The blonde waited for Lewis to ante up. Instead he gripped the two stacks of chips he’d won and poured them into his pockets. He left nothing for her, not even a smile. A few seconds later, though, he found himself walking back to the table, reflexively pulling chips from his pockets. He placed a few of them on the lip of the green without checking their value. Tens. She didn’t notice the chips, or perhaps pretended not to, offended by their meanness at a table with fifty for an ante. But that was luck.
The falling coins kept chiming in the slot machines as he sought a better view of that woman at the bar. But her face stayed angled away from him, so the improving image only clarified what remained beyond it.
The last row of slots receded and the noise of the casino turned mute and distant as he crossed into the cavernous bar. He moved to one side as he approached, carving around her, but just as more of her face came into view, and his memories began to stir again, she twisted away from him. He waited for her face to return, but the man was whispering in her ear now, and she was listening, and it seemed they would stay posed that way forever.
He reached the bar and ordered a drink by touching one of the beer taps. A few customers separated him from her. The old man looked at Lewis as he talked into the woman’s ear.
“Do you really?” she said, finally, just as the bartender served Lewis’s pint.
Familiarity came all at once. The last of them—she’d called herself Lisa, in the street by his open car door, and under the overpass just before he’d done what he’d had to do. Three words and that was enough for him to know. Somehow she’d made it here. A shadow. Was she on the flight over? Three rows up, in a seat on the other side of the aisle, there was the dark hair, the pale skin of the legs. But again, the face out of view.
The bartender had just said something, clearly and loudly and definitely to Lewis. Except for the soft scratching whispers of the old man in Lisa’s ear, no sound competed. But still Lewis didn’t understand the words.
Before he could form a thought, Lewis searched his pockets to pay for the drink and rid himself of the bartender. His wallet was wedged beneath the chips. He scooped out as many as he could and set them on the bar, returning to his pocket to fish out the wallet.
The intervening customers, silent men he hadn’t realized were a group, paid for their drinks and left together. Now only empty space separated him from Lisa, the one girl he couldn’t read. He’d failed with her, it looked like. She was unchanged, still hooking, thousands of miles away. How many others had he failed with?
The bartender gestured and said something more, and Lewis, in fear or confusion or frustration, pushed the beer and the scattered chips toward Lisa and walked out of the bar into an indistinct chaos of noise, which was matched only by the confusion of light streaming down into the atrium at all angles, in several colors and as many intensities, freighting the air.
■■■
His father had told Lewis once about the time he saw Mike Tyson fight in this arena, with business colleagues, just a year before the boxer fell from greatness. It was not much of a fight. His British opponent’s reflexes were betraying him with age. But then, every boxer’s reflexes seemed to fail him against Tyson. The fight was over in five rounds, on a TKO. It would have been shorter still, Leo told him, had the Brit not taken to clinching from the opening bell.
But he had no thought of winning. It was a foregone conclusion that Tyson would triumph. Somehow this didn’t manage to dim the moment. The trick can’t be repeated too many times, but Tyson had only recently come to seem indomitable. For a while it was a thrill simply to see that status confirmed.
The bout turned from sport to theater, classic repertory work. There was almost sympathy for the Brit, as the only question was how, not whether, he would succumb.
Tyson seemed playful during the match, Leo said, shooting around the ring in little leaps, smiling through his mouthpiece, tossing the other man around with his forearms. All the while he was finding his timing. The opening came on a separation, the conclusion written in five punches: a double jab, a right cross, a tight left hook that sent the Brit’s mouthpiece into the front row, and an overhand right on the way down that sent his chin into his chest, making a mess of his tongue as he sprawled onto the canvas. He spat mouthfuls of blood as the victor, preordained, stood on the ropes over a turnbuckle, hopping down seconds later to congratulate the Brit on the part he’d played.
That day, decades ago now, Leo Eldern had been ringside. Today his son was in the closed circuit theater next to the arena, watching in, as if through the one-way window of an interrogation room.
Pornography awards not being prizefights, the theater was only half full, though the industry’s sex workers, hundreds of them, completely filled the auditorium itself. Lewis, who had calmed himself some since stumbling upon Lisa earlier in the day, scanned the seats right around him, but there wasn’t enough light to make anyone out. He wondered what sort of person would pay for a screening like this, assuming the ceremony was to unfold roughly as planned, that the vents in the auditorium gave nothing but chilled air. Some must be raincoaters on other nights, he thought, in other theaters, and they’d leave only after they’d made the floors sticky.
For the next three hours, he studied the screen, its glossed women and the ponytailed men, no less glossed and steroidal in appearance than the women, yet not merely of secondary interest but of hardly any at all. Their words, few though they were, and even less significant than they were few, barely caught his ears.
Most of all he monitored the master of ceremonies: a former queen of porn, now a producer and figurehead for her own adult studio. She was the ideal barometer, as she was onscreen most, and through the whole length of the ceremony. If the atmosphere was changing, it should show in her first.
But between the three-way and costume design awards, and between those and the girl-girl prize, had her skin flushed any? She’d been red to begin with, presumably from the Vegas sun outside, so it was hard to tell.
He listened carefully to her too, for botched words, names, stutters or any other struggles of the tongue. There were some, but then there were always some, even in the speech of the best. A decline is what he needed, and he couldn’t find one.
There was eye contact to assess. The auditorium was filled with the distractible. You wouldn’t arrive, and certainly not survive, in the industry if you weren’t. But was the hostess any more distractible toward the end, as the best-new-starlet award approached, than she was at the start? Did her eyes flit faster now? Did she forget the films, nominees, punch lines, and stories of the year that was in Porn Valley, only hours away in California? When she looked into the camera, did her gaze miss the lens, or the point beyond it, where the consciousness of the viewer lay?
There was her stride to attend to. She started the night with a textbook whore-strut, lightly pasteurized by the ease of Valley life. It was a carefully coordinated gait, its moving parts were many, and it could break down in any number of ways. But it didn’t seem to alter. No collapse into a lopsided swagger or a beach stroll, no retreat into a common strip-mall hustle. If there was any change at all, it was only in the direction of greater command. Whatever contempt there was in it at the beginning remained to the end, when she called up the best new starlet, Violet Skye, who trotted onto the stage with the sexualized power that five-inch heels a waxy red guaranteed.
All the while, Lewis was listening to the room itself, to the gaps between speeches and the hostess’s drivel. A presumed silence. There was always a hum, though. Was there any change in that? Was a hiss growing, and could this be picked up through the theater screen? Or did one need to be in the auditorium itself for that?
Could the hiss correspond to a draft from the vents? Could you see collars rustling, single strands, or tufts even, of bleached hair twirling, the lightest earrings swaying in it? Or was it too delicate a change for that? Could you only feel it, this cooling vapor on your neck, from inside the room, through a
sense the screen couldn’t provide for?
Lewis heard nothing and saw nothing. Not even Lisa.
The curtain was falling as the hostess, still unfazed, invited everyone back for next year’s ceremony. As the cameras whirled about, the guests rose. The audience of which Lewis was a part, in the theater, mostly stayed put. They would wait to watch the sex workers file out before they did the same.
Lewis’s mind whirled like the cameras, and there were only more questions everywhere he turned. Could they be immune to the gas? Could their plastic poise not be taken from them? Were their senses beyond further derangement? Was their compass so true that nothing could disorient them? Could they not be made to sleep either? Was it unnecessary, for the deathless?
He could feel himself flushing. His mouth had already gone dry. He got to the aisle but nearly fell in the dark, his thigh crashing into armrests several times along the way toward the exit.
As he opened the doors the lobby lights overwhelmed his eyes, forcing them into the tightest squint. He opened them slowly and the world reformed, first as two men in police blue, stock-still. Four more men in the same blue materialized in front of the exits off to the side of the popcorn machines and the candy under the long glass counter. The employees of the theater, dressed in green uniforms and gathered together, were the last to take shape, on the opposite end of the lobby.
A feeling distilled many times over, from an ether, in days long past, down to this barely viscous thing, like glass—it filled Lewis completely. He had no name for it. Nothing was more familiar.
No one moved.
32
The floor was small, the walls enormous. Four hundred people made arm’s length unachievable, yet the warehouse, a silo for carbon black before it burned down in an unprovable arson, remained nearly empty. It felt it, too, even with them crowding the floor. All that space hovering above, a sealed sky.
Some of the damage from the fire remained. Most of the windows lining the top were missing or shattered, and thick soot covered a ceiling that had yet to be scrubbed or blasted. Streaks of bleach stained the walls, as did grand blazes of rust formed by the rainwater that would have rushed in through the broken windows in the weeks since. The smell of coal-fire was everywhere. There was a hint of soil in it too, and a polymer that lent a saccharine note.
In the gray space between laws the owners, chemical suppliers mostly to experimental labs in the region, had rented the silo to the bands for the night. The last group had just taken down their gear, and Larent, Moto, and Ravan, the closers, were setting up their own. The monitors blared Reich’s 18 Musicians. They weren’t quite eighteen in number themselves, but they’d brought enough other musicians along with them to fill out the sound and play everything that needed playing.
Dozens of small speakers sat convexly behind the audience, along the curve of the silo wall. Directly across, they set up Larent’s collection of oscillators, two MPCs rigged to laptops, a frequency modulation synthesizer, several rack-mounted amplifiers, and a Marshall stack for Ravan’s fretless guitar.
Moto’s drums were out in front rather than behind all of this, and had been whittled down to a bass, a snare, a floor tom, and a series of splashes with no true crash. Between the drums and the electronics were the strings and brass: the cellos, a violin, Larent’s double bass, and a quartet of trumpets.
Three hundred rungs up, perched on an iron grating at the top of the tower, Renna and Stagg watched and listened. They hadn’t talked about that night yet, the one that ended in broken glass. The music meant they didn’t have to right now, which pleased them both. Language was hurting more than helping lately. It was better simply to sit together, alone.
But the ladder rattled and faces started to appear. A half-dozen of the crowd below had found their way up. They’d come with Percocet and marijuana at least. Recompense for the intrusion, that was the way Stagg thought of it. He waved off the marijuana but accepted a clutch of the familiar off-white pills, the ones Jen had softened her tragedy with. Instead of popping one, though, or handing one to Renna, he pocketed them all and went for the ladder in search of an emptier grating. Renna gave them a sheepish smile and followed him down. She was getting sick of that smile, the one she seemed to need more and more around him.
The two had hardly made it down ten rungs when a rising wave met them from below, 440 hertz shooting up at them from the lens of speakers on the factory floor, like the ocular beams once thought to leave the eye. At the same time that this filtered sawtooth traveled the length of the tower, bouncing off the ceiling, its pitch spiraled upward through the series of overtones, a second per.
The sheer height of the silo gave it reverberative powers greater than most cathedrals. But the acoustics were flawed. There was especially the coldness of the sound, which must have been augmented by the concrete and further distorted by the tunnel-like shape of the building.
Stagg lost the rhythms of his descent in the wake of the sawtooth, the coordination between hands and feet. He paused and Renna’s foot came down on his hand. He pulled it away from the ladder and twisted around before finding his grip. As the wave disappeared above the 46th partial, into the inaudible range, the two of them continued their descent in a countermotion to a music they could no longer trace.
The strident buzz of a naked square wave replaced the sawtooth. This time it was Renna who paused. Stagg looked down, his hand still hurting, and saw Larent working the oscillators, peeling away partials, paring down the brute wholeness of the wave with the same slip-stick motion he would use to hold a note on the double bass, his rosined bow alternately catching and sliding across the strings.
Around this synthesized core the musicians they’d hired arranged an organic, pure body: doublings, pure fifths and thirds, and a pure major sixth above it, all played in measureless notes, the instrumentalists ducking in and out of the chords at will. Having dialed in the oscillators, Larent triggered the MPC samples and joined them on the bass, bowing the lowest A.
Harmonically the piece was simple, the motion generated through synthesis, additive and subtractive. Ravan ran a kind of interference with his guitar, injecting tempered notes just micro-tones off from the rest, shading the music away from purity. Quickly these beating tones, these wolves with intent, went from peculiar accents to percussion more vicious than anything provided by Moto, who pounded out a beat on bass and snare made up of the fewest strokes necessary to imply the time signatures revolving every sixteen bars: 3/4, 4/4, 5/4, 3/2.
Renna and Stagg dropped onto a vacant grating about half way up the silo and took half the Percocet. Over the next minutes, or however long it was, by infinitesimal increments that evaded the ear the music grew extraordinarily loud. Stagg hadn’t noticed any discrete bump in volume, but now that he’d sensed the scale of the sound, it was unignorable and still expanding.
As the music grew, the audience shrunk in proportion. Since the silo doors couldn’t be seen from where they were, the contraction too occurred by imperceptible intervals. Every few minutes, though, they could see, with a detachment the opiate permitted, that the crowd was that much smaller and the music that much larger.
Sick from sound, they took the rest of the pills. Everything dimmed, the sound transforming from an exogenous crush to a simple flush of space. They leaned against each other and stared down at the band. At Larent. Neon green peeked out of his ears. Plugs. Prepared.
They passed out on the grating, or fell between sleep and wakefulness, whether from shock or the drug or both. An abrupt silence woke them. They looked down to the floor and it was empty. Only the band members remained. Larent stared up at them inscrutably. Ravan was smoking something.
33
The rings were hardly louder than the ringing in his ears. Several came and went before Stagg noticed the doubling. He reached down from bed, groping for the source, and found it in the pocket of his pants, which were strewn on the floor, inside out, and still buttoned at the waist. The belt was buckled too. He must
have pulled himself out of them somehow. He couldn’t remember. Even now he was dazed.
Before he could separate the phone from the pocket the ringing stopped. He dialed back.
“Well, you’re an asshole,” he said just as Ravan picked up.
“Oh, you weren’t supposed to stay to the end, Carl! Only the fools did,” Ravan said. “Or the ones with earplugs, like us. How could I have known you’d overdosed—and fifty feet up at that? You made no sense after you climbed down.”
“Because of whatever you call what you were doing.”
“Because of the pills you took, I’d think. You came quite close to falling from the ladder. Renna too. Plenty of suspense in it. And what I call it is music. It was quite classical in some ways. The score was agonized over, you know, by Edward and me.”
“It was more like theater.”
“Well, the volume bit was really Edward’s idea, if that’s what you mean. Did you think it ruined things? Funny, he said you’re the first person he’d bounced the idea off of. You’d liked it then.”
“My ears are fucked.”
“So you’ve changed your mind,” he said. “I’ll let him know. Anyway, it’ll all come back, don’t worry. My ears have nearly bled after some of the things I’ve heard. And you weren’t even that close to the speakers, like the people on the floor. If anyone should be worried… but tell me this, it must have been a sight from up there, looking down on this factory floor just disgorging people, fleeing, essentially, hands over their ears.”
“I don’t know what I remember.”
“I suppose it doesn’t matter. To have seen everything perfectly, to have been changed, you don’t have to remember a thing,” he said. “But this isn’t really why I called. This storm, you see, there’s a chance, a meaningful chance, it’s going to be much worse than expected.”
Square Wave Page 34