Mark de Silva - Square Wave

“Your family is here,” Stagg asked, “or in England?”

“My accent you mean?”

“Your phrasing really. Your words. But the accent too.”

“It is mangled, isn’t it. No way around it now, though. Stuck with a mongrel tongue. My mother and father are back in Delhi, actually, after too many years abroad, first in Palo Alto, when I was very young, and then in London, at King’s College, for many years. I grew up there, really, until university — college — when my father went back to his research at Stanford. I went with him, and then to Berkeley for the doctorate. My brother, Menar, stayed on in England, but he studied the same, at Oriel, in Oxford. He’s with my father in India now, working alongside him. Researching. Testing.”

“And you’re here,” Stagg said.

“Well, he’s the better physicist, of the two of us. Better vision, bigger ideas. No one says that exactly but it’s true. Is that why I got out?” He asked the question to himself and laughed dismissively.

As the roach consumed itself in the ashtray Ravan took out a tiny bud from the sandwich bag on the table. It was shaded olive and swathed in blue-white filaments. He tore it apart into stiff crinkled threads and set it on a rolling paper. He took a pouch from his pocket and sprinkled dark, sticky tobacco onto it and started to make a joint of it.

Stagg slid the lighter on his edge of the table across to Ravan and stole a look into the bedroom. The door was leaning against the inner wall and though it was misted with water, he could see out of the far window: the neon sign of a Mexican restaurant, El Calque, frosted pink.

The bowing of the bass had stopped for a while. It had been replaced by a steady mumbling between Renna and Larent. Stagg had strained to pick it up, any of it, and he might have if it weren’t for Ravan prattling on the entire time. Marijuana always had the opposite effect on Stagg. For him, that was the point. Apparently not for Ravan.

Renna finally emerged, heavy-lidded and happy, though the reason for her happiness, the soft smile on her face, he had no way of grasping, except that it came out of a conversation with Larent. She climbed onto the couch and deposited her head in Stagg’s lap, this time with her knees tucked up close to her chest and her arms wrapped around them. He tugged on her ear and she frowned playfully. He held her neck gently, four fingers against her pulsing throat. She turned up toward him with her eyes closed and her lips puckered. He laid his finger on them lengthwise and she took it between her teeth like a bone.

Ravan watched the exchange as twists of smoke leaked from his mouth and shot up his nostrils, returning by the same channels in thinner, more uniform streams. He picked up with the chatter as if there’d been no interval, and on his third joint of the night, perhaps for him there hadn’t been.

“I don’t actually think so,” he said, “that he’s the better physicist. Not necessarily. It might just be he looks harder, or that the world, the qualities of clouds, tugs on his eyes a bit more sharply. It really is his life, physics. But not mine. I think our father would have liked it, actually, if I’d turned out to have been the more committed one. But he knew I was leaning away quite early on.

“I studied music composition too, you see, along with the obligatory physics, which came very easily to me, because of the mathematics at its core. And I took as a child more avidly than he could have guessed to the sarod, of which my uncle was a master. He lived with us for a time, and he would find me sometimes in his room, tunelessly sounding notes, just kneeling over the thing, plucking randomly. I was very young then, and it was enthralling, this source of sound where any note at all could be found. The fretless guitar I’ve got now is modeled on it, really. Edward and I, we come at this matter of pure tunings, intonation, from such different angles. I think it’s auspicious.

“So, yes, I think my father knew Menar Jr. — they’ve got the same name — would end up the proper colleague, not me. But his firstborn has always been a bit aloof, occasionally surly, and now to top it off he’s gone and married a Muslim.” He seemed to wink as he said this, or it may have been smoke in his eye. He passed the joint to Stagg.

“So they’re not so close,” Stagg said.

“Oh, they get on well enough, but my father and I, we get on more easily — or did, before it became clear my intentions were musical. I seem to be a better detector of his humor, which can be very sly, subtle. That seemed to count for a lot; he’s not generally thought of as a funny man.

“I am, or was, probably more alive to his sense of purpose — even if I didn’t quite share it — of wanting to turn the ground of our origins, our ancestors, from this flaking, sunburnt dirt that produced only hunger in any abundance, to something less violently resistant to growth. Whereas Menar Jr. always seemed to be in thrall to the physics of the project more than its potential to change things, to intervene in anything… human. At least that’s how he was. I don’t know why exactly, but his interest in applications, fieldwork, has picked up lately — and just as mine’s been drowned out by the music.

“Still, physics has been important to me. I’m only a few years removed from it, really, and even then, I’ve been checking in throughout. Menar’s worked straight through, of course, right alongside my father. The work is captivating in its way. Now I suppose, with the new job, I’ll just have to summon a bit more of that interest. If I can’t get the music right with Edward, I may end up rejoining them more permanently anyway. I don’t know what I think of that.”

“But what they’re doing in India, you’ll be doing in Princeton, basically?” Stagg asked. “Or is that not right?”

Renna’s breath turned heavy and sleep-indicative. She had a habit of dozing in public, but without the narcoleptic’s excuse. Depending on the occasion, Stagg found it vexing or charming. Tonight, though, it changed nothing. She had smoked, so it wasn’t as ridiculous as it usually was.

“No, something similar. What we all do. Weather mod — cloud seeding lately. Only got the job, I think, because of my father. He’s become something of a celebrity in applied atmospherics, for his work precipitating and dispersing clouds. Forty years he’s been working on this. The original motivation was drought and famine relief, especially in Orissa, Bengal, and the inland plateaus, where we’re from, ancestrally.”

“Kalinga,” Stagg said.

“Impressive! Yes, very good. In any case, my grandfather was a director of Project Gromet, back in the ’60s, the first large-scale weather mod attempt in India. The White House backed it, actually, to relieve the Bihar drought. It didn’t, of course.

“There’ve been a lot of cul-de-sacs along the way. Gromet was just the first. But they were all worth something. And the field trials I was a part of, they always brought me some satisfaction, whatever the outcome. My brother was always more pencil-and-paper, and more purely about results, success. I think my wider interest pleased my father, who could also take a certain delight in the flowering of a doomed experiment. I was with him through a lot of them, sometimes just in the role of spectator, to be fair. Every couple of years we would go back to India, the Ghats, from London or Palo Alto, to try something new, something big, like bringing in a monsoon out of season, say, luring it into the inland plateaus it normally avoided.

“My father understands the history of weather modification profoundly. He’d spend weeks in the archives alone, searching for the germs of ideas in those errant experiments, the truth in failure. Really it’s not much different from what we’re trying to do with music, Edward and Li and I.