by Glen Duncan
What is it?
Jack came down the steps and put his hands on her arms. He was a tall man and in the black overcoat looked monumental. His shirt cuffs were exactly the white of the snow. Selina had her fists clenched against her chest. She laughed, once, then shook her head, no, then said: No. She tried to get out of his grip but he pulled her close to him. She held her head away from him, writhed in precisely the way she would have when she was a little girl. She stopped and looked at him and there was his implacable face, at which point Augustus knew her father had come to tell her Michael was dead.
It’s the second week of December and Calansay’s under heavy snow. Trees are intricate with it. The stream’s frozen. Indoors Augustus and Morwenna feel the new weight on the roof. The morning after the first fall they couldn’t get out either door. She had to climb through the window in his boots and scrape away at the drift with anything she could find. Later in the afternoon Maddoch sent the boy over with a shovel.
Augustus’s leg wounds are healing. Marle’s GP, Goyle, came out to see to them a week ago, apparently at the connivance of the Maddochs. Antibiotic injection, sutures, fresh dressings, drugs. This might sound like a stupid question but did you want to have these amputated? Augustus had submitted, head hot and confused. There’d been a danger of collapse into something when he felt the care in Goyle’s hands but it passed. We’ll send you a practice registration form, the doctor said. If you’ve not had that hip X-rayed I can arrange for it. Augustus had observed Goyle noting conditions in the croft. Plenty of fluids and stay off the booze. You’ve got to keep the dressing dry. Flannel wash or a plastic bag round it. Health visitor’ll come out to look at it in a couple of days. Meantime no jitterbugging. Morwenna had leaned against the chimney breast and watched everything.
A routine’s established itself. Augustus wakes early, washes, dresses (or rather adds to the clothes he’s slept in) and steps over her to light the fire. In the first few days she’d wake with a start, shocked, face pouchy, hair full of static, and sit up in the bivvy bag, blinking, a look of complete bewilderment that sometimes took an hour to fade. But by the end of the first week her animal self had adapted: now at the sound of Augustus stirring she struggles awake, moves her legs so he can get to the fire, then falls asleep again. He makes instant coffee, rolls a smoke, takes his stick and goes outside to look at the weather. She wakes up much later, has trouble summoning the will to leave her plastic cocoon and the fire’s warmth, to concede it’s another day. If they’re low on supplies he gives her money and she goes into Marle. Otherwise she stays by the fire with Hello! and OK! and Cosmopolitan and Elle. He’s made her buy clothes against the cold, a fleece, jeans, a woolen hat, a pair of hiking boots. Cash. (Marle inferred the obvious transactional relationship but Maddoch—bizarrely as if his own honor was at stake—put the idea down. ’S’no like that. Lassie’s had a tough time of it an Mr. Rose is helping her out. There’s nothin like that goin on. ’Sides which, fella can hardly walk. He doesnie need to walk, Ade McCrea in Costcutter said. He just needs to lie back and enjoy!) They eat the same tinned junk diet, more or less, though lately she’s been coming back with a few fresh things, bananas, tomatoes, a cauliflower, carrots, zucchini they call courgettes here. The only thing she can cook is chili, which done by her is vegetables, tinned tomatoes and excessive chili powder. Mrs. Maddoch, aghast at the amount of Heinz she knows they’re consuming, has sent down with the logs a cooking pot, a sharp knife, a colander, a set of tea towels. Also once or twice, a winter vegetable pie. Bit late for housewarmin’ Maddoch had said when he brought them, peering around Augustus in the doorway to see if the girl’s presence had domesticated the croft.
It hasn’t. She’s not interested in what the place looks like. Its existence between her and the outside world is enough. Not being moved on is enough. Paulie’s the dark matter her talk surrounds. Augustus doesn’t need the details—or so he thought, until after she mentioned being in hospital for the second time and he said, Why didn’t you go to the police? and she’d looked surprised and said, Did I not say? Paulie’s a copper. Plainclothes.
The snow sanctions postponement. There are questions (all resolvable into one: What is he doing?) but this unexpected beauty pushes them aside. He’s used to city snow, the hush after the first big fall, someone opens a canned drink a block away and it sounds so close—this is different. Clear days look enameled, white land and turquoise sky. Dull afternoons are moody daguerreotypes. He might be on an alien planet. Aesthetic amnesia dictates big things are every time almost new: snow, thunder, moonlight, cloud-shadows, frost, constellations. He’s twice struggled up the hill, leg plastic-bag-wrapped, to get the bigger view and both times felt close to final dissolution. The first time the blue of the sky invited it. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see his atoms trickling upward, could’ve sat down and let himself go. The second time the same effect from dusk light on the sea. The water was a peach-tinted mercury he was convinced offered a portal to oblivion. For a moment he felt sure this was a great gift humanity had yet to discover, the ability to gently volunteer oneself into nonexistence. Harper had said we were antsy for the next paradigm shift. What if it was this, the knack of dying peacefully? Experimentally, Augustus had lain down in the snow and waited. But there was interference. He remembered the small pleasure he’d experienced when Morwenna had pulled the new woolen cap down snug on her head. Which memory called up his inner Harper. We see this. The obvious script is she gives him the will to live. Harrowing but uplifting. You’re working with this—otherwise why let her in? So the woolen hat, the flicker of fatherliness. There’s a lost child back there after all. And a fifteen-year-old’s maidenhead blasted to the devil. O Rose, thou art well, or at least trying to get better. The flip-side script is you do something horrible to her, true to the universe’s grotesque equalizations and benign indifference. It’s the familiar story: for better or worse all that stands between you and the void is the durability of the habits. And yes that is snow melting through the calves of your jeans. The senses are the most durable of the habits. We see this. You know this is true.
So the moment had been lost. He’d got up, stood for a while watching the water, conscious of his flesh knitting where the sutures itched, then with great difficulty in the failing light inched and slithered back down the hill.
Out of boredom, he knows, she asks him about his life or tells him about hers.
“What’s a proxy?”
“Someone who stands in for you when you’re not there.”
“And that’s what this Darlene does?”
The truth is Darlene could’ve cleared out by now for all he knows. He hasn’t spoken to her since coming to Calansay. I want someone who can run the show, he told his lawyer. Make all the decisions. I draw a salary. I’m out of it. That’s all. Cardillo left six restaurants to Juliet, in which the mob had what amounted to a 50 percent stake. She made a deal, signed four of the restaurants over completely, kept two for herself. When she died in 1983 she had two more of her own places up and running. Augustus inherited.
“So you stopped being a journalist?”
“I became a restaurateur.”
It sounds, he realizes, like the result of deliberation. But by the time of Juliet’s death it was simply that he couldn’t stand what he was doing. El Salvador had made him sick, not with its corpses or its corruption or its crash course in U.S. moral bankruptcy, but by his own apathy. He didn’t, in the end, care. Fuoco dentro di te, Juliet had said, the fire inside you. It means you’re going to do something big in life. Fire, yes, but since he’d had (and lost) love it wouldn’t burn in anything else. Love was the big thing. This was his deformity. His theorist rationalized it down to racial liminality, the rootlessness of being neither one thing nor the other, an inconvenient mix of black and white, ghetto and academe, no home in Faith thanks to Reason and no faith in Reason thanks to History, so where would he find shelter if not in love?—but he’d spent enough time with Selina to suspect hi
mself. He was just like millions of others, a lazy selfish coward. The Golden Years of protest and argument at the end of the sixties—who or what had it all been for? the soldiers? the Vietnamese? the Peace Movement? the principles of justice? It had been for Selina, which was to say it had been for himself.
After Michael’s death it took less than a week for Selina to end things with Augustus. Superstition feasted on her: she’d killed her brother. She kept saying: It’s no use, it’s no use. But there was love. He’d be endlessly patient and gentle. There was love. Yet the gentler he was the stonier she became. In the end she said: You don’t understand. I can’t fuck you any more. What I see. Thirteen years later he was still hollow from the loss. On a tip he went with a photographer to La Rancheria to look at the remains of an Atlacatl Battalion raid: a woman, a man, a boy and girl of maybe ten and twelve, all decapitated. There was the usual unreality, the mildly surprising availability of laughter or dreamy dislocation. This was normal. But also a sudden grasp of his abiding delusion, that all his experience would one day be shared with Selina. He moved through his life haunted not by the past but by the future. He disgusted himself, though as with all such seizures of the soul it passed. The photographer took shot after shot, Augustus made notes, they were both inured. But he knew he had to get out. The death squads were murdering hundreds every month and governing his experience of it was the image of a time when he’d tell Selina all about it. The belief was that his life was still for her. He was an offense, a retardation. He lingered for a couple of months. Then came the message that Juliet was in the hospital.
“Costcutter fella says there’s gonnie be more snow tonight,” Morwenna says. It’s evening. They’ve eaten canned kippers on toast, potato chips, a bar of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut chocolate. “Another foot they’re sayin.”
The forecast’s a momentary relief to Augustus, who’s in no hurry to discover the consequences of his recent choices. Momentary because delusory. This is the twenty-first century: if the consequences want him snow’s not going to stop them.
“Bring it on,” he says. He knows she’s glad of the weather for the same reason he is. You open the door and day after day the white landscape says the lockdown’s still in place. Nothing’s required. Questions are about what to eat, when to put another log on the fire, whether you want a cigarette. Under its roof’s frozen pelt the croft sits in a stillness that says this time is finite but pure. Relish it, each second.
“Time for a wee dram?” she says.
“Sure.”
“For the cold, you know, for the cold,” in a falsetto she says is an imitation of a bag lady she knew in London. As of her last trip to the village there are two plastic tumblers with “CALANSAY” printed on them. Since the disastrous drinking session she adds water to her whiskey.
“D’you not miss it just now, New York?”
“Just now?”
“Well anytime. But I mean, Christmas. Must be great at Christmas there. All the skyscrapers lit up.”
“I can’t say I miss it,” Augustus says. “I haven’t lived there for quite a while.” After quitting journalism he’d resided almost twenty years in Manhattan (in what used to be Cardillo’s apartment) running the restaurants without ever regaining the Selinaera feeling of having his teeth in life’s throat. His days had shape, content, challenge, conflict, no soul. No passione per la vita, as Juliet would’ve said, no fuoco. Naturally there were flings, affairs (two less fierce versions of love, which for the women involved were the fierce version—therefore wreckage) but as his thirties gave way to his forties he began to be aware of a constant mild nausea at…(he pictured himself sitting opposite a shrink and having to come up with what was bothering him)…well, every- thing. He did nothing extraordinary, ran the business, watched TV, read the newspaper, surfed the Web, bought a new coat every now and then, dated women—black, brown, white—consumed pornography, smoked, met friends for dinner, dreamed, honed anecdotes, got minor ailments. He had a life. He had the sort of life meant by the phrase “get a life.” But year on year the silt thickened. The meta-nausea was knowing the nausea wouldn’t lead to anything. There was no revolution gestating, no psychic crash or religious conversion in the offing. He’d live with it, but this was what it would be like, a state of tolerable vapidity overlaid with entertainment and fucking. It was nothing. It was the deal. He was the protagonist in a million creative writing class short stories, one more quiet sufferer lost in the American Dream. He took antidepressants and managed the restaurants perfectly well. A TV ad he’d seen countless times would suddenly irritate him—Have it your way at Burger King—and if he stayed with it irritation became disgust and if he stayed too long with that despair. You saw how, incredibly, you became someone who ought to avoid reflection. The unexamined life is not worth living. The examined life was not worth bearing. He supposed he should devote himself to macrobiotics or feng shui or Led Zeppelin memorabilia. People said of shows like Seinfeld, it’s a religion, and thought they were speaking figuratively.
“Oh aye Barcelona, I forget,” she says. “D’you speak Spanish then?”
“Yes.”
“How d’you say: Hello, my name’s Morwenna?”
“Buenos días, me llamo Morwenna.”
She repeats it, solemnly. Meeyarmmo Morwenna. Then a sad smile that says she’ll never remember it. Or have cause to use it. Her experience is like this, bits of paper blowing past her, she grasps one for a moment, starts to look, then it’s snatched by the wind and gone.
In the small hours something wakes Augustus, though the room’s silent—or rather bears the not quite silence of falling snow. Huge flakes descend like an angelic invasion. He lies still and watches, lets the repetition take him. Is it that each snowflake’s unique? Something about fractals. Mandelbrot? Either way he’s aware of entering this drowse to fend off the question of the girl and the future. The future’s in the vicinity, a perpetual threat. He used to have a recurring dream of himself and a wolf trapped in the apartment building on 128th Street. He never actually saw it, but it was there, a presence. The dream was one of knowing that sooner or later he’d open a door or round a stairwell and there it would be. The future’s like this, a padding predator. Sooner or later.
Morwenna sniffs, suddenly, with a rattle of mucus and a swallow that says otherwise silent crying. The snow light will show her face wet with tears if he looks down from the cot, so he keeps still, fixes his eyes on the drifting flakes, lets them take him again, like counting sheep.
It’s dusk when Augustus wakes up. He’s wet himself in his sleep but since he’s once again in the restraints there’s nothing he can do but lie in it. Thinking of Joyce: When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold. He’d dreamed he was back in his Manhattan apartment. The whole front of the building had been blown off so that his sitting room fourteen floors up was open to the elements. Bit by bit, starting with light things—pencils, socks, papers—the contents of his home were being sucked out and carried away on a wind that spiraled up into the sky. He’d held on for as long as he could, but eventually, clinging to the arm of his sofa, he’d followed the rest of his possessions irresistibly up into the freezing darkness above the city.
The door unlocks and Harper comes in with a Styrofoam cup and something wrapped in a paper napkin. Another change of clothes: combat trousers, pale T-shirt and light canvas bomber jacket, a getup that convinces Augustus he’s leaving, maybe even tonight. Augustus’s model now is that the existing thing gets replaced by something worse. Better the devil you know.
“You awake?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want this?”
He lets Augustus out of the hand restraints and gives him what he’s brought, tepid sweet coffee and some kind of savory pastry. Augustus tastes mincemeat, thyme, potato, peas. The coffee allowed to go tepid so there’d be no point throwing it in Harper’s face. Does Harper still think he’s capable of doing something like that? If the coffee had been scalding would the idea
of using it have occurred? Augustus concludes it wouldn’t. They’ve retained the notion of his potential for autonomous action. He’s let it go. You let things go so there’s less to care for.
“Something I never asked you,” Harper says. “Were you ever tempted?”
“Tempted?”
“By the whole thing: Husain. The peace of submission. The alleviation of the burden.”
Augustus remembers the early days of paranoia, when he was so afraid of exposure he stuck to the prayer times even if he was alone in his apartment, even fajr and isha. Ritual wears away reason. Mere repetition’s enough to wear it away, much quicker than you’d think. Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! It wasn’t long before he was in a kind of madness addressing God, dreamily asking for strength to do what he knew must be done. Need breeds faith, the need for vengeance no less than the need for consolation or love. Sometimes he’d get up for fajr, imagining hurrying straight back to bed afterward, but end up on his prayer mat for hours.
“I had a contained disease of belief going on,” he said. “A thing between myself and the Mystery I knew wasn’t there. But I’d have got it anywhere, the church, Transcendental Meditation, kabbalah, the Hare Krishna, probably just by sitting down and staring at myself in the mirror or repeating the word ‘moron’ for several hours a day. You can let yourself be led by it knowing it’s nothing. It’s reason using faith to get a job done.”
“But Husain himself? The group?”
“Different species. I was never tempted by that.”
There’s a gentle elation about Harper just now. He’s lit up by something inside. Augustus wonders if he’s tempted by it, supposes according to the law of antithetical attraction he must be: All extremists risk conversion by their opposites, and what is Harper if not an extremist of flexibility?