Mark de Silva - Square Wave

Bach’s suite continued without pause. Larent had been playing the entire time, so steadily the music had seemed to disappear. Now they were suddenly aware of it. The gigue had been reached, its articulation smoothed by drink, making the music elastic and droning in a way Bach never was.

Ravan came back to the table shrugging. Stagg waved off the glass in his hand. “Maybe when she wakes,” he said, setting the wine down in front of her on the table.

“You haven’t heard about this, then?”

“Parts of it,” Stagg lied.

“You have.”

“Just what anyone knows. From the Internet.”

“Oh.” Ravan tilted the glass, anchoring it on his lower lip. “And of course the two squares, the fountains, both exploded.”

“And rebuilt.”

“Well, not quite, not fully.” He leaned over again. “You know Celano has resurfaced, but across the water, in Henning.”

“I did know that,” he lied again. “No more girls have turned up.”

“Right.”

“The museum could well be his and Jenko’s work. I’m quite sure the Wintry’s discussions lately — about the resistance to popular orders, about linking voting, political clout, to knowledge or wisdom or whatever you want to call it exactly — this can’t suit Jenko’s constituency of workers. More than that, we both saw how expertly their own meeting space, the pool hall, I mean, was destroyed not a week ago. If anyone had both the inclination and the resources to do it, well, you’d have to think about the Wintry. Or the government, of course. But we can’t really be destroying everything , can we? And Jenko is certainly no friend of the Wintry, as far as I understand the matter.

“But then maybe I don’t. I was sent in to the museum just to take stock. I suppose we’re not really the brains of this operation, just the registers, the scribes. I’ve filed it with my boss, and yours, Penerin. The main subject I interviewed is someone you must know, probably quite well. That’s why I mention all of this.”

“Oh?”

“Harry.”

“Harry?”

“The director. Harry Kames. You did say your talks are at the Wintry, right?”

“Ah, Harold. Sorry, that’s the way I know him.”

“So you do know him.”

“Of course. It makes perfect sense he was there, though the thought didn’t cross my mind till now. But I don’t know him well.”

“I interviewed a few others, and they corroborated various details he offered. But really he seemed to have taken in the most, felt the happenings most acutely. Just the sweep of his picture. You might think he’d be more shaken for it, and he was definitely shaken, but he was in no worse shape than the others.”

“Better shape, I’d guess. He’s really not society. He is of them, but he’s not them, not at this point, not for a long time. I can’t see him being as surprised as the donors, the supporters, by the things you describe, on some level. Or as angry even.”

“That must be right,” Ravan said. “That’s the way it seemed.”

“While they — well, not all of them, I think the real robber barons are probably not that surprised either. But they must be angrier. Their sons and daughters, their wives, I can’t say what they must be. Probably they don’t know as much.”

“Yes, well, the breeding, the markers, they were there in Kames. But he didn’t seem to share the vanity. That particular sort of vanity, I mean. He seemed plenty vain. That Brahmin drawl. But not in the way that makes shock possible, the kind that comes just before indignation. He was, well, something different, when I met with him. Quite calm. As if that night was gone for him, already. Even the present. There was only the future.”

Suite No. 5 closed, officially, but Larent hung a fermata on the last note and seemed reluctant to let it go. “Well done. Well done, Edward. Now come and have a drink.” From the bedroom came the sound of glass rattling against glass, then the extended gurgle of a heavy pour. The bow slapped against the floorboards. Larent didn’t come out, and he said nothing. “We can wake Renna up if you like,” Ravan called out to him. His eyes shined with faint malice as he nodded at Stagg and drank the rest of his wine.

Stagg drew his fingers together at the base of Renna’s neck, pushing the blood from the surface, leaving blanched tracks on the pale downy-laden skin that filled in a redder shade of white. He angled his fingers to bring his nails into play and caught a tiny fold of skin between them as they met at the base. She revived.

Jen drew breath chilled by last night’s spirits. That morning, from the reaches of her mouth, at the throat, along the gums, and most of all in the vague tissues beneath the tongue, neutral grain returned to her as a vapor. It seeped from the skin inside her face. Brushing didn’t help. Ten minutes later the flavorless, alcoholic cool cut through the lesser cool of peppermint paste.

Reed had moved out of her place a few weeks ago, and she’d spent the time since regressing. For almost three days now she’d lived on Fanta and Smirnoff — a sort of ersatz screwdriver — along with a few protein bars.

Renewal, though, was promise of the afternoon. It’s why she’d made the effort today, through a crippling hangover, to come to this tiny airless studio across the river from Halsley, for her first day in a new, or newish, line of work.

She hadn’t lied to Stagg about the kind of thing she’d be doing. It would free her from the fears of the city’s hookers. That blackjack, really. He should be happy with that, and she’d tell him so the next time he called.

She knew violence couldn’t be dodged, of course. In some sense, it wasn’t even to be dodged. Life was sculpted out of it, the Romans had taught her that much. Homer too, all the pillage and piles of bones burning for the gods. The only question really was which flavor you’d have.

What she’d heard is that this one went down easy. Other escorts she knew were starting to make the same shift. The money wasn’t usually quite as good or quick, and for the first time, it was actually going to be taxable. But everything was controlled. No more surprises. You knew exactly what was going to happen to you, even if it wasn’t any prettier. The material did end up online, it was public, but how long could she keep worrying about that? What wasn’t online? Even some of her hooking had probably been recorded discreetly and posted by some of her johns. It’s just what people did. In any case, without her brother around, she needed a job, the kind she could fit around benders like the one she was coming off of now. There were only so many like that, and none were attractive exactly.

She rubbed her toe along the time-darkened grout of the kitchen floor. The tiles it framed iridesced from a solvent’s residue. Fingerprints plastered the black refrigerator, and its noisy compressor ran almost continuously, even with the dial rolled to five, its warmest setting. The racks of the dishwasher, sea green cages, stretched out from the machine, holding acrylic plates and cups that steamed. Smaller cages held steak knives with sodden wood handles and forks with tines that failed to form a plane.

Sitting conspicuously on the counter, next to the burners and the smoke-stained fan, was the blender — pastel yellow, with imperial measures embossed on the dingy plastic of its jar.

Jen leaned a hip against the counter and pulled the tank top away from her stomach, breaking the seal of sweat. She popped watery blueberries more gray than blue from a perforated plastic box while the two men, mid-thirties and unshaven, misted the fridge with cleaner. They used wads of toilet paper to wipe it down and the streaks iridesced like the tiles till they burned off under the hot floods overlighting the kitchen.