Mark de Silva - Square Wave

The black man pulled his sleeve back down and gripped his face. He started tapping his pockets with his other hand, searching. The screens emptied. After a long moment they were reanimated not by a ruined courtyard but a razor blade, as tall as a man, briskly circling the plaza’s digital perimeter. The blade shimmered as it flew through the deep black nonspace of the screens and glided into place alongside several other blades in a cartridge. A razor flying in the opposing direction met the cartridge, fastened to it, and fell into the palm of a waiting hand the width of three men.

Just in front of this race-indeterminate palm, the black man was lost in concentration, on a point inches from his nose. He flicked his thumb along the strike strip of a white book, dragging the crumbling pink match head across it. Still attached to the book, but with its cardboard stem bent around to reach the strip, the head combusted as his thumb withdrew into the space beyond the book. The stem held the flame as he maneuvered it to his unwavering point of focus, the tip of a short filterless cigarette.

The digital hand behind him and the razor in its palm faded. The first traces of the razor maker’s name gathered in their place. But a thousand footfalls were already echoing through the plaza. The crowd had lost interest, had perhaps never had any, having probably seen the ad many times, on many screens — just like what had come before it, the billowing smoke, the dust of another detonation.

Larent and Moto pushed through the crowd toward the edge of the courtyard. The man, smoke swaddling his head, lurched toward them before they could make much headway. A pocket of space enveloped him, but it moved with him owing to the fire jutting from his mouth.

“I bet I can help you,” he said.

“I’m fine, I think,” Moto said.

“Why?” Larent asked the man. “Why would you think that?” Larent didn’t know quite why he’d asked the question, though the man offered a creditable answer.

“Because.” He held out a crumpled soft-pack of Camels toward him. “Because can’t anyone?” The pocket around the man hardened in place, penning him in, just as the two of them drifted away on a current of foot traffic toward the shops beyond the screens.

They stepped through the beaten doors of Moto’s haunt, The Round, a pedigreed rock club on the courtyard’s eastern edge. The bar itself was no more than a low-ceilinged corridor line with a dozen cherry stools. Behind it were three local drafts that Moto attested never changed, and a modest shelf of spirits, mostly common stock, though spiked with a few rarities the owner apparently enjoyed, things like Green Spot, or Yoichi.

No one was tending bar. Moto scraped past the two vintage Rickenbacker F-holes hanging on the wall and clutched the shoulder of a bearded man on the farthest stool. Larent, who had slowed at the head of the bar, near the door, searched the eyes of the four men for the bartender, the one indulging his regulars in the slow hours of early evening, he assumed.

Before he could single him out, Moto caught his eye and waved him on past the bar. By the time Larent entered that cube of a room at the back, Moto was comfortably seated at a long unvarnished table near the entryway. Larent looked over the stray music gear that demarcated the small stage beyond: the Korg keyboard, the well-used twelve-string, two pre-war steel strings in slightly worse shape, and the powder blue Fender bass with oversize tuning pegs like cloverleaves.

Clustered near the gear, around what looked like a plastic patio table, were several twenty-something girls, all of them in threadbare sweaters, one in white jeans, and two more like twins, though not, in leggings and gauzy skirts. A bottle of Campari sat on the table, and their mouths moved violently, probably with gossip. What else inspired that kind of passion? But all he could hear was the Fahey record jangling through the sound system. The music soon vanished the girls from his mind, and as it did he began to study what was left in that peculiar blue-walled space, what Moto would later point out was actually a white-walled space bathed in pale blue light (hence the peculiarity).

You couldn’t say what Fahey was, really, Larent thought. Or how exactly he’d arrived at the music he did. Probably Fahey couldn’t have told you either, even afterward. Or he’d give you the wrong explanation. No one seemed to think that was a problem. Larent liked the thought. Maybe he needed it too.

He hadn’t sat yet. He looked back at the bar from the doorway. “Drinks, yeah, he knows, he’s coming,” Moto said over the music as he ran his hands through his hair.

Finally Larent sat, still bemused. Moto began to tell him of the bands of distinction who’d played there — The Fall, Embrace, Can, and twenty years on, Gastr del Sol, June of 44, Polvo — often to audiences that were, though modest in an absolute sense, large enough to make the room, not the audience, seem to be what was too small.

All of this was mostly lost on Larent, preoccupied as he was with the musical failures of that first rehearsal. It was fine to talk of seminal bands, but what could the two of them hope to achieve, if that , the flatness of the afternoon, was ground zero? Beginnings mattered. Nothing was just practice. Or you could say practice told you more about everything to come than you would ever have wanted to believe. And he hadn’t liked what he’d heard. He could remember this same feeling, with other musicians, on the cusp of stillborn projects.

The worthiest material Larent played that day was never heard. It came in between, after they’d let a feeble improvisation shrivel and die. He was hunched over his double bass, with his right hand blindly fingering chords, or if not quite blindly, then in the dimmest light. Nothing could be heard because nothing was sounded; his left hand lay flat along the strings. He had that talent for hearing unsounded notes, and what he was hearing seemed to him to make more sense than it strictly should have. It was something to unravel, these new instincts his hands were turning up more and more now.

It helped him ignore what he was actually hearing, with his ears. Then, as now, it was Moto. He was retuning his drums, directly behind Larent, with what must have been, judging by the sound, little quarter twists of the drum key, moving from one lug to the next along the smaller tom’s perimeter, tapping his stick against the center of the head. The pitch dropped as the drum deflated. He kept loosening the head until it fell a whole tone above the larger tom he’d already tuned. There was a pause before Moto smashed the open hi-hat. The rattling alloy cut its way through Larent’s silent song.

He bent his head around to Moto. The drummer’s hair seemed to glow under the white lights crossing the loft’s ceiling along a concrete beam. He was expressionless, or perhaps he wore the thinnest-lipped smile, and it seemed as if he had finished adjusting his setup, though the differences looked meaningless to Larent. Now, the splash cymbal was just to the right of the hi-hat, and the crash hovered over the left tom, overlapping it slightly. The ride was still on the right, and for whatever reason the china had been pushed away from the set.

Moto dropped Larent’s gaze and stared through the transparent heads of the toms. A deep, compact note answered his taps of the bass pedal as an eighth-note pulse took shape. The snare flams came next, interlaced with a roll so slow you could pick out every strike.

Larent returned to his silent fingerings, though, to the inner music that seemed to be leading somewhere. But Moto persisted, and eventually he relented. He set aside the baffling chords he’d been toying with and returned to the scales of earlier, bowing every third note, sounding ascending fourths and sevenths, flattening and sharpening notes as he crossed through several modes. Having won Larent’s interest, or at least his commitment, Moto distilled the thick rhythms down to a quiet line on the toms, a tapping of the ride, and a sharp snare.