Mark de Silva - Square Wave

The powder was dark and fine, really a dust. It carried into the light in tobacco wisps as he loaded the chamber, packing it flat with the weight of his body, twisting the tamp before easing the pressure. A featureless surface remained. He locked the handle in place and started the pump. Two honeyed streams oozed from the filter head down to the shallow white cup.

The springs squealed. She leapt up from bed, the Ballade in D minor Brahms, her favorite following her out of the bedroom as she opened the door and darted to his side. He did not react. Her hands clung to the edge of the sink as she leaned over it, finding a way into the margins of his view as her bare breasts grazed the Bolognese-stained plates poking up out of dishwater, frothless now after three days of attrition.

He stared down into the filling cup. Without raising his head he looked at her. Blue eyes edged with green they fluttered, fixed his own, released them, and fixed them again. He was unchanged. She swung her head away from him, tucked her chin in the hollow of her shoulder, and swung it back, her face now more flush with light just as cirrus draped the sun. He turned off the pump.

We should take a trip, she said.

The crema was thinning already. Shed left an entire bag of beans, a Kenyan peaberry finer than her palate, to stale in the unlidded grinder.

He handed her the cup. She tasted it and made a face, crinkled her nose. You make it bitter. She spooned too much sugar into the drink and sipped at the travesty.

Why? he asked as he refilled the basket.

Why?

Then where.

We could go to Sri Lanka. Its safe enough there now, right?

I have what I need.

Well then not for that. She shut her eyes in concentration or its imitation. Runion. The word came abruptly, eyes popping. She touched her thumb to her lip and tilted her head. Dakar?

There might be things I could use back in England. More letters, maybe some journals. We could probably stay at the old house itself this time. If you really have to go somewhere.

Dakar! The eyes quivered that, her manner of punctuation. Isnt there art in Dakar?

In going there?

A biennial. I think. Oh, I need to know these things.

Really, though, I shouldnt go anywhere. Not till Ive written up these pieces up for the Wintry.

He pulled the second shot and smiled. The pumps din made conversation impossible, forcing her to wait the twenty-five ticks of his Submariner.

But if you have everything you need, you can do it there.

He paused, though without quite shaking his head. And do you even have the time for this?

Too much. You know that. It is such a strange little place to work, Carl. Theres hardly enough to do. Three issues. Its more like half a years work. And just to go into that office the six of us. Maybe youd think, I did, that that would make things intimate, more informal. And it is informal, but not intimate. Its a vacuum. Silence from start to finish most days. And these are supposed to be people youd actually wanted to work with. Really good readers. They write interesting stuff too, smart commentary. But in the flesh, theyre false, or tepid, or humorless or falsely so without alcohol, and even then, the jokes are mostly bad. Paper-interesting, thats what Im calling them. Halsleys made them that, I think, if they werent already.

He downed his espresso and set the cup on the surface of the gray water. They watched it capsize and sink to the bottom, trailing dark ribbons that coalesced into a cloud. Her cup sat on the counter, nearly full.

Its like theres some threshold we havent reached, she continued. Maybe it takes, I dont know, ten before you have a staff, any real range. Or else less people than weve got, if you want something concentrated, personal. Ten or more, five or less, and weve fallen in between. But then maybe its got nothing to do with numbers. Theres just so much ego in that room, and less than half of its paid for. She threw her arms out to her sides as she said this. And no one stays past five, except for close. Thats three weeks a year. And still only till eight.

I should take your job, he said.

You should! I can follow the hookers then.

Thats not really my job.

But thats what you do.

Incidentally.

And they pay you for it. Thats a job. I dont know what I think of it, but its sounding better than mine right now.

But youd be just as bored. Because most of the time nothing happens. You just walk around, looking for trouble, and you dont end up finding it, the right kind, easily or at all. This stuff with the whores, it could still turn out, probably will turn out, to be the wrong kind. Tangential. Not my job.

She shook her head and ran her finger along the lip of her cup. I dont know what to do. Maybe I should start reviewing more. Do you think theyll let me have my old job back?

You were replaced.

I found her for them, though. The magazine could take us both, replacement and replaced. She looked at him hopefully. No, youre right, they wont. I dont really want to go back anyway. Every time I talk to them, and they still count as friends, individually, every time they mention the magazine, their voices change, they tighten, or if its in person, their faces do, and I know I was right to leave. I dont like the silence, the sputtering pace now. But the sort of noise I came from and it only got worse after you left.

I was pretty bad at the job. The midwifing. The Rolodex. The dinners.

But you were sort of hoping to be bad. Relieved at least.

Im not sure what I was hoping.

No, Im not blaming you for quitting. I would have had to leave anyway. But youre too something, for editing. Not just there. Anywhere, probably. Too yourself. Maybe for the city too.

I wouldnt

And I love that. Her eyes flashed. But cant we go somewhere? Youll like it.

The first essay needs to be done soon. In weeks probably.

Oh, youll get them all done. Theyll be perfect.

You havent seen them.

But I know.

She must have known most of what she knew of him this way, whatever way it was. Shed never asked to see the drafts, though she was better positioned than most to appreciate them, having once been a graduate student in history, at the same university hed attended, in fact, in England, and at the same time, though they knew each other only glancingly then. She dropped out before finishing her masters thesis, on literary expatriatism in the Georgian era, with Washington Irving, and his Geoffrey Crayon, the would-be pivot.

It was only after the scholarships, back in the States, in Halsley in magazines, in fact that theyd become properly acquainted. But he bore the citys literary world no better than academe. The issue now was frivolity not fustiness. It took him just months as an editor to see this, that wit and bombast would always trump rigor. They liked to condemn it as dreary; apparently this was the worst thing something could be. It didnt have to be, though, applied in the right way, he thought, even if the universities had made it seem so and given them cover for a sloth of mind he was never going to acclimate to, however artful the dress.

She seemed to have run into the same problem. Wasnt that what she was complaining about just now? The fecklessness? Still, he wasnt going to suggest that she quit as he had. Bright as she was, it might be that nothing in the world suited her better. No one, after all, could accuse her of being too herself, only not enough.