At four that afternoon she affixed a piece to it—a line of typewritten text on vellum, found somewhere along the way, in Louisville or Ann Arbor, and sliced down into components. She buried it halfway behind a sliver of something opaque, its letters sitting there like something halfway dreamt, like a name darted down a path and out of reach. She would let it dry, she thought, and then see what should come next.
When Marianne touched the surface thirty minutes later, it was solid like a narrow river deep in winter. The sun’s light still arched through the windows, its source still risen but withdrawing toward the horizon. The day’s remainder seemed elusive to her now, something to gather before street and sky settled into dusk. In that clear and mortal light, she stood before the atlas and began to understand that it was complete.
It took most of another hour before she was convinced. The placement of it throughout the room, in different shadows and different light. The consideration of it from yards away and via intimate stares. She watched it and watched its elements position themselves: almost a narrative, something it had to tell. At five-fifteen she telephoned Iris and they spoke about it briefly. There was talk of drinks later that night or on Sunday, after Iris and Esteban had finished their night’s work, or their advance work for the weekend.
By five forty-five Marianne was at the opposite end of the apartment, a wine glass in hand, looking across at her work as one might consider an old paramour encountered on neutral ground. She felt a lightness throughout her body, and as she drank and felt the wine impart its own sway she wondered whether this drink was there to ground her. A first for everything, she thought.
Marianne considered, then, her longtime vow to herself about transit, about relocation once this work had been transmitted into the world. She considered other cities, other places to be, other selves yet to be revealed.
She considered the night’s conversation, and what to tell Iris and Esteban; a process, she understood, far more vexing than the delicate delivery of the atlas. As sunset claimed Seattle, she called words home toward her, unsure of which might arrive.
16
There were trains: Charleston to New Orleans, New Orleans to Los Angeles. Alone in a cabin for the duration, the ticket charged to the company. If he made it back to Seattle before the inevitable dismissal, Timon told himself, he would expense it all to the Clarligne account.
One night spent in Los Angeles, Timon crouched in a sedate hotel. Still no calls from an infuriated father or a disappointed mother press-ganged toward intervention. He stalked the corridors of his lodging waiting for doors to be broken down, for angry shouts or denunciations to rattle through telephone wires. This was not his first visit to the city in question. He had haunts here; he had places he could go, two clubs to his liking and a bar whose locals he envied. He ventured out only to purchase a satchel for the books he had carried since New York, and to add a few to their number. This time, none were relevant to the business; these were for his own interests and his own distraction.
From Union Station he boarded a northbound train. Sixteen hours until Seattle, they told him. Most of what he had carried had been checked. In the bag with him were five books, a change of clothing, and a handful of vintage postcards. He stared out the window until he slept, the nerves and his gut still transmitting evidence of a hunt, of a quarry, of the anticipation of capture.
By the time he reached Seattle, some of that satisfaction in his own impending breakage had dissipated. Still no word from his father, an uncanny lack that had begun to unsettle him. A cab from the station took him home; he acknowledged one neighbor with a wave and a smile and received a wave and a smile in return. He came in to the apartment and saw messages, and grinned: finally, the trap had opened and he might fall. All of the recordings came from local sources, however: two old acquaintances suggesting separate gatherings for purposes of catching up. One call from his sister, her usual irregular communication. Three sales calls from businesses he did not know. No recorded talk of the business; no messages from his father about inconsistencies or reputation, no barely contained contempt or—this was, he realized it, even worse—panic, panic that Timon’s actions had ruined the business’s reputation, would dash the family out of comfort and into sordid destitution.
No calls from Clarligne, from any Clarlignes, about inconsistencies or inadequacies. No electronic transmissions or missives. A recuperative silence drew closely around Timon as he resumed his daily life in Seattle with some small restlessness.
A week later, Timon heard from his father. A job well done, his father told Timon. The obligatory inquiries were made about the tithe, with Timon’s replies as perfunctory as ever. More work was directed to Timon now: boxes shipped by air and the occasional project that would lure him to another city, conveyed by plane, his manner and mode quiet.
And Timon walked sedately through Seattle. He hoped to reflect a sort of temperance, a denial of anything that might leave him slurring down the sidewalk or stumbling across lawns and into impassable stretches of landscape. He considered reconnection with the old friends who had called him, but left their numbers taped to his computer, always in his sight but perpetually stranded in that realm where their existence was undeniable yet lacked any practical function.
17
Timon flies back into Seattle from St. Paul on a Thursday night. The family has been hired to look into another clutch of photographs, and so he spends three days in a manor house eyeing egg-stained and blanched black-and-white portraits and lining them up with old licenses, academic records, and a few members of the client’s immediate family. Are these my ancestors? he is asked, and he stares from face to face and from face to face and sleeps and wakes and walks the grounds and laughs when he considers the history of phrenology. At the end of the three days he has an answer for his client, has explanations of gaps in the family and theories of issue, and he shakes a few hands before stepping into the car that will carry him to the airport.
In Seattle that Thursday night he sleeps.
On Friday he’s awake earlier than he’d like. He thinks about the Olympia breakfast drive, considers it, then sets out on foot for somewhere local. His next few days are barren, the rest of his family away, the business somehow silent. An old restlessness wells up in him, and he finds a local paper to look through its listings.
There’s a new space opening tonight, he reads, a sort of storefront museum. It seems a solid choice, a virtuous one: an experience in his newfound mode, not his old Seattle of rising acid and brutal collisions. And so he spends the afternoon wandering, trying to find new corners and lost harbors to explore. And in the evening, he returns to his apartment and dresses himself in attire that seems to him suitable for the night’s encounter. He looks calm, sedate, the prisoner given way to paragon.
A twenty-minute walk gets him there. Immediately, he is taken with the space: decades-old architecture pared down to its most minimal elements, the museum half art and half geography. At one table in the back, they’re serving beer from a keg for donations and at another beside it, wine and whiskey can be procured for the same. Timon slips a ten into the jar and asks for a beer and receives it. Music comes from speakers bolted to a bar in the ceiling. Something quiet, he thinks: FCS North or 764-HERO. Something with restraint.
He likes this place, and he’s already thinking of coming here again, of bringing visiting members of the family or perhaps dates, of making it a haven. He sees the crowd around him, a mass sectioning off into clouds. Some faces look familiar, and he wonders who he might have encountered, and under what circumstances. He wonders if one of his old compatriots might surface here, if the birth of this space might serve to recharge an old camaraderie. The evening is early yet, Timon tells himself.
Another few drinks of his beer leads him to look toward the walls, to summarize the work that lines them. Slowly, one piece, a larger work than most of the rest, begins to draw him closer, his feet stepping
toward a corner before he’s even aware.
No particular attention has been lavished on this piece; aside from a tapestry on a different wall, it is of a scale several times that of those around it, but it seems dulcet; it seems, Timon considers, uniquely qualified to be here.
Timon is now stepping around conversational groups to draw closer to it. He sees it coming into focus as he walks and already he’s beginning to think, beginning to drift and sort out its meaning. As he draws even closer he notes that he’s lost his drink along the way. Whether dropped in a bin or lost to the floor, he knows not, and he dares not look back now that he has reached his anchor.
He stands before it; he sees the atlas, and his eyes jot away from it for just a moment to see the artist’s name. It seems to him that it’s halfway familiar, that he’s heard it before, but before he can think any more, before he can place that name his head turns back to face the work again. It’s as though something—hands, immeasurably strong hands adjusting him with the greatest of care, hands that could crush or rupture him without any stress—is pulling him, forcing him to take the image in, to take in the entirety of it. His eyes are on the atlas, and they will not look away.
It is conjoined images and layers and roadmaps and artifacts. It is a communication, a signal, a totem, and a web of objects and references and prompts. He knows all of these things, has seen them before. He is delving in, taking apart each, watching as the atlas yields its own language, a language that he might someday learn to speak if only he could retain focus. His attention drifts from piece to piece and from section to section, each of them a feast for him, each of them is an acrostic waiting to be read. Each piece, each moment, its own world. Timon sees it, the all-encompassing now.
Timon stands before the atlas in the room. It grows before him, its references and intersections looming, and he knows it will surround him and engulf him and he will dwell in it, and it in him. A Halo Benders song begins to jar through the speakers, a keening rhythm and a kinetic call toward motion. Marianne is three weeks gone from Seattle now; as he stands with storefront rigidity, Timon will not be moved.
Acknowledgments
Immense thanks are due to Mairead Case, Scott Cheshire, and Michele Filgate for reading early versions of this novel and providing helpful notes and comments. Thanks are also due to Jason Diamond for publishing a version of the first chapter on Vol. 1 Brooklyn (under the title “Revolution Come and Gone,” which is absolutely a reference to an early-nineties Sub Pop record label compilation) several years ago.
Many friends of mine who reside, or formerly resided, in the Pacific Northwest helped shape this novel. Molly Templeton introduced me to the coffee shops in Eugene, Oregon where I wrote a lot of the initial section of Reel. A number of the Seattle locations in the novel were shaped by visits to parts of the city that a number of friends introduced me to, including Rocky and April Votolato, Sarah Moody, Joan LeMay, Éilish Cullen, Bekah Zietz, and Adam Voith. Thanks to all; without you, this novel would literally not exist in its current form.
Thanks to Tyson Cornell, Julia Callahan, and Alice Marsh-Elmer at Rare Bird for all of the work they’ve done, and for taking a chance on this novel. Thanks as well to Steve Shodin, Scott Shields, Paul Rome, Al and Angela Ming, Tom and Barbara Carroll, Theo Travers, Daphne Carr, and Michael J. Seidlinger.
The third part of this novel takes its name from an excellent collaborative album by Rachel’s and Matmos, released by Quarterstick Records in the year 2000.
Reel Page 11