo.

She snaps.

LIBBY: The outskirts of the city of Las Vegas. Metropolitan population –

LIBBY and VICKY: 1,951,269.

LIBBY: This is Joan, a cocktail waitress with a mortgage and a car loan. She just got laid off.

She’s in the darkness now off North Las Vegas Boulevard, in a place called the Neon Boneyard, alone with only the lizards for company. Before her are the signs of long gone casinos: the Desert Inn, the Stardust. The fragile bones of electric dinosaurs.

She looks at the new skyline, at the bronzed Wynn casino, at the golden Mandalay Bay, at the 40 billion-candle-power beam of light streaming upwards from a black glass pyramid.

JOAN looks out, a quiet desert moment.

She looks at the frozen construction sites… The cranes look like animals in the dark.

MISS ATOMIC (and JOAN): (Singing quietly, almost like a voice on the wind in JOAN’s mind. JOAN joins her for the second line.)

I think somebody is Burning Down this Place I built But if you believe in Vegas…

JOAN: Fuck.

LIBBY: Two days ago at a casino, south on the Strip.

A flashback. A casino, glowing,...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Act One
• Act Two