Reel

by Tobias Carroll

  “That’s good to hear,” said Jonathan Clarligne. “But really, we’re more concerned about the shotgun.”

  Timon looked ahead of him, locking Jonathan Clarligne in a quiet stare. He felt the part of a sprinter having arrived unexpectedly to a swim meet. He felt unexpected.

  “This is the order in which we found them,” said Jonathan Clarligne. One hand reached out and then drew back in a truncated croupier’s wash. “And there’s a dealer we know, traffics in elder firearms. And he says he knows something, has seen this one before. And its worth is abundant.”

  Timon felt formality enter him. “How do we compliment this arrangement?” he asked.

  “Verification,” said Jonathan Clarligne. “There’s history in these photographs, and there’s definitely history in that shotgun.”

  “Who’s the child?” asked Timon. “You know who he is.”

  Jonathan Clarligne shrugged. “He’s a bishop now. My mother’s cousin. It’s family business, I suppose, but it always is.”

  At home, Timon removed that which he was wearing and adopted a new look: monochromatic, flat, anonymous. He withdrew a bottle of vodka from his freezer and poured a shot and took it down. Its chill filled his sinuses with a feeling of hurtling toward some expanse, an underdressed downhill racer, his transit chaotic. Timon thumbed through local listings and zeroed in on something appropriate, something suitable for his mood, and headed there on foot. From outside the venue, he heard striking sounds from an organ and a guitar slowly escalating. He handed over eight dollars at the door and stepped inside and walked toward the bar. Six dollars transacted, and he had bourbon to nurse, complementing the sound that filled his ears. Timon turned his head toward the stage. There, the band was completing their set, their final song given the appropriate crescendos, the predicted buildup and sendoff, the anticipated payoff, the moment when everything is stripped raw, when players grew flayed and tempos crumbled. Timon always loved last songs.

  And then the song was over and the soundman cued a Kentucky Pistol song for the entr’acte; one band began collecting their equipment as the next drew theirs close to the stage in preparation to unfold, to assemble, to prepare. Timon walked to the bar and ordered a fresh bourbon and drained it and smiled down the bar at a woman he didn’t know, who promptly turned away. He ordered a fresh bourbon, and twenty-five minutes later he was in the midst of it, alcohol running down his chin and numbing skin like anesthetic’s rub before a root canal.

  He ran in circles, occasionally pushing against the bodies of others, his mind drawn again and again to a taller man, rail-thin, standing at the circle’s fringes, long sleeves for this weather, hands in his pockets. Timon considered disruption and, after a minute hesitation, proceeded, digging into this man a fraction harder than he had to the others. The thin man looked over and glared and pushed back and Timon smiled an unjust smile and proceeded, hoping he might draw this man out before it was time to refresh himself at the bar. Another pass completed, Timon reached out to shove again, and from behind him Timon heard words take shape, disparaging words funneled at him though their specific cadences were indistinct. He shoved again and the man shoved back and the crowd around them sensed the beginning of a confrontation. The band continued to play. Timon grasped at the thin man and pulled him in and the thin man held one palm up as he came, reaching out toward Timon’s throat, and so Timon paused and thought it best to unburden himself and moved to throw the thin man, to shift his weight and somehow release him. The thin man took his free hand and grasped Timon’s wrist and looked at him with an expression of fury, unadorned fury, and now the band had stopped and Timon heard a concerned voice over the speakers—the vocalist, he assumed—saying, “Is everything okay in there? We don’t want to see this at one of our shows,” and Timon thought that perhaps a spiral might work the best. Around him the crowd was drawing back and someone was moving toward both of them, samaritan or bouncer, and Timon went carefree and estimated weights and was certain he could outmaneuver the thin man and began to rotate, leaning his body to the right and hoping to end this fight before it began, to allow for tumbling and collisions and then to leave, to retreat toward another bar or to the vodka in his freezer. And then there was a blur in his peripheral vision, his left eye saw something, and then his skull was bursting, his sense of the space he was in became swollen, the room abruptly turning bubble-shaped and then contracting. His hand released its grasp on the thin man’s shirt and he fell backward and no one caught him and the music started up again. As he dropped, he saw two sets of arms holding the thin man back; he dropped and he hit the ground and things faded. His next memory was twenty minutes and three blocks away, stumbling into a brick wall, vomit already cast across shoes and ankles.

  8

  The after-work hours of Marianne’s Tuesdays generally found her meeting friends for dinner, generally at a bar with agreeable fare or at a coffee shop where smaller, yet more satisfying, portions could be found. Her partner on this particular Tuesday was Elias, and their dining space was one in Ballard, better known for its coffee than its food. As she walked through the door, she saw that Elias had already secured a table, had already procured beverages for them both. As she sat, she noticed that he was rubbing one hand with the other. Before raising her cup, she asked, “What happened?”

  From Elias, a sigh. “I had to box a guy’s ears the other night.” To her stare, he added, “Unavoidable. He wanted a fight and I wanted to watch the band.” He gestured, halfway to a raised eyebrow, and went to take a sip of his drink. “Look. They didn’t throw me out, if that tells you anything.”

  “They threw him out, then?”

  “I assume. I didn’t see him around after that.”

  Marianne sighed, then reached for her coffee. She grazed the cardboard shell of the cup and drew her hand back. “What’s on your mind?” she heard Elias say. She looked up at him.

  “The usual at work,” she replied. “The usual there. I’m helping Iris and Esteban with something this weekend. Staying home a lot. It’s becoming a template.”

  “You feel like another road trip?” said Elias. “I’ve been meaning to get another tattoo, one I’m actually happy with. Lady who does them moved up north a few years ago, lives out in the woods somewhere.” He rolled one shoulder back and idly glanced away. Marianne wondered what had pulled his attention away; Elias had never been one for stray glances.

  Elias rolled both of his shoulders, then focused back on Marianne. “I was thinking of camping for a day or two, then cleaning myself up and heading in.” One hand skipped over another like flint idly striking a rock. “Might be a time.”

  “It might,” she said like a reflex. Half of what she was saying these days sounded to her like reflex responses, flowchart conversations she fell into readily. There was a guy halfway across her office whose desk she passed on the way to make coffee, and every few days she would hear him talking, essentially preaching, about the Turing test, about how he was going to be the one who built something to overwhelm it.

  Elias hadn’t said anything in response. He sat there, one hand now reposed atop the other, a grateful stillness on his face. She could hear the door opening and the sound of rain newly falling on the sidewalk outside, the sounds pedestrians made hastening to their destinations and yet looking to avoid a tumble. “What’s the tattoo you’re thinking of getting?”

  He held up his wrist and pulled down the sleeve of his shirt, showing her blank skin. “Here,” he said, his finger marking the spot. “In the smallest letters she can do. One word.” There was a birthday-boy grin starting to take shape on him now. A brightening.

  “What’s the word?” Marianne asked.

  “‘Stakes,’” said Elias.

  A day later, seated at work, Marianne decided to call Dana Guterson. Her notebook sat on the surface of her desk, open to sketches structuring the project she had undertaken for Jonathan Clarligne. From a few desks over
, she heard her boss on the phone with someone. “Exactly,” he was saying. “When I was in Prague, I ate at a restaurant called Reykjavik, and I knew my next trip had to be to Reykjavik. And when I went to Reykjavik, I flew to Helsinki and I ate at a restaurant called Santa Fé. Right, exactly. And that’s where I met Bernadette. No, not in Helsinki. No, she was in Santa Fé for a conference and I was there…well, the sad thing is, I was there looking for a restaurant named for somewhere else.”

  Marianne pulled out her box, a patterned tin box that she had bought at a roadside market somewhere that turned out to have fit the contours of a business card perfectly. Her hands stopped at Dana Guterson’s card and she pulled it toward her, nestled it in her keyboard.

  Marianne had dated a printmaker for much of her time at college. Gainesville had been her home for four years, and for a span of two and a half she had liaised with a quiet man named Henry Benson, known to most of his friends as Hermano. She had never entirely understood that: Henry spoke four words of Spanish, if that, and had no siblings whatsoever. He was a lifelong resident of the city; they had met while watching a Blacktop Cadence show, two sets of eyes resting on one another while throats were torn and hearts exposed from the stage. There had been a mutual decision made in those moments, a rapid recognition of attraction that each soon understood, and things had proceeded accordingly.

  They had parted ways in her final year of college, at first amicably, then not. He was still living in Florida, making a living from teaching a few courses and spending his off hours in isolation, layering colors atop text, studying the effects of different sorts of ink on different sorts of surfaces, losing himself in textures and treatments. Through mutual friends, they had begun to correspond; intimacy had, years later, birthed something a half-step between acquaintance and friendship. She was, she wagered, the only person aside from his students who called him Henry.

  The picture of Henry, and of Henry’s pictures, came to her unbidden as she stared at Dana Guterson’s card. It entered through a small hesitation: through an anxiety at impropriety, at the notion that contacting a client’s companion might be taken the wrong way, might lead to a tremor, a weakening of certain aspects of her life, a collapse of rafters. A subtly triggered breakdown. And so she considered: might Dana Guterson and Henry Benson travel in similar circles? And still she eyed the card before her. She considered countries lost from maps, boundaries erased from edition to edition, capitals she had memorized in her youth for nations that no longer existed.

  And she reached for the phone and dialed Dana Guterson’s number and left a taut message, leaving her home number, before hanging up. She stood and filled a glass full of water and stood drinking it, surveying the cubicles and cubby-holes of the office around her.

  Timon feared the port of Charleston. The family had had a house there once, his mother’s academic life transporting her there, and as an inland-raised northerner, he found the avenues of the city theoretically fascinating yet, ultimately, distracting: an overlap of details that left his mind leaping from reference to reference, a massed set of associations that left him longing for night, for shattered streetlamps or a looming fog.

  He had flown there from Seattle four times, and the quality of each visit had depended on which of his relatives had been waiting to greet him at the airport. His mother had been present once, and the visit had been a stable one, handshakes and the occasional embrace and clear meanings, a dearth of business and an abundance of quiet, four cars converging on a restaurant or pier; long drives up or down the interstate. At other times, his father had awaited him as he stepped into the baggage claim area, and those visits had been different, concentrations of meetings, temporary desks in clients’ offices. The fitful sensation of being constantly monitored.

  In the end, his father recommended that Timon visit Charleston as part of the Clarligne job. “You can do it without it,” he said, “but you shouldn’t.” And so Timon eyed airfares and allowed his mind to wrap itself around the question of the imaged shotgun, and of what it might mean. It was one o’clock in the afternoon. Jonathan Clarligne, recently returned to the Carolinas, would certainly be available. It would be no intrusion for Timon to call, to announce his planned visit, to propose dates. But first he stood and walked into his kitchen and opened the refrigerator. A fading lightbulb shone on a glass bottle of water, three cans of beer, and a depleted carton of eggs. He took one of the beers, opened it, and walked back to his desk. Three times he drank from it before dialing Jonathan Clarligne. He would fly in two days, it was decided, Seattle to New York, New York to Charleston. A hotel room would be provided.

  It was an early flight, preceded by a five-thirty cab ride through a fogged-in city. The highway brought no relief; from the back of the taxicab Timon watched headlights shafting through the shroud and nestled himself lower in his seat. “It’s a fucking grim morning,” said the driver. Timon grunted assent. “I remember mornings like this forty years ago. Crisscross the valley we’d go, my brother and me, a harvest stacked in the pickup.” Timon took this neutrally and continued to listen; by the time they reached his terminal at Sea-Tac, the driver’s narrative had reached the year of Timon’s birth. Timon handed him a few folded bills and exchanged them for a blank receipt. He took his suitcase in hand and strapped bagged garments to one shoulder and began the walk to his gate.

  As Timon understood it, he was the only member of his family unafraid to fly. He had traveled with his father on two work trips, and on each his father had asked Timon to wait for him outside the nondenominational chapel provided in the terminal. “Righting my soul,” he told Timon. “In case of the worst. Bomber or bloodclot.” The notions made Timon shudder, and he stood there, carry-on bag at his feet, book in his hands—history, always at least one book of history for flights—and waited as his father conducted some private ritual or sought atonement. Even before security became a sharper presence in such places, Timon’s placement and solitude earned him looks, glares from those who wore uniforms emblazoned with some derivative of the word security.

  Bags checked and metal detection complete, Timon moved down the terminal’s crowding corridors toward his gate. He found a cup of coffee and sat down and opened the monograph he carried with him. He had two such volumes, along with a historical dissertation and a pop-science paperback recommended by his father in a way that seemed unavoidable. Timon stared out at the passage of planes and supply trucks across a neutral morning.

  The anticipated boarding time arrived with little fanfare. Heads in the waiting area, Timon’s among them, turned toward the desk, where a man in a uniform shrugged and apologized. “We don’t know yet,” he said. “We’ll tell you when we know something more.” And so Timon waited and read in a sort of stillness. He tried to breathe normally, and yet wondered why airports only held chapels and meeting rooms. Not yet nine in the morning and yet he felt the need to move, whether the space was a crowded bar with busted speakers or a high school’s track raised from shredded sneakers. Ninety minutes past the expected boarding call, he surrendered his seat and stood, to walk the terminal for a while. A morning later and three thousand miles to the east, he boarded a train, southbound for Charleston.

  The departure from Sea-Tac to New York had been uneventful until the flight’s final minutes. A warning came from the pilot: notification of passage through turbulence, a guarantee of bumps, of shudders, of nausea. Timon hated the feel of the drop, that split-second hollowing; his body, all of their bodies falling what would be a fatal distance to them without the jetliner’s thin shell. Sometimes there would be screams or involuntary shouts; sometimes Timon would hear groans or grunts from a corner, from a form huddled head to chair, head in hands, hands in prayer.

  The storm they’d lurched to clear had rendered delays onto Timon’s connecting flight. And so he proceeded to a ticket counter and began to summon demands: demands for a hotel room and a per diem and an early-morning connecting flight. As he spoke he
heard his voice and his voice sounded foreign to him, sounded almost childlike, not the low transmission with which he ordered drinks or the hesitant academic’s intonation that he found placated certain ebullient clients. This voice, he considered, was not one he wanted recognized as his own. This was the voice of a petulant disgrace.

  At first he was shouting; then, thinking better of it, he turned and walked away. Then an elastic return, spinning back and nearly stumbling as he turned, boarding pass in hand. He set it on the counter—gingerly, he thought, be ginger with it—and pushed it slightly toward the attendant. “There’s nothing you can do for me?” he asked.

  The ticket agent shook her head. “No. If you called the airline, someone there might be able to help. But there’s really nothing I can do.”

  “Then I should just fucking—” He crumpled the ticket, scooped it up. “Fucking get out of here and just…go.” He turned and walked off again. Three steps clear of the ticket counter, he recognized himself, reckoned with shame, and spun again. This time he tried not to stumble. The paper sphere sat in his hand, its edges mockingly prodding his skin; for a moment, he wanted it to dig so deep it bled.

  Back at the counter. “No, no—seriously? There’s nothing you can do.” The sad head shake across the counter showing weariness, then panic. “Nothing? So I should just…get in a fucking car and drive to South Carolina? Will you pay for that? Will you fucking pay for that?” And the heat running through his cheeks, that loss of distinction in his words, his words bleeding into a shout. Timon heard himself elongate the word “God” for far too long. He set down the sphered boarding pass and began to smooth it out, hoping for some sort of restoration. He saw a tabletop pen and saw its flattened edge and began running it over top of the paper, rejuvenation in mind.