Reel

by Tobias Carroll

  The firm turned a profit from the start. Poul held it in the doorway as a bulwark against the fear and gave thanks to God on Sunday and manufactured fortunes until the tides had gone back to the sea. A year later, he walked with a rigidity in his back; two years from there, it was Poul who inspired fear in others. In him they saw a clenching, a trigger, fingers that could become a fist at a moment’s notice.

  Timon’s grandfather left a pause there, an implied gap into which questions could be asked. A course of food was placed before each of them, and Timon’s grandfather tore into it with a younger man’s leverage. After half his plate was cleared, after stray crumbs and supple juices had been wiped from his face, he continued.

  “I’ll tell you of your father now. We made him. We made him smart. We raised him up and set him at the altar most weekends and saw his senses blossom in the classroom. We raised him bright, raised him to know things on instinct. There’s a bit of Lamarck in me now, I think.” He chuckled, his lips almost spelling out a sentence to follow that, then withdrawing it with a gleam in his eye.

  “Then were the years we sent him off to seek his degrees. Sometime between the beatniks and the hippies, he found a way to be worse. Not soft; like a soldier, but fueled by something off its keel. We encouraged him, in those days. We dwindled him and shaped him in the hope that he would emerge into this state of fearlessness as surely as I had. Hoping all the while that he would be ready; your uncle complemented his knowledge well, but never seemed to be the readied heir we needed. Your father? We hoped against hope we might see him operate the firm one day. And we spent years doubting that anticipation.

  “I know. Your father. You never saw him as a child, never saw him indecisive. Never saw him scared. One late-night call, him to me, his voice shaking. He’d botched something. His voice shook. What it was, I couldn’t say. It was an obstacle. It was something that could be repaired, as he needed to be repaired. As he shook and quavered and stumbled before us, we sought to restore him. At fifteen, your father was a god; the potential he had made all of us shake. And when we saw him at nineteen, at twenty, how we grieved.

  “We sought restoration. We drew him to us after his commencement. We dredged forth the beneficial parts and culled out the ones that were damaged, before their rot could spread. A sort of moral gangrene that was stripped away.

  “There were years that he strayed again, and then your father became devout. Far more than me. Far more than my wife or my sister, than his brother, than anyone. We thought, for a brief period, we might lose him to a monastery or the priesthood. We had words; we spoke with him. We convinced him of his value to us, strengthened our tithe, ameliorated his vows.

  Poul Ingert’s face grew softer. “It was a beautiful time,” he said.

  Timon cleared his throat. “I didn’t ever know that,” he said.

  His grandfather smiled. “I wouldn’t expect your father to ever speak of it. Or acknowledge it, truth be told. It was never his finest moment.” He angled his glass toward his grandson. “I wonder of your devotion, Timon. And I can only say this: it’s a stronger place, where your father and I dwell. A strength that our faith gives us, and a kind of balance. A sense of restoration. A surefootedness. No stumbling or being attacked or assailed. You don’t flail in the darkness. You might doubt, Timon, but you do so without the fear.”

  Over their coffee, Poul and Timon spoke of Timon’s planned work with the firm over the summer. No more family history was unveiled before the younger man’s eyes, and no details of Timon’s life here were demanded of him. They parted with a handshake, Poul toward his hotel and Timon toward the city bus, the fare in his hand and a coastal geography taking shape in his mind. The summer would take him elsewhere, would take him to a quiet office maintained by some distant relation, annexed to the firm a half-decade before. The summer would envelop him in the firm’s business and would impart to him grim tidings of knowledge and a sense of affairs and decorum. As he sat nights in an upscale city’s subleased apartment. His furnishings spartan, his meals in monochrome, he anticipated his work in the firm until that anticipation became something else, something like an upended form of dread. It was then that he began a consideration of coastlines beyond the one he had known since birth; it was then, his eyes darting across maps, that he pondered his own relocation amidst the sound of guitars.

  11

  Marianne and Elias faced a locked door at the tattoo shop at one in the afternoon. The door’s sign listed an opening time thirty minutes earlier. They had passed a sandwich shop less than a mile the way they’d come, Elias saying, “We need to go there afterward. I’ll be famished,” and Marianne allowing herself one subtle cringe. Here they were, on time and eyeing the road’s lines for a figure bearing linework. The only number Elias had been given was for the shop’s own countertop phone, something they learned when they dialed it and—faintly at first, then with the clarity of recognition—audited its trill as it sounded from the other side of thin glass.

  The parking lot sky was a welcoming gray—not the haze that gives way to a humid sun or the massed shapes that give way to cloudbursts, but something promising wind and languor. This was the sort of color you could gather round you and dwell in, even if only briefly. A transitory neutral shade, a traveler’s friend, made for silhouettes and portraiture.

  Their drive from the campsite had been jocular, Marianne thought. No eager glances from Elias toward her, either in the car or as they’d sat at breakfast in a diner near Issaquah. Instead, she found herself talking about her project, about assemblage and mediation, about allowing two images or objects to interact, even if only for a moment, and to see whether they clashed or agreed, could become conjoined or would stand at odds. Elias listened, enraptured, only breaking gaze with her when idly surveying his text’s future home.

  Two storefronts down from where they waited was a doughnut shop. There, caffeine and sugar, in varied forms, were purchased to aid in their observance. They stood beside Elias’s truck, Marianne in sunglasses. A car pulled up one stop away—not their quarry—and provided a surface for reflection. “We look like a band,” Elias said with a smile. The remark dwindled down and suddenly became a jab halfway through Marianne’s digestion. She wondered whether that was subconscious shorthand, whether Elias was in fact telling her that she looked aloof. In this scenario, Elias would be the drummer, she knew. In his mind, Elias would always the drummer: steady and half-obscured, the cast of his eyes forever excused.

  Marianne took a bitter shot of coffee and took her turn at observance. Not a band, she thought. They looked like miscast actors, playing sullen teens in someone’s off-brand melodrama. Each of them in a role their junior by the better part of a decade. At that moment, she wanted a shower and a familiar view. She looked over at Elias and smiled. “How long do you think we should wait?” she said.

  Timon’s train took him south, through Washington and down tree-lined tracks that defied a geographic placement. He felt separate from any maps now, displaced as though he had been taken surgically from a city’s surface and mounted below glass, a subject for scientific classification. On the train, eight hours down, he shivered. A hole in his stomach asserted itself, prompting still more shakes. It was an old friend come back after long absence, a hearty handshake and a wicked gleam in the eye. An unwelcome guest, this old fear, this nervous fit. This transient discomfort, cloaking Timon, not ill-fitting, not like shrouds fitted for an older body. Not a childish cloak at all.

  Two-thirty, he thought. Two-thirty was fine for a drink while in transit. He walked to the bar car and purchased a beer and took it back to his seat. Sat and watched the books beside him. Opened one and sought photographs of a community, a right and proper scene. He saw kinetic images and arcs in the air, a photographer’s flash echoed in the downward motion of a guitar, its player here anonymous, face blurred, T-shirt unreadable. He saw tours in thumbnail, saw studio sessions and apartments and well-worn practic
e spaces. Timon closed the book and opened another, brushing up on areas of knowledge useful to the family business. It drifted into him and his knowledge of the sounds of motion bled out. Four hours to Charleston, he thought.

  Elias drove toward Seattle, no wordplay inscribed on his arm. Marianne watched him. They had stood beside the car for five hours, waiting for the shop’s neon OPEN to become lit from within, hoping for the existence of a back entrance through which some artist might have slipped. Two hours into watching, a light rain had begun to fall, and they had taken shelter inside the car, occasionally making runs to a deli a few storefronts down for supplies: first water and then, after some debate, a pair of pre-fab sandwiches (Swiss cheese, lunchroom turkey) that left them unmoved. Eventually, Marianne had offered to run down to a nearby pay phone and call the number stenciled on the tattoo shop’s door in case someone might have slipped inside. The phone had rung and rung, with no machine or human voice providing an answer. Three such calls had she made before, by mutual consent, the decision was made to return home.

  Elias had a sour look on his face, a stubbled variant on a child deprived of a favorite toy. On the interstate, after they’d passed a familiar exit, Marianne looked at him. Elias deserved a better weekend than this, she thought, even with her reservations about his choice of tattoo. She thought about salvage. “Dinner?” she said after a while. “I have things at home; I could call Esteban and Iris.”

  He looked up, an eager light in his eyes. “Sure,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind, you know, showering first, but—that sounds wonderful.” Marianne saw him twitch slightly after the last word’s enthusiasm.

  He dropped her off in front of her apartment in the late afternoon’s pale sunlight. Three hours later, he arrived again, washed and cleaned; his bones, no longer shrouded by stubble, leaning through his skin. Marianne was talking with Esteban and Iris when he arrived, their conversation, as always, about art and the mechanics of small business loans. It was a good dinner, the four of them splitting three bottles of red wine and making headway through a fourth, this one of port. Of them, the largest share by far was taken in by Elias, and he was also the first to depart, bidding farewell at ten-fifteen after asking Marianne whether he could pick his car up the following day.

  Iris and Esteban stayed around for another hour before quietly bidding Marianne farewell. She made herself a cup of tea and sat in the apartment, the sounds of cars passing and a few hardy Sunday night drinkers drifting in slowly, as though the soundwaves they had birthed wanted to savor the night air for a while before reaching windows and drifting through.

  Marianne stood and opened each window wider. She took two deep draughts of tea and twisted her head slowly.

  At the deli near the tattoo shop, she had bought a road map of the state, had slipped it into her back pocket before rejoining Elias in the car. She hadn’t understood the impulse as she did it; rather, she had understood on some level that it represented a new project, a work separate from her primary cartography, but had not yet given the specifics a definite form. Now it came to her; she produced the map and laid it on the worn and spattered work-table she used for drafting. In one closet was a spare board, purchased for use as a shelf but decommissioned; this, too, she took and set on the table. On a ledge in the same closet was an adhesive; in a drawer, a knife for the cutting and a mat to layer atop the table.

  In a Belltown apartment, Marianne began the work of excising the weekend’s route, her mind already rearranging arranging interstates and local highways, their destination presently a null set, the stakes anything but small.

  PART THREE:

  FULL ON NIGHT

  12

  Timon had expected a driver to meet him when he stepped off the train into a humid Charleston night. Instead, Jonathan Clarligne stood outside the low-slung station, an impeccable figure, miraculously free of palpable sweat. Timon paused a body’s length from Clarligne as Clarligne looked him over—a steady procession from shoes to face. “Your train’s late,” Clarligne said.

  “Not my fault,” said Timon.

  “No,” said Clarligne, and beckoned him toward the car. After the luggage had been placed inside and the two men had taken their seats, he continued. “We’ve got you in a hotel near the old town. I don’t expect you’ll need a car for the trip. Everything’s walkable.” He cycled his fingers down the steering wheel. “Should be just like home.”

  Headlights were subsumed within a humid haze as they drove. Timon wanted a meal and he wanted to see Clarligne’s pictures again: the shotgun, the preacher; wanted to sift through to see patterns beneath the surface. He craved that moment of connection the way epicures crave new tastes, the way lovers starve for a certain touch. Clarligne wore a light blazer over a silk shirt that looked untouched by the air’s moisture or the body’s means of cooling. Timon looked over at him and felt rumpled, unformed; his lack of sleep blindsided him and summoned him toward rest.

  “There’s people here you should meet,” Clarligne said. “There’s a small restaurant at your hotel. I’ve arranged something.”

  “I appreciate it, but—”

  “You’re on our clock now, Timon. Plenty of time on the train to sleep, if you’d needed it then. This will take an hour, at most. Should you need stimulants, we have stimulants.”

  “Coffee sounds good.” It was a compromise, Timon thought, that he could live with.

  “I’m not talking about coffee.” The look that came into Clarligne’s eyes at that moment reminded Timon of his client’s youth. It was a look that his father had warned him about. The look of a life without consequence, his father had said. When you see that look, that’s your cue to decide whether or not you want to walk.

  Timon coughed. “We’ll see,” he said. “When we get to the hotel.”

  Dinner was caterer’s generic: carrots and broccoli cooked with a slight tinge of butter and little else, chicken roasted in a way that bled from it all notable qualities, and a dollop of onions caramelized at an echelon leagues above the course’s other components. A line-cook savant back there, Timon thought. He had hoped that the attendees at this dinner would be relevant to the process he planned to undertake while here. Instead, they were Clarligne’s fellow scions: gleaming with unknown pleasures and flush with loose money. He doled out business cards at Jonathan Clarligne’s request, a dispensary for theoretical expertise. He stifled yawns with the help of whiskey’s sharpness and pungent shivers.

  Clarligne bid him farewell just after eleven. Clarligne and his peers had designs on a nightclub downtown, were traveling there en masse. An invitation was extended to Timon, and that invitation was declined. Instead, Timon waited until his client was out of sight and crossed to the front desk. He asked about alt-weeklies and requested a neighborhood map. If he was to be here for a week or more, ensconced in a hotel friendly to a pedestrian traversal of the city, the least he could do would be to seek some localized oblivion.

  Timon’s hotel room seemed constructed for neutrality: the walls an off-white color, the furniture representative of no specific period. He set his suitcase and his traveling bag on the edge of the bed and began a thudding transfer of clothing from both into the dresser before him. On the walls, a pair of pastel landscapes framed in gold leaf punctuated a view of nothing in particular. The paintings’ view was of a world gone blurred, a vista taken in by an observer lacking corrective lenses. This was how the room seemed to Timon—not by virtue of drink or anything similar, but via simple fatigue. When he had finished with his clothing, Timon arranged reference works and files around the space. He found himself standing stock-still then stumbling forward, his movements hazy, perception drifting. In his last conscious moments, he scrawled a note to himself laying out the following day’s objective: to see the site housing Clarligne’s photographs. From there, the project hung vaguely open, offering ambivalent promises.

  The morning Marianne got good news from Iris and Esteb
an was the same morning Marianne got bad news from Archer. That morning was one punctuated by thunderclaps, hurried in their arrival as though behind schedule and rushing toward an engagement somewhere nearer Spokane.

  The Clarligne project hadn’t gone through, Archer told her. He side-stepped into her office looking dismal, some blood on his cheek suggesting difficulties while shaving. “Foppish fuck doesn’t want us involved anymore,” Archer said. “Sounded almost apologetic when he talked to me.” He shrugged, dark circles below his eyes and an extra week’s worth of hair jutting out from his skull. Marianne considered his distress: personal or business? And if it was the latter, should his distress be hers as well?

  Marianne suggested that he shut the door, but Archer shrugged. “I’ve got no hesitation about calling a man out for his foppishness,” he said, then slapped the doorframe. Archer winced, rubbing an apparently injured finger across his lower lip. “This is a piss-pot of a day,” he said.

  Marianne idly tapped a knuckle on her desk’s taut surface. “Anything that should concern me?” she said. Archer shielded his eyes and shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “Honestly, this is mostly a relief. Would’ve been extra work, would’ve stretched us more than I’d have liked.” His laugh was a death rattle, a summoning of some awful sound meant to reassure. He squinted one eye, then tilted his head like a dog in the presence of a teakettle. “If you hear from that guy again,” he said, “put him through to me. I think we need to have words. Still.” He cleared his throat, and continued. “Even now.”