Mark de Silva - Square Wave

“So this is another way of seeing the dispute between the noble and the merchant, for whom popularity, in the end, not goodness, accuracy, quality, strength, beauty, and so forth, must be the guiding principle. And that’s just because the most valuable product, from the merchant’s point of view, must be the one that sells. Otherwise, well, he goes out of business.”

Relleau, a political correspondent for Halsley’s newspaper of record, with a master’s-level training in both history and anthropology, brushed blond curls from his eyes before taking his turn. “If one looks at our situation, where conceptions of the good are now beyond number, and where the communities answering to many of these conceptions are perpetually stymied in the elections, simply for lacking scale, numbers, it’s difficult to tell them that our political arrangements are as they should be. Anyway they aren’t listening, are they? Coalitions in the legislature, and between interest groups, are the obvious route in situations like this, and we have gotten that for some time. But what is more interesting, and newer, is how the last decade has seen a kind of turn toward other approaches, in particular, to certain forms of aggression, not always of a bloody sort, or mounted directly against the people, but against state institutions. Infrastructure — assembly halls, schools, and so forth. But that is still violence, dead bodies or not. And it might be a more potent one in the end, we don’t know. The elections, in November, might tell us. We’ll see how many are brave enough to show up at the polling stations.

“In some ways, however, it isn’t an altogether different approach, because this extra-democratic aggression has itself turned coalitional. We hear of libertarians, and also the advocates of direct democracy, collaborating in some of the destruction — in its funding and sometimes its execution — of voting booths, subways, public monuments. We hear even of Muslim and Christian groups acting jointly. And they are targeting not just abortion clinics, but scientific institutions more generally: the flooding of UCLA’s genomics center, most recently. This sort of collaboration was unthinkable just ten years ago. But today they are agreed on something, the substance of which isn’t totally clear, even to them, one feels.

“But this is getting pretty speculative, so I think I’ll leave it there. What do you make of this, Anders? Your research intersects with this in interesting ways.”

The young sociologist with the burgeoning reputation, formerly of Bonn but now full-time at the Wintry Institute, leaned over the arm of his chair toward Relleau. “For just the reason you mention, I’m going to save my remarks for the discussion. If that’s all right,” he said, smiling broadly.

“That’s just fine, Anders,” Kames said. “I think they’ve had all they can take of general remarks, anyway. So, we’ll all do just twenty minutes or so, and at the end we will open up the discussion to our very patient audience, for an hour or beyond, whatever we are feeling like.

“And I did mean to say at the start — I’ll say it now — thank you, to our guests, fellows, and regular attendees, for coming to these sessions of the Wintry Institute. And of course to our founding donors, who have put us in a financial position to forget about finances. It’s left us free to follow the argument wherever it leads, to examine our homilies open-endedly, without thumbs on the scale. We are very lucky to be what we are. Let’s see where we go tonight.”

The first intervention was nothing of the sort. Thirty floors up, at the Four Seasons, Lewis sat on the edge of a California king, slugging Caol Ila from a crystal lowball short on lead. The door was ajar. The desk sent her up, a Junoesque brunette with a bronze clutch, wearing silk the green of those portraits of Laurette (Matisse was still the master, Lewis thought). He felt he ought to be in tails, not this linen blazer that could use a pressing. The cut of the dress — high-back, ankle-length, flowing around the legs with a matchless drape, subtly pleated above the waist — played nothing up or down, neither flaunting nor withholding. Distortion was needless. The dress was her equal, and together they formed a pair of autonomous beauties, as handsome couples do.

She sat on the bed at his beckoning, not too close to him, and laid her hands in her lap decorously. The watch flashed in the low light of the nightstand lamp. Breguet. He studied its face, the immaculate guilloché work. The hands, at eleven and twelve, blued, not painted. The case too, it glowed whiter than stainless, in a way peculiar to gold. And the strap’s irregular crosshatchings, the crispness of the black, bespoke alligator.

Lewis rarely confronted finery anymore, only when he saw friends from the old life, or his mother. The august materials, the fabrics, hides, metals, and minerals, the aura of ultra-skilled labor emanating from their rendered forms — these were woven through the mise-en-scène of his youth. Their reappearance, though, in these circumstances, attached to this woman, left him of several minds.

Through a college friend, son of a pop icon and now a practiced layabout, he’d made these arrangements with Life, Halsley’s top escort service. Three grand for ninety minutes. Utterly wasteful. But Lewis felt life telescoping. They’d asked him if, for another fifteen hundred, he wanted to include dinner; for five figures she could even be rented out for the weekend. He’d declined. The girlfriend experience didn’t appeal. He liked Janus.

She ventured a few pleasantries, sustaining that dazing restraint. The faux-gentility — there was no question of authenticity, given her vocation — it only estranged him. Her tony clientele must have expected this, at least initially, especially at dinner, if they took that option.

He remembered speeding the encounter past these awkwardnesses: first a rote offering of a drink (she declined) and then, while holding her by the Bregueted wrist that still lay in her lap, a wordless unzipping of the dress. She leaned her face against his, only grazing it, letting her breath fall on his neck, which he could just barely feel. She went no further, and she said nothing. She was merely keeping his pace, letting him lead.

He pulled her to her feet and disrobed her with a care that seemed directed more at the dress than at her. The stitching was close to invisible, patently hand-done. The silk was even finer than he thought, with a pleasing weight. Givenchy. He folded it over the desk chair and turned back to her. She was standing in matte-black bra and panties, smoothing the copper-brown curls that fell just beyond her lightly freckled shoulders. To the smallest degree possible her eyes had brightened, and they fixed on him without the hint of the coquette, calibrated to project only gentle desire.

The seamlessness of her performance, the longer it went on, only deepened his bewilderment. He stripped with haste and pounced, hoping to slow the process, even reverse it. It worked at first. Sex grounds. But quickly her perfection in bed was manifest and impossible to ignore. He started to drift again, and as he did, the urge drifted too.

It wasn’t long before he found himself slapping her breasts, hard, then very hard. From behind, he did the same to her ass, her ribs, her thighs. Her twitches and cries took on a new ring of truth, breaking the illusion so troublingly convincing up to now. With that revelation, his desire, the species of it he needed, returned.

He got her on top and, using her neck as a grip, threw her down onto his cock. She accepted this, mouth open, eyes closed. He tried to take her bobbing breast in his mouth but found it just out of reach. His hands tightened around her throat as he stilled her body. He pulled her up, toward him, and found the nipple as a rasping escaped her. Her hands clutched the backs of his, prying at them, scratching at his fingers, as his teeth came together around her nipple. Her chest jerked away from him, her fingernails dug into his face. She coughed as his hands convulsed from the pain, and as they did her own sprung from his face back to her neck.