Mark de Silva - Square Wave

“You’ve known of our satellite discussion groups and lecture series, springing up around the country, I take it?” Kames asked.

“I attended a talk — in London. On Fourier’s flaws.”

“We are there too. The endowment funds all of this. We’re injecting ideas, complex, careful ideas, but bold ideas, into the world with a speed no university can match.

“But our mission’s considered problematic. And not just by the universities. Why, I don’t know. That we don’t take politics, democracy, to come before philosophy? That’s a very anti-Socratic view. That we don’t mind testing truisms? Probably it’s that we don’t do it in a way safely disengaged from actual life. Corrupting the youth, they’ll say.”

Stagg felt a buzz in his chest.

“But what has really changed, I think, is the surrounding circumstances: ‘at a time like this.’ The attacks at the turn of the century, 9/11, then the ones in Spain and England, for all the tragedy they wrought, seem to have freed something up in people — peoples — who substantively couldn’t be more different. The discord, this interminable collision of interests that will not yield, the impossibility of any course sticking for more than a moment, until the next election, and, more than anything, these voting blocs that are persistently defeated, cycle after cycle. All this has left people… primed.

“The planes, the falling towers of World Trade, were the sparks to this charge. Then there was an exploded space, a place from which another look at our political mechanisms, the entrenched methods of coordination and decision making, became not only possible but unavoidable. They stood exposed.

“It’s taken a few years — almost three decades now — but not that many. The Wintry was quick to recognize that space, I would say, and we’ve been effective in suffusing the atmosphere with, well, reconceptions of the social world, ones that aren’t definitively aligned with any active political tradition, and certainly not with any of the parties and their ragbags of ideas and policies. It is confusing the order, what we do. Clouding any Archimedean vision of political process. We are not so easily forgotten about.”

The buzzing recurred — Stagg’s phone, in the inner pocket of his blazer.

“I tell you all this, as a prospective fellow,” Kames said, “because these are complicated times for the Wintry, or really anyone looking to scrutinize form, the shape of things. You are doing that, it seems, but obliquely: the collision of several historical orders, the trajectory of a family, and then, in an enacted sense, of the form historical inquiry might profitably take. All this interests me, us. I’ll be curious to see what your genealogy unearths, tells us, now, about today.”

“I should be able to get something polished to you in a few weeks, the first talk, or piece.”

“Fine. Very good.”

Kames walked Stagg to the oak doors flanked by enormous bay windows, concave like eyes.

Outside, on the honey cobblestones, Stagg checked his messages. A text only: “Jenko billiards. Downtown ASAP.”

The cues were in three and four pieces, ragged spikes of maple shorn by an undetermined force. Several of the tables closest to Stagg were on their knees, half their legs having been blown off at the joints, leaving them buckled, with cloths sloping. The balls were cloaked in soot, mildly discolored or worse. Most were numbered, stripes and solids, meant for games of eight- and nine-ball. There was also a small share of unnumbered balls, continuous pinks, reds, blacks, greens, browns, blues, and whites.

In the back of the hall, beyond a sodden curtain fallen to the ground and a line of sharded glass, lay the remains of a table of great dimensions — for snooker, and billiards as well, judging by the white ball resting against its edge. The table had lost all its legs and lay flat on the ground. The cloth had burnt off, but evenly, completely, and the dense wood had turned a rich charcoal tone. The plane of the table was still flat and smooth, and though the airier wood of the cushions was only ashes now, the metal frame, marked by pockets at its joints, skeletally cordoned off the space. Stagg thought it looked as though it were meant for a different game entirely, perhaps one played with clubs instead of cues; or if not that, then a kind of billiards where players lie prone like snipers to shoot. The posture might not suit the billiards clientele. But then, he thought, they did enjoy the hunt traditionally.

Further back, there were a couple of pocketless carambole tables for defunct games like straight rail and balkline. The entire area had been shielded from the common eight-ball tables by a frosted glass partition, though Stagg could only see the indeterminate remains of it, and would have to confirm the fact later, with Emile, the Jenko who owned the hall.

The Jenkos were Slovenian transplants, but several generations past now, first to London in the 1920s, then to Boston and Halsley in the 1960s. They were an educated clan, mostly in law and medicine, though they were businessmen at heart. Emile himself had taken an LLB at Imperial, in London, where the broadest branch of his family remained. He never practiced, though. After returning to the States, he passed up the LLM or JD and went into business, with money his grandfather had made with a series of snooker halls in North London: Jenko halls, as they came to be called.

He opened one downtown, in this space, which originally housed a small factory. As a child he’d enjoyed the antiquated table games, dead like Latin, especially carambole, where the balls were few and even then unsinkable. He’d first learned them in the small London halls that carried those embalmed traditions forward. Cue-sport connoisseurs were their custodians.

Thanks to Jenko’s efforts, Halsley was home to a cadre of well-heeled enthusiasts, one already familiar with billiards. The glass partition, though, hadn’t been their idea.

Emile’s father, a doctor but also a businessman in medical supplies, had gotten some of his friends to frequent his son’s club. But the humble clientele jarred them visibly, so much so that they would rent out the entire hall for the night.

Emile put the partition in thinking they might come more often that way, since the whole hall would not have to be rented. They could treat it as a private club of sorts downtown, which was close to the banks but somewhat far from the best recreation. But even the mute, blurred presence of the eight-ball players turned out to be unbearable to them; they kept renting the whole hall for a single table.

The glass was functionless, then, except as decoration. Jenko had commissioned the frosting at some expense, for the way light refracted through the etched pattern: a coat of arms slashed with Habsburg quills, the only nod to Slovenia in the building. Lit from behind, it produced a vague illumination sharply articulated only along the clear shafts of the arrows, which gave them the look of being on fire.

The curtain that ran along the partition was almost always left open, mostly because both sides of the hall were rarely occupied on the same night, but also because when they were, the carambole enthusiasts would be of less benighted origins, and they felt no need for distance from the common eight-ball players. On nights when the common hall became particularly rowdy, though, the curtain was closed to discourage curiosity, which drink had a way of darkening.

Stagg was the first of the extended intelligence forces to arrive. The police had taped off the basement staircase and given the hall a first look, making note of potential evidence, dusting for prints. At the top of the stairs they stationed two men to watch over the place. They IDed Stagg and left him to examine the hall. Through the blown-out windows behind the stairs, he couldn’t make out the specifics of the damage. But its complexion was heavy.