circa sixties erotica, but everyone was acting like he’d just ordered porn, and now he had to submit a Freedom of Information Law request just to get his own damn police report from the bureau of criminal records verification or something. He sighed grandly. Damien is the queen of histrionic sighs.
“What’d you do last night?” he finished finally.
“I had dinner with a friend from when I first moved to New York,” I said. “It was weird, she mentioned…Do you have work, am I distracting you?”
He waved his hand cheerfully and sauntered farther into my office.
“So, ten years ago this good friend of ours killed herself—and the friend from last night, Sarah, she found her.”
“Christ, Lindsay, I’m sorry. Did she take a bunch of pills or what?”
“No, she used a gun. And left a suicide note on her computer.”
He shook his head. “That’s awful. Was she young?”
“We were all twenty-three.”
“Damn.” We stared at each other. Finally he said: “Ten years ago. You’re old.”
“Fuck you.” I smiled. Why am I telling you this? Because he could bring me back to the present, take the gravity out of it. “Yeah, it was really sudden and…awful. Been on my mind.”
“Why’d she do it?”
“There turned out to be so much weird stuff going on that we didn’t really know about until we, like, compared notes in the week or two after,” I recited. “Like, her family was struggling and going through some stuff, and she and her boyfriend had just broken up but they were still living together.”
“Living with her ex,” he said, whistling. “I’d kill myself.”
“Right?” Why hadn’t we seen it as uncomfortable at the time? Well, because bucking conventions had been our status quo. “So anyway, I saw the friend last night, and it turns out right after the suicide, she went totally conspiracy theorist and claimed it wasn’t a suicide.”
“Jesus,” he breathed. “Wait, you’re just learning this now?”
“I kinda split from the group after the funeral. They all lived together, and it was…We were kinda drifting apart by then, anyway.” I sighed. “They were like this beautiful little hipster clique. When Edie died, it all fell apart.”
“I need to see these people. Facebook.” He gestured at my monitor and I pulled up some group photos.
“She’s cute,” he said when I pointed to Edie.
“And there’s the final proof that you are zero-percent heterosexual. She’s stunning.”
“Did everyone want to fuck her?” He shrugged. “So skinny. You could snap her in half.”
“Christ, Damien, she’s dead,” I said through inappropriate laughter.
He apologized, grinning, then headed for his desk.
I returned to Facebook, to the grid of photos. There were so many pictures of us hanging out in Sarah, Alex, Kevin, and Edie’s apartment, which we’d jokingly called SAKE, pronounced like the Japanese wine, unwilling to bear the inconvenience of mentioning all of the tenants’ names. Always with drinks around, always with drunk, sparkly eyes. So few of these images stirred up memories; they were like loose leaves or a deck of cards: Young People Having Fun. I seemed to be always there, though I lived two stops away on the subway. Sarah was sort of right: While Edie and I had been best friends for a moment, I’d never quite been a full member of the clique. Once Edie and I had had our falling-out, I’d been just outside, watching them through a sheet of glass.
I scrolled. There were just as many photos of us in other apartments within Calhoun Lofts—beer bottles scattered around, someone flipping off the camera or finding a way to look blasé. It was such an odd building, a full block long and set up like a college dormitory, only instead of small dorm rooms, there were apartments, each tall and rectangular, like a giant shoebox. They came gapingly vacant except for a kitchen and a bathroom crouched in one corner. And into those giant shoeboxes, tenants brought plywood and drywall and constructed their lives: lofted bedrooms resting on stilts with a forest of four-by-four pillars underneath, or cubbylike rooms lining either side of the long walls, so that standing in the central corridor felt like being on dry sand with the Red Sea rising on either side.
Sarah had been the Virgil who’d led me through Calhoun’s graffiti-splattered front doors and into its deepest circles. I’d first met Sarah in Manhattan a week or two earlier at a vodka-soaked rooftop party thrown by effervescent PR people for some product or campaign launch. It was August 2008 and I’d just started my