A Common Loss

by Kirsten Tranter

  I went to the door. ‘Cynthia?’ I called. She was checking her phone and glanced up. ‘Come on in. There’s no one else in here.’

  She followed me inside and took a couple of photos. I offered to take one of her, and she stood next to the hammer and sickle, gesturing happily toward it like a magician’s assistant, blinking from the flash.

  Photographs carefully framed above the urinals showed the Wall in its original state in Berlin, and some of the jubilant scenes at its destruction, providing a documentary context for the pieces of graffitied concrete that felt incongruous in this setting. In one of the pictures a group of young men cheered, arms in the air, two of them with arms slung around each other’s shoulders. One of them reminded me of Dylan — his straight dark hair and slim, lanky body — and the other reminded me of someone else. I looked for a while before I realized he reminded me of myself. I quickly glanced away, at the other photos — bulldozers, politicians, children, rubble — and back again. He didn’t look like me at all, really; maybe around my height, and with glasses. I wondered if there were any photos of Dylan and me together, just the two of us, and couldn’t remember.

  ‘You know,’ Cynthia said, gazing at the porcelain urinals, ‘I’m kind of disappointed. I thought you’d be able to pee on the Wall. But I guess that wouldn’t make sense.’

  ‘I guess you could if you really wanted to,’ I said.

  She nodded, her face serious.

  ‘I’m not going to, if that’s what you’re thinking,’ I told her.

  ‘No. I wouldn’t ask you to do that.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Thank you, escort. Or should that be chaperon.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  We heard the door swing open. ‘Let’s go,’ Cynthia said, and we hurried out past the man coming in, reeking of cigar smoke and whiskey.

  ‘Do you smoke cigars?’ Cynthia asked.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Once in a while.’

  ‘There’s a cigar bar here, in an old railcar …’

  ‘Do you mind if we see it another time?’

  ‘Sure,’ she said, and smiled at me. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  We walked for blocks looking for a bar Cynthia had read about, through the Fremont Street mall and out the other side onto streets that looked the same as any other city at the quiet end of downtown. Parking lots, corner stores. In the middle of one block, Cynthia stopped outside an unmarked storefront of dark glass. ‘This is it,’ she said, and tried the door. It wouldn’t budge.

  We tried to see inside. There was a dim orange glow through the windows, but it could have been a reflection. She tried the door again. After a second it opened, pulled by someone on the inside, a young woman who said, ‘Come on in,’ in a quiet voice.

  We followed her, pushing aside a heavy velvet curtain. There was a short set of stairs leading down. Cynthia was one step behind me, and I managed to catch her arm when she tripped and almost fell. I held on as she straightened up.

  ‘I’m OK, I’m OK,’ she said, and I let go. ‘Shit.’ She reached down to her feet and raised one hand to show me the heel of her shoe, cleanly broken off, a three-inch spike held in her palm with a couple of tiny nail points jutting out of it. She winced. ‘I’m not even drunk! This is so unfair. Fuck.’

  The steps had left a graze against the side of one calf.

  ‘Does that hurt?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’ She looked down and brushed her fingers across it. ‘No. Skin’s not broken. I’m annoyed about my shoe, though.’

  There was a bar against one wall, low seats and tables around the room, and a few candles and lamps here and there that didn’t give much light, just the orange glow I’d seen from outside. We found a seat in a quiet corner, Cynthia walking with a lopsided shuffle, and ordered drinks from the woman who had let us in.

  ‘This isn’t exactly research,’ Cynthia said. ‘But I wanted to visit all the same. I like the idea of the unmarked door.’

  ‘What’s it called?’ I asked.

  ‘Drink, or Bar, or something like that,’ she said. She leaned down and tried to fix the heel back onto her shoe. It seemed to work but didn’t look very secure.

  There was an enclosed fireplace set against one wall, emitting more flickering orange light. Of all the things I’d seen in Vegas this somehow seemed the most extravagant. I wondered how they dealt with the heat it generated, how they got it to stay so cool inside. The thick glass around the fire must have been strongly insulated. I wondered whether it was a real fire or gas or maybe some kind of holographic illusion.

  ‘It’s weird to see a fireplace, isn’t it?’ she said.

  ‘I was just thinking that,’ I replied. ‘Is it fake or real?’

  ‘Exactly!’ she said, and laughed gently.

  The couch we were sitting on was dark velour, wide and overstuffed. I could make out other people in the room, some faces lit by the lamps, some voices, but our corner felt secluded from the rest of the place.

  ‘How am I going to explain this?’ she said, smiling. ‘Breaking my shoe on the way into some unmarked Vegas bar?’

  ‘I’m sure it’s happened to Brian before,’ I said. ‘Or the equivalent. Or worse.’

  She raised her glass as though what I’d said had been a kind of toast.

  ‘So, how do you like it at BU?’ I asked her.

  ‘It’s fine. It’s great.’

  We went through the normal pathways of conversation about graduate student life at an institution, established who I might know on the faculty or in the numbers of recent graduates of the program. We were drinking vodka again, on our second round, this time with tonic. Cynthia reached into her drink as she talked and squeezed the slender piece of lime floating on the surface between her thumb and forefinger, releasing its juice. I lifted my own glass and drank, searching out the faint sour trace of citrus, unable to concentrate on anything except the idea of her wet fingers, which she had brushed against her upper arm, leaving a small smear of liquid. It was hard to find the lime taste through the pervasive tonic bitter-sweetness; if I could taste her arm, I thought, that’s where it would be …

  Something she said caught my attention and I tried to focus. Was she talking about a syllabus? For a class she had taught, or taken?

  ‘Did you say “lyricism”?’ I asked.

  ‘Did I say what?’ she said, smiling.

  ‘Lyricism.’

  ‘Lyric and what?’

  ‘Lyricism.’

  ‘Oh, lyricism. No! I love that word, though. You know, I’ve never said it out loud. Lyricism. Why would I be saying that?’

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I wonder when was the last time anyone ever said that word in Vegas.’ Her gaze traveled across the room, slow and restless.

  ‘Don’t you think there’s lyricism here?’

  ‘I suppose the place is kind of poetic.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘I thought you hated Vegas.’ Her smile now was conspiratorial.

  ‘I hate poetry.’

  She laughed. ‘You hate poetry.’

  I shrugged again.

  Cynthia crossed her legs and I watched her ankles, the skin taut around the bones there. Her slim legs, the motion of crossing them, made me think of Jodie, the one time I could remember seeing her. It was the last thing I wanted to think about.

  Looking at Cynthia I was suddenly exhausted by the weight of the secrets I carried. I swallowed, and it struck me immediately as a guilty, nervous action. Wouldn’t you want to know, in her position? I asked myself. Did I have some kind of moral obligation to tell her what I knew about Brian and what he’d done? I knew that the impulse was fueled by opportunism, and I let it die; that particular piece of knowledge bled into all the other things I knew, or things I’d done, that I wanted to hide, or had to.

  I felt the presence of the secrets in my head, in my body — they were thoughts, they were knowledge, but they felt like physical objects. I tried to reduce them in my m
ind to their simplest form — information; imagined them as particular patterns and connections of synapses, individual little pathways in my brain. Electrical pathways. From this perspective they were neutral, a collection of on-and-off switches. As if in response, the lights of the city in the distance through the windows glittered and winked like faraway stars, on, off, smog and the haze of heat through the window’s dark tint producing an illusion of blinking shimmer.

  As much as I tried to imagine the information as an impersonal pattern in my brain, the space it occupied in my body felt visceral, a pressure in my chest. My lungs continued to contract and expand in their unconscious accustomed way. It was at this sort of moment of self-awareness — noticing my own breathing — that I expected to feel my heart pounding, a live nervous pulse, but I felt disturbingly numb, and fought an urge to put my fingers to my wrist to feel the reassuring beat of blood.

  Cynthia’s eyes rested on her glass, her face almost in profile toward me, the clean, sharp line of her jaw. I found myself watching for the correlative beat of her own pulse in that place in her throat. But her skin was smooth and still — and then it was there, a flicker of movement, quicksilver; she raised her glass to her lips and drank and I lost sight of it as she swallowed, and wondered if what I’d seen was her pulse at all or something else, the prelude to motion.

  ‘What is it?’ she said, murmuring, her lips hardly seeming to move.

  In another place — another region of my brain, a slice of time already gone, or only ever imagined, never real — there was Jodie White, on a white-covered bed; there was Dylan, leaning in to look at her closely in some intimate environment, a bar, her room, the front seat of her broken-down expensive car; there was Brian, thinking only about himself; there were all of us, doing the things we were ashamed of, or worrying about the people we wanted to protect.

  It crossed my mind to say ‘nausea’ or something like it, but it got lost on the way. The distance between us, a few inches of space, seemed wonderfully empty and open compared with the toxic saturation inside me. I embraced it, leaning in to her, and closed the gap, but it imparted none of its promise of grace and lightness, at least at first. I kissed her mouth, and took her face and neck in my hands, pressing my thumb against that place where her pulse had shown, and thought I sensed it, a quick, fluttering throb. She kissed me back. She gasped, a sharp intake of breath, at what in particular I couldn’t tell, and I felt that burden in my chest give way like a crumbling wall, overcome by the urgency of another feeling, of the present.

  I drew her closer, and fought the urge to pull her completely onto my lap, to feel the weight of her legs across my own. We unglued ourselves after a while and sat with our foreheads touching, breathing hard. I lifted a finger to touch a freckle on her arm, a dark, tiny, perfect circle just visible in the dim glow; and then reached my thumb to another, smaller one farther down, and it seemed full of significance that it was just that far away, a measure tailored to my handspan, the dimensions of my body. I was fairly drunk. I was still thinking about how her skin would taste with that trace of lime juice on it. Now that I looked there were little freckles scattered here and there, and I moved my fingers and thumb from one to another.

  ‘Are you making constellations out of my freckles?’ she asked with a smile. That’s what she said, but I misheard her for a moment before the right word settled in.

  ‘I thought for a second you said “consolations”,’ I said.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, and smiled again, more broadly. ‘Consolations? But no one’s losing here …’

  Losing, she said, and I was overwhelmed suddenly by the idea, the sensation of loss. Not as it seemed to apply to the way she’d said it, like losing a competition and accepting a consolation prize or whatever had run through her mind (did she think I was competing for her with Brian, I wondered; it didn’t feel that way at all) but in some broader, more general and yet also more specific way, about what I was losing and what I had lost.

  The first random thing that came to mind was the box of books and files that had mysteriously disappeared in my move from New York to Riverford, with my entire collection of twentieth-century poetry (not much) and notes from several graduate courses inside. I remembered the tree that stood out front of our house, a dogwood, and how Lily had liked to climb it with bare feet when we were small and didn’t seem to notice her skinned knees although my own stung so much when I followed her up. The tree had lost several branches in a storm years back, but still flowered white and green in the spring. For some reason I recalled with a sharp pang of longing the one time I’d visited San Francisco and developed a huge crush on the city itself, the sheer beauty of it, the way the ocean would appear in little glimpses as you came to the end of a block and looked down the hill, framed by the steep, straight streets, and then was gone again. It was the Pacific, glittering and full of promise, exhilarating pure blue, not the steely Atlantic I was familiar with.

  I thought of Dylan and what it was like to be here without him, how all the bright spaces were quietly haunted by his absence however much I tried to ignore it. I thought about the others, and how things would never be as they were before, and how they had never been like I’d thought they were, anyway. It wasn’t just the future of a certain kind of friendship with them that felt lost, but also my whole experience of the past, or pieces of it.

  Cynthia’s body distracted me again. I reached to touch another little spot that I’d already touched before, and couldn’t reach it this time without lifting my hand, breaking contact.

  ‘Constellations,’ she repeated softly.

  I wondered what shape could be made out of lines connecting the dots of her freckles, and pictured the night sky over Vegas, stars all but obliterated by the bright casino displays and the emerald shaft of light beamed up into space by the Luxor pyramid, a piece of pure extravagance that could supposedly be seen from space. The stars had never seemed so melancholy, with their light so old that it came from the unimaginably distant past, so far away that the star could be dead by now. To imagine the dead person as a star was the traditional consolation trope of the elegy, I knew, and wondered whether I’d learned that from the essay Dylan had gotten someone else to write for me.

  I thought about Natasha and what felt like all the lost opportunities with her so far: not having kissed her when I stayed in her bed; not having reached out to her quickly enough when she was sitting on my couch.

  Cynthia’s hand was on my shoulder and she seemed to become very still. She chewed the inside of her lip. When she raised her eyes to mine it was as though the sun had shifted from the surface of water, a river or the sea, and what had been ripples and reflection was suddenly clear all the way down. What I saw for a second — the sun moved again, her expression changed — wasn’t a feeling I could interpret exactly; it looked something like curiosity, and something like desire and reluctance all at once.

  Something shifted. Neither of us said ‘this is a bad idea’ or anything like that, but we both knew it.

  My phone rang. She moved her hand from where it was, ready to take it away. I touched her collarbone again, palm against her chest where I could feel the slight swell of her breast, before I reached for the phone in my pocket. I felt sure that it would be Brian, but it was Tallis. It stopped ringing as I held it and read his name on the display.

  Cynthia’s eyebrows lifted in a question.

  ‘Tallis,’ I said.

  She nodded. The phone came to life in my hand again, shuddering and bleeping. Tallis again. I opened it.

  ‘Tallis?’

  ‘Elliot. It’s Cameron,’ he said, and I was confused because it was Tallis talking. ‘It’s Cameron.’ There was panic in his voice.

  ‘Tallis? Where are you?’ I asked. Cynthia stirred beside me, pulling farther away.

  ‘They got into a fight — Brian and Cameron. He’s not moving — he’s not moving, Elliot …’

  ‘He’s what? He’s unconscious?’

  ‘Oh, God …’


  It’s strange how immediately I believed what Tallis seemed to be telling me: that Cameron was not just unconscious but possibly dead. Part of me detached from my body, almost, it seemed, from time itself. I felt all of us become part of a dreadful story, as though our lives had slid in a single second into yet another surreal world of fiction. We had just been friends, drunk and fighting and at one another’s throats. Now I wondered whether we had landed in a murder plot, flattened out into killers, accomplices, corpse.

  ‘Where are you?’ I asked again, my voice slow.

  ‘In the room. My room. Wait.’ I could hear another voice in the background, close by: Brian, speaking in an urgent tone. ‘No — yes,’ Tallis said. ‘He’s breathing. He’s not dead. Thank fucking God. Brian!’ he started shouting.

  I took the phone from my ear and held it against my chest. My rib cage thumped — there it was, alive and beating. Time came back and moved sinuously fast and slick, carrying me forward like a wave. The murder story slid away with a sly glance back before it disappeared; that wasn’t us after all.

  I raised the phone. ‘Hang up. Call an ambulance or the hotel doctor, whatever you’re supposed to do.’

  ‘There’s a doctor?’

  How could he not know that, I wondered, with his hypochondria? ‘Just call 911.’

  ‘Right. That’s the thing to do. Brian’s doing it.’ A pause. ‘Get over here. Room 841.’

  I closed the phone. A mutinous feeling rose within me, an impulse whose movement was exaggerated again by the shock, and I wanted only to leave. I saw myself in a taxi, and striding by the slot machines in the airport corridors, and on the plane with my face turned away from the windows, grateful to be traveling so fast. The thing that brought me back down to earth wasn’t my injured friend, I’m ashamed to say; I didn’t think I could do much to help, and wondered what Tallis had been thinking when he’d called me. It was Colin and our meeting with him tomorrow morning, and the fact that I couldn’t leave that unresolved.