In the Autumn of the year  - – - 3 a seemingly otherwise unremarkable friend of mine inherited a sum of money from an aunt at Marienberg am Rhein whose immediate line had died out. The freedom thus conferred upon my friend allowed him to leave our company suddenly and completely. Some years later I received a letter containing the address of a decommissioned secondary schoolhouse in West Seattle written in my friend’s hand. The envelope also contained a small, worn key. I was compelled to wait until the completion of the winter quarter to make the inevitable though vexatious journey. When I arrived, I found the schoolhouse inhabited by a community of artists . The manager of the property led me to a classroom on the third floor of the building. The door that accepted the key bore the name of my friend and a stencil of an eye. The door opened to a well-ordered room. The shelving that covered the walls and windows contained various cameras and equipment. Photographs had been clipped to wires that ran across the ceiling from wall to wall. A broad mahogany desk occupied the center of the room. My friend’s rather imposing high-backed throne sat at the desk while two modest wooden chairs faced it. On the desk was a pile of notebooks containing the following accounts of his cases. The drawers of the desk contained colored pencils, aromatic pieces of dark tobacco, and three rolls of jute twine. I have not edited the notes of my friend and make no comment on their worth other than this introduction and the sponsorship of their private publication.

Edmund Furey, PhD

Ithaca, New York

 

I am a detective. My name is writ thus on the door. The advert is in the paper. I wait. I am waiting. Three weeks have passed. This feels right. Something is coming– the wind has come up and last night looked like it would hail but did not. Rice has lost its taste completely. The water tastes like radishes. The Brahms concerto is still heroin. Something is coming.

Private Investigator– the term doesn’t fit. The discomfort we feel turned it into Private Eye, a redundancy and a joke, or P.I. or pi, which is better. Pi is the solution to all circles. We ’solve,’ but the answer goes on forever, unresolvable unwavering and unknown.

This is reflected in our literary history. When Poe, Edgar Allen, invented us, he invented also our existential predicament. The killer was an orangutang. That is to say, an innocent. The crime was solved and at the same time the crime was erased.   

Orangutang. A burning cathedral.

Something has happened. The precision of the causal chain is clear. The radiator over-heated. I opened a window. The driving wind caught the strap of a camera and slowly pulled it off the shelf. It fell, but not into pieces, on the pillow where I rest my head. The message was clear.

A gestalt detective doesn’t wait for his case. He walks the street until the sensitive ordering of his perception discovers and creates it. I am out then with my camera on a walk. The hard streets of West Seattle ring like a bell struck by a clapper of autumn light.

¤

I heard the absence of the For Sale sign loud in the wind. Then the immobility of the mobile. The truck stalled, acquiring roots of rust. The camper a rolling stone no longer, now and for a long time now rimmed with moss. Inside I knew and later found true it contained an autonomous country of wasps, asleep in its winter. Mushrooms instead like stalagmites and a child’s toy as well, a green absinthe sauropod.    

I entered the home thru the window with the winding sheet. No corpse tho. Only a pile of clothes holding it down and preserving its sepulchral shape. The wind thru the window earlier, thus: the detective thru the window at the scene of the crime, doubled by my presence. Breaking, they say, and entering. The light breaking. Breaks. Light breaks in. Crime in its absence, evidence in its presence.

Why do we take photographs? They are evidence, either official or sentimental, tho in fact we could consider sentiment the evidence of our emotional, rather than criminal, history in the case life makes against us. All the pictures had been taken off the walls. Their absence squares of moonlight in the cigarette smoke yellow. Witness and testimony.

The ‘i’ in those two words are the same. The private eye. I am there in each of those words. In witness and in testimony. This is important work!

In the corner of the largest bedroom a nightstand bore traces of wax and dark stains from candles. An empty shrine to the Virgin. Faintly, still, the caterpillar feeling of incense.

I heard the boots of two bulldozer men quickening the stairs but they were so like the ’sound of boots’ that I didn’t know that they were real until I felt them. While I was conscious they said nothing. When my six senses returned I could perceive that they had spoken of important subjects while I lay insensible beneath them. A man’s name had fallen onto the carpet. The fleeting nature of time had touched the door frame. Nothing useful. Just the itching of lost events.

Their boots smelled of seawater and engine oil. I remembered this as I attempted to stand. A clue, I thought, falling over.

I should explain the sixth sense. To the five senses of taste, smell, touch, sight, and hearing, is that which moves between them, emphasizing and erasing, composing, posing. Called apprehension, called perception, that sense of destiny, the sense of now.

Now! I left the house thru the front door, retrieved my camera from the empty engine parts box where I had hidden it and caught the bus just as it rattled to the stop.

The pain in my head tasted of raspberry sorbet.

Here’s how we hope it’ll work: I shoot five or seven potentially evocative pictures, send them to William. He chooses the one he best responds to, then writes 1000 words, such as inspire him to be written. Then he lobs me the ball and I take such inspiration as his words provide, and shoot another flight of pictures. We volley, ideally weekly.

Here’s my first round of pictures. In a bit, I’ll post the one William selected to write upon, and post up his story.

Your comments are invited. 

Watch this space for the announcement of our new wedding site and blog’s rollout.

First off was Island Books, on Mercer Island. This is the kind of bookstore that gives bookstores a good name. The kind that inspires people–Amy’s mom among them–to look at books on Amazon.com, just so she can go over to the brick and mortar local bookstore and buy the books there. And happy to pay full retail for the honor of having a good shop in the ‘hood.

Roger Page, who runs the place, was a very generous host. He also had very kind things to say about our book. He himself had once worked on a fine art documentary book of words and pictures, and so it meant a great deal when he told us what a fine and unique book we have. 

Roger’s good natured optimism meant he had many (many) more copies of Edges on hand than what our audience was able to consume. Okay, seriously here, there were only two people in the audience that we didn’t already know. (At least one of them bought the book, thankfully!) Thank goodness for the folks you know and love pulling in to help!

Co-owner/Chef Ericka Burke introduces the evening, and the menu, but not the book!

It was a good thing that Roger had all those extra copies on hand, as the next night we had our Very Cool Author Dinner at the Volunteer Park Cafe. Through a miscommunication, there were no books on site when we got there, and I didn’t think to ask about this until about 10 minutes to 7, when our event was to start.

William Emery, my pal and co-author, with the only copy of the book in the restaurant. The drama!

“I’ll get on the phone,” I told Ericka, one of the owners. Quick call to Island Books and we arranged to have 30 copies boxed up and ready to load into the car–we got Amy scrambled to go and pick them up. On an empty tank of gas. Oof. 

No big though. Amy strolled back in leisurely about the time the last of the Duck’s egg pizzetta as being served. Amazing and beautiful grub. I’ve had egg on pizza before, but never from a duck. The rich, almost sweet egg, and the little bed of shaved brussels sprouts it was on–seriously great. And pretty much all the food was locally grown. 

Did you know Washington is responsible for something like 80% of domestically grown lentils in the US? Neither did I.

Some time after Amy got back, after a couple courses, we finally passed the books around. William and I got to chat with all of the 24 or so people who were there. I guess of that number a few were ourselves. Our friend Traca was there, she of SeattleTallPoppy blogging fame–and well she should have been, as she lined this gig up. 

We were honored and excited to have Linda Derschang in the house. Among countless other buzzy and venerable Seattle eating and drinking spots, Linda is also co-owners (along with Ericka) of Oddfellows Cafe. Kind of the new hotness around here I guess. 

Thursday night was the first time we ate at Volunteer Park Cafe, and I have to say I was really impressed. And I’m not just saying that because they treated us so nice. The food really was quite remarkable. And all the more so because it was prepared in this tiny little kitchen where they don’t even have a range. It’s smaller than our kitchen here at Casa NonFiction. 

Ericka gets busy with the lamb. 

There was no question that the evening was going well, but any worries I might had were truly dispelled when, about halfway through I stepped into the restroom to wash some spilled wine off my hands, and all I could hear were peals of laughter, clinking glasses, excited talk across many conversations… the sounds of a killer dinner party! It was very satisfying. 

Thanks, Volunteer Park Cafe!

That was Thursday night. Friday we had off, and then we had our big ticket reading at Elliott Bay Book Company on Saturday afternoon. We were pretty excited about this one.

That’s our book in the lower left there. Hasn’t stopped being exciting to see our book in bookstore windows!

The reading space downstairs is super friendly, and they had a nice projector and a mic set up for each of us. We were actually kind of part of a program, and we followed the writer, recipe-chef and photographer of Chefs on the Farm. Pretty good match if you ask me. 

Amy had coached William and me a bit on giving a better presentation, which I believe we did. Or so the nice people said. It was fun. I can’t speak for William, but I was pretty nervous. Reading at Elliott Bay is kind of like getting on Def Comedy Jam or singing your arias at the Met or something. Well, maybe not the Met. But still.

I hope I’ll get a chance to do it again.

Tomorrow, if you haven’t been barraged by emails and flyers and by the skywriter buzzing your neighborhood (which really works better in summer), we’re having our dinner at the Voluteer Park Cafe. I’m super excited about this, on account of it’s going to be a lot of really good, local food, plus we’ll get to read and project some pictures, and everyone gets a book. 

Finally (for Seattle area events in the immediate future) we’ve got a reading at Elliott Bay Books on Saturday, at 4:30 pm. 

Sure hope to see you there!