“That’s still hard to say. I don’t know how all the pieces fit together, or that they will. There’s a king besieged not just by the Europeans—the Portuguese, since he came to power, and then the Dutch, the more recent arrivals—but by his own people, in a rebellion. There’s a scholarly class of priests, linked to the nobles, who are themselves linked to the upper echelons of the military. There’s this mix of commercial and martial conquest in Sri Lanka, and behavior in the kingdom that in less strange times would have to be called paranoia. At the same time, in England, there’s a royal, Charles II, being restored after a fallow period, and then London being eviscerated by the bubonic plague soon after.
“Then the political dynamics: Rutland and Knox and their crew having left from Cromwell’s England, watching another ruler try to keep his kingdom in one piece, sometimes, but only sometimes, against the will of his people. And the king’s seeming admiration of the Europeans, their manner. There are all these less sinister relations between the natives and Europeans—admiration, respect, in both directions—some through force of circumstance and others based only on misunderstandings.”
Kames seemed to frown. Perhaps he was simply thinking hard.
“If you mean more analytically, almost everyone involved, in incompatible ways, is trying to start certain things over, on better footing. Clearings, you could call them. Conceptual or political ones, not ethnic ones per se. So they aren’t obviously irrational, any more than the Glorious Revolution was in sweeping away absolutism.”
Kames dropped his head, twisting it to the side. “There is that view.”
Stagg narrowed his eyes as he stared at Kames’s fallen locks. A grin formed on his face, though Kames, face still down, couldn’t see it. Kames lifted his head suddenly and pursed his lips. “And these martial and scholarly orders, you have a chapter, or a scene or whatnot, on this? The ties there interest me, and many at the Wintry, actually.”
“Well, I have some description of the martial strategies used by the Sinhalese against the European outfits—‘Christian armies,’ Knox calls them—who of course had the better arms. But better techniques, that’s not so clear. The Sinhalese used the terrain to their advantage, relied on deception and surprise and speed. Like any overmatched opponent, really. And they played the Europeans to a draw for a long while. 310 years. The end game was very drawn out. Which is victory of a kind.”
Kames nodded and blinked heavily. “And what’s the end date, for you? How far do you plan on taking this?”
“For the talks, we could stop at 1680, with Charles dissolving Parliament, and Rutland and Knox returning to England. Eventually I’ll take it further, as close to the present as I can, I think, with the other sources I have from later centuries. Those are still mostly back in England, in my grandmother’s country house, actually. I’d also like to include the British return to Sri Lanka a century later.”
“For now, though, five talks are what we are thinking?”
“If that works for you. I think I’ll include some sort of commentary, as you mentioned. A supplement I can save for the last lecture, a gloss on what came before. Or is it better to present them with no explanation? Maybe that’s too much,” Stagg said, fingering his trousers.
“Why don’t we see how things shape up first. Say we tentatively schedule the talks for the last week of October. Six weeks’ time. You can show me the drafts before then, and I will pass them on to the board. On that basis we can consider you for a fellowship. We can also think about publishing the pieces, as revised lectures or something else, in the Institute’s monthly journal. For the talks themselves we can pay you a small commission, and your status for now will be affiliated researcher. It’s not enough to live on, of course,” Kames said with a tap of his pen on the papers. “But it’s something anyway. Perhaps you have money left from your graduate stipend?” Kames got up from his chair. “In any case.”
“I have some saved from teaching. But most of it’s coming from freelancing,” Stagg said, rising.
“Ah. Commissions like this one? Maybe adjunct labor?”
“No adjuncting. Really it’s whatever assignments I can pick up right now. The commission definitely helps—thank you—and if I can turn this project into a full-time matter with the fellowship, even better. The part of school I miss. Now I’m juggling research with mundane things. Earning a wage.”
“Right. Yes,” Kames said without listening. “Actually, you know, there is one other thing we should discuss.” He sat down again.
“Yes?” Stagg said, doing the same.
“About the Institute. I have this chat with everyone who wants to research here, whether on a provisional basis, like you, or as permanent staff. Most of it you’ll know, but I feel it’s a responsibility I have.
“The Wintry isn’t celebrated in all quarters,” he began. “The casual indifference that greets standard think tanks and research centers, we don’t seem to get that. That’s a mark of distinction, in a way.
“The universities are bothered by the public debates we’ve set off about education, the blinkers we’ve raised on the entrenched way. It must be a little unnerving, to see us producing work that isn’t socially and politically inert, invisible except when reinforcing the established ways, fit only for the conference circuit, the academic presses, and, finally, the mausoleums, the university libraries.
“And we’ve done it without sacrificing any seriousness. The proof of that has been their concern for our poaching. Many of our senior fellows are drawn from their highest ranks. Our credibility is mostly unassailable at this point. We are neither a practical policy think-tank with the usual ersatz scholarship, nor simply a first-class research institute that’s insulated from the broader culture, like the Institute for Advanced Study, say. We’re a kind of hybrid, unaffiliated with any external body, with no reigning political doctrine, where thinkers can come to conduct unusual or contrarian—potentially paradigm-shifting—research. The number of MacArthurs our people have won, for instance, it’s exceptional. So what’s unique about us is temperamental almost. The focus is on giving uncommon ideas a hearing without repercussion.
“More than that, though. It’s also the way we open out onto the world. The atmosphere here, the chance to intercede in the culture, which our fellows take seriously, and the very generous endowment our donors put in place early on, means we are the ideal place for a certain sort of intellectual.
“You’ve known of our satellite discussion groups and lecture series, springing up around the country, I take it?” Kames asked.
“I attended a talk—in London. On Fourier’s flaws.”
“We are there too. The endowment funds all of this. We’re injecting ideas, complex, careful ideas, but bold ideas, into the world with a speed no university can match.
“But our mission’s considered problematic. And not just by the universities. Why, I don’t know. That we don’t take politics, democracy, to come before philosophy? That’s a very anti-Socratic view. That we don’t mind testing truisms? Probably it’s that we don’t do it in a way safely disengaged from actual life. Corrupting the youth, they’ll say.”
Stagg felt a buzz in his chest.
“But what has really changed, I think, is the surrounding circumstances: ‘at a time like this.’ The attacks at the turn of the century, 9/11, then the ones in Spain and England, for all the tragedy they wrought, seem to have freed something up in people—peoples—who substantively couldn’t be more different. The discord, this interminable collision of interests that will not yield, the impossibility of any course sticking for more than a moment, until the next election, and, more than anything, these voting blocs that are persistently defeated, cycle after cycle. All this has left people… primed.
“The planes, the falling towers of World Trade, were the sparks to this charge. Then there was an exploded space, a place from which another look at our political mechanisms, the entrenched methods of coordination and decision making, became not only possib
le but unavoidable. They stood exposed.
“It’s taken a few years—almost three decades now—but not that many. The Wintry was quick to recognize that space, I would say, and we’ve been effective in suffusing the atmosphere with, well, reconceptions of the social world, ones that aren’t definitively aligned with any active political tradition, and certainly not with any of the parties and their ragbags of ideas and policies. It is confusing the order, what we do. Clouding any Archimedean vision of political process. We are not so easily forgotten about.”
The buzzing recurred—Stagg’s phone, in the inner pocket of his blazer.
“I tell you all this, as a prospective fellow,” Kames said, “because these are complicated times for the Wintry, or really anyone looking to scrutinize form, the shape of things. You are doing that, it seems, but obliquely: the collision of several historical orders, the trajectory of a family, and then, in an enacted sense, of the form historical inquiry might profitably take. All this interests me, us. I’ll be curious to see what your genealogy unearths, tells us, now, about today.”
“I should be able to get something polished to you in a few weeks, the first talk, or piece.”
“Fine. Very good.”
Kames walked Stagg to the oak doors flanked by enormous bay windows, concave like eyes.
Outside, on the honey cobblestones, Stagg checked his messages. A text only: “Jenko billiards. Downtown ASAP.”
16
The cues were in three and four pieces, ragged spikes of maple shorn by an undetermined force. Several of the tables closest to Stagg were on their knees, half their legs having been blown off at the joints, leaving them buckled, with cloths sloping. The balls were cloaked in soot, mildly discolored or worse. Most were numbered, stripes and solids, meant for games of eight- and nine-ball. There was also a small share of unnumbered balls, continuous pinks, reds, blacks, greens, browns, blues, and whites.
In the back of the hall, beyond a sodden curtain fallen to the ground and a line of sharded glass, lay the remains of a table of great dimensions—for snooker, and billiards as well, judging by the white ball resting against its edge. The table had lost all its legs and lay flat on the ground. The cloth had burnt off, but evenly, completely, and the dense wood had turned a rich charcoal tone. The plane of the table was still flat and smooth, and though the airier wood of the cushions was only ashes now, the metal frame, marked by pockets at its joints, skeletally cordoned off the space. Stagg thought it looked as though it were meant for a different game entirely, perhaps one played with clubs instead of cues; or if not that, then a kind of billiards where players lie prone like snipers to shoot. The posture might not suit the billiards clientele. But then, he thought, they did enjoy the hunt traditionally.
Further back, there were a couple of pocketless carambole tables for defunct games like straight rail and balkline. The entire area had been shielded from the common eight-ball tables by a frosted glass partition, though Stagg could only see the indeterminate remains of it, and would have to confirm the fact later, with Emile, the Jenko who owned the hall.
The Jenkos were Slovenian transplants, but several generations past now, first to London in the 1920s, then to Boston and Halsley in the 1960s. They were an educated clan, mostly in law and medicine, though they were businessmen at heart. Emile himself had taken an LLB at Imperial, in London, where the broadest branch of his family remained. He never practiced, though. After returning to the States, he passed up the LLM or JD and went into business, with money his grandfather had made with a series of snooker halls in North London: Jenko halls, as they came to be called.
He opened one downtown, in this space, which originally housed a small factory. As a child he’d enjoyed the antiquated table games, dead like Latin, especially carambole, where the balls were few and even then unsinkable. He’d first learned them in the small London halls that carried those embalmed traditions forward. Cue-sport connoisseurs were their custodians.
Thanks to Jenko’s efforts, Halsley was home to a cadre of well-heeled enthusiasts, one already familiar with billiards. The glass partition, though, hadn’t been their idea.
Emile’s father, a doctor but also a businessman in medical supplies, had gotten some of his friends to frequent his son’s club. But the humble clientele jarred them visibly, so much so that they would rent out the entire hall for the night.
Emile put the partition in thinking they might come more often that way, since the whole hall would not have to be rented. They could treat it as a private club of sorts downtown, which was close to the banks but somewhat far from the best recreation. But even the mute, blurred presence of the eight-ball players turned out to be unbearable to them; they kept renting the whole hall for a single table.
The glass was functionless, then, except as decoration. Jenko had commissioned the frosting at some expense, for the way light refracted through the etched pattern: a coat of arms slashed with Habsburg quills, the only nod to Slovenia in the building. Lit from behind, it produced a vague illumination sharply articulated only along the clear shafts of the arrows, which gave them the look of being on fire.
The curtain that ran along the partition was almost always left open, mostly because both sides of the hall were rarely occupied on the same night, but also because when they were, the carambole enthusiasts would be of less benighted origins, and they felt no need for distance from the common eight-ball players. On nights when the common hall became particularly rowdy, though, the curtain was closed to discourage curiosity, which drink had a way of darkening.
Stagg was the first of the extended intelligence forces to arrive. The police had taped off the basement staircase and given the hall a first look, making note of potential evidence, dusting for prints. At the top of the stairs they stationed two men to watch over the place. They IDed Stagg and left him to examine the hall. Through the blown-out windows behind the stairs, he couldn’t make out the specifics of the damage. But its complexion was heavy.
The door was cold and damaged at the hinge. He wrenched it open. The room tasted of smoke, its wood base made acrid by phenolic resin. He stepped past the centerline of the hall, scanning the floor. Ambient sunlight fell from the street above, through the long narrow window frames set high against the wall. It was the only light there was.
He counted at least a half-dozen balls in various states of abjection. One was melted away into a hemisphere that had recessed itself into one of the long floorboards lying atop the concrete factory floor. Some of the boards were burned away, but many remained, at least in fragments, especially on the far side away from the bar. The “2” on the ball was partly effaced, the resin presumably subjected to extended and extreme heat.
Three other balls were similarly deformed, having been liquefied to varying degrees, one nearly completely, so that it was only a smudge on the floor, and another, a green one, only fractionally, so that it was like a standard ball with a flat spot, a bruised apple. There was also one that seemed abraded, as if something had scraped at it viciously, or immense jaws had seized it. Though the innards of the ball were rough, looking of raw marble, portions of the surface remained lustrous and perfectly enameled.
There were also those that were more than deformed, that neither a forensic worker nor the imagination could reassemble. Shards of resin, and flakes too, like arrowheads, were clustered where the pool cues and racks once hung but now lay crushed. This, near a pool table that was itself in shards and flakes. Green tangles of cloth were strewn across the mess of wood and metal like bandages, and it was only by the quality of the cloth, the fineness of the nap, that one could say it had once been a pool table at all.
The fire apparently hadn’t reached it, as there was no hint of soot or char. Stagg imagined the force that would have had to visit it, exert itself upon it, the outsize impact it would have had on this part of the room. Looking over the surrounding tables, the force’s vector—its destructive signature—was obvious.
The arrangement of the
damage suggested a single detonation. He’d visited over a dozen venues like this now, which equipped him to make such diagnoses reliably. It would have altered atmospheric conditions for only an instant. The air would have been still immediately after. But the fleeting change had transformed every object within the walls. Fire finished the job, consuming the shattered tables, bottles, benches, and balls at a rate that was always accelerating, each object that succumbed to the flames increasing the odds and speed with which the rest would.
The firefighters managed to defeat the blaze quickly, which explained why much of the room’s contents were, if hardly intact, not ashes either. No one had died here. The officers confirmed this later, but Stagg knew by his nose. The air had much wood, resin, plastic, even glass in it, but not a trace of denatured flesh, or the iron of blood. Nor was there any of the usual visual evidence, no chunks of femur, pelvis, and skull; no encrusted circles of burnt fluid; no crimson spatter or mist on the walls.
The hall was struck at night, the fire put out in the morning, the investigation conducted at noon. The evening prior had been a busy one, Jenko would say. The tables had all been pushed up against the walls, so the room looked like a rectangular slab bounded on all sides by tables: in other words, a larger table, dwarfing the snooker table behind the glass.
Two hundred builders filled the space. The sliding glass doors of the partition were open, and on a small podium, Javier Celano, recently elected leader of the largest labor union in the state, spoke in resolute tones. Emile provided kegs of cheap lager gratis at these biweekly meetings, but on this night, they would not be tapped till after.
It was the substance of the talk, and equally Celano’s measured cadences, that kept them from the treacly beer. He was not himself a laborer, unskilled or otherwise; nor had he ever been. He was also not an American, but a Spaniard, and an Old Rosean, if dropouts could be counted. His father was a construction magnate based in Seville, with concerns extending as far north as Denmark and as far east as Russia. Jenko and Celano had become close in London, both scions, both sympathetic, genuinely so, to the swaths of people they felt their money had compromised.
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