Transitory

PRAISE

FOR

TRANSITORY

"Ingenious and mysterious, the stories of Tobias Carroll are spun with quiet loneliness and wild surprise. Transitory is that rare kind of collection where each story stands shining alone and, in the end, forms a beautifully melancholic whole. Tobias Carroll is an original and deeply exciting talent."

—Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel and Find Me

"The stories in Tobias Carroll’s Transitory sneak up on you. They wear their inventions lightly, casually exploring an impressive range of styles and effects. Filled with haunting mysteries, sly humor, and tender melancholy, these companionable tales promise to lodge themselves in your memory. You’ll want to revisit them again and again, right down to the liner notes."

—Jeff Jackson, author of Destroy All Monsters and Mira Corpora

This enthusiasm for language is in keeping with the other preoccupation of the collection, which is the lingering nature of art. The stories are full of remembered songs and VHS tapes, indie films and student paintings. People may be transitory, but through the years a work of art retains its emotional weight. Even art we no longer like.

—The Rumpus

"…art is the dark star around which its satellites of broken artists orbit. The men and women who make the weird films and stark soundtracks that populate Transitory are permitted some degree of detachment. Not so their audience of obsessives."

—San Diego City Beat

Transitory

_

by

Tobias Carroll

7.13 Books

Printed in the United States of America

Second Edition

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Selections of up to one page may be reproduced without permission. To reproduce more than one page of any one portion of this book, write to 7.13 Books at leland@713books.com.

Cover art by Olivia Croom

Edited by Leland Cheuk

Copyright ©2023 by Tobias Carroll

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN (paperback): 979-8-9877471-6-2

ISBN (eBook): 979-8-9877471-7-9

LCCN: 2023947412

TRANSITORY

Winter Montage, Hoboken Station | 1

The Wenceslas Men | 10

Last Screening of A Hoax Cantata | 16

Airport Hotel Ghost Tour | 21

A Record Called American Woodworking | 34

Yannick’s Swiss Army | 39

You IN REverse | 45

An Old Songwriter’s Trick | 48

Party Able Model | 67

Dulcimers Played, Strings Played | 70

Why I Was Not In New Jersey For Christmas in 1997 | 77

Western Bridges | 80

Twenty Minutes’ Road | 85

Spencer Hangs Over Newark | 104

Stanton Sees, Stands, Stares | 120

The Independence Shipping Company | 129

Some Things I Botched | 141

SELECTED AMBIENT FICTION

When We Came to City of the Stars | 147

Where We Left Ixian County | 154

Wonderclown | 158

LINER NOTES + CREDITS | 167

TRANSITORY

WINTER MONTAGE,

HOBOKEN STATION

Nathan’s talking to me about melancholy songs. He’s talking to me about this band from Seattle and how he’s getting obsessed with them. His kid brother’s girlfriend turned him on to their music when they’d gathered last Christmas, where long drives down crisp winter highways were the rule. I like it, mostly, he says. When I’ve got it on, it makes everything in my life seem like a montage. And suddenly I’m seeing it too: Those moments of revelation and realization at the end of television shows and sentimental movies, wordless or with words rendered redundant by a pop song’s rise and fall. The people in those movies and those television shows are about fifteen years younger than Nathan and me. They’ve got good skin and good hair and never have odd bits looking unkempt. They walk wide-eyed in daylight, never squinting because of brightness, eyes never tearing up from the sheer strength of the sun. They have epiphanies and those epiphanies coalesce into something that matters. Montages don’t belong to folks in their thirties sitting in a train station bar in Hoboken.

I rode the light rail in from Jersey City at two. Clumps of snow were falling in an unhinged slurry, and had been since the night before. I had some downtime; I was waiting for word back on two freelance projects, and those whose word I awaited had told me they had no desire to stagger through snowbanks and slushpiles. Which was good: It left me feeling less apprehensive about seeing Nathan. Suggested I could arrive early and have a first afternoon beer alone before I knew what awaited me.

Transit always reminds me of transit. The light rail that runs along the Hudson calls back every trip I’ve ever taken to the Twin Cities—if the cars used on each line aren’t the same make, they have to be siblings or kissing cousins or flat-out doppelgängers. Minneapolis makes me think of winter, makes me think of long walks through the same snowbanks that petrify my clients out here. I spent four years there, punctuated by repetition: Every six to eight weeks, I would take the light rail from riverside neighborhoods to the airport, would step out into the airport’s cavernous station, and would take flight. I almost always returned at night, and sitting at that station, half a dozen standing in random concentrations along the platform, might as well have been heraldry for that time in my life. An inexact isolation, punctuated by a Whitman’s Sampler of transportation.

Then I moved back here. I’d hear from Nathan periodically. We’d matriculated at opposite ends of the country; he’d headed east when I went to the Midwest, and he went north when it was my turn to make a return pilgrimage to old haunts. The slender times we saw one another after high school remained close at hand, those moments when shifting and dwindling groups would gather at chain restaurants to update life stories and anecdotal evidence. Nathan generally had a sibling in tow. Having none myself, I stood as my family’s lone representative at such functions.

Jokes would be made about the inevitability of things the one time we talked about our plans for the world when we were twenty-two: the city he chose and the city I chose. The dog-eared rib-jab: You go to the city, you meet someone, you get married, buy the house, move to the suburbs. Have the kids. The inevitability we joked about became reality, and in the years that followed, we realized you could keep tabs on that, fiber optics bringing us news of last names changed and faces altered, of bright-faced children, of moves and divorces and an evolution I never quite caught.

Nathan had tried his best at these steps, but had gone at them in a grab-bag style. He’d moved north of the city, bought a house there. Some time later, there was a wedding. Two months after that, the marriage dwindled. I tried to imagine Nathan’s house, but could never manage it properly: part of a postwar subdivision or something much older; a townhouse of right angles and judgmental points; something older, worn down and in need of restoration. The only time Nathan ever spoke of houses was one of the few times in our twenties when visits to our hometown had overlapped. Nathan was drinking well whiskey, no ice, and seemed obsessed with certain makes and models of shelter. Childhood’s glow in his eyes, he spoke of geodesic domes, modular houses, minimalist residences six hundred square feet total. He spoke of unnamed places hidden away off a mountain road. The whiskey in him prompted an unusual evangelism, and he began to scrawl figures on a series of napkins, his pen inevitably tearing through each in turn and prompting him to start again.

We kept in fractured touch, missives sent in clusters, periods of exchange in a rapid-fire queue followed by long gaps, a dub rhythm if charted on paper and viewed from a distance. He mentioned he would be in Hoboken on that particular day, that he would be taking meetings with a lawyer. Later, he suggested we get a drink in the afternoon. Morning of, I heard from him that nothing had changed, that he was still boarding a train near the state border and taking it down. And so the place was set, and as I walk towards it, a bar in a space hidden away, I realize there’s no way of knowing what’s to come.

I walk from the light rail tracks towards the trains—the bar’s beyond—and I look around, look to see if there’s a sign of Nathan, if he’s had the same idea as I had. The schedule looks down at me as I pass, and a few people stand, waiting to become passengers. The waiting room is similarly piebald. I look over at the engines and see cloudlight shining through. From a gap above, a small rectangle of snow comes to rest just past the edge of a dormant train. A hundred feet down the line is the bar. There’s a dim light inside, sparse gray shapes at a few tables, two at the bar. My hand is pushing on the door, my reflection’s briefly seen in the glass, and I’m through. There’s no sign of Nathan, and after a momentary monetary exchange, a pint of beer is before me. Through the glass, I see a short parade to one of the tracks; a few minutes later, I see a short exodus from a different space.

The second thing Nathan says to me, after the obligatory hello, is to comment on my head and its lack of hair. Whatever the widow and the monk left over isn’t particularly luxuriant, and after a while, I stopped trying to adjust the remnants and opted for the filing down. (My actual explanation of this to Nathan is much more concise.) I offer to buy him a drink, and he scans the bourbon behind the bar and cites a name I don’t know. It sets me back nine dollars. It is three-fifteen, and I’m on the day’s second beer; we have a corner of the bar to ourselves, and I think it’s only fair to follow Nathan’s comment about my hair with a question about his lawyer.

He winces. It’s an intellectual property thing, he says, but I probably shouldn’t talk about it. The sip he takes of his bourbon is of a scale I’d associate with slide-making in our high school biology class.

How’s upstate? is greeted with another grimace. I’ve always thought it strange that New York towns like Nathan’s get service from this state’s transit. I had a weekend once when I did study maps: eyeing bus and train lines, routing them, trying to bring them all together, finding the odd spots around me that were inaccessible to all but drivers. Nathan clears his throat.

When did we first meet? he asks. I don’t think I can remember a time when I didn’t know you. And that’s true for me as well. I’m pretty sure I could narrow it down if I tried, think of memories of elementary-school classes where Nathan was there and ones where he wasn’t, but that starts to back up on the years when memory collapses into a grayness, a sense of a time when I was alive but lacked awareness. Through the doors comes another boarding call and my eyes start to drift. I focus back on Nathan, look at him, envy him just a little for the fact that, for all he’s been through, he still looks good, looks five years younger than his age.

It starts coming to me, then, this phrase: Boy with triangle head. Kindergarten or the first grade. We were told to draw ourselves. I don’t remember my own scrawls, though I doubt that my skills with pen and paper have improved much since then. But I remember Nathan’s: a figure with a triangle for a head, distinct from a series of figures with round and block-shaped heads.

I tell Nathan this and his face sours even more. Christ, I did that, didn’t I? He takes another wisp of whiskey and lowers the glass and then raises it back to his mouth and takes a normal drink. Yeah, I did. God, I remember doing that more than I remember most of 1996. This whole time we’ve been facing the liquor rack, our heads angled in one another’s direction rather than looking at each other head-on. Now he turns to face me. I don’t remember shit else from that time, but I remember why I did that. I kept thinking, this has to be different. This one can’t be round, this one can’t be square. And that left me with a triangle. I had three hairs jutting from the top of it, and I think I colored the face in blue.

Here I start to wonder whether Nathan’s legal meeting perhaps involved a spot of drinking. I don’t tend to talk childhood unless there’s beer in me, and generally a lot of it. And when I do, it’s to wake the next morning with needles in my skull and a hard-rain regret, uttering self-directed curses as I maneuver down sidewalks towards food, towards client meetings, towards travel and exercise and passage. I wonder whether this is condescending, whether Nathan will pick up on it. Terseness aside, it’s good to see him, but I’ve given up all hope of directing this conversation, and I’ve given up on my expectation that it might last more than a drink. These silences are stretching longer than I’d like, and we’re disrupting them with the briefest of utterances: gossip we’ve heard, news of classmates’ childbirths, deconstruction of our old hometown.

After the longest of these silences, Nathan finally says, I miss the weird. His whiskey is down to something barely perceptible, but when the bartender moves to take it, Nathan snaps that he isn’t finished yet. He looks back over at me. I’m trying to get the weird back. And that’s when he ushers in the yarns about his family, about his brother, his brother’s girlfriend, the montage rock, and a range of familial discontent. He names a bus route and starts to explain it, and I wave him off. I know that one, I say. He gives me this weird look through a squinted eye, and I try to think of ways to explain it and realize I really can’t phrase it in a way that’ll make anything resembling sense. It’s my own weird, and I suspect inspiring envy is not what I want to do just now.

I can remember how we’d see bus stops when driving around our old roads. Not the ones I’ve grown used to here and elsewhere in the country, with shelters and seats and posted schedules, but ones that were mounted on steel frames and left at random by the sides of well-trafficked avenues. Sometimes you’d see them walking your dogs or out for a run, transit logos emblazoned on the top with a route number. Sometimes the ground would have a worn patch of dirt left there; sometimes the grass would sit undisturbed like a graveyard or memorial.

I ask Nathan whether he wants another whiskey. It’s his turn, but I suspect he’s fence-sitting on the question of the second round. As I wait for him to come up with an answer, I rub the top of my head and catch a sliver that isn’t exclusively scalp. I’ve been sloppy with the morning’s routine, and I vow to touch it up when I get home lest some previously unrevealed engagement take shape for the evening. I momentarily think I should say something to Nathan, invite him for dinner, suggest we go on the town, we two bachelors; that we seek out bars and charm our way through the city. But as the words begin to accumulate and configure themselves, Nathan taps the top of his glass and says, Yeah, the one more. But after that, I ought to go. And he looks at me and meets my eyes and says, I appreciate it.

I fish in my pocket and find a twenty and hail the bartender, beckoning another round. Nathan taps me on the shoulder and says he needs a bathroom, and I tell him his best bet is in the waiting room, two sets of