Mark de Silva - Square Wave

The tailgate was down, which was odd. Odder, though, was the woman beneath it, lying against the hulking tire in a bra and a silk skirt the color of straw. She forced the draft, the monk, from his thoughts.

Were it not for the peculiar way she was dressed, Stagg would have taken her for another unsheltered alcoholic and let her be. Instead he swung the tailgate shut and watched harsh purple light flood her face. Her eyes were open but so vacant he wouldn’t have thought it a mark of consciousness had she not eventually blinked. She stared out at the length of walkway he had just passed, her head down on her shoulder. She must have seen him coming.

Her face, her forehead especially, was swollen and bruised, her nose scuffed and crusted over with blood turned black. She drew shallow breaths and her chest jerked with each arrhythmic pull of air. Stagg knelt beside her, brought himself into her line of sight, trying to extract the true form of her face. Beneath the swelling and cuts and shifted bones, beneath the heavy eyeliner and thick rouge, there was symmetry.

Their eyes were very close now, but she said nothing (maybe she could not), and he obliged with silence (anyway he could think of nothing to say). Her chest was swollen and red in patches. He put the palm of his hand beneath her breasts, near the sternum, and felt the skin inflated with fluid. He was searching for the articulated firmness of ribs but finding only a vague mass of tissue wrapped in torn skin. His investigations made her squint, but still no words came, just a slightly heavier breath.

He lifted her head and set it against the treaded tire beneath the bed of the truck. With his thumb he cleared away the hair that had slid across her face, and her eyes shone green again under that strange light.

Soon he found himself pulling her from the shoulders, disregarding everything he had just confirmed about her condition. Her collarbones seemed to flex as he tried to raise her to her feet. She squirmed violently. It seemed to encourage him, this first vigorous sign of life, and he could think of nothing else, if he was thinking at all, than to pull her out from below, onto the sidewalk and up against the brick wall.

He wrapped his arm around her waist, leaned her upper body against his thighs, and dragged her toward the wall. She clasped her arms around her chest, closed her eyes, and mumbled or moaned as Stagg pulled her up the curb, her legs vainly kicking.

As soon as he released her she curled up on the sidewalk on her side, stretching her legs along the length of the wall. He didn’t try to right her. Instinctively he searched his pocket for his phone. It was at home, he remembered now, the source of his trouble earlier with Renna, or the excuse onto which it fell.

There was a phone booth at the end of the passage, though he’d never noticed it till now, and was unsure whether it actually worked, or if it were merely the remains of a dead technology too costly to bury.

He had none of the numbers he would have liked to use, so the call was to 911.

“Yeah, I’m under the freeway at Harth. There’s a woman, a hooker, I think. She doesn’t look great. Second Watch. We’ll need a car too. Carl Stagg.”

From the booth he could see warehouses, some converted to apartments, some still serving commercial functions: textiles, lumber, paint. His eyes settled on the four-story directly across. The building’s framework stood exposed at the near corner. The bricks had broken away unevenly. The matrix of beams, once precisely arranged along several planes, had wilted into a jumble of iron, soot-covered and twisting into the evening sky. An intense blaze must have shriveled the metal, but the beams, tangled almost sculpturally now, meant there had been combustion as well. A flammable inventory, probably. Whatever it was, the building was unsound, unusable, abandoned. Its lower windows were boarded, as were the doors, as of course were many others now throughout the city, not only warehouses but restaurants and shops and public facilities.

Through the building’s charred scaffolding the moon was visible, a brilliant white haphazardly fragmented by metal. He walked back down the passage and sat on the wall, waiting, with the woman at his feet.

Light arrived as a plane, projecting through the slit between drawn curtains, cutting the bedroom in two. Stagg sat at the foot of the twin bed, on a short pine bureau intersecting the light. He passed his hand through the beam and watched sun-kissed dust swirl within its borders. He pulled the thick curtains apart and two dimensions became three, the light broadening until it was nearly the width of his little studio apartment.

In the street below, a small child and an older one, not quite a teen, hurried along with brows pulled low and heads whirling. The woman from last night, her broken body, the picture came to him. What will Penerin want to hear?

His shirt was heavy with sweat. He pulled off the black tee and balled it up in his hand, felt the damp in it before wiping it across his neck. It took some of the stickiness away. He reached down to the tiny metal handles and opened the second drawer of the bureau beneath him, sliding his legs out as far as the drawer itself. The clothes, overstuffed in the drawer, plumped as he did. He’d not looked at this surplus in over a year, ever since he’d moved in, after returning to the city from England. Everything in his closet was on the floor at this point, and as filthy as the tee shirt. At least these were clean, he thought, even if they looked like someone else’s clothes to him now.

Along the top layer he found a crushed blue button-down with a mangled spread collar and flannel trousers. He opened the drawer below with his toes threaded through the handles and kicked a three-pack of generic boxers to the floor. They looked as if they’d been bought at a drugstore. Why he’d bought them, he didn’t know, but he wasn’t troubled by it. When you drank like him, little oddities like this lost their oddness.

It was only after piling the retired outfit on the bed that he noticed the small loaf of olive bread on the nightstand. It must have been there, sitting on the red plastic plate, since he’d last slept here. Two nights — three nights — now. One of the two chunks was nearly eaten. Only a hard beige crust covered in semi-elliptical ridges remained. The other chunk formed a complete half, its exposed interior a gauzy white punctuated by oblong streaks of purple. The sight of it seemed to hollow out his stomach. He felt a weakness in himself he hadn’t known only a second before.

He pressed his arched fingers against the white of the bread, but like a cast that had set, it was no less firm than the crust itself. He gripped the half-loaf with two hands, his fingertips lining up in parallel along the white. One twist and the shell gave way. He pulled the quarters apart, put one in the palm of his hand, and dug his fingers into the crumb as close to the crust as he could. This was not so close, as some of the crumb had also staled. Leaving the husk on the plate, he pulled out the small core of cottony crumb. He did the same with the other quarter and pushed the husks off to one side, exposing the ridge at the edge of the plate in which olive oil had collected. He swabbed the chunks of bread until they turned a greenish-yellow.

Breakfast in the Spanish style, he thought. And who was it, the curly-haired golfer, who’d been known, decades ago, to eat bread and a shallow bowl of oil before each round? His father had told him about him, presumably as an example of Spartan values. But the name didn’t come back.

He turned to the second chunk, warily eyeing the desk across from him, overwhelmed, for months now, by legal pads with most of the sheets torn out; xeroxed journal articles, some pristine for not having been read, others bearing the underlines of successive readings, such that virtually the entire paper was lined, restoring its balance; loose papers and index cards carrying unassimilated notes; books, open (Collingwood, Bentley) and closed (Barnes, Burnyeat), stacked and scattered, concerning several projects; the disintegrating letters and journals on paper of varying constitution and age; and the little hand-drawn maps, water-stained and mottled in every shade of orange and yellow and brown.