Mark de Silva - Square Wave

“Basically. With the lights on, part of the time.”

“Did you revise at all though?”

“I don’t think I need to. It’s more about order, placement. I’ll just read that piece on exegesis later in the series. Really I’m changing course a little, and I’m not sure if Kames will like it. A new introduction. But I’m not going to try to sell him on it yet.”

“Do you ever think, though, Carl, that at least for now, that maybe you should withdraw?”

“What? Because why?”

“Because what your boss said about Kames, what you told him Kames said to you. It’s possible, isn’t it?”

“It’s hard to say exactly what Kames meant, though. Penerin’s paranoid. And there are three days left now till the first talk, Renna. Nothing’s going to change in that space. And easy for you to say.”

“I’m only worried! I don’t know why you have to make everything into something besides love.” She made a fist under his hand and thumped his chest with it before flipping away from him.

“There’ll only be one lecture, if you’re right,” he said in a cooler voice. “More reason to do things the way I want, I guess. And if there’s only going to be one, it should be about my family, and the escape. That’s what Kames was saying he wanted anyway.”

“Maybe,” she said. By the shifting of the bed he could tell she had pulled her knees up to her chest, as she did when she was fed up, or worried, or tired, depending.

“Maybe what?”

She said nothing. He drew breath.

“How was Larent?” he asked.

“Fine.” She was curt.

“He asked you over?”

“He and Ravan.”

“You don’t know Ravan.”

“Edward told me he wanted me to come too.”

“Li asked you as well, I guess.”

“No.”

“You don’t know him?”

“I do. You know that. Edward just didn’t mention him.”

“And I guess you have to accept every invitation.”

“You can’t do this, Carl. I offered to cancel.”

“You don’t want to be rude.”

“You can be such an asshole.” Her eyes were rolling, he knew this. That he couldn’t see this didn’t matter.

He rolled on his side, toward her, and pulled her to him with one hand between her breasts. “An asshole?” he said. She squirmed and thrust her legs out straight and grabbed his hand. “I thought you can’t be rude,” he said. He slid his hand up her chest to her long and graceful neck and held it without a hint of compression. “Just to me, I guess.”

Her own hand, still on his, went limp in a familiar way. Her lips ran across his cheek as she turned her face toward him, as if it were possible to look him in the eye in the dark. Their lashes touched as she blinked. Her eyes, millimeters from his, they’d be deathless now, earth-inheriting and faintly defiant about it. There would be that suggestion of a snicker in them. And why shouldn’t she look at him? The dark was as good as the light for what she was searching for.

“What do you get from this?” he said, keeping his hand where it was. She turned past his face until he could feel her breath on his ear. He thought she might bite him, so hard he’d need stitches to close the gash.

“I thought you weren’t going to drink on your own anymore,” she said. “This doesn’t happen otherwise.”

“From him.”

“Nothing. I’m not getting anything from him. There’s just history, that’s all.”

“And what does that have to do with now?” His grip may have tightened.

“Don’t talk to me.”

“Oh, but you love to chat.”

She lunged for the light but he held her just out of reach. Her fingers grazed the metal string dangling beneath the bulb and it struck the lamp rhythmically, four times.

“I am with you every night,” she said.

“And our time together. We’re either unconscious or fucking. Day or night.”

“I am always thinking of you. I talked about you till they told me to stop.”

“That’s thoughtful.”

“This isn’t going to work like this. He’s my oldest friend.”

“There’s nothing wrong with him. He’s fine. I just don’t get what he does for you.”

“Do you really not get friendship? Is that actually possible?”

“If it were for the magazine it would be different.”

“Do you really not understand it?”

He took her face, which was pressed down into the pillow, in his free hand. He torqued it toward him and stared into the spots where he thought her eyes must be. They could have been closed.

“Do you get that he’s nothing next to me? I really don’t give a fuck if he’s played with the Concertgebouw, or that he composes shit that’s too ridiculous to fit on a staff.”

“I do get that,” she whispered. “And you are such an asshole for making me say it again.” It was his hand that went limp now. She sat up and pushed herself back against the headboard. He waited for the light but it never came.

“He has qualities,” she said in a tone that had turned deathless like her eyes. “He has gifts. Different from yours. Not as great maybe. But he has them. You’ve said that. You’d be disappointed in me if he didn’t.”

“The pale-faced fag with the bow in his hand.”

“He can be charming, in this soft, quiet way. Elegant. I think you even like that about him, though you won’t admit that now. And he would never talk about you like this, he doesn’t have the crassness, the churlishness in him.”

“Churls. Okay.”

“You wouldn’t think it’s possible. You can outshine him when you want to, in every way that matters most to me. But you don’t seem to want to anymore. You’d rather be this . It makes no sense, but you’ve chosen it, you keep choosing it.”

“I haven’t earned the right to this feeling, you mean? Of course I haven’t. But you wouldn’t think of me like you do if I didn’t already believe that something, capital-s Something, is going to come from me, and that it isn’t all that far off now. And that it’s all a fait accompli, before I can prove that it is, or that there’s any such thing as one.”

“I know.”

“That’s the balls of it, and the trouble with it. Justifying—”

“What?” she taunted. “Justifying what?”

“I don’t know. Contempt. You know, there’s this story that back before everything, before he had the books, Wittgenstein told Russell how distressed he was, justifying his contempt for the philosophers around him. For all the ones who couldn’t or wouldn’t clear it all away, untie themselves from everything they knew or thought they did, and try to recover the world from that mess. Justifying, because he hadn’t recovered it himself yet. But the way he was going at it, untangling knots, it was only a matter of time. But he couldn’t hold himself to a standard that demanding, ask that of himself, without the contempt. It was the fuel. They were one thing. However fucked up that is, they were.”

A long silence followed.

“Wittgenstein,” she said.

“Whatever. Naipaul then. The feeling came long before the right to it, that’s the point. And if you see me as in any way the same as Larent—”

“But you just said how, basically. What he’s trying to do in music, isn’t that untangling knots?”

“No, still, if you see me as operating on the same plane as that meek shit — or any of these literary men you go on about, their pathetic shticks. Charming, right.” He felt himself beginning to flail.

“Look, I don’t,” she said. “I don’t. And I know who you are, what you are. That’s why we’re here. But I can’t keep telling you who. My angel.”

“I am always, always waiting,” he said. His voice was brittle and dark now. “Always there’s something between you and me. Does it make sense to you that I, not me, really, just anyone like me, should be waiting? And fine if you run into a greater mind on the way home, but not this effete—. He can’t be why I’m waiting. Or any of the others. But if you find a Wittgenstein out there, yeah, by all means, take him home. Or bring him over. I’ll suck him off too.”