Mark de Silva - Square Wave

The powder was dark and fine, really a dust. It carried into the light in tobacco wisps as he loaded the chamber, packing it flat with the weight of his body, twisting the tamp before easing the pressure. A featureless surface remained. He locked the handle in place and started the pump. Two honeyed streams oozed from the filter head down to the shallow white cup.

The springs squealed. She leapt up from bed, the Ballade in D minor — Brahms, her favorite — following her out of the bedroom as she opened the door and darted to his side. He did not react. Her hands clung to the edge of the sink as she leaned over it, finding a way into the margins of his view as her bare breasts grazed the Bolognese-stained plates poking up out of dishwater, frothless now after three days of attrition.

He stared down into the filling cup. Without raising his head he looked at her. Blue eyes edged with green — they fluttered, fixed his own, released them, and fixed them again. He was unchanged. She swung her head away from him, tucked her chin in the hollow of her shoulder, and swung it back, her face now more flush with light just as cirrus draped the sun. He turned off the pump.

“We should take a trip,” she said.

The crema was thinning already. She’d left an entire bag of beans, a Kenyan peaberry finer than her palate, to stale in the unlidded grinder.

He handed her the cup. She tasted it and made a face, crinkled her nose. “You make it bitter.” She spooned too much sugar into the drink and sipped at the travesty.

“Why?” he asked as he refilled the basket.

“Why?”

“Then where.”

“We could go to Sri Lanka. It’s safe enough there now, right?”

“I have what I need.”

“Well then not for that.” She shut her eyes in concentration or its imitation. “Réunion.” The word came abruptly, eyes popping. She touched her thumb to her lip and tilted her head. “Dakar?”

“There might be things I could use back in England. More letters, maybe some journals. We could probably stay at the old house itself this time. If you really have to go somewhere.”

“Dakar!” The eyes quivered — that, her manner of punctuation. “Isn’t there art in Dakar?”

“In going there?”

“A biennial. I think. Oh, I need to know these things.”

“Really, though, I shouldn’t go anywhere. Not till I’ve written up these pieces up for the Wintry.”

He pulled the second shot and smiled. The pump’s din made conversation impossible, forcing her to wait the twenty-five ticks of his Submariner.

“But if you have everything you need, you can do it there.”

He paused, though without quite shaking his head. “And do you even have the time for this?”

“Too much. You know that. It is such a strange little place to work, Carl. There’s hardly enough to do. Three issues. It’s more like half a year’s work. And just to go into that office — the six of us. Maybe you’d think, I did, that that would make things intimate, more informal. And it is informal, but not intimate. It’s a vacuum. Silence from start to finish most days. And these are supposed to be people you’d actually wanted to work with. Really good readers. They write interesting stuff too, smart commentary. But in the flesh, they’re false, or tepid, or humorless — or falsely so without alcohol, and even then, the jokes are mostly bad. Paper-interesting, that’s what I’m calling them. Halsley’s made them that, I think, if they weren’t already.”

He downed his espresso and set the cup on the surface of the gray water. They watched it capsize and sink to the bottom, trailing dark ribbons that coalesced into a cloud. Her cup sat on the counter, nearly full.

“It’s like there’s some threshold we haven’t reached,” she continued. “Maybe it takes, I don’t know, ten before you have a staff, any real range. Or else less people than we’ve got, if you want something concentrated, personal. Ten or more, five or less, and we’ve fallen in between. But then maybe it’s got nothing to do with numbers. There’s just so much ego in that room, and less than half of it’s paid for.” She threw her arms out to her sides as she said this. “And no one stays past five, except for close. That’s three weeks a year. And still only till eight.”

“I should take your job,” he said.

“You should! I can follow the hookers then.”

“That’s not really my job.”

“But that’s what you do.”

“Incidentally.”

“And they pay you for it. That’s a job. I don’t know what I think of it, but it’s sounding better than mine right now.”

“But you’d be just as bored. Because most of the time nothing happens. You just walk around, looking for trouble, and you don’t end up finding it, the right kind, easily or at all. This stuff with the whores, it could still turn out, probably will turn out, to be the wrong kind. Tangential. Not my job.”

She shook her head and ran her finger along the lip of her cup. “I don’t know what to do. Maybe I should start reviewing more. Do you think they’ll let me have my old job back?”

“You were replaced.”

“I found her for them, though. The magazine could take us both, replacement and replaced.” She looked at him hopefully. “No, you’re right, they won’t. I don’t really want to go back anyway. Every time I talk to them, and they still count as friends, individually, every time they mention the magazine, their voices change, they tighten, or if it’s in person, their faces do, and I know I was right to leave. I don’t like the silence, the sputtering pace now. But the sort of noise I came from… and it only got worse after you left.”

“I was pretty bad at the job. The midwifing. The Rolodex. The dinners.”

“But you were sort of hoping to be bad. Relieved at least.”

“I’m not sure what I was hoping.”

“No, I’m not blaming you for quitting. I would have had to leave anyway. But you’re too something, for editing. Not just there. Anywhere, probably. Too… yourself. Maybe for the city too.”

“I wouldn’t—”

“And I love that.” Her eyes flashed. “But can’t we go somewhere? You’ll like it.”

“The first essay needs to be done soon. In weeks probably.”

“Oh, you’ll get them all done. They’ll be perfect.”

“You haven’t seen them.”

“But I know.”

She must have known most of what she knew of him this way, whatever way it was. She’d never asked to see the drafts, though she was better positioned than most to appreciate them, having once been a graduate student in history, at the same university he’d attended, in fact, in England, and at the same time, though they knew each other only glancingly then. She dropped out before finishing her master’s thesis, on literary expatriatism in the Georgian era, with Washington Irving, and his Geoffrey Crayon, the would-be pivot.

It was only after the scholarships, back in the States, in Halsley — in magazines, in fact — that they’d become properly acquainted. But he bore the city’s literary world no better than academe. The issue now was frivolity not fustiness. It took him just months as an editor to see this, that wit and bombast would always trump rigor. They liked to condemn it as dreary; apparently this was the worst thing something could be. It didn’t have to be, though, applied in the right way, he thought, even if the universities had made it seem so and given them cover for a sloth of mind he was never going to acclimate to, however artful the dress.