Reel

by Tobias Carroll

  The train crossed the Delaware into Pennsylvania and stopped in Philadelphia and then entered Delaware. The books beside Timon now had placeholders marking their pages, indicating areas of enrichment. Some served as a means for him to expand or revisit things he had believed or sought to believe for over a decade; others would serve as fresh shoots, an expansion of territory, new verses and new expectations. There had been no rhythm to the volumes chosen. Some came at the suggestion of the family, while others were his own acquisitions, some made at random, others intended to fill in gaps between two disparate pursuits which might otherwise have toppled one another, distance mimicking gravity or, more appropriately, magnetism.

  Slowly, Timon built his own structures amidst the plans others had blueprinted for him. Areas of his own interest, a burrow-hole where his tallies and disciplines might be brought to serve the purposes of the family, or to serve purposes as yet undefined.

  At his university, he had seen a film focused through one character’s perspective, in which the ending proved that its protagonist had been in a sort of denial, had cloaked his true motivations and true purposes from all who had watched, the audience included. That this protagonist had, in fact, never been in any danger; that the interrogations he faced pertained not to tangible crimes but to offenses of the soul; that the procedural Timon had thought he was watching was, in fact, something far more metaphysical in its scope.

  Timon had felt a sort of betrayal at that, had stormed out of the theater before the final frames faded, then sullenly stalked the green. Timon paced, wearing holes through the grass as though he had been faced with impossible mathematics, with evidence that the calculations he had taken for granted his whole life had suddenly been rendered false. It had happened once before, with the nature of planets; why not now? Why not with anything else?

  His grandfather had come to visit him at college in his third semester. By that point, Timon’s face had grown lean, his hair slack. His style fit neither the well-off scions he saw daily nor the outsiders in well-worn shirts of an age to have fathered their wearers. He drifted in his own fissures, occasionally carving some of his own. Walks through the campus where he swore he left some sort of trail, an embedded cartography gradually made external.

  Timon’s routine was notable in its density, his course of study mapped out by relatives in distant cities, always according to the needs of the business. Two majors known for their embedded pressures and a business minor, tacked on for pragmatic reasons. Or so his father had said: “Eventually you’ll be needed in the operations, in a financial role.” None of the subjects were outside of his areas of knowledge, and he excelled in certain areas and struggled in others. His memory, the facts buried in his mind, his ability to place: these were not in doubt. His quality for synthesis—as one professor put it—was more tenuous.

  “You should be working toward theories,” the professor had said. “You should be seeking a meaning, a method of organization.” They sat in a quiet office, the professor’s neighbors vanished or silent.

  And Timon had felt words form that must be suppressed. But that’s unimportant, he nearly said before choking them back and learning, in that exchange, to acquiesce with a murmur.

  He had taken to ducking in to see music at out-of-the way spaces that had the feel of witches’ covens. There were perhaps faces he was coming to know in these collectives, eyes and cheekbones and shapes of chins that were familiar even as they were nameless. He sought a shapeless noise from the speakers, a roar that came in patterns anarchic and brutal, one with a shape he could not anticipate.

  It was hard for him to claim the attraction. It began with him a non-drinker, nineteen and withdrawn, an elusive roommate and no habits, nothing that might dissuade him from his work, from pursuits academic and familial. Upon his dispatch to academia, Timon had been told that his work for the business would be reduced to almost nothing. This was not, he was to learn, precisely true. Roughly every six weeks, packets would arrive via post, sometimes brimming with information, sometimes sparse. Affixed were notes and curling facsimile transmissions, ink smudged from their conveyances. Once in a great while there would be transportation somewhere, along with instructions on mannerisms and code of dress. He would scan over photographs and replicated documents stacked neatly between textbooks and notebooks and journals, the last of which found him tracing long routes idly in the night’s waning hours, constructing routes that traveled mazelike, complementary to his thoughtpaths for the night. Sometimes his pen dug routes into the page and into the one behind; other evenings found him subtly crossing over the eaves of one page and onto their opposite, his eyes indistinct and his senses muted. If his roommate ever saw Timon engaged in these actions, he never spoke of it.

  One night he saw a couple step into a gallery space. One was dressed casually, her shirt silkscreened and readjusted, while the other wore a suit made for a man twenty pounds heavier. Each was beaming. Timon, with no paths in mind, no readings for the night, no business to conduct, followed them inside. Their appearance was a momentary pitch-shift, a short inspiration for Timon’s intrigue. There was a discontinuity there, a comfort in how they walked that attracted Timon, a sense that their separation from categorization paralleled his own but achieved something greater, something closer to a standard as yet unnamed.

  He followed them in and handed a few dollars to someone collecting at the door. Once inside the room, Timon saw a makeshift stage in one corner, well-worn metal legs and a scuffed surface flanked by two battered speakers. On the stage, places for three players had been set, but only one was used. A man stood there behind a guitar, his look similarly out of time, his face focused on the spaces before him where no one stood, his guitar conjoined to his stomach, his guitar shaken and thrashed as he screamed, his voice hitting peaks and then coaxed itself down. The effect was beautiful and terrifying. The singer declaimed lyrics with wavering syntax, with names and references classical and mythological, roared and cooed. The music’s rise and fall collided with Timon and pieced his skin, filled him with the charge of the unknown and the soon-to-be-known.

  It could be something of my own, Timon thought two songs later. And the singer made his exit. This could be something of my own. And a band followed the singer, this one four in number, their rhythms more identifiable but their guitar still a howl, their lyrics a jumble, unknown. It struck Timon like a newfound wellspring that offered unconditional bliss.

  By the time of his grandfather’s arrival in town, Timon had been attending events in unutterable places for several months. He made no friends there; rather, he simply stood and watched as music was played. He imagined that he might see a face familiar from dormitory life or a class, or even a pathway navigated through crowded hallways and elevators even more stifling. He saw none that he recognized, and none gave any indication of knowing him. He would stand midway through the crowd and let the waves of sound reach his anonymity. Timon gorged himself on the sound like a gourmand recently released from prison, and did so as often as he could.

  Timon’s roommate, a surgeon in embryo, was little seen around their gray-walled alcove. The phone rang one Sunday morning at just after nine. After two rings, Timon took the call and heard his father’s voice on the other end. “I’m glad you’re up,” his father said. “It’s a work matter.” Poul Ingert, grandfather to Timon, would be making one of his sporadic appearances in the Northeast the following weekend. “Leave your schedule open,” Timon’s father said.

  Poul Ingert lived in Flagstaff at the time, alone in a modest house most of the way up a mountain. He had moved west years before Timon’s birth, seeking an atmosphere less taxing on lungs that had, upon the onset of middle age, begun a slow and inexplicable decline. The air in Arizona had rejuvenated him, he told his issue, and isolation had made his mind keener. He appeared as a figure half monastic and half divine, albeit a kind of divinity thousands of years removed: spiteful and arbitrary and, Timon had
gleaned from conversations a generation above his own, given to lustful declarations when so moved. Poul Ingert could be relied upon to make short jaunts, fewer than one per season, to visit family and certain valued clients and occasionally and infrequently to deliver lectures. It was the last of these that was to bring him into his grandson’s proximity.

  “I’m going to send you money,” Timon’s father said. “Your grandfather will probably pay for the meal, but he’s been known to challenge presumptions. He might give you a look when the check comes and refuse all claim on it. You should be prepared.” A wad of twenties arrived via carrier two days later, and on the day after that Poul Ingert called Timon about making arrangements for a Saturday lunch.

  At first, Timon never knew the names of the bands and artists he saw. Sometimes they would announce it from the stage, and sometimes he would pass a flyer for that night’s show, logos pasted together with typewritten descriptions and glued atop a graphic purloined from a comic book, old advertisement, or family photo. Timon stared at these sometimes, attempting to unearth the buried image and assign it to some extant taxonomy.

  That night at the space there was motion: the band’s drumming attracted a newer, sleeker crowd, a crowd prone to collisions and the clearing of a ovular space in the middle of the venue. Timon saw a nervous look on the face of the man who had taken his five dollars as bodies met bodies frenetically and spun off, the guitars on stage releasing sound that dove through the drumbeat’s cut-time rhythm. Some moved with their hands up and reflexively covering their faces and others moved with their hands out, and on the fringes of the space that had been cleared Timon saw others standing back, pushing at those in motion with cross looks on their faces, looks that stopped just short of accusation and indictment. It came time for Timon to dive in. His legs haltingly sought to find a beat to lock themselves to even as he began a circuit of his own.

  As he turned, the sense of the music shifted: now the sound from his left ear was overpowering, and as he moved it he felt as though he moved through the crashing chords and drumbeat crescendos like some new style of swimmer. He put his arms up, half in emulation of those around him, and half because he nearly swore he could feel the sounds. It was a feeling not far removed from joy. The music was made tactile around him; it descended onto him; he embraced it, a rush like dreams.

  As the band continued to play, Timon began to stretch, began to consider the space around him as the one-two-three-four sped onward, as the notes grew more ragged, as the vocals ten feet from him became more strained, began to ebb. His arms reached out more: he felt the music run through fingers and impact his arms. He imagined it sliding beneath his skin and raising up marks and images and leaving him altered, unrecognizable and redefined. He thought of marathoners observed in the last mile, approaching their contest’s end. As he moved, he reached beyond the music’s skin and began to push. As he moved, he began to shove and collide, the path toward his own bliss never more certain.

  A slow sort of convergence developed in his mind: thoughts of his family, of his work and his learnings and his leavings ushered toward a common center. From the stage, the singer’s voice had reached a peak, had shifted past words to a scream from which all comprehension had been sapped. The guitars grew louder, and Timon saw the outskirts of the center, saw the beginnings of an answer. He reached out for it, not caring what he pushed through now, not concerned with obstacles or boundaries.

  And then a hand gripped him by the collar and pulled him away from the space before the band. “Fucker!” a voice not his shouted. “Fucker! You don’t do that!” And flung him and prompted stumbling until his momentum brought him to rest at a wall.

  Timon woke the next morning red-faced and bruised, informally barred from the gallery that he had come to haunt. It would be years before he stepped inside again, and then only tenuously, paying five dollars for the show and, after five minutes, taking steps away from the massing crowd, toward the door to the outside and then passing through it. The gathered crowd paid him no mind; he drifted away in mock anonymity.

  It was nine o’clock on the morning of lunch with his grandfather. The next two hours passed through his hands like tidewater—a rudimentary breakfast, studies conducted below a window as the early day’s brightness achieved its mid-day competence. He dressed himself in clothes he still inexorably associated with religious ceremonies and false teenage formality. He resembled someone’s idea of himself: an altered, barely recognizable Timon, a semi-formal Timon. At eleven in the morning he walked toward the bus, his route and destination carefully considered, mapped relentlessly.

  Lunch was the first time Timon had seen his grandfather in years. His last memory was of a stern face unexpectedly rendered childlike in a cathedral-held mass. Poul Ingert had been staying with them for a week, but hardly interacted with the children, preferring instead to recount business dealings with Timon’s father and bask in the breadth of Timon’s mother’s knowledge. His was a shape to glimpse through half-cracked doors, an elder making fluid gestures. Timon would watch for a moment and then walk away.

  As Timon walked into the restaurant, he felt the return of an old inadequacy, the same sensation that prevented him from lingering outside company conversations in his childhood. He noticed the high ceilings, the columns and their spacing, the minimally placed artwork on distant walls. Brief details about each came to him as he glanced around the room. He saw the diners that populated two-thirds of it. He was clearly the youngest one here; had one of his parents been with him, they would have been just behind him on that list.

  Poul Ingert sat alone at a table toward the back of the room, close-cropped white hair making him resemble less a patriarch than an aging agitator, a hidden wrench destined for turning gears or breaking windows. As Timon approached, his grandfather did not stand. Rather, he raised one hand in greeting, palm facing him—a salutation with empires behind it. The hand moved; the greeting became a gesture, indicating to Timon that he should sit.

  “I don’t see much of you,” Timon’s grandfather said after pleasantries had been exchanged and food ordered. “Truth is, I don’t see much of any of you. I ceded that. I traded it away some years ago and let the others manage the business now. Let a younger generation operate things.

  “I’d like to tell you about my own involvement in it. How I came around to the business.” To Timon’s ears, it sounded like a lecture or a sales pitch. He wondered whether his grandfather had delivered this to each member of his generation in turn: a recruitment and motivational speech all in one. To his knowledge, no one in the family had not been offered a chance to work for the business, and none had left it.

  “It was a winter of tangled wires,” Poul Ingert began, this confirming Timon’s hunches. “I was thirty-nine. Listless and directionless. A bachelor watching his friends’ children becoming men and women. I had my Sundays and little else. I taught, in those days. You didn’t know that? Your father never told—No. well, wasn’t my best work. I wore it like a pudgy man wears a shirt fitted too small for him—that constant inhalation and contortion.” He leaned in, jabbing a fork in Timon’s direction. “You wrack yourself,” he said, then speared a bit of salad.

  In that winter of tangled wires, Poul Ingert said, he was at work on a manuscript, one that his apartment encircled like a shrine. In his idle hours, he fancied himself the American answer to Chesterton, and saw this manuscript as a window opened onto this identity. In his idle hours and in relaxed conversations with compatriots, he cited his own ambitions, earning him smirks and facsimiles of respectful responses.

  On one night in that selfsame winter, Poul walked down a street, two books under one arm and a wavering hand before him. Snow fell, subtle like dust from a long-untouched volume in some obscure archive. Poul came to a bar and lingered for a moment, the window’s signs somehow sirening him inside. If not successful, they at least prompted his lingering beside the window.

  As he s
tood there, a man with oak’s build walked outside, stinking of vodka and damp cigars. Poul was pushed aside, and when he regained his composure enough to look at the larger man, he called out. The broad-shouldered man glared at Poul and swung once, then a second time, fists meeting face, leaving Poul unconscious on the street, bruises soon to rise.

  When Poul woke, he probed the inside of his mouth with his tongue, proceeding from tooth to tooth meticulously, accounting for the presence of each before he would allow himself to stand. He swore some of the pain before his fall had come from a molar tearing itself from gums and falling outward, blood reaching out as though it hoped to rejoin with his body. But no such thing awaited him on the sidewalk: only his books, opened and sprawling, but still intact.

  The night’s plans erased, Poul arrived home and tore the bloodied shirt from his body. Buttons whizzed everywhere, ricocheting off bookshelves and, in the case of one particularly determined disc, chiming off the edge of an irregularly stained coffee mug. In the years to follow, Poul would find them in corners, buried beneath rugs and cushions and behind volumes on his shelf, and collect them in a jar, never finding the need to discard them.

  Poul surveyed his own form in the mirror, eyes locking into reflected eyes, then encompassing the reddened face, half from blows and half from anger. He thought to himself, You look weak. Reprehensible, a creature to be shamed, mocked, casually struck down by passerby. Not deserving of an explanation or warranting an apology.

  Poul walked through other rooms and saw amassed items that seemed alien. They seemed to belong to a previous self, one that required a hasty strangling or smothering. For the items stacked in the rooms outside his study, he quickly found takers, and bonfired the rest. And then he took to the phones, declaiming his dissatisfaction in the hopes that someone might have something, an assignment or position or role more suited to the building of a man less prone to attacks, less prone to contempt. Poul spread notions of his own knowledge and found them receiving receptive ears. In turn, he drew up contracts and worked the late nights of a younger man, venturing into the days on dwindling currents of sleep.