Mark de Silva - Square Wave

Tyson seemed playful during the match, Leo said, shooting around the ring in little leaps, smiling through his mouthpiece, tossing the other man around with his forearms. All the while he was finding his timing. The opening came on a separation, the conclusion written in five punches: a double jab, a right cross, a tight left hook that sent the Brit’s mouthpiece into the front row, and an overhand right on the way down that sent his chin into his chest, making a mess of his tongue as he sprawled onto the canvas. He spat mouthfuls of blood as the victor, preordained, stood on the ropes over a turnbuckle, hopping down seconds later to congratulate the Brit on the part he’d played.

That day, decades ago now, Leo Eldern had been ringside. Today his son was in the closed circuit theater next to the arena, watching in, as if through the one-way window of an interrogation room.

Pornography awards not being prizefights, the theater was only half full, though the industry’s sex workers, hundreds of them, completely filled the auditorium itself. Lewis, who had calmed himself some since stumbling upon Lisa earlier in the day, scanned the seats right around him, but there wasn’t enough light to make anyone out. He wondered what sort of person would pay for a screening like this, assuming the ceremony was to unfold roughly as planned, that the vents in the auditorium gave nothing but chilled air. Some must be raincoaters on other nights, he thought, in other theaters, and they’d leave only after they’d made the floors sticky.

For the next three hours, he studied the screen, its glossed women and the ponytailed men, no less glossed and steroidal in appearance than the women, yet not merely of secondary interest but of hardly any at all. Their words, few though they were, and even less significant than they were few, barely caught his ears.

Most of all he monitored the master of ceremonies: a former queen of porn, now a producer and figurehead for her own adult studio. She was the ideal barometer, as she was onscreen most, and through the whole length of the ceremony. If the atmosphere was changing, it should show in her first.

But between the three-way and costume design awards, and between those and the girl-girl prize, had her skin flushed any? She’d been red to begin with, presumably from the Vegas sun outside, so it was hard to tell.

He listened carefully to her too, for botched words, names, stutters or any other struggles of the tongue. There were some, but then there were always some, even in the speech of the best. A decline is what he needed, and he couldn’t find one.

There was eye contact to assess. The auditorium was filled with the distractible. You wouldn’t arrive, and certainly not survive, in the industry if you weren’t. But was the hostess any more distractible toward the end, as the best-new-starlet award approached, than she was at the start? Did her eyes flit faster now? Did she forget the films, nominees, punch lines, and stories of the year that was in Porn Valley, only hours away in California? When she looked into the camera, did her gaze miss the lens, or the point beyond it, where the consciousness of the viewer lay?

There was her stride to attend to. She started the night with a textbook whore-strut, lightly pasteurized by the ease of Valley life. It was a carefully coordinated gait, its moving parts were many, and it could break down in any number of ways. But it didn’t seem to alter. No collapse into a lopsided swagger or a beach stroll, no retreat into a common strip-mall hustle. If there was any change at all, it was only in the direction of greater command. Whatever contempt there was in it at the beginning remained to the end, when she called up the best new starlet, Violet Skye, who trotted onto the stage with the sexualized power that five-inch heels a waxy red guaranteed.

All the while, Lewis was listening to the room itself, to the gaps between speeches and the hostess’s drivel. A presumed silence. There was always a hum, though. Was there any change in that? Was a hiss growing, and could this be picked up through the theater screen? Or did one need to be in the auditorium itself for that?

Could the hiss correspond to a draft from the vents? Could you see collars rustling, single strands, or tufts even, of bleached hair twirling, the lightest earrings swaying in it? Or was it too delicate a change for that? Could you only feel it, this cooling vapor on your neck, from inside the room, through a sense the screen couldn’t provide for?

Lewis heard nothing and saw nothing. Not even Lisa.

The curtain was falling as the hostess, still unfazed, invited everyone back for next year’s ceremony. As the cameras whirled about, the guests rose. The audience of which Lewis was a part, in the theater, mostly stayed put. They would wait to watch the sex workers file out before they did the same.

Lewis’s mind whirled like the cameras, and there were only more questions everywhere he turned. Could they be immune to the gas? Could their plastic poise not be taken from them? Were their senses beyond further derangement? Was their compass so true that nothing could disorient them? Could they not be made to sleep either? Was it unnecessary, for the deathless?

He could feel himself flushing. His mouth had already gone dry. He got to the aisle but nearly fell in the dark, his thigh crashing into armrests several times along the way toward the exit.

As he opened the doors the lobby lights overwhelmed his eyes, forcing them into the tightest squint. He opened them slowly and the world reformed, first as two men in police blue, stock-still. Four more men in the same blue materialized in front of the exits off to the side of the popcorn machines and the candy under the long glass counter. The employees of the theater, dressed in green uniforms and gathered together, were the last to take shape, on the opposite end of the lobby.

A feeling distilled many times over, from an ether, in days long past, down to this barely viscous thing, like glass — it filled Lewis completely. He had no name for it. Nothing was more familiar.

No one moved.

The floor was small, the walls enormous. Four hundred people made arm’s length unachievable, yet the warehouse, a silo for carbon black before it burned down in an unprovable arson, remained nearly empty. It felt it, too, even with them crowding the floor. All that space hovering above, a sealed sky.

Some of the damage from the fire remained. Most of the windows lining the top were missing or shattered, and thick soot covered a ceiling that had yet to be scrubbed or blasted. Streaks of bleach stained the walls, as did grand blazes of rust formed by the rainwater that would have rushed in through the broken windows in the weeks since. The smell of coal-fire was everywhere. There was a hint of soil in it too, and a polymer that lent a saccharine note.

In the gray space between laws the owners, chemical suppliers mostly to experimental labs in the region, had rented the silo to the bands for the night. The last group had just taken down their gear, and Larent, Moto, and Ravan, the closers, were setting up their own. The monitors blared Reich’s 18 Musicians . They weren’t quite eighteen in number themselves, but they’d brought enough other musicians along with them to fill out the sound and play everything that needed playing.

Dozens of small speakers sat convexly behind the audience, along the curve of the silo wall. Directly across, they set up Larent’s collection of oscillators, two MPCs rigged to laptops, a frequency modulation synthesizer, several rack-mounted amplifiers, and a Marshall stack for Ravan’s fretless guitar.

Moto’s drums were out in front rather than behind all of this, and had been whittled down to a bass, a snare, a floor tom, and a series of splashes with no true crash. Between the drums and the electronics were the strings and brass: the cellos, a violin, Larent’s double bass, and a quartet of trumpets.