Square Wave (8 page)

He climbed to the third floor of an adjoining structure to take down the exterior markings on the palace walls. The angular inscriptions seemed to him clearly more than decorative, patterned as they were with something like a syntax, though not of a language like Sanskrit or any of its descendants.

The more he studied it, the more the writing came to resemble not a language but a shorthand, one that would have been filled in contextually during Kassapa’s reign. On either side of the writing were elongated etchings, some of a creature that was a man below and a lion above, depicted beneath a broad parasol, and adjoining other images of palm trees and scabbards.

He copied down the three-inch-high script bounded by these drawings. On the fifth and narrowest floor, a pair of interior columns within the king’s chambers was similarly marked. He kneeled near one of the columns and transcribed the text that wound its way up to the low ceiling in a spiral. After finishing the other column, he sat against the wall and put away the stylus and the palm book. The day was not unusually hot, but an ordinary day was fiery in the midlands, far from the cooling seas.

The king would inquire about the commentary on the Great Chronicle the monk would prepare back in the Highlands, the core of the modern kingdom. He was sure of this. Rajasingha presented himself to the Sinhalese, and to the Europeans equally, as a champion of historical inquiry—perhaps he was—and, more certainly, of the notion of lineal rule of the kingdom tracing back to Kassapa.

The king would be even keener, naturally, to know what the committee of monks was preparing to add to the Lesser Chronicle about his own reign over the last decades. But here Rajasingha’s inquiry could not be direct. By tradition the clerical records were not to be interfered with. If influence were to be exerted, it would have to travel by subterranean channels.

For the moment, Darasa thought, the king might be occupied by more pressing matters—the intensifying Dutch raids from the south, and the more ambiguous, mature standoff with the Portuguese to the north—to bother much with this. Any sort of respite from his “vigilance” would be a relief.

The monk took a sesame ball from his satchel and ate in the heat, thinking of the trip back down the mountain, to the village temple where he’d spent these last nights.

■   ■   ■

Stagg rose from the desk and pushed open the bathroom door. He tugged on the beaded metal chain that hung at eye-level. The bulb hummed then flickered. It stabilized a faint white and revealed a mirror stained by a mist of toothpaste and a tiny oval sink ringed with millimeter-length hair. He put his hand on the hot water knob of the shower. But he was late. In the many months now since he’d started writing the pieces in earnest, stopping only when the scenes trailed off in his mind, he always was.

From the medicine cabinet he pulled an uncapped bottle of mouthwash, bright green, and gargled with his head held back while pissing into the stained bowl. The sound of disturbed water confirmed his position as the burn of alcohol grew in his mouth till he had to spit it out over the last trickles of piss. He dressed quickly in the clothes on the bed, sank his feet into loafers, and squeezed his laptop into a briefcase, a gift from Renna, that was stiff from underuse.

The air in the hallway was an improvement, cooler, smelling faintly of sawdust. The trip down three flights seemed longer than usual, and he caught himself limping slightly. His Achilles was sore, though he couldn’t think of when or where he might have strained it. Perhaps dragging the girl.

The foyer was flush with sunlight. It streamed through the glass doors and reflected off the concrete stairs outside and the glossy speckled tiling underfoot that smelled of disinfectant. For a moment everything disappeared in the glare.

5

“This is what,” thomas penerin said, studying the manila-foldered report on the last assault. “Jen Best. Found… Harth, right, well, that says almost nothing. This is what, then? For us.”

“I’ve seen a lot of girls now on that route,” Stagg said. “And no one’s turned up like this.” He picked bits of lint from his sock, which rested on the opposite thigh, his legs being crossed. “Maybe that doesn’t say much. Either way, though.”

“Not really, no. One way counts, Carl. The other is simple assault. Run-of-the-mill police work. We’d turn that over. Even a string of beatings—if that’s
all
it is, we’re wasting our time. So, does this woman, what happened to her, have anything to do with anything? Jenko, say. Or the elections—”

“Does it matter who wins anymore?” Stagg said. “Sometimes, for a few seconds, I can forget who’s president now. Which is crazy.”

“It matters,” Penerin said.

“A third of them voted last time.”

“And that’s what we’re trying to fix. We have to make it matter to them. Obviously it already does to the ones destroying everything. So as long as you work for me, as long as the government keeps picking up both our tabs, it’ll have to matter to you. So, from all the months you’ve been with us, Carl, can you tell me something?”

A sneer overtook Stagg’s face. “Look, this girl, she got seriously fucked up. But it looked like, to me, she was meant to live, the exact way she’d been fucked up. That’s it. She didn’t say a word, not when the police and the ambulance came either. They must have gotten her name after I left, or from something she had on her. I only know what you’re holding in your hands. And there’s not all that much in the report, beyond the few details I supplied. What’s there to interpret yet? Her empty stare? If it’s speculation—sure, a less-than-murderous ex, maybe. Or a warning for the check that bounced. Or just a dissatisfied customer looking for a refund. There was nothing obviously about… politics—the ‘State’—if that’s what you mean. That I can say.”

Penerin got up from his swivel chair. “Your impressions, even the faint ones, are why you’re here. If that’s all you have, then fine, that’s all. But did you check this against the earlier incidents? That at least could mean something eventually—that they’re definitely all related, if they are.”

“I wasn’t working here when they happened, though.”

“But the reports. Did you look them up?”

“This happened yesterday. No.”

“Then we need to check now.”

“I’m going to get something just from comparing names, images? I need to talk to her.”

“We’ll do both,” Penerin said as he got up from his desk. “Anyway, here’s the thing. I have another watch here, from Henning, who’s seen prostitutes harassed or worse recently. I sent him a copy of the report this morning. He thought we should compare notes.” He walked past Stagg to the door that looked only a little like wood and gestured for him to follow.

At the end of an underlit corridor they came to a room of glass. The ceiling was painted a cool green. In the corner was a small desk with a fax machine and a printer. Three folding chairs were laid out around a coffee table in the center of the room. A South Asian sat in the middle chair, slender-framed, long-fingered. His eyes livened when he caught Stagg’s.

“This is Ravan, this is Carl,” Penerin said without gestures. Stagg extended his hand and Ravan received it happily, though without standing.

“So you’ve seen what I’ve seen, something a bit like it anyway,” Ravan said, still shaking his hand. His accent confounded. England was in it, but in a complicated way.

“Really there hasn’t been a case like this in months, in Easton,” Penerin said.

“But yeah,” Stagg interrupted, “I found a woman, beaten but not mugged. She lost nothing,” he said, scanning Penerin’s copy of the report. “Her bag, money, ID, everything was found on her. Just yesterday.”

Ravan pulled on the collar of his polo with two fingers. His sneakers were battered, offsetting the curiously sharp creases in his gray wool trousers. He turned his eyes to the floor and then quickly back to Stagg. “Lately there’s been quite a lot of this, in the more unpleasant parts of Henning, where I keep an eye out, the way you do here, I understand. Some even in the better places. Mostly it’s among the girls, the escorts, this.”

“And what’s ‘this’?” Stagg asked, staring at the heavy glass windows that were the room’s walls. There was a small speaker next to one of them, but the glass was untinted and non-reflective, ruling out interrogative uses for the room.

“This violence, that’s never quite fatal,” Ravan replied. “I’ve had at least four of these. You’ve had at least four, even if they were a while ago now. And the report you’ve sent—the physical description of the man is basically consistent with one running across most of the cases for which we have one. There is also the car, its make and color. An uncommon kind of green, actually. You’ll have to check further with her, but it sounds as if your victim is describing a vehicle from another case of mine. I’d have to know more, of course, but I can’t help thinking she’s just the latest. The meaning of it, though, I’ve no idea.

“Some of the beaten girls have disappeared since. That’s worth keeping in mind. We can’t say, of course, if they’ve just left town, gone back to some relative or boyfriend or whatnot. That’s the thing with tarts, isn’t it.” He looked up at Penerin. “A couple of dealers, cocaine mostly, have been roughed up. Put in hospital actually. There have been a few firefights too, which have put them on notice. In a way, well, I tend to think it’s all had its use.”

Penerin shook his head with a resigned smile.

“Well, the police can’t be bothered with this at the moment, right?” Ravan said. “Bigger things afoot. That’s true. And there are certainly, visibly, less girls working now. That must be good. And it can’t not have something to do with this force that looms.”

“Force,” Penerin repeated the euphemism.

“Violence—its possibility,” Ravan said. “Mostly that’s been enough. Except when memories need refreshing, like this, maybe. And isn’t that what the police ordinarily provide? That possibility? Doesn’t someone always?”

No one said anything.

Penerin closed his eyes briefly, as if clearing Ravan’s words from his mind. “Carl is going to talk to Best as soon as he can,” Penerin said. “We’ll be in touch after, Ravan.”

“I think she’ll be out of commission for a while,” Stagg said as he stood. He shook hands again with Ravan, who seemed settled just where he was.

“Whenever you can get access,” Penerin said. “Maybe before she’s discharged if we’re lucky. She can’t disappear on us.”

Stagg and Penerin stood near the door. Finally Ravan got to his feet, almost reluctantly, and the three of them filed out of the glass room with the green ceiling.

6

A hundredth of the city’s substance voided, sixteen months in, and hardly any deaths.

Idle police cars, a fleet of them, rendered down to a veil of sheltering smoke, itself lost in the broader black of night. It took the large-bore beam of a scrambling chopper, gyrating above, the beam and the chopper both, to expose the shroud. A few minutes pass and a gas tank yields to the simmering orange and blue of the lot. White flames dilate twenty feet, spraying metal and glass, plastic and leather, puncturing another tank and setting off another round.

That was the first crack. June of 2027. Stagg had seen it presented with rare pomp, if it could be called that, at a friend’s parent’s place, a duplex downtown. This was in the weeks after Easter term. He was just off a flight from Heathrow, back in Halsley, to work on the closing chapter of his doctoral dissertation, which was not in imperial history but analytic philosophy. There’d been a tie he had yet to find, and he thought it might lie at some distance from the library’s stacks.

That night, though, there would be no writing or reading, no rewriting or rereading, no reflexive mulling, no deleting and restoring verbatim from memory alone. Instead there was
Hour of the Wolf
. He was told, for this director, that scale was the essence of the thing, his somnolent figures defined in light-eating blacks and silvered whites.

But before they could get the film onto the pearlescent vinyl sheet the very same shade of white as the living-room wall from which it hung, cable news and its smoking lot of police cars came blaring through the digital projector. In the small hours, the two of them would make their way back to the film, to Johan’s chafing spirit, to his arched fingers pinned against the temples. But by then one magnitude had displaced another. Plates were shifting. Bergman could make no impression.

In the months to come a pair of abortion clinics, one attached to the city’s most distinguished university, the other to a Jewish hospital, were abolished by floods, ceiling-high and sewage-laced—the reported cause, exploded mains. A tax court, and across town, an employment office and several check cashers, were razed in sequence. Then it was the churches and mosques, collapsed in alternation, transubstantiated, burned down into shells soon boarded up, some of them metamorphosing along the way into shooting galleries and heroin dens. Simple backpack devices sufficed to cripple the subways and buses. But through all of this, no deaths, just paralysis, erasure, a neutron bomb in a mirror.

Arrests were made, but mostly at the lower levels: the ones who dispatched the devices, lit the fires, sprung the waters. This slowed nothing. Frequently it was impossible to tell whom any of them served.

These negations and nullities wound their way through the city, across its bridges, penetrating its outer districts, laying ellipses everywhere, relieving Halsley of an analog fullness, or anyway disenchanting people of the notion, and of the very idea that the state was any longer in a position to make guarantees.

Strangely, there were no claimings, only denials. They grew fiercer as accusations sharpened and rote as they diffused. Motives, originally few and imputed confidently (not to say correctly), metastasized, every effect guaranteed by several causes. A building saved from one attack—many were foiled along the way—would soon fall to another, often bearing the trace of difference, the activity of a rival body.

The government only added their own scars to the city, exploding hives of alleged factionalist activity, sometimes preemptively and on little grounds.