Square Wave (26 page)

He jumped the massive lip of the fountain and approached the statue. Plaster, or some sort of binder, was spattered along the fissure beneath the ribcage, where a curving chunk of the torso had been reset. The same had been done to one of the arms, though the hand, which was meant to rest on its waist, was still an absence. The wrist simply hung in the air, falling short of the body. He studied the legs, veined in hairlines as if a severe compound fracture had been set. A few slivers had been replaced by closely matched marble, perhaps quarried from the same mountain in Carrara, though it was a touch lighter, more translucent. It would have to age.

The closer he came, the more fissures appeared. Touching the arm, he could see that the entire statue had been remade from hundreds of distinct chunks of marble, some original, some new, put together like a puzzle.

The plaque, which he’d never thought to inspect before, read thus: “A Gift of Benjamin Henkel Jr. (1835-1870).” The Henkels must still be rich, Stagg thought, to have the wherewithal to put this back together or the clout to have the city council do it at its own expense.

How many pieces was the head in? And when the restoration was finished, would it carry a new aesthetic valence? Restored works, after all, always bore the trace of that labor, even if only an expert could say in exactly which details it resided.

The long bulbs attached to the beams around the statue streaked the blue-white marble with light and gave it an uncertain presence. Standing back from it, looking only upon its lower half, which was almost complete now except in its finest details, the fractures seemed to bring a kind of weight to the sculpture he’d not noticed before.

On late afternoons turning into night, as an undergraduate in the city he used to sit on the benches circling the fountain, reading Sidgwick or Hobbes, even Grote, under the statue’s growing shadow. He felt he knew it better by that shadow, in fact, than by direct sight. The piece had never stirred anything in him, so he’d spent hardly any time face to face with it: the eyes long and drawn and faraway, the chin short and wide, the pose languid. All the interest, for Stagg at least, was shunted into one feature: the head’s being turned off to one side, as if something had sounded in the distance.

Only this marble man’s destruction, and his ongoing reconstitution, had given Stagg a reason to consider him properly, to scrutinize him as a whole, in his own right, and not merely as an element of the square. The chance to study his lines, his translucent skin, at this distance, standing within the now-dry fountain, all of this depended on his having been exploded.

He considered whether the original could truly be made to reappear, whether an entropic event could be run in reverse, an object unexploded. The viewer’s eye measured the conglomeration of marble shards, their discrete totality, against this ideal, of a statue hewn from a single slab, which Stagg seemed to grasp more fully now, in memory, than he had on any of the occasions he confronted the original in experience; those times he had stood in front of it, then sat under it, sometimes looking across the fountain, over his shoulder, as the statue itself did, though his mind was still mulling the books, seeking in them too discrete totalities, parts and wholes.

A sound. This time not a squealing but an effervescing of notes, rising, ringing, locking together in unfamiliar combinations, not clashing exactly, but making the ears skeptical. If the tones didn’t keep coming that way, and if he didn’t hear the rhythm section enter, he would have assumed a mistake. There was a kind of absolute strangeness to it, or something just short of that. The work of an undiscovered culture maybe.

Stagg drifted toward the tones, not yet ready to call them music. He’d come out, at Renna’s request, to see Larent and his new band, which this must be. But he was still thinking of the statue. The legs alone, in their rough state, seemed already to carry a charge different from the one he recalled, one that, no matter how exacting a job was done, he thought, could never be brought entirely into line with the original’s. But if the shifting by millimeters here and there; the discreet interpolation of foreign marble; the glues and plasters used to hold the exploded materials together as one; and the various hairlines that would invariably remain; if all of this altered the tone of the original, why must that be a shortcoming?

The new valence, he thought, must make a more complicated impression, and for that it might well have greater heft. Doubtless the original had to guide the reconstruction. That didn’t mean it was any measure of the finished piece. As objects of art, they were two and not one.

■   ■   ■

Through the scarred doors of The Round, then, and into a welter twice over, bodies and pitches teeming. The music—it was music now—had filled out. The crowd, mostly clutching drinks, appeared a congealed mass, lacking the moving parts that might make for passage through to the back, where Larent was performing, and Renna was listening, raptly, he assumed.

The short leg of the L-shaped bar, facing out onto the courtyard, was mostly vacant, as the people crowded into the long leg to see into the cubed space beyond. But the sonic whirl was enough for Stagg. He stood at the end of the short leg, near the window, with his hands on the bar. When the bartender came he simply pointed at a sign describing the well scotch for the night. It was cheap, and tasted it: thin, sour, vulgarly medicinal.

The snack bowl overflowed with a house medley. Cheetos, Chex, Fritos, corn nuts, Lay’s, pretzel sticks, and probably some other things. Any one of these made a passable nibble, but the mix was perverse, possibly by design, as it was suitable only to those well past drunk. He’d had nothing to eat since morning, only champagne and vodka. He finished half the bowl in five handfuls, slowing the alcoholic nausea he knew to expect.

Larent had moved on substantially from what Stagg had heard from him last, that night at the little café. Gone was the precision counterpoint. In its place, a diffuse harmony driven by piano and guitar: arpeggiated, key-revolving, and set in a strange motion. The progression seemed of indefinite length; or if it had a length, Stagg couldn’t mark it, no better than a tone row of Schoenberg’s. Structure was tacit, more felt than grasped. The percussion, mainly toms, bass, shimmering cymbals, surfaced in low rolling flourishes, barely fixing a rhythm, which was left to the contrabass—Larent’s, presumably. He bowed a stream of half notes, then dotted half notes. It was the tether the ear sought in the driftlessness, grounding the harmony.

Gone, along with the counterpoint, was the ordinary diatonic scale itself. Or if not gone exactly, reformed. Except for the octave, the newly untempered notes had all been nudged up or down, so what remained was almost a diatonic scale, but not, a shadow.

The corresponding chords were shadows too, seeming just off target to the ear, precisely displaced, which retarded their uptake. The result was a music apprehended retrospectively, the chords’ well-formedness established, their musicality unlocked, only after they’d given way to others that raised puzzles of the same order. The ear had no rest, and the struggle wasn’t his alone. The faces along the corridor leading to the cube showed a blankness—furrows and squints self-consciously held in check—or else, imperfectly masking this, a prehensile quarter-smile attesting only to a knowledge unpossessed.

Many registers above, a lofted figure, aptly skewed, glided above the harmony before drifting down to mingle with its pitches. Quickly it returned to those first heights and fell again, a dissolving line that varied with each descent, adjusting to the drones of the new key.

Stagg cleared a second bowl of the mix. The powdered cheeses disagreed with the peat rot of the whiskey. He could feel a heat behind his eyes, the first trembles of his eyelids. The best of his night was already past. The sickness had caught him. He’d be both drunk and hungover the rest of the night, and the bowl would have played its part.

The music thinned and the joints of the piece emerged. The chords clarified around their central intervals, the fifths and thirds and sixths. There was a sonorousness to them, foreign, ineffable. The music had a dual aspect, he thought, like a Necker cube. Heard one way, it was alien beyond exotic, a deformation. Heard another, there was a sort of primordial solidity to it, an exactitude that made the tempered diatonic scale seem not a rival but only a coarsened derivative. The more Stagg’s ears probed these pure intervals, the more this second aspect fixed itself. The sense of skew fell away; the factitious and the real switched places.

The drums petered out with the guitar, leaving the keyboard and bass to negotiate a few more chords, then a few fifths, then a few unisons, on their way to Bb, the tonic, a traditional resolution to a maundering piece.

A crescendo of claps was the last of the percussion, though it lacked the tentativeness that might have saved it from vulgarity. The unconstructed response, he thought, for anyone outside the vanguard of composition, was a ruffled silence. And the too-large eyewear, the too-small clothing all around him, did nothing to convince him the audience was any better placed than he was to grasp the night’s singularity, seeing how far this was removed from the references they could plausibly have. MBV, maybe, or Earth.

He rose. He’d sweated through his socks and his feet felt bloated and wet in his sneakers. His head buzzed, not from trains or guitars now, but the day’s drinking. He jostled his way through oncoming traffic to the back, the overlit blue room. A pink blanket with looping knits, along with a small armchair pillow, poked out of the sound hole of the bass drum, which someone was taking the toms off of. Two patinated crashes and a ride lay off to the side, halfway settled into brown vinyl sheaths.

Larent was at the edge of the stage, his face turned down toward his feet. And though there was nothing to talk over, or shouldn’t have been, not as far as Stagg was concerned, Renna had her mouth to his ear.

“Carl.”

His dark hair shining with water or sweat, and a joint hanging from his lips, Ravan approached him, looking in all other respects an overgrown English public schoolboy.

Larent approached and his face appeared over Ravan’s shoulder. Renna came past them both and wrapped herself around Stagg.

“We played pool once,” Ravan said, preempting the question on at least a couple of their minds: how did he know Stagg? Renna craned her neck back toward Ravan but soon dropped his gaze for Stagg’s. “You won by three balls, yeah?” He extended the joint to Stagg, who took it without hesitation and pulled on it with his head bowed. “Took the table off me,” Ravan said, “then lost it straight away to a Russian. This must have been, what, six weeks back? The place has shut since, did you know that, Carl? Renovations.”

“Rundown place,” Stagg said, exhaling.

“Who’d you go with?” Renna asked him.

“And how would you know these two?” Stagg said to Ravan, ignoring her.

“I was going to tell you,” Renna said. “This is their first gig together, with their new guitarist. Ravan. I thought you might like to see it.”

“Li and I—have you met him? He’s the one taking the drums down—Li and I saw him playing this unfretted guitar in a gallery,” Larent said. “It looks like it would be a nightmare to play, and it is, it turns out. He pulled the frets out with pliers and just sanded the wood down.”

“Filled the cracks with wood putty, actually,” Ravan said.

“Really unbelievable things came out of that guitar, I remember,” Larent said. “There isn’t anyone I know of, Li either, working that way. We played some of his stuff tonight. Sorry you weren’t here for it,” he said to Stagg.

“No, he heard it—from the bar,” she said with a trace of contempt, or pity, Stagg thought.

“Oh. Good. We were more of a rhythm section tonight anyway, backing him up. We can go a lot further,” Larent said.

“My head is still buzzing,” Stagg said.

“Mine too,” Larent said.

“She says you’re a writer, Carl,” Ravan said. “I did think I caught a whiff of that. You had to do something besides.”

“Just some lectures,” Stagg said.

“Besides what?” Larent said.

“Well, we’re both rubbish at pool,” Ravan said. “You don’t disagree, do you?” Stagg hit the joint again. “Not stories, then?”

Stagg shook his head while holding in the smoke. “Histories,” he said through a cloud.

“Colonial ones. Is that right?” Ravan said, looking to Renna.

“Imperial ones. South Asia, in the seventeenth century,” Stagg said.

“South Asia,” Ravan said with a smile Stagg thought might possibly be vicious, though the marijuana might have already started to encourage paranoia in him, as it sometimes did. “And your family, I understand, in the middle of it all. A serious man, you are. And there’s a fellowship, she tells me?” He took the smoldering joint back from Stagg.

“No,” Stagg said. “No idea. We’ll see I guess.”

“Oh, how can you not win it,” Renna said.

He let go of her hands. Larent and Ravan collected their instruments and the four of them headed for the exit together.

■   ■   ■

They sat on the black canvas couch in Larent’s living room, all but Li, who’d gone on to a party with the opening act. While the three of them passed another joint, Larent played bass in his bedroom with the door cracked open. He never smoked marijuana or anything else, and he drank only wine, as now. Renna had once mentioned his habit of getting drunk after gigs and playing like this, away from the rest. He’d been doing it since prep school. Bach’s Cello Suite No. 5—he couldn’t resist the clichés when drunk either, it seemed—wafted out of the bedroom, transposed to the bass.

“So this is what
you
do,” Stagg said, gesturing at the air, the music that filled it. “Besides.”

“Haven’t seen a penny,” Ravan said. “Think we will, Edward?” he said above the bass notes.

Larent stopped the bow mid-passage. “It was full tonight,” he called out from the bedroom.

“But think of how small the place was,” Ravan said. “And I suspect the opening act was actually headlining. How did you manage that?”