Square Wave (33 page)

Kames couldn’t stand to hear it called a think tank. The phrase smacked of something shallow, intellectually second class, and depth was at the core of the project, though it was inflected in a new way. It had brought him notoriety, as he and his colleagues injected ideas, like this essay, at once incisive and ambiguous, into settings where they might make contact with ripe circumstances.

With help from friends like Leo Eldern, Kames had transformed the Institute into a national force. At this point, he had to be heard. So publishers obliged, pushing aside their normal concerns, sometimes of clarity, always of length. But this piece was unusual, even for him. It seemed more of an artful jotting, a pretty ramble, fit more for a good blog. It might have been pride alone that prevented Kames from publishing it that way, what made it necessary that it appear in the print issue.

But then it might also be that the note was not a note at all, with its suggestion of incompleteness and approximation, but the finished version of a form Stagg failed to recognize as such. The essay’s apparent imprecisions might actually be a set of carefully inscribed double- and triple-entendres and, indeed, occasionally, red herrings. And why not? These days, if you were to flourish or even survive, everyday life seemed to demand the most subtle exegesis. Why then shouldn’t actual texts? Which meant, Stagg thought, that Kames’s article might well be as perfect for what it was, and what it was meant to be, as
Madame Bovary
was a novel, what
its
author had hoped for it, and for her, Emma.

This struck Stagg as more likely, knowing the value Kames placed on rigor. Anyway it had been a while now since one worried about a prestige gap between print and digital. Even Kames, in his mid-60s now, was not so antiquated. In some ways, he was seeming as modern as could be. Probably more than Stagg himself, who seemed more interested in the past than the future.

Stagg slept with the lights on, in his clothes. It was cold and the heat was unpredictable, so this was not only easy but practical. He left the thinking for the morning, when there would be two of them, he and Penerin.

■   ■   ■

The same essay, printed out on paper that had been wet at some point and had dried wrinkled and stiff, was sitting on the desk when Stagg came into the office. A Venn diagram of coffee rings marked it along the margin, and it was turned around, as if he should read it. He picked it up. There were only a couple of underlines, most of which seemed not to correspond to anything of outstanding importance: “museum,” “plain clothes,” “a fine speaker.” They must have been stray markings as Penerin followed along with his pen. But then they seemed too definite for that; they showed through on the reverse side of the pages.

“Strange, right?” Penerin said from the doorway. His voice was soft, as if he were standing farther away than he was.

Stagg nodded and set the sheets down. Without looking at him, his boss walked around to the desk and sat slowly in the mesh swivel chair.

“I can’t see what this
does
, or what it’s about… really about,” Penerin said in almost philosophical tones. “Can you?”

The question sharpened his voice, and his eyes, which finally fixed on Stagg, held a new intensity.

“It’s definitely—”

“It’s accusations, it’s camaraderie, directed at this same guy, Celano,” Penerin interrupted. “And Jenko too. Then there’s the insinuations about us, but just fuzzy enough for him to deny. And then the academic jargon that I don’t know what.” His voice was sharper still.

The fluorescent loop overhead, veiled by frosted glass, crackled faintly and continuously. Stagg waited a few beats to see if Penerin was done.

“Ravan spoke with him,” Stagg said.

“About the museum, right. He collected the facts—a strange bunch of them.”

“Strange events.”

“No, but what he put down, what Kames gave him, the emphasis is all wrong. It’s more about the wine than the bombs. It’s bizarre.”

“Is that Ravan or is that Kames, though.”

“Jesus fuck, Carl, this isn’t about distortion, you have to see that.” He paused, calmed himself. “What about this essay then? These are Kames’s words, right? He chose them. So whatever is odd
here
, there’s no excuse, no messenger, we know it’s him. And it is
weirder
than anything Ravan reported. For one, why is he talking about the assaults on the hookers like this? Of all the things he could have chosen, why was
this
his example of something you could just as well accuse him of?”

Stagg avoided his eyes now.

“Any ideas? Even just about how this guy thinks?”

The contempt in his voice was unconcealed now, and a good part of it must have been directed at him. Stagg shrugged vaguely.

“No? Then any idea why we still have no clue why the beatings tailed off since Best?”

“Not yet.”

“Not yet. That’s great. You realize we have every right to be paranoid now, right? There are weeks till we’re supposed to pick a president. Are you paranoid?”

Stagg nodded.

“See, that can’t be true. I can’t see how, anyway. You haven’t said a single useful word about Kames today. Which means you think there’s no point worrying about him, or you just don’t know anything about him. But of course, you
do
know him. So you must not be worrying about him, and you should be.”

Stagg didn’t know what to say. For a moment the hum of the bulb took over.

“We had to look into the Wintry, obviously, after this,” Penerin said, holding the printout up. “They tell me your name is on the schedule, for a lecture. So does Ravan.”

“It’s not—”

“There’s nothing wrong with that. Prestigious place is what I’ve heard, whatever the controversy. You’re there for your research, I guess. History? Politics?”

“Yeah.”

“You must consider that your real life, the one you’d rather be living all the time instead of sitting here with me. But see, this is history too. This is politics, what we’re doing. So this
is
just as much your real life as anything.”

“I never said it wasn’t.”

“Then you can take it just as fucking seriously, can’t you.”

Stagg gripped the cool chrome armrests that sloped away from him. He slid his hands down the metal tubes, loosening his grip to prevent them from clinging to the metal, which seemed damp. But that may have just been his sweat. He lifted his weight with his elbows and pushed himself further into the chair until his back went straight.

“Look, you don’t have to do anything
that
different—it’s just noticing,” Penerin said. “Same as always. So you bring up this article with him, show some interest in the details. And maybe you end up finding out a tiny bit about what he’s really playing at. That’s all. There’s nothing for us to argue about really, Carl. I’m not angry you work at the Wintry. It could actually be a good break we caught here, really.”

“I’m only applying to work there at this point. But what you’re saying now, it—”

“Wait. What have I said?”

“Well, I’m thinking now maybe I shouldn’t—”

“But I haven’t said anything. Or, okay, no, I am saying there are things we don’t understand, Carl. And as long as that’s true, nothing’s right, nothing’s wrong. That sounds like freedom, I know, but it’s also a very big fucking problem. You can see that, right? Because it won’t last. Because after the fact, after people die, or an election’s derailed, when none of us can do anything about it, we—not “they,” but us, all of us—we’ll say this was wrong, that was right. I don’t know that it makes any sense that we do that, but we do that, and we’ll do it here too. If we’re lucky, you could help us see which is which a little quicker, and we’d have a tiny bit of choice in how we come out. In history.

“Understand, I’m not saying Kames must have done something wrong,” he continued. “It’s always possible there’s nothing there. Mostly there is nothing, right, you’ve already seen that by now. But we’re coming at this from several angles. Ravan will be involved too. Our numbers people have been working. You’re just another arrow in the quiver, one we didn’t even know we had till yesterday. We’re grateful. We need you.”

“And how would you know that yet?”

Penerin rubbed his eyes.

“Let’s just see what I see.”

They listened to the light.

23

1. From the East, from that town, there came a spark the size of a glowworm. Growing ever bigger it came to the center of Kolamba, waxed here to unmeasured size, and burned up everything at once. On that day, in consequence of its splendor, the enemy who had penetrated to Sirivaddhana took flight with the haste of those who are threatened with peril
.

2. The Ruler of men guarded his son, who grew by degrees like another moon
.

Darasa weighed the passages against what he knew. Senaratana, the “Ruler of Men.” Rajasingha, his son, born to Queen Dona Catherina, the Portuguese princess and wife previously to Senaratana’s brother and predecessor on the throne, Vimaladhammasuriya, who was now dead. And the “cruel and brutal”
Parangi
—Portuguese—merchants “puffed up with pride,” who “waxed very strong” in Colombo.

General de Azavedo had seen this glowworm spark in his dreams and scattered his forces in the hours before dawn. The Portuguese scrambled to their forts locked safely in the forests, leaving the great port of Colombo clear. This was in the decades after 1600, in which the Portuguese were still strong in the south of the island, before the Dutch arrived.

The threat of the spark deferred, the king would have made his way to Sirivaddhana, a jagged and unassailable land. He divided the kingdom between three sons, two being his dead brother’s, and the other his own. On three leaves, the names of the three provinces were inscribed: Uva to the east, Matale to the north, and then the Highlands in the middle surrounding Kandy. The boys reached down to the overturned leaves at the base of the mounted relic, which held a molar said to belong to Siddhartha Gautama. To his blood fell the prize, the impregnable Highlands, safest from European advances. Seven years hence, Senaratana died and his true son, soon to be known as Rajasingha, ascended to the throne.

Darasa sat at his desk in fine dawn light in the town of Nillemby, not far from Kandy. He reached for the stylus and drew the nib from the bottom of a shallow black pool of ink. In a broad book of palm leaves, he copied the passages from the Lesser Chronicle, which took account of the years between 1604 and 1635 in a thousand words, on a sheet of palm leaf fifteen inches square and started to annotate it with these thoughts.

The length and complexity of the text determined the size of the sheets. When it was sprawling, like the Chronicle, it would have to be divided across many small sheets, as now. Other times, when it was possible to see the piece as a whole, in one sweep, the giant palm leaf would be left uncut. Once, in commentary on the Jataka tales, part of the Pali Canon, he amassed 547 whole leaves, one for each life of the Buddha described. The stack remained in the attic of Kandy’s main temple, several feet high and hopelessly bound with twine.

The margins, top and bottom, left and right, usually dwarfed the text itself, which he would inscribe in the center of the leaves. As he annotated, he would box paragraphs, sentences, phrases, words—not always nouns and verbs, but conjunctions, definite articles, simple negations, all the way down to the smallest atoms of sense. A light line led from each of these items to the margins, where Darasa would set the relevant comment.

The technique was unique. The other monks simply numbered passages from the text to correspond with their annotations in a separate palm book. But Darasa’s strategy encouraged commentary of much greater length; the sheer size of the margins seemed to call out for detail, otherwise the sheet would appear empty and the labors of the commentator slight. More than this, his approach revealed hidden relations between annotation and text, and between annotation and annotation. A network of sense emerged, the nodes playing off each other. Only on its basis would Darasa compose his finished commentary, in a standard palm book.

For this reason, his rooms appeared less like a scholar’s and more like a draftsman’s. During his working sessions, leaves of various sizes would drape most of the furniture, covering the bed, the chairs, the floor. The eyes of his guests would invariably drift from his own toward these annotations overrunning his quarters.

But the results were difficult to dispute. His work threw a light much brighter than most. There were perhaps only a half dozen monks in the country with minds both as expansive and exacting as his (it was the combination that was rare). His eccentricities—not just his quixotic approach to commentary, but his avidity for maps, seamanship, and foreign theologies, as well as the special interest he took in the Europeans in the kingdom, which some of the conservative monks had once (and perhaps still) found perverse—mostly induced reverence rather than ridicule.

Commentary was only part of his work. Together with twenty other monks of scholarly repute, he was responsible for adding to the historical record of the island. This was done under the eye of Rajasingha, who was not, however, in a position to edit or guide the monks, not openly or explicitly, anyway.

Here too Darasa found a way to apply these same interpretive techniques. Most monks knew the Chronicle well. A few knew it nearly by heart. But none of his contemporaries spent more time annotating it, wondering after its mode of composition, the potentially variable intentions of the chain of authors from Mahanama onward. None searched with quite the same vigor for interstices, elisions, interpolations.

The prevailing thought in the priesthood was that their role was to write the present, not interpret the past or consider the veracity of the Chronicle, which was, after all, composed by
them
, their predecessors in the temple. This was especially so of recent portions, where the language resembled the vernacular and interpretive measures were not required as a matter of course, as it was when proto-Sinhalese was involved in the earlier periods. Those parts of the Chronicle demanded a fusing of horizons, which, depending on how the monk managed it, affected his grasp, and the grasp of any reader of the Chronicle, of even the simplest matters of fact.