Mark de Silva - Square Wave

“I think I do too.”

“When I’ve been able to. And they say, can’t I write after the degree? How could studying classics hurt a writer? I don’t know if that’s right though. But it doesn’t matter really, does it, since I don’t actually write. But I do still read them. Or I’ve started again. Ovid, last.”

“Oh.”

“You’ve read him? Your other profession maybe.”

“No.”

“Then?”

“Of ancient things, Gorgias last.”

“I knew I knew you. The Gorgias . Plato.”

“Actually, his Encomium of Helen”

“He’s there in Sextus Empiricus too, right? Against the Professors.”

“Right, but second-hand again.”

“I don’t know Gorgias, really. Except from the Gorgias.”

“He doesn’t really show up there, though. No one shows up in Plato but Plato. But Ovid, yes, I have read bits of the Metamorphoses . Not so different… your family, though, do they help you, financially?”

“I don’t expect help from them anymore. They used to send money, sometimes through Reed. They still do, but less regularly, less enthusiastically. It’s not enough anymore to help. He says they’re pretty desperate, wanting me back in Bethesda. I called them from my hospital bed, actually, in the middle of my stay, as if everything was fine. My body was just pieces after the beating. My mother asked me to speak up. That was the jaw. The drip kept me together. And the Librium.”

“Detox.”

“Yeah.”

“You’ve stayed that way.”

“Mariela kept carting me to meetings in the wheelchair. NA, CA, AA. All I really needed was the last of those. The other things aren’t, well, entirely ‘unmanageable.’”

“You still go to AA.”

“I’m not drinking.”

“But the—”

“The point is I’m doing better. That was your point too, wasn’t it?”

“You won’t go home.”

“Not a solution.”

“For a stay. It could be easier to be sober.”

“Well, I spent two summers there during college, and every night I’d end up drinking this plastic pint of vodka out on the driveway. It’s no different now. And there’ll still be the decisions I can’t make.”

“Outside of that, since the hospital, nothing unusual. We haven’t heard from you, so that’s what we’ve assumed.”

“No.”

“Things are getting back to normal? I’m not interested in interfering, it’s not what I’m supposed to do. Same as the last time.”

“You only watch, I get it. Not normal exactly. Hooking was never normal. Anyway, what I’m thinking now is different. It’s safer.”

“It is.”

“It’s legal. I haven’t started. Reed won’t stay forever. He won’t stay more than a couple of weeks now really. I need to do something. I might move. Perk of the job.”

“New profession?”

“It’s definitely an improvement. I haven’t even told Reed what it is. If he knew, he’d be happy, or maybe he’d be sad, and then he’d be happier. You know, it’s been strange not needing to find money these last weeks, to have so much time. I sleep and read. And talk to Reed. I like him more than I remember. A lot more. Maybe I’m just not remembering. Or I just like him more now, and I remember fine.”

“But you won’t level with him.”

“Not now.”

“You can’t trust him.”

“I trust him completely.”

“It’s probably easier to tell—”

“I’m going now, Carl.”

“Okay.”

The light was diminishing in the forests surrounding Belemby, but more slowly now, almost asymptotically, as if the night were unbreachable. Rutland searched for the thin branches he might light with the bark he’d scraped as kindling. Most lay in damp undergrowth, moss-covered, rotting. But in a small clearing he found the stones and barely singed wood of a fire that looked as if it had been made and unmade immediately after. He fingered the branches, wispy and abundant. He pulled twine from his pocket and tied some of them up in a bundle.

The monk appeared at the edge of the clearing, his rust robe catching in a gust of wind. Rutland rose, leaving the wood on the ground. His fire, perhaps. Beyond the monk, in the distance, Rutland made out a narrow, tall building in gray stone with a steep roof tiled in the Portuguese style. The village vehar , its Buddhist temple.

Belemby was small so the temple housed only a few priests, and most rotated from this site to others in the region. To mark its autonomy from the kingdom proper it was placed on the outskirts of the city, though by a centuries-old arrangement between the priesthood and the royal court, the king paid for its construction and upkeep, beyond what the locals provided through a temple tax.

Rutland raised his hand and the monk came forth. In a mix of English and Sinhalese he explained his bundling of the wood, the assumptions made. He started to untie the sticks but the monk, Darasa, held his hand out flat and received a nod in thanks.

Over the years, Rutland had picked up enough Sinhalese to survive on. For his part, Darasa knew substantial tracts of the invaders’ languages: Portuguese, Dutch, and already some English. He asked the Englishman if his needs went beyond wood, light, heat. Rutland scanned the undergrowth before seeing the stylus and the folded parchment next to it in the monk’s hand. Darasa unfolded the parchment, revealing the script, alien to Rutland. He gestured for him to follow him back to the temple, explaining he may have something he might like to read.

I cannot trouble you, Rutland said. He thought to return, with or without the branches. The villagers would soon wonder where he’d gone. The bending of patterns brought unease. Darasa smiled and explained that he would escort him back to the village himself afterward.

They walked toward the spot the priest had emerged from, making parallel prints — Darasa’s feet, Rutland’s boots — in the dirt. The monk had acquired more than a few books over the years from the foreigners: navigational works, texts describing proper seamanship, collections of maps, and a very recent account of a plague crippling Europe. There were also religious works, like the Gemara, portions of the Mishnah, the Koran, and two copies of the New Testament. At the mention of the Bible, Rutland’s eyes got large.

They came across a shack. Rutland recognized it at once — a covel , a temple of the jacco , the devil’s house. They dotted the country. The resident priest ( jaddese ), pious in his way though of low birth and little learning, was absent. A boy with neatly combed hair sat on the stone steps, looking faint and ashen. Darasa touched his head with an impersonal warmth.

The two men entered the front room of the covel. Plates of rice, loose betel leaves, and overripe mangos stretched across the floor. Along the walls men were drawn in reds and blacks. Lying behind the offerings were arrowheads of flint and bone, one affixed to a long branch. They found two poorly wrought shortswords next to a door leading on to a space with room only for a bed. The blades were so blunt and tarnished Rutland couldn’t tell if they were weapons or relics.

They crossed out of the opposite door and came to the yard. Four birds, all short-feathered and blood-red, moved about the pen, pecking at the grass. Each represented a healing, or anyway a patient’s recovery by one means or another, ague being the common malady. The birds would have been gathered for a mass sacrifice to the governing devils; or else for a sale, depending on the scruples of the jaddese.

In trips through the country selling caps, Rutland had seen red cocks of this sort sold in bulk by these lesser priests. A dozen years later, during one of several escape attempts, Knox and Loveland would bring six of these birds, gathered on a reconnaissance trip, back to camp. They’d got them from a jaddese for an iron pan and a few coins. Having lost their common blade fording a river, Knox twisted the necks of some of the birds, rotating them two revolutions until he heard the pop. Loveland, disturbed by the noise and feel of cleanly snapping bone, preferred to smash their heads with a rock. Rutland recalled the plucking vividly, the luster of the feathers, the patience involved. Once the birds were all gooseflesh, they tore out their bowels with their fingers and spiked the gutless creatures on long young branches, roasting them with only the salt they had for sale.