Square Wave (31 page)

He’d turned to the porn forums only after breaking off his physical interventions in the city. At this point, he felt, he could only be a beating or two away from arrest. Anyway, the last of the hookers, Lisa, her calm had exhausted something in him. He couldn’t explain it to himself, but he knew he’d rather not look these girls in the face anymore, especially with the streets as clear as they were these days. The rewards no longer justified the risks. Isn’t that how his father would have put it? In the end, there was nothing that wasn’t an investment.

That didn’t mean there wasn’t more work to be done. Just not in Halsley. Scale was the question. He’d first grasped its importance, in the realm of politics, a decade ago, when he’d helped Kames and the Wintry expand into Providence. The group was fragile back then. Now they were a force.

How to answer the question of scale in his own case, given his own ethical imperatives? How different were they really, though? Lewis’s sensibilities owed more to Kames than he’d like to admit. The two hadn’t spoken in years, except through the odd email. Still, Lewis had listened to him lecture dozens of times. It must have left a mark.

Pornography, Lewis thought, might well be the bigger canvas he needed now, and these chat rooms might be his inroads. He’d grown up, like most men, thoroughly at home with porn, in both its public and private guises. It shadowed him, but so closely he had a hard time seeing it as something distinct from himself. But in the last few months, as he’d withdrawn from the world and tapered off his meds, the fetish had come plainly into view as something attached to him like a parasite. Once he saw it this way, he found it impossible to get off to it. Lately he seemed to feel it less necessary to get off at all—by himself, with Janice, with anyone. It felt like evolution.

One of the things he liked about the forums—and he’d liked this about his pre-assault chats with the hookers too—was that they forced him to improvise, react in the moment. He didn’t come to them with scripts, fixed ideas, or stories to lecture them with. The situation would draw fresh ideas out of him, extend his thinking in unpredictable directions.

The chat rooms took things a step further, though. Now, he had to react from the very point of view of the ones he held in contempt. It was a way of putting himself in the girls’ shoes—in its way a compassionate act. He felt more empathic for it, and his moral thinking seemed suppler to him. He was learning something, not just about himself, or even the girls, but about the space between them and how it might be closed.

Skye wasn’t his only character. He had others going at rival forums, some of which were dedicated to more extreme pornography. In one case, the raw fact around which he built his lies was that Maya Haven, a Czech newbie to Porn Valley, was to star in the latest Piss Mops flick. Lewis-as-Maya had so far explained to the fans in the chat room how, in shooting the scene, the taste of urine was not unlike white beer; that though the first sip was always jarring, no matter how many times you’d had it before, by the third swallow, there was something quenching in it, even if the aftertaste was worse and more persistent than beer.

In shooting the scene, he, Maya, had kneeled in the bathtub. Her patellas ached from the ceramic. Each man—there were three, though in the most heroic scenes in the series, there might be twice that—each man undid his jeans, just slightly off camera, and the first man up, his cock would dangle into frame. Lewis described the initial spurt onto the tongue; how Maya was encouraged to gargle with the piss; how she let the first stream, a golden brown, leak down her chest, running over her tits and belly through her legs.

But to the surprise of all, including herself, with the second stream she began to drink. She angled her head so that the piss struck the back of her throat and disappeared directly down her gullet. By the end of it, she’d consumed more than two pints. The men clapped spontaneously as she stood and twisted the shower knob. The sound of the falling water merged with the extravagant claps as the image went dark and she rinsed the piss from her hair and body. Just this once, she nearly forgot about the money. The director even threw in an extra hundred for drinking.

So far, no one had called Maya out, questioned her reality. The forum members seemed entranced, touched, disgusted, and yes, slightly shamed by Lewis’s tale. Which was his hope. It was also a funny story, he thought, and nothing hurts like humor.

But would the real Maya ever discover what she’d said in the forum? And would she be shocked by the odd detachment of her words, the self-lacerating wit? Or would she reluctantly recognize her reflection in them and hate herself more for it? Maybe she’d even learn something about herself from Lewis, just before she reported the deception to the moderators.

And then Violet, who was becoming far more famous than Maya. What would she think of what
she’d
said, which was altogether more reflective, if equally troubling? Maybe she’d be proud, and want to take up the challenge, live up to the portrait. Maybe one day soon she’d give it all up, this twisted image of the good life. Unlikely, but not impossible.

The only woman’s thoughts Lewis didn’t seem to speculate about lately were Janice’s. He spoke to her mostly in freighted trivialities now. Overall he simply spoke less, and even before he’d stopped getting off on porn, he’d stopped getting off on her. He was willing enough to go through the motions for her, she found. But she wasn’t. So they didn’t.

She of course could speculate about no one’s thoughts
but
his anymore. It felt to her as if he were flattening out, shrinking. There was less of him to inhabit now, to live in or with. At the same time, she had the odd feeling he was also deepening, growing, and rapidly. But the growth was taking place far away from her, on the other side of him, a place she knew existed but always left alone out of respect, love. Now it seemed ground was being gained there, so much that it was dwarfing all she knew of him. It was changing too, seeming no longer merely unknown, though available in principle to her, if she felt it important to know. It was becoming unknowable territory, and it chilled her. She had to admit that what she had left of him now was mostly abandoned land, scorched earth. No one could survive here for long.

He shut the laptop. She shut the window and left him to himself in the kitchen.

22

It’s been two weeks now since the great museum’s facade was pocked. Tiny plastic charges, military grade RDX, arranged with art. The paintings escaped damage, the guests and patrons too. The event did not. A philanthropic gathering, hosted by the Wintry, dedicated only to strengthening political literacy in the city’s charter schools—put simply, an education fundraiser—dispersed like that. It will be restaged. Most of the funds, we hope, will be collected, perhaps through online auctions, if in-the-flesh meetings remain fraught. (There is every chance they will.)

The bare idea of introducing a discussion of weighted voting, of power indexes, of
phronesis
, fundamentally, into our schools—readers of this magazine must wonder: how, and whom, does it disturb?

Before this, we had the leveling of the Morlen Center, which federal and city officials had planned on using to address, first privately, then in a series of town halls, what they have come to call the background instabilities, and what I prefer to call the quiet dissonances, of the last year and a half. Three people did die in the destruction. But that seems, from what we know and have come to expect, beyond the intention. The means were primitive, effective, they could even be symbolic. Ammonium nitrate—ANFO—packed tight into minivan casings. (Fertilizer, in essence, in a doorstep detonation.) Those talks have been delayed, will have to be moved, and one expects security will have to be ratcheted up again.

Then, three weeks ago, there was the careful disembowelment of a downtown pool hall that doubles as a meeting place for labor. It’s Emile Jenko’s. The talks held there were organized by a fine speaker, quietly convincing, so far from his roots: Javier Celano IV. Now he must seek a new place to lecture, to beseech, to plead. Another of Jenko’s halls, perhaps. It’s not known where he’s spoken, if at all, since the attack. The meetings, if there have been any, must be of a smaller scale, less visible. Perhaps he is gathering his thoughts, privately. Perhaps he finds other ways to speak.

And the source of the implosion, of the hall, the first in what can seem—though this cannot be known, or is not, yet—a chain. Whom can
it
trouble? Celano speaks, yes, for the lay, the common. But must that put him at odds with those wondering, like us, how character, knowledge, habit, and influence—political influence—should relate? If the education, or better, the life-training, on which the apportionment of political power properly depends were to be made available to all—the charter schools need only be the beginning—why should that be so? Even the most extreme electoral reweightings needn’t create
inherent
disadvantages. All those I have heard floated, anyway, call for a phasing-in, where the relevant opportunities would be made available beforehand.

I should say, I have no settled opinion if any of those proposals are worthy, though for predictable reasons, it is assumed I and others of the Wintry do, that we want things to come out a certain way. But public debate might well lead, probably would lead, only to quite moderate revisions of our understanding of political say-so. In fact, and this bears emphasis, we might well end up only reconfirming our existing arrangements, that brute, biological one: one person, one vote. Why not, if the basis is as sound as we have been assuming, collectively, it is, all these years?

This is all to say, then, that the gathering in the museum that night should not be taken, eo ipso, as a threat to Celano and his causes, which, however obscure they are—and they are quite, which I’ll say something about presently—has to do with the conditions of today’s workers, whether they labor in factories or storefronts, part-time or full. The assumption of a clash of class interests, tempting as it is, is superficial. And we can say that while granting that the venue of our event, the museum, is certainly itself a
symbol
of orthodox power—anything can become a symbol of anything, though—and that the patrons, it is true, were ones of great means.

The proposals discussed that night—the provision of education was the issue, nothing more—intersect with the problem that really afflicts Celano’s people: even when their true interests stand revealed, the unskilled, however much in unison they may vote, are destined to be overruled in any system of decision making that is egalitarian, majoritarian, and self-interested at the level of the individual vote. It is not, then,
proposed
political arrangements, like the ones considered by the Wintry, that are his problem, not in the first instance anyway. It is the present, not the future, that is the obstacle.

Perhaps our pictures differ. I am sure they must, in some ways, though the differences may not be nearly so deep as imagined. At this point, they are irrelevant anyway. There may be doglegs we will discover down the road. But that is down the road.

Now, does Celano, the Old Rosean, see things this way? Sometimes I think he must. He’s experienced too much to go in for the face value, in present circumstances, when the face value is everywhere a screen—not a blank one, but a screen nonetheless—or at least a potential one, onto which motive powers are perpetually being thrown, superimposed from a distance. And incredibly, not always with intent. That doesn’t stop meanings from forming.

If he is thinking clearly, I can’t see how he could see things otherwise. Perhaps he’s just unsure whether the Wintry does too. He can be assured that we do. It is the sensible view.

But then, nothing around us conduces to clear thinking. Since that attack on the pool hall, there has been a level of scrutiny at the Wintry, a presence of police, plain clothes and not, that, though no formal accusation has been made, must mean we are under some suspicion (though that will be denied). Celano may take that attack, and equally that scrutiny, as evidence against us.

I am sympathetic. There is at least the ring of truth to it. But that ring attends every specious proposition too. Today the truth appears to be sounding out everywhere and all the time, and everything simply cannot be true. Facts are facts, of course. There is no question of truth. There are no false facts. But propositions are something else. And the attribution of cause and effect, for all these happenings, it could not occur at a more vexed moment, from the standpoint of what can be decisively known. Circumstances aren’t exactly
un
favorable to seeing the Wintry as an actor here, somewhere behind the destruction of Jenko’s hall. I must acknowledge that frankly.

But then, if
that
is the standard, how many more events might one implicate the Wintry in? How about the waste station that was recently compromised in one of our less affluent neighborhoods? And what of these beaten escorts, the community of sex workers? Would they not make as good a target, even if they are not yet politically organized? A preemptive strike of sorts? How different are they from Celano’s great unwashed? Some of them work legally too, after all, in the adult film industry.

I wonder, then, when Celano does surface, whether he also will face greater suspicion, in his case for the profaning of the museum and our fundraiser. I suppose I don’t wonder but know. The evidence there paints an even more damning picture, though it is still nothing so strong as conclusive, the very idea of which—conclusive evidence—has receded lately, hasn’t it, into a sea of probabilities. It will be, as they say, something for the police to decide. (I hope, of course, it turns out he has little to do with this, if his thinking is as probing as I hope it is, going by some of his prognostications.)

The forced fact, whatever the truth, is that both of us are now under surveillance. The government’s license implicitly expands. So one wonders, again, about the origins of both attacks. It is hard not to notice that though the materials involved differ—small guerilla charges in the museum, a single sophisticated leveling device in the pool hall, one that could incinerate the place without causing a hint of structural damage (the buildings on either side have been virtually undisturbed)—the manner of their deployment is eerily on a par. The elegance and economy. The practiced precision. There is the perfection of performance here, so perfect one doubts any private organization could manage it.