WIllis Earl Beal

At the end of a little dirt driveway twenty miles outside of Olympia, Washington, overlooking Lake Saint Clair, there’s a mossy manufactured home with a slouching basketball hoop out front. It belongs, for the next few weeks anyway, to Willis Earl Beal. At dusk the screen door hangs open, and inside Willis sits alone at the messy dining room table—one of the few pieces of furniture his wife left behind when she moved away—smoking a cigarette with the lights off. He is, as ever, overdressed and contemplative, and he has expressed a sincere desire to subvert his own biographical materials. “Am I important or am I not important,” he asks rhetorically. “Does it matter? And who decides that? It would be really nice to just be happy for a change, without any posturing.”

Beal has lived on this lake for the past two years, and he’s been alone here for the past few months. Lately he’s been riding the bus to downtown Olympia and spending time with strangers, some of them homeless, some of them high on drugs of indistinct origin. They know Beal as “Nobody,” a name—or the absence of one—that he gave himself some years ago in a moment of extreme clarity or career sabotage. But Olympia has seen stranger characters than Beal. “On any given day you’ll be sitting between a man named Trashcan and a woman named Dandelion, and you’ll smoke Blue Dream and time is over and everybody understands. Conversations are abstract, so you can say whatever you want to say. You can start shouting if you want to. That can be really beautiful, but it’s also extremely draining.”