A Common Loss

by Kirsten Tranter

  ‘There’s plenty of time,’ Brian said.

  He stood up with his plate and headed over to one of the buffets. A minute later he was back with a plate piled with sausages and bacon and scrambled eggs, another plate that he placed in front of me, and a fresh pile of toast that he deposited on Cynthia’s plate. She accepted it silently. He slung one arm around her shoulders, like he had when I’d spotted them in the check-in line the day before. She leaned in just a fraction and smiled at him. He began to eat with dogged determination and little pleasure.

  ‘Elliot. Go ahead. There’s enough here for three of us. Go on,’ he said, his mouth half full, when I shook my head. Eventually I took a piece of toast and some eggs and discovered that I was actually hungry.

  Cynthia picked up her conversation with Cameron; it was all about the various law firms in Boston and Chicago. She had a couple of friends from college who had wound up in those places, and they gossiped about the bosses and the partners, and who had won a case against whom. She nodded at things Cameron said, and said, ‘Mmmm!’ in agreement, with her mouth full. I studied her face for signs of tiredness, awkwardness, any trace of consequence left by the night before, but couldn’t find any.

  Brian sank into a still, self-absorbed state that I recognized as his way of dealing with pressure and, often, anger. When we all rose to leave, he put a black messenger bag over his shoulder, slung over his neck and across his body. I caught a flash of yellow against the black interior where the flap closed over and left a small gap: the envelope, inside.

  Cynthia kissed him hard on the cheek once we reached the door and gave us a wave before she walked away.

  ‘I should check at the front desk,’ I said once she was a fair distance from us.

  We walked there in silence, through what seemed like miles of rooms of slot machines and games of poker, blackjack, roulette. Some players had evidently been there all night: stifled yawns, stiff bodies. Others were just starting out for the day, alert and shifting in their seats. With some it was hard to tell; a certain glazed expression could come over people’s faces so quickly, and looked much the same after five minutes or several hours.

  The clerk at the desk glanced up from his computer when we approached.

  ‘Yes …’ he said in answer to my request, typing in fast, sporadic bursts, and spun around, collecting an envelope from a shelf against the wall. It wasn’t yellow, like Brian’s, but a pale gray. For a moment I wondered if it might be something else altogether, not a packet of blackmail, something innocent. But then I saw the handwriting and knew what was inside.

  Cameron spoke to the clerk. ‘Can we see if there’s anything for our friend to collect, also? Hyde, Tallis Hyde.’

  That earned him a long stare. ‘I’m sorry, sir, we can’t do that without the guest’s permission.’ He went back to typing.

  ‘If you look it up, you’ll see we have a group booking,’ Cameron tried. The clerk looked unconvinced. Cameron pulled out his phone. ‘Here — I’ll call him.’

  The clerk raised his eyes, irritated, picked up the phone on the desk next to him and punched in a number he read from his computer screen.

  ‘Mr Hyde? Good morning, Peter here from the MGM Grand, sorry to bother you, sir. We have someone here enquiring whether he is authorized to collect any documents that might have been left here for you?’ He looked at me. ‘A Mr Elliot West, sir?’ A short pause. ‘Thank you so much, Mr Hyde, and have a wonderful day.’

  He replaced the phone and went to the shelf, returning with another gray envelope in his hands. ‘Have a wonderful day and enjoy your stay at the MGM Grand,’ he said, in the same smooth tone he had used on the phone.

  The envelope was so light it might have been empty. I shook it a little and felt the weight of small things inside, pieces of paper or photographs.

  Walking to meet Tallis with the envelopes under my arm was uncannily like that walk I’d made with Dylan all those years ago to the English department that evening, the essay in my hands, waiting for it to fall in a puddle. The heat hit me with its brutal, casual familiarity when we stepped outside, the contrast with that cold winter twilight somehow bringing it even closer in my memory.

  Brian and Cameron kept glancing at the envelopes I was carrying.

  ‘You know what’s inside?’ Cameron asked, eyes shielded behind sunglasses.

  ‘I guess,’ I said.

  Brian started to smile.

  Tallis pulled up in a long black sedan with a fresh-looking scratch all the way along the side ending in a small dent toward the tail-light.

  ‘What’s with the scratch?’ Cameron asked when we all got in. He sat in the front passenger seat, and I sat behind him in the back, conscious that he and Brian had unthinkingly positioned themselves with maximum possible distance between them. Or maybe they had thought about it; habit and conscious decision might have become inseparable by now.

  ‘The scratch was there already,’ Tallis said. ‘They gave me a discount.’ He grinned, lifting his sunglasses to reveal bloodshot, bright blue eyes. His skin showed a faint flush of pink, already anticipating the sunburn he would have by the end of the day just from walking between the car and the door of whatever building he entered. ‘Good morning, everyone. All in?’ He tipped the glasses down again and pulled out into the traffic, too fast. ‘What do you have for me from the desk of our esteemed hotel?’ he asked.

  Again, the cheery bonhomie. I felt myself beginning to sulk already, resistant.

  ‘Just this.’ I held up the envelope and he glanced at it in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘Throw it over here,’ he said when we pulled up at a red light moments later. I passed it to him. He opened the seal with some difficulty, shaking it a little like I had, to convince himself that there was actually something inside.

  ‘Oh, fuck,’ he said quietly. ‘I knew it.’ Then, louder, a stream of curses, increasing in vehemence and force, as he gripped the steering wheel with his large, pale hands.

  Cameron shrank slightly over to his side of the car, alarmed. Brian was the calmest among us. I felt sure that he was enjoying the spectacle of all of us, one by one, being subjected to something like what he had felt the day before.

  ‘The light’s changed,’ Brian said, leaning forward. ‘Tallis. Green light.’

  Tallis gave a final, definitive-sounding ‘Fuck’ and put the car into gear. He remained ominously silent for minutes, changing lanes recklessly, earning horn blasts from other drivers. At the next red light he lit a cigarette, his hands slipping on the lighter.

  ‘Do you know where we’re going?’ I asked.

  We had turned off the Strip a few blocks earlier, and were now heading west — I thought — down another busy boulevard. No one answered. Tallis always took it as an extreme of bad manners if one of us ever questioned his navigational ability, and I didn’t want to press it.

  Many possibilities passed through my mind. Mainly I pictured us driving west for miles along this road until we left the city and wound up on a dirt track fringed with trailers and shacks and dusty, half-derelict gas stations. It was hard to shake this idea I had of Colin as belonging to a vaguely imagined Vegas underclass. I thought of his dead mother having her other child adopted because of youth or poverty or both. He must be desperate, I thought, he must be poor; why else would he be motivated to do this, if not for money?

  The question of money had preoccupied me that morning as I forced myself to consider the question we hadn’t been able to address yet, collectively — what was it that he wanted? What was the goal, the aim?

  I didn’t have a lot of money, and had no obvious way of getting my hands on any, or not very much, in any case. For a single person, my salary was fine, but a lot of it went toward paying the massive student loans I had managed to accrue in graduate school. Tallis and Cameron each earned good money, but Cameron had a family to support. Brian didn’t make anything much, but his family was rich.

  I wondered whether Dylan had given money to his brother
while he was alive. It seemed possible, even likely, although it couldn’t have been much given his small salary in publishing and the crazily high rent he paid in Manhattan.

  Blocks passed, shopping malls, supermarkets, bars.

  ‘Should we talk about this?’ I asked. ‘Shouldn’t we have some sort of, I don’t know, a plan?’

  Cameron glanced over at Tallis and then twisted around in his seat to talk to me. I knew then that they had talked about it in some detail the night before.

  ‘I think we need to check him out, find out what his intentions are,’ Cameron said. ‘Let me do the talking.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Elliot?’ Cameron asked.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What’s in that envelope of yours?’

  It sat on the seat beside me, already a little creased, still clean around the edges except for one faint fingerprint near one corner, probably my own.

  ‘It’s a paper,’ I said. ‘Once, in college, I didn’t have time to finish a paper I was working on — I ran out of time. Dylan knew someone who could finish it for me.’

  ‘He got someone to write it for you?’ Cameron asked.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘So it’s like, plagiarism? Or would you call it fraud?’

  I shrugged. The light hit his glasses so that I could see the darkened shape of his eyes behind them, but couldn’t read their expression.

  ‘Is that it? I mean, is that the only thing?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘I can see that something like that could be embarrassing for you.’ He kept looking at me.

  I stared hard out the windshield. The mountains were there, I knew, beyond the line of buildings, the same ones I’d seen from my window that morning. It was just concrete now before me, and neon struggling to show itself against the bright sunlight.

  ‘But it wouldn’t cost you your job, would it?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said, and hoped that I sounded convincing.

  ‘But tenure can be so tricky, can’t it?’ Cameron mused, turning back to face the front, almost as though he were talking to himself and not to me. ‘You never know what little thing is going to make a difference.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Unless, you know, your book changes the world and they’ll do anything to keep you, right? If you win, what is it, a genius grant or a huge prize or something?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  In the silence that followed I reflected — and I’m sure Cameron did too — on how unlikely it was that my work would have that kind of impact, that kind of value, or that I would be up to the task of engineering the kind of networks of admiration and influence that led to nominations and prizes. In recent months I had been procrastinating on the question of how to shape the thesis into a book manuscript, or whether to give up on that idea altogether (not a thought to mention to anyone with influence in my department). I pretended to be ‘extending the argument’ of one chapter by reading and taking copious notes on one of Middleton’s even lesser known works, a probable collaboration with some other playwright.

  It’s not like I was hopeless at that stuff — I’d managed to get good fellowships going through graduate school, impressive publications, appeared on the right panels at a couple of conferences, got a good job. But Cameron was right: tenure was tricky, and any little thing could make a difference. The discovery of a fraudulent paper in college was exactly the sort of thing that could make a difference.

  Plagiarism was a serious issue in our department, and the chair had recently encouraged the whole faculty to adopt a more rigorous and uniform approach to it. Since my days in college the internet had only made it easier to get access to papers, and easier to cover your tracks if you did. Felix, my colleague with the ulcer, had shown me a website one afternoon where you could not only pay good money for an A paper, but also for a B paper on the same topic, and a C plus if you didn’t want to draw attention to any vast improvement in your writing skills. Felix’s student had purchased the A minus option for his final paper (which Felix had actually graded as A, I noticed, glancing at the papers on his desk) and B plus for the previous assignment. The whole thing was horrifying to me, for the specters it raised from my own past, and Felix mistook my dismay for genuine academic outrage.

  ‘It’s unbelievable, isn’t it?’ he said, rocking back in his ergonomic chair. ‘They’re so good. It’s no wonder …’ He seemed to be feeling bad for not having caught the faked B plus when it had been handed in.

  ‘It’s no wonder you didn’t see it,’ I reassured him.

  The chair let out an alarming creak, as though something was about to snap. He didn’t change position, eyes fixed on the screen.

  ‘Do you want the password?’ he asked me as I was about to leave his office. ‘You need a password to log in to this website — the one that lets you put in the text, find the papers, all that.’

  I froze. It would have looked strange to refuse. ‘You know, I’m not too worried about my students this semester.’

  He looked injured. ‘Right. Good. You can never be too careful, though. I mean, look at this …’

  He gestured hopelessly toward the B plus on his desk, the A minus beside it. It was covered with comments in blue pencil: Good thesis! next to the first paragraph; checks in the margins.

  ‘Can you email it to me?’ I asked, trying to save face.

  He nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I won’t lose it that way. Be on the safe side.’

  He turned back to the website, scrolling through samples of papers on topics in his field. He worked on twentieth-century fiction, Nabokov; I dreaded to think how many papers there would be available to buy addressed to topics close to those he would have spent time perfecting, analyzing those particular passages he would have carefully chosen as the most significant, the richest or least appreciated. Confronting our own lack of originality in the way we taught or thought was one of the worst aspects of the process of detecting faked or stolen work.

  The prospect of confronting plagiarism in my own students’ essays troubled me for obvious reasons, and I probably turned a blind eye to any suggestion of it apart from instances I couldn’t help noticing: the stupid version of it, where pages of barely punctuated prose were suddenly interrupted by a perfect paragraph lifted directly from a website or copied in carefully from the pages of a reference book. Those cases aren’t the ones that students fail for, or risk getting put on academic probation like they can expect if they fake a whole paper or copy another student’s exam. In those minor cases I could get away with simply grading down a full grade and writing a cautionary letter advising them to consult the guidelines for correct citation of sources, or asking the student to resubmit. A few times I’d managed to do that and feel almost not haunted, almost righteous. I might have performed the most serious infraction — paying someone else to write a paper for me and pretending it was my own work — but at least when I did write my own work, as I had for every other assignment, it was all my own. I was scrupulous about obeying MLA citation for every source, giving credit to every critic whose ideas I used, making sure I got every quote exactly right.

  The car slowed. We stopped at a light, waiting to turn. I didn’t think about the accident these days much at all, but something now brought it back to me, traveling in the back of the car. It was a slight shimmer in the fabric of time and memory, as though the past was for a moment uncomfortably closer than usual. Each of us was in a different position in the car than we had been then. Brian was still huddled over in his seat, arms folded tightly.

  ‘What about you, Tallis?’ I asked. He hadn’t spoken since the stream of invective. A muscle in the side of his jaw worked, tense and busy.

  ‘I’ll tell you,’ he said, through teeth that didn’t seem to want to open. ‘Let me find the place first.’

  It might have been my imagination, but I thought I heard his English accent slip, thought I heard a hardness around the end of the word first that s
houldn’t have been there. All the years he’d lived in the States it had seemed strange the way he spoke with no American inflection. His English accent always sounded exaggerated to me; I didn’t ever get used to it, or not hear it. I noticed that he took up some American idioms, words and phrases — he liked to say ‘awesome’ and ‘dude’, for instance, always in a very self-conscious way — but the words never lost their distinctive, different sound.

  He drove in silence the rest of the way, four or five blocks after the turn, and started backing into a space next to a hydrant.

  ‘Tallis,’ I said, looking out the window at the chipped yellow hunk of metal.

  ‘Fuck it,’ he said, glancing over his shoulder as he turned the wheel.

  ‘They’ll tow the car,’ I said. ‘Not just a ticket.’

  ‘Elliot, calm down.’ It seemed to help him relax, to be able to scold me in that familiar way. ‘No one will tow the car. Christ.’ He turned off the engine and let the key sit in place.

  ‘So,’ he said, and looked at me with tired eyes. ‘It’s about my father. This thing Colin has on me, that Dylan had. It’s not about me, exactly. It’s about him.’

  Cameron knew about it, whatever it was. He slouched further down in his seat and sighed.

  I’d met Tallis’s father once, in our junior year when he’d paid a quick visit halfway through the spring semester and then taken Tallis away for a weekend in New York. He and Tallis’s mother were settled back in England by then — they seemed to move every few years — but he traveled back and forth to the States for work. I’d stopped by Tallis’s place that Thursday morning. His father had answered the door and greeted me with a lazy, utterly disarming smile and a beautifully pronounced ‘Hello’, as though I were the person in the world he most wanted to see at that moment. He was thin, with the emaciated face and slight stoop of the serious alcoholic, and a cigarette burned in his hand.

  ‘Hi,’ I said, and introduced myself. ‘Is Tallis here?’

  ‘Of course. Come in.’

  He stood back from the door with a movement like a compressed, enervated flourish, like someone who used to be graceful and quick on his feet. I looked through into the apartment and Tallis stepped out of the kitchen, looking at once grave and boyish, preoccupied, hands busy drying a glass with a dishtowel.