Mark de Silva - Square Wave

These alliances might also be as unavoidable as they were unfamiliar. There was overlap in these redefinitions, yes, but even more discord than agreement, so that wasn’t why. Really it was the act of redefinition itself that arrayed them all against the state, which was itself happy enough with the old understanding and doing its best to stamp out the shifts of meaning the factions were floating. As far as the government was concerned, they were the same. Revisionists.

The particulars were still shrouded, Celano said, but the mist was burning off every day. He said no more. Which was wise, Jenko thought.

Celano’s abstractions quieted the room. There was a coded charge to the words, though the code was neither one he had encrypted nor one he was necessarily equipped to decipher. A murmur came from the workers as Celano stepped down from the podium and re-entered the partitioned space. They clapped with calloused hands. The taps shot beer into chilled mugs. They returned the tables to their places and began to play games of nine-ball, in teams.

The footfalls came on slowly, the soft slapping of leather on stone. Stagg twisted toward the staircase: a descending pair of unshined wingtips, then seersucker trousers, then a heavy wool cardigan a deep green.

“You got that text too, yeah,” Ravan said.

“I did.”

“And what’ve you found?” he asked, surveying the damage casually.

“Looks like a police raid. Same contractors, at least. Same matériel.” Stagg pointed to a charred strip of tempered vinyl that appeared military grade.

These raids were sometimes as destructive as any wrought by the factions they were meant to subdue. The government had already exploded several hives of the agents of opposition and their alleged abettors, on grounds of national security. Of course, political license for this kind of violence wasn’t easy to acquire. It depended on the sustained appearance of sedition.

There were certainly clear-cut cases of it. Lately, though, the basis for these interventions appeared to have grown thinner, more preemptive, even reckless. It was consuming credibility, and questions of this sort were losing their paranoiac ring: How many involved embellished charges, only to justify the tightening of control? Worse, how many of these police raids were passed off as the work of factionalists, for the same purpose?

Jenko’s hall looked to be one of these confidence-eroding cases. As far as anyone knew, alongside more mundane discussions of procedural matters, only Celano’s almost philosophical talks went on at Jenko’s. There was no history of violence to point to, and no manifest incitement to it either.

In the wake of the attack, the government had the usual choices: claim that the evidence of violence, or the intention to it, had to remain classified — this did not ease anyone’s worries, not at this stage — drum up some evidence, or disclaim the attack and count it as internecine warfare between factions.

The angle to be taken on Jenko’s hall was not yet established, or anyway known to the two agents.

“The meetings might have been a bother to the government — to us, I mean,” Ravan said. “They’ll have to make the case for going this far, though,” he said, gesturing at the wreckage. “Or implicate some enemy of labor in this. A pretty sophisticated one, by the looks of it. Anyway, I’ve just come from talking to Emile, the owner, at the station.” He relayed the substance of the workers’ meeting to Stagg, as told by Jenko.

“And where is Celano?” Stagg asked.

“He wasn’t there, but Penerin’s looking for him.” They walked through the space, the debris. “You know, I don’t think I’m seeing anything you’re not. It does look like our work — the same sort, actually, I’ve seen in other districts lately. That’s really why I’m here, to compare. But I don’t see a difference. Not one that makes any.”

Ravan paused over a shattered cue ball. A blue dust coated it. “The explosive traces, the shrapnel, the placement and timing — maybe the motives too — generations of R&D behind them all. That’s the way it looks, anyway. They’re convinced these are framings, Penerin and all. Not actually government work. The appearance of state oppression. That’s what they’re designed to give.”

“ We are convinced,” Stagg said, touching Ravan’s shoulder with the tips of his fingers. His voice was flat.

“We are?”

“It’s not so easy to make the case, I guess, when things look like this,” Stagg said. “So… to form.”

“Well, yes, how does it play?” Ravan said. “And what do I know, we know, about what Penerin and my supervisor are convinced of? We know what they tell us. And they might not even know as much as they think, never mind what we do. I don’t see how any of us can be convinced of anything much, really.”

They ascended the staircase, leaving a precisely established chaos behind them.

“I hear you’re doing better,” stagg said over a crackling phone line. “A little bit better.”

“The wheelchair’s gone,” Jen said. “They took it back.”

“That’s good. You can walk.”

“Is that what you mean?”

“Well—”

“No more rolling around.”

“And your eye… I remember. It was painful.”

“I have whites instead of reds again.”

“Good.”

“I still see double at night, brights against darks. Everything haloes, and text, especially text, like on a computer screen, it doubles.”

“You’re not done getting better. That’s what the doctors tell me.”

“My ribs get sore, they’re sore now, when I’ve coughed too much, or laughed too much the night before.”

“Laughing is—”

“It’s happened once.”

“They take time. I’ve broken mine.”

“Have you. And your collarbones too?”

The line flickered with static.

“I’m sorry. What I—”

“My fingers work. They didn’t for weeks. They were all these colors. Green, orange, blue, red…”

“The bruises must have been deep.”

“Must have been.”

“But they’re gone.”

“My grip’s still weak. All my fingers tremble when they come together. I drop a lot of things.”

“That’ll change.”

“The stitches have all come out. I had twelve above my right eye.”

“I remember.”

“Left a scar along my eyebrow. My head just split there. And I’ve got stitches along the edge of my wrist. Odd place to get them. I don’t know how a lot of it happened.”

“That’s okay.”

“It wasn’t, though.”

“To who?”

“At the interview. You didn’t say it. But it wasn’t okay.”

“That’s not true. You were very helpful.”

“I was on drugs, for the pain.”

“You were helpful. And you have a copy of your statement. So if you did want to add—”

“See, I knew you would ask me that. That’s what I mean. It’s not okay. But nothing’s clearer now. I read it over four times. I could have been clearer, more direct, answering your questions, but the facts are the same. The tiny ones are sharp. But the big ones are dull, soft. The facts are the problem.”

“We aren’t expecting anything more from you. But yes — this is why I’m calling, mostly — as helpful as you were, we still don’t have anything concrete. I’m sorry to have to tell you that.”

“Nothing.”

“Though there are a dozen or so people under special watch.”

“There’s a profile, you mean.”

“And what you’ve told me has contributed to it.”

“But it fits twelve people.”

“Well, yes. Even they aren’t hard suspects. I don’t want to mislead you.”