Mark de Silva - Square Wave

“As I say, limelight,” Menar said.

The NOAA staff looked on as water pooled around their shoes. Absolute white and sizzling in their ears, the darts broke the plane of the cloud and dug into the storm. The men watched these haloed dots of white, still surprisingly bright, as they continued to race away from each other, though the rust-colored lines of the star itself disappeared, cloaked now by cloud.

Their eyes dealt more easily with the veiled limelight, and they continued to follow the expanding circle of lights. When the darts had finally exhausted themselves, they marked the vertices of a star twice the size of the terracotta one they’d just painted on the underside of the storm above.

Menar looked back at the laptop. The spent darts would be descending now, unlit and unseen.

“So let’s see,” he said. It was still storming hard and the mudflats outside had become a lake of red, as they did in flash floods. (Nearby Furnace Creek also reported unusually heavy rains.)

Ravan thought he could hear the beginnings of a decrescendo. The roiling waters filled the ears less fully now, and it was easier, it seemed, to attend to the rest of his senses. The first thing he noticed were his sopping shoes. The lab assistants pulled heavy towels from a storage closet and threw them to the ground, working them around with their feet, mopping up what they could.

“You can give the drone another pass,” Menar said. Michael radioed again with the orders. “It must be quite hot now.”

They all sensed the diminishing patter of water on the roof. Outside on the flats, the ropes withered to beads, first swollen and oblong, but then, sooner than seemed reasonable, just tiny dots, specks.

“Very much hotter,” Michael said, staring into a screen.

The cloud itself was losing substance, not through collapse but expansion. As it distended it turned wispier, vaporous, ever more transparent, the gray and black ribbons seeming to lighten as they dissolved into simple air.

The lightest drizzle persisted, but the extent of the transformation left the NOAA people nodding vaguely to one another and pointing up at the faltering cloud.

“What you have here is something real,” Michael said without looking at Menar, who was seated on the table, playing with his laptop, his mouth bent this time into an insouciant smirk visible to anyone who cared to see. Ravan, shoeless now, joined the other assistants looking out onto the watery flats, his heart beating harder but not faster.

In a lightless room he awoke to her weight, a leg strewn across his, a palm planted in his chest, a chin tucked above his collarbone, a mouth set against his neck. She’d rather he not wake. He knew this. Probably she thought this was the surest way of stopping him. At the very least she’d be hoping he’d wink at her delayed arrival, once again past midnight.

“How was the night?” Stagg’s voice was uneven and weak from sleep. It pleased him not to have to simulate this, though he would have, had he been awake, say, for hours in the dark, waiting.

“Good,” she whispered.

For a moment he let Renna believe that was it, and she began to take the long, even draughts of air that bring sleep.

“Good,” he said into the silence.

He put his hand over hers, the one on his chest, and she rubbed his fingers, pressed her lips more firmly against his neck, but without a pucker so it made no sound. Thalidomide kisses, she called these. He’d been the first to offer them, nameless then, and she disliked them, shuddered when he placed them on her cheeks in jest. Tonight, though, she must have thought they made a kind of sense.

He squeezed her fingers together, running the tips over one another, and put his free hand behind the knee of the leg that ran across his own.

“I got you the cinnamon-lox thing,” he said. “Sounds disgusting. But it’s on the desk.”

“No it’s so good. I had some,” she said. “Why are you so nice to me?” This time she kissed him properly on the neck, held his skin between her teeth. She slid her hand down his stomach. He caught it.

“And those three were how?” Though no louder, his voice was more substantial now, more committed to wakefulness.

“Just rehearsing.” Her voice was firming up too, though reluctantly. “There was marked-up staff paper everywhere. The way your papers are. I think I stepped on some of them in the dark just now.” She scratched the hair on his chest. “You’re not mad, I hope.”

The laugh he gave was inaudible, but the tightening of his chest was enough for her to know.

“Ravan can read music?” he asked.

“Yes. And well. He’s as serious as Edward.”

“And Li.”

“He wasn’t reading. Not sure he can’t though.”

“And you can, still?”

“Sort of. But I would never have been able to read this stuff. Partly it was so heavily corrected. There were slashes of ink everywhere, strikeouts, notes that had been written over, woven right into the passages. So it was hard to read off what was left through all of that. But even if it had been clean, the notation is just really weird. I think a lot of it they’ve just made up, for all the microtonal things.

“They’re working on this long piece, symphony length, with some parts that are electronic, tape loops, things Edward’s always been interested in,” she continued. “There are all these sweeping lines linking sections, and little scratchings and symbols in the margins and between staffs, for notes that don’t belong on the lines. A bunch of different sharps and flats too, and a bunch of fermatas, caesuras, which made the page that much more crowded and weird.”

“I’m supposed to know what those are?”

“Caesuras? Well, I guess there’s no reason you should. But you do, don’t you.”

This time his laughter made it to their ears.

“And the sound?”

“I’m still thinking about it. Sort of a wall, I guess. But it felt like it was taller and wider than the room. It’s hard to explain. Like it was only part of a whole that wasn’t all there to be heard. But really it was the whole. That was it.”

“And?”

“And… it sounded strange at first. The chords. But as you got used to the structure, the motion, that sense of incompleteness, it sounded even stranger, but in the details now, the textures.” She paused. “Ravan’s done a lot of the writing, I think. Or at least the rewriting. It didn’t look like Edward’s handwriting, or only partly, so I’m guessing.”

“But it was only notes.”

“You can still tell someone’s handwriting.”

“Clearly.”

“They work together in this weird way,” she said, ignoring the minor provocation, which was her way. “They write over each other’s music, so the score is just dripping with ink by the end of it. That’s what it looked like. Sometimes one of their hands is dominant, these heavy marks fixing the other’s sketchier ones. In other parts it’s the other way around. They just keep rescoring this way, going back and forth, without going to clean paper, and somehow they can still read the result. It’s a true composite, though. It’s rare.”

“Hm.”

“And what did you do?” she asked. “Did you call the hooker again? What’s her name, Jen?”

“No.”

“She’s okay now?”

“I don’t really know. I don’t see how she could be though.”

“But is she cute , Carl?” Renna had never been jealous of another woman in her life, and her glibness about it grated on him.

“I thought,” Stagg said.

There was a long silence.

“You thought what?”

“No, that’s what I did tonight. Think.”

“Just like this?” She patted his chest with the hand that was still under his, again sidestepping the tacit rebuke, the conversation it might open.