I’d walked over to her and we embraced; she seemed smaller and thinner, weakened by it all. The car drove up, Sally, grim-faced, at the wheel, Leo in the back. She slipped her glasses back on, I opened the door for her, and she gripped my shoulder briefly, understated as ever, before sliding in with all her usual elegance and economy of movement.
‘So, Colin,’ Brian began, slowly, painfully. ‘What is it that you want? If you just wanted to catch up, reminisce about old times with Dylan, you could have just called us. Obviously you know where we’re staying. And obviously you know a lot about us.’
Colin smiled in an almost self-deprecating way. ‘To tell you the truth, I wanted to make sure I had your attention. I didn’t know how you’d feel if I just called you.’
‘You have our attention,’ Tallis said, his voice dangerously quiet.
‘How is your father doing?’ Colin asked him.
Tallis’s face turned pale, then the color started to come back in blotches of angry red.
‘OK, sorry. Look, what I want is to get out of this town. I need help to do that. This was all really bad timing.’
‘Timing?’ Tallis asked.
‘Dylan was going to help me. We had plans to talk about it this visit. He was going to get me to meet you guys, all of you, we were going to talk about college … it was all set up.’
‘OK,’ I said, trying to ignore how disturbed I was by the way he’d described Dylan’s death as a matter of bad timing for his own plans. ‘What do you do?’ I asked. ‘Do you have a job?’
‘I have a job, yeah. I work as a croupier. And I’m in college. Freshman at the University of Nevada, right here.’
‘What’s wrong with that?’ I asked. ‘It’s not a terrible school.’
‘That place you teach,’ he said. ‘I’d like to go there.’
He said it calmly, as though I’d offered to buy him lunch and he had decided to order a sandwich. It didn’t sound like a simple observation, nor was it quite a request. Was it a demand? It was hard to tell.
‘Do you mean you would like Elliot to assist you with looking into the possibility of transferring?’ Cameron asked, all business. ‘I’m sure he could help you come up with a list of reputable colleges where you would be a good fit, a good match.’
Colin regarded him blankly.
‘There’s nothing we can do about your transcripts,’ I said. ‘It would depend a lot on that.’
‘There’s no problem with my transcripts,’ he said. ‘My grades are good.’
‘The fees are expensive.’
‘I could use some help with that, sure.’
‘So that’s it,’ Tallis said with contempt. ‘Money.’
‘Elliot’s right,’ Colin replied. ‘Fees are expensive where he teaches. And at the other places I’d be interested in going. But look, I can get financial aid. I could do it that way. I’m not asking for a million dollars.’
‘Colin, we haven’t made any decision about whether we’re willing to, uh, help you, as you say, with your school fees or anything else,’ Cameron said.
‘There’s not just fees to consider with college,’ Colin went on, for all the world like an average student talking with a father or an uncle who’s agreed to help pay for college. ‘They’re expensive, yeah, but I’ve got to get in there in the first place. That’s the hard part. I’m talking about opportunities. College, and beyond. Tallis, you could really help me with opportunities in the business sector. And Brian — I have some great ideas for scripts. For films. I’d really like to get your feedback. I brought some outlines along with me, to give you, and a couple of scripts I’ve been working on.’
He reached into a bag by his feet and retrieved several spiral-bound documents, pushed them toward Brian. ‘Dylan always talked about that — he always said how much you’d connect with my ideas, that you’d be able to put me in touch with producers, with people who could make that happen.’
‘Make what happen?’ Brian asked.
‘You know — the green light, Hollywood production. Or maybe not Hollywood. He said you were right into the whole independent scene.’
‘Did he?’ Brian said.
‘Yeah, he mentioned it. He was going to approach you about it, you know, he was going to come to you with these ideas, he was just waiting, uh, waiting until it was the right time.’ He cleared his throat. ‘He hadn’t told his parents, his adoptive parents, he hadn’t told them about me and Mom, about finding us again. He was waiting to tell them.’
‘What was he waiting for?’ Brian wanted to know.
Colin studied his coffee.
‘Well?’ Brian pressed.
‘It’s complicated,’ Colin said.
‘What’s complicated?’
‘It was hard, I guess — after all these years — he didn’t want to hurt their feelings.’
‘Did you see them?’ I asked. ‘At the funeral — did you talk to them?’
Colin shook his head. ‘I talked to Semele.’
‘Sally,’ I corrected him automatically.
‘Dylan always called her that. Semele. I talked to her. Dylan had told me that she knew — yeah, she told me about the funeral. She’s the one … she called me. After he died. She pointed out Greta and Leo, her mom and dad.’
‘They were his parents, too,’ I said.
‘Yeah, right. Right. Greta was hard to miss anyway. I didn’t talk to them.’
‘Maybe they would have liked to meet you,’ I suggested.
He met my eyes with an almost hungry look. ‘I thought that, for a second there, at the funeral. I wanted to talk to them. I thought, you know, it wouldn’t be so bad — why would it be so upsetting for them? I’m, like, a part of Dylan’s life. Maybe they would have liked to know I was there.’ He shrugged. ‘It was too hard. They were so … I just couldn’t intrude.’
I thought about what it might have been like for Colin, coming to the funeral. There was something unbearably lonely about the idea. I remembered the dark-suited figure toward the back of the room and felt sure that it had been him.
‘Were you wearing a dark suit?’ I asked.
‘Everyone was wearing a dark suit,’ he said. ‘Except Leo.’
Leo had turned up in one of the linen suits he favored, a beautiful Italian one in a color like old parchment. He never wore dark colors. It sounded strange to hear Colin using Dylan’s father’s name when they had never actually met.
‘You could have said hello to us,’ I said. ‘To one of us.’
He would have recognized all of us — from the photograph, just as he’d said earlier.
‘Like I said, I didn’t want to intrude. You all weren’t doing so great yourselves.’
It occurred to me that he could have been sitting there thinking about ways to apply pressure to us, weighing up whether to approach us individually or as a group, trying to assess the lines of loyalty.
‘It didn’t seem like the right time,’ he continued.
Brian had started to drum his fingers on the table, a faint galloping sound. Tallis nudged him and he stopped. My sense of sympathy for Colin that had surfaced as I considered his lonely place on the margins of the funeral gathering, gave way to other feelings. I began to experience the start of real, tangible hatred for him — his carefully pressed clothes, his patronizing tone, his attempts at smug arrogance that didn’t properly hide the fact that he was desperately nervous and uncertain. I hated the fact that he seemed to want us to like him — to actually like him, of all things.
All the feelings of resentment toward Dylan that had started to sharpen and coalesce since my talk with Tallis and Brian the previous afternoon now shifted direction and pointed at Colin. It was much more comfortable to hate him than it had been to resent Dylan. And he was, after all, the reason behind my having to so drastically reassess Dylan and my whole friendship with him, as well as the revelations about Brian that I still hadn’t figured out what to do with. I forgot for a moment that it had been Brian who had done those stupid thi
ngs and Dylan who had kept the records, and could only think that it was Colin who had made me aware that they existed at all, who was threatening us now.
Colin stayed motionless in his seat, but his stillness had an air of defiance about it, as though he was battling to keep from shifting nervously. He raised his chin and set his mouth firmly. I saw Dylan’s features echoed there in his face through the movements and gestures that were nothing like his, and the sharpest point of my newly minted hatred deflated.
Maybe it was no surprise that Colin saw blackmail as the path to connection with us. I thought about Dylan, cementing his friendships with gestures that bound us to him not only in gratitude for his generosity, in debt to him for the potentially serious cost they incurred, but also in the way they gave him power over us. Colin was acting out with us an extremely crude version of Dylan’s own tactics, just as you might expect a younger brother to emulate an older one, especially one who wasn’t a very scrupulous teacher.
I tried to imagine the scene where Dylan had handed over the information he had on us, or talked with Colin about it. Picturing it showed me a Dylan who was disturbingly alien, a stranger in my friend’s body. Had he handed over these envelopes on one of his recent visits, with a whispered conversation about the potential impact of what they contained? Had he left one big file with Colin, or sent it to him in the mail? Had it all been in a safety deposit box somewhere, a key with Colin, with instructions to open it after Dylan’s death?
My imagination ran crazily down these noirish paths, each one more like a scene from a heavy-handed movie, but it was no wonder: the moment the envelope had arrived for Brian, all our lives had moved into strange territory that could not be negotiated through experience, for there was no comparable experience in life, for me at least. This could only be approached through the scripts of fiction.
Cameron asked the question in my mind. ‘Did Dylan tell you to do this? Did he leave you all this in a secret will? How did you get it?’
Colin kept his hands on his mug of coffee. ‘I went to New York, after the funeral. I wanted to see where he’d lived.’
‘You’d never visited?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘It was always so hard to organize, you know? It’s so hard to get the timing right with these things. I was going to come visit this summer — we’d talked about doing that.’
I glanced at Cameron, wondering whether he shared my sense of doubt about Dylan’s promised plans. His eyes widened. He raised his eyebrows as he met my gaze for a second.
‘Anyway,’ Colin continued, ‘the place was empty. Semele and Greta had been through by then.’
‘You had keys?’ I asked.
Colin smiled. ‘He kept a whole huge set of keys at my place here in Vegas. That’s the only thing he kept here — that and some photos, pictures of me and Mom. He never said exactly what they were for but I guessed that some of them were house keys. Apartment keys. I knew his address. I knew he had a storage unit. Semele didn’t know — I told her about it after I went there. It was just a small unit, right out in Brooklyn somewhere in a big building. I went there on the subway.’
He said this as though it were an accomplishment we would respect, his navigation of the subway in New York. I did respect it, I found, remembering riding it my first few weeks in the city, bewildered by the labyrinthine tunnels of connection between lines, the fear that came when trains would stop for no apparent reason for long minutes underground, under the city, under the river …
‘There was all the usual stuff — boxes of books, old videotapes, old toys, a couple of old cameras,’ Colin said. ‘There was a microscope — that was cool. I took that with me as well. And there was a file box there. I knew most of it.’ He glanced at Cameron. ‘He’d told me most of it. He told me about the accident.’
Cameron stayed quiet.
‘So he didn’t exactly leave it to me,’ Colin said. ‘But in a way, he did.’
‘In what way?’ Tallis asked.
‘He left me the key,’ Colin said. ‘What else was it for? He left me the key. And I used it.’
‘How much of this stuff was there?’ Cameron asked. ‘Is it just us — are there other people involved?’
Colin thought about it carefully, as though he was searching his memory for obscure information. ‘You know,’ he said eventually, ‘that really doesn’t matter.’
‘It might matter to us,’ Cameron said.
‘I just can’t see why it’s important.’
Tallis intervened just as Cameron was readying himself for another comeback, lifting his hand in a gesture that said ‘Stop’. I didn’t see why it mattered, how many other people were involved; all I cared about was that we were involved, and I wished that we weren’t. If there were other, richer, more willing people involved I supposed that would take the pressure off us a little, maybe. I was glad that Cameron was there, and Tallis, maintaining some kind of handle on all the possible permutations, or at least giving the illusion of doing that.
But the illusion of control started to crack as soon as I’d noticed it. Cameron’s eyes, when I looked back at them, didn’t appear hard any more, but tense and worried; Tallis remained pale and angry.
‘Look,’ he said, in his bullying, superior way. ‘This is a shock and an insult. You must understand that.’ I could see Colin harden at his tone. But Tallis continued. ‘You seem to enjoy a very distorted view of our collective resources and abilities. I don’t know what Dylan told you. He almost certainly exaggerated.’ He paused and changed tack, and said almost apologetically, ‘We loved Dylan. But he wasn’t always the most realistic person. I mean, he wasn’t always the most truthful person.’
‘There’s no ambiguity in the information Dylan left me,’ Colin said.
‘No — you’re absolutely right, of course not.’ Tallis’s tone was almost intimate now. ‘Of course not. But I don’t know how you’ve come to believe that we could provide the sort of, uh, help you’re imagining. Dylan may have exaggerated our … our influence … in the situations you’re talking about.’
Brian leaned over. ‘I’d love to be so powerful in Hollywood or the Sundance universe or whatever that I could get any movie made that I like — but it’s not like that. I’m not that guy. I work for a company that makes documentaries.’
Colin stared at him, unmoved. ‘Dylan always said how talented you were,’ he told Brian. ‘He could never understand why you didn’t just go into production yourself. You have the means to do it. You could finance it yourself.’
I could see Brian responding to the flattery almost involuntarily — eyes cast to the side for a second, mouth twisted in a shadow of a self-deprecating smile — even as he visibly winced at the open reference to his family fortune.
‘It’s not like that —’ he started.
‘I know you want to make it on your own terms, Dylan always said what fantastic integrity you have,’ Colin cut in, warming to his topic, reverential on the subject of every opinion Dylan had imparted to him. ‘He said that’s why you’d make such a great artist.’
Cameron rolled his eyes and sat back heavily in his seat.
‘We could make a fantastic partnership. I’d love to run some of my ideas by you,’ Colin continued, gesturing toward his scripts.
‘I don’t know,’ Brian murmured, visibly confused.
‘Colin,’ Tallis said sharply, ‘Dylan exaggerated. Your brother was a bit of a liar.’
‘I don’t think that’s true,’ Colin responded. ‘And in any case, it’s irrelevant. I know more — Dylan knew more — about your finances than you’re probably aware of.’
Tallis kept his face and body still.
‘Why do you want to go to college?’ I asked, thinking selfishly of my own role in his plans, and how it could be minimized. ‘It sounds as though you’re so passionate about the movie business.’
‘I like the idea of college,’ he said, meeting my eyes with an almost erotic gleam. ‘You know? Not this — whatever this is, Univ
ersity of Nevada — I mean a real college, that whole experience. The whole Ivy League thing. I know,’ he said, when I started to protest, ‘this place you teach at isn’t strictly Ivy, I know, but it has that same, I don’t know, ambience. It has the kind of thing I’m looking for.’
The air-conditioning whirred around us, cool but not as frigid as the air inside the big casino hotels. A passing car sent a painful glint of reflected sunlight directly into my eyes, and I became suddenly conscious of just how hot it was outside and how much energy it took to maintain these comfortable interiors. The spacious, empty diner, the baking concrete block outside, the whole city extended and stretched out around us, relentlessly bright. I had never visited the campus of the University of Nevada. I imagined carefully manicured quads and buildings constructed in perfect imitation of Harvard and Princeton, gardens planted with just the right species of ivy. Maybe it wasn’t like that; maybe it was all red-brick, square buildings. Either way, it could only be an imitation, an approximation, of the romanticized idea of the ‘college experience’, and being in Colin’s hometown could never provide that crucial aspect: the experience of going away to school, to another, rarefied atmosphere, a better world.
‘Nevada’s a good school,’ I repeated weakly.
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