Square Wave

by Mark de Silva

  “Strange, right?” Penerin said from the doorway. His voice was soft, as if he were standing farther away than he was.

  Stagg nodded and set the sheets down. Without looking at him, his boss walked around to the desk and sat slowly in the mesh swivel chair.

  “I can’t see what this does, or what it’s about… really about,” Penerin said in almost philosophical tones. “Can you?”

  The question sharpened his voice, and his eyes, which finally fixed on Stagg, held a new intensity.

  “It’s definitely—”

  “It’s accusations, it’s camaraderie, directed at this same guy, Celano,” Penerin interrupted. “And Jenko too. Then there’s the insinuations about us, but just fuzzy enough for him to deny. And then the academic jargon that I don’t know what.” His voice was sharper still.

  The fluorescent loop overhead, veiled by frosted glass, crackled faintly and continuously. Stagg waited a few beats to see if Penerin was done.

  “Ravan spoke with him,” Stagg said.

  “About the museum, right. He collected the facts—a strange bunch of them.”

  “Strange events.”

  “No, but what he put down, what Kames gave him, the emphasis is all wrong. It’s more about the wine than the bombs. It’s bizarre.”

  “Is that Ravan or is that Kames, though.”

  “Jesus fuck, Carl, this isn’t about distortion, you have to see that.” He paused, calmed himself. “What about this essay then? These are Kames’s words, right? He chose them. So whatever is odd here, there’s no excuse, no messenger, we know it’s him. And it is weirder than anything Ravan reported. For one, why is he talking about the assaults on the hookers like this? Of all the things he could have chosen, why was this his example of something you could just as well accuse him of?”

  Stagg avoided his eyes now.

  “Any ideas? Even just about how this guy thinks?”

  The contempt in his voice was unconcealed now, and a good part of it must have been directed at him. Stagg shrugged vaguely.

  “No? Then any idea why we still have no clue why the beatings tailed off since Best?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Not yet. That’s great. You realize we have every right to be paranoid now, right? There are weeks till we’re supposed to pick a president. Are you paranoid?”

  Stagg nodded.

  “See, that can’t be true. I can’t see how, anyway. You haven’t said a single useful word about Kames today. Which means you think there’s no point worrying about him, or you just don’t know anything about him. But of course, you do know him. So you must not be worrying about him, and you should be.”

  Stagg didn’t know what to say. For a moment the hum of the bulb took over.

  “We had to look into the Wintry, obviously, after this,” Penerin said, holding the printout up. “They tell me your name is on the schedule, for a lecture. So does Ravan.”

  “It’s not—”

  “There’s nothing wrong with that. Prestigious place is what I’ve heard, whatever the controversy. You’re there for your research, I guess. History? Politics?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You must consider that your real life, the one you’d rather be living all the time instead of sitting here with me. But see, this is history too. This is politics, what we’re doing. So this is just as much your real life as anything.”

  “I never said it wasn’t.”

  “Then you can take it just as fucking seriously, can’t you.”

  Stagg gripped the cool chrome armrests that sloped away from him. He slid his hands down the metal tubes, loosening his grip to prevent them from clinging to the metal, which seemed damp. But that may have just been his sweat. He lifted his weight with his elbows and pushed himself further into the chair until his back went straight.

  “Look, you don’t have to do anything that different—it’s just noticing,” Penerin said. “Same as always. So you bring up this article with him, show some interest in the details. And maybe you end up finding out a tiny bit about what he’s really playing at. That’s all. There’s nothing for us to argue about really, Carl. I’m not angry you work at the Wintry. It could actually be a good break we caught here, really.”

  “I’m only applying to work there at this point. But what you’re saying now, it—”

  “Wait. What have I said?”

  “Well, I’m thinking now maybe I shouldn’t—”

  “But I haven’t said anything. Or, okay, no, I am saying there are things we don’t understand, Carl. And as long as that’s true, nothing’s right, nothing’s wrong. That sounds like freedom, I know, but it’s also a very big fucking problem. You can see that, right? Because it won’t last. Because after the fact, after people die, or an election’s derailed, when none of us can do anything about it, we—not “they,” but us, all of us—we’ll say this was wrong, that was right. I don’t know that it makes any sense that we do that, but we do that, and we’ll do it here too. If we’re lucky, you could help us see which is which a little quicker, and we’d have a tiny bit of choice in how we come out. In history.

  “Understand, I’m not saying Kames must have done something wrong,” he continued. “It’s always possible there’s nothing there. Mostly there is nothing, right, you’ve already seen that by now. But we’re coming at this from several angles. Ravan will be involved too. Our numbers people have been working. You’re just another arrow in the quiver, one we didn’t even know we had till yesterday. We’re grateful. We need you.”

  “And how would you know that yet?”

  Penerin rubbed his eyes.

  “Let’s just see what I see.”

  They listened to the light.

  23

  1. From the East, from that town, there came a spark the size of a glowworm. Growing ever bigger it came to the center of Kolamba, waxed here to unmeasured size, and burned up everything at once. On that day, in consequence of its splendor, the enemy who had penetrated to Sirivaddhana took flight with the haste of those who are threatened with peril.

  2. The Ruler of men guarded his son, who grew by degrees like another moon.

  Darasa weighed the passages against what he knew. Senaratana, the “Ruler of Men.” Rajasingha, his son, born to Queen Dona Catherina, the Portuguese princess and wife previously to Senaratana’s brother and predecessor on the throne, Vimaladhammasuriya, who was now dead. And the “cruel and brutal” Parangi—Portuguese—merchants “puffed up with pride,” who “waxed very strong” in Colombo.

  General de Azavedo had seen this glowworm spark in his dreams and scattered his forces in the hours before dawn. The Portuguese scrambled to their forts locked safely in the forests, leaving the great port of Colombo clear. This was in the decades after 1600, in which the Portuguese were still strong in the south of the island, before the Dutch arrived.

  The threat of the spark deferred, the king would have made his way to Sirivaddhana, a jagged and unassailable land. He divided the kingdom between three sons, two being his dead brother’s, and the other his own. On three leaves, the names of the three provinces were inscribed: Uva to the east, Matale to the north, and then the Highlands in the middle surrounding Kandy. The boys reached down to the overturned leaves at the base of the mounted relic, which held a molar said to belong to Siddhartha Gautama. To his blood fell the prize, the impregnable Highlands, safest from European advances. Seven years hence, Senaratana died and his true son, soon to be known as Rajasingha, ascended to the throne.

  Darasa sat at his desk in fine dawn light in the town of Nillemby, not far from Kandy. He reached for the stylus and drew the nib from the bottom of a shallow black pool of ink. In a broad book of palm leaves, he copied the passages from the Lesser Chronicle, which took account of the years between 1604 and 1635 in a thousand words, on a sheet of palm leaf fifteen inches square and started to annotate it with these thoughts.

  The length and complexity of the text determined the size of the sheets. When it was sprawling, li
ke the Chronicle, it would have to be divided across many small sheets, as now. Other times, when it was possible to see the piece as a whole, in one sweep, the giant palm leaf would be left uncut. Once, in commentary on the Jataka tales, part of the Pali Canon, he amassed 547 whole leaves, one for each life of the Buddha described. The stack remained in the attic of Kandy’s main temple, several feet high and hopelessly bound with twine.

  The margins, top and bottom, left and right, usually dwarfed the text itself, which he would inscribe in the center of the leaves. As he annotated, he would box paragraphs, sentences, phrases, words—not always nouns and verbs, but conjunctions, definite articles, simple negations, all the way down to the smallest atoms of sense. A light line led from each of these items to the margins, where Darasa would set the relevant comment.

  The technique was unique. The other monks simply numbered passages from the text to correspond with their annotations in a separate palm book. But Darasa’s strategy encouraged commentary of much greater length; the sheer size of the margins seemed to call out for detail, otherwise the sheet would appear empty and the labors of the commentator slight. More than this, his approach revealed hidden relations between annotation and text, and between annotation and annotation. A network of sense emerged, the nodes playing off each other. Only on its basis would Darasa compose his finished commentary, in a standard palm book.

  For this reason, his rooms appeared less like a scholar’s and more like a draftsman’s. During his working sessions, leaves of various sizes would drape most of the furniture, covering the bed, the chairs, the floor. The eyes of his guests would invariably drift from his own toward these annotations overrunning his quarters.

  But the results were difficult to dispute. His work threw a light much brighter than most. There were perhaps only a half dozen monks in the country with minds both as expansive and exacting as his (it was the combination that was rare). His eccentricities—not just his quixotic approach to commentary, but his avidity for maps, seamanship, and foreign theologies, as well as the special interest he took in the Europeans in the kingdom, which some of the conservative monks had once (and perhaps still) found perverse—mostly induced reverence rather than ridicule.

  Commentary was only part of his work. Together with twenty other monks of scholarly repute, he was responsible for adding to the historical record of the island. This was done under the eye of Rajasingha, who was not, however, in a position to edit or guide the monks, not openly or explicitly, anyway.

  Here too Darasa found a way to apply these same interpretive techniques. Most monks knew the Chronicle well. A few knew it nearly by heart. But none of his contemporaries spent more time annotating it, wondering after its mode of composition, the potentially variable intentions of the chain of authors from Mahanama onward. None searched with quite the same vigor for interstices, elisions, interpolations.

  The prevailing thought in the priesthood was that their role was to write the present, not interpret the past or consider the veracity of the Chronicle, which was, after all, composed by them, their predecessors in the temple. This was especially so of recent portions, where the language resembled the vernacular and interpretive measures were not required as a matter of course, as it was when proto-Sinhalese was involved in the earlier periods. Those parts of the Chronicle demanded a fusing of horizons, which, depending on how the monk managed it, affected his grasp, and the grasp of any reader of the Chronicle, of even the simplest matters of fact.

  For Darasa, though, even when the language of the past dovetailed smoothly with that of the present, and it was an option to take the Chronicle at face value, it was a mistake. The present—the activities of the king and his court, the role of the priesthood, the changing constitution of the island’s population (Indian, Chinese, Arabic, European)—should, and in a way could, only be recorded in the light of a fuller account of the past.

  But the chapters of the Chronicle were heavily condensed. What he needed was a way of regenerating the original heft of history from the distillate left in the Chronicle. (Some auxiliary records did exist, of course, which partly explained Darasa’s interest in the Europeans, the records they kept.) Only then could the present be set down with the right weighting and balance.

  In fact his ambitions extended further, though he never spoke of this. He hoped earlier sections of the Chronicle might not only be reinterpreted but reweighted—redistilled—which might alter the complexion of the era while respecting the facts.

  But revisions were not something considered by the priests. Their predecessors had direct access to the full spread of facts. It was thought that later revisions could only introduce distortions, bending the past to the needs of the present. But in Darasa’s view, the present affected the past, or anyway the present affected the history of the past. Potentialities contained in events, invisible to the contemporary eye, might reveal themselves only to the future.

  But perhaps this sort of account was not to the point. Previous chroniclers might have meant to capture the past as present, the lived past, illusions and all, and not the past as past, a living past whose tail might grow ever sharper. If the goal was to record a people’s consciousness, the psychological texture of an era, its truths, its madnesses, the Chronicle as it stood might well be the better guide.

  However it was with revising the past, in composing provisional text for the Chronicle, where his hand was freer, Darasa applied his usual exegetical methods, annotating the older record heavily, teasing out the implications and presuppositions to draw excluded material to the surface, or even implicit material the original authors may have only accidentally deposited in the text. With this fuller history in hand he would make sense of his time.

  The committee of monks would write up the same events. The texts, unattributed, were then compiled. The monks would meet and take each from the stack and read it out to the assembly. Line by line they debated its merits, compared it against the others. Twenty versions of the near past were sifted this way. Notes were taken on suggestions for a composite text, and a rough outline was settled on. One monk would then be asked to whittle, meld, and rewrite as necessary, developing a draft version to be voted on by a group of seven senior monks, who would ratify the text, typically unanimously (though five votes sufficed), or else send it back to the monk with corrections until an acceptable version emerged.

  ■■■

  Darasa was taken from sleep by a warbling groan. Soon it appeared a chorus, just out of tune, sometimes two voices, sometimes three and four. Occasionally it thinned to a single plaintive whine, but never would it cease. Like the chants the fellowship practiced, a voice always carried through.

  This went on for several minutes, Darasa in a semiconscious state. Footsteps began to sound in the midst of the droning voices, then mutterings. Panicked ones. He raised himself from the mat and kneeled at the window: a comet, bluer than the moon and larger than the stars. Another glowworm spark. But the child, Rajasingha, was now a man.

  In the courtyard in Nillemby, the black was unstained save for several spheres of light. Four of these, separated from each other by a few yards, were thrown by the palace torches mounted along the entryway. At the base of each lay a sentry. Two were curled on their sides, wriggling. One was prone. The nearest to him was on his knees. A flash of metal shot from his chest into the dark, the orange light of the torch imperfectly camouflaging the red staining his chest. The wailing persisted.

  There was a banging. Two more spheres, barely overlapping, hung in front of the palace doors, which had just swung shut. At the same moment a rifle may have discharged, the sound was so sharp, and one man fell to the floor in front of the doors. Others, cloaked in royal garb, lay along the wall of the palace, creating a further background groan Darasa hadn’t noticed till then. Men in the same attire—turncoats, presumably—pried at the doors alongside several others carrying scabbards, men of good birth.

  One ran his sword down the slit between the doors, striking the heavy b
olt. From the other side came the murmurs of Rajasingha’s men, the loyalists who had managed to shut themselves in, and also the most trusted guards, stationed in the interior, who were known to carry formidable European weaponry. More men, aristocrats down to peasants, judging by the varied dress, shot through the spheres at the entryway and reappeared seconds later within those at the palace doors. There they stayed for hours. The courtyard rapidly filled with rebels. They would wait the king out, assumed he would surrender.

  Darasa knew the king would not give himself up. The palace grounds sat on the v-shaped edge of a plateau that descended into a valley widely thought to be covered in impassable forest, making it unapproachable from anywhere but the front. The monk knew, though, from some of the great men of the court—intimates of his own distinguished family, who had delivered him, as was the practice, to the priestly order when he was a boy—that a steep, barely visible path only partially cleared of brush led down into the valley. With the heavy arms of his men, and with the two elephants he kept at the back of the palace, for his own amusement, but also to break through the remaining brush, Rajasingha had a strong tactical advantage over anyone who might be stationed in the valley, supposing the rebels could envisage this possibility, which they almost certainly could not.

  Until day broke Darasa watched the crowd with a steely calm. Some of the lead rebels came early in the night to assure the monks of their unconditional safety. The four resident monks, a couple of them in a panic, asked Darasa to speak with them, but he saw no need. He told them simply to wait in their quarters as he was doing in his.

  Rajasingha never emerged. In daylight the rebels found one of the king’s cannons in the village and thought to use it to breach the palace. Soon after they found one of his elephants and changed tack. The beast was whipped repeatedly, apparently to no effect, until finally, irate, it lunged through the palace doors. The building was deserted. They went to the back of it and found the trampled brush.