Rocky Waves (Jag)

They always seemed uncomfortable. When Jag chose to personally intervene—which he really tried to avoid—the council members always seemed uncomfortable. He kept himself less professionally than his brother had. He was sure it was because he never really wanted to wear a shirt—he had to keep his tan even, he told himself—and the perfume of salt and smoke that clung to him like a hand-stamp ticket from the night before. It was unprofessional. Professionalism didn’t build bridges. It didn’t invert test tubes or excise cancer or increase the quality of life, either. Professionalism didn’t do much of anything, he supposed, so he wouldn’t have much of it. People liked it. It made them feel important and the more they felt important the faster the cogs of progress ticked forward. Jag knew that order required people more important—more professional—than the general rank and file. Jag had seen what scientists did when each one was equal to another. On the forefront of advancement, consensus was a myth. They bickered about quality of results and misinterpretations from dusk to dawn and then all the way around again and nothing would get done. He understood why Aquavia had set itself up the way it had and he knew the reasons why the Council was necessary—

But he still wasn’t putting on a damn shirt for them.

The day had been excruciatingly long and painful and he was sober for too much of it. They requested his guidance ethically—Jag almost split his ribs laughing about that—about a couple of the programs that had come under fire from some splinter group. Something about growing faux-humans to be used as organ donors. Until they could find a better, more efficient way of doing things, he told them, don’t worry about it. Progress comes at costs. Some of them were disheartened, others were relieved. He had no clue how Dym would have treated the situation. He was always better at foresight than Jag was, or maybe he was just too timid to take chances sometimes. So through meetings and meetings and general oversight on the affairs of the country, Jag managed to claw his way out of it and into the gentle rocking of a hammock in the breeze, situated as a checkpoint between a pair of palm trees on the beach of his stationary domain. The sun was sliding its way past the horizon and it mutated the blue sky into a bruised pastiche of red and orange and purple. He held a cigarette between his forefinger and his middle finger and inhaled deeply, causing the end to flare like a younger brother to the descending sun. It quickly shrunk to a stub and Jag dropped it onto the sand and the cigarette turned into salt water and filtered through the sand. He stopped and listened to the rustling of the leaves around him. He inhaled deeply only on the air and the salt felt good as it went through his nose and into his lungs, and then he reached down and scooped a fistful of sand into his hand and let it sift through his fingertips. It was the panacea for a day’s effort.

Water condensed from the air around him and it molded itself into the gross-outline of an acoustic guitar before becoming a proper acoustic guitar. Jag picked at each string and then began adjusting the tautness of each until they were tuned. Then, his hands moved up and down slowly, treating each string delicately and extending the chords as far as he could until each piece of the chord harmonized with the memory of the last. It started softly but Jag began to play faster and harder as he progressed to a new song and a new riff that built to no particular conclusion, only his satisfaction. He played to the time kept by the hammock’s sway, and it all just felt good.