One Life to Lose

by Kris Ripper

  “Oh. Okay. You don’t go out after closing, do you?”

  “Rarely.” It wasn’t that it was late. It had more to do with the steady rhythms of my life, which necessitated going home after closing the theater. I could go out, of course. I just didn’t plan to.

  “All right. Well, I’ll talk to you at some point.”

  “I should be at Scream Night.” I paused. “Do you think—if whoever they are killed last night, do you think they’ll do it again on Friday?”

  “No. They could, but I doubt it. I think they’re feeling the heat right now and this is how they’re avoiding getting caught. Plus, they’d be all banged up. Detective Green said Philpott definitely got some hits in, because his knuckles were bloody.”

  “All right. I’ll be on the lookout for anyone who looks like they were recently in a fight.”

  “Yeah. Well, I’ll see you, then. Bye, Cam.”

  “Bye, Ed.”

  I hung up my phone and disabled the alarm, which was set to go off in half an hour. I was up.

  Anderson Philpott, whom I knew casually, was dead. Togg, the blogger who kept all of La Vista’s crimes against queer people in the public eye—who kept the pressure on the La Vista PD when they seemed inclined to forget those crimes, or worse, when they treated them as jokes—was dead. I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, wondering if Philpott’s alter ego had ever weighed on him. Cary Grant had spent most of his life, on- and off-screen, playing Cary Grant. Philpott had balanced the intense rage of Togg with the milder persona he had at the bar—a guy you thought was decent and polite, if a little passionate at times, but with a good sense of humor.

  Not that it mattered now. Both parts of him were dead. I got up and started my day.

  My phone dinged at 3 p.m.

  Keith: Oh my god, Philpott/Togg.

  Keith: Oh my god, Philpott is Togg.

  Keith: I can’t even.

  Keith: . . .

  Cameron: I know. It’s awful.

  Keith: Josh loves that site. I can’t take it most of the time, but he’d sit there in the morning reading the most offensive comments out to me and laughing.

  Keith: This sucks.

  Cameron: I know.

  I thought they might stop by the theater, but they didn’t. I thought I should text to check in later, but in the end I wasn’t sure it would be welcome, so I didn’t.

  Sometime after I’d gone upstairs, when I was sitting on the couch with a cup of tea reading my favorite Cary Grant biography—which I knew so well it was the adult equivalent of a child’s security blanket—my phone dinged again.

  Keith: Club Fred’s is depressing as hell right now.

  Keith: Seriously, we saw him here last week.

  Keith: Like, at this same table. We sat here, with Philpott, and processed our feelings about straight people who come here looking around like it’s a zoo.

  Keith: (He said sometimes he can’t tell if the scared people are straight or in the closet. Which: point.)

  Keith: I know I barely knew him, but I’m still sad. And we didn’t start our day with a new post on his website, which . . .

  Keith: It’s so stupid, but we’ve always done that. And now we never will again. Like, I get it’s not bad like it would be if we’d been good friends with him, but it still makes me sad.

  Cameron: I think that makes sense.

  It did. That was true. I sat for a long moment, debating what to say next.

  Cameron: When my grandmother died, my grandfather didn’t cry for five days. That’s how long it took him to run out of bread. When he ran out of bread he started crying and my parents had to call in paramedics to sedate him.

  Cameron: He kept saying, “We’re out of bread, we’re out of bread.”

  Cameron: Obviously he was really grieving her. Not worried about bread.

  Cameron: Not that that’s the same as Philpott, but sometimes your brain gets sad about relatively minor things in order to not get sad about the really big things.

  Keith: I think that is totally true. Exactly.

  Keith: Because really it’s fucking scary that we sat here last week with a super smart guy, who was fit, and strong, and he still got killed. That’s so fucking scary and wrong.

  Cameron: It really is.

  Cameron: How’s Josh?

  Keith: Doing his thing. Being the rock.

  Keith: I used to be kind of annoyed by it, like why can’t he ever be the asshole who breaks down?

  Keith: Then I realized that putting up a front was sort of his way of breaking down, of kind of working through whatever was happening.

  Keith: So now I feel better. Most of the time.

  Keith: :-P

  Cameron: You know I have no idea what that means, right?

  Keith: I’m sticking my tongue out at you.

  Keith: . . . That sounds less dirty when you don’t spell it out.

  Cameron: :-P

  Keith: Hahaha, you got it, Cam!

  Keith: I just told J that I’m teaching you text smileys. He said, “Oh no.”

  Cameron: :-P to him too, then.

  Cameron: That’s the only one I know.

  Keith: You can do the basic smile face. :-)

  Keith: And this is a wink: ;-)

  Cameron: ;-)

  Keith: Are you coming on to me, Cam? ;-)

  I laughed, and blushed.

  Cameron: Is there one for laughing?

  Keith: XD

  Keith: Or :-D

  Cameron: :-D

  Keith: You’re growing up so fast!

  Cameron: :-P

  Keith: XD

  Keith: Okay, we’re taking off. Have a good night, Cam.

  Cameron: Good night.

  Keith: J says good night too.

  Cameron: Good night to Josh as well.

  Keith: <3

  I stared at that one for a long moment, trying to figure it out. A handlebar mustache? But what did inverted eyebrows mean? No, those couldn’t be eyebrows.

  A horn blared outside and I glanced up for a second, waiting to see if the crunch of metal would follow. It didn’t. When I looked back down at the screen with fresh eyes, I realized what <3 meant.

  A heart. Keith had texted me a heart. I flushed and put away my phone.

  True to his intentions, Ed got the news about Philpott up on the Times-Record site, and posted updates. He told me when he stopped by on Thursday that his editor had given him carte blanche to write short posts for the site, always pending approval before posting.

  By Friday it seemed clear that most, if not all, of Ed’s stories were approved.

  It wasn’t as dramatic as Togg’s site—at no point did Ed seem inclined to start a fistfight, and the comments were permanently disabled—but his articles were the most up-to-date local news the Times-Record had ever published online. He said he still had the same workload as before and everything beyond that was on his own time, but he didn’t seem upset about it.

  Somehow Philpott’s death had done more for Ed’s job in three days than the year or two before had managed. If there was some sort of afterlife, and souls really could monitor the things happening back on earth, I thought Philpott would be pretty satisfied with that.

  I donned one of Great-grandfather’s old circus costumes for Scream Night (he’d been passing through the Bay Area when he met my great-grandmother, whose dream of having a movie theater—with sound—fit perfectly in with Great-grandfather’s notions of exhibitionist entertainment), but apparently, despite its authenticity, my costume failed to impress.

  Zane slapped me on the shoulder as I took the stool beside hers at the bar. “Hey, Cameron came as Cameron Rheingold.”

  “Actually, I came as Harold Rheingold.” I tugged at my lapels. “This is a vintage suit. My great-grandfather wore it when he was a juggler in the circus.”

  “A juggler? Count on a Rheingold to have been in the circus.” She straightened my tie. “Still, it looks an awful lot like you, Cam.”

  “I think he w
as going for Bobby May, actually.”

  She blinked.

  “He was a juggler. Bobby May. Probably America’s best juggler.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I sighed. “Never mind.”

  Tom walked over with my Scotch and a smile. I waited until he turned away to ask Zane why he looked happier than anyone else in Club Fred’s.

  “Oh, that’s easy. Not that he’s not upset about Philpott, but he has an alibi for Tuesday night. The cops were here first thing Wednesday asking around, but not only does Tom have an alibi, no one else saw Philpott here either.” She shook her head. “It’s still not real to me that he’s dead. I always went days without seeing him. Part of me expects to find him at a table inciting one of those marathon debates of his any minute now. Jaq’s taking it pretty hard, though.”

  “They were friends?”

  “Not really. But she was his senior mentor when he was a freshman at the high school, so they knew each other for a long time. And they always kind of tried to out-think one another, you know? So it’s not so much they were friends as they . . . had a role. Played a role, in each other’s lives.” She shrugged. “Like Honey. I used to go to knitting with her. She wasn’t a close friend or anything, but every time I go to knitting, I miss her. Anyway.”

  “I understand.”

  “I think there’s going to be a memorial service, if you’re interested. His parents are having a small funeral, but Ed got a bee in his bonnet about the community not being able to grieve, so I think he’s arranging a thing.”

  “I’ll ask him.”

  She patted my shoulder again. “I’m gonna go drown my sorrows in the long, gorgeous legs of Mz Prz. Have a good one, boy.”

  “You too, Zane.”

  I pulled out my phone and started reading. I’d finished Rebecca with the usual sense of lingering unease and moved on to a mystery Alisha had told me to read, about a detective solving murders at a fashion show somewhere in England. The writing was excellent, and I appreciated the immersive quality of the book. A quarter of the way through I still hadn’t solved it, which meant it would either reach a terrible conclusion with a heretofore unknown character being the killer, or it would impress me by being someone I’d already rejected. I looked forward to finding out.

  I was somewhat lost in the story when two hands clamped down on my shoulders, startling me.

  “Sorry!” Keith slid onto Zane’s abandoned stool, and Josh the stool on my other side. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “Oh no, it’s fine. Good book is all.”

  “I have no idea how you read in here. It’s so loud.”

  “I guess I hadn’t noticed.”

  He smiled. I turned toward Josh, to be inclusive, but he was grinning as if the idea of feeling excluded had never occurred to him.

  “I admire your concentration,” he said.

  I narrowed my eyes. “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing. Exactly what I said. Hey, what about Philpott? Crazy, right? Man, I read his blog every morning with my coffee.”

  “That’s what Keith said.”

  “Ha, yeah.” His eyes slipped to the side. “I liked his site more than Keith. I mean, I didn’t always agree with him, but I really liked seeing what he’d say. He had this way of forming arguments that made me think about them differently. His whole lecture on trans politics and how harmful it would be to try to separate ‘trans’ from ‘queer’ as if somehow binary queer people shouldn’t be saddled with nonbinary queer people—I was up for nights mulling that whole thing over.”

  “Literally,” Keith mumbled. “Nights.”

  “Dude made me think. But I wish I’d known it was Philpott all along. I would have liked to have told him I really thought about that after reading his stuff.”

  Keith nudged his shoulder. “You did.”

  Both of us looked over.

  “I’m serious. One night we were sitting here with Philpott and I think Obie and some other people, and you asked him if he ever read Togg’s site because it had blown your mind. So you told him, Josh. Even if you didn’t know it.”

  “He was here when I said that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’d he say?”

  Keith smiled. “He told you he thought Togg was full of hot air, but he’d see if he could find the article you were talking about.”

  “Oh man. Shit. That just made me more sad. But I guess I’m glad he knew I thought his alter ego was cool.” He shook his head. “Listen, what do you guys think about getting out of here? It’s not really the vibe I thought it was going to be.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Keith said. “Cam? You’re, uh, coming over, right? I mean, no pressure or anything.”

  I put away my phone. “That was my intention.”

  “Is that why you only had one drink?” Josh asked.

  “I always only have one drink. It’s more sentimental than anything. Scotch was my dad’s drink, and Humphrey Bogart’s.”

  “Your dad stole his favorite drink from Bogie?”

  “He did.”

  Keith nudged me. “And you stole yours from your dad. Aw. Come on. Do you want me to send you the address? Or ride along?”

  “You should ride along,” Josh said. “Road work at LVCC screwed up all the maps.”

  “Good point.”

  I hadn’t prepared for this. I hadn’t prepared for them to part with a brief kiss, for Josh to wave, for Keith to follow me to the Volvo.

  I hadn’t prepared to start the car with him beside me. When was the last time I’d had someone in my car? I sometimes gave the high school kids rides home after closing the theater. That must have been it. Impersonal, friendly, a wave and a “Thanks, Cameron!” at the curb.

  Keith exhaled, loudly, a rush of breath that was faintly white in the cold air. “You are making me so nervous right now. You’re okay, right?”

  “Sorry. And yes, I’m fine. This is unexpected, and I . . . don’t cope well with unexpected.”

  He turned so he was sitting half against the door, looking at me. “Oh, see, that’s like so tempting. Now I just want to throw all kinds of unexpected at you. I bet I could make it good. Like, I’m pretty sure I could help you with the coping.”

  “Maybe. But I wouldn’t be able to see the color of your eyes, or the shade of your skin. Everything shifts to black and white when things change too drastically from how I imagined they would be.”

  “Seriously? I’ve never heard of that.”

  “It might not happen to other people. I don’t think it’s physiological. It’s more of a defense mechanism. My brain turns life into an old film reel when it’s too overwhelming to deal with in color.”

  “Wow. Oh, left here, sorry. Get in the right-hand left turn lane. So wait, how often does that happen?”

  “Not often. Because I try to limit unpredictable events.” I considered it. “The last time was the night the film series began.”

  “Because of your index cards.”

  I nodded, relieved when the light changed so he wouldn’t expect me to look over. “I visualized a lot of different ways that night could go, but I never imagined I’d trip and fall on my own stage. I should have numbered the index cards.”

  “What you said was good. I’m sure your notes were good, too, but the way you stood up there and told us about how An Affair to Remember demonstrated the radical notion that two rich people might love each other so much they’d get jobs? That was really cool. We laughed at that, Cam. And your teleprompter joke.”

  “Oh. I’m glad.”

  “Me too.” He gestured to the other lane. “Right up here. So if you start losing color tonight, let us know, all right? It’s important. Will you tell us if that happens?”

  “I don’t— It’s not— It really isn’t a big deal—”

  “I think it kind of is. Josh will want to surprise you, because that’s one of the ways he gets off, but he’ll want to know if it’s too much. And if you have this sort of defensive slide into
old-movie mode, we need to know. Okay, so this is where we detour. Make the next right, then we’ll go up three intersections and take a left at the light so we can avoid the nonprotected left across traffic. It’ll make sense when you see it.”

  Josh had said it was all about Keith. That it was our job to make him feel safe. The word safe in the context of whatever they had planned intrigued me. I hadn’t thought too deeply about it the other night—surely anything that caused the marks I’d seen would include as a concept danger, and therefore safety—but I was beginning to wonder if he meant something else.

  My world dropped into silver and black when I felt unsafe, regardless of how objectively safe I was. That was what Keith wanted to know, the honesty he was requesting. I could give it to him, I thought. I could take a breath and say “I’m losing color,” and he would know what that meant.

  I wished that the night would pass without my ever having to say that, but if it should happen, I hoped I’d be courageous enough to share the truth with two men who were courageous enough to share their truths with me.

  Their apartment was a small one-bedroom in an apartment block I decided had probably been built sometime in the eighties. Everything still worked, but was dated, though it looked so much like the two of them that I liked it immediately.

  A comfortable leather couch, black side tables, black coffee table (Josh’s minimalism). A bookcase overflowing with books stacked every which way, a kitchen with appliances littering the limited counter space and a few dishes in the sink.

  “We totally meant to clean, sorry,” Keith said.

  “And by ‘we,’ Keith means ‘Josh.’”

  “Hey, I can clean!”

  “We know that you could, babe, but you don’t.”

  “You’re so rude.”

  “Did you Ghost Tour?” I asked, still looking around.

  “We so did.” Eyes alight, Keith grinned. “It was great. Well, it was the usual cheesy stuff, but we had fun.”

  Josh kissed Keith’s cheek. “We did. At one point Keith got scared and clung to me, I’m just saying.”

  “I did not cling—”

  It suddenly hit me that they were nervous. As nervous as I was, maybe more. I’d been thinking about this like I was the one who risked something because I had no idea what we were doing, but standing there, in the living room, surrounded by little pieces of their lives, I realized that they were risking so much more than I was.