Menar looked back at the laptop. The spent darts would be descending now, unlit and unseen.
“So let’s see,” he said. It was still storming hard and the mudflats outside had become a lake of red, as they did in flash floods. (Nearby Furnace Creek also reported unusually heavy rains.)
Ravan thought he could hear the beginnings of a decrescendo. The roiling waters filled the ears less fully now, and it was easier, it seemed, to attend to the rest of his senses. The first thing he noticed were his sopping shoes. The lab assistants pulled heavy towels from a storage closet and threw them to the ground, working them around with their feet, mopping up what they could.
“You can give the drone another pass,” Menar said. Michael radioed again with the orders. “It must be quite hot now.”
They all sensed the diminishing patter of water on the roof. Outside on the flats, the ropes withered to beads, first swollen and oblong, but then, sooner than seemed reasonable, just tiny dots, specks.
“Very much hotter,” Michael said, staring into a screen.
The cloud itself was losing substance, not through collapse but expansion. As it distended it turned wispier, vaporous, ever more transparent, the gray and black ribbons seeming to lighten as they dissolved into simple air.
The lightest drizzle persisted, but the extent of the transformation left the NOAA people nodding vaguely to one another and pointing up at the faltering cloud.
“What you have here is something real,” Michael said without looking at Menar, who was seated on the table, playing with his laptop, his mouth bent this time into an insouciant smirk visible to anyone who cared to see. Ravan, shoeless now, joined the other assistants looking out onto the watery flats, his heart beating harder but not faster.
27
In a lightless room he awoke to her weight, a leg strewn across his, a palm planted in his chest, a chin tucked above his collarbone, a mouth set against his neck. She’d rather he not wake. He knew this. Probably she thought this was the surest way of stopping him. At the very least she’d be hoping he’d wink at her delayed arrival, once again past midnight.
“How was the night?” Stagg’s voice was uneven and weak from sleep. It pleased him not to have to simulate this, though he would have, had he been awake, say, for hours in the dark, waiting.
“Good,” she whispered.
For a moment he let Renna believe that was it, and she began to take the long, even draughts of air that bring sleep.
“Good,” he said into the silence.
He put his hand over hers, the one on his chest, and she rubbed his fingers, pressed her lips more firmly against his neck, but without a pucker so it made no sound. Thalidomide kisses, she called these. He’d been the first to offer them, nameless then, and she disliked them, shuddered when he placed them on her cheeks in jest. Tonight, though, she must have thought they made a kind of sense.
He squeezed her fingers together, running the tips over one another, and put his free hand behind the knee of the leg that ran across his own.
“I got you the cinnamon-lox thing,” he said. “Sounds disgusting. But it’s on the desk.”
“No it’s so good. I had some,” she said. “Why are you so nice to me?” This time she kissed him properly on the neck, held his skin between her teeth. She slid her hand down his stomach. He caught it.
“And those three were how?” Though no louder, his voice was more substantial now, more committed to wakefulness.
“Just rehearsing.” Her voice was firming up too, though reluctantly. “There was marked-up staff paper everywhere. The way your papers are. I think I stepped on some of them in the dark just now.” She scratched the hair on his chest. “You’re not mad, I hope.”
The laugh he gave was inaudible, but the tightening of his chest was enough for her to know.
“Ravan can read music?” he asked.
“Yes. And well. He’s as serious as Edward.”
“And Li.”
“He wasn’t reading. Not sure he can’t though.”
“And you can, still?”
“Sort of. But I would never have been able to read this stuff. Partly it was so heavily corrected. There were slashes of ink everywhere, strikeouts, notes that had been written over, woven right into the passages. So it was hard to read off what was left through all of that. But even if it had been clean, the notation is just really weird. I think a lot of it they’ve just made up, for all the microtonal things.
“They’re working on this long piece, symphony length, with some parts that are electronic, tape loops, things Edward’s always been interested in,” she continued. “There are all these sweeping lines linking sections, and little scratchings and symbols in the margins and between staffs, for notes that don’t belong on the lines. A bunch of different sharps and flats too, and a bunch of fermatas, caesuras, which made the page that much more crowded and weird.”
“I’m supposed to know what those are?”
“Caesuras? Well, I guess there’s no reason you should. But you do, don’t you.”
This time his laughter made it to their ears.
“And the sound?”
“I’m still thinking about it. Sort of a wall, I guess. But it felt like it was taller and wider than the room. It’s hard to explain. Like it was only part of a whole that wasn’t all there to be heard. But really it was the whole. That was it.”
“And?”
“And… it sounded strange at first. The chords. But as you got used to the structure, the motion, that sense of incompleteness, it sounded even stranger, but in the details now, the textures.” She paused. “Ravan’s done a lot of the writing, I think. Or at least the rewriting. It didn’t look like Edward’s handwriting, or only partly, so I’m guessing.”
“But it was only notes.”
“You can still tell someone’s handwriting.”
“Clearly.”
“They work together in this weird way,” she said, ignoring the minor provocation, which was her way. “They write over each other’s music, so the score is just dripping with ink by the end of it. That’s what it looked like. Sometimes one of their hands is dominant, these heavy marks fixing the other’s sketchier ones. In other parts it’s the other way around. They just keep rescoring this way, going back and forth, without going to clean paper, and somehow they can still read the result. It’s a true composite, though. It’s rare.”
“Hm.”
“And what did you do?” she asked. “Did you call the hooker again? What’s her name, Jen?”
“No.”
“She’s okay now?”
“I don’t really know. I don’t see how she could be though.”
“But is she cute, Carl?” Renna had never been jealous of another woman in her life, and her glibness about it grated on him.
“I thought,” Stagg said.
There was a long silence.
“You thought what?”
“No, that’s what I did tonight. Think.”
“Just like this?” She patted his chest with the hand that was still under his, again sidestepping the tacit rebuke, the conversation it might open.
“Basically. With the lights on, part of the time.”
“Did you revise at all though?”
“I don’t think I need to. It’s more about order, placement. I’ll just read that piece on exegesis later in the series. Really I’m changing course a little, and I’m not sure if Kames will like it. A new introduction. But I’m not going to try to sell him on it yet.”
“Do you ever think, though, Carl, that at least for now, that maybe you should withdraw?”
“What? Because why?”
“Because what your boss said about Kames, what you told him Kames said to you. It’s possible, isn’t it?”
“It’s hard to say exactly what Kames meant, though. Penerin’s paranoid. And there are three days left now till the first talk, Renna. Nothing’s going to change in that space. And easy for you to say.”
“I’m
only worried! I don’t know why you have to make everything into something besides love.” She made a fist under his hand and thumped his chest with it before flipping away from him.
“There’ll only be one lecture, if you’re right,” he said in a cooler voice. “More reason to do things the way I want, I guess. And if there’s only going to be one, it should be about my family, and the escape. That’s what Kames was saying he wanted anyway.”
“Maybe,” she said. By the shifting of the bed he could tell she had pulled her knees up to her chest, as she did when she was fed up, or worried, or tired, depending.
“Maybe what?”
She said nothing. He drew breath.
“How was Larent?” he asked.
“Fine.” She was curt.
“He asked you over?”
“He and Ravan.”
“You don’t know Ravan.”
“Edward told me he wanted me to come too.”
“Li asked you as well, I guess.”
“No.”
“You don’t know him?”
“I do. You know that. Edward just didn’t mention him.”
“And I guess you have to accept every invitation.”
“You can’t do this, Carl. I offered to cancel.”
“You don’t want to be rude.”
“You can be such an asshole.” Her eyes were rolling, he knew this. That he couldn’t see this didn’t matter.
He rolled on his side, toward her, and pulled her to him with one hand between her breasts. “An asshole?” he said. She squirmed and thrust her legs out straight and grabbed his hand. “I thought you can’t be rude,” he said. He slid his hand up her chest to her long and graceful neck and held it without a hint of compression. “Just to me, I guess.”
Her own hand, still on his, went limp in a familiar way. Her lips ran across his cheek as she turned her face toward him, as if it were possible to look him in the eye in the dark. Their lashes touched as she blinked. Her eyes, millimeters from his, they’d be deathless now, earth-inheriting and faintly defiant about it. There would be that suggestion of a snicker in them. And why shouldn’t she look at him? The dark was as good as the light for what she was searching for.
“What do you get from this?” he said, keeping his hand where it was. She turned past his face until he could feel her breath on his ear. He thought she might bite him, so hard he’d need stitches to close the gash.
“I thought you weren’t going to drink on your own anymore,” she said. “This doesn’t happen otherwise.”
“From him.”
“Nothing. I’m not getting anything from him. There’s just history, that’s all.”
“And what does that have to do with now?” His grip may have tightened.
“Don’t talk to me.”
“Oh, but you love to chat.”
She lunged for the light but he held her just out of reach. Her fingers grazed the metal string dangling beneath the bulb and it struck the lamp rhythmically, four times.
“I am with you every night,” she said.
“And our time together. We’re either unconscious or fucking. Day or night.”
“I am always thinking of you. I talked about you till they told me to stop.”
“That’s thoughtful.”
“This isn’t going to work like this. He’s my oldest friend.”
“There’s nothing wrong with him. He’s fine. I just don’t get what he does for you.”
“Do you really not get friendship? Is that actually possible?”
“If it were for the magazine it would be different.”
“Do you really not understand it?”
He took her face, which was pressed down into the pillow, in his free hand. He torqued it toward him and stared into the spots where he thought her eyes must be. They could have been closed.
“Do you get that he’s nothing next to me? I really don’t give a fuck if he’s played with the Concertgebouw, or that he composes shit that’s too ridiculous to fit on a staff.”
“I do get that,” she whispered. “And you are such an asshole for making me say it again.” It was his hand that went limp now. She sat up and pushed herself back against the headboard. He waited for the light but it never came.
“He has qualities,” she said in a tone that had turned deathless like her eyes. “He has gifts. Different from yours. Not as great maybe. But he has them. You’ve said that. You’d be disappointed in me if he didn’t.”
“The pale-faced fag with the bow in his hand.”
“He can be charming, in this soft, quiet way. Elegant. I think you even like that about him, though you won’t admit that now. And he would never talk about you like this, he doesn’t have the crassness, the churlishness in him.”
“Churls. Okay.”
“You wouldn’t think it’s possible. You can outshine him when you want to, in every way that matters most to me. But you don’t seem to want to anymore. You’d rather be this. It makes no sense, but you’ve chosen it, you keep choosing it.”
“I haven’t earned the right to this feeling, you mean? Of course I haven’t. But you wouldn’t think of me like you do if I didn’t already believe that something, capital-s Something, is going to come from me, and that it isn’t all that far off now. And that it’s all a fait accompli, before I can prove that it is, or that there’s any such thing as one.”
“I know.”
“That’s the balls of it, and the trouble with it. Justifying—”
“What?” she taunted. “Justifying what?”
“I don’t know. Contempt. You know, there’s this story that back before everything, before he had the books, Wittgenstein told Russell how distressed he was, justifying his contempt for the philosophers around him. For all the ones who couldn’t or wouldn’t clear it all away, untie themselves from everything they knew or thought they did, and try to recover the world from that mess. Justifying, because he hadn’t recovered it himself yet. But the way he was going at it, untangling knots, it was only a matter of time. But he couldn’t hold himself to a standard that demanding, ask that of himself, without the contempt. It was the fuel. They were one thing. However fucked up that is, they were.”
A long silence followed.
“Wittgenstein,” she said.
“Whatever. Naipaul then. The feeling came long before the right to it, that’s the point. And if you see me as in any way the same as Larent—”
“But you just said how, basically. What he’s trying to do in music, isn’t that untangling knots?”
“No, still, if you see me as operating on the same plane as that meek shit—or any of these literary men you go on about, their pathetic shticks. Charming, right.” He felt himself beginning to flail.
“Look, I don’t,” she said. “I don’t. And I know who you are, what you are. That’s why we’re here. But I can’t keep telling you who. My angel.”
“I am always, always waiting,” he said. His voice was brittle and dark now. “Always there’s something between you and me. Does it make sense to you that I, not me, really, just anyone like me, should be waiting? And fine if you run into a greater mind on the way home, but not this effete—. He can’t be why I’m waiting. Or any of the others. But if you find a Wittgenstein out there, yeah, by all means, take him home. Or bring him over. I’ll suck him off too.”
“He was a fag, right? Wittgenstein?”
“One way to clear all the dumb cunts out of your life.”
“You can’t really think you can talk to me like this. Maybe the hooker, I don’t know. But not me.”
The bed rocked sharply. What came next was the sound of glass breaking glass, two ways, a doubling. The ambient hum of night entered and it made the room seem somehow blacker.
He pulled the sheets over his head after that, just as the switch snapped and the light annihilated something. Now there was the sound of cloth sliding, the swoosh of a long zipper, the rustle of laces, the clack of boot heels on wood and the hushed click
of a gently closing door.
28
Jenko’s intelligence would always be greater. He had more eyes than Penerin, and they were trained without training. His men had grown up in these untoward neighborhoods. It lent them the kind of easy attunement that the state’s agents could never quite match.
Jenko’s stake in the matter was also greater, which gave him the advantage of urgency, one the police couldn’t have felt, not for this demographic. Half the maimed hookers were his, though even the victims wouldn’t have known they belonged to him. Jenko operated at a remove. His girls answered directly to a committee of pimps he’d handpicked, or rather, that his assistant had. Two removes then.
Tending to the beaten girls cost Jenko much; but then, there had to be some benefit to working for him, splitting their earnings with him instead of going out on their own (though that had its own risks). He would pay for the girls’ hospital care, and then for some time afterward their rent, nursing them back to health. Erin, Mariela’s friend, was the last of his that had been hurt, many weeks ago. She was better now, back to maximum capacity, seeing one or two johns most days of the week.
It took longer than expected to identify the source of this cost, the one troubling Jenko’s girls. But in time the profile his men developed, the portrait they painted, turned singular. Its subject, Lewis, came into view, though he remained as obscure as ever to Penerin and his agents.
How to deal with him, though? A warning of some sort? A tit-for-tat beating? The only rule Jenko insisted on observing in this business: no deaths.
“So that’s him,” Aaron said. “Lewis Eldern.” It was midday, and he and Jenko were in their not-yet-reopened pool hall. Its windows were still boarded. Aaron was Jenko’s assistant, the one he used for the operations Jenko suspected his business partners, especially Celano, might not smile on. Prostitution, say.
In a Platonic sense, the old friends shared a politics. But Celano’s blood was bluer, his money purer, so the ordinary world, the one of flux, did less violence to his ideals.
This is how Jenko explained the complications. Certainly he himself believed the country had failed the weak. He was in fact only a few generations removed from having that very same grievance, though against another country (Slovenia), on another continent. Equally, he was doing what he could to arrange the world in a way that fortified labor, though he left the details to men like Celano. He’d spent far too much time and money on Celano’s political projects for that to be gainsaid.
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