Square Wave (45 page)

“No?”

“More like a test.”

“Of what?”

“I don’t know.”

34

Stagg was on his way up now, tight against the window, listening to his ears pop over the ringing that persisted. The clouds ahead were heavy and swirling, but nothing like what they were farther out, he assumed, with the storm coming in over the Atlantic. He could see the Coast Guard on the horizon, six ships bound for a fury they’d try to calm, just days now before the elections.

This was the last flight out. The seat beside him was empty but there was a young woman in the aisle. Tall, pale, and elegant, she didn’t seem to want to talk and he hoped she wouldn’t change her mind. She was someone the English would call the right sort, he knew that almost immediately. She’d said nothing more than, “No, that’s fine,” when he’d stooped over and slid his briefcase beneath the seat between them with a deferential glance. But she’d done it in the pure cadences of received pronunciation, the ones he knew mostly from his grandmother, who’d agreed, to his surprise, to let him stay at the country house in Kent indefinitely, whether he was researching or not, or coming with company.

Something indefinite appealed to him now. If he wanted, he could scrap everything he’d written and just live in that library, reading. And if the elections were thrown into chaos by the storm, or if they weren’t, and the results were adverse or simply meaningless once more, what would it be to him, at home, abroad, and free, finally, of Penerin’s heavy thumb?

For all he knew, this woman could be headed to Canterbury too, going by her accent. Or if not her, by sheer force of intuition—he’d not told her he was going anyway, without her, he’d just packed and left—Renna might be. (It wouldn’t have shocked him.) Or else, by the vaster powers of chance, which were really just the sublimities of miracle, maybe even Jen.

A tone sounded twice as they found themselves within a turbulence they’d been briefed on. The shades were wide open but they might as well have been closed now for all he could see through the windows whited out with cloud. The plane started to shake, first in a fine, even tremor, then less regularly but more viciously, sinking and rising and sinking again in a wind that seemed made of strands, tiny streams with their own natures, traveling at their own speeds, braided together like rope.

The plane steadied. The windows became windows again.

“Sorry about that,” said the captain. “At least you won’t be in Halsley for it.”

The woman took out a sterling pen and opened up a notebook, four by six, already much used. She began to write slowly, thoughtfully, in a cursive hand too small for Stagg to read; though if he looked closer, somehow he felt he might find only a wavy line. He wasn’t tempted to test the feeling, not now. Looking did have limits.

A different tone sounded and a flight attendant spoke over the speakers: “Feel free to use your wireless devices now.” A rose glow began suffusing the plane, a peculiar rose he’d never known, though he must have seen night fall, the sun set, dozens of times from above like this, shuttling back and forth between continents. Perhaps, though, there was never an hour, an atmosphere, quite like this.

He ran his fingers over the cold screen of his phone and thought of the two women he’d left in the dark, to find their own way. He watched the dark ink of this woman’s pen run onto paper, watched her illegible, undulating line deepen as the pulped wood pulled it in. She paused, held the broad nib against the book, wondering, he supposed, how to continue, just as the finest point bloomed before them both.

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