The neon glow of the Borgata promises a certain kind of American resurrection, a chance to wash the grime of the ordinary in a river of manufactured light.
This weekend, however, the river washed up something darker. In a hotel room high above the chiming slots and the green felt tables, a short and peculiar drama reached its final curtain, leaving behind a scene so perfectly strange it would be tossed out of a screenwriter’s office for being too on-the-nose.
The players were a pair of New Yorkers, their story now silenced. Baoyi Bowie Zheng, thirty-six, from Staten Island, and Wei Guo Liang, sixty-eight, from Brooklyn, were found in a circumstance that defies easy explanation.
The medical examiner, that great deflator of mysteries, reports that Ms. Zheng died of a broken neck. Mr. Liang, we are told, died by his own hand and by a knife.
The police, in their methodical way, are left to piece together the connection between these two souls, a task akin to assembling a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing and no picture on the box.
One cannot help but see the ghost of an old movie plot here, a tale of mistaken identity and misplaced earrings that once captured the frantic, quirky energy of a bygone New York.
But this is not a movie. This is the Atlantic City of today, and the only thing being desperately sought now is a motive, a reason, a thread of logic in a tapestry of chaos. The authorities have resorted to asking the public for clues, a sure sign that the official script has been lost.
What brought a woman from Staten Island and a man from Brooklyn together in this temple of chance?
Was it a business arrangement gone wrong, a familial dispute, or some fleeting, tragic alliance forged over a hand of blackjack?
The casino floor below continues its endless, blinking ballet of hope and loss, utterly indifferent to the small, stark tragedy that played out in one of its rented rooms.
It’s a reminder that for every public drama of a winning hand or a devastating loss, there are countless private ones unfolding behind soundproof doors, stories that end not with a jackpot, but with a coroner’s report.
The great American casino offers many kinds of escape, and it seems the two New Yorkers have taken the most final one of all.