Mark de Silva - Square Wave

He threw her off him. Her nipple swelled, and blood didn’t look far off. She kept both her hands around her neck, as if she were wringing it herself. In language he would never deign to use, she cursed him. He knew it was there, beneath the veneer. Reality seeped back into their exchange. Lewis had made it happen.

In stiff cadences he apologized, thought an outsize tip would prove he meant it. Sullen and silent but not teary, she dressed and left, leaving the door ajar and him to wonder whether there would be trouble from Life.

Everything was over in half an hour. He sat in the chair, feet up on the bed, taming the fifth of scotch two fingers at a time, swigging from the tumbler and a miniature can of macadamia nuts in alternation. By the time he left the hotel, at two in the morning, he wasn’t sure what he’d meant. He felt less sorry. He hadn’t come. In the back of the cab, Lewis weighed the glint of the watch, the drape of the dress, against the dinginess of his life, and with purpose, lost himself in the brake lights of passing cars.

This was a year ago. His profile had grown since. Or that of his deeds had, which was better, and what mattered. Lewis’s person remained opaque, or multiple, which came to the same. The sketches were various: a raven-haired man abundantly goateed, a mustachioed blonde in aviators, a brunet longhair with beard untended, witnessed only under low light. Twice he’d come ski-masked. Twice he’d managed entirely in the dark.

Locations too were diverse: hotel rooms, cars, deserted parking lots, the bathrooms of failing restaurants, the smaller subway stations, far into the night, and once, just as the sun peaked, at the site of a partly razed building. He would arrive by bus or train or otherwise car — a Corolla with a missing bumper, an Audi gleaming white, a windowless cargo van — all rented or with out-of-state plates. For its purity, though, he preferred, when possible, to come on foot.

Eleven girls in Easton and Henning, not counting the two he let go, judging them self-correctors. There were limits to masquerade and he was exceeding them. But between the spells of panic and the unleavened reaches of despair he would sometimes find an affectless calm. He struggled to worry about his fate then, felt it frivolous to do so, even pretentious. A kind of absolute selflessness, as he saw it, would follow. It was then that he made his “interventions.”

From each woman he would extract a biography. The inquiries all began from certain generic angles of attack, there being only so many to a conversation, but from there, each rapidly became its own, and the path forward had to be improvised.

Occasionally matters were simple and quick. In minutes they would begin releasing their histories. These, he supposed, were the women who weighed their stories, or whose stories weighed on them, perpetually or nearly so. There was no introspection called for, the tale was always at the ready, for better or worse.

Sometimes he suspected deceit. They were too quick to share, the narratives were too neat, either brimming with pathos or a frosty insouciance about their past and present both. But even their fictions, if they were fictions, could suffice. He would take these stories both ways, once as truth and once as lie. In all but one case, his conclusion was the same. If you told certain sorts of fictions about yourself, you might warrant the same treatment as those for whom those fictions were facts.

More often, though, unlocking their tongues took a fine probing; it could take hours, a half-dozen tacks, to find it, the key. But he had yet to fail. The accumulated detail could be extravagant, but he had little choice. He had to see the shape of each case, the precise trajectory of descent.

The eleven cases remained with him vividly — his memory was prodigious — so that when it came to them he had no use for pen and paper. He held them all in his mind, calling them up as he pleased. But on late drives home, like tonight, to Janice, or Janus, his preferred endearment (not hers), the stories would start to mingle.

He imagined that there might be, even must be, women in the world whose stories matched these permutations. As they all shared an endpoint, it was not always clear to him what difference it made how exactly they fell — whether from drama society walk-ons or orphans, state-school freshman or dressage champions — or what to make of the minutia of their lives, the many blind alleys.

But though the inputs were clear enough, the calculus itself was only partly conscious. At the moment of decision, when he would gather all he had been told before him, perhaps these trifling details were not so trifling. There may have been borderline cases, he thought, where everything turned on the girl’s mother being Jewish and the father not, or on her preference for ketchup not Tabasco with her eggs. He couldn’t say. All the same he felt his judgment unerring.

Beyond the histories, his mind held snapshots of the girls, before and after, along with ones of lower resolution, during. Like the histories, they would start to mix, and he often wondered then what one would have to do to turn one woman’s before into another woman’s after, what the intermediate stages would look like, how far he would have to denature them before finding the highest common factor. The lowest was easy; matches and gasoline sufficed. But that sort of reduction didn’t exercise the mind.

The most luminous images were the after-after ones, the women returned to a finer state. (Except for one case, which, if her unthinkable account was true, marked not so much a return as a first ascent.) Though these images weren’t stamped on him by the world, as memories were, they were clearest, most vivid, perhaps as only unmoored idealities can be.

The girls were never subjects for him — artistic subjects. He found the notion morbid. There was simply no art about what he was doing, nor should there have been. He hadn’t painted anything in months. Some charcoal line drawings were all he’d managed, of Janice on the fire escape or in the kitchen, and even those were more for her benefit than for his. He’d left art behind for life.

He had in fact descended too, like the girls. His father, Leo Eldern, had invested much of his personal assets in far more aggressive ways than the money he managed for a midsize hedge fund. Most of his fortune was lost this way, shorting the currency markets. The fund itself performed well, though, frequently surpassing the market by meaningful margins, sometimes very large ones. There were very few truly poor years.

Had he approached his own investments as he did his fund’s, he would still be beyond wealthy, given the size of the inheritance that had come to him from his mother, the lone child of a Midwestern auto-parts magnate.

Instead he was reduced to his salary at the fund, for a year or so, anyway, until several investors who ran in his circles couldn’t help but note the sharp contraction of his prodigality.

As he was being dismissed, he protested that he’d never subjected them to his personal risks. They granted that that might be true; the fund’s long-run success was sterling evidence. Still, they were unwilling to stay with him, not believing a bifurcation of character could be absolute. Leo’s life, with his son’s, was recast. All the money in his name was a play portfolio Leo had given him, perhaps to entice him into the trade, worth several hundred thousand dollars.

Early on Lewis had plumped for the impractical life, one in the arts. He’d wanted to fill it with the kinds of meaning his father’s, by his own admission, lacked: moral, aesthetic, intellectual. Moral most of all. Politics seized him even before college. He’d sensed the early signs of rot everywhere in Halsley, the kinds his urbane friends mostly ignored or felt at some remove from, though it was happening right in front of them, to them, to everyone.