Timon had expected a driver to meet him when he stepped off the train into a humid Charleston night. Instead, Jonathan Clarligne stood outside the low-slung station, an impeccable figure, miraculously free of palpable sweat. Timon paused a body’s length from Clarligne as Clarligne looked him over—a steady procession from shoes to face. “Your train’s late,” Clarligne said.
“Not my fault,” said Timon.
“No,” said Clarligne, and beckoned him toward the car. After the luggage had been placed inside and the two men had taken their seats, he continued. “We’ve got you in a hotel near the old town. I don’t expect you’ll need a car for the trip. Everything’s walkable.” He cycled his fingers down the steering wheel. “Should be just like home.”
Headlights were subsumed within a humid haze as they drove. Timon wanted a meal and he wanted to see Clarligne’s pictures again: the shotgun, the preacher; wanted to sift through to see patterns beneath the surface. He craved that moment of connection the way epicures crave new tastes, the way lovers starve for a certain touch. Clarligne wore a light blazer over a silk shirt that looked untouched by the air’s moisture or the body’s means of cooling. Timon looked over at him and felt rumpled, unformed; his lack of sleep blindsided him and summoned him toward rest.
“There’s people here you should meet,” Clarligne said. “There’s a small restaurant at your hotel. I’ve arranged something.”
“I appreciate it, but—”
“You’re on our clock now, Timon. Plenty of time on the train to sleep, if you’d needed it then. This will take an hour, at most. Should you need stimulants, we have stimulants.”
“Coffee sounds good.” It was a compromise, Timon thought, that he could live with.
“I’m not talking about coffee.” The look that came into Clarligne’s eyes at that moment reminded Timon of his client’s youth. It was a look that his father had warned him about. The look of a life without consequence, his father had said. When you see that look, that’s your cue to decide whether or not you want to walk.
Timon coughed. “We’ll see,” he said. “When we get to the hotel.”
Dinner was caterer’s generic: carrots and broccoli cooked with a slight tinge of butter and little else, chicken roasted in a way that bled from it all notable qualities, and a dollop of onions caramelized at an echelon leagues above the course’s other components. A line-cook savant back there, Timon thought. He had hoped that the attendees at this dinner would be relevant to the process he planned to undertake while here. Instead, they were Clarligne’s fellow scions: gleaming with unknown pleasures and flush with loose money. He doled out business cards at Jonathan Clarligne’s request, a dispensary for theoretical expertise. He stifled yawns with the help of whiskey’s sharpness and pungent shivers.
Clarligne bid him farewell just after eleven. Clarligne and his peers had designs on a nightclub downtown, were traveling there en masse. An invitation was extended to Timon, and that invitation was declined. Instead, Timon waited until his client was out of sight and crossed to the front desk. He asked about alt-weeklies and requested a neighborhood map. If he was to be here for a week or more, ensconced in a hotel friendly to a pedestrian traversal of the city, the least he could do would be to seek some localized oblivion.
Timon’s hotel room seemed constructed for neutrality: the walls an off-white color, the furniture representative of no specific period. He set his suitcase and his traveling bag on the edge of the bed and began a thudding transfer of clothing from both into the dresser before him. On the walls, a pair of pastel landscapes framed in gold leaf punctuated a view of nothing in particular. The paintings’ view was of a world gone blurred, a vista taken in by an observer lacking corrective lenses. This was how the room seemed to Timon—not by virtue of drink or anything similar, but via simple fatigue. When he had finished with his clothing, Timon arranged reference works and files around the space. He found himself standing stock-still then stumbling forward, his movements hazy, perception drifting. In his last conscious moments, he scrawled a note to himself laying out the following day’s objective: to see the site housing Clarligne’s photographs. From there, the project hung vaguely open, offering ambivalent promises.
The morning Marianne got good news from Iris and Esteban was the same morning Marianne got bad news from Archer. That morning was one punctuated by thunderclaps, hurried in their arrival as though behind schedule and rushing toward an engagement somewhere nearer Spokane.
The Clarligne project hadn’t gone through, Archer told her. He side-stepped into her office looking dismal, some blood on his cheek suggesting difficulties while shaving. “Foppish fuck doesn’t want us involved anymore,” Archer said. “Sounded almost apologetic when he talked to me.” He shrugged, dark circles below his eyes and an extra week’s worth of hair jutting out from his skull. Marianne considered his distress: personal or business? And if it was the latter, should his distress be hers as well?
Marianne suggested that he shut the door, but Archer shrugged. “I’ve got no hesitation about calling a man out for his foppishness,” he said, then slapped the doorframe. Archer winced, rubbing an apparently injured finger across his lower lip. “This is a piss-pot of a day,” he said.
Marianne idly tapped a knuckle on her desk’s taut surface. “Anything that should concern me?” she said. Archer shielded his eyes and shook his head.
“No,” he said. “Honestly, this is mostly a relief. Would’ve been extra work, would’ve stretched us more than I’d have liked.” His laugh was a death rattle, a summoning of some awful sound meant to reassure. He squinted one eye, then tilted his head like a dog in the presence of a teakettle. “If you hear from that guy again,” he said, “put him through to me. I think we need to have words. Still.” He cleared his throat, and continued. “Even now.”
Word reached her a few hours later that a grant had come through for Iris and Esteban’s pet project. Marianne left the office at seven that night and sat with them at an immaculate bar where drinks were forged at the countertop, ingredients mashed and swirled and decanted. Toasts were offered and plans made; schedules charted and contingencies recounted. It was in this discussion that Dana Guterson’s name was raised—specifically, by Esteban, as a patron or subject of the museum. “Funny,” said Marianne.
Why “funny” was the obvious question, and was posed as such.
“For a while, I was trying to get ahold of her. Some piece of art of hers; I was trying to figure out if someone in it was someone I’d seen around town.”
Esteban chuckled, leaned in with the confidence of an empty stomach and bourbon. “A paramour?”
“Fuck no,” she said, and the harshness of it grated even her own ears. “More like—someone to dissect. To try to figure out what makes a bad man bad.” She paused, fatigued, correct words elusive. “Not bad, necessarily. Inexplicable would be the best word to use.”
“I noticed you were using the past tense,” said Iris.
Marianne nodded. “You can only spend so much time on that kind of thing,” she said. “I have other things in mind now. I’d rather translate my own mind than look for piecemeal accounts of someone else’s. If I see the guy’s face around town, I see his face around town. Or not.”