Square Wave (6 page)

“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.

It was still dark, and it stayed that way for an uncomfortably long time, so long one couldn’t tell if it was the indulgent whim of the dancer or a technical failing. Finally heavy white light fell on a girl, just post-teen, inverted a yard off the stage. Her tanned, stockinged legs clasped the center pole; her dark curls dangled nearly to the floor. She loosened the lock and airily descended, her azure skirt falling upward. With splaying legs she carved half a circle in the air, gripped the pole tightly and brought her patent leather heels, an explosive black under now-strobing light, to the glossed floor. She sprung up and pranced to the front of the stage, her flowing proportions now appreciable. She was just feet from Stagg, burnishing appetites with an opaque hazel gaze.

With that the men were in her thrall, proving it possible to begin wistfully. He wondered about the makeup of that rapture, though, its less gleeful elements.

Skye’s repertoire seemed vast though her moves were mostly classic. The impression must have been achieved by small details—how else to explain it?—but he couldn’t pinpoint them. He wondered whether they would show themselves over the next weeks, or whether he would come to find it was only an impression.

Piece by piece, she shed the black blouse, the skirt, the lace bra and panties in white. The club’s DJ threw her a promotional tee shirt with her picture and their name emblazoned on it. She drew it slowly up her legs and held it between them. A spotlight appeared just in front of her and then the shirt was in it, a dark, wet patch on it against the bright white of the rest. She tossed it into the crowd as the men tossed cash onto the stage—small bills, large bills, everything. Stagg felt then there was nothing to fear from them or their rituals. And nothing to learn either.

It was too early, really, to say. One grasps so little the first time through, which was the way most of life was lived. But here was his peculiar advantage. He could bank on recurrence. It was his job. He would see and re-see all of this many times, a rerun with variations.

Skye made her way along the edge of the stage, taking a last round of tips and kissing each man on the lips as she leaned down and pulled the bills from his hand. She came to Stagg and looked at him with practiced sweetness.

“Was that fun?” she asked.

Stagg dug in his coat pocket for cash but came up with two quarters and a nickel. He looked away, felt himself shrug. “I think, I don’t…”

Her lips curled. She dropped to her knees and picked up a crisp twenty-dollar bill from the stage, folded it in two, and pushed it into his pocket. “Here,” she said. The staginess was gone from her voice. It was flatter now, but neither cold nor upset. “The next girl that comes on, you’ll be ready.” She leaned over the edge of the stage and kissed Stagg like the rest, her breasts pressing against his neck with the telltale firmness of silicone. Perhaps the kiss was different, though, he thought. She would have been racing through the space between personas when she gave it.

A young man appeared next to Stagg in a lush herringbone sport coat and a pinpoint oxford, his breath reeking of mixed drinks. “I loved you,” he slurred to her. “I did.”

Stagg retreated through milling patrons as Skye exited that space and claimed the young man’s money. At his table he found a short glass of tomato juice sitting on a five-dollar bill.

He thumbed the rim of the glass and sipped at what seemed almost a sauce. “You ready for another? Something else?” His waitress’s voice came from behind him.

“No… I don’t think so.” He lifted the glass into eyeshot.

“Oh. You haven’t done much with that one,” she said. “But take your time, you still have a while till the next one.”

“Thanks,” he said. He reached into his pocket and dropped the twenty onto the five and left.

■   ■   ■

The wind had grown stout on Fenton. Stagg fixed the throat-latch of his coat and squinted as the gusts drew tears from his eyes. He walked toward Harth, where the familiar portion of his route began (eventually this too would be shifted). A dust of plaster and wood filled the air as he approached a stretch of buildings under renovation. The sidewalk scaffolding shielded him from the worst of the thickening winds, though it also narrowed his vision.

The ovoid headlamps of a Lotus blinded him, just before bringing light to the grainy currents whipping about the metal framework. The car, of a dark, indeterminate shade, drifted down the street, and as it passed, he made out a long-faced man in a blazer behind the wheel and a woman with small bones and bronze skin beside him. Only the future could tell him if this was worth knowing, if it suggested anything, or if it was just one more of the thousands of observations that pointed only to themselves.

Stagg left behind the thin stream of people walking Fenton for its more sparsely populated cross-street, home to walk-ups punctuated by the occasional convenience store or gas station shining gauchely in the night. He came upon very little tonight on Harth: a few streetwalkers, a car parked with a small-time dealer he recognized behind the wheel, waiting, and two red-faced drunks, possibly a couple, in skullcaps and oversized coats, sitting on the curb collecting cigarette butts that had been stubbed out early. Nothing worth reporting.

A hundred yards on and the street darkened. The blue lamps gave way to dim yellow ones that appeared at ever-larger intervals. Finally the overpass came into view. The headlights of cars streaming along the bend in it combined to throw a pulsing beam over the edge, perpetually twisting leftward, as if on a pivot, with no clear terminus in the night sky.

The beam disappeared as he entered the passage beneath the overpass and walked alongside the short gray brick wall that ran the length of the massive structure. Long tubes of light encased in PVC lined the walls. Many had burned out; some only flickered. There were also those that had been diligently smashed by vandals, their casings caved in at the joints between lights, their weakest point.

The cement sidewalls bore a deep aerosol patina. Whirling outsize letters and images in washed-out colors that carried the trace of a former garishness, layer upon layer of them, applied over many years—they sealed the pocked surface like a primer. Scattered atop this base were more recent images, vivid, sharp-edged, soberly stenciled rather than freehanded: parasols, perched birds, nimbus clouds, and mathematical operators, the integer, derivative, and inequality signs among them. Other stencils were built from phrases in non-European languages: Japanese, Hindi, Arabic, and several African scripts. These palimpsests brought Stagg’s other work to mind, particularly his would-be draft about the Buddhist monk, Darasa. Even after months of mulling, that scene was no more than notes and thoughts. Maybe, he thought, he could just start at the fortress wall, the monk’s own palimpsest, and let the material find its own shape from there.

So far all his conscious efforts at tracing a vector between the monk and Haas had failed. Including Darasa in the series of writings always felt essential, though, and perhaps this was precisely because Haas’s cultural “mission” in Sri Lanka was so radically different from his—a mirror image almost, destroyer and preserver. There must have been a personal aspect to the inclusion as well: the monk, after all, was metaphysician, exegete, and historian in one. Just what Stagg was becoming, it seemed.

Every time he came through this passageway, he wondered why he didn’t carry the weapon he was entitled—encouraged, even—to carry. It routinely brought him across the fear-worthy. But tonight there was no one, just a chain of decrepit parked cars dotted with pickups and vans and the occasional overworked subcompact racer. He slowed near the other side of the overpass. A maroon sedan, the right side of its bumper collapsed, sat behind a pickup whose body appeared tiny and frail above its own gargantuan wheels.

The tailgate was down, which was odd. Odder, though, was the woman beneath it, lying against the hulking tire in a bra and a silk skirt the color of straw. She forced the draft, the monk, from his thoughts.

Were it not for the peculiar way she was dressed, Stagg would have taken her for another unsheltered alcoholic and let her be. Instead he swung the tailgate shut and watched harsh purple light flood her face. Her eyes were open but so vacant he wouldn’t have thought it a mark of consciousness had she not eventually blinked. She stared out at the length of walkway he had just passed, her head down on her shoulder. She must have seen him coming.

Her face, her forehead especially, was swollen and bruised, her nose scuffed and crusted over with blood turned black. She drew shallow breaths and her chest jerked with each arrhythmic pull of air. Stagg knelt beside her, brought himself into her line of sight, trying to extract the true form of her face. Beneath the swelling and cuts and shifted bones, beneath the heavy eyeliner and thick rouge, there was symmetry.

Their eyes were very close now, but she said nothing (maybe she could not), and he obliged with silence (anyway he could think of nothing to say). Her chest was swollen and red in patches. He put the palm of his hand beneath her breasts, near the sternum, and felt the skin inflated with fluid. He was searching for the articulated firmness of ribs but finding only a vague mass of tissue wrapped in torn skin. His investigations made her squint, but still no words came, just a slightly heavier breath.

He lifted her head and set it against the treaded tire beneath the bed of the truck. With his thumb he cleared away the hair that had slid across her face, and her eyes shone green again under that strange light.

Soon he found himself pulling her from the shoulders, disregarding everything he had just confirmed about her condition. Her collarbones seemed to flex as he tried to raise her to her feet. She squirmed violently. It seemed to encourage him, this first vigorous sign of life, and he could think of nothing else, if he was thinking at all, than to pull her out from below, onto the sidewalk and up against the brick wall.

He wrapped his arm around her waist, leaned her upper body against his thighs, and dragged her toward the wall. She clasped her arms around her chest, closed her eyes, and mumbled or moaned as Stagg pulled her up the curb, her legs vainly kicking.

As soon as he released her she curled up on the sidewalk on her side, stretching her legs along the length of the wall. He didn’t try to right her. Instinctively he searched his pocket for his phone. It was at home, he remembered now, the source of his trouble earlier with Renna, or the excuse onto which it fell.

There was a phone booth at the end of the passage, though he’d never noticed it till now, and was unsure whether it actually worked, or if it were merely the remains of a dead technology too costly to bury.

He had none of the numbers he would have liked to use, so the call was to 911.

“Yeah, I’m under the freeway at Harth. There’s a woman, a hooker, I think. She doesn’t look great. Second Watch. We’ll need a car too. Carl Stagg.”

From the booth he could see warehouses, some converted to apartments, some still serving commercial functions: textiles, lumber, paint. His eyes settled on the four-story directly across. The building’s framework stood exposed at the near corner. The bricks had broken away unevenly. The matrix of beams, once precisely arranged along several planes, had wilted into a jumble of iron, soot-covered and twisting into the evening sky. An intense blaze must have shriveled the metal, but the beams, tangled almost sculpturally now, meant there had been combustion as well. A flammable inventory, probably. Whatever it was, the building was unsound, unusable, abandoned. Its lower windows were boarded, as were the doors, as of course were many others now throughout the city, not only warehouses but restaurants and shops and public facilities.