Square Wave (7 page)

Through the building’s charred scaffolding the moon was visible, a brilliant white haphazardly fragmented by metal. He walked back down the passage and sat on the wall, waiting, with the woman at his feet.

4

Light arrived as a plane, projecting through the slit between drawn curtains, cutting the bedroom in two. Stagg sat at the foot of the twin bed, on a short pine bureau intersecting the light. He passed his hand through the beam and watched sun-kissed dust swirl within its borders. He pulled the thick curtains apart and two dimensions became three, the light broadening until it was nearly the width of his little studio apartment.

In the street below, a small child and an older one, not quite a teen, hurried along with brows pulled low and heads whirling. The woman from last night, her broken body, the picture came to him. What will Penerin want to hear?

His shirt was heavy with sweat. He pulled off the black tee and balled it up in his hand, felt the damp in it before wiping it across his neck. It took some of the stickiness away. He reached down to the tiny metal handles and opened the second drawer of the bureau beneath him, sliding his legs out as far as the drawer itself. The clothes, overstuffed in the drawer, plumped as he did. He’d not looked at this surplus in over a year, ever since he’d moved in, after returning to the city from England. Everything in his closet was on the floor at this point, and as filthy as the tee shirt. At least these were clean, he thought, even if they looked like someone else’s clothes to him now.

Along the top layer he found a crushed blue button-down with a mangled spread collar and flannel trousers. He opened the drawer below with his toes threaded through the handles and kicked a three-pack of generic boxers to the floor. They looked as if they’d been bought at a drugstore. Why he’d bought them, he didn’t know, but he wasn’t troubled by it. When you drank like him, little oddities like this lost their oddness.

It was only after piling the retired outfit on the bed that he noticed the small loaf of olive bread on the nightstand. It must have been there, sitting on the red plastic plate, since he’d last slept here. Two nights—three nights—now. One of the two chunks was nearly eaten. Only a hard beige crust covered in semi-elliptical ridges remained. The other chunk formed a complete half, its exposed interior a gauzy white punctuated by oblong streaks of purple. The sight of it seemed to hollow out his stomach. He felt a weakness in himself he hadn’t known only a second before.

He pressed his arched fingers against the white of the bread, but like a cast that had set, it was no less firm than the crust itself. He gripped the half-loaf with two hands, his fingertips lining up in parallel along the white. One twist and the shell gave way. He pulled the quarters apart, put one in the palm of his hand, and dug his fingers into the crumb as close to the crust as he could. This was not so close, as some of the crumb had also staled. Leaving the husk on the plate, he pulled out the small core of cottony crumb. He did the same with the other quarter and pushed the husks off to one side, exposing the ridge at the edge of the plate in which olive oil had collected. He swabbed the chunks of bread until they turned a greenish-yellow.

Breakfast in the Spanish style, he thought. And who was it, the curly-haired golfer, who’d been known, decades ago, to eat bread and a shallow bowl of oil before each round? His father had told him about him, presumably as an example of Spartan values. But the name didn’t come back.

He turned to the second chunk, warily eyeing the desk across from him, overwhelmed, for months now, by legal pads with most of the sheets torn out; xeroxed journal articles, some pristine for not having been read, others bearing the underlines of successive readings, such that virtually the entire paper was lined, restoring its balance; loose papers and index cards carrying unassimilated notes; books, open (Collingwood, Bentley) and closed (Barnes, Burnyeat), stacked and scattered, concerning several projects; the disintegrating letters and journals on paper of varying constitution and age; and the little hand-drawn maps, water-stained and mottled in every shade of orange and yellow and brown.

These materials spilled onto the floor, reducing by half the walkable area of an apartment already compromised by scattered clothing. At the very center of this mass was a laptop, with a cursor blinking on the last line of a document, the one that would make sense, or a kind of it, anyway, of all the ones surrounding it.

Obscuring the keyboard were his notes from last night, the flashes he’d had of the monk, just before he’d found the wordless woman. There were still a few hours till he had to brief Penerin. His real work, the next part of it, was glaring at him: charting the axes of Darasa’s being, if not Larent’s, or Renna’s, or his own. Although if he could find his way to accounting for the men peopling his histories—and they were all men—they might well end up accounting for him, given his ancestry. He was, after all, only the latest branch of the tree. He swallowed the last of the bread and pushed on toward the center.

■   ■   ■

Squinting into that bright stretch of rock, his own reflection obscuring the fine scrawl covering the wall’s mirror-black surface, the mendicant Darasa, poet, chronicler, exegete, and priest, would have wished for powers of vision greater than men are granted as he searched it for sense.

Whatever he could make out he transcribed into a book of palm leaves. The uncommonly curly script, a thousand years old and part of a language caught between Pali and Sinhala, had been molded by these leaves. Where straighter lines would have separated the plant fibers, rounded ones, running across rather than between them, did not. The writing of Darasa’s day, less rounded but distinctly curvy, answered in its own way to the same constraints.

The graffiti covering that wall at Sigiriya was only partly intelligible to him, first, because his grasp of the continuum running from ancient Pali to seventeenth-century Sinhala, his own tongue, was strongest at its termini and progressively less certain toward its midpoint; and second, because the inscriptions were multiply superimposed, sometimes in seven or eight layers.

They’d accreted over the twelve centuries since the island had been ruled from here and not Anuradhapura, the ancient capital farther north, or, as now—1664—Kandy, to the south. At the time each inscription was made, it would have appeared more distinctly than the ones overwritten, the marks sharper, more pronounced. But little had been inscribed here since the monks re-founded the monastery two hundred years ago, though at the base of the rock this time, and not on the palace grounds themselves, which had served that purpose as recently as 1100. The monks’ maintenance, high atop the rock, was thought too costly by recent kings, so the grounds were left to decay.

The years had flattened the writing. A kind of visual parity had overtaken the marks, making it difficult to say which inscriptions came last or first, or even to say which stretch of words or symbols went together with which others. Depending on how one grouped them, there were dozens of ways of reading the inscriptions. All of this only compounded his difficulties.

The monk had, some months back, cut a few words into the wall himself, in a blank area near its foot, discreet and permanently shaded from the sun. Mostly this was to test the tactile properties of the rock, the ease or difficulty with which the original inscriptions would have been made; and to see how the wall held a perfectly new inscription, in the hope that this might help him date the layers.

But perhaps he also did it simply to leave a few words behind, like the rest. His translated as “A lesser chronicler.” He wondered how the phrase might someday be overlain, misunderstood possibly, and taken up, perhaps, into something greater by that misunderstanding.

He folded the palm book and placed it, along with the thin, plain stylus, into the sheath he kept at his waist. The day’s transcribing was done. He would add these notes to the rest back at the temple.

For all the complications, he’d managed to give sense to some of the scrawlings. Most seemed addressed to the paintings that covered the rock fortress during Kassapa’s reign, particularly those of women, “long-eyed,” “golden-skinned,” whose essential features, judging by the inscriptions, were stillness and silence:

Those ladies of the mountain
They did not give us
The twitch of an eyelid

The paintings had been done after the fall of Kassapa, around 500, when his deposer, Moggallana, moved the capital back to Anuradhapura. Those living in the villages surrounding Sigiriya would have made the massive rock (and the wall at its base) theirs again, while the palace proper was converted into a monastery.

A few of the paintings, smaller ones, remained along the path spiraling hundreds of feet into the air, ascending the fortress’s edge. They would have survived for their location in the recesses and caves, which shielded them, along with the sentries of that era, from the elements.

There were also other inscriptions Darasa had at least partly interpreted, ones of a more mundane sort: declarations made between lovers, light rhymes, nicknames, and simple identifications (so-and-so from such-and-such). Amid these were the more significant ones, the ones he was after, carrying intimations of life in Sigiriya across the centuries. They dated as far back as 500, around the time of the death of Mahanama, the leading scholar of his era, and the primary compiler of the Great Chronicle (the Mahavamsa), a clerical history of the island covering the thousand years preceding his death.

Some of the graffiti spoke of noble families and their scandals, others of the lack of rice or meat, still others of populist discontent and the deposing of kings—and indeed of the fall of the fortress kingdom itself, to Moggallana, the rightful heir, apparently.

Darasa hoped these records might enrich the commentary he was preparing on the Great Chronicle. More to the point, though, what made the task pressing, was how they might inflect his contribution to the Lesser one (the Culavamsa), the still-living record of the kingdom. It had been accumulating in fits and starts from the time of Mahanama’s death up through to the arrival of the Dutch envoys thirty years ago. That arrival had disrupted the keeping of the record, and a handful of the most senior priests—Darasa, not yet 50, being the youngest of them—was charged with updating it, through a portrait of the most recent decades of the kingdom. When it finally arrived, he would say to himself sometimes, the light of the past, even the very distant past, must change the complexion of the present.

Interpreting the inscriptions was arduous and uncertain work. As was simply collecting them. He’d only begun to account for the many inscriptions carried by the architecture of the court and palace above. So he ascended again. This was his third trip. The monk left the mirror-wall behind and edged his way along the path. In the guard stations he passed several renderings of the Buddha, in bleeding shades of red, orange, and yellow. The path narrowed as it wrapped around the interior face of the fortress, which was hidden from both the entrance to the court and the nearby townships, partly by the thick forest at its base.

Further toward the top, the cliff turned sheer and the path narrow, in some places reducing to mere foot-holes. The shallow steps ascended at a radical angle, as a great height had to be scaled in the smallest distance. He leaned against the rock. At this height, already two hundred feet from the forest floor, the winds were muscular, death-dealing. He’d knotted the loose fabric of his robe to give the currents less to work with.

In previous eras, rope bridges had crisscrossed this part of the mountain, connecting various levels of the fortress on the exposed top, where the palace lay, to the plateaus, embankments, and interior caves below. As Darasa stepped from foot-hole to foot-hole, pressing his weight against the cliff, he wondered, as every person who had ever got to the palace above must have, how many would have lost their footing, been snatched by the winds, toppled from the bridges, only to expire in the coconut palms and shrubs below.

The sun descended from its apex just as he reached the top. The palace grounds had stood unoccupied for over four hundred years. It was a site for research only now, and so far, beyond the reach of the Europeans. Just as Kandy marked the southern stronghold of the kingdom, Anuradhapura, though more vulnerable, did in the north. Sigiriya lay safely between the two. It left Darasa free, in a less fraught space, to make sense of things, which was what monks of his rank chiefly did.

Scattered throughout the grounds were staircases of varying widths leading only into the sky, the surrounding structures long ago having been dispersed by the elements. Several well-preserved buildings with broad balconies lined the plateau’s far edge, each with eccentrically shallow stairs: sixty of them rising just ten feet.

The largest building, the palace proper, stood to the right, along the southern edge of the plateau, five stories high, each floor narrower than the one below. The inner wall had long ago collapsed, leaving behind a cross-sectional view.

The interior was mostly debris. The outer wall, facing over the cliff’s edge, was in better condition, but large patches of it had fallen away, leaving gaps of a leafy green—forest surrounded the great rock out to the horizon—against the pale gold of the remaining stone.

The vast quantities of rock had been quarried miles away and brought up the sheer walls by an elaborate system of pulleys. All supplies would have been carried on the backs of servants, dragging many to their deaths. The king himself would only occasionally be shepherded from the palace to the long rectangular pools at the foot of the rock, where members of the extended court, and further out, the priesthood, resided.

The walls were engraved with lions and other animals, alongside geometric patterns and what seemed an uninterpreted language. Darasa entered the ruins to finish recording these markings. They might shift the meaning, he thought, of King Kassapa’s description in the Chronicle, and perhaps send a sort of interpretive ripple through the ages down to the current regime and Darasa’s own king, Rajasingha II.