Square Wave (16 page)

Maybe now, though, crippled as she was, she’d have to find grace in the books again, to go back, to disappear properly. The clerk found the cigarettes on the shelves. Mariela paid for everything and hung the two plastic bags on the handles of the chair. She pushed Jen out the door, the bags swinging forward a few degrees, then back, as they crept back out onto the uneven sidewalk.

The sun was low and large outside. It gave light without heat. They trundled five blocks, across bone-white sidewalks and charcoal pavements, past public basketball courts, a narrow slate chapel, and a towering parking lot, almost a fortress, to 384 West—Mariela’s building—a walk-up in white with green accents, simple lines, eight floors. Mariela rolled Jen into the shallow retrofitted elevator and the doors grazed the blades of her shoulders as they closed. Jen’s slippered feet, wrapped in heavy black socks, pressed against the back wall and took on its angle from the ball up. They got out at the sixth, onto a hall lined with pastel green paper crisscrossed with long curlicues in a lighter green.

The apartment was shallow but very wide, with wood stained peach. Jen had been here before, though not in a while. Mariela was not a close friend, really. She’d arrived at
this
by a route so different, so much commoner, true intimacy seemed out of the question. By American standards, Mariela came from bona fide poverty, and her family was far away, in Ecuador, with so little connection to her now Jen couldn’t remember Mariela mentioning them more than once in the time she’d known her. Meanwhile Jen had a radiologist for a father, and her family was just in D.C., a few hundred miles away, waiting, probably, for that first honest phone call from her that could turn all of this around, almost overnight. They’d bring her home, or start sending real money again, make all this unnecessary. In just months she could even be back in school, as if she
had
just taken a little break.

This made her the exception in Mariela’s world. Sometimes Jen would marvel at how it had all happened, how, with so much opportunity, she had ended up just as alone. Wasn’t that common ground between them at least? That life had managed, for the moment at least, to reduce both of them to wraiths? Life was doing that to all sorts of people lately, though. Which meant you couldn’t take it personally, even if you wanted to.

Still, Mariela was here now, and Jen had very distinctly felt some of the tightness come out of her face when she appeared beside her bed in the hospital. Mariela didn’t pretend to really understand her, that’s probably what Jen liked about her most. Maybe refusing a false communion had established a different kind of closeness between them. In truth, Mariela probably understood enough of Jen, everything that counted now.

Mariela’s place had been in worse shape the last time, with clothes and an unusual number of shoes strewn about the living room, beer bottles in the sink, half the lights burned out, and everything reeking of several types of smoke, each of them illicit. Now it looked vigorous and right, prim even. Maybe Mariela was different. Or maybe it was just a matter of courtesy, and had just been made up. She hoped it wasn’t courtesy.

“I think someone will be here today, to talk,” Mariela said while splitting the noodles between ceramic plates. She flipped the plastic box and poured the ginger dressing, loose as water, onto them. It splashed against the ceramic and dribbled onto the countertop. Bits of chive floated in these black pools. “Erin had to talk to them—”

“They came by the hospital to tell me.” Jen’s lips twisted. “It’s fine.” Mariela had left her by the long line of latticed windows. The view was not especially interesting—a jagged row of pre-wars—but she had a lot of it. Mariela was good at what she did, and she worked six days a week.

The steam radiator, painted a burnt orange, provided what the light could not. But the pale wash fell on Jen all the same, in a grid that located her in its lower quadrants. She turned her head toward the facing buildings. Her eye shifted off a bar of shadow and filled with too much light as her damaged iris failed to adapt to the change. She shifted back by reflex and the buildings were replaced in her view by the lamp and table at the far end of the apartment.

“She’s fine now, pretty much,” Mariela said. “She got out right after you went in.” She held the plate out to Jen but she didn’t reach for it. So she lowered it onto the sill, a third of it hanging over the edge, and tucked the tines beneath the noodles.

Mariela ate. She stood at first; then she sat on the sill. The noodles, bloated with dressing from their time on the store shelves, dangled from the fork as she conveyed them from plate to mouth. They sparkled in the soft sunlight, and they dripped, having absorbed what they could. She finished most of the plate and set the remainder next to Jen’s.

“You’re okay staying here?” Mariela asked.

Jen took in a short, sharp breath through the mouth. Her thoughts scattered at the question, forcing her eyes from the lamp to the blue-green fingers on the hand of her slinged arm. With her good hand she gingerly picked up the plate and, shoulder stinging, balanced it on the armrest of the wheelchair. The bruised fingers steadied the plate but just as they did the fork fell from its edge, lifting droplets of oil and soy onto the window and taking the noodles that were to have held it in place to the ground. They stared at the udon caught in the tines. Small rivulets of dressing formed.

Mariela held out her fork to Jen. She took it and began to eat.

13

Stagg navigated the avenues and byways downtown, scrolling through the map, looking for the place, 384 West. The pulsing arrow leaped miles at a time, first here, then there, then somewhere else again, triangulating his location. But wherever it landed, the compass direction stayed true, even when, going by the phone, it was leading him into the river, or on toward Boston, or out to the prisons at the edge of town, or sometimes even through the Atlantic, on course to Europe.

As at sea, direction alone counted. So he held the phone out in front of him like a dowsing rod and followed. It took him across Knoll, the wide avenue near the cul-de-sacs abutting the city’s essential services.

The fire station rose up on his left, in gray brick, stolid. There had been three firebombings in as many months, all stillborn. Molotov cocktails punctured the upper panes of the windows only to be retarded by metal grills. The fires burned themselves out in the windows, on the steep iron escapes, carbonizing black paint but nothing more.

The department would soon succumb, though. The garage, two fire trucks in it at the time, fell to the flames just weeks later. Several firefighters came rushing up to the second floor after midnight, talking about an inferno below. As the smoke wound its way upstairs, they took to the escapes and made their way down to the asphalt outside. A neighboring fire department was called in to put out the blaze. The cause was never determined. The tanks of the trucks were double-lined steel and the garage itself was heavily insulated. Of the men, the night watchman, a junior firefighter, was dismissed pro forma.

The arrow leaped again, haloed in translucent powder blue and locating Stagg in the middle of the river. It swiveled around, holding course. He was close now, he felt.

He rounded the corner of a twisting lane and a sourness tore at his face. A spasm ran through him from the chest down. The phone slipped from his hand and somersaulted across the metal rain grating. He stumbled on a deep fissure in the sidewalk, a hand across his mouth, and nearly followed the phone to the ground. The loss of balance, the fallen phone, they displaced the odor of waste at the core of his awareness. Instantly it reestablished itself, filling not only his nose, but his mouth and chest. It seemed to penetrate his eyes too, like light, but passing through them altogether, filling the space beyond.

Stagg climbed up a short stoop with a hand on his forehead, instinctively separating himself from the street. An agitated water flowed across it, some vanishing down the sluice, but most flowing around it, toward the corner he’d just turned. Granules, whorls of fine sediment, and bubbles, some barely visible, some large, ballooning and popping, traveled in the flow. He took a snort of air through the nose and choked.

Having landed in the middle of the grating, the phone was mostly safe from these waters. He snatched it up and felt the grit on it. The screen bore a spiderweb crack but the arrow still pulsed, or really, it shimmered, through a halo extended by refraction. It guided him onward. He gauged the shallow flow and checked the time. The woman, Jen, would be waiting. He walked as briskly as he could, his course unchanged.

The source of the foul water seemed to be only a few buildings down, at the turn in the alley. The trouble would be over once he’d cleared it. The smell, of stool fringed with urine, bloomed as the building came into fuller view. But as he approached, it became clear the water came from further on, from the apartments near the next turn in the switchback.

Things went the same way with this building, though, and the one at the turn after too. For a time the source seemed always deferred. Stagg’s incredulity grew with each turn in the lane, each false origin, as the air grew fouler and the water flowed stronger and thicker with sediment. It splashed about at his feet as he chased the arrow, and by the time he finally came to the end of the passageway, his shoes were sopping.

The alley opened onto a wedge of industrial outfits: a body and tire shop, a small hardware store, seemingly family-run, a seller of insulation materials, and several others. An aquamarine billboard adorned with shortboards and blond cigarettes, its skin wrinkled, being imperfectly laid, loomed over the shops and angled out toward the freeway. The whir of traffic mingled with the manhole’s gurgle as it shot sludge and stained water up into the middle of the street like a fountain. The epicenter.

On the other side of the wedge was a tall chain-link fence topped with razor wire, and behind it one of Halsley’s smaller waste stations. The fence gaped—the hole made with bolt-cutters, it appeared. A dozen officials, some uniformed, some signifying their connection to the police force only with caps, but all masked for the pungent air, milled about, assessing the damage. Two others stood near the center taking sharp pulls from cigarettes held like joints. Another pair stood toward the edge, near the fence, silent and blank, with their phones pressed against their ears.

Several police cars and a fire truck were parked on the station lot as golden smoke streaked with rust billowed from the hydraulic pumps. The smoke enveloped a ten-yard stretch of the freeway; the cars shot through it unperturbed.

Beneath the billboard, some of the workers had their shirts pulled up to their eyes. Another held a grease-streaked rag over his mouth and nose. The flow had so far left their shops untouched, the slight incline drawing the filth down the lane Stagg had come by. His loafers were a mess, and his eyes began to water lightly, whether from the excrement rushing out of the manhole, the gauzy twists of smoke, or the ruined shoes. Cordovans.

Further up the road, past the filth, he could see a gas station. He would hear all about the incident soon enough: the demographics of the neighborhood, a public utility compromised in a poorer district. There was no rush—only to the interview with Jen. He’d left in plenty of time and now he was going to be late anyway. It was a pattern that wouldn’t break.

He walked around to the back of the station in shoes squeaking wet. He snatched the air hose by its neck and twisted the copper nozzle. A hiss turned to a whine. He knelt and untied his shoes with one hand while holding the hose pointing skyward near his ear, shooting air into air. Once out of the shoes, he took the hose to them, blasting away the crusting debris and dirty water. The shoes deformed. They shrunk flat when he shot them from above, looking almost like covered slippers, and the uppers ballooned when he pushed the hose up into the toe box.

Having left the socks in a stinking pile near the pumps, he did to his feet what he’d done to his shoes. The skin shuddered as their structure surfaced under pressure.

The hose took his shoes and feet from wet to damp and that was the best he was going to do. He twisted the nozzle shut and flipped the air hose to the ground, not bothering to hang it up. With the water hose he rinsed his hands and walked off from the station, sockless.

He dug the phone out of the pocket of his blazer and wiped the cracked screen, still beaded with water, across his sleeve. Apparently its brains were intact. The face glowed in the weakening light, and the arrow trembled back to life, pointing him further up the lane—away from the piss and shit—to 384 West.

■   ■   ■

The woman swung the door open at Stagg’s weak knock. Her flaking, lightly pockmarked face, the crevices filled with matte makeup not unlike cream spackle; the contrasting sheen of her forehead; the wide eyes offset by a narrow rhinoplastied nose; and the feathery shoulder-length hair, a brown leaning orange—for a moment his lungs locked up. He could think only of the cocks that would have bruised her throat over the years, the heavy mucus they would have drawn from her, fortified by pre-come, the demands, as those heads crashed against her tonsils, that she swallow. And then the trains she must have ridden to get here, the paperlessness of her life, the money better than she’d ever seen.

“She’s over there,” she said, pointing to the tan leather sofa near the windows. Stagg could see only a woman’s bare feet dangling over the edge of it in the last bit of light. They slipped off the sofa’s arm and fell out of sight.

“I’m Mariela,” she said. “Jen’ll be with me for a little.”

“Good.”

She opened her eyes wider.

“I’m from the agency. Carl Stagg. We just need—”

She backed up into the apartment and he passed through the doorway.

Jen was sitting up now, with her sling resting on an oversize sofa arm, and her figure-eight brace coaxing uncommonly good posture from her. The sight of her face, now largely healed except for the bloody eye, seemed to transform into the disfigured one he’d seen under the truck. This was an inversion of that night, when her true face, one he could now see he had correctly imagined, even in the finer details, had seemed to surface from behind the blows and cuts, the froth of blood along the mouth and chin. He wished he could leave the other face behind. But it remained as a kind of spectral superimposition. He couldn’t hold her eyes.