Mark de Silva - Square Wave

He turned away and carried on to Fenton, a broad street running perpendicular to the canal that was lined with squat one-and two-story buildings, mainly bars and strip clubs, as well as a couple of taller buildings — well-trafficked hotels. The street’s name was built on the backs of its escorts and its traders in pharmaceuticals.

Tonight it seemed empty. But even the impression of emptiness was more vivid, and equally, more confused, than it might have been. It was fresh. Without much explanation, Penerin, his supervisor, had altered his route again. Its newness was undermining the light trance Stagg usually did his rounds in, where perceptual reflex would suffice and his mind would be left free to work over other matters, like the knots in his drafts, or his relationships. That was watch-work’s appeal. After a time of tracing a fixed route, you hardly watched, not in any active sense. Though you were paid all the same, you might as well not be working at all, just daydreaming, and with the peculiar agility of mind only an ongoing closeness to violence can grant.

Everyone, in fact, was on better terms with violence now. But watches more than most. He couldn’t remember a stretch of more than a few days in which he hadn’t come upon a car smoldering or a building collapsed. Less than two months before general elections, the country was wobbling in a way it would have been hard to imagine just a decade ago. Stagg had to admit, though, the infirmity was nourishing him, intellectually and financially. His job wouldn’t exist if there weren’t a desperation for eyes now.

He had no feelings about this. After all, he’d never had any special faith in democratic processes, not of the usual liberal sort anyway. He wasn’t even totally sure he was an egalitarian. If anything, he was surprised the pieties of his age hadn’t frayed sooner. Wasn’t that the norm, certainties succumbing to doubts succumbing to new certainties, ad infinitum? Whatever it was, life now felt as though it was being lived on the cusp of fresh certainties, just when the doubts were deepest. Their nature, though, had not yet emerged.

One thing that could be safely assumed: if it was going to steady belief in its authority, the current government needed a landslide. First past the post wouldn’t do. Turnout too would have to be far stronger than usual for the results to carry conviction, if not in the eyes of all — that was an unrealistic target at this point — then at least in those of most. The ruling party, and the president, would settle for that — so long as they won, of course. Whether their democratic commitment might fray if they managed to lose, no one knew. That just wasn’t the sort of thing that could be known anymore.

The spate of attacks against the city’s infrastructure and its public spaces was putting in doubt the government’s claims to control, and especially its capacity to stage elections. Among the targets — schools, government offices, convention halls — were many prospective polling stations. This threatened turnout, of course, which must have been the point.

Stagg was the tiniest element of the effort to counteract this, though it was often far from his mind as he did his rounds. He took a more immediate interest in the novelties each new route introduced him to. Today it was The Lioness, the largest club in the area, and the best of its kind: two stories, four stages, and a tangle of VIP rooms. Nationally regarded dancers, their reputations spread by skin flicks, frequently headlined. The club was anomalous, though. If not for zoning laws consigning it to Fenton, The Lioness would have been built closer to its mostly upscale patrons. As things were, these men were forced to experience first-hand the grit that lay behind their entertainment.

Its sign was formed by narrow tubing shaped in diminutive lower case: “the lioness.” The phrase shone a dark gold. Stagg pulled a soft pack of Parliaments and a convenience store lighter from his shirt pocket and drew a weak flame through a cigarette, watched the tobacco wilt in the heat. He shot the first pull of smoke from his nostrils and regarded the sign. There were four more drags, hard and quick. He dropped the half-cigarette into the rain gutter and went through the club’s wide black doors.

“Thirty tonight,” said a scrawny man in a cheap printed tee behind the glass panel. “Violet Skye is featuring.” Stagg swept his phone across the face of the scanner mounted on the glass. “And it’s a drink every hour,” the man said.

“I get one?”

“You get to buy one.”

Stagg turned into the darkened corridor past the window. Two giants, one white and broad, one black and tall, stood in front of the entrance to the club’s main lounge. He waved his receipt at the blue-black African, who must have cleared seven feet, and paused before them both. Neither deigned to look. Stagg squeezed between the two into the room.

The stage seemed to recede indefinitely. It was as wide as the room itself, with an irregular, wavy lip like a designer pool. Three poles were aligned diagonally across it, front to back, and large screens ran across the back wall. All showed an ample-breasted Japanese dancer collecting the last of her tips from the men lining the stage.

Several hallways led out of the room, presumably to the smaller stages and private rooms Penerin had told him about. Stagg walked along the perimeter and sat far from the stage, at a table of lacquered wood. Most were empty. By strip-club standards, it was early.

Still in a glittering purple thong, the woman left the stage as glam metal resounded through the space. A waitress, beautiful only in her past, offered Stagg a wanton smile dull from use.

“And how are you?” The steel locket between her collarbones dangled as she bent down toward him.

“Yeah, fine.”

“We have a drinks special on—”

“How about tomato juice.”

“Sure? Everything’s fifteen, even Coke, so—”

“That’s fine.”

She looked at him with an expectation that briefly eluded him.

“Pay first? Right.” He pulled a loose twenty from his pocket.

“Or you can get it yourself from the bar.”

“No.”

She left with a more natural smile. Stagg slid his elbows onto the table. He cupped his mouth in his hand, pinched his nose lightly, and closed his eyes as the music played. “18 and Life.” Skid Row. This was hair metal’s afterworld, places like this. He’d never heard it anywhere else, except on Internet radio, when he used to listen to it sometimes for ironized laughs. (He was mostly done with that kind of laughter.) The frontman, Sebastian Bach. He probably shits in a pan in some Burbank nursing home by now, he thought. Still — not a bad song, at bottom.

The room began to fill. Suited men in their thirties and forties, twenty-somethings in exquisite sneakers and cashmere hoodies, they flowed into the room through the various arteries linking the club’s lounges. The undulating edge of the stage disappeared from view as the men gathered next to it, some sitting, most standing. Without waiting for his drink, Stagg got up and took his place among them.

As he approached he surveyed them, as he was meant to, but without knowing what to note exactly, except to note everything, which was impossible. He was there to detect change but lacked the baseline to do it. Tonight, and probably the next weeks, would be about establishing one, bit by bit.

Some of the men held wads of twenties; others, of fifties, though slightly thinner. Star money. A voice came from the speakers, interrupting Bach and introducing the dancer. The MC closed with a flourish, drawing out her name as a ring announcer would a fighter’s.

The room went dark, then silent. In seconds the faders came up: “The Ballad of Jayne,” another ghost of a song that had died decades ago. But again, not a bad one, if one had the stomach for the gratuitous. Still, it was an unlikely pick. It was wistful, or an attempt at it at least. Was it possible to strip wistfully? And even if, under the right circumstances, it was, can one really begin to strip that way, cold? Perhaps it was an eccentric challenge Skye, quickly becoming as porn-star famous as anyone, had set herself, to stave off the boredom of routine.