Square Wave (44 page)

He could feel himself flushing. His mouth had already gone dry. He got to the aisle but nearly fell in the dark, his thigh crashing into armrests several times along the way toward the exit.

As he opened the doors the lobby lights overwhelmed his eyes, forcing them into the tightest squint. He opened them slowly and the world reformed, first as two men in police blue, stock-still. Four more men in the same blue materialized in front of the exits off to the side of the popcorn machines and the candy under the long glass counter. The employees of the theater, dressed in green uniforms and gathered together, were the last to take shape, on the opposite end of the lobby.

A feeling distilled many times over, from an ether, in days long past, down to this barely viscous thing, like glass—it filled Lewis completely. He had no name for it. Nothing was more familiar.

No one moved.

32

The floor was small, the walls enormous. Four hundred people made arm’s length unachievable, yet the warehouse, a silo for carbon black before it burned down in an unprovable arson, remained nearly empty. It felt it, too, even with them crowding the floor. All that space hovering above, a sealed sky.

Some of the damage from the fire remained. Most of the windows lining the top were missing or shattered, and thick soot covered a ceiling that had yet to be scrubbed or blasted. Streaks of bleach stained the walls, as did grand blazes of rust formed by the rainwater that would have rushed in through the broken windows in the weeks since. The smell of coal-fire was everywhere. There was a hint of soil in it too, and a polymer that lent a saccharine note.

In the gray space between laws the owners, chemical suppliers mostly to experimental labs in the region, had rented the silo to the bands for the night. The last group had just taken down their gear, and Larent, Moto, and Ravan, the closers, were setting up their own. The monitors blared Reich’s
18 Musicians
. They weren’t quite eighteen in number themselves, but they’d brought enough other musicians along with them to fill out the sound and play everything that needed playing.

Dozens of small speakers sat convexly behind the audience, along the curve of the silo wall. Directly across, they set up Larent’s collection of oscillators, two MPCs rigged to laptops, a frequency modulation synthesizer, several rack-mounted amplifiers, and a Marshall stack for Ravan’s fretless guitar.

Moto’s drums were out in front rather than behind all of this, and had been whittled down to a bass, a snare, a floor tom, and a series of splashes with no true crash. Between the drums and the electronics were the strings and brass: the cellos, a violin, Larent’s double bass, and a quartet of trumpets.

Three hundred rungs up, perched on an iron grating at the top of the tower, Renna and Stagg watched and listened. They hadn’t talked about that night yet, the one that ended in broken glass. The music meant they didn’t have to right now, which pleased them both. Language was hurting more than helping lately. It was better simply to sit together, alone.

But the ladder rattled and faces started to appear. A half-dozen of the crowd below had found their way up. They’d come with Percocet and marijuana at least. Recompense for the intrusion, that was the way Stagg thought of it. He waved off the marijuana but accepted a clutch of the familiar off-white pills, the ones Jen had softened her tragedy with. Instead of popping one, though, or handing one to Renna, he pocketed them all and went for the ladder in search of an emptier grating. Renna gave them a sheepish smile and followed him down. She was getting sick of that smile, the one she seemed to need more and more around him.

The two had hardly made it down ten rungs when a rising wave met them from below, 440 hertz shooting up at them from the lens of speakers on the factory floor, like the ocular beams once thought to leave the eye. At the same time that this filtered sawtooth traveled the length of the tower, bouncing off the ceiling, its pitch spiraled upward through the series of overtones, a second per.

The sheer height of the silo gave it reverberative powers greater than most cathedrals. But the acoustics were flawed. There was especially the coldness of the sound, which must have been augmented by the concrete and further distorted by the tunnel-like shape of the building.

Stagg lost the rhythms of his descent in the wake of the sawtooth, the coordination between hands and feet. He paused and Renna’s foot came down on his hand. He pulled it away from the ladder and twisted around before finding his grip. As the wave disappeared above the 46th partial, into the inaudible range, the two of them continued their descent in a countermotion to a music they could no longer trace.

The strident buzz of a naked square wave replaced the sawtooth. This time it was Renna who paused. Stagg looked down, his hand still hurting, and saw Larent working the oscillators, peeling away partials, paring down the brute wholeness of the wave with the same slip-stick motion he would use to hold a note on the double bass, his rosined bow alternately catching and sliding across the strings.

Around this synthesized core the musicians they’d hired arranged an organic, pure body: doublings, pure fifths and thirds, and a pure major sixth above it, all played in measureless notes, the instrumentalists ducking in and out of the chords at will. Having dialed in the oscillators, Larent triggered the MPC samples and joined them on the bass, bowing the lowest A.

Harmonically the piece was simple, the motion generated through synthesis, additive and subtractive. Ravan ran a kind of interference with his guitar, injecting tempered notes just micro-tones off from the rest, shading the music away from purity. Quickly these beating tones, these wolves with intent, went from peculiar accents to percussion more vicious than anything provided by Moto, who pounded out a beat on bass and snare made up of the fewest strokes necessary to imply the time signatures revolving every sixteen bars: 3/4, 4/4, 5/4, 3/2.

Renna and Stagg dropped onto a vacant grating about half way up the silo and took half the Percocet. Over the next minutes, or however long it was, by infinitesimal increments that evaded the ear the music grew extraordinarily loud. Stagg hadn’t noticed any discrete bump in volume, but now that he’d sensed the scale of the sound, it was unignorable and still expanding.

As the music grew, the audience shrunk in proportion. Since the silo doors couldn’t be seen from where they were, the contraction too occurred by imperceptible intervals. Every few minutes, though, they could see, with a detachment the opiate permitted, that the crowd was that much smaller and the music that much larger.

Sick from sound, they took the rest of the pills. Everything dimmed, the sound transforming from an exogenous crush to a simple flush of space. They leaned against each other and stared down at the band. At Larent. Neon green peeked out of his ears. Plugs. Prepared.

They passed out on the grating, or fell between sleep and wakefulness, whether from shock or the drug or both. An abrupt silence woke them. They looked down to the floor and it was empty. Only the band members remained. Larent stared up at them inscrutably. Ravan was smoking something.

33

The rings were hardly louder than the ringing in his ears. Several came and went before Stagg noticed the doubling. He reached down from bed, groping for the source, and found it in the pocket of his pants, which were strewn on the floor, inside out, and still buttoned at the waist. The belt was buckled too. He must have pulled himself out of them somehow. He couldn’t remember. Even now he was dazed.

Before he could separate the phone from the pocket the ringing stopped. He dialed back.

“Well, you’re an asshole,” he said just as Ravan picked up.

“Oh, you weren’t supposed to stay to the end, Carl! Only the fools did,” Ravan said. “Or the ones with earplugs, like us. How could I have known you’d overdosed—and fifty feet up at that? You made no sense after you climbed down.”

“Because of whatever you call what you were doing.”

“Because of the pills you took, I’d think. You came quite close to falling from the ladder. Renna too. Plenty of suspense in it. And what I call it is music. It was quite classical in some ways. The score was agonized over, you know, by Edward and me.”

“It was more like theater.”

“Well, the volume bit was really Edward’s idea, if that’s what you mean. Did you think it ruined things? Funny, he said you’re the first person he’d bounced the idea off of. You’d liked it then.”

“My ears are fucked.”

“So you’ve changed your mind,” he said. “I’ll let him know. Anyway, it’ll all come back, don’t worry. My ears have nearly bled after some of the things I’ve heard. And you weren’t even that close to the speakers, like the people on the floor. If anyone should be worried… but tell me this, it must have been a sight from up there, looking down on this factory floor just disgorging people, fleeing, essentially, hands over their ears.”

“I don’t know what I remember.”

“I suppose it doesn’t matter. To have seen everything perfectly, to have been changed, you don’t have to remember a thing,” he said. “But this isn’t really why I called. This storm, you see, there’s a chance, a meaningful chance, it’s going to be much worse than expected.”

“My part of town doesn’t flood, however bad it is.”

“That’s not it. Anyway the barriers should save most of the city from the floodwaters.”

“Then?”

“It might be worse in a new way, where the problem’s not its size or speed.”

“I haven’t heard anything about this.”

“You aren’t going to. And I’m not going to go through meteorological stuff that won’t mean anything to you anyway. Ionic charges, isotopes, and such. I’m just telling you what we know now, or anyway a few of us do, here in Princeton. It could create a kind of… imbalance… in the atmosphere, one we haven’t quite seen before. It could last for days, even weeks after the storm’s officially dead.”

“Which means?”

“Which means it’s the perfect moment for a trip.”

“No, I—”

“You could go out to Vegas. That’s what it means. See exactly who this man—Lewis Eldern—we’ve been looking for all this time is. Extraordinary that it took some anonymous tip to bag him. We weren’t even close, were we? What a waste of money we’ve been.”

“But why would I care that much, to go out there?”

“Don’t say that,” Ravan said with a laugh. “After all, he did hurt that girl you’ve been looking for. The last one, Jen.”

“I’m not looking for her.”

“Really? I’d heard you’d been calling. He might know where she is.”

“It’s not important.”

“You’re sure?” he asked. “Well then, aside from that, Lewis
is
the one who’s mucked up your plans. That must be important to you at least.”

“We’ll have to see what happens.”

“Oh, come now. That Kames hasn’t seen Lewis or his father in years, it makes no difference. There’s too much history between them, too many common motives,
not
to investigate the Institute, given all the other evidence. Penerin’s been wanting to anyway, for lots of reasons. You know that most of all. And it’ll be closed until they’re done. It could take months. They’ll drag it out. And who knows what it’ll turn up. I think we both know they’re going to find something. At some point, there has got to be something.”

“Still. Seeing Lewis, interviewing him, isn’t going to change any of that.”

“For the gambling then, Carl. The whores. Nothing’s keeping you here. No lectures. No fellowship. Penerin will probably send you out there anyway eventually, unless you quit first,” Ravan said. “But now you can’t afford to quit, can you?”

“And where’ll you go? Jersey’s not escaping, they say.”

“India. I don’t recommend it.”

“Your family.”

“Take Renna somewhere.”

“Right.”

“You have to. You’d be a fool not to, Carl. More than that.”

Stagg switched off the phone. Renna stretched her leg across his and he wrapped up her head in his hands.

“Hm?”

“Hm?”

“I still feel sick,” she said.

He tapped out two Advil from the bottle on the windowsill and swallowed them. He tapped out two more and slipped them into her mouth. “Water?”

She swallowed without any.

“I can’t hear anything.”

He smiled. “So, Dakar.”

“Dakar what.”

“This weekend.”

“Oh, stop.”

“Really. We could go.”

She sat up. “Why?”

“What do you mean?” he asked. “It’ll be fun.”

“But all of a sudden.”

“That’s the thing. It has to be.”

“What?”

“We could stay a few weeks even, depending. We could make it up to England too. We could both get what we want.”

“You mean the hurricane?” she asked, incredulous.

He sat up.

“But that’s why they built the barriers,” she said. “It’s not
that
big a deal anymore.”

“They might not help, in this case.”

“And how would you know?”

“Ravan just called.”

“Of course he did. There’s nothing about him that’s not fucking weird.”

“Well, he would know, wouldn’t he? Of anyone we know?”

“And what about everyone else in the city? What are they going to do about it? I haven’t heard of anyone else evacuating.”

“They should probably go too. You can invite them.”

“I can’t, not just like that.”

“What happened to the whimsy, little girl?”

“I’m interviewing someone Monday. And anyway I can’t get vacation right now, even if I asked.” She touched his whiskered face.

“Let’s just go.”

“Carl! Just because there isn’t any fellowship now, I’m supposed to drop everything? I’m sorry about what happened but—”

“No, you know—it’s fine.” She could keep Larent company. Really, the guy would like that. Maybe she would too.

“No it’s not. It’s terrible. And I’m really sorry.”

“Later then. We’ll go, sometime.”

“Really, really soon. In a few weeks even.” She kissed him on the lobe of his ear. “We
have
to stop fighting, though. Clean the slate. I don’t even think this was about a storm.”