A Common Loss

by Kirsten Tranter

  ‘You know I’d never really do anything like that, Elliot, you have to believe me,’ Brian said. ‘Tallis wasn’t there when it happened, no one was. He’s probably heard all of Jodie’s version of it, which can’t be trusted, obviously.’

  I nodded. ‘Right.’

  My sympathy was with him. But then I remembered Jodie, her face that stood out from that group of girls, her wide smile. I wondered what justice might possibly look like for her, and Brian’s victimized stance was harder to stomach.

  There were no clocks in the bar; there were no clocks inside anywhere in any of the Vegas casinos. The interiors were all designed to stop you noticing the passage of time, to create a suspended reality that didn’t match with any actual recognizable time of day. My watch said it was 9:37 p.m. Still on East Coast time. I tried to pull out the little wheel on the side to change it to Nevada time but it wouldn’t budge. My fingernails weren’t long enough to lever it out. I gave up. Tallis rose and wandered off in search of a bathroom.

  ‘I need to take a shower,’ Brian said.

  I thought back to my recent conversation with Lily, her revelations about Dylan’s adoption story. The name snapped into place.

  ‘Did you know that Dylan had a brother?’ I asked.

  Brian looked at me with something like the expression I must have worn when Lily told me about it. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘He had a brother.’

  ‘He didn’t have a brother. What — do you mean he had a brother that died?’

  ‘What? No. No one died.’

  Two seconds of silence followed, filled with both of us thinking the same thing, that Dylan had died.

  ‘What brother?’

  ‘He was adopted.’

  Brian leaned closer. ‘Dylan was adopted?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘How do you know?’ He asked it in a genuinely curious way, not exactly challenging the truth of the information, or how I in particular would come to have it, both things I had expected. ‘How did you find out?’

  ‘Lily,’ I said. ‘He told Lily. On drugs one night.’

  ‘On drugs.’ Brian’s eyebrows lifted, skeptical.

  ‘On acid.’

  ‘Oh …’ He was thoughtful now, eyes narrowed. ‘Did you ever take acid with Dylan?’

  ‘No. You know I hate acid.’

  ‘It was like a truth serum for him. He always avoided it because of that. Why was he taking acid with Lily?’

  ‘I don’t know. It was at a party.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Last year. In New York. Oh, you know what? I think it was in the punch.’

  Someone had mentioned it to me — a woman in the kitchen, stepping up on her tiptoes to whisper it into my ear, as though it would delight me, her breath hot and sweet from fruit-flavored lip gloss.

  Brian nodded slowly, convinced.

  Tallis came back to the table. ‘The waitress likes you, Elliot.’ He flipped a matchbook case toward me. There was a phone number written inside it.

  ‘I don’t need you to do that,’ I said.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Fix me up. I’m not that desperate.’

  ‘Don’t be so sure. Well, the night is young.’ He laid both hands flat on the table and looked back and forth between the two of us. ‘What did I interrupt?’

  I ran through it again for him. He hadn’t known. He asked the same questions as Brian, only with more skepticism about the reliability of Lily.

  ‘She always had a bit of a crush on him, your sister,’ he said.

  ‘According to her they made out for hours. In the driveway.’ I’d started to sound like Lily, bolstering the idea that there had been something between them, in order to increase the validity of her story. ‘Who knows? She did have a crush on him. But — this is the thing. She said that he asked her about it afterward. He couldn’t remember exactly what he’d said to her, but he knew it was something he wouldn’t have normally said. Something he wouldn’t have wanted to tell her.’

  ‘It’s completely believable for some reason,’ Tallis said.

  ‘I know,’ said Brian. ‘I’m not surprised.’

  ‘Aren’t you surprised that he never mentioned it?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah. In a way,’ Tallis said. ‘But he looked like them, didn’t he? His parents, I mean. Leo and Greta. So it wasn’t something that came up automatically. And some people don’t even look like their real parents.’

  ‘Their biological parents,’ I said automatically.

  ‘What, are you going to get fucking politically correct about it?’

  ‘Maybe he was embarrassed about it,’ Brian offered.

  ‘Why would he be embarrassed about it?’ I asked.

  ‘Maybe not embarrassed exactly. It’s just very … personal.’

  ‘But we were his friends.’

  ‘It’s typical of him,’ Tallis said. ‘It was, I mean, it was typical.’

  We were all quiet for a moment then, aware of how much we had to do this to the way we talked about him, convert everything all the time in our minds, our speech, from present to past tense.

  ‘There’s something more I need to tell you about Dylan’s brother,’ I said.

  ‘The dead one?’ Tallis asked, frowning, as if struggling to focus on my face.

  ‘No, there’s no dead brother, I told you. He’s alive. As far as I know, he’s alive. The thing is, he’s living here, in Vegas.’

  ‘In Vegas,’ Tallis said slowly.

  ‘His name is Colin. Lily told me. I knew it was familiar.’

  ‘Fuck. It’s him, isn’t it,’ said Brian.

  I shrugged. ‘It could be. Why not?’ I remembered my conversation with Sally that night at my parents’ house. ‘I could call Sally,’ I said.

  ‘Does she know about the brother?’ Tallis asked. I nodded. ‘So call her. Get his number.’

  I pulled out my phone. ‘What should I tell her? I mean, why do we want his number?’

  Brian looked at me. ‘We’re here, aren’t we? We’d love to meet him.’

  ‘We’d love to meet him,’ Tallis echoed.

  Sally didn’t answer, as I’d expected, and I left a brief message asking her to call me.

  ‘I didn’t understand this thing of his,’ I said. ‘This thing with secrets. I didn’t realize how … well, how secretive he was.’

  They both stayed quiet for another moment.

  ‘No, I know,’ Tallis said.

  7.

  It hadn’t worked out quite like I had expected, being able to tell them something about Dylan that they hadn’t known. Part of me had assumed that they did know, ever since Sally had confirmed Lily’s story. They had been closer to him than I had, or so I thought. And so I’d been a little afraid of looking like the odd one out when I brought it up, of being the only one not in on the secret, who didn’t have the information. But I had also imagined scenes a bit like this one, where it wasn’t me who was the excluded one, but the other way around: I was the one who had the information the others didn’t have, and in my imaginings of the revelation it made them see me differently. It gave me something. But instead, the way it was, it didn’t seem to give me anything.

  ‘Where’s Cameron?’ Brian asked.

  Tallis shook his head. ‘We should get going if we’re going to get there by seven.’

  ‘What’s the point?’ Brian asked. ‘Let’s skip it. We’re all going to be here anyway. If he ever actually makes it down here.’

  It made sense. But it didn’t feel right. I’d been dreading this trip, all of it, looking forward with tired reluctance to especially, exactly, our rendezvous at the Flamingo. But without it the whole thing felt like even more of a pointless waste of time and energy.

  Tallis was scrutinizing me. ‘We couldn’t do that to the traditionalist over here,’ he said to Brian.

  ‘Is that what I am?’ I asked, laughing. ‘The traditionalist?’

  Tallis shrugged. ‘Of course. Don’t worry. We’ll go.
I have my own sentimental attachments to the old place.’

  ‘The traditionalist?’ I asked again, wounded, realizing it hadn’t been a joke.

  Tallis and Brian both reached out at the same time to pat me on the shoulder. I shrugged them off.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said. ‘I’m not the one who insists on coming here, coming back here year after year.’

  They had both tuned out. Again, I had a strange sense of seeing them differently, acting in concert in an unfamiliar way, this time from a shared, unspoken assumption about me. I did want to go to the Flamingo, I found. As a kind of show of respect for Dylan’s memory if nothing else, although that was turning out to be a complicated prospect now. Maybe I was the traditionalist, after all.

  They were getting ready to leave, putting money on the table.

  ‘Go and have a shower, Brian,’ Tallis said. Brian rolled his eyes but appeared to be compliant all the same. ‘Get dressed properly. Hurry up. We’ll see you over there.’ He adjusted his shirt cuffs, pulling them down so that they sat right with the sleeves of his suit jacket. ‘Elliot? Ready?’

  ‘See you there, Brian,’ I said. ‘Hang in there.’

  He walked off without saying goodbye, one hand in his pocket, one holding the envelope close to his side.

  ‘Feel like a walk?’ Tallis asked with a smile. He picked up the matchbook with the waitress’s number on it and tucked it into his top pocket.

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  I hated walking in Las Vegas, but Tallis loved it, especially on nights like this when it stayed unseasonably warm way into the evening. We stepped out onto the Strip: car exhaust, cigarettes, perfume and men’s bad cologne. And something else, something like dust and baking bitumen.

  ‘We can’t walk all the way to the Flamingo from here,’ I said. ‘It’s miles away.’

  ‘I know the hotel is kind of shit,’ he said, ignoring my remark. ‘But the deal I got us is good.’

  ‘You told us that already,’ I said. ‘And yeah, it’s kind of shit.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ he said, getting defensive. ‘What’s wrong with your room?’

  ‘You’re the one … Forget it. My room is fine. It’s just too big.’

  ‘Your room?’

  ‘No. My room is probably too small. It’s fine. The hotel is too big.’

  ‘It’s Vegas,’ he responded. ‘It’s all big.’

  ‘It’s too big.’

  ‘The nightclub is supposed to be good.’

  There had been a flyer for the hotel’s various nightclubs among the stacks of brochures and leaflets in my room. The image for one of them showed a man’s hand placing a tiny disco mirror ball, the size of a golf ball, into a woman’s open mouth. I suppose it was meant to be erotic but the mirror-ball idea ruined it for me; it was cold and fractured and metallic, the opposite of flesh.

  We were approaching a stop for the Deuce, the bus that went up and down the Strip. ‘Can we take the bus?’ I suggested. ‘Or a cab? It’s too far to walk.’

  ‘No way. We can slow down if you like.’ He slowed his pace a little.

  The twilight was just starting to fall, a dirty purple sky fading into pink and orange, low, thin banks of clouds settling on the horizon. We walked on.

  ‘All that feminist posturing, eh?’ Tallis said after a time.

  I nodded. ‘We’ve all done things we regret.’

  ‘That’s a cliché and you know it.’ He smiled as though he was pleased with me. ‘What is it they say? That there’s truth in all clichés?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Who says that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He threw the burning end of his cigarette into the gutter. ‘I’ve heard it said.’ He gazed straight ahead as he walked, in an unseeing, preoccupied way. ‘But I remember college. Women. Parties. How fucking confusing it could all be. How you were meant to behave. It’s not as if there were guidelines to consult.’

  I agreed in some kind of noncommittal way. It had been confusing; it still was confusing. ‘But all the same,’ I said, ‘it wasn’t that confusing. I don’t know if Brian was exactly confused. I don’t know if that’s the word for it. It’s easy for him to say that now.’

  He didn’t seem to hear me. ‘It’s all a darkness, right?’ He winked.

  His smile this time was less pleased, but he seemed to regard the topic as being closed. It sounded as though he was quoting something, a phrase I should have known, but I couldn’t place it.

  By the time we arrived at the Flamingo it was close to seven. Or so I thought, checking my watch and adjusting from East Coast time. The little wheel on the side still wouldn’t budge. Tallis noticed me tinkering with it as we walked up the steps. I’d fallen a step behind him, concentrating on the watch.

  ‘Haven’t set your watch yet? I always do that on the plane, as soon as it takes off.’

  ‘No — that’s a good idea, yes, but I forgot, and now it’s stuck.’

  He glanced back at me. ‘Stuck?’ he asked. ‘Let me have a look.’

  He stood close and waited while I undid the strap and handed it to him. The wheel wouldn’t budge for him either. His hands were large but his fingers moved with a surprising dexterity as he pushed and pulled at the mechanism. ‘Hmm,’ he murmured, and turned the thing over, inspecting the back of it as if he expected it to have some kind of written instruction, or explanation of this peculiar mechanical deficiency. Eventually he gave it back to me. ‘Never mind. Just add four hours, or take them away, whatever it is.’

  ‘I can never keep track of it.’

  ‘What do you need a watch for? Relax.’

  The pink lights on the giant flower over the entrance glimmered and undulated obscenely. We passed under them and into a large gaming room with red-and-pink carpet in a fractal, distorted paisley pattern. The Vegas smell was sweatier and staler here, with an artificial note in it, some kind of chemical fragrance that made me think of hibiscus flowers, although when I tried to think what a hibiscus flower actually smelled like, nothing came to mind. I couldn’t think of the last time I had seen one; here in Vegas, probably, in the tropical rainforest at the Mirage.

  Tallis had stopped outside the serious poker area of the gaming floor, a large corner filled with several long tables. The players were all men, almost all of them over fifty. One player was wearing a cowboy hat so large it was impossible to see his face, his head tilted down toward his chest, but he seemed younger than the rest of them. A balding, heavy-set player turned and glared at me with an unnerving, unblinking stare. He wore glasses with lenses so thick that his eyes were magnified to twice their normal size.

  ‘Come on, Tallis,’ I said. ‘This is a bad idea.’

  He sighed. ‘I know, I know.’

  The one time Tallis had fallen into a bad gambling spree had been at the Flamingo, at one of these poker tables three years back. Poker was in fashion. He’d been playing every week or so with some friends in London and his confidence had grown. He was the best player among them, won a bit of money over several months, and made a big deal when he arrived in Vegas about how he was going to play with his ‘winnings’. The winnings turned out to be quite substantial, in my terms at least, seven thousand dollars or so — the friends he played with were all corporate types like himself who could afford to lose that much over a few months in a friendly game. Tallis hit a winning streak on the first evening, right after our 7 p.m. drink, and bought us all an expensive lunch with bottles of French champagne the next day. But he went straight back to the poker room afterward, and the money was gone in a matter of hours. He withdrew enormous amounts from his savings account and lost it all, and soon turned into a mess. I’d seen his addictive tendencies with drugs and alcohol, but they had never seemed very serious — tendencies rather than actual problems. In the poker room it turned into something else. Gray-faced under the fluorescent lights, chain-smoking, dull-eyed, desperate. On our last day there we all began to worry that he would both ruin himself and miss
his flight; he was booked to leave at the same time we all were, early that evening.

  Dylan had been the one to talk him down in the end, of course. He convinced him to take just one quick break — just five minutes, he said, just two minutes, just come across the road to the veranda café at Caesars for a minute, they were mixing these incredible milkshakes and smoothies, Kahlua and coffee, caramel, one with Midori and real melon.

  Dylan had consulted with me briefly before going in to him. ‘I think he’ll go for it,’ he said. He’d remembered Tallis’s sweet tooth and ultimately childish tastes, and judged correctly that an alcoholic milkshake would be the thing to convince him to get up and leave.

  I had been skeptical, but thought it was the best chance we had. I’d already tried what I’d regarded as a sure bet, promising that a girl Tallis had tried chatting up had run into us again that afternoon and asked for his number, asked where we were going that night, tried to set up a date. He hadn’t been interested.

  ‘Once we get him there,’ Dylan said to me, ‘what should we do? I’ve got some Ativan — should I put some in his milkshake? Two or three? You can’t taste it once it’s crushed up. And the alcohol will mask it. And the ice cream and whatever.’

  ‘Ativan? I don’t know,’ I’d said. ‘That seems a bit harsh.’

  ‘No,’ Dylan had said, ‘this is harsh. He’s going to feel like shit if we don’t get him out of here.’

  ‘It’s his choice,’ I heard myself saying.

  ‘It’s not his choice,’ Dylan corrected me. ‘He’s not capable of making a sensible choice right now. That’s what I’m talking about.’

  I hadn’t liked the idea of drugging Tallis, but it said something about the worrying nature of his rapid transformation, and Dylan’s persuasive abilities, that it didn’t seem as bad to me as it might have done otherwise.