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.