On the evening of his meeting with Jonathan Clarligne, Timon wanted nothing more than simple inebriation. His day had been spent inside, primarily at his desk, trying to avoid the temptations of the rest of his apartment, trying to defer his own impulses telling him to run from this project, to run from the Clarligne account and the business and all that it encompassed. He threw on a jacket over a rakishly cut shirt that Dana had urged him to buy, had told him he wore well. He eyed himself in the mirror and saw nothing more or less of a particular mode than the clothes he had worn earlier in the day. He looked in the mirror and saw a man in need of a pocket watch. The thought unsettled him.
He set out from his apartment on foot. The air outside seemed suited to a long walk, even an uphill one. He had not lived in this city long enough for every walk over a certain distance to not strike him as inherently angled upward. He felt a steady and consistent forty-five degrees off the sidewalks and roads he had come of age walking. He felt unsettled here, still. As he walked, as his body became weighed upon by forces at odd angles, he thought, People who grew up here don’t feel it this way. This disorientation is the toll they pull from us, the migrants, those who came here from elsewhere. I would not know this push-pull urging collapse had I remained in the east.
Still. Then, in motion. The ascent, a slight perspiration on his forehead the only indication of the length of his trek. The conveyance westward after a series of conversations with his father. Two bottles of red wine mostly gone and a night watching spring emerge on the Eastern Seaboard and a cough and the question: “What’s the furthest I can go from here and still work for the business?” And the answer, without hesitation: “Seattle.” Timon had rehearsed it for weeks, had researched cities and retrieved data, amassed a folly of glyphs and monuments and potential outcomes. And yet his words had come through him like a spontaneous conversion, with his father’s response measured, a close cousin to a prepared statement. He had given the matter some thought on the drive out, and then buried it below other concerns. And in recent weeks, it had come back to him, an unruly haunting that flooded his thoughts and bore witness to the tithe.
His ascent was nearly over. He was passing an art school now, and in a block he would be past it. He knew its name from idle conversations at parties and, briefly, from the time he had entertained hiring someone. A rental of office space, someone to sit at an adjoining desk; a companion and a compatriot—a notion with which he had been infatuated since his arrival in the city. Instead, the decision to reinforce the home office, to go it alone. The desk and the computer and the halfhearted view. Call it pragmatism: it brought with it its own frustrations, but Timon had learned long ago how to temper those.
The restaurant named by Jonathan Clarligne as their meeting grounds looked unfinished. The name CAMP REVIVAL was halfway etched above the door. As Timon walked inside, his attention was pinched by the sight of towering grain-filled prints hanging at regular intervals on the walls, four feet high and almost square in shape. In each of them, he could see the shapes of tents. In some they were in the foreground, a series spread across a grass field. In others they were a distant presence, a sea; in others that sea stood divided beside an ocean. The faces in the photographs were full of elation and gratitude; in some, Timon could see ecstasy.
In the restaurant, someone was approaching. Timon knew it was Clarligne before he registered Clarligne but it was the photographs which continued to occupy his attention, setting him to catalog and lend translation. Ocean Grove, he thought. Ocean Grove in 1938 came to him first; then he began to register details that solidified that. The contours of a car and the wear on the side of a building he had passed in his youth, in the days when his father’s tithe brought with it a pilgrimage. The clarity of the photographs allowed for certain luxuries: a handful of discernible banners, a poster hanging on a lamppost. He pocketed this information and forced it to become compressed, a form he could slide into his hand like a magician’s scarf. Timon extended his hand to Jonathan Clarligne. “Always a pleasure,” said Timon. After a few moments, he nodded.
“There’s a table in the back,” said Jonathan Clarligne. As they walked, Timon wished for blinders. His eyes wanted the images on the walls. Look at them for long enough, he thought, and he would recognize the film from the grain, could venture a guess as to the conditions under which they were taken—the sunniness of the day, the brightness of sun on sand. He watched Jonathan Clarligne walk and stared at the back of his neck, watched the fibers of his suit and the edge of the shirt that it covered. Timon had made it a point to learn as little as he could about clothing: his own instruction was regimented so as to reliably clad him in an understated mode. If it had been conceived or sewn in the last half-century, it represented a precious void to him, and the thought of it brought him to a state approaching intoxication.
Jonathan Clarligne brought him to a table, a minimal square pushed up from the floorboards by a pole. At Clarligne’s setting was a spherical glass of red wine, its consumption marked by red threads traced on the inner surface. The color brought Timon to grief. From the speakers came a Steve Reich composition, reprocessed and redistributed, volume monitored to prevent disorientation. Timon eased his chair back and twisted into it, and Jonathan Clarligne did the same. From a satchel by the floor, he withdrew a taut envelope and passed it across the table. “Charleston,” he said. “We found them in a building we owned, during renovations that were being made to it.” He swallowed nothing in particular, the motion bobbing his neck forward and the sigh that followed returning his poise. “Less renovation, I suppose, than a kind of demolition.”
Timon took up the envelope and opened it, sliding his finger under the seal, the contact leaving a small bloody nick beside his fingerprint’s whorl. Inside were a stack of photographs, some with black marker notes on the back, and papers, a lengthy numbered list paperclipped together. His unmarred fingers paged through them and, preparing for the review, he licked his cut and rubbed it idly on his napkin. “Do you mind?” he said to Jonathan Clarligne and, when the other man ushered his hands forward, began to spread the contents of the envelope on the table before him.
“I remember your father telling me you were fond of a well-aged bourbon,” Timon heard from across the table. Already he was vanishing into the photographs, transparent hands spreading them in triptychs on the table. Peripheral vision brought signs of a motion to him: Jonathan Clarligne in the last stages of a nod. He stared at the images, studied the composition of each in turn. Studied loose outlines of figures, fragments in the frame, and the textures, and the grain. There would be time enough for detail, for the savoring and supposition.
A sudden flatness struck Timon, gloss where none should be. “These are copies,” he said. “Not just prints.” He raised his head from its study, coughed, and spoke. “They have the look of the third generation to them.”
“The originals—they might not be the originals, but our originals—are in Charleston. We haven’t trusted the airlines with anything since the problem with the recorder last April.” Timon returned a shrug that conceded the point. Contemplation resumed, a standard left-to-right evaluation. The first of the three in the first row of two was, perhaps, the oldest. In it, a child stood. Instincts said Prohibition: clothing style and masonry and the look of the focus, the look of the eyes. The child was male, ten or eleven; he held a gun, pointed it toward something in the leftward distance. The child’s face was neutral.
The second photograph was of a wedding. As was the third, Timon gathered, and possibly the fifth. Late 1930s, lantern-lit, formal dress and many drinks already downed. Guests, he saw. None of them the couple at the event’s heart. A smiling man, his hand on one strand of lanterns, the other beckoning. The next photograph featured the same man, his arm around a woman of similar height, her hair long, probably red, her eyes meeting the lens and enriching it.
Fourth image: possibly a monochrome print of color film. A church wall, a body laying in state. Corpse hands, suit-clad, united in prayer in the image’s lower-left corner. Filling the upper-right corner, filling most of the photograph, was a stained-glass window, intricate in design. The window’s image: a man in a cloak offering an open hand to a bird in a tree, the tree bearing fruit, light shining through glass-flesh and pear-shape.
The fifth image was a wedding of roughly the same period as the previous two. A tree-stump of a man stood on a balcony, a cigarette in one hand, his necktie loosened. With his free hand, he was pulling back his suit jacket; with the smoking hand, he was indicating something on his shirt. Timon drew closer, as though proximity might somehow cause the film to grow sharper, as though it might summon the photographer’s ghost to declaim pertinent issuances. The shirt was torn, Timon concluded. The shirt fell on flesh unmarred, but the shirt was nonetheless cut. Twice, Timon decided.
The eyes Timon saw in the sixth photograph convinced him in moments that he was beholding the child from the first image. All other details fell away: he did not look to the background to date it or to styles of clothing or novels in hand or posters in shopwindows. This was the boy who had held a shotgun, now at least twenty years older, wearing robes and clerical collar, a determined look on his face, blonde hair forming a widow’s peak. Timon looked up at Jonathan Clarligne. “Same one,” he said. Then he arranged his fingers, one pointer above each of the two photographs in which the priest appeared. “This one,” he said. “Became this one.”
“That’s good to hear,” said Jonathan Clarligne. “But really, we’re more concerned about the shotgun.”
Timon looked ahead of him, locking Jonathan Clarligne in a quiet stare. He felt the part of a sprinter having arrived unexpectedly to a swim meet. He felt unexpected.
“This is the order in which we found them,” said Jonathan Clarligne. One hand reached out and then drew back in a truncated croupier’s wash. “And there’s a dealer we know, traffics in elder firearms. And he says he knows something, has seen this one before. And its worth is abundant.”
Timon felt formality enter him. “How do we compliment this arrangement?” he asked.
“Verification,” said Jonathan Clarligne. “There’s history in these photographs, and there’s definitely history in that shotgun.”
“Who’s the child?” asked Timon. “You know who he is.”
Jonathan Clarligne shrugged. “He’s a bishop now. My mother’s cousin. It’s family business, I suppose, but it always is.”
At home, Timon removed that which he was wearing and adopted a new look: monochromatic, flat, anonymous. He withdrew a bottle of vodka from his freezer and poured a shot and took it down. Its chill filled his sinuses with a feeling of hurtling toward some expanse, an underdressed downhill racer, his transit chaotic. Timon thumbed through local listings and zeroed in on something appropriate, something suitable for his mood, and headed there on foot. From outside the venue, he heard striking sounds from an organ and a guitar slowly escalating. He handed over eight dollars at the door and stepped inside and walked toward the bar. Six dollars transacted, and he had bourbon to nurse, complementing the sound that filled his ears. Timon turned his head toward the stage. There, the band was completing their set, their final song given the appropriate crescendos, the predicted buildup and sendoff, the anticipated payoff, the moment when everything is stripped raw, when players grew flayed and tempos crumbled. Timon always loved last songs.
And then the song was over and the soundman cued a Kentucky Pistol song for the entr’acte; one band began collecting their equipment as the next drew theirs close to the stage in preparation to unfold, to assemble, to prepare. Timon walked to the bar and ordered a fresh bourbon and drained it and smiled down the bar at a woman he didn’t know, who promptly turned away. He ordered a fresh bourbon, and twenty-five minutes later he was in the midst of it, alcohol running down his chin and numbing skin like anesthetic’s rub before a root canal.
He ran in circles, occasionally pushing against the bodies of others, his mind drawn again and again to a taller man, rail-thin, standing at the circle’s fringes, long sleeves for this weather, hands in his pockets. Timon considered disruption and, after a minute hesitation, proceeded, digging into this man a fraction harder than he had to the others. The thin man looked over and glared and pushed back and Timon smiled an unjust smile and proceeded, hoping he might draw this man out before it was time to refresh himself at the bar. Another pass completed, Timon reached out to shove again, and from behind him Timon heard words take shape, disparaging words funneled at him though their specific cadences were indistinct. He shoved again and the man shoved back and the crowd around them sensed the beginning of a confrontation. The band continued to play. Timon grasped at the thin man and pulled him in and the thin man held one palm up as he came, reaching out toward Timon’s throat, and so Timon paused and thought it best to unburden himself and moved to throw the thin man, to shift his weight and somehow release him. The thin man took his free hand and grasped Timon’s wrist and looked at him with an expression of fury, unadorned fury, and now the band had stopped and Timon heard a concerned voice over the speakers—the vocalist, he assumed—saying, “Is everything okay in there? We don’t want to see this at one of our shows,” and Timon thought that perhaps a spiral might work the best. Around him the crowd was drawing back and someone was moving toward both of them, samaritan or bouncer, and Timon went carefree and estimated weights and was certain he could outmaneuver the thin man and began to rotate, leaning his body to the right and hoping to end this fight before it began, to allow for tumbling and collisions and then to leave, to retreat toward another bar or to the vodka in his freezer. And then there was a blur in his peripheral vision, his left eye saw something, and then his skull was bursting, his sense of the space he was in became swollen, the room abruptly turning bubble-shaped and then contracting. His hand released its grasp on the thin man’s shirt and he fell backward and no one caught him and the music started up again. As he dropped, he saw two sets of arms holding the thin man back; he dropped and he hit the ground and things faded. His next memory was twenty minutes and three blocks away, stumbling into a brick wall, vomit already cast across shoes and ankles.