Word reached her a few hours later that a grant had come through for Iris and Esteban’s pet project. Marianne left the office at seven that night and sat with them at an immaculate bar where drinks were forged at the countertop, ingredients mashed and swirled and decanted. Toasts were offered and plans made; schedules charted and contingencies recounted. It was in this discussion that Dana Guterson’s name was raised—specifically, by Esteban, as a patron or subject of the museum. “Funny,” said Marianne.
Why “funny” was the obvious question, and was posed as such.
“For a while, I was trying to get ahold of her. Some piece of art of hers; I was trying to figure out if someone in it was someone I’d seen around town.”
Esteban chuckled, leaned in with the confidence of an empty stomach and bourbon. “A paramour?”
“Fuck no,” she said, and the harshness of it grated even her own ears. “More like—someone to dissect. To try to figure out what makes a bad man bad.” She paused, fatigued, correct words elusive. “Not bad, necessarily. Inexplicable would be the best word to use.”
“I noticed you were using the past tense,” said Iris.
Marianne nodded. “You can only spend so much time on that kind of thing,” she said. “I have other things in mind now. I’d rather translate my own mind than look for piecemeal accounts of someone else’s. If I see the guy’s face around town, I see his face around town. Or not.”
13
Jonathan Clarligne had left keys for Timon at the hotel’s front desk. A warehouse, eight blocks away, was the destination; still standing empty after the photographs had been found. Timon ate a terse breakfast and set out into the day wearing the lightest attire he could find. It still wouldn’t be sufficient, he knew, to keep the sweat away. He would need something softer, something with space, not the long-sleeved shirts and densely woven jeans his working methods favored.
He took a to go cup of coffee with him, and was drinking it as he stepped through the hotel doors into the air outside. It seemed to him as though it was aiding him in reaching a state of equilibrium with the sidewalk air, the moisture brutalist as it bore down on him. Nine in the morning: Timon watched people go by in their suits, unfazed by the climate. It left him mystified. Through the glass doors, he heard the hotel’s phone ringing, heard the muffled sound of a pickup, a breezy welcoming voice, the words left behind as they translated through cracks into the open world.
Timon walked down clean sidewalks, amidst emissaries of a region unknown to him. The coffee dug down his throat and disoriented his stomach. He wondered if word of his misbegotten travel had reached his father yet, if he should expect a call during his Carolinian foray. Wondered whether he should expect a visit during this time, whether his standing would be in jeopardy. As far as he knew, positions in the family business were inviolate, intact short of resignation or death. Certain nights he feared a summoning back to New York, feared family dinners turning to talk of redundancies, feared his own position becoming a liability. Nine in the morning and this line of thought made him want some sort of obviation, in work or sound or sting.
Call his father, then. Preempt the bad news. The soft sell; formulate a reason for the trip by train. Formulate a reason for the exception to his normally rational methods of travel. Elide away notions that this might be getting worse; filter out the concept that you might be evolving into something unreliable. They’ll bring you back into the fold, he thought. Back to the cathedral. A semblance of conviction until it becomes more than a semblance. An automation of belief.
Although, he asked himself, isn’t that already what you’re doing? He hastened his pace, sweatstains and shortness of breath carried along with him, trotting just below the reach of his hands.
Obstructions within the windows’ glass—old paint and dirt smears—were what made the warehouse bearable in daylight. Could it even be considered at a different hour? Certainly at nighttime, lit from within—but any light fixtures mounted to walls or ceiling beams were by now antiquated and unreliable, gutted, or obsolete. The paint that had endured was white, and the structure itself was a light gray; had the windows been opened, had the sunlight been given full license to flow, all that Timon now saw would be washed out with light, would bring tears to eyes and heaviness to lids. The face of God in a warehouse in Charleston, he thought, and grew a hollow grin.
There was a hole in one wall; Clarligne had left copies of the photographs there. Timon withdrew them, shuffled them in his hand, resisted the urge to give them a narrative. The indications of a wedding, the Prohibition-era child with firearm, the formal man with a gutted sleeve below a tuxedo jacket. Find the shotgun, Clarligne had told him. He was here to find the shotgun, and nothing more.
And yet: the room, flooded with light. Timon withdrew into himself: a compensation. A disappearance into memory. The child, now a bishop: a bootlegger’s son. The photographs: all from the same camera, taken over the course of a decade or more. The wedding? Incidental. He heard wind pick up outside. The glare coming through the windows lessened.
Two public questions and one private one remained. The private one: the question of the torn sleeve. Animal attack? Dog or cat? Did they have predators here in the Carolinas, Timon wondered. Mountain lions, wolves, or wild dogs. He had no doubt that the photographs had been taken somewhere close to this space. Even with the lack of landscapes, telltale background details, historical figures, or landmarks. He could label it, wanted to label it, wanted pen and ink and adhesive for application. Six photographs, he would inscribe, taken between 1923 and 1942 in Charleston, South Carolina. Other images he had seen dangled in his mind around these and reached toward them. Other images that matched via make and model of camera or mode of clothing or years. He could walk, could carry these with him; could pull body apart and leave a museum revealed.
He began to walk the warehouse’s floor. He began to notice the walls: some intact, some pried apart by crowbars and handheld hammers set to clawing. The assumption, as yet unconfirmed by the word of Jonathan Clarligne: the photographs, found by workers dismantling the building. The images deemed scandalous: a bishop, ruined in life or prescreened for posthumous disgrace. The images handed off to Timon for discretion: his own and his family’s business, their reputation. Timon’s feet seemed to sink into the old floorboards, the wood underfoot not creaking but simply seething, exhaling like something massive, the stomach of some leviathan. He breathed in and out as he turned his head, charting the process of the room’s demolition. Four hundred feet, end to end.
The efforts to dismantle the walls had ended a third of the way through with a jagged line that ended halfway down one of them. Upon finding the photographs, the process had ended immediately. A scandal. Quash the scandal, then. Beckon young Timon to Charleston, beachhead and filter.
One public question: the shotgun’s location. Timon walked to the wall and began to tap. Clearly, it wouldn’t be this easy, but still. He struck the walls at short intervals: hollow all the way around. After one circuit had been completed, he struck the wall again just to hear how the sound traveled. To hear whether the back wall produced an echo. To stand before the resonance and allow the resonance to seep into his skin. His shirt, Timon noted, was dry.
No sounds came from outside. Whoever had built this place, Timon thought, had built it sturdy, had made it isolated. He looked at the beams in the ceiling, at the structure surrounding him. He considered years. He cleared his throat and set the photographs down on an improvised table close to one of the desiccated walls. He opened the front door and locked it behind him, then crossed the street and stared at the building’s shell. He chose new vantage points, making circuit after circuit of the warehouse from outside. Cars passed and the occasional pedestrian stared at Timon’s observation. He continued his walk, calculating, making comparisons. Best estimate: put the warehouse in the late 1930s, early 1940s. Photographs, then, placed there after the fact.
He crossed the street, re-entering the warehouse. The door hung open behind him as he walked to the jagged edge of the demolition. The tear in the wall ended at shoulder level. He looked at the paint, the age of the wood, taking in the abbreviated arc made by the act of tearing into the structure. He sniffed it, then crossed the room to the other side, seeking an intact wall. The paint seemed off: more recent, a more nuanced shade. He circuited the room again and again, marking where different sections had been repainted. By four in the evening, his work there was done. Taking the photographs with him, he made his way back to the hotel.
The first call that he made was to his father. A short message was left, hopefully cordial, summarizing his trip so far and leaving the hotel’s name and number. The second was to Jonathan Clarligne. This, too, resulted in a message being left—specifically, a request to meet to discuss his findings. Timon hung up the phone and poured himself a glass of water. He opened the alt-weekly and held the city map beside it, hoping to formulate a plan for the night.
Twenty minutes later, Clarligne called back, setting a meeting for that night at a bar fifteen blocks away, a rooftop affair, a name unfamiliar to Timon from the afternoon’s research. He returned to his papers, hoping to calculate a newfound plan for the night once his conversation with Clarligne had ended. Nothing came to mind, though—no dive bars or punk shows to be found, no places where noise might overwhelm him.
Before he walked to the meeting point, he took out a notepad and summarized the day’s findings in shorthand. He changed his shirt, toweled off his face, and readied himself for the evening’s conversation.
Jonathan Clarligne sat alone at a table on a downtown bar’s roof deck. Before him was a drink, ebbed into, clear, ice-filled. Timon wagered vodka. He ordered whiskey at the bar and settled in across from his client. Clarligne hmphed and raised his glass in a halfhearted toast, returned by Timon. Timon cleared his throat after taking an abbreviated drink from his glass. “So,” he said. “I’ve been through the warehouse. I’ve got a sense of the timeline here, and I have a pretty good idea of where the shotgun is not.”
“Good,” Clarligne said.
“I assume talking to the bishop himself is out of the question?”
“You assume correctly.”
Timon nodded. “Is there anything else I need to know right now? Charleston isn’t the largest city I’ve had to do this kind of work in, but neither is it the smallest.”
Clarligne smiled. “Stop by our offices tomorrow. I think we can move to verification.”
This paused Timon in the act of raising glass to lips. “Why bring me out here, then?”
“An antique shotgun is still a shotgun,” Clarligne said. “Not the easiest of objects to ship. The cost of shipping a man from Seattle to Charleston was significantly less than shipping a trio of firearms to the Northwest.”
Timon considered the glass before him. He twisted it, as though trying to wrench a hole through the table. “What does the bishop make of all this?”
Clarligne smiled. “The bishop is quite grateful for the process,” he said. “And he’ll be even more satisfied when it’s been finished.” He completed his vodka and bid Timon good night.
Timon sat there for a time, eyeing the remainder of his bourbon and pondering a second drink. When he stood, his thoughts on an abbreviated dinner, he realized he understood the nature of the arrangement now, and wanted nothing more than to be finished in Charleston. Nerves brought salt moisture bundling on his brow; Timon grabbed at a napkin from the bar for blotting as he made his exit.
He found a bar to settle into, brick-walled and anonymous. He had a beer, then had a second. He did not seek dancing, nor did he wander north or south in search of something more kinetic, the impact of bodies on bodies and its jarring absolution. After his third beer in as many hours, he returned to his hotel and stood in the gray scale room. He noticed a flashing light on the telephone. He dialed in, wondering which camp the message had come from. Fewer than ten knew of his presence here, after all.
There had been a brief time in Seattle when he had had a proper social circle. Through a college friend or two, he had briefly been a friend to some who lived there. Had established a calm in which he could dwell. Groups of four or five, afternoon drinks or brunches on a rainy weekend morning. Bars at which he was a subdued regular. The occasional house party, a time when he could appreciate music as music, not simply as trigger or incentive. A time, he thought, when his work would take him out of Seattle for a week and there would be people waiting to greet him upon his return. Once or twice, he’d even sent postcards—a Santa Fé trip he recalled with perfect clarity, and a shorter one to Halifax.
Even now, he could not precisely demarcate the point at which he became solitary, though he could recognize that there had been a general bleeding away of those around him. There had been a cooling—he did remember that, and it squatted like an imp in his memories, a fierce border between states. A point after which calls were no longer returned, a region of awkward pleasantries and pleasantries gone blurred from alcohol and fatigue. It had not, he had come to realize, coincided with the end of his relationship with Dana Guterson—a breakup that, while not entirely amicable, was also not horrific, a case study that peers might cite when ending their own relationships to say, “Well, at least it never got that bad.” But the breakup had accelerated things, sped up certain processes toward inevitability.
Seattle felt empty. A return to it from Charleston seemed as arbitrary to him as a return to Princeton or New York or his college haunts. There were visitations to his onetime bars, but he recognized neither patrons nor tenders. There were periodic nights when, hungry and wandering, he found himself striding down previously familiar sidewalks, looking across the street at buildings that had once held meaning for him. Jonesing his own history for a different city, an improbable one where he might be welcomed home again.
The message played. His father. A quiet inquiry as to how his work was proceeding. Nothing significant: quiet, awkward pleasantries—the reduced shape of most of their exchanges in recent years. Timon was unsure of whether it even warranted a response. The dispatch, the relay, the inevitable tithe, and the return home. A guaranteed routine, an enclosure. City’s darkness around him, Timon wondered if he could even function outside the company’s sphere, and pondered, in alternating arguments, a rambling life and a return to the fold.
14
There was a wood block compass that Marianne had carried with her since her time in Texas. Two days before finishing most of the work on the introductory map, she had purchased a small canister of light gray paint on her way home from work. She immersed the surface of the wood in this paint, then withdrew it and let the excess fall away. When paint was taut over surface, she brought it above the smaller map—a collage, layers of years’ worth of maps, contemporary and historical, certain paths gouged out and altered, newspaper photos xeroxed and colored in by hand—and placed it, pushing down with an even pressure. Her seal, she thought, and pulled the wood block away, leaving the navigation on her ersatz chart forever set.
It was ten-fifteen and she felt a craving for air. Leaving the piece stabilized, she walked down the steps to the street below. It was a Thursday night, and quiet. From another street, she could hear cars in transit, ghost drives propelling themselves from block to block, fading before she could consider them in full.
There were things she considered saying. It was a late enough hour that friends who might be reasonable recipients of those words would be turning in for the night, would not welcome a transmission from her apartment to theirs. An inefficiency, a collapse. More lost words, to be dispersed into air or—if the fit was correct—subsumed into her larger atlas. But words carved or typed onto a stable surface would not restore this night’s hollowness; that was a deferred fix, an installment-plan cure for solitude, patchwork and unsteady on its feet.
In the end, she w
ent to a bar and sat alone, hoping to avoid awkward conversation and running two, three, four versions of how that might go in her head. The rye she drank went down quickly, and she did not order a second. Aside from the usual pleasantries with the bartender—not someone she knew—she spoke a total of five words in her half hour there. From there, home, words unsaid to an undetermined partner still hanging, precariously, in mid-air.
Walking toward the morning’s meeting with Jonathan Clarligne, it struck Timon that he had not called his father back. The air around him sputtered rain like saliva born from an agitator’s spiel. He ducked his head, no umbrella in hand, and again checked the address scrawled in smudged pencil on hotel stationary. His client had promised clarification: three shotguns there to verify. Three possibilities; one might be correct, or none of them would be the end of this particular search.
He could leave Charleston that night, he realized. Rebook his flight or take a slow train home. Banter and barter in dining cars and sleeping cars, attempt to reconnect with the world, detach himself from observation, usher himself slowly toward something that might, at some future point, become a home.
As he walked, Timon thought about how he might reconcile himself with greater Seattle. There were, he knew, a few of his old friends with whom he might possibly reconnect. True, there was alienation there: a wall of static and silence, of correspondence not responded to and messages left unreturned. He thought about clear nights, wandering the city sober and only slightly less than sober, scratching a nostalgic itch, briefly hoping for a space to be as it was, for a chance meeting to be replayed in the way it had been in his early days living there. The replays never came, and Timon returned home to curse his own impulses or to a bar to submerge them, to keep them stifled below a certain level. To leave his blinders on, to blunt the aches and stings brought by his own history.
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