Marianne and Elias drove north on the interstate. Elias’s car was old, its mileage signifying that it was at an age where abandonment would be a reasonable alternative to significant repairs; abandonment or a direct route to the scrap yard. Still, it hummed along, Elias reclining as he drove, the ceiling fabric above Marianne’s head beginning to bow. The sky was a sharp shade of blue, a color that seemed to flow into the evergreens flanking the highway rather than demarcating itself from them. Marianne looked ahead, her stare through the windshield mirroring that of Elias. As he drove, Elias’s right hand selected a cassette from the console’s cubbyhole. Split Seven Inches, read the label; Marianne saw it and saw Elias pry it open, withdraw the actual tape from within, and slide it into the stereo. The music began mid-song, a ramshackle acoustic guitar and an untrained voice striving for a higher register.
“Hope you don’t mind,” Elias said.
“No, it’s fine,” said Marianne.
The highway ushered them north past Mukilteo and Issaquah toward the night’s destination. The cassette moved from grim introspection to long distorted chords and agitprop vocals. From the corner of her eye, Marianne saw Elias’s thumb occasionally emulate a rhythm on the steering wheel’s edge. Her mouth allowed itself the suggestion of a smile. The sun was at its apex now. “We’ll sweat off autumn yet,” said Elias. Marianne nodded.
Their destination was an hour or so north. Marianne wondered whether the mountains would look the same from there. The back of the car held gear: a sizable tent, Elias’s sleeping bag, and an older one of Marianne’s that dated back to her college days. That had earned her the sound of Elias’s clicking tongue. “Florida?” he had said. “Shit. That won’t serve you well up here. I’ve got some blankets and an air mattress. You should be okay.” There was a cooler: beer and a stray bottle of wine given to Marianne eight months earlier, some food that could be easily roasted. And a container of popcorn, which Elias implied had been added as a joke. “Just like when we were kids,” he had said. The gleam in his eye was unexpected. As they passed an exit, Marianne noticed that Elias’s glance had flickered in her direction, just for a moment, before returning to its devotion to the road before them.
There was silence for a long stretch of road, mile markers observing a quiet car, its inhabitants’ eyes forward, their heads occasionally nodding at a noteworthy site or simply in keeping with the rhythm of their passage. Inside the car, Elias’s cassette had come to an end and reversed and started again, its telltale first notes ringing out—except, as Marianne realized, they weren’t a demarcated opening to one song but were instead the fleeting coda to the one before it, notes played by a different band entirely.
Elias said, “I’m going to put something new in,” and Marianne told him that that would be fine. The tape he chose opened with long ambient clouds, sounds that seemed at odds with the blue and open sky above them. Marianne waited; she was sure she had heard this album before, and knew that if she waited long enough, in would come the drums, and a melody would be born.
Timon watched from the traincar window as it rattled through New Jersey, occasionally sliding past the local train system, the contrast of their motion exhausting him. First class remained empty save him. On the seat beside Timon, their configuration constantly shifting, were his books, his research materials, and his laptop. Though he had tripped through timezones and felt a disconnect from the hour at hand, Timon couldn’t sleep. He felt pressed against the outer edge of Eastern Standard Time, body sore as though he had traversed the country’s length on his own legs and, having arrived here, was now expected to rest.
He rubbed one cheekbone with the outer ridge of his thumb and felt nothing between bone and skin. He walked to the dining car for his third cup of coffee of the morning, and when he returned he set it before him and his mind began to wander.
When he was seventeen, the family had briefly attended religious services in a cathedral far from any landmarks he could recognize. He recalled a March afternoon in which he had traveled in a car separate from the rest of his family. He remembered a fervor and a lopsided tradition inside, a service which moved from voices near to breaking to a low and minimal chanting of certain select portions of the text. This was a Sunday; on Saturday, his father had brought him into the company’s offices in a building downtown. A humble place, he thought, looking on it with eyes different than those of his childhood, when he had been brought here for entertainment rather than prospecting. Then as now, he had looked upon the lines of the walls and their simple adornments and the prints hanging from them and processed. He walked the halls behind his father and his uncle Gilbert, whose presence in these offices at any hour was a given.
Timon surveyed the walls and skipped from image to image, wondering whether the series of images were meant to be an equation, whether the room represented a collage, a riddle for the amusement of the company and no others. Along one wall: maps torn from century-old atlases, grainy photographic prints of rain on cobblestones, and one framed Art Chantry print. He walked and was slowly ushered into the conversation in front of him. Even as he spoke, seeking to impress, most of his thoughts remained on the sequence, running it backward and forward: the meaning of the images as one entered the office and their meaning as one walked from Gilbert’s office back to the front door. He would consider this after leaving the office and on the drive back home, and in his own car and down academic hallways for the next few weeks, until a stray remark of his mother’s revealed to him that the photographs, the cobblestones gleaming with reflected streetlights, were from Gilbert’s camera; that Gilbert walked the city on some evenings, chasing the magic hour; that there was a full darkroom behind some door in the office suite. Gilbert’s passion, she said with a smile. And with that, Timon grudgingly surrendered his pursuit of meaning to the sequence. The other images were quantities he could know, but the notion that one of the family could also make art was foreign to him, the revelation of a new letter in a language he had considered familiar, and all of the possibilities that it held.
The polestars—his father, one uncle, and his great-aunt—sat opposite him at the New York office’s conference table. It felt unfair. A flash came to him suddenly: standing, younger, classmates advancing on him on the asphalt, knowing he was due a swing and impact and wondering, in those moments between shove and strike, whether they’d draw tears again.
Three from his family sat and looked at him. “This is what we’d like you to study,” he heard, and a list was passed to him: dot matrix Courier, shreds of edging straying past the perforation. He looked it over and the admissions process cascaded around him briefly. He looked it over and saw familiarity, concepts and movements that were already more than known to him.
His fingers brushed the surface of the paper, the words’ indentations a surprising source of texture. “I know most of this already,” he said.
This was greeted with nods. “The degree helps,” his great-aunt said. “In certain circles, our methodology, our name, will suffice. Others? Other clients want the right schools, the right names and phrases.”
His father cleared his throat and said, “It’s a kind of currency.” And his uncle said nothing, his gaze skittering from one of the others at the table to the next.
Timon understood his future here, as he looked down at the list. He knew what to say next, swallowed nothing. “Where does it start?” he said.
The next day he arrived at the cathedral in a car, separate from his father. He had been reading about lower frequencies and the way in which they might be brought to resonate throughout the body. It came up in a freeform curriculum he was pursuing, the evolution of his childhood drills. He would wake pre-dawn, take cold showers and coffee, and dwell within ninety minutes of immersion before a typical school day.
The stone building before him seemed ideally suited for resonance, for echoes and arch-echoes. He would search for it that day, in the harmonies sung and the cadences spoken and in their rhythms and call-and-response and clatter. Within the cathedral, he sought his father and grandfather and sat beside them in silence. He waited for a transformation to occur, or at least to begin. Barring that, Timon awaited illumination.
His drive home alone was filled with late-eighties punk rock, surges of guitars and compact rushed harmonies, wordless and buoyant. It brought him a greater sort of comfort. His ritual since becoming a driver ended at the banks of a river, sandwich in hand, watching over a landscape still foreign to him.
A bridge conveyed, the Delaware below, portraits evoking failed connections beside him. The morning still young, Timon rose and walked to the dining car for a fresh cup of coffee.