Square Wave by Mark de Silva

troubled Larent, more than the destruction itself almost. Perhaps he could be so playful, so detached, because it wasn’t his country being sundered. He could always jet back to Japan, or Monaco, for that matter.
    At Deerfield he’d been a parachute kid. But a gifted one, Renna had said. She’d re-introduced Moto to him just days ago as a possible bandmate. He’d been in her class, one behind Larent, and though, according to her, the two musicians had met before, neither could remember anything of it.
    Moto’s money, the leisure it brought, had freed up his gift for unprofitable things like experimental music. (From the little Larent had heard from him, earlier in the afternoon, he had to agree, Moto had talent, though he was unsure how or if it connected up with his own.) A few years after finishing at Deerfield, Moto went back to Japan with the noise-rock band he’d formed across the country, in San Francisco. They’d broken up for no good reason, as far as he was concerned, and he’d only just returned to the States, to that artfully spare loft—paid for, Larent assumed, in yen. He had no reason to begrudge him, though. Larent’s family’s money had done much to free his own creative impulses. There just wasn’t quite as much of it, none to carry him now.
    Larent regarded the black man, who along with Moto was grinning more freely. Really it wasn’t his country either. He could never be free here. History, the sugar trade, wouldn’t let go of him. And unlike the drummer, there wasn’t much chance of his escaping. This, Larent thought, might have darkened the man’s amusement with this chaos that was rolling in waves around them— all of them now, not just his kind, and for months.
    The black man pulled his sleeve back down and gripped his face. He started tapping his pockets with his other hand, searching. The screens emptied. After a long moment they were reanimated not by a ruined courtyard but a razor blade, as tall as a man, briskly circling the plaza’s digital perimeter. The blade shimmered as it flew through the deep black nonspace of the screens and glided into place alongside several other blades in a cartridge. A razor flying in the opposing direction met the cartridge, fastened to it, and fell into the palm of a waiting hand the width of three men.
    Just in front of this race-indeterminate palm, the black man was lost in concentration, on a point inches from his nose. He flicked his thumb along the strike strip of a white book, dragging the crumbling pink match head across it. Still attached to the book, but with its cardboard stem bent around to reach the strip, the head combusted as his thumb withdrew into the space beyond the book. The stem held the flame as he maneuvered it to his unwavering point of focus, the tip of a short filterless cigarette.
    The digital hand behind him and the razor in its palm faded. The first traces of the razor maker’s name gathered in their place. But a thousand footfalls were already echoing through the plaza. The crowd had lost interest, had perhaps never had any, having probably seen the ad many times, on many screens—just like what had come before it, the billowing smoke, the dust of another detonation.
    Larent and Moto pushed through the crowd toward the edge of the courtyard. The man, smoke swaddling his head, lurched toward them before they could make much headway. A pocket of space enveloped him, but it moved with him owing to the fire jutting from his mouth.
    “I bet I can help you,” he said.
    “I’m fine, I think,” Moto said.
    “Why?” Larent asked the man. “Why would you think that?” Larent didn’t know quite why he’d asked the question, though the man offered a creditable answer.
    “Because.” He held out a crumpled soft-pack of Camels toward him. “Because can’t anyone?” The pocket around the man hardened in place, penning him in, just as the two of them drifted away on a current of foot traffic toward the shops beyond the