Square Wave (29 page)

“I interviewed a few others, and they corroborated various details he offered. But really he seemed to have taken in the most, felt the happenings most acutely. Just the sweep of his picture. You might think he’d be more shaken for it, and he was definitely shaken, but he was in no worse shape than the others.”

“Better shape, I’d guess. He’s really not society. He is
of
them, but he’s
not
them, not at this point, not for a long time. I can’t see him being as surprised as the donors, the supporters, by the things you describe, on some level. Or as angry even.”

“That must be right,” Ravan said. “That’s the way it seemed.”

“While they—well, not all of them, I think the real robber barons are probably not that surprised either. But they must be angrier. Their sons and daughters, their wives, I can’t say what they must be. Probably they don’t know as much.”

“Yes, well, the breeding, the markers, they were there in Kames. But he didn’t seem to share the vanity. That particular sort of vanity, I mean. He seemed plenty vain. That Brahmin drawl. But not in the way that makes shock possible, the kind that comes just before indignation. He was, well, something different, when I met with him. Quite calm. As if that night was gone for him, already. Even the present. There was only the future.”

Suite No. 5 closed, officially, but Larent hung a fermata on the last note and seemed reluctant to let it go. “Well done. Well done, Edward. Now come and have a drink.” From the bedroom came the sound of glass rattling against glass, then the extended gurgle of a heavy pour. The bow slapped against the floorboards. Larent didn’t come out, and he said nothing. “We can wake Renna up if you like,” Ravan called out to him. His eyes shined with faint malice as he nodded at Stagg and drank the rest of his wine.

Stagg drew his fingers together at the base of Renna’s neck, pushing the blood from the surface, leaving blanched tracks on the pale downy-laden skin that filled in a redder shade of white. He angled his fingers to bring his nails into play and caught a tiny fold of skin between them as they met at the base. She revived.

20

Jen drew breath chilled by last night’s spirits. That morning, from the reaches of her mouth, at the throat, along the gums, and most of all in the vague tissues beneath the tongue, neutral grain returned to her as a vapor. It seeped from the skin inside her face. Brushing didn’t help. Ten minutes later the flavorless, alcoholic cool cut through the lesser cool of peppermint paste.

Reed had moved out of her place a few weeks ago, and she’d spent the time since regressing. For almost three days now she’d lived on Fanta and Smirnoff—a sort of ersatz screwdriver—along with a few protein bars.

Renewal, though, was promise of the afternoon. It’s why she’d made the effort today, through a crippling hangover, to come to this tiny airless studio across the river from Halsley, for her first day in a new, or newish, line of work.

She hadn’t lied to Stagg about the kind of thing she’d be doing. It
would
free her from the fears of the city’s hookers. That blackjack, really. He should be happy with that, and she’d tell him so the next time he called.

She knew violence couldn’t be dodged, of course. In some sense, it wasn’t even to be dodged. Life was sculpted out of it, the Romans had taught her that much. Homer too, all the pillage and piles of bones burning for the gods. The only question really was which flavor you’d have.

What she’d heard is that this one went down easy. Other escorts she knew were starting to make the same shift. The money wasn’t usually quite as good or quick, and for the first time, it was actually going to be taxable. But everything was controlled. No more surprises. You knew exactly what was going to happen to you, even if it wasn’t any prettier. The material did end up online, it was public, but how long could she keep worrying about that? What wasn’t online? Even some of her hooking had probably been recorded discreetly and posted by some of her johns. It’s just what people did. In any case, without her brother around, she needed a job, the kind she could fit around benders like the one she was coming off of now. There were only so many like that, and none were attractive exactly.

She rubbed her toe along the time-darkened grout of the kitchen floor. The tiles it framed iridesced from a solvent’s residue. Fingerprints plastered the black refrigerator, and its noisy compressor ran almost continuously, even with the dial rolled to five, its warmest setting. The racks of the dishwasher, sea green cages, stretched out from the machine, holding acrylic plates and cups that steamed. Smaller cages held steak knives with sodden wood handles and forks with tines that failed to form a plane.

Sitting conspicuously on the counter, next to the burners and the smoke-stained fan, was the blender—pastel yellow, with imperial measures embossed on the dingy plastic of its jar.

Jen leaned a hip against the counter and pulled the tank top away from her stomach, breaking the seal of sweat. She popped watery blueberries more gray than blue from a perforated plastic box while the two men, mid-thirties and unshaven, misted the fridge with cleaner. They used wads of toilet paper to wipe it down and the streaks iridesced like the tiles till they burned off under the hot floods overlighting the kitchen.

They were going to need to quiet the fridge before they started. They squatted on either side of it and nudged it forward before angling it away to one side. The skinnier one, his forearms dressed in paisley tattoos, worked his way into this new space behind the machine. He reached down and switched off the compressor at the base of the fridge as his chin bit into the cold metal.

The other man, shorter and less useful, started putting the forks and knives in the dishwasher away, into a kitchen drawer. The tattooed one came out of the crevice and pushed the fridge back in by himself, closing the space. When he saw what the other man was doing, he slammed the drawer shut. The other man quickly shut the dishwasher. They wiped it down with the dirty wads used on the fridge. It looked neither cleaner nor dirtier for it.

Jen put the box of blueberries back in the fridge and took a pair of muscle relaxants from her pocket, the last of the Soma prescription. How useful they’d been, how necessary, after the beating. Today, though, nearly healed, she might find them more necessary still, if necessity came in degrees.

■   ■   ■

“I could really use a pick me up,” Lisa said as she re-entered the kitchen in flannel pajamas strewn with elephants and monkeys. She opened the fridge wide. “Blueberries!” she said. “I love blueberries.” She pulled out the plastic box she’d just been eating from and set it on the counter. “What else do we have? Oh a papaya. A nice one.” The fruit, somewhere between red and yellow, rolled along the counter until the box of blueberries checked it. “Then a banana,” she said, pulling one off the bunch in the rattan fruit-basket on the opposite counter. “And kiwis too. This all looks so good.” She turned back to the open fridge and found a green carton of two percent: “Got to have milk.”

Her brow furrowed without nuance. “You know what else we need, though.” She swung the freezer door open. “Ice!” Her hands emerged clutching cubes she’d dug out from the icemaker. Before she could deposit them in the salad bowl, several fell to the ground with a crack. The handfuls were greedy.

“What a long night! Cramming is so exhausting. And I’ve got to be fresh for the test.” She took a potato peeler to the kiwis, scuffing them with artless strokes and divesting the fruit. She skinned the overripe papaya and drew the short blade against the sopping fruit, hewing chunks from the slab, gathering them in one hand, and dropping them into the jar of the blender. By the same process she transformed the naked kiwis.

“Now for the banana.” After freeing it from the peel she broke it into pieces with her hands and tossed them into the jar one by one. “And what about citrus? I thought I saw an orange in there,” she said, referring to a large tangerine in the basket. After that, the blueberries went into the mix. “A little milk now.” She tore away the green plastic strip from the milk cap, popped it off, and tipped a cup’s worth into the mess of fruit. “And ice. Can’t forget the ice.” The ice went into the blender in the same way it had come out of the freezer, in fistfuls.

The machine was quieter than she’d expected. As soon as she turned it on, the ice sank from the top of the jar while the blade made its way through the mix. The mash jittered at the base, splashing against the plastic higher up in ribbons, the colors marbling, passing through the rich purples of pure blueberry pulp, the pinks of papaya cut with milk, the cream tones and texture of banana melting, before going pastel orange as the tangerine fused with it. In the midst of the purple of the blueberries, though, orange, green, and even red proved recessive. Everything settled into a smoothness and simplicity when there was nothing left to resist the blade.

The cycle stopped. Lisa pulsed it a few times as sweat came down her temples. Her body goose-bumped everywhere, though, and she wished for layers over her pajamas. She poured the blend into a tall, narrow glass with shaky hands and sipped more than she was supposed to from it. She was starving, literally. “So good.” She went to take another unauthorized sip but stopped short and furrowed her brow again. “Hm… there’s just one thing missing. And there’s still time before school.”

■   ■   ■

The chill came from without now. It rose through the rainbowing tiles into Lisa’s neck, her bare shoulders. The glass was gone. Her breasts hung near her collarbones, which were still sore and swollen, and her legs and back rose up along the cabinet. She was inverted. The white key light, blocked in spots by her dangling feet that were vainly searching for a comfortable position, turned her pupils to points, barely visible against emerald irises. The light shone down on the hair in her crotch, producing, from her point of view, a fuzzy silhouette in the space between her legs.

She could feel the wood knobs bearing into her back. The inversion made her whole body hurt. It was just too soon to be in a position like this, after the beating she’d taken.

“Ready, Lisa?” The man with the tattoos pried her legs apart. She felt another chill now, a drip, a pooling slick. Just behind that she felt the pressure of plastic, then a collapse, then a pure presence. Her stomach tightened.

A click of the speculum and she felt the distance. Another click. Three more and a shiver shot up her back. The man fed the slick. Some of it fell straight down inside her, some clung to the walls, coating and cooling them. One more click and she grabbed his wrist.

“Okay?” he said.

He disappeared without waiting for an answer. A few seconds later, she saw the backlit glass of purple puree held up between her legs. Sweat rolled up her belly and breasts to her chin, which was pressed against her chest. It crossed her cheeks into her eyes, forcing them closed and drawing tears that fell into her hair.

“Here you go, honey.”

“Oh, I can’t wait,” she said sweetly, though her eyes were stinging.

She felt another chill, much cooler, denser, than the slick. It built. It made her stomach cramp and her legs twitch. He grabbed them, held her stomach, and kept pouring.

“It’s thirstier than you,” he said.

Lisa thought of ice-cream headaches. From some point within her, near the pelvis, the cold climbed up her tailbone. “I think you’re full,” he said. There was a convulsion then, and as if something gave way, the coolness shifted in her, to a place near her center.

“There we go,” he said. “Just needed a sec to swallow.” He started to pour again. More contractions. He called these gulps. Finally the chill ran half the length of her torso. The space was gone.

The glass clinked on the counter. He pulled the speculum out without reducing its compass. She felt the stretch she’d forgotten about vanish. It spurred a new coolness, though, of her outsides. It flowed up her back and stomach. She squirmed and twisted, opened her eyes. Her belly was streaked in purple.

He caught her before she fell. “Whoops. Maybe that was a little too much. No, you’re okay, you’re okay,” he said in sing-song. He held her in place and wiped her down gently with a kitchen rag. His arms were strong and took away her fear.

He guided her body down off the cabinet and she lay on the cold tiles with her knees in front of her. She spread her fingers on the floor and hopped to her feet. She leaked smoothie. The man was gone and she stared into the glass eye of the camera that iridesced like everything else.

“Oh, that’s cold,” she said, rubbing her stomach. “Now just to finish it off.” She began to jump in place, ungainly leaps and turns facing the camera, in profile, and then away from it too. Soon the jumps turned to spins and rocking hips and lithe glides and coy shakes. The sweat made her face shine.

Her muscles ached from a hangover accruing from a full week of drunkenness. Her hands trembled as they had before, from the blackjack. She was dizzy now too. The vapor of grain alcohol filled her mouth again, overriding the blueberry aftertaste. She dry heaved once but in a controlled way. No one noticed, she hoped. She was in no shape for this much movement, and there were pains in places she hadn’t felt since the beating. It would have been easier, she thought, to lie there and get fucked. Maybe that’s what she’d need to do the next time around. Probably these same two men would shoot it. There’d certainly be more cash in it.

“Okay,” she sighed, losing a little of her brightness. She held her stomach and rubbed it in circles. She felt very strongly like shitting, just as she had after the morning’s enema. “I think it’s done!” she said, finding some vigor for the camera.

She put the glass on the floor. The lens dipped with her as she squatted and stared out of frame, above the camera, as if in contemplation of a weighty matter.

Before she could settle into position and bear down, the smoothie squirted from her, onto the outside of the glass and the floor, purpling the grout lines. The incontinence brought a twinge of embarrassment to her. She felt like a child with undeveloped faculties, or a geriatric with worn out ones. Quickly, though, she tamed the flow and shot it into the glass.