Reel

by Tobias Carroll

  Reconciliation. Or something more, some new community. The family had joked to him about his becoming a churchgoer; his sister Kiasma having met a boyfriend there, a boyfriend to whom she was now affianced. Timon had huffed about it at the time and since then; he did not expect to be invited to the wedding, and if he was he was likely to send his regrets, citing distance or inventing a conflicting event.

  As Timon walked, he noted one hand clench and expand. He momentarily envied the believers in his family for that window into a community that they had. It would not be his, he knew, could not be his, but it seemed to him to be a shortcut. Others had their art, their work, their children, their academic lives, their hobbies, their pursuits, their families, their craft. He had nothing but the dissection of time and his own ramblings, the fitful walks through neighborhoods in Seattle preceded by fitful walks through his college town and stabler walks, no less fraught with doubt, through the streets around his home. In those moments, he would bleed if only to summon a trickling balm.

  He checked the address on the sheet of hotel stationary with the oaken door before him and found a match. Set flesh to wrought-iron and knocked, and, soon after, was granted entry. The room into which he walked was white-walled and washed out, blanched stones inset into surfaces, lending it a patchwork austerity. Timon was directed down a hallway. He could hear coughing from the room he assumed to be his destination. As he walked, he saw more inset stones and wanted to run his fingers over them, to gouge knuckles into them and leave traces of himself there, a signpost, an offering, some sort of ritual to clear himself of these thoughts.

  The lamp-lit room into which Timon walked was stark: a simple desk, a few folding chairs, long-buried floorboards newly disinterred. Jonathan Clarligne sat in one of the chairs clearing his throat; before him on the table rested three firearms. At first, they looked identical, and Timon stepped closer to the table to begin immersing himself in their differences. Each was contained in a large and anonymous clear plastic bag.

  “I’d like histories,” Timon said. He was nodding, he realized. Nodding before he’d even finished speaking, looking down at Clarligne as though he had any right to condescend. Stop it, Timon told himself. He wanted, at that moment, to pull himself into Clarligne’s skull, to run a tap through the thoughts that traveled in his client’s head, to see how he might appear to others. Were his own conceived notions of a well-dressed man rooted in fact? Was he compelling, or merely competent? Timon stood there, collars and cufflinks jutting from jacket sleeves, no tie in this heat, a few tell-tale indicators of sweat beginning to blossom on his chest. Jonathan Clarligne cleared his throat, then raised one hand palm to the table.

  Jonathan Clarligne nodded methodically, his motion controlled like a dancer’s, and he reached into his jacket. For a moment Timon’s mind took him to cliche, envisioned Clarligne pulling out a minute revolver and shooting once, twice, leaving Timon’s body prone and sweating blood on the floor beside the table. Another abandoned room, this one housing a body, housing three sealed firearms. Not the perfect crime, Timon thought, but something close to it. A thesis project in a perfect-crime master class. And then something sensible rose in him and overwrote the accumulated paranoia. No more horrors for this morning, he told himself. Temper the arched curves and coils that wrenched up his back and neck. Breathe, he told himself.

  Clarligne handed a trio of index cards up to Timon. Each looked hand-typed, and Timon couldn’t resist the urge to hold each in turn up to the light, to savor the canyons made from typescript, to stare at each one and then gaze at the air a foot from his eyes and then, after most of a minute, to silently conclude that each had been issued from the same typewriter, to picture that typewriter in turn and offer a silent guess as to its vintage. Let Clarligne stare, he thought. This is mine.

  Three biographies of three weapons. Clarligne’s voice: “This is to avoid scandal. The bishop? He knows we’re working, but doesn’t know it’s come this far.” Three histories: where the guns had been made, and more generally, for how long they had been in circulation; notable histories, notable facts. Cheat-sheets meant to trigger associations in his mind. This was how Timon operated: not entirely in the manner of his father and grandfather. A subconscious business, his father had called it once during better days. “It’s a funny thing,” said Clarligne. “I’m still not sure why your father recommended you for this when half your family would have been closer.”

  Timon coughed, punctuation for his fugue. He had a feeling he knew why. “A kind of education, is my guess,” he said faintly. “My father’s big on lessons. Even now.” From the corner of one eye, he saw Clarligne subtly nod. Timon found himself walking to an isolated part of the room, then stopping, then walking back to the table. He felt wholly tactile, fingers running over fingers and craving something more, craving perception, becoming tools waiting at the ready. He looked at the first gun, picked it up, held its barrel close to his eyes, holding it close so that he might not see the plastic hovering around it. He looked over its surface for artifacts even as he knew that the possibility of artifacts was low, that there would be no crucial detail shouting out its story, that his solution would come from gouges and scuff marks, from smudges and lovingly smoothed patches, from indicators and quirks and quiet tells. He considered the gun and moved on to the next.

  For Marianne, the Seattle days were passing like summer storms. There was work during the days and atlas construction at night, and periodic visits to the space soon to be filled with Iris and Esteban’s small museum. Those were nights of sheet-rock and drywall and, later, the staining of wood, aided and concluded by red wine. Their hands the next day bore a rare and unique mottling, never repeated. At times it would be severe enough to occasion a comment at work or a bartender’s odd look.

  Elias was drifting, she heard from a mutual friend. Keeping to himself, amassing more tattoos, occasionally visible in the background at a rock show or wandering out of a bar just before last call. Marianne remembered something he had told her once: “I never like being the last one out,” he had said. “I always stay just sober enough to mind the time. Fifteen minutes before I know they’re going to say it, I down my last, I settle up, I walk outside. I always hate being the one to force something awkward.” It might simply have been Elias’s time to wander, she thought. That was the sort of creature their group was: shifts, a dance, roles to be filled, comfort offered and, sometimes, comfort given.

  Then there was the case of her own work: the map of the road trip complete, waiting to be shown to Iris. Iris’s request to her delivered with grave clarity, hands coming to rest on shoulder blades: “Show it to me. Not now, but soon.” Marianne had never before thought Iris capable of summoning urgency. It was like a newfound gift hidden behind a couch cushion, this discovery of facets of friends previously unknown. An egg hunt a season early, or an unnamed day newly joined to a religion’s long spell of feasts.

  But there was the question of her own work. And her determination that, upon completion of the atlas, her time in Seattle would be similarly concluded. Not truncated, she told herself. A natural endpoint, a time for progression, a kind of matriculation. Late one night, exhausted from a detailing of one corner of the atlas, she began to consider her options: a revisiting of former homes, or a cryptic road toward some new city, one still undiscovered. New bodies to join, new ensembles; some horizon of potential.

  And yet there was some of that here. One night she walked with Iris and Esteban to a Hint Hint show not far from where they lived. There was a dazzle in the air—Esteban’s words, not hers—and a collection of sounds coming from the stage that jolted her with an onrush of something new. The sound of a thorn-torn voice and something jagged behind it and a sort of music that held within it a silent space and rushed to fill that silent space, knowing it might never make it all the way through. That was what she took with her on the walk home, disengaging from Iris and Esteban and taking the last blocks on her own
. A slow separation from the sounds of still-shouting nightlife, of car horns and drunkards hoisting insults and praise in equal measure. The city held her close on that night, and she slowly let herself walk home to a quiet space. She drew the space close around her: one that might occupy this city or another, but would not cease to be hers wherever it might fall.

  Timon knew, in the end, that it was the second gun. He had held the photograph to all of them, had compared markings, had tried to imagine how it had been used in the years since then. At one point he turned toward Clarligne. “The bishop,” Timon said. “He’s left-handed?” A nod. The second one, then. The remaining path was clear: make the declaration, sign off on the forms, be handed a check, and dispense with that check.

  Timon pointed toward the first gun. “It’s that one,” he said.

  It was like toppling a domino and being unsure of where its effects would end. Something else would fall, he knew. He assumed his action would jettison him into space somewhere, would leave him adrift in some western void. As he said the words, he faltered for a moment, imagining Clarligne’s hand neatly dropping to snatch a collapsing monolith from the crumbling path and thus averting the inevitable wreckage. Timon wondered about trust in that split second.

  Clarligne took a form from the other side of the table. “I’ll need you to sign this. The affirmation,” he said.

  As Timon’s hand scratched out a viable signature on the forms, marked down two, then three, then four times—at least the second generation of Timon’s family making this mark for at least the second generation of Clarligne’s—he saw those dominoes falling, saw them hit the earth and shatter and saw the earth shatter below them. He should stop right now, he told himself. He should pause and confess his deception to Clarligne and await reprimand and discipline. But on some level he was aware that a momentary fracture wouldn’t be enough—that for this to work, he would need the damage to be fundamental, for his exile to be total. The family’s business woven into him; extraction calling for more than a simple loosening of bonds.

  With the fourth signature came a cold panic that ran through him and prompted an ecstatic shudder. Timon put palm to paper, turned it, pushed it back at Clarligne. Clarligne looked it over and nodded, accompanied by a sound that might have been a hum. He cleared his throat and then raised his neck to his associate, the sort of signal that, in another country, might have signaled Clarligne as willing sacrifice. Instead, his associate witnessed the form, adding signatures to compliment Timon’s, then inscribed the date.

  It had always been a ritual, Timon thought, even with his family’s faith; there had always been something lucid and pagan about it, the process becoming its own idol. His part in it was now ended. He watched the men opposite him mark down notes in small books and chart signs in the margins of the document he had just endorsed. He felt his breaths return to normal, felt the gridlock between his shoulders begin to pass.

  Clarligne’s eyes fell from his associate and drifted back to Timon. “I heard about you from Dana,” he said. “I heard about you from her long before I made the connection between our families.” The world around Timon retracted, cutting into ribs and skin. “That’s the funny thing. Still the strangest referral I’ve ever gotten.”

  And then, blind panic—the instinct to confess it all bleeding away, replaced with the simpler impulse: run. The instinct to grab the papers and shred them. The cold shivers came back, as did regret, as did desolation. They bore with them the concept of a new world, the sense of a new game. The sensation of sitting at a blackjack table unaware of how one doubles down, realizing the stakes are automatic, and represent all that you have before you. Timon knew that his body had brought an onrush of sweat beyond the season’s calling, that that sweat was certainly seeping through his shirt, that Clarligne—an adamant observer of humanity—couldn’t help but observe this strange collapse.

  A goodnight or a goodbye would have been fitting, and yet Timon felt himself go mechanical, falling back to some default setting, a sort of homing beacon, a b-side to the instincts that drunkenly carried him home safely on countless nights, that prevented him from tumbling down inclines or staggering through unsafe streets. The instincts that prevented failed pedestrian escapades on the interstate.

  And he saw himself fulfilling something, saw himself pantomiming the mannerisms of his father and grandfather, saw himself feeling no fear. He spoke the words like an actor onstage. In the corner of his right eye he could see his arm, his wrist, his hand, all angled on the desk and gesturing in a manner transplanted from a screwball comedy. A restraint, a command, an authority amidst portents and flailing anarchy.

  “I miss her,” Timon said. He shook his head, the character, feeling regret. “One of those moments, the old saying—not knowing how good you have it until it’s gone.” These words felt piped in, coming from somewhere, some better Timon’s voice married with his. “We all have our, ah, our bad moments, situations where our flaws come to the forefront. And all of that happened with us.” All of it true, he thought as he said it. These were not lies that he imparted to Clarligne in this oddly lit house in the middle of Charleston. “She was right to go when she did.” His arm still akimbo on the desk. Then, a rueful shake of the head. “Sometimes I’d see her around; I’d want to say something, to at least make things better, but I know that nothing I could say could make things better. So I kept my distance and drifted away.”

  Clarligne’s face was flat opposite his. “It’s probably for the best,” he said. “She might well have tried to poison you. Or at least blacken your eye, twice over.”

  Timon nodded: understanding, or at least the mimicry of it.

  Clarligne squinted one eye, taking in Timon. Timon felt posed, a marionette whose operator had become paralyzed. He wondered if Clarligne had seen through him, had narrowed in on his insincerity, his fashioned regret, his parodic sympathy. But then Clarligne was pushing back his chair, holding out his hand, expecting Timon to do the same.

  “Been a pleasure,” said Clarligne. “Hopefully again soon. This relationship between our families—I can see why it’s been a fruitful one.” Timon took his hand, tried to find the appropriate grip, the appropriate nod, appropriate gravity amidst the contours of his face. Clarligne said something to him about fees; Timon nodded and shook and withdrew his hand.

  That was it, then: the day’s business concluded, the purpose of the Charleston trip fulfilled. A time bomb set for his family’s reputation.

  When he arrived back at the hotel, he cancelled his return flight, instead booking his passage to Seattle via a long series of trains. He would be unreachable for as long as he could, would wait for the damage to arise, for the breakdowns to begin. He would suffer the recriminations and then go adrift in the Northwest. The prospect of a heightened alienation, a completion of the rift begun years before, brought him a satisfaction he had not felt in years.

  15

  And there Marianne stood, before the atlas, this work complete.

  It was an idle afternoon, not the time she would have expected, or even chosen, to finish the piece. A Saturday that treaded closely to a delving wrenching Friday, a late night at the office with barely time to eat, a frenetic pace, shouts across leagues of cubicles and desks and sometimes through barriers. A deadline marked there. Lots drawn for determination of unluck, the recipient—important in that it was not her—given petty cash and a box and told to ship overnight first thing in the morning, sent off from a chain of expediters near the office. That Friday: a proposal assembled and then made gargantuan, then checked for bloat and shorn of bloat; then a second proposal assembled. Eleven, twelve. Three clocks on three walls ticking into early Saturday. Caffeine nerves jarring them all from idleness. When their work had been done, half under desks half lit, a voice had come from one room suggesting a ceremonial drink, a trek out in search of a half-empty bar—there had to be one, that voice protested—where they could at least en
d the night drawn toward one another again; to have that final memory of the week be one of a group, not of isolated shouts and misjudged tones cast like test balloons and unraveling dispatches.

  There had been a rush through the office, then, as they had all paused to consider the suggestion. Calculations had been run, a dozen takes on local bars mapped: lunchtime and after-work crowds translated into the hour before last call. Practicality considered: a dozen separate visions of a group of a dozen crushed into a crowded bar, navigating through crowds gone to blurring and gesturing ecstatically and the dozen of them lost, proceeding toward an open space that wasn’t anywhere close to open. And so a dozen polite demurrals, then, and a dozen different paths home.

  Marianne had stopped at her local bar just in time to make last call. She ordered a whiskey, neat, and saw the night through to its end.

  The morning was clear before her. Up before eight, a jog up and down hills. Coffee and a roll for breakfast, the usual Saturday morning errands. Back at the apartment, she poured herself a glass of seltzer and threw in lemon bitters, a practice she’d inherited from an elusive roommate three cities ago.

  There was a corner of her apartment dedicated to the atlas now. A small corner, true, but the devotion was unmistakable. This was a work area, designated as such and cordoned off appropriately: the shelves nearby cleared, the furniture separated. Propped up around the hasty table on which the atlas sat were points of reference, signs of inspiration, tokens and icons for the focusing. There had been idle thoughts now and then as the corner declared that the corner demanded an explanation; save Iris and Esteban, its presence was inscrutable. The thought that bringing someone home and before it would derail some theoretical night, would change the conversation’s focus and alter moods in some substantial way, reducing that “we” back down to an idiosyncratic “I.”