She looked around the mural for some indication of when it had been made, and perhaps for a trace of information on the artist. A lost cause, she assumed, but one worth pursuing. After completing a full circuit of the structure, she saw no signature, but did see a scrawl that resembled a date closely enough that she saw fit to deem it as such. It was close enough to the present day that the drunkard could very well have been the model for the figure in question. Marianne shook her head to herself, eliciting a brief exhalation from Elias. “Forensic scene done?” he said, bearing coffee-rooted drinks in his hand.
“Give me just a second,” she replied, and wandered to the kiosk’s window, making inquiries about the mural. The recipient of those questions shrugged. “I started here last week,” they said. “Can’t tell you much about it.” Marianne thanked them and took her beverage; with Elias, she ventured back to the car. They continued north to Anacortes, where music and revelry awaited.
3
Timon’s Monday began with a slash of daylight across his face, one eye’s view rendered red through still-shuttered lids. A silent, monolithic awakening, and his attempts to stir it away. His body felt knotted as he contracted his knees, pivoted, and readied himself to stand. A root between his shoulders tightened, loosened, then tightened again as though maintaining its own rhythms. He palmed one alarm and looked at it. Seven in the morning. An awakening with the dawn, then. Still, ten back at the home office, and a verification due this day. Timon to the shower, cold water on his face to accelerate waking, though not to abate the aches that ran through him like finely tethered circuitry.
Static in the upper arms, suffusing his triceps with a perpetual dwindling. Mornings like these, he would feel it and in paranoid times wonder if this was the onset of a heart attack, if it was some revenant prefiguring agitation and horror before collapse. Two keloid scars behind his shoulders danced a chrysalis twist. Sometimes the ache would drift into his legs, idle, then swiftly dissipate. He felt the pattern of his day’s discomfort emerge, felt a desire to reshape himself.
His sister had advised him to jog on mornings such as these. “You’ll get the demons out,” she said. Timon considered it, saw her wisdom, and yet. Not this morning, he told himself—the early beginning seemed progress enough.
The walls of his apartment stood slate-gray, windows’ light slapping Modernist designs across them at odd angles, yielding curious framings. The walls stood unadorned, their color in some cases obstructed by a standardized series of black bookshelves. Books on art, on history. Monographs, cultural dictionaries, museum catalogs—some his own and some given to him for the business, to act as reference or reminder of facts that had enveloped him at an early age, the phrase “formative years” feeling all too literal on the rare occasions when he encountered it.
At the end of the room stood a desk. The sleeping area was sectioned off from the work area with a series of screens; the bathroom door stood next to his workspace, an awkward location tolerated only because it allowed his desk a placement below his street-view window, sometimes his only indication of the day’s progression and measure. There were days when he would descend into dimly lit rooms on dark mornings and emerge into darkened evenings and feel a dislocation, a removal from the days and weeks of others; an exemption from the cycles experienced by those around him.
He had once had a routine in this city that was considered normal, albeit briefly. It had cycled him out, though—his timing never entirely lining up with that of the people around him, and so he had considered himself dispatched, whether or not he had actually faced that verdict.
This particular morning began with a message from his father—a project undertaken for Yannick Sarja, a longtime client.
Timon’s family was in the business of verification. They were consultants, of a sort—hired by clients, generally individuals rather than institutions, to delve into the history of notable objects, to ascertain whether certain suppositions about them were, or were not, accurate. They dwelled in a world of artifacts rather than one of fine art; they did not sniff out forgeries or subject paint-shrouded canvases to chemical and X-ray analyses. Timon understood that there was some precedent for this; an uncle of his had taken on a few assignments of this nature, but that the firm’s founder, Timon’s grandfather, had discouraged it. “That’s for others,” Timon, at twenty, had heard him say. “Our work lies in the artisanal, in things forged and manufactured. Leave art to the scientists and critics.”
And so they had.
Timon took breakfast at a corner café two blocks east. Took cheese on a croissant and called himself sated; walked out the door, still sipping coffee, face turned away from the wind that darted through his hair like downhill racers passing snow-leavened gates. He felt a slow-motion revival spread through his body, a Pentecostal elation returning certain tissues to a joyful baseline. Six blocks toward the interstate was the address at which he maintained a mailbox, and he walked there now, wondering if the coffee would expire before the distance did.
Timon’s grandfather had built the firm, in its early days. His sons had been raised into it—the notion that the business was everything, could become anything. When he considered it, considered the disciplines pursued by his father and his uncles, he wondered how much coaxing it had taken on his grandfather’s part, and how much steering. Had they reduced pursuits out of passion, or from it?
His father and uncles had briefly been fast-track academics, polymaths in an increasingly specialized world. Their line of work, then, seemed oddly fitting. The arrival of Timon’s generation had prompted a new system, upon which two generations had convened in order to develop. Timon himself had known little of it as he grew up—it was simply his default mode, a constant barrage of facts and stimuli, amniotic knowledge, constant renewal; associations, constantly formed. A mind honed for verification and drawn toward the obscure. He had, ironically, learned more about his own rearing when researching, in one spell of downtimes, certain educational theories of the twentieth century, some now considered heretical or apocryphal. These were moments in history, systems of thought, that Timon would find cross-referenced in his own research. The balance, at his father’s urging—three-quarters for the firm, one-quarter for himself. And so Timon’s quarter was spent hovering around documents of cultural subcultures, monographs of punk photography, and underground semiotics. And, on certain evenings, the pursuit of guitars distorted or fuzzed out, of snare and bass hard-hit in small rooms, lightning rounds, and whiskey shots. Timon’s promise to himself of neutrality on just one occasion: a vow, constantly snapped. And in the morning, regrets.
He came to rest at the mailbox. There he received a handful of envelopes, as well as one box for which he was required to sign. Its construction was a masterpiece of trim symmetrical security, thick tape lashed around and across cardboard. While Timon could place its outline, could recognize intellectually that the object before him would ultimately dissolve given enough time in a hard rain, it still seemed to him, in that moment, to be more durable than most of the buildings he had passed that morning.
In his apartment, facing an unadorned and wiped-clean table, Timon began the task of dissection. The seams steadied and then stretched taut by left thumb and pointer. From the right hand came the blade to prompt the package’s dismantling. He noted Sarja’s return address, an old neighborhood in Quebec City. It was not the first package Sarja had sent, though the two had never met—all Timon knew of this particular client was his age, and even that was vague, composed of conjectures formed after an unexpectedly late night of drinks on the East Coast with his father and uncle, two years before.
The first layer cleared, Timon sloughed the box away from its core—something encased in a skeletal three-dimensional frame and huddled between glistening plastic sacs of air. His father had always been fond of elaborate packaging, as though some other self, some other world’s architect version of Timon’s father had bled through, scatt
ering some talents on his counterpart. Here, this scaffold surrounded something older, perhaps a sculpture or a sort of pottery. A tablet, Timon saw, but not something ancient. Rather, a fragment, bone-white and abstractly patterned, no language recognizable in the carvings. Beside it, a compact disc in a carrier and jottings in Timon’s father’s scrawl. Northern Fragment Recordings in fragmentary handwriting.
Beside the two objects stood the usual complement of documents and images, reference points and starting points. It came to him, what this was, coming through his mental fog suddenly, a capsule memory a few weeks old. Yannick Sarja’s company had located a set of elderly audio recordings in a vault on the outskirts of Quebec City, sitting beside a few objects, the shard among them, in a safe deposit box. Sarja believed this to be evidence of an inventor, Henry Pärn, and been known to have lived in the area a century earlier, who had experimented in the early days of recorded audio, and dabbled in unorthodox disciplines.
“His interest in this is mainly for academic reasons,” Timon’s father had said. “Should it be legitimate, it’s something to be bequeathed. A gift to an institution, his name in the papers—a patron, and a laudable one at that.” Here, the firm stood as a bulwark—their instincts determining whether the recording merited passage for formal verification or was revealed as a strange curiosity and nothing more. This was Timon’s particular talent, a sensitivity to small details and knowledge grafted onto him to match his own inborn inclinations. And so, in this case, a simple assignment: listen to this recording and determine whether the speaker’s diction was consistent with the assumption: an Estonian taught French by the Québécois.
The fragment beside the recording was a supplement, packaged along with it because it had been found beside it, on the off chance that its own contours and components might prove revelatory. There was precedent for this: Timon’s father matching a wooden frame to its maker, and thus naming a likely forger; his uncle tying white sands in a shirt pocket to the space of that same name in New Mexico; Timon himself registering a photograph in the background of a photograph as the early work of a transgressive artist, and from there filling in state, city, neighborhood, block, direction of the light, the year, the season, the week, the time of day.
And after that had been done, they signed off on their work, gathered the materials strewn before them, swaddled them and bound them and prepared to return them to their origins. Forms and documents were readied and stamped, and sometimes customs declarations were made. Timon had heard from his father that an intern now graced the halls of the New York office, walking discreetly. Timon wondered just how far someone from outside the family might progress in this particular framework.
“We watch the liturgy together sometimes,” his father had said, and Timon had nodded despite the continent between them.
And now Timon turned his attention to the recording. He took the disc from its case and walked it to his alcove and pulled audio into his computer. After a while playback came, and Timon sat in a high-backed chair and listened. First there was static, a tower made from it, or perhaps a wave, rolling toward him out of speakers and instantly filling the room. It was as though the walls had been made irrelevant; as though the sheets of overburdened sound had taken it upon themselves to redefine the boundaries of his living space. Timon’s proximity to the sound concerned him: it seemed to him to be too much, too immediate; he stood and walked to the center of the room, a place where the sound might gather around him and where his observations might be made with clarity.
Timon sought something in the sound—some strand of recognition, of notes or words or sounds from which he could render meaning. He wondered whether he wasn’t listening deftly enough, if the transfer of the recordings was perhaps flawed in some substantial way, when the words began, a whisper through a smoke-filled room. The words settled on Timon, and as they first came to rest on him their language seemed impenetrable. They seemed like collections of glottal sounds, of syllabic patterns devoid of meaning.
He stood, centered in the room, waiting. The clip ran for three minutes and then repeated. By the third repetition, Timon could confirm the language as French, could comprehend a few key phrases. He stood in the center of the room and let the words hit and hit and hit, their rhythm unceasing. After ten listens he felt that he could comprehend the entire recording—or at least what could be understood, certain of its words having been lost to the vagaries of the process or to a general decay having borne down on the recording as it waited in isolation.
As he stood in it, Timon began to file details, to isolate and prepare and dissect sounds that emptied suffering and rebuilt walls. A thought of his father’s note: “An Estonian taught this language by a Québécois scholar.” His proof to find or dismantle, then. Soft cadences stumbling. Timon was proceeding back out of meaning and analysis; beyond words, digesting words back into components, compositing words and consonants and autopsying the residue. For seven sessions he heard only patterns, a return to rises and falls and pauses. Timon inhaled and sank into its substance, into its surface, and he settled in, his thoughts returning to old linguistic tracts, field recordings, and curated ethnography.
It ran again, this phrase, on him now like oxygen or ozone. A foregone science, no subject he’d studied save in some preternatural womb that drifted over most of his life. Timon’s father had often spoken of instinct, of how he had been raised under theories of instinct, of a reaching out and a reconnection to something seeded years before. And here, Timon was beginning to see it, to visualize transit, this imagined speaker’s journey from the Baltic to ice-riven Canadian walls, and of the age at which the Estonian might have begun his studies of this new language. An early year, Timon decided. The theoretical Estonian had undertaken his studies from a young age. And so—an instinctual grasp of tenses and verbs and the appropriate placement of adjusted adjectives? And so the Estonian grew in his mind, in it a middle-aged man trekking through Europe, socially adept across a score of nations.
In the twenty-sixth repetition of the speaker’s words, Timon began to detect stumbles in the grammar. Stumbles that he himself, speaking French—or, for that matter, Estonian—might have made. Here a half-cough, there a pause as an appropriate word, a just word, was sought. And by the twenty-seventh, the flaws became even fuller, this tapestry more crude. Halts and drags and a faint probing search, some other grammar bleeding in the hesitant patterns.
The static had nearly abated, had come to be indistinguishable from the room’s architecture. There was the room and the room’s echo, its slipcover, this fantasy of sudden deliverance. And on some level, Timon knew that when the recording was inevitably silenced, when his hand rose to cease the speaker’s repetition, the static would snap back into silence, and he would stumble in the manner of a man whose crutch was displaced by a swift diagonal kick.
But for now the state remained, for now the room was wreathed in it, the voice the garland. A few more passes, a few more cycles, before Timon could be sure, could telephone his father in the east and say with certainty that this recording was not the work of Henry Pärn, that Yannick Sarja’s curiosity was merely a curiosity and no mean revelation. And then would come forms: his signature, the guarantee of his instinct—which Timon still took as a strange concept, but it did earn him his keep—and the deft repackaging of the recording and its accompanying detritus.
This was all to come. For now, Timon stood in the path of words that were now simply sounds, no decision made. For in the words’ fall, they slipped from grounding, evading all categorization, and could no longer prompt associations or trigger affiliations. He stood in the alien sounds and the familiar state and felt relief, felt everything other than relief drain from him and leave him empty save a quiet succor.
4
Timon’s Thursday night routine: a careful drone, a subdued sort of activity that he conducted in solitude and silence. It was a bastardized contortionism, resembling to a theoretical
onlooker nothing quite so much as someone’s flawed idea of pilates: a series of movements both less intensive and more theatrical than the actual discipline. In fact, Timon’s contortion was part of a routine, and had been fairly consistent for the past eighteen months. It had descended from his memories of an observed yoga, a lesson witnessed in a studio down the coast and a testimonial received later on; the sudden and all-consuming thought in Timon’s mind that this was something he needed to do, a practice he needed to adopt. One night a few months later, he returned home whiskey-drunk and inspired and saw fit to diagram the routine. It was this combination of movements, executed at a meticulous pace, that he had undertaken at regular intervals in the days and weeks and months since then.
On some level, Timon understood that this system was flawed, or perhaps worse than flawed, but he remained at it, satisfied by the regular sense of nothingness it allowed him. It was an area in which he was not an expert. It was something that he could experimentally raise, a phantom discipline, something he could create in and out of solitude.
And so when the sound of the call trilled through his apartment at a point where he was halfway through his motions, the sense of being wrenched away from a point of beatific focus left him feeling halfway born, feeling a surreal anger that inhabited his tone, his manner, his choice of words. And so when he heard his father’s voice saying, “We need to talk about this business in Charleston,” Timon’s initial response was to spit out something about his hatred of the city’s palmetto bugs and humidity, before doubling back, coughing. “A rough night yesterday,” he said by way of explanation, not quite an apology. Not for the first time, Timon wondered just what his family thought of his drinking, implied and otherwise.
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