Timon woke at five-thirty on the morning of his meeting with Jonathan Clarligne. They were to receive cocktails at a bar near Seattle Center that evening. Timon knew of the place, and had set foot inside once or twice a year or two ago, during the time when his last relationship of any immediacy had been in its dying spasms. The couple had stepped into the bar and seated themselves and attempted diplomacy, as though Old Fashioneds and specialty bitters might serve as tonic for the fracture that bore down on them.
Timon took time to recollect all of this the night before, an hour or so before allowing sleep to take him. Had he recalled the bar’s name before then, he might have suggested a different meeting place to Jonathan Clarligne, but by now it was too late; by now he had no choice but to attire himself in the garb of a more sophisticated man, to steady his hands and allow himself the ability to assume something resembling luxury.
Five-thirty, though. Eyes opened to a dark sky, and that moment of panic, of irrational fear of an eighteen-hour sleep. And the attempts to return to that state, alarms arrayed ’round his bed to wake him at a more sensible hour, one not shared with captains of industry and salarymen on East Coast time. He lay there, his eyes unwilling to close, still staring at the cold blank sky. There was a cursory review before the meeting, Timon pondered, but that could be accomplished anywhere papers could be set before him and a few notes jotted on a pad. The true work would be invoked at the meeting and begin after the meeting, once Jonathan Clarligne had offered up his documents and his images and bade him commence. And so Timon decided to stand and shower and then make the drive down the interstate to Olympia for breakfast.
The morning birthed foggy: Timon at a quarter past six, southbound on Interstate 5. He went for narcoleptic music in the car, chords like driftwood colliding with the shore. Six forty-five and he was free from Seattle’s well. He felt the road open itself to greet him, the fog still present with coal-gray clouds above. Old mixtapes and demos from bands that had practiced around the block from his former office rested in the center compartment, and after a while he thumbed through them, his hands coming to rest on a familiar one, atmospheres with violin cutting through them, seemingly endless looping melodies. It fit the weather, he thought. Good music for jarring connections free, to let them drift into air. He drank the last of the coffee cupped beside the gearshift and continued south.
By seven-thirty, he had parked and was walking anonymous in Olympia. Timon surveyed his curved reflection in car windows: the neutral jacket, the neutral hair. He thought, that right there is a man who looks restrained. He moved on, the windows in which he watched himself gradually moving from automotive curvature to storefront translucent sheets, slipping down into pavement only to be met by metal restraints. Around him there was movement on the streets: students awake before early classes, bodies a few years older moving down sidewalks, running errands or breaking for coffee before the day’s work began. Neither operated in a mode that matched Timon’s own: he felt formally nondescript, professionally median. The corners became more familiar, the sounds from passing cars easing him into a tempo he understood. Around another corner was a diner at which he could pass the time, could ready the words and the offers necessary when dealing with Jonathan Clarligne.
As he walked through the diner’s door, recognition blindsided Timon like a hunter’s club: the same relationship that had clued him in to the cocktail bar at which he would find himself later that night had also been his first reason for coming here. Second broadcasts of disquieting thoughts struck him again; notably, that half of his knowledge of the state had come from her. That even now as he went about his business, his business and his family’s business, he was in some way tracking in grooves that had long since worn down. It seemed to him, as he was ushered to his seat and a mug of coffee set before him, that it was strange that their paths had rarely overlapped since the break. Still the occasional glances at crowded rooms, still the sporadic events for which their tastes had overlap. Their corridors dwelt mainly in parallel; for Timon, that was almost adequate.
She had hated the tithe as well, Timon remembered as he paged through the menu, as he zeroed in on the morning’s meal. She had hated his ties to the family firm, had urged him to quit it, had raised countermeasures and offered up scenarios and solutions in order to extricate him from that life. Their time together seemed to him now to have been an arrangement of paradoxes: the work that had allowed him entry to Seattle was the same work that had led to the unraveling of the sole occasion he had for intimacy in that city. His own rushes and need for strange and infuriated contact were not the source of horror to her that it was for others, but were rather the wellspring of a fascination and an attraction and, perhaps, of inspiration. He ate and regarded his papers. At one point his gaze lifted and he looked toward the windows. Outside, the cloud cover had not departed, and now their low diffuse sprawl seemed to promise rain. In the glass, Timon found his reflection’s eyes and met them. He looked at himself: a man hunched over a plate, nondescript and of little obvious purpose. And after a while, he returned to the information before him, letting it drift into his eyes and waiting for connections to form.
Marianne arrived home after her meeting with Clarligne to find her data connection temporarily fractured, her ability to delve for information from home hobbled. With that truncation came a sort of frustration: she needed to see Dana’s art. To have asked about it when discussing business with Clarligne, she knew, would have been improper. Dana had sat and watched the meeting, as though she had acted as a particularly creative bodyguard: the sort who would effortlessly fell a threat to one’s person, then sculpt their own rendition of the intended attack.
Dana and Clarligne had possessed the sort of ambiguous intimacy that caused Marianne endless frustration. It was never readily apparent to her, those who embodied this condition: half the time she would learn of their status as lovers and feel confident in her assumptions, a lasting teenage pride in that quality of recognition. But there were also the times when she had been wrong: when she had casually said to mutual friends, “They’re together, right?” and received a bewildered look, as though she had raised suggestions of incest or something less conceivable, of a relationship beyond the mind’s ability to process.
And so she woke early that morning to a streaked city. She clad herself in a jacket and checked that her windows were closed and began the trek toward work. The trees she passed were bent low like supplicants and mourners. She was the third to arrive at the office that day, behind the partner who thought it appropriate to live on Eastern Standard Time, and the new guy, all sharp sideburns and Western shirts, early enough in his tenure that he was still eager to please. Marianne keyed in Dana’s name and began her search.
Dana’s full name was shared with the owner of a pet supply store in Nebraska, a British swimmer, a professor at a small Baptist college. Marianne followed all of them, as each retained just enough plausibility to warrant the time. After ten minutes, her suspicions were confirmed: the store owner was seemingly in her sixties; the swimmer, sixteen; and the professor had in fact given a lecture the previous night on a campus two thousand miles away.
Another twenty minutes passed before Marianne found anything that seemed likely. Some photographs on a hand-coded page collecting pictures of murals were credited to Dana Guterson. While Marianne had never been a precise scholar of artistic movements or periods, these were clearly the work of the same artist whose mural she had encountered on the road to Anacortes. There was nothing else featuring the drunkard, however; his face or contortions marred no other pictured work. As she cycled though Dana’s work, Marianne found the drunkard to be increasingly irrelevant; instead, she studied the evolution of a style, the way in which lines were formed and connected, the layering of Krylon atop a subtly melting coat of oil. This is what beckoned her in; this is what prompted languorous stares long after she realized that work’s demands hovered just to her side.