Mark de Silva - Square Wave

But there was second synthesis, of course, a more important one: an alignment of flesh and spirit in the women. How to know if he was succeeding? Or even improving? Tonight’s drive was evidence, wasn’t it? It was becoming harder to find streetwalkers in Halsley since he’d started. It was the same way with finding escorts, for him or anyone else, he understood. He’d brought things to a boil. He’d taken away their shortcuts, through fear. They would have to find another way. They’d have to kick, if they were strung out. They’d have to go humbly back to their families, if they’d run away. They’d have to learn how to make actual lives for themselves, however modest actuality proved, whether it meant Starbucks or Target or community college. This is what the new emptiness of the streets meant to him.

What was certain, though, was that the most recent intervention, carried out days ago beneath an overpass, was a regression. It was as impenetrable, as confused, as the first one. It lacked all form. And it was worse than any botched painting.

The girl — she went by Lisa — she’d been clear-eyed. There was no defensiveness or callow defiance, as with the intervening girls. She pursed her lips thoughtfully when he spoke and seemed to accept the fallibility of her stance. It was discomfiting, the possibility of wisdom in her.

He might have let Lisa go had it not been for that, the easy cogency of her replies. They were familiar enough at their core, and he’d rejected versions of them in other girls. But their dress, her even-handed delivery, was unusual. It seemed to reform their content. Pinpointing her bad faith became impossible, which undid his sense of purpose and returned him to that first night at the Four Seasons, where there had been almost no talking at all.

Lisa couldn’t be accused of elementary misapprehensions or a jumbled mind. But her notions were cool and neutral, and they threatened to ablate his own, in the way the sublime can menace beauty. Maybe too, in the shadow of the sublime, he sensed the monstrous. The feeling had hastened his decision. He aborted the inquiry, and for the first time since the Breguet girl, was tempted to have her. But he stopped short, striking Lisa instead with a rashness that embarrassed him now. He rolled her out of the car and pulled away after he’d finished.

He tried to flush the memory of this episode from his mind as the back of a convertible, its top down, expanded before him. Lewis tapped the brake. A police SUV was parked roadside, its tailgate pockmarked here and there. The upper edge of a sheet of fine gray grit traced a line halfway up the back window and the mounted spare tire. On the other side of the road a squad car’s light-bar strobed.

Lewis had yet to be stopped at a checkpoint. They were springing up with a confounding arbitrariness, never staying put for long, shifting throughout the city and the wider region. Halsley’s district borders were only sometimes used. Just as often, police cars would flank small roadways like this one that didn’t make it out of town without merging with the larger arteries. Whatever pattern there was, it was illegible, and anyway underwent continuous mutation, presumably in an attempt to trap trouble, or more frequently, its mere potentiality, which of late had become necessary, supply having grown so great. How many of these movements were addressed to the future? How many the past? He liked to think prevention and retribution were on a par.

In the early days Lewis could safely assume his exploits could effect no change in the movement of the checks. He wasn’t serious quarry, given all else. But the assumption grew less secure every day. He wondered now if the net was sometimes recast to bag him, and at times, studying the newspapers, he couldn’t avoid the feeling that his deeds were making deeper impressions than even he intended.

The quality of his masquerade was being tested. It made grasping the pattern urgent. There were websites devoted to mapping the checkpoints, but when he superimposed the locations of his encounters on these maps, he couldn’t settle the question. Sometimes he thought he saw influence, but quickly he would see nothing at all.

The convertible, unstopped, drifted past the officer standing astride the road. The resolution of his face rose as Lewis approached, the details filled in: squat neck, wide ears, sharp nose, bad skin. His eyes remained unchanged, though, black voids from a distance and the same up close. The laws of optics appeared to have no bearing on them. Lewis fixed on the officer’s slack arm, looking for a twitch of the sinews running along the back of his hand, or perhaps some tightening of the forearm. Nothing.

On the other side of the checkpoint, heading home to Janice, untested again, he assumed a swell of satisfaction, however small, a lightening, however transient, would arrive. But there was nothing. The eyes of the officer stayed with Lewis on the rest of the drive while he wondered what laws of affect his mind had just flouted.

Stephen rutland stood at the top of the path, well water in hand, peering down into the narrow Kandyan valley below, which was in truth not much more than a ravine. A stream, small but running with some force, passed through the rocks and tall grass of the valley floor. A wood frame twice his height and nearly half that wide lent shape to his view. A door was propped up on the cross-post of the frame, with ropes holding it in place, so that it formed a sort of inverted drawbridge. Rather than being fashioned from a solid piece of wood, it was woven from thick branches and vines radiating four-inch thorns.

The gate was open, and the thorn door projected over the shoulders of the Rajasingha’s sentries stationed on either side of it. All comings and goings were kept track of at these checkpoints. Unless those passing were from neighboring villages and recognizable to the gatekeepers, they would produce identification issued by their village councilmen, or, in extraordinary cases, by their county governors. The ID would be impressed upon a small clay table. There were twenty-four recognized stamps, indicating caste, village seniority, marital status, as well as the sort of business they had that required passing the gate, whether personal, trade, or official.

The Ceylonese councilmen or governors would modify these twenty-four if they needed to express something the stamps couldn’t accommodate. The meaning of these alterations — a set of x’s along the bottom of the tablet, say, or a red swatch cutting across a stamp — was often not known to the travelers, so that frequently they carried information about themselves and their journey they were not in a position to decipher.

In times of little threat the gates were kept open. The sentries merely ensured that only locals freely passed. They could often be found chatting with them, joking, chewing betel-leaf. But whenever security was a concern, which was often, and even more often in the king’s mind, Rajasingha would send messengers, or else military scouts in the threatened areas, to have the gates lowered. Since the paths through the Highlands were typically narrow, falling away steeply into deep rocky crevasses, the kingdom was nearly impassable with the thorn-gates shut, and any part of it could be isolated from the rest.

The gates, in fact, and the mountains they were built into, were a good part of the reason there was an independent kingdom left at all; whereas the coasts, north and south, where geography gave no advantage to the Sinhalese, had fallen easily to the Europeans.

Dutch or Portuguese incursion was nearly always the given reason for closing the gates, and probably that was always a genuine concern. Still, had that reason not existed, it seemed to Rutland that the king might have been driven to do much the same for others. The people’s rebellion against him, for one, must have changed things. Rutland was still piecing the story together.