Mark de Silva - Square Wave

As at sea, direction alone counted. So he held the phone out in front of him like a dowsing rod and followed. It took him across Knoll, the wide avenue near the cul-de-sacs abutting the city’s essential services.

The fire station rose up on his left, in gray brick, stolid. There had been three firebombings in as many months, all stillborn. Molotov cocktails punctured the upper panes of the windows only to be retarded by metal grills. The fires burned themselves out in the windows, on the steep iron escapes, carbonizing black paint but nothing more.

The department would soon succumb, though. The garage, two fire trucks in it at the time, fell to the flames just weeks later. Several firefighters came rushing up to the second floor after midnight, talking about an inferno below. As the smoke wound its way upstairs, they took to the escapes and made their way down to the asphalt outside. A neighboring fire department was called in to put out the blaze. The cause was never determined. The tanks of the trucks were double-lined steel and the garage itself was heavily insulated. Of the men, the night watchman, a junior firefighter, was dismissed pro forma.

The arrow leaped again, haloed in translucent powder blue and locating Stagg in the middle of the river. It swiveled around, holding course. He was close now, he felt.

He rounded the corner of a twisting lane and a sourness tore at his face. A spasm ran through him from the chest down. The phone slipped from his hand and somersaulted across the metal rain grating. He stumbled on a deep fissure in the sidewalk, a hand across his mouth, and nearly followed the phone to the ground. The loss of balance, the fallen phone, they displaced the odor of waste at the core of his awareness. Instantly it reestablished itself, filling not only his nose, but his mouth and chest. It seemed to penetrate his eyes too, like light, but passing through them altogether, filling the space beyond.

Stagg climbed up a short stoop with a hand on his forehead, instinctively separating himself from the street. An agitated water flowed across it, some vanishing down the sluice, but most flowing around it, toward the corner he’d just turned. Granules, whorls of fine sediment, and bubbles, some barely visible, some large, ballooning and popping, traveled in the flow. He took a snort of air through the nose and choked.

Having landed in the middle of the grating, the phone was mostly safe from these waters. He snatched it up and felt the grit on it. The screen bore a spiderweb crack but the arrow still pulsed, or really, it shimmered, through a halo extended by refraction. It guided him onward. He gauged the shallow flow and checked the time. The woman, Jen, would be waiting. He walked as briskly as he could, his course unchanged.

The source of the foul water seemed to be only a few buildings down, at the turn in the alley. The trouble would be over once he’d cleared it. The smell, of stool fringed with urine, bloomed as the building came into fuller view. But as he approached, it became clear the water came from further on, from the apartments near the next turn in the switchback.

Things went the same way with this building, though, and the one at the turn after too. For a time the source seemed always deferred. Stagg’s incredulity grew with each turn in the lane, each false origin, as the air grew fouler and the water flowed stronger and thicker with sediment. It splashed about at his feet as he chased the arrow, and by the time he finally came to the end of the passageway, his shoes were sopping.

The alley opened onto a wedge of industrial outfits: a body and tire shop, a small hardware store, seemingly family-run, a seller of insulation materials, and several others. An aquamarine billboard adorned with shortboards and blond cigarettes, its skin wrinkled, being imperfectly laid, loomed over the shops and angled out toward the freeway. The whir of traffic mingled with the manhole’s gurgle as it shot sludge and stained water up into the middle of the street like a fountain. The epicenter.

On the other side of the wedge was a tall chain-link fence topped with razor wire, and behind it one of Halsley’s smaller waste stations. The fence gaped — the hole made with bolt-cutters, it appeared. A dozen officials, some uniformed, some signifying their connection to the police force only with caps, but all masked for the pungent air, milled about, assessing the damage. Two others stood near the center taking sharp pulls from cigarettes held like joints. Another pair stood toward the edge, near the fence, silent and blank, with their phones pressed against their ears.

Several police cars and a fire truck were parked on the station lot as golden smoke streaked with rust billowed from the hydraulic pumps. The smoke enveloped a ten-yard stretch of the freeway; the cars shot through it unperturbed.

Beneath the billboard, some of the workers had their shirts pulled up to their eyes. Another held a grease-streaked rag over his mouth and nose. The flow had so far left their shops untouched, the slight incline drawing the filth down the lane Stagg had come by. His loafers were a mess, and his eyes began to water lightly, whether from the excrement rushing out of the manhole, the gauzy twists of smoke, or the ruined shoes. Cordovans.

Further up the road, past the filth, he could see a gas station. He would hear all about the incident soon enough: the demographics of the neighborhood, a public utility compromised in a poorer district. There was no rush — only to the interview with Jen. He’d left in plenty of time and now he was going to be late anyway. It was a pattern that wouldn’t break.

He walked around to the back of the station in shoes squeaking wet. He snatched the air hose by its neck and twisted the copper nozzle. A hiss turned to a whine. He knelt and untied his shoes with one hand while holding the hose pointing skyward near his ear, shooting air into air. Once out of the shoes, he took the hose to them, blasting away the crusting debris and dirty water. The shoes deformed. They shrunk flat when he shot them from above, looking almost like covered slippers, and the uppers ballooned when he pushed the hose up into the toe box.

Having left the socks in a stinking pile near the pumps, he did to his feet what he’d done to his shoes. The skin shuddered as their structure surfaced under pressure.

The hose took his shoes and feet from wet to damp and that was the best he was going to do. He twisted the nozzle shut and flipped the air hose to the ground, not bothering to hang it up. With the water hose he rinsed his hands and walked off from the station, sockless.

He dug the phone out of the pocket of his blazer and wiped the cracked screen, still beaded with water, across his sleeve. Apparently its brains were intact. The face glowed in the weakening light, and the arrow trembled back to life, pointing him further up the lane — away from the piss and shit — to 384 West.

The woman swung the door open at Stagg’s weak knock. Her flaking, lightly pockmarked face, the crevices filled with matte makeup not unlike cream spackle; the contrasting sheen of her forehead; the wide eyes offset by a narrow rhinoplastied nose; and the feathery shoulder-length hair, a brown leaning orange — for a moment his lungs locked up. He could think only of the cocks that would have bruised her throat over the years, the heavy mucus they would have drawn from her, fortified by pre-come, the demands, as those heads crashed against her tonsils, that she swallow. And then the trains she must have ridden to get here, the paperlessness of her life, the money better than she’d ever seen.

“She’s over there,” she said, pointing to the tan leather sofa near the windows. Stagg could see only a woman’s bare feet dangling over the edge of it in the last bit of light. They slipped off the sofa’s arm and fell out of sight.