West Las Vegas is a city unfolded. Here, the map is the territory, but with better signage.

A 52 Pickup of urban planning, West Las Vegas has conquered blight by embracing it, by creating a soil too barren for weeds.

It’s 9 am on a Saturday and I'm alone on Tropicana Boulevard. Alone in a moving, city-sized sculpture of alienation where everything keeps its distance and presides over the aloneness of the rest.

That distance is the most striking feature. Separation is everywhere. Immense space between buildings, between sidewalk and storefront, between curb and block, between gas pump and driveway, even between crows. It’s a scale that turns cars to mice and people to roaches. A scale that makes the wind tired to blow.

Here even birds of a feather eye each other warily. They don’t flock together as much as loiter, each preserving the Minimum Safe Distance. How did “far” become “close enough?” How did everything here come to agree that twenty feet must separate a sidewalk from the building it supposedly serves? Why does every blank office tower know that 100 yards of empty parking lot is plenty close there, pal, thank you?

Half a mile of walking and I'm still the only person. Sure, the streets are full of cars, but they’re armored, tinted and hurtling by at near freeway speeds. The only face is on a homeland security poster at an empty bus shelter that admonishes the local Spanish speaking mass transit riders (where is this mass? Where is anyone at all?) to “stand guard” against terrorism. What could a terrorist possibly do to West Las Vegas? Level it? It defines flat. Poison it? How could you be sure you’d succeeded? Incite terror? If the population cowered in fear, who on these deserted streets would tell you? Nothing would penetrate the dark windshields and drawn shades to betray the secret.

Las Vegas is the fastest growing urban area in the country. 5000 souls move here every month. Put another way, every year sixty thousand people decide someplace else is worse. Where could they possibly be living? Where did their hope go?

To Las Vegas.

But not in equal measure. If it requires capital and specialized labor, it’s on The Strip. If it requires no capital and unskilled labor, it’s here in West Las Vegas. I tally off the businesses I can see down Tropicana Ave: fast food, gas station, nail salon, tanning beds, mini mart, paintball, ice cream, frozen yogurt, bagels, party supplies, drug store, kick boxing, travel agent, bar. Repeat as necessary.

To be on foot in West Las Vegas is to be a scavenger, an opportunist. “Neighborhood” has been replaced by a randomly shuffled deck of business licenses and two year leases, with each place bearing no relation to the business next door or the people living nearby. “Honey, I’m going to the Tanning District. Do you need anything?”  The reach of the car has made the placement of everything completely arbitrary. Everything but gas stations.

An hour’s walk and I've seen none of it and all of it, and I wonder if it’s possible to do it differently here. Could some wild-eyed dreamer come here tomorrow and build, and talk, and admonish and cajole and make something out here that was like being somewhere? Or is West Las Vegas like a prion, where every new thing conforms to the morbid fold of the substrate, and every idea, every good intention, every optimistic blueprint with fresh ink and curled edges inescapably becomes just one more part of the existing whole, another pale block under the lifeless sun? Geography becomes destiny, new building on old, the barrenness reaching unchecked through the desert until it reaches…what? A mountain? A river? A city? And if this desiccated tumor could metastasize across the desert, consume the lifeless sands, and reach the borders of human civilization—which would win?

Thinking of the strip mall parasite consuming all out to the horizon makes me the survivor of some end of world catastrophe, the lone madman in a wasteland of plenty, surrounded by more than I could ever need to stay alive, except a reason.

At this, I can’t imagine the labor of re-making the desert. I can’t even imagine crossing it. The risk of contamination is too great. Better to accept fate. Trapped here, what would I do? How would I live? What would become of me? With only what I see around me, with this parched shell for my oyster, what would I do?

Just what I'm doing now. I would sit here in the air conditioned Starbucks and hum along to the faux 80s music and chat up the coffee girl with the big blonde hair and the eye makeup and the game smile. We would be alone together here, and I would stand by her and shut my eyes from the vertigo of endless space around and time ahead, and as the sun retreated lay with her on a bare carpet in one of ten million beige cubes, clutch her loneliness to me and violate the Minimum Safe Distance.