Mark de Silva - Square Wave

Generally all of this nauseated him, and though he didn’t like to think about it, it must have been one of the less lofty reasons he’d dropped out of publishing so quickly: that he might not have to know these gallants of empty graces and Cheshire smiles.

In fact, she too wanted to feel she was something apart from these men, that world, especially its charlatanry, which in quieter moments she allowed, in the soft, slow monotone she did her thinking in, was part of its essence, maybe even part of its allure. You were never really expected to show your hand.

His affection for her, though, was the proof that she had a hand to show. After all, she thought, he’d done the work — not just intellectually, in books, but introspectively, in himself — that they mostly pretended to. If she could hold his attention when they could not, that must mean something: that though she spent much of her time swanning around, disappearing in the froth, there would always be a remainder. And this, the solidest bit of her, was something that he had to take seriously.

But did she really want that, to be truly seen? Wasn’t that seriousness, the very one he was applying now while she ran off into that world, already beginning to undo them? The closer he looked, the more she squirmed, the more the remainder receded like a mirage. Even if it existed, she did nothing to honor it. And was that what drew him to her anyway? He stepped around the idea that her appeal might be grounded in bone structure. Perhaps they both needed the conceit then.

None of these thoughts, of course, helped in bed with her. But alone, with his hand on his cock, they brought him not just nausea but pleasure. Solitude activated their sexual potential. He came hardest this way now, without her around, only a notion of her and him, and not a flattering one.

It occurred to him then, in that swell of endorphins, that really her history with men was derivative, an effect emanating from a cause broader if not deeper than sex. She was shot through with a flutter.

The skittering and lunging, more than her beauty, had a near unassailable force on him — near only because, like bad hearts, her attention too had a flutter in it. The order of explanation, though. Was it just that she was a perfect conduit? The impressions the world made on her, lighting the eyes, tickling the skin, was their transmission simply uncorrupted, and all her buzz and bloom merely the reflection of a chaos woven into the world itself, an irreducible manifold? Was it, then, only his own sensorium’s deficiencies that rendered the world smooth enough to still his mind? Could this distortion, the soft focus, be what provided for the possibility of sustained attention, and so of art, love, friendship, and the rest of the things the gymnast had spoken of?

But then it might have been the other way around. Maybe the flutter dwelled in her, sent a tremor through the world. It might have been what governed the flitting that so transfixed him, if “governed” was the right word.

What whiskey remained he tipped into last night’s snifter till the better part of the balloon was amber. He took four overlarge gulps, brimming mouthfuls that sent trickles of liquor down his chin. Sparking the flint of the lighter continuously, he sat back on the bed and returned his eyes to his feet, waiting for the soft and familiar burn of the stomach and a still airier texture to the world in his mind.

Sometimes he wished simple condemnation were an option. But there were spasms of awareness in her as rich as any he’d known: the times, say, she could tell he’d had four drinks not three, or more preternaturally, ten drinks not eight, by the slightest variations in the clatter of his words as they left his mouth; or sense the strength of his misgivings by how their hands fit together when they walked; or weigh the gravity of his thoughts by how his head lay on her shoulder, in bed.

There were the times too when she seemed to recall every detail of his boyhood, however quotidian, or of his sexual history, however odd, that he’d ever conveyed to her, even if only implicitly. She would seem more at home with his life than he was, more able to flip through the facts, his facts, and arrange them into significant wholes. She couldn’t do the same for herself, of course. She could be you but not her. That was her perversion.

Then there were the times, when she was excited for a stretch, for whatever reason, that she would effortlessly absorb the tiniest things he did, chart the place and nature of every object around him. Long after he’d let go of the occasion’s minutia, she could recall just what he’d eaten, what he’d passed on, and in what order; or where the power outlets were or weren’t in a country house she’d been in just once, many months ago, in another country; or the exact page on which he’d given up on a book forever, setting it face up and open on the kitchen table, its spine broken.

In all of these moments he felt transparent, and something like parity would reign between them. For the grain of his own attention, she admiringly granted, was unobservable, only a postulate; and it seemed always pitched that way, toward her, toward anything — except, as she’d ruefully pointed out more than once, when he made himself hopelessly drunk, and understanding was no longer an option.

But her awareness undulated. Like a square wave of terrific amplitude, the crests would drop precipitously into troughs no less remarkable, but for the purity of their oblivion. She was made of nothing then, as was everything around her. Nothing counted, not even things that meant the world: her work, his writing.

His own being would begin to flicker. Sometimes she would smile. It terrified him, the voided eyes. He would look into his hands and croak, “Anyway…” She would say things then they would never remember, not because the words didn’t reach their ears, but because their sense, so slight, seemed to die with their sound.

He couldn’t help but anticipate these slackenings. They contaminated the tauter stretches, throwing them in relief, making them more acutely felt and then immediately missed, even before they had actually gone. Sex was no different — towering spikes of communion plunging down toward onanism until it was only that. She’d get herself off lying next to him, eyes closed, having only just got off on him. “I like it when you’re selfish,” she’d say. He liked it when she wasn’t.

So things went, in an endless oscillation. She was as close to him, then as far from him, as one might be, and it was rending him. It made him wonder what exactly he was to her. Once, she’d cheerfully volunteered that he was like a stone at the bottom of a pond. He was still thinking about that. She, on the other hand, she was the lizard that walks on water, she said. Or not walks. It couldn’t do that, not without crashing through. Certainly not stands. Only runs. The surface was just firm enough for that, shattering only after she had moved on.

You slow me down, she said. That must be how she’d arrived, falling to him, beyond the dappling light above. It was new. She liked it, seeing in the dark, without the glare. And what was she to him then? An emissary? Of that same light?

The whiskey continued to disperse him. He considered now how the crests of the wave might be dilated, if that was the key between them. Perhaps it could be accelerated, he thought, its frequency increased, its period compressed, so that the gaping voids at the base might be elided from experience, as the black between film frames is, and her attention might appear a continuous succession of peaks.

Perhaps, though, he would get used to the pairing of states, learn to take what he could from both. To take the flutter out of her mind, even if he could, might take it out of her body too, and he couldn’t be sure he’d want what remained. She might be an alloy, not an element. There might be no space, when it came to her, between purity and dispersion.