Square Wave Page 7

  Idle police cars, a fleet of them, rendered down to a veil of sheltering smoke, itself lost in the broader black of night. It took the large-bore beam of a scrambling chopper, gyrating above, the beam and the chopper both, to expose the shroud. A few minutes pass and a gas tank yields to the simmering orange and blue of the lot. White flames dilate twenty feet, spraying metal and glass, plastic and leather, puncturing another tank and setting off another round.

  That was the first crack. June of 2027. Stagg had seen it presented with rare pomp, if it could be called that, at a friend’s parent’s place, a duplex downtown. This was in the weeks after Easter term. He was just off a flight from Heathrow, back in Halsley, to work on the closing chapter of his doctoral dissertation, which was not in imperial history but analytic philosophy. There’d been a tie he had yet to find, and he thought it might lie at some distance from the library’s stacks.

  That night, though, there would be no writing or reading, no rewriting or rereading, no reflexive mulling, no deleting and restoring verbatim from memory alone. Instead there was Hour of the Wolf. He was told, for this director, that scale was the essence of the thing, his somnolent figures defined in light-eating blacks and silvered whites.

  But before they could get the film onto the pearlescent vinyl sheet the very same shade of white as the living-room wall from which it hung, cable news and its smoking lot of police cars came blaring through the digital projector. In the small hours, the two of them would make their way back to the film, to Johan’s chafing spirit, to his arched fingers pinned against the temples. But by then one magnitude had displaced another. Plates were shifting. Bergman could make no impression.

  In the months to come a pair of abortion clinics, one attached to the city’s most distinguished university, the other to a Jewish hospital, were abolished by floods, ceiling-high and sewage-laced—the reported cause, exploded mains. A tax court, and across town, an employment office and several check cashers, were razed in sequence. Then it was the churches and mosques, collapsed in alternation, transubstantiated, burned down into shells soon boarded up, some of them metamorphosing along the way into shooting galleries and heroin dens. Simple backpack devices sufficed to cripple the subways and buses. But through all of this, no deaths, just paralysis, erasure, a neutron bomb in a mirror.

  Arrests were made, but mostly at the lower levels: the ones who dispatched the devices, lit the fires, sprung the waters. This slowed nothing. Frequently it was impossible to tell whom any of them served.

  These negations and nullities wound their way through the city, across its bridges, penetrating its outer districts, laying ellipses everywhere, relieving Halsley of an analog fullness, or anyway disenchanting people of the notion, and of the very idea that the state was any longer in a position to make guarantees.

  Strangely, there were no claimings, only denials. They grew fiercer as accusations sharpened and rote as they diffused. Motives, originally few and imputed confidently (not to say correctly), metastasized, every effect guaranteed by several causes. A building saved from one attack—many were foiled along the way—would soon fall to another, often bearing the trace of difference, the activity of a rival body.

  The government only added their own scars to the city, exploding hives of alleged factionalist activity, sometimes preemptively and on little grounds.

  A half-dozen interests stood to gain from the laming of every building, the stilling of activity within, whether libertarians, religious fundamentalists, direct democrats, socialists, anti-egalitarians—even some anarchists who felt they’d found their moment, with a faltering central authority. (There was also the mention, among some, of democratic dictatorship and what it might mean.)

  But the manner of gain, the precise aim, the strategic or cathartic value, grew less obvious by the month, its significance emerging only against a backdrop, itself perpetually expanding, of hundreds of crisscrossing antecedents and an ever-growing list of factions.

  With each disembowelment, government security thickened, necessarily so, and without much complaint from the citizenry: the arbitrary checks and searches, the shows of force, the rapid and continuous diffusion of officers and agents, plainclothes and otherwise, the reserves on permanent domestic deployment. A crosstown bus trip, the purchase of a phone, the filling of a theater, all of these proceeded at half or quarter speed. The city clotted, and as it did, the day, unit of life, contracted.

  Now, with elections approaching, the disruptions were peaking.

  ■■■

  The expansion of security, and the gradual mutation of the National Security Administration and the Federal Bureau of Investigation into a clutch of allied and semi-autonomous intelligence agencies, was the bit of luck Stagg needed, the stopgap income between academe and the think tanks that editorial work couldn’t provide, not without exacting a toll anyway, socially, intellectually. For the Second Watch, his own division with this reorganization, there were the eight weeks of training to deal with: target-work with the G17, techniques of spontaneous interrogation and dissemblance, a few self-defense maneuvers (chokes, grips) he was sure he would never actually find the idealized conditions, or the calm, to use. And with that, he was paid to do little besides wander and watch. His mind was mostly his, to dispose with as he liked, which generally meant mind-writing, as he liked to think of it.

  Generations ago, wasn’t it Matthiessen, Stagg thought, who’d written his first book, and even helped found a once-significant literary journal, a bit like this? That was on the foreign side of the intelligence community, though, the CIA, which itself had splintered. Now it was Stagg who was searching for a book, and something like a new historiography, even a new identity, but right here at home.

  The Second Watch assigned and continually modified three or four basic routes for each agent, to prevent detection, but also, by disturbing the monotony, to re-sharpen the senses. No more than four, though. Too much familiarity was blinding, but so was too little, especially in picking up minute deviations from one night to the next. Most days his walks were the mildest permutations of each other, a story written over and over, intercalated with a few novel clauses here and there.

  Still, he was more valuable to them than a camera eye, which anyway they had stationed at most segments along his routes. He could catch the atmosphere of an exchange, the charge carried by a tone of voice, the way the same stretch of words might be variously inflected on seven occasions, five innocuous, one obscure, one toxic.

  The watches’ logs were processed a level up, by veteran staff who sifted them for useful patterns. But the ground-level reports were the critical inputs to this process, which was in effect a kind of echolocation.

  Penerin valued the capacity to discriminate in these, his lowliest of charges, quasi-agents at best. It was not strictly a job requirement; the country’s needs now were too great to make it one. A degree from the elite colleges, though, had become a common point of entry, in a way it hadn’t been in the days when domestic intelligence was considered child’s play next to the foreign side. Now that it was, by anyone’s reckoning, at least as complex, pedigree helped, even if, as for many, there were only gentleman’s Cs to speak of.

  Still, some watches managed to distinguish themselves. Their reports came to be relied on, sometimes as much as the experienced investigators on staff, though they saw no more pay. They would be shunted toward paths thought information-rich, and also—the qualities frequently coincided—to places where the signal-to-noise ratio was low, and an uncommonly fine capacity for discrimination, whether learned or innate, was a boon. It helped no one to raise red flags everywhere. It was about noting the shifts of consequence. In this respect Penerin had begun to trust Stagg, his sense of significance.

  Stagg would later learn that his and Ravan’s reports, in particular, had been critical in mapping the whore beater’s activities. (Despite his insouciance, Ravan had the kind of consciousness that registered much.) Stagg’s discovery of Jen Best under the overpass ha
d not been simple chance then. Penerin had had his suspicions, though he kept them to himself, about the possibilities of political meanings attaching to the assaults, and had been funneling Stagg toward a hypothesized perpetrator. The route that took Stagg under the bridge had been suggested by information coming in from him and the other watches. Penerin was continually recalibrating Stagg’s route, of course. He just hadn’t told Stagg that this man was already one of its targets.

  That he’d come across Jen, and Ravan had come across two other girls in even unlikelier places—just off from a heavily trafficked pan-Asian restaurant, up against transparent garbage bags of rancid bok choy; and on a dank emergency staircase in a subway station, next to faltering industrial-scale elevators—also meant that between them they had likely come face to face with the man, or men, though they believed he was one and not many.

  Probably Stagg had seen him several times, among the regulars along his route, people who recognized him as much as the reverse, though he hoped, of course, they didn’t recognize him qua watch. A subset of these he’d even befriended in limited ways, leaching data of unknown quality. Some of these were surely other watches, the sensoria of other agencies whose domains overlapped, or even tiers of the same groups, where jurisdictions were often structured concentrically. Responsibilities intersected.

  Somewhere within the twin penumbras, the shifting loci formed by Stagg’s and Ravan’s movements, was the man (or woman, though the history of violent crime all but ruled this out). Or if it was not the man himself, then something that shadowed him.

  But it was always possible, and Stagg would frequently think about this, that all their calculations were for naught, and it was only something like dark, useless chance that brought them upon those beaten women, giving them the sense, and only the sense, that they were closing a distance.

  7

  A churning violet cylinder of smoke, a thousand feet tall and growing with no compromise to its proportions, rose off forty smoldering broadleaf acres on a windless morning on the Indian plateaus. The second millennium had seventy days left to it.

  The younger son, twelve, the father, fifty, and a lineup of atmospheric researchers, military officers, and statesmen all waited near a temporary station cluttered with meteorological devices. A heavy crackling, the cavernous thud of collapsing trees, and most of all the rumble of rushing smoke—it filled their ears.

  The sky was dawning an uninterrupted cobalt, cloudless. The dew point was thought adequate, the upper atmosphere appropriately turbid, to stoke this enormous immaterial engine, one whose operation, it was hoped, would induce a torrent.

  Deep in the Orissan jungle, every ten miles, for forty miles, another cylinder fired and another group clustered a mile from its base. It was the father, though, Menar Peshwa, deputy head of the country’s military weather bureau, and Indian representative to the World Weather Watch, who led.

  The hard edges of the towers gave way. The smoke dispersed laterally at the tops, where the atmosphere turned violent, merging into what looked like gray nimbostratus underlain by scuds. This, as the sky was losing its green and going a truer blue in the half-light of a sun cresting the horizon. The jungle, a thicket of shrubs, airy bushes, lanky trees, all brown where they were not a searing orange, had been scanted by the monsoons, as had, more important, the rice paddies woven through the base of the mountain range, the Eastern Ghats.

  Within the station, Menar studied the atmospheric data coming in from the probe, the small blimp they had sent up five thousand feet. The advanced metrics rolled across the screen, forming patterns whose significance he could read off the matrix like a map. The assistants, the sergeants, and the other officers all watched the data percolate through the display, but they could apprehend only elements of it. For a synthetic interpretation, a final diagnosis, they turned to Menar.

  Intimates could sometimes see the answer in his face before Menar could turn it into words. This time he was blank. He rose from the long metal desk and strode between the men out of the station. “The readings are fine,” Menar said, the men gathering behind him. But on the fringe of the horizon they saw something unwelcome: a thick sheet of nimbus headed in. Menar disappeared into the station. On the radio he pressed the Bhubaneswar weather monitors for news. A voice explained that the fast-moving storm had unexpectedly kept much of its force as it made landfall. It had brought significant rains to the paddies among the Ghats—that was the good it had done—but it was now on its way, at great speed, to the plateau. In ones and twos the men trickled back into the station. Now Menar wore the news on his face. Only his boy, Ravan, remained outside, watching the convergence of clouds, natural and artificial.

  The smoke had risen to seven thousand feet and now descended, as hoped, to three thousand, as nimbostratus clouds about to storm normally would. But the men stood at the monitors, indoors, and watched the incoming monsoon explode the experiment. A fine drizzle came down at first, then, in minutes, heavy rains. But the two clouds had by now become one, and the precise origin of the water became unknowable. Menar came outside again and called the boy’s name. Ravan looked back, drenched. Nothing more was said as he followed his father inside. At the cost of one hundred and sixty acres of scorched forest, the storm engine would have to remain hypothetical.

  There were, and would be, many occasions of this sort. Like the time, in 2010, in Andhra, south of Orissa, that they covered a hundred acres of fallow fields in carbon black, and an adjoining area of the same size in chalk, hoping to promote thermal updrafts. For Ravan, who was now finished with university, art was overtaking science. So he couldn’t help but see the project under two aspects, as the atmospheric experiment his father intended, and as the Earthwork triptych, or else the field painting, unwittingly created. From the mountains running down to Andhra, Ravan and his older brother, who was also their father’s chief assistant and namesake, looked down onto the fields: an immense black against an immense white against an immense blue (the Bay of Bengal).

  Menar had decided the project was worth a try. It was much less expensive than the others, and it destroyed nothing. The fields were already empty, and the carbon black might even rejuvenate the soil. The Babylonians, he told his boys, would burn their old fields to stimulate new growth, and rain too, for the next year’s crop. These ancients were, to the father, progenitors of a thermal view of storms.

  He hoped the pattern of heat absorption and reflectivity produced by the dusted fields might stimulate ocean winds and condense water into low-lying marine clouds. Rain did come, and the blackened fields received a substantial share. But so did the white fields. Moreover the effects showed themselves only over weeks, making it hard to trace the causality. It may have been that the black was responsible for bringing rain to both, given that a storm’s trajectory couldn’t be precisely controlled. Or it could have been, as the skeptics at the weather bureaus at home and abroad thought, that the matter was, once again, simple coincidence.

  There was the time, too, they set the sea on fire. This was even before they torched the forests of Orissa. They cleared a mile of beach, floated fire-retardant buoys, and applied refined oil to the ocean’s surface with six boats that covered the field in the manner of lawn mowers tending a soccer pitch, strip by strip.

  At his request, Ravan ignited the slick. Aiming slightly upward, the boy, just ten, pulled the flare gun’s heavy trigger with three fingers. The stick shot out of the broad barrel of the pistol and ignited within yards, trailing red sparks before exploding in a ball the same color, shimmering from then on as it cut a path through the air toward the center of the slick.

  As the flare struck the ocean, the smaller flare acted as the spark to a vastly larger one. Because of the slick’s expanse, the flaring proceeded as if in slow motion, the flames traveling methodically in all directions from the center. The breeze riffled the waters in the bay. It gave the flames a topography. Burning waves rolled in toward the shore, while the wind sent smaller, more fragmented waves l
aterally, intercepting the others. The path of the fire itself was unaffected. The flames rose over all of it, and for a moment, under the midday sun, a translucent, rolling red overlay the aquamarine of shallow bay water, just before smoke, charcoal black, came up off the tops of the flames, cloaking the red and blue beneath.

  They kept the burn alive by piping fuel in just beneath the surface of the water, from tanker trucks stationed on the compacted sands of the beach. Within hours, stratocumulus formed and returned a steady drizzle to the sea. The clouds drifted inland on air currents aided by the flames, bringing rain to the rice fields, as hoped. A layer of larger cumulonimbus began to deliver a true storm.

  They regarded the trial as promising, an advance over the last time they tried out the idea, in a slightly different form, inland, just a few months prior. A pool of oil, Olympic-size in width and length, but just a foot deep, had been set alight, sending a thick sheet of black smoke drifting into the lower atmosphere. No correlation with rain emerged. The humidity might have been inadequate. The sight of the flaming pools would stay with Ravan, though. They reminded him of the burning oil wells of Iraq, from the second American war there, though the flames had less clear purpose then. Still, as he drifted away from science, into art, music, the two, war and weather modification, would merge for him like clouds.

  In the sea trial, the timing between the burn and the storm seemed better than luck could provide for. But consistent replication eluded them. Though the burning slicks appeared to increase the odds of rain, they couldn’t be depended on to produce them. Unaccounted variables remained.

  There was the environmental cost to consider too, the sheer amount of fuel necessary, at best, merely to increase the odds of rain; the oil invariably seeping beyond the buoys out to sea; and the smoke itself, which was possibly an aid to rain but certainly a pollutant.

  Storm generation ex nihilo proved hit or miss. But Menar’s results were good enough for his governmental sponsors. They pledged continued support of his experiments with weather, including newly begun interventions in existing clouds. There were other incentives in play, after all, beyond bringing water to rice fields during drought: military ones that remained hazy, still notional. There was also the perennial problem of flooding in the north of India, which meant there was as much to be gained from destroying storms as there was from creating them. It was thought the processes involved must be related. So Menar’s program grew.