Reel

by Tobias Carroll

  This is a Genuine Barnacle Book

  A Barnacle Book | Rare Bird Books

  453 South Spring Street, Suite 302

  Los Angeles, CA 90013

  rarebirdbooks.com

  Copyright © 2016 by Tobias Carroll

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to print, audio, and electronic. For more information, address: A Barnacle Book | Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 453 South Spring Street, Suite 302,

  Los Angeles, CA 90013.

  Set in Minion Pro

  Cover illustration by Ameu

  ePub ISBN: 978-1-942600-95-4

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

  Names: Carroll, Tobias, author.

  Title: Reel , a novel / Tobias Carroll.

  Description: First Trade Paperback Original Edition | A Barnacle Book | New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA: Rare Bird Books, 2016.

  Identifiers: ISBN 978-1-942600-70-1

  Subjects: LCSH Punk culture—Fiction. | Punk rock music—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction. | Art—Fiction. | BISAC FICTION/General.

  Classification: LCC PS3603.A7749 R44 2016| DDC 813.6—dc23

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  Acknowledgments

  PART ONE: ICONS

  1

  Timon met Marianne at a Black Halos show in Seattle. It wasn’t the cold season yet, but its arrival loomed. Jackets and a few bold scarves could be seen on bodies on the streets surrounding the club. These were melancholy hours, a time to have impractical thoughts and ponder ways in and out on walks through the city.

  The second opener had ended and the headliners had begun arranging their gear across the stage. Illumination was enough to see one’s neighbor, be they acquaintance or stranger, but was not yet the clarifying light that signified the end of the night’s music and stifled hopes of an encore. Through speakers came the sound of guitars wrapped around one another, a sinuousness evoked through unfamiliar rhythms. Seated at a table halfway between speakers and bar, Marianne wished for a change, for whoever handled such things to make a change, however abrupt the transition. She had hoped for something cerebral, some sort of literate pop, songs with lyrics she could run through her mind to trigger evocation. Instead: complex textures and low-slung fissures, atonal voices shouting in the distance.

  Timon waited closer to the stage, beer in hand, poised like a soldier or skydiver.

  She was there alone and he was there alone; she had come for the first opener, and he was there for no apparent reason, had been out on a walk, had seen that there was a show happening with tickets available as he passed by the club, and so he had forayed inside and ordered beer after beer after beer to pass the time. He had walked there down one hill and up another, and anticipated a brutal traversal of those same inclines on his homeward route. Timon wondered whether this might be the night he slipped and would be able to confirm his own theory of the downward roll, whether he would tumble until he reached a certain point in the sidewalk or instead overrun the curb and come to a terminal point mid-lane, either to raise himself up and begin his trek once more or to encounter vehicle, for rolling inebriated flesh colliding with decelerating but nonetheless lethal rubber and metal. And so Timon drank and awaited the headliner’s arrival on the stage and, across the room, Marianne stood, feeling compelled to stay for more.

  And when the band entered, garage-rock from across the state’s northern border, Timon took a long drink from the bottle he’d been nursing for the past few minutes and thought of the phrases that had occupied his head for months. His grandfather’s final words, relayed to him across a continent via his parents: “It’s the fear,” the phrase coming to Timon secondhand. “The fear.” And that phrase dovetailing, curling around the title of the album that had occupied much of his stereo’s time recently: I Am That Great and Fiery Force. And Timon thought, Yes: I will be that fear, and I will be that great and fiery force, and as the guitars began to roar he rushed into the crowd a dervish, eyes wide, seeking the contact of body on body, not willing destruction but not willing to prevent destruction, and so the spins, the loose arm, the images from the periphery of his vision of forms pushing backward, retreating from him. Retreating from no others, none yet joining him in this cleared space.

  Timon thought of the fraying then, of the days as a child when he’d first been in adult spaces, spaces that had not seen anyone of his age in decades. His parents would be in another room, discussing arcane subjects with the building’s occupants or caretakers. He would be left somewhere to wait, dressed in a style that mortified: an awkwardly patterned tie and a nondescript blue blazer, always a size too large. He would wait and while waiting he would simply observe. He began to catalog the accumulation of dust in certain houses and apartments and the lack of dust in others, the presence or absence of plastic covers for furniture, the ways in which window side drapes began to unwind, the manner in which certain colors faded from photographs taken in a certain decade.

  As his parents would go about the family’s business, he would begin his interrogation of the less-forthcoming photographs, trying to guess as best he could when they were taken. Trying to suppose the period, then the decade, then the specific year. And after he’d done this alone and in isolation for ten months, he finally posed his first question to the home’s owner and learned that his estimate had been only two years off: 1926 rather than 1924. His parents nodded, never specifically encouraging him in this but never interjecting as he began to ask questions of each of their hosts, and began to formulate courses of study. And after another year, when his guesses as to the years had become encyclopedic in their accuracy, he turned his attention to location and time: Chicago on a cloudy day; a bright morning in Vilnius; a late-night reverie in Halifax, just after the end of the Great War.

  In the club in Seattle, Timon swung out again and again, hands moving through the air. As he drove backward, his body encountered the hands of others, those hands pushing him back into the center of the room, into his emptied center, and he clenched and unclenched and nursed at his beer and began the process again. It was deeper each time, a constant kind of motion, obeying the dictates of the rhythm coming from the stage and the speakers, his mind empty as long as he could keep from stopping.

  And from twenty feet away, Marianne’s eyes drifted from the stage to the spinning, shaking figure to her left, and she thought, Christ, who is this asshole? Thought: this brutalist, making a fool of himself, wasted and stumbling. Thought: fucking imbecile, and edged herself further away from him. Over the sound of torn guitars her mind shifted to other topics: forgotten garage bands from steel towns and pulp novels and the lurid taste of drinks assembled by a bartender she’d once encountered in west Texas, on the drive that had brought her to Seattle several years before. There was a construction she had in mind, a loose collage of images from atlases documenting an impossible geography. It was a notion that had circulated and inspired her when she first came to this city, during a time when she had sought work and disciplines to occupy her time and delay the onset of panic. Soon after she had begun her sketches of the piece, steady work had arrived, and she had shelved the project. More recently, the notion of completing it had returned to her, along with the notion that its construction would return to her a kind of freedom of movement, would unb
ind her from the city in which she dwelt. A sort of thesis, then, or the end of a journeyman phase. She considered leaving the city more frequently now than she ever had before. As her eyes returned to the drunkard, she thought, And this will be the reason for my departure.

  Eight songs in, Timon was still careening from body to body, was down to his last sips of the bottle, was earning the enmity of those around him, their faces shifting over time from acknowledgment to condemnation. Epithets and epitaphs hovered on low frequencies and Timon shifted in and out, hearing only sufficient syllables to comprehend the general mood of his vicinity. He continued to contort until something in his stomach wrenched and his face felt cold and his throat ran bilious, and he was off, pushing away from the stage, pushing through a section of the crowd unaccustomed to being pushed through.

  Minutes later, he stood over the sink, hands cupped to drink. Cue the inspection: was it visible on him? Was he marked? He was not. And so he returned to the crowd, positioning himself toward the back now, assuming the rest of the set with arms at his sides, breathing easily, his stomach still allowing for telltale twinges but overall settled. He stood there as the band played their final song, stood there as the crowd began filing toward the club’s exit.

  Marianne was set to meet friends at a bar nearby to have a drink or two before closing. She looked down at her phone to check the time and joined the dwindling group walking outside. As she neared the bar, she saw the man she’d previously shunned. Now, he looked preternaturally still, like a monument or mile marker or memorial, his skin pale and his cheeks flushed, his eyes bloodshot. She looked at him, their eyes level. “Look, you,” she began, and his attention flared up, his eyes met hers. “That’s not okay, what I saw there. You keep doing that, people will deem you loathsome.”

  Timon swallowed, half expecting this to be a critique made in transit. She wasn’t moving, though; she was standing there, looking him in the eye. Daring him, in Timon’s mind, to say something. And standing there in an emptying club, the night’s energy moved elsewhere, diminished by alcohol and the damages it had already wrought on his body, he could only think to absolve himself. “Meant nothing by it,” he said, hoping that this simple phrase might lend him some humanity in her eyes, might convince her that he was not simply the blind thug he assumed she took him for; that he meant no harm in his unrestricted motion. He heard his words fall to the club’s floor and realized that he sounded robotic, and he tried to hold the look of the woman opposite him. It was a conversation that was destined to fail, he realized.

  He reached for his wallet and withdrew his business card. He handed it to her. “Here,” he said tenderly, as though displaying a photograph of a newborn child. Then he said something like, “Damages.” She held up one hand, palm facing him, and shook her head. Marianne stepped outside, making her way toward her friends. Timon waited at the bar and wondered whether he should order his night’s final drink.

  2

  Timon was the western outpost of the family business. He rose late, hovering on a bridge shift, sometimes handling the family’s clients on the Pacific coast and sometimes, as the sky grew dark, making terse conversation with early risers on that ocean’s other shores. Sometimes he would cloak himself in respectable attire and drive far from the city to confer via video with the remainders of the firm: his father, now almost an academic with a small cabin in Princeton; his uncle Clark, gone reclusive on the coast of Baja California; his uncle Gilbert, newly settled in Istanbul; his cousin Kiasma, reluctantly listening from a space on the outskirts of Beijing. Which, Timon suspected, was not unlike the company’s Seattle office: a dedicated room in an apartment or townhouse, its decor neutral, its tone wind-swept granite relative to the clamor around it.

  During the slivers of time when Timon had been social, he had been pressed with questions about the family business and his seeming ambivalence toward it. The company had been a crucial piece of his parents’ courtship; the business had provided a fulcrum around which they could interact, and it was to the despair of several generations of Timon’s family that, following the marriage, his mother had opted to follow an academic career. “Looking back on it now, I could never have done it,” she told him once during a fleeting trip he had made to the eastern seaboard. “Did you know that at the time,” he asked her, knowing it to be an unfair question, a question lacking an answer, but feeling that it needed to be said. Or worse, that it was the question that should have been said, that he was simply the vessel for a selection of prepackaged words, of halves of hundreds of conversations that he need only stand in place to deliver.

  His mother had shaken her head. “I couldn’t tell you. I feel wholly divorced from who I was then. It’s as though I’m reading a novelization of my own life story: the names and events ring true, but the motivations lack any sense to me now. I see a love story, but it’s not mine.”

  When considering his parents’ marriage, now nearing the thirty-year mark, Timon often wondered what lessons he might learn, what patterns he might emulate in his own life. This normally occurred prior to long sessions with whiskey, with thrice-distilled vodka, with stouts as dense as masonry. Sometimes there were calls back to his homestead: lurches and requests for forgiveness that encountered confused ears.

  A city-boy friend of Marianne’s had inevitably led to her coining the term “brunching econo.” This had been years before, during the Omaha years; the term had stuck, however, and she had carried it with her to Seattle and used it to fuel the groups with which she ran. One of them had turned to her and said, “Does this mean we’ve just sold out punk rock?” And Marianne had laughed and said something charming, then let it slip her mind; then remembered it again and felt its memory issue regret that ran through her, a prompt for contortions and sudden glances toward rooms’ empty corners and solitary figures, words issued in mid-air with no expected response.

  Marianne and her friend Elias had driven north on an inexplicable day trip to Anacortes, the spiraled result of brunchtime discussion and the realization that neither of them had anything worth doing on the Sunday in question. Elias was a few years older than Marianne and had left the early part of his twenties swathed in denials and carefully parceled information. He had alluded to tattoos that no one should ever see, and in doing so had divulged one halfway-relevant piece of information at a party. “Ah,” some drunkard had said, a rictus grin on his face. “You’re an old fascist, then. Hate tattoos and National Socialist brands all across your arms.”

  Elias’s face had gone pale, then red. He swallowed up torrents of anger that Marianne didn’t believe him capable of possessing, then leaned in, his voice suddenly coarse. “I sure as shit,” he said, “would fucking quiet that shit down.” His hands went to fists. “I sure as shit would not say one damned lie about me being a fascist.” He turned his face up; the drunkard had four inches and thirty pounds on Elias, but it was his turn to go pale. “Do you comprehend? Call me a fascist, call me a racist, and things will break.” And Elias looked up at the drunkard and waited for him to back away. Which, of course, he did.

  On the road to Anacortes, the subject of Elias’s tattoos was raised once more. “There’s a rumor floating around,” said Marianne, “that the reason you came to Seattle was for the climate. That you wouldn’t ever need to wear short sleeves, that it wouldn’t look unnatural.” There was silence from Elias, and Marianne paused, unnerved, feeling a sudden fear that Elias might whip his car around and return them to Seattle, or would simply leave her stranded roadside. Instead, Elias emanated something that looked distinctly like a smile.

  “You’ve known me two years,” he said. “You’ve seen me in ninety, ninety-plus weather. You ever know me to sweat?” She smiled, then shook her head. Elias was one of those peculiarly blessed people with taut frames who rarely, if ever, perspired. “I’m a kind of freak, but it’s a convenient sort of freakishness. That said, I don’t know that I could have pulled off this particular look, t
his particular style, somewhere else. As much as I suspect that I’m a man destined for the desert somewhere, Arizona or Albuquerque was not to be my home.”

  “Then why Seattle?” Marianne asked.

  Elias shook his head. “I had reasons, you know. And I still do.”

  They stopped thirty miles north of the city for coffee; it was the sort of trip that was as much about stimulants on the journey as it was about the destination itself. Elias was a notoriously inefficient driver in this way, and as such his trips were prized by those that accompanied him.

  They stepped out of the car at a small roadside kiosk that friends had recommended after a similar trip two months earlier. It appeared to be a prefab shed that had been modified in some essential and unsettling way, its walls and roof lengthened, an asymmetric window carved into one side for the taking and distribution of orders. It was as though someone or some group had done their best to remake the space, as generic a structure as one could envision, as something organic, something fully formed and uniquely conceived, something withdrawn from a womb. And as they parked out front and approached it, they saw the mural, the work of an artist they knew from Seattle by style if not by name. The thought entered Marianne’s mind seemingly from nowhere: that this artist would not be out of place in Europe, that his or her linework and sense of form and placement of bodies aligned more closely with images she had seen of street art an ocean away than with the forms that alighted on buildings and infrastructure in the spaces with which she was familiar.

  Around the structure, four bodies, just under life-sized, had been painted. Three men, one woman, each somewhat stylized, each making some sort of offering. It was highly symbolic, Marianne thought: there was a quality of the religious to it, as though it could have adorned, with few alterations, the center of a stained-glass window or the walls of a Mayan temple.

  The figures looked dressed for a funeral, Marianne thought: the men wore black suits, and the woman a long black dress. The first of the men held out a heart; the second, a knife. Marianne stared at the textures and ventured a guess as to the type of paint used, and after some consideration, decided that she was not feeling particularly optimistic about the level of symbolism on display. The third figure was the woman. She was holding something up, further from her body than the other figures; upon closer inspection, Marianne recognized the object as a loose strand of film. The fourth figure held a playing card in one hand, and covered his mouth with the other. Strange, thought Marianne, and then paused from turning away from the mural. The height of the figure, the look in his eyes—it looked not unlike the man she had reprimanded some time ago.