THE FIRST TIME I SAW ACTUAL TYPE MADE OF WOOD AND LEAD, I fell in love. I picked up a plain, heavy Helvetica O and the weight of its curve, the purity of its shape, made me dreamy. I loved that letters were things you could hold in your hand. I went to the art department’s basement letterpress room every day that semester, earned my own set of keys, and stayed late into the night setting type, plucking the letters like tiny statues from their compartments and lining them up in order. I slid the leading under their feet and over their heads and built the city of letters that became words that became real things. Computer text needed only eyeballs and fingertips. With the letterpress, you walked alongside it, turned the crank with your arms and hands, your shoulders flexing; your whole body brought it to life. I could fall into it for hours, forsaking all other schoolwork. Then I came back from that Christmas in Nebraska, and I had to turn in my keys.
But a few of us soon discovered that a lot of old letterpresses were hanging around in corners of the Northwest, and most people didn’t think the hulking things were worth wanting or asking much money for. Lead ships. Dead stock. Dead ends, like us queers—and yet here we were, more of us than ever, multiplying by convergence and setting up shop in the business of reproduction. Obsolescence was our saving grace.
Four of us formed a small collective, scavenged buckets of heavy lead type, and went in on a space, cheap because it was mostly illegal, down in the industrial part of Southeast, close to the river. Bridges sloped overhead. Old train tracks cut through the asphalt, and cobblestones showed through the worn patches. We set up our print studio in a former warehouse with high windows, big jails of light that slid across the floor. Two Vandercook letterpresses and a few garage-saled tabletop presses and a screen-printing station. The smell of ink, thick paper, sweet oil on old steel.
We all wanted to make art—prints, broadsides, show posters, record sleeves, chapbook covers—and swiftly learned that art paid few bills. But weddings did. Future brides and grooms were the reliable few who found letterpress timeless instead of time-consuming.
I turned out invitations and save-the-dates in scores, each one customized and as special as the bride and groom themselves, yet pretty much exactly the same. If these people put a year and as much effort into art as they did into their own weddings, they could have made feature films and finished novels.
But I needed the money and was glad for the work.
The one I was working on today would be held in a renovated barn in an orchard, fixed up and rented out for urban people who loved the idea of the country. I could hear my mother: “Married in a barn? Where’s the reception, a feedlot?” But I could see it. In Nebraska I stepped into an octagonal barn once, empty and tall with light slanting in through high windows, and it was a kind of cathedral.
I had hand-drawn the barn for this invitation and had it digitally transferred to a plate, and while I was running proofs I imagined myself into my own tiny line drawing. I remembered the barns at my grandmother’s house where my siblings and I used to play. The big corrugated metal one that housed the John Deeres and the combine and echoed your voice; the old wooden one where cows once lived but later only an extended family of skeptical cats. A pang of homesickness hit me. It didn’t happen often but when it did it hit hard, dug deep. That smell of old decades. I even missed the ones I hadn’t been alive for.
When I got home I went looking for the photos.
But my Childhood Part I album was nowhere to be found in my archives. In fact, the entire box of photo albums was neither shelved nor in the stack of things I had yet to unpack. The absence of it swelled. The box contained my whole childhood, the part where my grandparents were still alive and my parents still loved me and we were a family of six. I didn’t want to look through it but I wanted to know I still had it. I pictured mice nibbling at the corners of the box.
“Fuck,” I said, and called Flynn at home. Ex-home.
“It’s in the attic,” Flynn confirmed. “I’ll be around until six.”
Then where? I didn’t ask.
The wisteria vines on the porch were shooting long green tendrils everywhere. “You should cut those back,” I said when Flynn opened the door.
She shrugged. “I know. Hello.”
“Hi.” It was strange to get so basic, no nicknames or babys. “Is anyone else here?”
“No.”
I lowered my eyes and walked inside.
The tiny house had absorbed my absence and regenerated disappointingly fine. A vintage lamp there, an armchair moved here, the gaps in the bookshelves filled, a couple of unfamiliar objects on the mantel. I tried not to look for the evidence of another aesthetic at work. The place still smelled potently the same, like home.
“Do you want some coffee?” Flynn said. “I brought home some of this new single-origin we just got in from Guatemala. Really good stuff.” Coffee was both science and religion to Flynn.
“I’m good. It’s almost five. I don’t want to be up all night.”
“I can bag some up for you to have in the morning.” What was with the charm? Guilt or reflex?
“It’s okay, Flynn. I just want the photos.”
I pulled down the attic trapdoor and unfolded the staircase. I paused halfway up, head and shoulders afloat in the dusty attic and the rest of me weighted below in the hallway. To my eyes, a floor; to my feet, a ceiling. The box was behind an unused ottoman toward the back. I crawled to it like a thief and extracted the last of my past from the house.
“Got it?” Flynn said, standing at the base of the steps. “That looks heavy.”
“It’s okay. I can handle it.” On the day I moved out, I had made Flynn leave the premises. There was only so much assistance I could take.
“I found this of yours too. It was in the dishwasher.” Flynn held out a mug that read ERRORS WILL BE MADE. OTHERS WILL BE BLAMED. I had taken it from a temp job at a financial office.
“You can keep it,” I said, sidling past her into the living room. “I hate passive voice.”
“Isn’t that the whole joke?”
“It’s not worth it.”
Flynn dropped the hand holding the mug to her side. I felt like a jerk.
“You should contribute something to this group show we’re putting together,” I suggested, conciliatory.
“Already on it. Kate told me about it.”
“Oh. Kate.” A light sting. I had known her first. “Good.” Please don’t put in any photos of Vivian, I thought, but I couldn’t bear to say it—as if verbalizing it would give her the idea. Flynn was The Photographer among us. It got her into shows and it got her into beds. By now, at age thirty, she had an impressive body of work on both counts. Flynn had photographed me in the woods, on the street, at the coast, in fields, in bed, close up, far off, in black and white, in color—so prolifically that her record of me felt permanent. I had been in her shows. I was a whole series. I was one in a series.
“I’ll let you know if I find anything else,” she said.
“No,” I said. Flynn looked quizzical. And the dreaded tears began to line my eyes. “I don’t think I can come back here. Not just for five minutes.”
“I want us to be friends,” Flynn said. “I really do.”
“I’m not clear on what that word means anymore.” I thought, If we were “friends” you would have sex with me. “Maybe Vivian can tell me. She seems to have a new definition.”
“Oh, Andy.” Flynn tilted her head, brown eyes warm. Her hair was damp from the shower, peroxided forelock falling into her eyes. She reached a platonic hand toward me, my arms wrapped around the box of photos. “We didn’t mean to—”
“Stop, I don’t want to hear any more we.” I shied away from the hand and wiped my teary eyes off on my own shoulder. “Sorry to be a baby. I should get going. I don’t want to keep you.” Flynn was dressed to go somewhere: jeans and boots and belt, a form-fitting T-shirt. Her chest looked muscular—no, flattened. I did a double take.
“Are you binding now?” I asked.
Flynn glanced down. “Uh, yeah. I’m trying it out.” She looked up at me, a nervous certainty in her eyes, not far from the look that first time she paused by my table at the coffee shop and asked if she could call me sometime.
“It suits you,” I said. It was true. Flynn was a beautiful boy—those big wrists, that saunter.
“It feels right.”
Maybe Flynn at thirty was still becoming, I realized. Maybe the Flynn I loved was on the way out. Or maybe the Flynn I loved hadn’t been around for some time now. It was easy to mistake proximity for closeness.