From what I could tell the Englishman was a thoroughly decent man, decent all the way down to his English bones. Had it occurred to me that this situation—two strangers having a drink together in a casino shaped like an Egyptian pyramid—might turn into some sort of sick, twisted, perverted encounter?

Yes, that had occurred to me. All my life I’ve thought that even the most innocuous situations are going to somehow turn into sick, twisted, perverted encounters.

But the truth is this: very few of the situations in my life that I’d thought were going to turn into sick, twisted, perverted encounters actually turned into sick, twisted, perverted encounters. Which is a huge relief. And, also—let’s be honest—a bit of a disappointment, too. Fact: A sick, twisted, perverted encounter once or twice a year can be good for you. They get the old heart pumping, get the adrenaline simmering. They wake up those dormant fight-or-flight instincts.

The Englishman and I seated ourselves at one of the Luxor’s dank, murky bars. Once the bartender delivered our drinks, I decided to get the conversational show on the road. The sooner the two of us started talking, the sooner I’d get this ordeal over with. I began with my preferred ice-breaker in January. “Do you think ghosts are real?” I asked. If you enjoyed a conversation with me last month, then you likely had a chance to answer this.

The Englishman, like myself, was skeptical on the existence of ghosts. I shared my theory that the best-known ghost stories were fictions cobbled together either by insecure people looking for attention, or by the clinically deranged.

“That’s your formal diagnosis on the subject of haunts, is it?” the Englishman asked with a sneer.

“It is,” I said, stroking my invisible goatee.

That’s when the Englishman did something unexpected: he leaned in close to me. How close was he? He was so close that I could feel his English body heat radiating out of his Harrod’s cardigan. He was so close that I caught a waft of his upscale cologne. I recognized the waft: Sandalwood from Taylor of Old Bond Street. My German roommate in college had doused himself in that stuff on a daily basis.

The sudden proximity? The body heat? The cologne? It all added up to one logical conclusion. Here comes the sick, twisted, perverted stuff, I thought. Brace for impact!

Instead of giving my knee a catty squeeze, the Englishman had leaned in close to tell me something. And what he told me gave me a bit of a chill. “Did you know,” he quietly said, “that a river once ran straight through the Luxor casino?” He sounded like a scout leader around a campfire.

“What do you mean by ‘river’?” I asked. “Like a river-river?”

“Yes. A river-river,” the Englishman said. “Straight through this place.”

Egyptian boats, he explained, sailed along the river-river via automated, amusement-park-style machinery. These boats ferried the Luxor’s guests and their luggage from the check-in desk over there, all the way to the elevators, which were over there. This experience was known formally as the “Luxor Nile River Adventure.” The boats weaved this way and that, navigating the great landmarks on the Luxor’s casino floor: The Valley of the Queens, King Ramses’ Temple, the Pyramid Buffet, etc. The Englishman pointed out an invisible path around our periphery with his index finger, showing me where the river-river once ran. It had been a shallow river, he said—knee-deep, at most—and about four or five meters wide. I asked him where the river-river was now. It couldn’t be easy to remove a river, could it?

“The Luxor did a renovation in 1995, ” the Englishman said, “and they erased the river completely.”

The Nile River Adventure, he explained, was an embarrassing mistake for the Luxor. It was a grand-scale engineering folly. The Luxor’s arriving guests had to wait an hour for one of the molasses-slow fiberglass barges to arrive. When a barge did finally pick them up, it would transport them to the elevators at a painfully slow rate of speed. “For people who had only just gotten off an airplane, and who were anxious to gamble, the Nile River Adventure was an exercise in sadistic torture,” he said. “It seemed like hellish comedy to put twitchy gamblers through such an ordeal.” I recalled my own interminable wait for the East Tower elevator earlier with the quiet Japanese man. An hour-long wait for an ornate mechanical boat to carry me there? I would have lost my mind.

The Englishman and I touched our glasses together. “Rest in peace, Nile River Adventure,” I said. Then, carrying things a little further as I tend to do, I began dabbing at my eyes with a nearby cocktail napkin to mop up my phony tears. The Englishman admired my theatrics; he grabbed a cocktail napkin and did the same. The two of us sat together and had a cathartic “cry” for a fake river that no longer existed. I was liking the Englishman more all the time.

The bartender interpreted our dramatic display as an excuse to bring us two more pints. “Figured you could use these,” he said setting them down on our coasters. The man had a spray of age spots across the upper half of his face. He looked like he been splashed with motor oil. He wore a crimson vest that was at least two sizes too small for his frame. I asked him to tell us about the Nile River Adventure. “Oh sure, I know about the Nile River,” he said. He said that he’d started working at the Luxor in the year 2000, or 2001, around that time. “By the time I got here, the Nile had been gone for awhile,” he said. “So I never saw it first-hand. Not with my own eyes.”

The Englishman asked what the casino had done with it. “Come on, man. This is Las Vegas, man,” the bartender said. “They did what they always do here: they covered it up and built new things on top of it. This whole city is a mirage built on top of a mirage.”

“…Built on top of another mirage,” the Englishman added.

Then the bartender planted his elbows on the bar in front of us and leaned down close. His breath smelled like cigarettes and, bizarrely, cinnamon. He looked over his shoulder a few times, to see if anyone nearby could hear him. “Some nights in the winter months like this one, when the wind blows out of the south,” he said in a low voice, “you can hear it down there.”

I was confused. “Hear what down where?” I asked.

“The wind, man. It gets into the building and it blows through the old, covered-up riverbed of the Nile River Adventure,” he said. “It makes this low sound, like a howl. Some nights, it sounds human. Listen.” The bartender stopped talking and looked up at the ceiling.

The three of us sat there, our ears sifting through the trash heap of Luxor sounds: the bells, the buzzers, the whistles; the idle slot machines and their dun-dun-dun-dun rhythms; Cher singing, “Do you believe in life after love?” And then, underneath it all, I could hear something else. It was off in the distance initially, very far away. Then, once my ears were tuned in, I heard it more clearly, more distinctly. It was the wind, exactly as the bartender had described, blowing across the Nevada desert, entering a pyramid-shaped casino, and whistling through a sealed-over riverbed of a now-defunct amusement park ride that had never worked properly. They did what they always do here: they covered it up and built new things on top of it.

I felt an unnerving tickle down my back, as if the ghost of Liberace was tracing its ring-heavy skeletal hand along my spine.

That’s when the low, guttural howl abruptly stopped. The Englishman and I looked at the bartender. He was grinning. Then he laughed, and we knew. We knew what had happened here. He had been making the howl in his throat the entire time. This was all an exercise in Las Vegas bartender theatre.

“You two are the greenest goddamned pair of guys I ever had in here,” he said. He barked to the other bartender on the far side of the bar. “Claude! Claude, come over here. You won’t believe what I just did to these guys. Come on over here and let me tell you all about it.”