Mark de Silva - Square Wave

These negations and nullities wound their way through the city, across its bridges, penetrating its outer districts, laying ellipses everywhere, relieving Halsley of an analog fullness, or anyway disenchanting people of the notion, and of the very idea that the state was any longer in a position to make guarantees.

Strangely, there were no claimings, only denials. They grew fiercer as accusations sharpened and rote as they diffused. Motives, originally few and imputed confidently (not to say correctly), metastasized, every effect guaranteed by several causes. A building saved from one attack — many were foiled along the way — would soon fall to another, often bearing the trace of difference, the activity of a rival body.

The government only added their own scars to the city, exploding hives of alleged factionalist activity, sometimes preemptively and on little grounds.

A half-dozen interests stood to gain from the laming of every building, the stilling of activity within, whether libertarians, religious fundamentalists, direct democrats, socialists, anti-egalitarians — even some anarchists who felt they’d found their moment, with a faltering central authority. (There was also the mention, among some, of democratic dictatorship and what it might mean.)

But the manner of gain, the precise aim, the strategic or cathartic value, grew less obvious by the month, its significance emerging only against a backdrop, itself perpetually expanding, of hundreds of crisscrossing antecedents and an ever-growing list of factions.

With each disembowelment, government security thickened, necessarily so, and without much complaint from the citizenry: the arbitrary checks and searches, the shows of force, the rapid and continuous diffusion of officers and agents, plainclothes and otherwise, the reserves on permanent domestic deployment. A crosstown bus trip, the purchase of a phone, the filling of a theater, all of these proceeded at half or quarter speed. The city clotted, and as it did, the day, unit of life, contracted.

Now, with elections approaching, the disruptions were peaking.

The expansion of security, and the gradual mutation of the National Security Administration and the Federal Bureau of Investigation into a clutch of allied and semi-autonomous intelligence agencies, was the bit of luck Stagg needed, the stopgap income between academe and the think tanks that editorial work couldn’t provide, not without exacting a toll anyway, socially, intellectually. For the Second Watch, his own division with this reorganization, there were the eight weeks of training to deal with: target-work with the G17, techniques of spontaneous interrogation and dissemblance, a few self-defense maneuvers (chokes, grips) he was sure he would never actually find the idealized conditions, or the calm, to use. And with that, he was paid to do little besides wander and watch. His mind was mostly his, to dispose with as he liked, which generally meant mind-writing, as he liked to think of it.

Generations ago, wasn’t it Matthiessen, Stagg thought, who’d written his first book, and even helped found a once-significant literary journal, a bit like this? That was on the foreign side of the intelligence community, though, the CIA, which itself had splintered. Now it was Stagg who was searching for a book, and something like a new historiography, even a new identity, but right here at home.

The Second Watch assigned and continually modified three or four basic routes for each agent, to prevent detection, but also, by disturbing the monotony, to re-sharpen the senses. No more than four, though. Too much familiarity was blinding, but so was too little, especially in picking up minute deviations from one night to the next. Most days his walks were the mildest permutations of each other, a story written over and over, intercalated with a few novel clauses here and there.

Still, he was more valuable to them than a camera eye, which anyway they had stationed at most segments along his routes. He could catch the atmosphere of an exchange, the charge carried by a tone of voice, the way the same stretch of words might be variously inflected on seven occasions, five innocuous, one obscure, one toxic.

The watches’ logs were processed a level up, by veteran staff who sifted them for useful patterns. But the ground-level reports were the critical inputs to this process, which was in effect a kind of echolocation.

Penerin valued the capacity to discriminate in these, his lowliest of charges, quasi-agents at best. It was not strictly a job requirement; the country’s needs now were too great to make it one. A degree from the elite colleges, though, had become a common point of entry, in a way it hadn’t been in the days when domestic intelligence was considered child’s play next to the foreign side. Now that it was, by anyone’s reckoning, at least as complex, pedigree helped, even if, as for many, there were only gentleman’s Cs to speak of.

Still, some watches managed to distinguish themselves. Their reports came to be relied on, sometimes as much as the experienced investigators on staff, though they saw no more pay. They would be shunted toward paths thought information-rich, and also — the qualities frequently coincided — to places where the signal-to-noise ratio was low, and an uncommonly fine capacity for discrimination, whether learned or innate, was a boon. It helped no one to raise red flags everywhere. It was about noting the shifts of consequence. In this respect Penerin had begun to trust Stagg, his sense of significance.

Stagg would later learn that his and Ravan’s reports, in particular, had been critical in mapping the whore beater’s activities. (Despite his insouciance, Ravan had the kind of consciousness that registered much.) Stagg’s discovery of Jen Best under the overpass had not been simple chance then. Penerin had had his suspicions, though he kept them to himself, about the possibilities of political meanings attaching to the assaults, and had been funneling Stagg toward a hypothesized perpetrator. The route that took Stagg under the bridge had been suggested by information coming in from him and the other watches. Penerin was continually recalibrating Stagg’s route, of course. He just hadn’t told Stagg that this man was already one of its targets.

That he’d come across Jen, and Ravan had come across two other girls in even unlikelier places — just off from a heavily trafficked pan-Asian restaurant, up against transparent garbage bags of rancid bok choy; and on a dank emergency staircase in a subway station, next to faltering industrial-scale elevators — also meant that between them they had likely come face to face with the man, or men, though they believed he was one and not many.

Probably Stagg had seen him several times, among the regulars along his route, people who recognized him as much as the reverse, though he hoped, of course, they didn’t recognize him qua watch. A subset of these he’d even befriended in limited ways, leaching data of unknown quality. Some of these were surely other watches, the sensoria of other agencies whose domains overlapped, or even tiers of the same groups, where jurisdictions were often structured concentrically. Responsibilities intersected.

Somewhere within the twin penumbras, the shifting loci formed by Stagg’s and Ravan’s movements, was the man (or woman, though the history of violent crime all but ruled this out). Or if it was not the man himself, then something that shadowed him.

But it was always possible, and Stagg would frequently think about this, that all their calculations were for naught, and it was only something like dark, useless chance that brought them upon those beaten women, giving them the sense, and only the sense, that they were closing a distance.