Below is an excerpt from Mark de Silva’s first novel Square Wave. It’s one of our favorite titles of 2016. Go and buy it here or suffer the consequences of missing out. Thanks to the author and his publisher, Two Dollar Radio.
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17
“I HEAR YOU’RE DOING BETTER,” STAGG SAID OVER a crackling phone line. “A little bit better.”
“The wheelchair’s gone,” Jen said.
“They took it back.”
“That’s good. You can walk.”
“Is that what you mean?”
“Well—”
“No more rolling around.”
“And your eye… I remember. It was painful.”
“I have whites instead of reds again.”
“Good.”
“I still see double at night, brights against darks. Everything haloes, and text, especially text, like on a computer screen, it doubles.”
“You’re not done getting better. That’s what the doctors tell me.”
“My ribs get sore, they’re sore now, when I’ve coughed too much, or laughed too much the night before.”
“Laughing is—”
“It’s happened once.”
“They take time. I’ve broken mine.”
“Have you. And your collarbones too?”
The line flickered with static.
“I’m sorry. What I—”
“My fingers work. They didn’t for weeks. They were all these
colors. Green, orange, blue, red…”
“The bruises must have been deep.”
“Must have been.”
“But they’re gone.”
“My grip’s still weak. All my fingers tremble when they come together. I drop a lot of things.”
“That’ll change.”
“The stitches have all come out. I had twelve above my right eye.”
“I remember.”
“Left a scar along my eyebrow. My head just split there. And I’ve got stitches along the edge of my wrist. Odd place to get them. I don’t know how a lot of it happened.”
“That’s okay.”
“It wasn’t, though.”
“To who?”
“At the interview. You didn’t say it. But it wasn’t okay.” “That’s not true. You were very helpful.”
“I was on drugs, for the pain.”
“You were helpful. And you have a copy of your statement. So if you did want to add—”
“See, I knew you would ask me that. That’s what I mean. It’s not okay. But nothing’s clearer now. I read it over four times. I could have been clearer, more direct, answering your questions, but the facts are the same. The tiny ones are sharp. But the big ones are dull, soft. The facts are the problem.”
“We aren’t expecting anything more from you. But yes—this is why I’m calling, mostly—as helpful as you were, we still don’t have anything concrete. I’m sorry to have to tell you that.”
“Nothing.”
“Though there are a dozen or so people under special watch.”
“There’s a profile, you mean.”
“And what you’ve told me has contributed to it.”
“But it fits twelve people.”
“Well, yes. Even they aren’t hard suspects. I don’t want to mislead you.”
“So it fits even more? I helped you put together a picture of a person—”
“Not a picture—not a physical description. Parts of it are that.”
“No, but a picture of a person, an idea of a person.”
“You did. It was vital, what you added to it.”
“But this idea fits twelve, and not even them so well you’ll call them suspects. Maybe it fits a hundred, really.”
“That’s true.”
“A thousand.”
“I don’t know.”
“And this was vital.”
“It could be. You were vital in creating it.”
“How is that even an idea of a person? What sort of picture matches everyone? What sort of picture is that?”
“Look, Ms. Best—”
“I think ‘Jen’ is better.”
“We haven’t had any incidents recently. Nothing in weeks, in any of the districts.”
“And that’s not good?”
“Well, of course it’s good. It’s—”
“But for the case. You need more. More beatings.”
“No. We don’t want to see any more—”
“You don’t want more. Obviously. Of course. You’re not evil. You only need more. It would help. And you wish I had more. But that’s what I mean. I can’t tell you very much about how it happened, not the way you want to know.”
“That’s not your fault.” “Well that’s just idle. ‘Fault.’”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe you are evil, Carl.” She laughed and it mixed with the static and made the phone clip. “And my experience, my pain, it hasn’t moved anything, changed anything.”
“I just said it has. The profile.”
“It really is a stupid word you brought up.”
“Jen, we are going through what we have. What we know, in all sorts of ways, from every direction. Something can emerge.” For a long time, they listened to each other breathe.
“You seem different today,” Stagg said finally.
“Different how?”
“Terse.”
“Just like you. Maybe it’s being off the pills. Or just the phone.”
“Maybe.”
“And does that mean you found me awfully chatty at the interview? You can be strange. Just like she said.”
“She?”
“My friend. The one who let you in.”
“Mariela.”
“Dress shoes and no socks. Wet pants.”
“The legs. She mentioned that?”
“You looked at my fingers the whole time I talked.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“The colors maybe.”
“I was listening.”
“You ran into Mariela on your way out.”
“That’s right.”
“She thought you were so strange.”
“Well, I’m not a cop. Maybe that’s who she’s used to dealing with.”
She laughed. “I’m sure she is. But there are lots of you now. Watches, I mean. That’s not strange, Carl.”
“Maybe I was bothered by your story. I’d only just heard it. It might have showed.”
“Maybe you were bothered?”
“Jen—”
“Do you have a girlfriend, Carl?”
“Your story—”
“Do you?”
“Yes, but this story—”
“She must be very understanding.”
“I’m sorry, if I didn’t—”
“Or she just tunes you out. I bet that’s it.”
“I was taking it all down.”
“I guess you’ve already got plenty to worry about, don’t you?”
“It’s a terrible story.”
Again there was a pause.
“You know,” Jen began, “what someone should seem like, why they should seem like anything in particular… Mariela’s ideas are definite. Not like the profile. The opposite problem. But maybe I’ve missed something. She’s managed to stay on her feet the whole time. And I’m still not better. Still, I was glad to go in the end.”
“Go?”
“Mariela’s too worried, too aware, whatever it is, to live with for very long. Does it even help? I wonder whether she took me in partly for that, to size up this threat. From a toll. I’m a toll. I don’t think that’s true. She did ask me a lot, though, long strings of questions, stretched out over days. She would pick up out of nowhere. About friends of hers I may have worked beside, people I saw that day, any signs there may have been, what did I miss, what did I not see. Or the lack of signs. Maybe I missed nothing, he was that good, or lucky. And how quickly I knew, and now that it’s happened, what will I do. She’s been trying to get me to call you, actually.”
“Strange as I am.”
“But I didn’t call you. You had to call. And that’s because I don’t think there’s much I know. She just assumes I must, that it’s only got to be fished out. I don’t mind talking about it. But the angle, the way it’s always a piece of a bigger puzzle. I can’t think like that.”
“You don’t.”
“Not as that. A reign of terror or whatever. And over a bunch of sluts.”
“But you’re worried about the profile.”
“I want to be useful, Carl. You aren’t calling me for personal reflections, ones that end there, tell you nothing about the future.”
“What about just your future?”
“I don’t think about that either.”
“It would be pretty hard not to.”
“It is hard.”
“Impossible almost.”
“No. But it doesn’t help, so I don’t.”
“And Mariela?”
“She thinks only of the future, as far as I can tell. That must be hard too. She has a kind of concern for the group at the front of her thoughts—her among the many. She’s helped me because of it probably. She might have helped anyway. But she thinks about things in this way I can’t. Like you.”
“About the city, the community.”
“The future of it.”
“Well, professionally, yes, I think about it.”
“This can’t seriously be your profession. This is about convenience. I’m sure of that.”
“It’s one of them.”
“Right, so there are others.”
“They pay me to consider the whole—”
“They pay you for the particulars, like these.”
“Yes, but for the benefit of the whole. I keep it in mind.”
“Professionally.”
“Right.”
“Maybe that’s what Mariela meant. That it ended there for you. Just a job to do. Or is that impossible too?”
“It could be. I’m not sure.”
“Anyway, she needed the space back. It was always temporary. Her boyfriend made it from Quito. Mariela’s the breadwinner now. Proud.”
“And—”
“I’m in my place, for weeks now. With my brother, for the meantime. He’s in the other bedroom. He’s helping me cover rent.”
“So things are okay.”
“He can work from here. Coding identity software. It’s kept our parents out of it. I think they think I’ll eventually go back to college. That’s what he—Reed—tells me. But they are less sure now, it’s been three years, not the year off they signed on for.”
“You were studying what, before you left.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Anything can help.”
“Classics, while it lasted. Is that funny? Is it strange?” “They get you to pick something. Why not.”
“It’s more than that. But the incompletes were piling up.”
“And they think what?”
“My parents? Traveling, partly. And I am. I spent about half the time, less than that, in California, between San Diego and L.A. And then a bunch of places around here. I assume they think I’m figuring things out. That’s never totally false, I guess, whoever says it.”
“And nothing unusual, no trouble.”
“Things aren’t good between us, just in the last year really. My father won’t take the phone anymore. I’m not mad though. I see it. They’re wondering about college. Officially it’s odd jobs— waitressing, tutoring even. I’ve done a little of those things too. They don’t know why I want to keep doing this, though, and I’ve said some things along the way about writing. I guess that’s another thing you can say and never really be insincere. Everyone has that wish in them, somewhere. But I’ve written nothing. No journals. I don’t really think I will, when it comes down to it. I think I prefer reading.”
“I think I do too.”
“When I’ve been able to. And they say, can’t I write after the degree? How could studying classics hurt a writer? I don’t know if that’s right though. But it doesn’t matter really, does it, since I don’t actually write. But I do still read them. Or I’ve started again. Ovid, last.”
“Oh.”
“You’ve read him? Your other profession maybe.”
“No.”
“Then?”
“Of ancient things, Gorgias last.”
“I knew I knew you. The Gorgias. Plato.”
“Actually, his Encomium of Helen.”
“He’s there in Sextus Empiricus too, right? Against the Professors.”
“Right, but second-hand again.”
“I don’t know Gorgias, really. Except from the Gorgias.”
“He doesn’t really show up there, though. No one shows up in Plato but Plato. But Ovid, yes, I have read bits of the Metamorphoses. Not so different… your family, though, do they help you, financially?”
“I don’t expect help from them anymore. They used to send money, sometimes through Reed. They still do, but less regu- larly, less enthusiastically. It’s not enough anymore to help. He says they’re pretty desperate, wanting me back in Bethesda. I called them from my hospital bed, actually, in the middle of my stay, as if everything was fine. My body was just pieces after the beating. My mother asked me to speak up. That was the jaw. The drip kept me together. And the Librium.”
“Detox.”
“Yeah.”
“You’ve stayed that way.”
“Mariela kept carting me to meetings in the wheelchair. NA,CA, AA. All I really needed was the last of those. The other things aren’t, well, entirely ‘unmanageable.’”
“You still go to AA.”
“I’m not drinking.”
“But the—”
“The point is I’m doing better. That was your point too, wasn’t it?”
“You won’t go home.”
“Not a solution.”
“For a stay. It could be easier to be sober.”
“Well, I spent two summers there during college, and every night I’d end up drinking this plastic pint of vodka out on the driveway. It’s no different now. And there’ll still be the decisions I can’t make.”
“Outside of that, since the hospital, nothing unusual. We haven’t heard from you, so that’s what we’ve assumed.”
“No.”
“Things are getting back to normal? I’m not interested in interfering, it’s not what I’m supposed to do. Same as the last time.”
“You only watch, I get it. Not normal exactly. Hooking was never normal. Anyway, what I’m thinking now is different. It’s safer.”
“It is.”
“It’s legal. I haven’t started. Reed won’t stay forever. He won’t stay more than a couple of weeks now really. I need to do some- thing. I might move. Perk of the job.”
“New profession?”
“It’s definitely an improvement. I haven’t even told Reed what it is. If he knew, he’d be happy, or maybe he’d be sad, and then he’d be happier. You know, it’s been strange not needing to find money these last weeks, to have so much time. I sleep and read. And talk to Reed. I like him more than I remember. A lot more. Maybe I’m just not remembering. Or I just like him more now, and I remember fine.”
“But you won’t level with him.” “Not now.”
“You can’t trust him.”
“I trust him completely.”
“It’s probably easier to tell—”
“I’m going now, Carl.”
“Okay.”
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Mark de Silva’s first novel Square Wave is out now from Two Dollar Radio. Buy it. Read it . Love it.
