by Glen Duncan
“The accent,” she says. “’S great. Anyway sorry, sticking my nose in.”
His concentration goes, reeled back in by the fever. Peripherally he’s aware of her consciousness settled on him. Their little contact demands a phatic exit line but he can’t think of anything. He turns his back and takes two unsteady steps into the blowing rain.
Headlights dazzle him and he stops. A bus pulls up at the shelter. Its doors gasp open and passengers one by one alight with a processional quality that mesmerizes him. Time seems to stand still. The brightly lit bus remains stationary, doors open, engine running. The driver looks down at Augustus, nods, then turns his attention to a newspaper folded against the steering wheel. For a few moments this stasis feels dreamily hellish to Augustus, as if he’s died and been assigned a mild damnation. Then he understands: This is the terminus; the driver goes by the clock.
“You go up near Maddoch’s farm?” Augustus asks.
“Up to Marsh Hill,” the driver says. “You can swim across from there.”
Augustus’s left hand in his pocket feels as if it’s melting. Swim? What the fuck? Then he gets it: a joke; the rain. He knows where Marsh Hill is. From there a mile on foot back to the croft. This mile fever-filled with mischievous presences. He sees himself, clothes sodden, flailing at shadows. So be it. He has his stick. He glances at the girl, who’s made no move toward the bus, finds her intent upon the rolling of a cigarette, which he reads as a little self-consolation for their abortive exchange. In the back of his mind, habit’s been intuiting her history: too full of life, an indiscriminate force that should have been trained into athletics or math or the cello instead left to drive her into wrong adventures. Consciousness without structure, energy without direction. She’s many times found herself sitting amid wreckage trying to understand how such good impulses and generous hungers bring down such catastrophe. Lonely, he thinks; still carrying the ruby of her genuine self no one wants—then feels lonely himself since such thinking’s only habit and leads nowhere.
She looks up with a smile, which he after a moment of dizziness returns. It’s obvious she’s not getting on this bus, or any other bus. He plants his stick on the step, grabs the handrail and hauls himself onboard.
You hold out for a length of time so disinformation will feel like a genuine yield. That you can hold out for a length of time is the central humorless assumption. Augustus doesn’t know how long he’s been holding out, or, with certainty, that he’s been holding out. Time’s been showing a schizophrenic side, rushing, stretching, pooling, freezing, doing the opposite of whatever he wants. He’s kept trying to make out the hands on Harper’s wristwatch (the guards have removed theirs and left them on the table) but it’s no use. In any case what good would it do? If the watch said ten o’clock he wouldn’t know if it was night on the first day or morning on the third.
“I don’t think you’ve been honest with me,” Harper says, easing himself onto his haunches and bobbing there for a moment until one of his knees ticks. “You’ve got the detachment method down.” The guards have been nodded back to their corner. One of them mops his face with a pale blue hanky so large it’s hard to believe it fitted in his pocket. The other guard whispers something Augustus is convinced is a joke about the size of the hanky and which evokes for him a vision of the man at home with his wife and noisy indulged young sons, a ceiling fan above the dining table, bowls of spicy stew, large rosemary-flecked breads, a wall calendar, a TV with satellite channels. This is the betrayal: you want them to be other, monstrous, in forfeiture of love and humor, but commonality persists. The people who do this are people. Which truth is like a spirit of boredom in the room. Harper straightens up. “You make yourself the object of your own study,” he says. “As with meditation employ value-neutral awareness: now I’m breathing in, now I’m breathing out, now here’s distraction—an ad jingle, a sexual image—now a pain in my left side, now the resonance of pain, now pain subsiding, now fear of more pain etc., keeping all the while separate from yourself.”
Augustus remains silent only because it’s all he can do to breathe. He’s hanging from the ceiling hook, shackled ankles dangling. His wrists are on fire. A film of wet heat clings to his face. The waistband of his trousers has slipped down to expose his pelvis and the sensitive zone above his pubes Selina used to deliberately dawdle over. That they haven’t touched him there yet makes the area a screaming invitation. The predictability of his future adds to the room’s bulk of warmth. He imagines a camera zooming out from him suspended here—room, building, desert, city, country, world—how quickly the details of his situation would get lost. Millions of television news reports: political reshuffles; sports results; quirky or heartwarming codas; the weather. Not long ago an item about a woman who prayed nightly to David Beckham.
“But if you know the technique you know its limitations,” Harper says. “Generally effective while the subject knows the injury’s recuperable.”
Then why bother with the recuperable injury phase at all? As if telepathically tuned Harper says: “On the other hand escalation teaches nuance, and the longer this goes on the more important nuance gets. I need to be able to read you properly.”
The information Harper wants isn’t—Harper believes—time-sensitive. He wants names, places, the infrastructure, the how. There’s no hurry. Augustus has been fighting this thought since they brought him in but now without warning his resistance goes, a tiny violence like a loose tooth tweaked free. When he closes his eyes his body knows what a drop into darkness sleep would be. Lying with Inés after sex he’d felt himself drifting off, it was so quiet and still; resisted because her waking him would have brought transaction back. If Harper lets him fall asleep now (he pictures his head’s galaxies and nebulae going out as if their plugs are being pulled) he’ll never wake up again.
“Tell me something,” Harper says. “Have you ever been in love?”
Augustus opens his eyes. Harper smiles and says, “Academic interest only. Here, rest a minute.” He slides the chair back under Augustus’s feet so he can stand and take the strain out of his arms. The blood in his shoulders begins unpacking itself, draining joy into him. Harper sits down, puts his hands in his pockets, stretches his legs. Come on, seriously, if you talk I’ll listen. Augustus doesn’t doubt it. This is the other thought he’s been avoiding, that Harper wants more than just the information, that his life’s gone a certain way and he can’t resist the opportunity to test the choices he’s made. The man knows himself but rarely gets the chance to take a sounding. By now Augustus knows he’s one such chance. Knows too that if he wants this over as quickly as possible he should keep his mouth shut or tell Harper to go fuck himself. He sees the sort of courage that would take, the cleanliness of it, could laugh at how filthy he is with fear.
“When I was young,” Augustus says.
“White girl.”
“You know all about it already.”
“You’re black, you grow up with a white girl myth. You’re too smart and handsome not to have got one. How old were you when you met her?”
“Nineteen. Same as her.”
“Was she beautiful?”
“Yes.”
“And you were full of what, brilliant shame?”
Augustus hears the question but is detained by the previous one. That rat-faced little bitch, his mother had called Selina once, suddenly revealing the jewel of jealousy having until then inveigled her into wry sorority in the matter of their shared burden, namely him, His Smartass Highness Who Always Had To Be Right. Rat-faced showed him for the first time it was partly the hint of meanness in Selina’s sharp nose and chin that drove him crazy. As a little girl she’d tripped running with a glass jar of pennies and nickels. The accident left her with a scar like a sickle under her bottom lip. Your sexy scar, he said, which annoyed her at first because she assumed he was performing the standard romantic inversion, force-loving the bit of her he hated. Then she saw the cruel white woman was part of his fantasy and s
ubsided, enriched. Augustus remembers going to bed with her that first time. She shared a sixth-floor walk-up in the East Village with Vera, a bony white girl with small face and a mass of dark hair like a Cossack’s fur hat who wrote songs and worked at the ACLU and chain-smoked Virginia Slims. The apartment, on Eleventh Street between Second and Third, was a mess. Television said nice white girls were clean and tidy but the chaos and dirt here looked feral. Certainly both girls hated their parents but what might have started as juvenile rebellion had revealed innate laziness. Augustus, stunned, wondered if they were going to do it standing up, since there was no visible room to lie down, until Selina began slinging things off what turned out to be her bed, a mattress on the floor under the window. She went to the record player—then as if she’d caught his thought that this was too big for musical accompaniment changed her mind. The Harry’s consensus was you fucked without batting an eyelid but there was no fooling themselves: they were full of catastrophic potential. The months of flirting and fencing suddenly fell away, left them a nude insistent reality. In reverential silence they went to the bed. For a long time kissing was a way of avoiding looking at each other since their eyes when they did gleamed with fear. Augustus was so preoccupied by the fact of having got her that he found himself trying to pretend she was someone else so he could get hard. For the first few minutes both of them faked hunger out of terror that their instincts had been wrong. It was nearly a disaster. But between them they got her blouse buttons open and the exposure of her breasts stilled him for a moment. He lifted himself to look at them, then at her. For a second or two he thought she was going to cover herself or roll away. But she calmed and looked back at him with something like amoral curiosity, and that was that. There was no going back. Once he was inside her it was a terrible effort to slow himself down, and every time he did there was her stare of collusion.
“You were nineteen,” Harper says. “So we’re talking Sixty…what? Seven?”
The arithmetic’s beyond Augustus. His face prickles, his feet are bags of blood. “Sixty-seven,” he says. “Yeah.”
“Now they’re saying the sixties only happened in Haight-Ash-bury and the King’s Road. The rest’s just wishful revisionism.”
Harper closes his eyes for a moment and Augustus risks a glance at the guards. They’re actually playing cards with the porn deck, which presumably requires a weird concentration. He gets his eyes back on Harper just in time. Don’t suggest these interludes are wasted. “Well there was a lot going on in New York,” he says.
“The Vietnam party and the miracle of contraception. Must have been something to be able to fuck strangers without wondering if you were signing your own death warrant. Don’t you think it’s laughable there’s only been one window in history from the ’thirties to the ’eighties when sex wasn’t a potentially lethal activity? Syphilis at one end and AIDS at the other and between them fifty golden years of trouble-free fucking. You were lucky.”
Selina dug out a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from somewhere and rolled them a joint. It was March, Manhattan’s nothing season, everyone reluctant to uncurl from winter’s searing. While they lay together talking about the world the apartment’s radiators hissed and tonked. Augustus, trying and failing to hold the feeling of cunning conquest, was in shock. For the first time since therefore Socrates is mortal a new reality raised itself into view and he realized it had been embedded all along, waiting for him to be ready to see it so it could shiver free. You saw the word love all over the place then suddenly got your license for it. A delicious panic filled him. He daren’t wonder if it filled her too. Maybe it did: there was something displaced about their conversation now—the latest bombing campaign; the absurdity of Ronald Reagan becoming governor of California; Jack Ruby’s death and the reawoken migraine of the Kennedy assassination—this was their métier but the new reality (once the word love was in there was no getting it out) was a pulse of mockery behind it all. They’d done this thing—after weeks of mutual stalking and the building expectation of the Harry’s clique—fucked each other, and what emerged from it shrank everything else. Ludicrous that a whole world could be washed away like that, but here it was, a new heaven and a new earth. He imagined the ten-thousand-strong rally crowd standing in stunned silence having watched the two of them at it on the mattress. You go to bed together and discover disloyalty to everything else. Except—he caught himself—hers to her brother. He did it to spite me. No doubt she’d done this to spite him in return. Her eyes had had plenty going on. She’d wrapped her legs round him and pushed her breasts up for his mouth but he knew she was moving dreamily between motives. Even without the shadowy presence of Michael there was the giant fact of her father and fucking Northrop Aircraft. Earlier, when Augustus had walked her to her door and she’d slipped her hand into his and looked at him in the way that meant yes she’d said: I should warn you, I’m trouble. So am I, he’d said, the kind of trouble that eats trouble like you for breakfast.
“It was a good time,” Augustus says, seemingly involuntarily since the sound of his own voice surprises him. “We thought we were shining.”
“But you’re not using it now. The memory of love.”
Augustus coughs up something ironish and pulpy, retains it on his tongue for the moment it takes Harper to say with a nod he can get rid of it, then turns his head and spits it into the corner.
“Wouldn’t be any point,” Augustus says. “You need something that hasn’t already failed.” Telling this lie feels sacramental, a small victory. In Barcelona just before the bombing Selina had said: Everything’s better now. Coffee tastes better. Breathing feels better. Talking, waking up, watching a movie. Peeing feels better. Her body had kept its shape though naturally not its tension. That first hot afternoon she’d been nervous, closed the hotel room’s leaden drapes. Three decades take their toll on a gal, she’d said. You’d better prepare yourself. They’d stood face to face. He’d opened her robe and slowly covered her with kisses. He wanted to get down on his knees and thank the Lord. In fact he got down on his knees and tenderly kissed her cunt. On the morning of their second day, after they’d made love and were lying together she’d said: Are we really to be given this, so late in the day? And in a state of complete muscular and skeletal peace he’d smiled and said: Yes, we are. God’s got a romantic streak after all. She slid her leg over his, nuzzled his chest, pinched the soft flesh under his ribs (as if every moment required its own proof that yes, here they were, after all these years together again) and said, If He’s responsible for this I might consider giving the old bastard a second chance. How do you feel about ordering up a couple of Long Island Iced Teas, by the way?
“This is the crux,” Harper says. “The failure of the scripts. Love, justice, equality, salvation. There’s a script here and now failing, right? Several scripts. The conversion script. The epiphany script. The reversal script, in which by interrogating you I end up interrogating myself.”
“I was hoping for the rescue script,” Augustus slurs—and after a pause Harper chuckles, their eyes meet, the connection’s sweet, demands acknowledgment.
“The humanist script says humor trumps everything,” Harper says. “You go with that?”
Augustus has acute pins and needles down his left side. The body persists in such things regardless, which consistency is the real horror, not Sartre’s Nature-gone-crazy and people’s tongues turning into centipedes. “No,” he says. “We’re past fairy stories.”
“Hollywood’s pushed us past them, ironically. On-screen psychopaths now are Wildean wits, charismatic wisecrackers, above all empathic: They get it. We’re over the delusion that if only these people could share a joke with us they’d be incapable of doing what they do. Now it seems incredible we held on to that delusion so long.”
Laughter was absent from the halaqah meetings in Barcelona. Jokes were tacitly taboo. The cell’s culture was one of fierce po-facedness and cocked anger. In the first weeks and months it wasn’t a problem for Augustus, s
ince in the wake of the bombing he’d lost his ability to laugh anyway. But as time passed the capacity for seeing the funny side began to reassert itself. There were moments of terrible temptation, rich ironies and juicy puns the act of resistance made doubly delicious. Several times he had to pretend visits to the bathroom so he could sit with his shirt stuffed into his mouth to smother the sound of his laughter. Eventually he understood. Humor destroyed literalism. The halaqah’s silent proscription made perfect sense.
“Humor’s the gap between what we are and what we’d like to be,” Augustus says. “Same gap conscience operates in.”
Nodding, Harper gets to his feet, paces away, reaches up and squeezes his left trapezoid with his right hand. It’s not the first of these tension-easing gestures and in spite of himself Augustus grasps at the theory of imperfectly suppressed compassion surfacing in another form, like referred pain.
Presumably at a signal from Harper the guards put down their cards and get to their feet. Everything goes from Augustus except the knowledge that he won’t be able to stand any more. He realizes he should have spent the interlude readying disinformation. Fear comes up so fast from soles through knees belly chest and there it is filling the back of your throat and the space behind your brain so you can’t talk, no room for anything.
At Marsh Hill Augustus gets off the bus into the night’s soft tumult. He’s sorry to see the vehicle pull away. In the few minutes from Marle its bright interior befriended him with local ads and the muted conversation of the three lady passengers at the back. Trundling through the dark it had had the feel of a last unit of civilization. He’d sat sweating and shivering and being in ten thousand spider bites eaten by the fever but also knowing the bliss of having his fate in the driver’s hands. A great nobility attached to drivers if you were in a bad way. Declining celebrities presumably fell for theirs, the silent pilot, the dependable silhouette. Take me home, oh please just take me home.