Mark de Silva - Square Wave

The thin blond light turned to gleaming gold, the chill stiffened in a rising wind, but still the whiskey pulled him under. Lately his dreams were duller than his life. They embarrassed him, their triteness, their risible symbolisms. They were also countable, and this redeemed them for him, at least a little.

There were five. Or else five acts of a single dream. In the first, standing, he eats a cold Reuben just peeled from the plastic wrap, the meat stiff, the striations of fat congealed, the rye disintegrating in a bath of Russian dressing. He throws a quarter of it out, but on its way past the swinging door of the deli trash-can, a twisted rope of plastic gets stuck in it. The man behind the counter, the one without a paper hat, stares at him as he decides whether he’s expected to push the sandwich through. Often he would wake after this, and once he even fixed himself a sandwich.

When he returns to sleep, invariably he’s high above half-court watching basketball. He can taste salted beef cutting through the barley of arena beer. A lanky guard on the wing sheds his defender off a high screen but runs into a forward, arms wide, legs low, waiting at the elbow. He’s forced toward the baseline, where he starts backing down the bigger man. The help comes, a passing lane opens, but the clock is at four. He picks up his dribble, holds the ball against his chest, and puts up a turnaround fade-away over the fingertips of the forward and the center. The horn sounds and the backboard is framed in pipes of red light. The ball skips across the rim. The half is done. The score stays tied. The stadium monitors replay the shot three times, each one in slower motion than the last.

Before the close, two intervening acts: the first, at a latrine, listening to the drumming of piss on steel, and the second, in an enormous crowd molded in the shape of an avenue, on New Year’s, creeping down the Las Vegas Strip. Sometimes he can only manage to keep his feet beneath the spot where the crowd steers the rest of his body, but sometimes he feels as if, for a moment, it is his feet, his body now driven by them, that moves the crowd.

And then the finale, which is without all sound. In the midafternoon sun he walks four blocks, through empty streets, in the city’s red light district. When he arrives at the river, he sits on the front slats of a bench, right on the edge of it, with a Parliament behind his ear. He pulls the box of cigar matches from his shirt pocket and lights one, large like the tiniest torch, with a gentle stroke. The tall teardrop of a flame fails to bear a twitch of the air. Four matches go the same way. The box has many more. But he sets it down on a slat, bites down on the filter, and hunches forward, resting his chin on his hands as his thoughts turn to nothing especially. There the curtain drops.

In these dreams he is only half there, sometimes less, though he does not for that recognize them as dreams. If the cycle fails to complete in a night, usually it begins the next day afresh, with the sandwich. However many times his rest is broken, the sequence nearly always resumes with the next dream, as if waking were merely a scheduled intermission. It has been like this for weeks now. He anticipates them before he dozes, the acts he knows await him.

But this morning, this afternoon, just traceless dreams, or none at all, it is impossible to say. He awakes beneath a mass of blankets, piled high and twisted, overlying each other at odd angles but failing even in their totality to cover him. The sheets are damp. The cold has taken the feeling from his feet, as the bedroom, window agape, is now only an annex of a half-formed night. He shuts the window with a struggle, needing to lean on the frame with both hands, which are numb like his feet. It opens more easily than it closes.

He sits on the bed and studies the painting in translucent white on the floorboards — apparently his own work from this morning, just after Renna left. Three Newman zips. But it’s the only abstraction left. Sleep has cleared away the rest.

The bottle is darkening with the afternoon. He pictures the stripped mattress on the other side of the wall, a queen covered, head to foot, only in his papers — the scattered Dutch records, dug up in a minor Viennese library indifferently pointed out to him by his father. Haas’s journals.

He rises. If nothing else, there is work. Bricolage.

With both hands on the stock, and the barrel nearly vertical, Haas lifted the arquebus ( haakbus ) above his head. The grain of the heavily wooded arm, descendant of the handgonne, flashed copper in the light infiltrating the canopy. The sterling serpentine, engraved with boar and crossbow, held the slow match, and from its ends, narrow streams of smoke rose without curling, revealing the light’s architecture, the crisscrossing, odd-angled channels by which it arrived at the canopy floor.

Haas rested the tip of the barrel in a tree fork, smooth and black and eight feet high. Along the blade sight, with his left eye shut, he regarded the thorn-gate along the mountain path, and beyond that, the fortified walls of a highland village, Detumbeneram, not far from Kandy, center of the island kingdom of Lanka ( Zeilari ).

The village had been sealed off in anticipation of his approach from the south, the Dutch strongholds of Colombo and Galle. The Portuguese had claimed these cities in 1500, more than a century and a half ago. It took the Dutch, newly arrived in the next century and working with the Sinhalese from 1640, a decade or so to dislodge them. By now, though, in 1663, the allies were enemies. The Dutch were at least as interested in controlling the island as the Portuguese they’d helped drive off.

The North Country remained in Portuguese hands. Strangely, they’d made no progress in the Highlands separating them from the south. Had they found it impossible to take Kandy? Or had a tacit understanding formed since the Dutch-Sinhalese alliance collapsed, that the island belonged to them both now but no other, that the common enemy was the Dutch?

That was beyond Haas’s ken. What he knew was that ten years ago the Portuguese ably defended the north coast against his Dutch ships descending from India. He’d had to circle back from the south of the island to gain a foothold — at the time with Sinhalese aid — against more porous Portuguese defenses, unfortified by the European forces stationed to the north, in India.

He also knew that some of the soldiers he’d been fighting lately, in the Dutch effort to take Kandy, had a complexion neither native nor European. They fought a bit like Europeans, more than the Indians did, though with a greater ease with ambush. There were also some that fought alongside the Sinhalese who seemed to Haas purely Portuguese by blood, though they spoke, and cursed, only in Sinhala, the native language, even in the moments before death, with a bayonet twirling their guts, when one’s mother tongue ought to be irrepressible.

Haas cocked his head toward the other Dutchmen — some soldiers, but many merchants, stand-ins for the severe casualties suffered only months ago. They all stood in a line beneath the giant palm leaves that overlay the tall wood frame bound by twine. The shelter was less for their protection than for the powder’s. A pile of round ball, another of buck, lay just behind the men, and a large sack of powder lay beneath still more leaves. These also served as wadding for the guns.

The men held a collection of cheap flintlock and wheel-lock muskets, with the odd matchlock among them. Haas’s arquebus was of another era: unwieldy and requiring a rest to fire, though forked branches could play the role, as now. For all its faults, it was of altogether better class than the muskets.