Reel

by Tobias Carroll

  From behind him in the line, he heard someone breathe the word “Certifiable.” And then the pen was jabbed into the surface through one corner of the board pass, the pen shattered, plastic flaking off into daggers. Then there was an escort for Timon. Repeated again and again: “You should be grateful all we’re doing is throwing you out. You should thank God for that.” And a low stream of apologies from Timon, not really discernible as such, simply a low mantra of whispered desultory sounds, his head angled into his neck, linoleum floors his epic scenery.

  He made arrangements an hour later. A train the following morning, a long slow ride to get him to Charleston. And then a version of his delay, composed for Jonathan Clarligne’s ears. Merely a delayed flight, said Timon, a sheepish shift in conveyance. He sat by a hotel room phone and looked out at billboard lights and shifts in the night sky and spoke words that provoked no response from his client save the equivalent of a nod. “So you’ll be late,” said Jonathan Clarligne. “That can be reconciled.”

  A taxicab brought Timon to a hotel a handful of blocks from Penn Station. At a restaurant two doors down he ate Korean, waiting for the bowl’s heat to sear rice into something crisp and resonant. At the front desk, he made arrangements for an early wake-up call: a six in the morning departure was the critical event of his tomorrow. Four stops on the subway brought him to a clutch of still-open shops, and from them he purchased as much as he could for the following day’s transit. The books he bought were large, lavishly illustrated. Documents of cities and scenes and cultures, monographs on artist’s works and industrial practices and schematics. And two histories of Baltic nations, his own area of expertise within the business. He knew landmarks, knew the names of cities and avenues; now, he wanted to understand the context in which they dwelled.

  Down the street, he found a shop in which he bought a Birthday Party album. After he paid, he stepped across the threshold to the sidewalk and felt the eastern city’s air on his face and turned back inside. He added a Born Against album to his purchases and then ventured back to his hotel.

  There was a bar a few doors from the hotel’s entrance, and once his purchases had been deposited in his room, Timon made his way there, to a stool and a countertop sprawl in front of him. The ale hit the rice in his stomach, and for a moment he remembered his childhood, his parents speaking of throwing rice at weddings and then, a decade later, telling him to avoid this practice, that rice expanded on contact with liquid and tore through avian innards like pencils through a balloon. He felt something quiver in his stomach, a stop-motion shake, and wondered whether this would be where he met his end. Stomach distended and expanded, eventually ruptured from brown ale and bibimbap at an unscheduled point of transfer. Eventually the shakes subsided; Timon lay payment on the bar and navigated the route back to his bed.

  Timon’s eyes opened; ten seconds later, his alarm began to sound. This was how he woke in hotels: just early enough to outwit the alarm, but not quite early enough to escape its wrath. The shower came in cold, an enemy’s shake, an expulsion into clarity. Checkout at the hotel was simple; check-in with Amtrak proceeded gingerly, each participant reluctant to raise their voice. At just after six in the morning, the train departed Penn Station. Timon was alone in first class, his luggage above him and his reading material in the vacant seat beside him. He plugged in his laptop and charged his phone and began his research, the sun still hesitant to cross the horizon.

  PART TWO: SECRET ORIGINS

  9

  Marianne and Elias drove north on the interstate. Elias’s car was old, its mileage signifying that it was at an age where abandonment would be a reasonable alternative to significant repairs; abandonment or a direct route to the scrap yard. Still, it hummed along, Elias reclining as he drove, the ceiling fabric above Marianne’s head beginning to bow. The sky was a sharp shade of blue, a color that seemed to flow into the evergreens flanking the highway rather than demarcating itself from them. Marianne looked ahead, her stare through the windshield mirroring that of Elias. As he drove, Elias’s right hand selected a cassette from the console’s cubbyhole. Split Seven Inches, read the label; Marianne saw it and saw Elias pry it open, withdraw the actual tape from within, and slide it into the stereo. The music began mid-song, a ramshackle acoustic guitar and an untrained voice striving for a higher register.

  “Hope you don’t mind,” Elias said.

  “No, it’s fine,” said Marianne.

  The highway ushered them north past Mukilteo and Issaquah toward the night’s destination. The cassette moved from grim introspection to long distorted chords and agitprop vocals. From the corner of her eye, Marianne saw Elias’s thumb occasionally emulate a rhythm on the steering wheel’s edge. Her mouth allowed itself the suggestion of a smile. The sun was at its apex now. “We’ll sweat off autumn yet,” said Elias. Marianne nodded.

  Their destination was an hour or so north. Marianne wondered whether the mountains would look the same from there. The back of the car held gear: a sizable tent, Elias’s sleeping bag, and an older one of Marianne’s that dated back to her college days. That had earned her the sound of Elias’s clicking tongue. “Florida?” he had said. “Shit. That won’t serve you well up here. I’ve got some blankets and an air mattress. You should be okay.” There was a cooler: beer and a stray bottle of wine given to Marianne eight months earlier, some food that could be easily roasted. And a container of popcorn, which Elias implied had been added as a joke. “Just like when we were kids,” he had said. The gleam in his eye was unexpected. As they passed an exit, Marianne noticed that Elias’s glance had flickered in her direction, just for a moment, before returning to its devotion to the road before them.

  There was silence for a long stretch of road, mile markers observing a quiet car, its inhabitants’ eyes forward, their heads occasionally nodding at a noteworthy site or simply in keeping with the rhythm of their passage. Inside the car, Elias’s cassette had come to an end and reversed and started again, its telltale first notes ringing out—except, as Marianne realized, they weren’t a demarcated opening to one song but were instead the fleeting coda to the one before it, notes played by a different band entirely.

  Elias said, “I’m going to put something new in,” and Marianne told him that that would be fine. The tape he chose opened with long ambient clouds, sounds that seemed at odds with the blue and open sky above them. Marianne waited; she was sure she had heard this album before, and knew that if she waited long enough, in would come the drums, and a melody would be born.

  Timon watched from the traincar window as it rattled through New Jersey, occasionally sliding past the local train system, the contrast of their motion exhausting him. First class remained empty save him. On the seat beside Timon, their configuration constantly shifting, were his books, his research materials, and his laptop. Though he had tripped through timezones and felt a disconnect from the hour at hand, Timon couldn’t sleep. He felt pressed against the outer edge of Eastern Standard Time, body sore as though he had traversed the country’s length on his own legs and, having arrived here, was now expected to rest.

  He rubbed one cheekbone with the outer ridge of his thumb and felt nothing between bone and skin. He walked to the dining car for his third cup of coffee of the morning, and when he returned he set it before him and his mind began to wander.

  When he was seventeen, the family had briefly attended religious services in a cathedral far from any landmarks he could recognize. He recalled a March afternoon in which he had traveled in a car separate from the rest of his family. He remembered a fervor and a lopsided tradition inside, a service which moved from voices near to breaking to a low and minimal chanting of certain select portions of the text. This was a Sunday; on Saturday, his father had brought him into the company’s offices in a building downtown. A humble place, he thought, looking on it with eyes different than those of his childhood, when he had been brought here for entertainment rather than prospecting.
Then as now, he had looked upon the lines of the walls and their simple adornments and the prints hanging from them and processed. He walked the halls behind his father and his uncle Gilbert, whose presence in these offices at any hour was a given.

  Timon surveyed the walls and skipped from image to image, wondering whether the series of images were meant to be an equation, whether the room represented a collage, a riddle for the amusement of the company and no others. Along one wall: maps torn from century-old atlases, grainy photographic prints of rain on cobblestones, and one framed Art Chantry print. He walked and was slowly ushered into the conversation in front of him. Even as he spoke, seeking to impress, most of his thoughts remained on the sequence, running it backward and forward: the meaning of the images as one entered the office and their meaning as one walked from Gilbert’s office back to the front door. He would consider this after leaving the office and on the drive back home, and in his own car and down academic hallways for the next few weeks, until a stray remark of his mother’s revealed to him that the photographs, the cobblestones gleaming with reflected streetlights, were from Gilbert’s camera; that Gilbert walked the city on some evenings, chasing the magic hour; that there was a full darkroom behind some door in the office suite. Gilbert’s passion, she said with a smile. And with that, Timon grudgingly surrendered his pursuit of meaning to the sequence. The other images were quantities he could know, but the notion that one of the family could also make art was foreign to him, the revelation of a new letter in a language he had considered familiar, and all of the possibilities that it held.

  The polestars—his father, one uncle, and his great-aunt—sat opposite him at the New York office’s conference table. It felt unfair. A flash came to him suddenly: standing, younger, classmates advancing on him on the asphalt, knowing he was due a swing and impact and wondering, in those moments between shove and strike, whether they’d draw tears again.

  Three from his family sat and looked at him. “This is what we’d like you to study,” he heard, and a list was passed to him: dot matrix Courier, shreds of edging straying past the perforation. He looked it over and the admissions process cascaded around him briefly. He looked it over and saw familiarity, concepts and movements that were already more than known to him.

  His fingers brushed the surface of the paper, the words’ indentations a surprising source of texture. “I know most of this already,” he said.

  This was greeted with nods. “The degree helps,” his great-aunt said. “In certain circles, our methodology, our name, will suffice. Others? Other clients want the right schools, the right names and phrases.”

  His father cleared his throat and said, “It’s a kind of currency.” And his uncle said nothing, his gaze skittering from one of the others at the table to the next.

  Timon understood his future here, as he looked down at the list. He knew what to say next, swallowed nothing. “Where does it start?” he said.

  The next day he arrived at the cathedral in a car, separate from his father. He had been reading about lower frequencies and the way in which they might be brought to resonate throughout the body. It came up in a freeform curriculum he was pursuing, the evolution of his childhood drills. He would wake pre-dawn, take cold showers and coffee, and dwell within ninety minutes of immersion before a typical school day.

  The stone building before him seemed ideally suited for resonance, for echoes and arch-echoes. He would search for it that day, in the harmonies sung and the cadences spoken and in their rhythms and call-and-response and clatter. Within the cathedral, he sought his father and grandfather and sat beside them in silence. He waited for a transformation to occur, or at least to begin. Barring that, Timon awaited illumination.

  His drive home alone was filled with late-eighties punk rock, surges of guitars and compact rushed harmonies, wordless and buoyant. It brought him a greater sort of comfort. His ritual since becoming a driver ended at the banks of a river, sandwich in hand, watching over a landscape still foreign to him.

  A bridge conveyed, the Delaware below, portraits evoking failed connections beside him. The morning still young, Timon rose and walked to the dining car for a fresh cup of coffee.

  10

  Morning drives. Elias pulled out a cracked cassette case of an Uncle Tupelo album and fed it to the deck. Morning drives west. Marianne stretched in the passenger seat as best she could, pressing hands to the glovebox and arching her back into padding-foam and auburn-dyed fabric. Morning drives west and Elias cleared his throat and looked to the road ahead. “You all right?” he said.

  “I don’t camp as much as you,” Marianne said, and it was true. The previous night, they had arranged sleeping bags so that they faced one another, rather than laying down in parallel. Elias had been the first to fall to sleep, and quickly began to snore. She ceased the already-dim light in the tent and lay in silence for a while, hoping to find a rhythm in Elias’s exhalations.

  There had been four circuits of the country before her arrival in Seattle. Four circuits with no false complications; rather, they had been almost continuous, two grand circles and two treks on the diagonal, week-long sublets and couches surfed and the occasional hostel. Brief jobs and temporary positions that had occupied her time. She had grown to understand the tastes of things in these towns and cities. She could speak with some authority about tap water in Montana and vegetables sold roadside in Alabama, and she found herself feeling a rush of delight on the rare occasions when she saw a statue reflecting some sort of local cryptozoology—a relic of her a childhood fascination with the weird, true, but one that brought a smile to her face even when summoned from memory.

  In a Louisville winter, she had met a man named Broder who had undertaken travels similar to hers a few years earlier. He bore tattoos across his body, each one a small memento of the places he had stayed, for good or for bad, that had changed him. Briefly, seated at a bar’s booth with three others, she had tallied the cost of them, based on her own brief experience with the process, and wondered how he had managed to afford it. Broder played bass in a series of bands, some of them crude in their chord progressions, others complex in the weave of their melodies with dissonance, and did little else, save for bartending a night a week at the bar in which they regularly sat.

  She understood her own economics and had slight inklings of how they might be perceived, of how tenuous they were in certain cities. There had been a few hushed nights of silence awaiting angry or despairing phone calls, hoping for a correct alignment of checks cleared and cashed. The infrequent occasions on which this was required pained her; she felt like someone corseted into the role of compulsive gambler, and when she recalled it after a few years from her space in Seattle, she gladdened herself by noting that it had only been necessary twice, that she had minimized the potential damage done. The shortened breath, the mornings waking with quickened pulse, the nausea that spread throughout those days.

  Louisville had been the longest stop on any of the circuits. Long enough to fall into routines and begin to consider places her own; to think about deeper acquaintances and settle in to comforting routines. To consider ending her transit and finding a rhythm specific to this city. She began to consider spaces and neighborhoods and walks, train and bus schedules neglected, “For Sale” signs on cars regarded with interest. Pauses near buildings seeking tenants. Jobs for more than travelers lingered over. A circle began to form, haltingly, of a group of regulars. Which eventually prompted questions on Broder at the waning moment of a night’s drinks. Allison was a longtime resident, a friend of the friend who had been Marianne’s lodestar in Kentucky. Allison sat in the booth, as did Jeremiah, wispy beard and full-sleeve tattoos. And Marianne turned to them both and posed the question: what was Broder’s story? Native or expat, in town for his education or to seek his fortune, local scion or road-borne traveler?

  Neither of her friends had known. Broder seemed to them to be some sort of immortal fixture
, picking up haphazard bar tabs and occasionally subjecting all in his orbit to fulminations on various topics. A man who could be relied upon for the unanticipated: a display of esoteric knowledge or a quietly crooned song or the revelation of a banjo or conch shell at 3:00 in the morning, then proceeding to chime out a few selections indicating far more than a passing familiarity with its playing. A charming mammal, Allison called him. And somewhere along the way, the economics were lost, the conversation led along digressive paths.

  When her days in Louisville became languorous, Marianne knew that it was time to leave. Her last days there were a collage: Polaroids of significant places and brief rushes into shops she had come to prize. Items acquired that would feed into a project born in her mind there on a morning where she’d awakened early, the sun still new in the sky. Skills she had formed across the way, skills and predilections and talents. Lost charts she’d vowed to remake. Those were the seeds of her collage, her work in progress that had followed her to Seattle and had traced a route, stops in older cities used as a reason to gather material. Sometimes she’d see a sign of home, of a home, in an odd place: a bar with antiquities and memorabilia for sale on the country’s other side, an open-air market that resembled a tent city, an antique volume akimbo on an acquaintance’s bookshelf.

  As Marianne watched him, Elias wove his knuckles around the steering wheel and sighed. The roads, she noted, had become more organized, suitable for navigation and a certain restraint.