Square Wave

by Mark de Silva

  The clapping peaked. Normally at these talks Kames would be walking up the aisle to the microphone near the stage to moderate questions. But he remained where he was until the clapping died. Stagg sucked in his lower lip and gave two quick nods to no one. He left the pages on the lectern. Kames could study them later if he liked, for the niceties he had encoded in them. He snatched the folio, pinching it from the foldover, and strode off stage with the unknotted leather string dangling.

  30

  “I was sure we wouldn’t have these for a long while,” the lab director said. “Nice to get them so soon, put them to work. Federal approval’s been simpler than usual too.”

  “Because the storm’s so big,” Ravan said.

  “And so fast. I think we just have days now. A clear category five. But it’s also because of what they saw you and your brother demo in Death Valley. I can tell you from watching it from here, it was shock and awe.” He spread the emphasis evenly across the last three of these words in a way that didn’t neutralize it.

  Men wearing the orange and black of Princeton Tigers wheeled the metal cabinets across a bare concrete floor polished to such a smoothness it seemed wet to walk on. The director’s leather soles made a crack with each contact and then slid along the surface, failing to find purchase as he put his weight on them. Ravan’s topsiders and the sneakers of the workers did better, silently.

  Each cabinet was loaded with weather rockets, twelve of them, settled in the u-shaped grooves of the steel matrices within. The storage space amounted to a vault recessed into the far wall, held at sixty-three degrees Fahrenheit.

  Ravan spent his days just on the other side of that wall, plowing through masses of figures, checking the ideality of simulations against the raw jags of the world. The data came from tests carried out in the airless heat of Nevada; the frost of Idaho (he’d seen twin blizzards induced in October); and, just recently, the simmering wet of Florida’s Everglades, on light storms rolling in off the coast.

  Trajectories, temperatures, displacements, and payloads, a cocktail of reagents forever recalibrated: thirty-four primary variables in all, collated by proprietary software engineered in the atmospheric labs of his father and brother in India.

  After several years away from the daily details of weather research, Ravan’s handle on the intricacies of the software’s algorithms paled next to theirs, and even next to some of his colleagues in the Princeton labs. Yet his easy way with mathematics, especially his natural bent for ratios, semblances, pairings and functions, and most of all divergences (latent or nascent), was enough to make him essential to the lab. He was fast, and with the storm approaching, speed is what they needed most.

  The director looked over the phalanxes of rockets as the two walked alongside the men rolling the last of the cabinets into place.

  “Amazing that we have these now, Ravan. Something so concrete.”

  “And semi-predictable.”

  “All our research, it’s already being taken more seriously now, after Death Valley. That there can be productive yields in our lifetime, that it’s not just speculation anymore,” he said. “Now, I just hope your father’s rockets work as well over the ocean as they do in the desert.”

  “Well, you’ve seen the footage from India,” Ravan said.

  “I have. Though nothing’s as convincing as a live performance. But I guess you were there for those trials too.”

  “For one of them, the first. We burst a monsoon just off the northeastern coast. By landfall it had totally bled out. By the time it reached the Ghats, this trivial thing was left, not even a drizzle so much as a mist just heavy enough to fall rather than hang. It felt like Disneyland in the summer, all that mist. They’ve done that twice since. So why not a hurricane like this.”

  “Why not.”

  “There’ve been failures, of course. More of them than successes. I’ve told you all this. But we have yet to make a storm worse.”

  “Of course. And all the usual precautions are being taken anyway. Halsley’s surge barriers too, which might be adequate by themselves, we don’t know. But if we can stop this storm from even making landfall, well, why test the barriers? Not making the storm worse is really all NOAA is asking of us. The rest is hope. Intelligent hope, though. That’s the big change.”

  “It’s more than hope. The conditions here are colder, but I don’t think that will alter the action of the cocktail, introduced the right way. Menar doesn’t either. I think we can count on changing things.”

  ■■■

  Ravan fingered the triad, his thumb climbing over the back of the sanded fingerboard barren of frets, to stop the low E string. He ran his nails across the strings with his other hand and something like a minor chord came from the tiny practice amp in clean, reverbed tones. There were several beatings between notes, long and slow. He resolved them without lifting his fingers. Instead he simply leaned them up or down the board, a shifting of weight more than a change of position. The tones bonded and the chord, till then something small and discrete, appeared to emanate from the room itself rather than anything in it.

  The chirp of Skype accented the third of the chord. Ravan tapped the mouse and one of the Disintegration Loops, an etiolated six-note specter of a piece, an echo stripped of its origins, resumed on the loop he’d set up. He’d let it run all through the night, many times through. He dreamed through it.

  The black of the sleeping computer screen was replaced by his brother’s face, and beneath it, a smaller face, less formed: Menar’s son’s.

  “Ravan,” Menar said, just before the child lodged his fingers and much of his hand in his father’s mouth. He coaxed the hand back out. “You have the shipment now, yeah. How did it all look? And what is that?”

  “What are you seeing?” Ravan asked, looking down at the guitar still in his lap.

  “No, the sound. Can you turn that down?”

  Ravan nudged the slider partway down with the mouse.

  “Actually can you turn it off?”

  “Don’t you like it?”

  “So this is what’s become of music, is it?”

  “You can hear me fine it looks like.”

  “You’ve got a lot left to fill in, don’t you. It sounds like nothing.”

  “It’s not me, actually. But as far as I know it’s finished. Polished nothing.”

  “You’ll do better.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. It memorializes 9/11. It’s very deep. I slept to it last night.”

  “So when is this concert of yours?” Menar asked. “I told Dad about it. He just stared at me.”

  “Saturday.” He unplugged the guitar and strummed the strings he was choking with his other hand.

  “After the show, Ravan, can’t you use a break? From all this industriousness. Dad would like to see you. So would this little one.” Menar resettled the boy on his lap. For a moment the baby’s eyes, the bridge of his nose, took up the entire screen. He’d lunged over the keyboard. Menar pulled him back and the giant became a child again.

  “The storm is coming in,” Ravan said. “I’m pretty sure the lab will want me here.”

  “They will. But I can put in a call to your boss. You owe it to yourself to come back this way. The family hasn’t seen you in a while, not all at once. You can sift data for them so long as you’re on the network. The seeding missiles are what count. They’re all marked. The ones with gold decals should go to the naval platforms, the Coast Guard.”

  “I know.”

  “The gold ones are calibrated for your storm, the colder air. The other seeders are standard, but can be added if necessary, or used later in trials.”

  “Good, good, yes.” Ravan wasn’t looking at the screen anymore but the fingers he was forming chords with now.

  “So…”

  “So…” Ravan didn’t look up.

  “You know,” Menar said, “I was thinking just today how tricky it all is, really.”

  “What.”

  “Preparing these roc
kets.”

  “Hm.”

  “Do you appreciate that? Probably that’s what you don’t quite grasp. You’ve been too busy with this music to notice.”

  Ravan let go of the guitar and let it swing from the strap around his neck. “Actually I know quite—”

  “You know a lot, yes. But not as much as you should. The hundreds of steps we take each of the seeders through, the treatment of the antimony at the core of the formula. You see, beyond the allotropic phases, the cooling and heating, there are all the isotopes. Some are more useful than others. Most are benign. But if the starting materials are off just a little, or if we overtreat them a fraction, a couple of kinds of radioisotopes appear.”

  “Right.”

  “One of which, post-treatment, is worryingly radioactive. A very short half-life, but within that window, a big problem.”

  Ravan unstrapped the guitar and leaned it against the amp. “I’ve been paying that much attention, yes.”

  “The margins are just so fine. That’s why this has been as expensive as it has been, the precision that’s demanded.”

  “I know the dangers.”

  “In theory, you do. But the thing of it is, it’s actually already happened once in trial. Just last year we launched a few seeders into clouds deep in the Indian Ocean. They failed to make rain. Fine. Nothing so unusual about that. But they succeeded in doing something else. They charged the cloud with the radioisotope, loaded it like a gun. When the storm finally did break—by this point it was an odd pink, or red—it broke in the middle of the ocean. That was our one bit of luck. The waters were sampled and tested, as always. And they were more than a little toxic. We dodged a bullet. Did you know all that too?”

  Ravan shook his head slowly and switched off the amplifier.

  “Now you’re paying attention. Good. You see, I’m a bit closer to Dad on these matters than you. The music’s taken you away from some of this. Your government has been leaning on us for these rockets for a while now. Bringing the Starstreak missile home, for properly humanitarian purposes this time, they say, by converting them into cloud seeders. But do you suppose they can cleanse these rockets of their former purpose entirely? Or will we find, down the road, that it was merely dormant, and at just the right moment these missiles will come chasing us again, but as weather this time?”

  “I don’t know how we can say.” Ravan said this only after a complicated pause, one that consumed all the distance he usually felt toward his brother’s line of work.

  “And isn’t that just the problem, Ravan?” Menar said gently. “In any case, you’ll know they’ve asked for this batch last minute, and we’ve obliged and rigged these seeders up quickly—more quickly than they really ought to have been. All just to deal with your storm.

  “Now, in fairness, it does look to be a true monster. That’s why clearance was so easy on your end. The storm we had that problem with in India, it was quite small, and it was not a bet to make landfall. But yours, well, if we don’t burst it, it will certainly come ashore, brutally. And all that coastline, the nerve center of the country. I don’t know if there is any surge barrier that can cope with it. It’s more than a category five, really. We just don’t have the right scale for it.

  “Given its size, we are sending up a lot of seeding agent. I have complete belief in our chemists, of course. The odds are small, objectively speaking. But these things, well…”

  Menar kissed the back of the child’s head and finished the thought in a lower, slower voice. “Nothing is perfect. And no process, none at all, is really, truly stable.”

  Ravan needed no convincing.

  The child squirmed and cried, stretched out his hands to one edge of the screen. Menar’s wife broke into the frame. Ravan had met her only once, at the wedding. She was a gentle, fine-boned woman with a translucent complexion, the signature of the Muslim clan his brother had married into a few years ago.

  The union had driven a slight wedge between the two Menars, Sr. and Jr., though they still worked closely together. After the marriage, work seemed to become the central plank of their closeness, and this was not lost on the son. It changed him, his father’s chilly response to his wife and her family, which included higher-ups in the Pakistani military his father thought needlessly radical, and moreover who seemed to be suspicious of his own research collaborations with the U.S. government—though, infuriatingly, they would always stop short of saying so.

  She took the Indo-Aryan boy to a place off-screen without saying anything to Ravan.

  “Look, however it is, I’m glad you’ve got everything,” Menar said. “The gold ones, I know I’ve said this, are the ones that will do what’s needed. God willing.”

  The smirk made the briefest of appearances. Then a hot stare shot down somewhere near his feet. Finally there was a firm smile back at his brother.

  “Got it,” Ravan said.

  “You really must come and see this boy,” Menar said, looking off-camera with a softer smile toward his wife and child. “Before he gets any bigger. You’d be a fool not to.”

  31

  The nap of the cloth was as dense as jenko’s pool tables, but the green was deeper, carrying thick casino light that broke up the dark between games of cards. Lewis thumbed it in a slow spiral, felt the trapped warmth. He ran his finger over the cold white paint of the stenciled box, and then the card sitting face-up within it, a ten of diamonds. The second card came. He was looking for an ace, a blackjack. A king arrived instead.

  Lewis’s hand froze beside the pair. There was no hitting a hard twenty, so he waited for her, this young Vegas dealer with a face like an arrow and a platinum blond ponytail bobbing behind her head. She had a six showing. He nodded to show he would stand. She flipped her hole card. Another ace, giving her a soft seventeen. She pulled another card from the dealing shoe, still four decks thick and resistant to counting, though he wouldn’t have known how to anyway. He wasn’t a real gambler, just passing time till the show. Now a second face appeared, not a king’s but a queen’s. Twenty-seven. Dealer bust. She pushed a small stack of chips toward him.

  He and the blonde had been going heads up for an hour now since the others had dropped off, first the old woman with the bottomless cosmopolitan, then the young man whose unfussed boredom suggested he was a local. Lewis was left alone with the dealer, who played, as she had to, like a machine, standing and hitting by rule alone. He was ahead, on intuition.

  Janice was gone. She wouldn’t answer his texts even. There was no fight, he’d been too stunned. She’d called her sister and quietly moved out of their apartment. His apartment, he had to get used to that now. The two sisters packed Janice’s things up while he lay hungover in bed, pretending he was asleep while everything was taken away. She said he’d already left her in every way that mattered. Whatever its truth, he resented her resort to a breakup cliché. They didn’t fuck. They didn’t talk, for a while now really. He’d stopped asking about her life, the kind of restaurant she dreamed of opening someday, and he didn’t answer her about his.

  He’d left himself behind too, she said. That was less of a cliché, but it was also less true, he thought. Yes, he didn’t paint, didn’t work, didn’t do much but go out at night, without her. And whom was he meeting, she wanted to know. No, she didn’t really want to know. But there was no one else, if that’s what she meant.

  He hadn’t left himself behind, he felt, only a promise of what he might have been that turned out wrenchingly false: that he might be one to transmute life into paint and back into life, reformed. Should he apologize for the gift he didn’t have? Maybe she would rather see him die trying, vainly trying, for what was beyond him.

  Really, he’d only resuscitated an earlier version of himself, the one he’d left behind for art, after college and those Wintry seminars. He was back to politics again, and in the most straightforward way. He’d never been so practical. He was going to transmute life only into life, without the indirection of either art or theory, the
Wintry and its talks, this time.

  Even just before the end, though Lewis and Janice would go to bed on separate sides of the mattress, they’d wake in the morning tangled together. She would separate herself from him then, resent the false intimacy. There was nothing less false for him. It was what was left of them: the quietest, most sustaining part.

  There were no more of those tangles now. She was gone. And he was gone in one way at least, the flesh and blood of him. Without her he was an abstraction, a thought-in-the-world, not a being.

  It diminished him in every way but one. When the world fell away, its costs and risks did too. Bringing to life the idea he was now—even on the largest scale—suddenly seemed possible. He owed it to Janice. He’d put all but fifty grand he had into this scheme, including the money he’d earmarked for her restaurant.

  He was here in Vegas alone to see his handiwork tonight. He thought he was alone, anyway. Past the humming slots discharging coins, in a cave of a bar shielded from the light, he saw the creamy shoulder blades and the dark hair nipping at them, and then just the edge of her jaw. She was facing away, toward the bar and an assemblage of bottles backlit in the color of bourbon. But her profile, the unusually sharp angles, was enough to kindle something in him, a vague displeasure, a mild sense of shame or fear, twinned to a gauzy curiosity.

  She was sitting in a raised, short-backed chair, talking to a very old man in a very good suit who stood rather than sat. Going by the man’s posture and expression, the two didn’t know each other intimately but would shortly. She put her hand over his and with the other she lifted a broad martini glass to her lips. An olive looking twice its size through the vodka or gin rolled around the base of the cup.