At five-fifteen, a cab pulled up outside their office to convey her to a downtown hotel. She stepped inside and walked toward the agreed-upon meeting place. The restaurant and bar were nearly empty, and so her contact was easy to locate. Seated in a booth was a fresh-faced young man with a gleam in his eyes, his clothing the Platonic ideal to which Archer’s aspired. A manila folder and a laptop sat on the table before him; Marianne placed his age at twenty-four, and a young-looking twenty-four at that. Beside the young man sat a woman dressed casually, tall and thin, with short red hair tied severely atop her head, some strands beginning to make their escape. Marianne introduced herself and sat. Her contact indicated his companion.
“This is Dana,” said Jonathan Clarligne. “She’s a muralist.”
6
Timon woke at five-thirty on the morning of his meeting with Jonathan Clarligne. They were to receive cocktails at a bar near Seattle Center that evening. Timon knew of the place, and had set foot inside once or twice a year or two ago, during the time when his last relationship of any immediacy had been in its dying spasms. The couple had stepped into the bar and seated themselves and attempted diplomacy, as though Old Fashioneds and specialty bitters might serve as tonic for the fracture that bore down on them.
Timon took time to recollect all of this the night before, an hour or so before allowing sleep to take him. Had he recalled the bar’s name before then, he might have suggested a different meeting place to Jonathan Clarligne, but by now it was too late; by now he had no choice but to attire himself in the garb of a more sophisticated man, to steady his hands and allow himself the ability to assume something resembling luxury.
Five-thirty, though. Eyes opened to a dark sky, and that moment of panic, of irrational fear of an eighteen-hour sleep. And the attempts to return to that state, alarms arrayed ’round his bed to wake him at a more sensible hour, one not shared with captains of industry and salarymen on East Coast time. He lay there, his eyes unwilling to close, still staring at the cold blank sky. There was a cursory review before the meeting, Timon pondered, but that could be accomplished anywhere papers could be set before him and a few notes jotted on a pad. The true work would be invoked at the meeting and begin after the meeting, once Jonathan Clarligne had offered up his documents and his images and bade him commence. And so Timon decided to stand and shower and then make the drive down the interstate to Olympia for breakfast.
The morning birthed foggy: Timon at a quarter past six, southbound on Interstate 5. He went for narcoleptic music in the car, chords like driftwood colliding with the shore. Six forty-five and he was free from Seattle’s well. He felt the road open itself to greet him, the fog still present with coal-gray clouds above. Old mixtapes and demos from bands that had practiced around the block from his former office rested in the center compartment, and after a while he thumbed through them, his hands coming to rest on a familiar one, atmospheres with violin cutting through them, seemingly endless looping melodies. It fit the weather, he thought. Good music for jarring connections free, to let them drift into air. He drank the last of the coffee cupped beside the gearshift and continued south.
By seven-thirty, he had parked and was walking anonymous in Olympia. Timon surveyed his curved reflection in car windows: the neutral jacket, the neutral hair. He thought, that right there is a man who looks restrained. He moved on, the windows in which he watched himself gradually moving from automotive curvature to storefront translucent sheets, slipping down into pavement only to be met by metal restraints. Around him there was movement on the streets: students awake before early classes, bodies a few years older moving down sidewalks, running errands or breaking for coffee before the day’s work began. Neither operated in a mode that matched Timon’s own: he felt formally nondescript, professionally median. The corners became more familiar, the sounds from passing cars easing him into a tempo he understood. Around another corner was a diner at which he could pass the time, could ready the words and the offers necessary when dealing with Jonathan Clarligne.
As he walked through the diner’s door, recognition blindsided Timon like a hunter’s club: the same relationship that had clued him in to the cocktail bar at which he would find himself later that night had also been his first reason for coming here. Second broadcasts of disquieting thoughts struck him again; notably, that half of his knowledge of the state had come from her. That even now as he went about his business, his business and his family’s business, he was in some way tracking in grooves that had long since worn down. It seemed to him, as he was ushered to his seat and a mug of coffee set before him, that it was strange that their paths had rarely overlapped since the break. Still the occasional glances at crowded rooms, still the sporadic events for which their tastes had overlap. Their corridors dwelt mainly in parallel; for Timon, that was almost adequate.
She had hated the tithe as well, Timon remembered as he paged through the menu, as he zeroed in on the morning’s meal. She had hated his ties to the family firm, had urged him to quit it, had raised countermeasures and offered up scenarios and solutions in order to extricate him from that life. Their time together seemed to him now to have been an arrangement of paradoxes: the work that had allowed him entry to Seattle was the same work that had led to the unraveling of the sole occasion he had for intimacy in that city. His own rushes and need for strange and infuriated contact were not the source of horror to her that it was for others, but were rather the wellspring of a fascination and an attraction and, perhaps, of inspiration. He ate and regarded his papers. At one point his gaze lifted and he looked toward the windows. Outside, the cloud cover had not departed, and now their low diffuse sprawl seemed to promise rain. In the glass, Timon found his reflection’s eyes and met them. He looked at himself: a man hunched over a plate, nondescript and of little obvious purpose. And after a while, he returned to the information before him, letting it drift into his eyes and waiting for connections to form.
Marianne arrived home after her meeting with Clarligne to find her data connection temporarily fractured, her ability to delve for information from home hobbled. With that truncation came a sort of frustration: she needed to see Dana’s art. To have asked about it when discussing business with Clarligne, she knew, would have been improper. Dana had sat and watched the meeting, as though she had acted as a particularly creative bodyguard: the sort who would effortlessly fell a threat to one’s person, then sculpt their own rendition of the intended attack.
Dana and Clarligne had possessed the sort of ambiguous intimacy that caused Marianne endless frustration. It was never readily apparent to her, those who embodied this condition: half the time she would learn of their status as lovers and feel confident in her assumptions, a lasting teenage pride in that quality of recognition. But there were also the times when she had been wrong: when she had casually said to mutual friends, “They’re together, right?” and received a bewildered look, as though she had raised suggestions of incest or something less conceivable, of a relationship beyond the mind’s ability to process.
And so she woke early that morning to a streaked city. She clad herself in a jacket and checked that her windows were closed and began the trek toward work. The trees she passed were bent low like supplicants and mourners. She was the third to arrive at the office that day, behind the partner who thought it appropriate to live on Eastern Standard Time, and the new guy, all sharp sideburns and Western shirts, early enough in his tenure that he was still eager to please. Marianne keyed in Dana’s name and began her search.
Dana’s full name was shared with the owner of a pet supply store in Nebraska, a British swimmer, a professor at a small Baptist college. Marianne followed all of them, as each retained just enough plausibility to warrant the time. After ten minutes, her suspicions were confirmed: the store owner was seemingly in her sixties; the swimmer, sixteen; and the professor had in fact given a lecture the previous night on a campus two thousand miles away.
Another
twenty minutes passed before Marianne found anything that seemed likely. Some photographs on a hand-coded page collecting pictures of murals were credited to Dana Guterson. While Marianne had never been a precise scholar of artistic movements or periods, these were clearly the work of the same artist whose mural she had encountered on the road to Anacortes. There was nothing else featuring the drunkard, however; his face or contortions marred no other pictured work. As she cycled though Dana’s work, Marianne found the drunkard to be increasingly irrelevant; instead, she studied the evolution of a style, the way in which lines were formed and connected, the layering of Krylon atop a subtly melting coat of oil. This is what beckoned her in; this is what prompted languorous stares long after she realized that work’s demands hovered just to her side.
7
On the evening of his meeting with Jonathan Clarligne, Timon wanted nothing more than simple inebriation. His day had been spent inside, primarily at his desk, trying to avoid the temptations of the rest of his apartment, trying to defer his own impulses telling him to run from this project, to run from the Clarligne account and the business and all that it encompassed. He threw on a jacket over a rakishly cut shirt that Dana had urged him to buy, had told him he wore well. He eyed himself in the mirror and saw nothing more or less of a particular mode than the clothes he had worn earlier in the day. He looked in the mirror and saw a man in need of a pocket watch. The thought unsettled him.
He set out from his apartment on foot. The air outside seemed suited to a long walk, even an uphill one. He had not lived in this city long enough for every walk over a certain distance to not strike him as inherently angled upward. He felt a steady and consistent forty-five degrees off the sidewalks and roads he had come of age walking. He felt unsettled here, still. As he walked, as his body became weighed upon by forces at odd angles, he thought, People who grew up here don’t feel it this way. This disorientation is the toll they pull from us, the migrants, those who came here from elsewhere. I would not know this push-pull urging collapse had I remained in the east.
Still. Then, in motion. The ascent, a slight perspiration on his forehead the only indication of the length of his trek. The conveyance westward after a series of conversations with his father. Two bottles of red wine mostly gone and a night watching spring emerge on the Eastern Seaboard and a cough and the question: “What’s the furthest I can go from here and still work for the business?” And the answer, without hesitation: “Seattle.” Timon had rehearsed it for weeks, had researched cities and retrieved data, amassed a folly of glyphs and monuments and potential outcomes. And yet his words had come through him like a spontaneous conversion, with his father’s response measured, a close cousin to a prepared statement. He had given the matter some thought on the drive out, and then buried it below other concerns. And in recent weeks, it had come back to him, an unruly haunting that flooded his thoughts and bore witness to the tithe.
His ascent was nearly over. He was passing an art school now, and in a block he would be past it. He knew its name from idle conversations at parties and, briefly, from the time he had entertained hiring someone. A rental of office space, someone to sit at an adjoining desk; a companion and a compatriot—a notion with which he had been infatuated since his arrival in the city. Instead, the decision to reinforce the home office, to go it alone. The desk and the computer and the halfhearted view. Call it pragmatism: it brought with it its own frustrations, but Timon had learned long ago how to temper those.
The restaurant named by Jonathan Clarligne as their meeting grounds looked unfinished. The name CAMP REVIVAL was halfway etched above the door. As Timon walked inside, his attention was pinched by the sight of towering grain-filled prints hanging at regular intervals on the walls, four feet high and almost square in shape. In each of them, he could see the shapes of tents. In some they were in the foreground, a series spread across a grass field. In others they were a distant presence, a sea; in others that sea stood divided beside an ocean. The faces in the photographs were full of elation and gratitude; in some, Timon could see ecstasy.
In the restaurant, someone was approaching. Timon knew it was Clarligne before he registered Clarligne but it was the photographs which continued to occupy his attention, setting him to catalog and lend translation. Ocean Grove, he thought. Ocean Grove in 1938 came to him first; then he began to register details that solidified that. The contours of a car and the wear on the side of a building he had passed in his youth, in the days when his father’s tithe brought with it a pilgrimage. The clarity of the photographs allowed for certain luxuries: a handful of discernible banners, a poster hanging on a lamppost. He pocketed this information and forced it to become compressed, a form he could slide into his hand like a magician’s scarf. Timon extended his hand to Jonathan Clarligne. “Always a pleasure,” said Timon. After a few moments, he nodded.
“There’s a table in the back,” said Jonathan Clarligne. As they walked, Timon wished for blinders. His eyes wanted the images on the walls. Look at them for long enough, he thought, and he would recognize the film from the grain, could venture a guess as to the conditions under which they were taken—the sunniness of the day, the brightness of sun on sand. He watched Jonathan Clarligne walk and stared at the back of his neck, watched the fibers of his suit and the edge of the shirt that it covered. Timon had made it a point to learn as little as he could about clothing: his own instruction was regimented so as to reliably clad him in an understated mode. If it had been conceived or sewn in the last half-century, it represented a precious void to him, and the thought of it brought him to a state approaching intoxication.
Jonathan Clarligne brought him to a table, a minimal square pushed up from the floorboards by a pole. At Clarligne’s setting was a spherical glass of red wine, its consumption marked by red threads traced on the inner surface. The color brought Timon to grief. From the speakers came a Steve Reich composition, reprocessed and redistributed, volume monitored to prevent disorientation. Timon eased his chair back and twisted into it, and Jonathan Clarligne did the same. From a satchel by the floor, he withdrew a taut envelope and passed it across the table. “Charleston,” he said. “We found them in a building we owned, during renovations that were being made to it.” He swallowed nothing in particular, the motion bobbing his neck forward and the sigh that followed returning his poise. “Less renovation, I suppose, than a kind of demolition.”
Timon took up the envelope and opened it, sliding his finger under the seal, the contact leaving a small bloody nick beside his fingerprint’s whorl. Inside were a stack of photographs, some with black marker notes on the back, and papers, a lengthy numbered list paperclipped together. His unmarred fingers paged through them and, preparing for the review, he licked his cut and rubbed it idly on his napkin. “Do you mind?” he said to Jonathan Clarligne and, when the other man ushered his hands forward, began to spread the contents of the envelope on the table before him.
“I remember your father telling me you were fond of a well-aged bourbon,” Timon heard from across the table. Already he was vanishing into the photographs, transparent hands spreading them in triptychs on the table. Peripheral vision brought signs of a motion to him: Jonathan Clarligne in the last stages of a nod. He stared at the images, studied the composition of each in turn. Studied loose outlines of figures, fragments in the frame, and the textures, and the grain. There would be time enough for detail, for the savoring and supposition.
A sudden flatness struck Timon, gloss where none should be. “These are copies,” he said. “Not just prints.” He raised his head from its study, coughed, and spoke. “They have the look of the third generation to them.”
“The originals—they might not be the originals, but our originals—are in Charleston. We haven’t trusted the airlines with anything since the problem with the recorder last April.” Timon returned a shrug that conceded the point. Contemplation resumed, a standard left-to-right evaluation. The first of the three in the
first row of two was, perhaps, the oldest. In it, a child stood. Instincts said Prohibition: clothing style and masonry and the look of the focus, the look of the eyes. The child was male, ten or eleven; he held a gun, pointed it toward something in the leftward distance. The child’s face was neutral.
The second photograph was of a wedding. As was the third, Timon gathered, and possibly the fifth. Late 1930s, lantern-lit, formal dress and many drinks already downed. Guests, he saw. None of them the couple at the event’s heart. A smiling man, his hand on one strand of lanterns, the other beckoning. The next photograph featured the same man, his arm around a woman of similar height, her hair long, probably red, her eyes meeting the lens and enriching it.
Fourth image: possibly a monochrome print of color film. A church wall, a body laying in state. Corpse hands, suit-clad, united in prayer in the image’s lower-left corner. Filling the upper-right corner, filling most of the photograph, was a stained-glass window, intricate in design. The window’s image: a man in a cloak offering an open hand to a bird in a tree, the tree bearing fruit, light shining through glass-flesh and pear-shape.
The fifth image was a wedding of roughly the same period as the previous two. A tree-stump of a man stood on a balcony, a cigarette in one hand, his necktie loosened. With his free hand, he was pulling back his suit jacket; with the smoking hand, he was indicating something on his shirt. Timon drew closer, as though proximity might somehow cause the film to grow sharper, as though it might summon the photographer’s ghost to declaim pertinent issuances. The shirt was torn, Timon concluded. The shirt fell on flesh unmarred, but the shirt was nonetheless cut. Twice, Timon decided.
The eyes Timon saw in the sixth photograph convinced him in moments that he was beholding the child from the first image. All other details fell away: he did not look to the background to date it or to styles of clothing or novels in hand or posters in shopwindows. This was the boy who had held a shotgun, now at least twenty years older, wearing robes and clerical collar, a determined look on his face, blonde hair forming a widow’s peak. Timon looked up at Jonathan Clarligne. “Same one,” he said. Then he arranged his fingers, one pointer above each of the two photographs in which the priest appeared. “This one,” he said. “Became this one.”
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