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?”
Larent released the bow and said something. A single word. Perhaps “charity.”
“Yes, pity. Anyway, no, this won’t do for money,” Ravan said to Stagg, lowering his voice. “Not yet. I don’t know how he gets by.”
“His father,” Renna said. She was curled up on the couch with her head in Stagg’s lap.
“I’ve just got a fellowship of sorts myself, actually,” Ravan said.
“A writer too, I guess,” Stagg said.
“Nothing so noble. Meteorology.”
“Channel four,” Renna whispered before pulling on the joint. These sorts of comments, two in a row now, innocently undermining, they made him feel close to her. He raked her dirty blond hair with his fingertips and smiled as she let the smoke rise from her mouth.
“Oh I don’t think they’d have me for a weatherman,” Ravan said as he took the joint from her. “I’m taking up a provisional spot at NOAA, starting next week. Out of Princeton. Atmospheric research. With some fieldwork, from time to time, in Vegas, if you can believe it. Like you, Carl, I’ve got a doctorate. Not in philosophy, though. Something less sexy, that’s the difference.”
“Physics?” Stagg asked.
“Of aerosols.”
“Cloud physics.”
Ravan laid the joint on the oxidized copper table, green like the statue in the port.
“You know much about it?” he asked.
“No. Not really. But it doesn’t sound so dull.”
“It’s sort of the family business. I don’t much care for it anymore, but it is how I got on to what does interest me. The physics of sound, psychoacoustics, alternative tunings… Tell me, though, did you like what you heard tonight? Or not ‘like’—what did you make of it?” Ravan picked up the joint by its waist and passed it to Stagg, who pinched it between index and middle fingers like a cigarette.
By this point he had nothing intelligent to say.
“Too drunk to have an opinion,” Renna said. She pushed herself upright, using Stagg’s thigh for leverage, and followed the music to its source in the bedroom.
“Too drunk?” Ravan said. “Too stoned, she means. She might be herself.”
“I don’t know,” Stagg said.
“I think it quite complements drunkenness, actually. Our music. Induces something like it, if one isn’t already. At least until you recalibrate. It’s been extraordinary finding someone just as interested in these microtonal things as I am. Now, if only Edward and I could make a living this way. He might be right. Perhaps there’s hope. But fo
r now it’s back to the physics labs, really just as a glorified research assistant.”
He continued in a slightly quieter voice. “At least I’ll be finished with this intelligence nonsense. We’re both not long for that line of work, it looks like. Your fellowship is decided soon? Weeks? Months? She must be right, Carl. You’ve got to succeed. You just can’t walk the streets like this anymore.” His eyes mocked softly. “Neither of us. Though there is something to it. A ne’er-do-well appeal. That’s it.”
“Your family is here,” Stagg asked, “or in England?”
“My accent you mean?”
“Your phrasing really. Your words. But the accent too.”
“It is mangled, isn’t it. No way around it now, though. Stuck with a mongrel tongue. My mother and father are back in Delhi, actually, after too many years abroad, first in Palo Alto, when I was very young, and then in London, at King’s College, for many years. I grew up there, really, until university—college—when my father went back to his research at Stanford. I went with him, and then to Berkeley for the doctorate. My brother, Menar, stayed on in England, but he studied the same, at Oriel, in Oxford. He’s with my father in India now, working alongside him. Researching. Testing.”
“And you’re here,” Stagg said.
“Well, he’s the better physicist, of the two of us. Better vision, bigger ideas. No one says that exactly but it’s true. Is that why I got out?” He asked the question to himself and laughed dismissively.
As the roach consumed itself in the ashtray Ravan took out a tiny bud from the sandwich bag on the table. It was shaded olive and swathed in blue-white filaments. He tore it apart into stiff crinkled threads and set it on a rolling paper. He took a pouch from his pocket and sprinkled dark, sticky tobacco onto it and started to make a joint of it.
Stagg slid the lighter on his edge of the table across to Ravan and stole a look into the bedroom. The door was leaning against the inner wall and though it was misted with water, he could see out of the far window: the neon sign of a Mexican restaurant, El Calque, frosted pink.
The bowing of the bass had stopped for a while. It had been replaced by a steady mumbling between Renna and Larent. Stagg had strained to pick it up, any of it, and he might have if it weren’t for Ravan prattling on the entire time. Marijuana always had the opposite effect on Stagg. For him, that was the point. Apparently not for Ravan.
Renna finally emerged, heavy-lidded and happy, though the reason for her happiness, the soft smile on her face, he had no way of grasping, except that it came out of a conversation with Larent. She climbed onto the couch and deposited her head in Stagg’s lap, this time with her knees tucked up close to her chest and her arms wrapped around them. He tugged on her ear and she frowned playfully. He held her neck gently, four fingers against her pulsing throat. She turned up toward him with her eyes closed and her lips puckered. He laid his finger on them lengthwise and she took it between her teeth like a bone.
Ravan watched the exchange as twists of smoke leaked from his mouth and shot up his nostrils, returning by the same channels in thinner, more uniform streams. He picked up with the chatter as if there’d been no interval, and on his third joint of the night, perhaps for him there hadn’t been.
“I don’t actually think so,” he said, “that he’s the better physicist. Not necessarily. It might just be he looks harder, or that the world, the qualities of clouds, tugs on his eyes a bit more sharply. It really is his life, physics. But not mine. I think our father would have liked it, actually, if I’d turned out to have been the more committed one. But he knew I was leaning away quite early on.
“I studied music composition too, you see, along with the obligatory physics, which came very easily to me, because of the mathematics at its core. And I took as a child more avidly than he could have guessed to the sarod, of which my uncle was a master. He lived with us for a time, and he would find me sometimes in his room, tunelessly sounding notes, just kneeling over the thing, plucking randomly. I was very young then, and it was enthralling, this source of sound where any note at all could be found. The fretless guitar I’ve got now is modeled on it, really. Edward and I, we come at this matter of pure tunings, intonation, from such different angles. I think it’s auspicious.
“So, yes, I think my father knew Menar Jr.—they’ve got the same name—would end up the proper colleague, not me. But his firstborn has always been a bit aloof, occasionally surly, and now to top it off he’s gone and married a Muslim.” He seemed to wink as he said this, or it may have been smoke in his eye. He passed the joint to Stagg.
“So they’re not so close,” Stagg said.
“Oh, they get on well enough, but my father and I, we get on more easily—or did, before it became clear my intentions were musical. I seem to be a better detector of his humor, which can be very sly, subtle. That seemed to count for a lot; he’s not generally thought of as a funny man.
“I am, or was, probably more alive to his sense of purpose—even if I didn’t quite share it—of wanting to turn the ground of our origins, our ancestors, from this flaking, sunburnt dirt that produced only hunger in any abundance, to something less violently resistant to growth. Whereas Menar Jr. always seemed to be in thrall to the physics of the project more than its potential to change things, to intervene in anything… human. At least that’s how he was. I don’t know why exactly, but his interest in applications, fieldwork, has picked up lately—and just as mine’s been drowned out by the music.
“Still, physics has been important to me. I’m only a few years removed from it, really, and even then, I’ve been checking in throughout. Menar’s worked straight through, of course, right alongside my father. The work is captivating in its way. Now I suppose, with the new job, I’ll just have to summon a bit more of that interest. If I can’t get the music right with Edward, I may end up rejoining them more permanently anyway. I don’t know what I think of that.”
“But what they’re doing in India, you’ll be doing in Princeton, basically?” Stagg asked. “Or is that not right?”
Renna’s breath turned heavy and sleep-indicative. She had a habit of dozing in public, but without the narcoleptic’s excuse. Depending on the occasion, Stagg found it vexing or charming. Tonight, though, it changed nothing. She had smoked, so it wasn’t as ridiculous as it usually was.
“No, something similar. What we all do. Weather mod—cloud seeding lately. Only got the job, I think, because of my father. He’s become something of a celebrity in applied atmospherics, for his work precipitating and dispersing clouds. Forty years he’s been working on this. The original motivation was drought and famine relief, especially in Orissa, Bengal, and the inland plateaus, where we’re from, ancestrally.”
“Kalinga,” Stagg said.
“Impressive! Yes, very good. In any case, my grandfather was a director of Project Gromet, back in the ’60s, the first large-scale weather mod attempt in India. The White House backed it, actually, to relieve the Bihar drought. It didn’t, of course.
“There’ve been a lot of cul-de-sacs along the way. Gromet was just the first. But they were all worth something. And the field trials I was a part of, they always brought me some satisfaction, whatever the outcome. My brother was always more pencil-and-paper, and more purely about results, success. I think my wider interest pleased my father, who could also take a certain delight in the flowering of a doomed experiment. I was with him through a lot of them, sometimes just in the role of spectator, to be fair. Every couple of years we would go back to India, the Ghats, from London or Palo Alto, to try something new, something big, like bringing in a monsoon out of season, say, luring it into the inland plateaus it normally avoided.
“My father understands the history of weather modification profoundly. He’d spend weeks in the archives alone, searching for the germs of ideas in those errant experiments, the truth in failure. Really it’s not much different from what we’re trying to do with music, Edward and Li and I.
“Anyway, you
could say, in his own work, he’s re-created the evolution of the field, experiment by experiment, all the salient ones. Most of the men who came up with those experiments have been dismissed as charlatans, and mostly they were, or just second-rate scientists. But even they, or especially they, through their recklessness, could strike on unconventional approaches, ones that might yield results if you applied them with a certain rigor they lacked, or if you just shifted them away from some misguided theoretical axis.
“It was about disentanglement. The experiments, any experiment, really, in physics, in music, brings a cluster of ideas together. Once you’ve separated them, you can try out other combinations, often with ideas gathered from entirely different experiments. And the whole thing is guided not by rules but by steeped intuition. The quality of my father’s creative intuition is something everyone’s aware of, he has that kind of nose for ideas, applications.”
Ravan rubbed his jaw. He took the joint back from Stagg and pulled the last smoke from it before stubbing it out in the ashtray. He exhaled and sighed at the same time. “Well.”
Stagg’s sense of what Ravan said was vague in a way that pleased him. That he was under no obligation to grasp more than half of it, that he didn’t need to pose smart questions—he’d smoked and couldn’t reasonably be expected to, however interested, however bright he was or wasn’t—made him want to hear more, to revel fecklessly in Ravan’s words, which had poetry in them. To Stagg it was a performance, and maybe to Ravan as well, one he liked to give when he was stoned, for all he knew. The drug seemed to propel Ravan to a greater eloquence. He seemed to be enjoying it all, and set to Larent’s playing, which had resumed, it formed something like a libretto. Stagg wanted a second act. “The experiments,” he said. “What were they like?”
“Oh, you must have had enough by now,” Ravan said. “I’ve already put her to sleep.”
“She’s not a doctor, of anything, though,” Stagg said. He looked down at her and was pleased to find her asleep now. It had wiped the smile off her face that he hadn’t put there.
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