Marianne and Elias faced a locked door at the tattoo shop at one in the afternoon. The door’s sign listed an opening time thirty minutes earlier. They had passed a sandwich shop less than a mile the way they’d come, Elias saying, “We need to go there afterward. I’ll be famished,” and Marianne allowing herself one subtle cringe. Here they were, on time and eyeing the road’s lines for a figure bearing linework. The only number Elias had been given was for the shop’s own countertop phone, something they learned when they dialed it and—faintly at first, then with the clarity of recognition—audited its trill as it sounded from the other side of thin glass.
The parking lot sky was a welcoming gray—not the haze that gives way to a humid sun or the massed shapes that give way to cloudbursts, but something promising wind and languor. This was the sort of color you could gather round you and dwell in, even if only briefly. A transitory neutral shade, a traveler’s friend, made for silhouettes and portraiture.
Their drive from the campsite had been jocular, Marianne thought. No eager glances from Elias toward her, either in the car or as they’d sat at breakfast in a diner near Issaquah. Instead, she found herself talking about her project, about assemblage and mediation, about allowing two images or objects to interact, even if only for a moment, and to see whether they clashed or agreed, could become conjoined or would stand at odds. Elias listened, enraptured, only breaking gaze with her when idly surveying his text’s future home.
Two storefronts down from where they waited was a doughnut shop. There, caffeine and sugar, in varied forms, were purchased to aid in their observance. They stood beside Elias’s truck, Marianne in sunglasses. A car pulled up one stop away—not their quarry—and provided a surface for reflection. “We look like a band,” Elias said with a smile. The remark dwindled down and suddenly became a jab halfway through Marianne’s digestion. She wondered whether that was subconscious shorthand, whether Elias was in fact telling her that she looked aloof. In this scenario, Elias would be the drummer, she knew. In his mind, Elias would always the drummer: steady and half-obscured, the cast of his eyes forever excused.
Marianne took a bitter shot of coffee and took her turn at observance. Not a band, she thought. They looked like miscast actors, playing sullen teens in someone’s off-brand melodrama. Each of them in a role their junior by the better part of a decade. At that moment, she wanted a shower and a familiar view. She looked over at Elias and smiled. “How long do you think we should wait?” she said.
Timon’s train took him south, through Washington and down tree-lined tracks that defied a geographic placement. He felt separate from any maps now, displaced as though he had been taken surgically from a city’s surface and mounted below glass, a subject for scientific classification. On the train, eight hours down, he shivered. A hole in his stomach asserted itself, prompting still more shakes. It was an old friend come back after long absence, a hearty handshake and a wicked gleam in the eye. An unwelcome guest, this old fear, this nervous fit. This transient discomfort, cloaking Timon, not ill-fitting, not like shrouds fitted for an older body. Not a childish cloak at all.
Two-thirty, he thought. Two-thirty was fine for a drink while in transit. He walked to the bar car and purchased a beer and took it back to his seat. Sat and watched the books beside him. Opened one and sought photographs of a community, a right and proper scene. He saw kinetic images and arcs in the air, a photographer’s flash echoed in the downward motion of a guitar, its player here anonymous, face blurred, T-shirt unreadable. He saw tours in thumbnail, saw studio sessions and apartments and well-worn practice spaces. Timon closed the book and opened another, brushing up on areas of knowledge useful to the family business. It drifted into him and his knowledge of the sounds of motion bled out. Four hours to Charleston, he thought.
Elias drove toward Seattle, no wordplay inscribed on his arm. Marianne watched him. They had stood beside the car for five hours, waiting for the shop’s neon OPEN to become lit from within, hoping for the existence of a back entrance through which some artist might have slipped. Two hours into watching, a light rain had begun to fall, and they had taken shelter inside the car, occasionally making runs to a deli a few storefronts down for supplies: first water and then, after some debate, a pair of pre-fab sandwiches (Swiss cheese, lunchroom turkey) that left them unmoved. Eventually, Marianne had offered to run down to a nearby pay phone and call the number stenciled on the tattoo shop’s door in case someone might have slipped inside. The phone had rung and rung, with no machine or human voice providing an answer. Three such calls had she made before, by mutual consent, the decision was made to return home.
Elias had a sour look on his face, a stubbled variant on a child deprived of a favorite toy. On the interstate, after they’d passed a familiar exit, Marianne looked at him. Elias deserved a better weekend than this, she thought, even with her reservations about his choice of tattoo. She thought about salvage. “Dinner?” she said after a while. “I have things at home; I could call Esteban and Iris.”
He looked up, an eager light in his eyes. “Sure,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind, you know, showering first, but—that sounds wonderful.” Marianne saw him twitch slightly after the last word’s enthusiasm.
He dropped her off in front of her apartment in the late afternoon’s pale sunlight. Three hours later, he arrived again, washed and cleaned; his bones, no longer shrouded by stubble, leaning through his skin. Marianne was talking with Esteban and Iris when he arrived, their conversation, as always, about art and the mechanics of small business loans. It was a good dinner, the four of them splitting three bottles of red wine and making headway through a fourth, this one of port. Of them, the largest share by far was taken in by Elias, and he was also the first to depart, bidding farewell at ten-fifteen after asking Marianne whether he could pick his car up the following day.
Iris and Esteban stayed around for another hour before quietly bidding Marianne farewell. She made herself a cup of tea and sat in the apartment, the sounds of cars passing and a few hardy Sunday night drinkers drifting in slowly, as though the soundwaves they had birthed wanted to savor the night air for a while before reaching windows and drifting through.
Marianne stood and opened each window wider. She took two deep draughts of tea and twisted her head slowly.
At the deli near the tattoo shop, she had bought a road map of the state, had slipped it into her back pocket before rejoining Elias in the car. She hadn’t understood the impulse as she did it; rather, she had understood on some level that it represented a new project, a work separate from her primary cartography, but had not yet given the specifics a definite form. Now it came to her; she produced the map and laid it on the worn and spattered work-table she used for drafting. In one closet was a spare board, purchased for use as a shelf but decommissioned; this, too, she took and set on the table. On a ledge in the same closet was an adhesive; in a drawer, a knife for the cutting and a mat to layer atop the table.
In a Belltown apartment, Marianne began the work of excising the weekend’s route, her mind already rearranging arranging interstates and local highways, their destination presently a null set, the stakes anything but small.