by Glen Duncan
“Okay,” Harper says, exhaling smoke. “Let’s talk about how this is going to work.”
On Calansay his resolution is to keep the gun with him at all times. Harper had said: “‘It’s better to have a gun and not need it than to need a gun and not have it.’ Tarantino. True Romance.” The reference was lost on Augustus. Its sentiment wasn’t. Therefore reinforced inside pockets in his jacket and overcoat. The weapon bumps his ribs when he walks.
The land is three flat acres between a ridge of low hills and the sea, a pan of salt-scoured sedge and gorse dotted with yellow-eyed sheep, several daintily limping with foot rot. Maddoch’s croft, or what’s left of it, sits a hundred meters from a narrow cove of tarry pebbles and viscous lime-green seaweed. It’s a littered beach: dented oil cans, rotting rope, three net floats that would have been bright red in their day now bleached pinkish white. Augustus’s prowls have discovered desiccant condoms, beer bottles, a maxi pad, the scars of fires. Eco-death in microcosm. He pictures teenagers coupling here under the stars but the image immediately hauls in the universe’s silence and emptiness.
There are birds. Crows lope away from him with a look as if he radiates atrocity. Black-headed gulls wobble midair with sunlit dangling legs. Oystercatchers scrutinize the tide line, beak-stab, generally come up with nothing. Maddoch’s farm is on the other side of the ridge so Augustus has the landscape to himself. The place speaks in Spartan declaratives: a blast of raw wind; a sudden stink of dead fish; an abrupt downpour. None of these utterances invites him beyond itself. More familiar landscapes would have persisted in evocation: God, spirits, purpose, meaning. He’s done with all that. What’s left is the contingent bones and meat and blood of himself, the paltry fact of his skull, the entropic drift of his organs.
Maddoch wasn’t exaggerating the croft’s dilapidation. There’s a hole in the roof big enough for Augustus to stick his head through. Half the bare floorboards are rotting. Bracket fungus is growing in a corner of the kitchen. Damp maps the lime wash. The fireplace is home to a pile of rubble it appears to have vomited. Windowpanes are missing or flimsily boarded up. The three rooms smell variously of cat piss, dog shit, mold, dust, drains, wet earth. Barbed wire erected against teenagers has been cut and shoved aside. More condom remains, torn pages from porn magazines, cigarette butts, broken bottles, beer cans, a bong with the glass bottom smashed. Painstakingly (accrued damage but also ritualistic concentration he can’t explain), Augustus has filled three garbage bags and dumped them at the side of the building, where what was once a vegetable garden is now waist-deep in nettles.
He can’t face the labor of unblocking the fireplace but there is in any case a miraculously still-functioning wood stove on which he heats up canned soup or fish or beans. Not entirely without shame Maddoch tractored down a supply of logs, told Augustus to give him a shout when he needed more, nae charge. Word of the ludicrous rent has got out, village opprobrium has descended. Maddoch is now the villain of his own piece.
The boiler engineer took two weeks to appear, by which time he’d achieved mythic status in the exchanges between Augustus and Maddoch. Then he arrived, pronounced half a dozen replacement parts necessary, and left. Parts to be ordered from the mainland: another ten days. Augustus washed in the brown-bottomed tub with freezing water and a bucket, a fierce business that shrank his nipples and balls.
When the parts arrived the engineer returned to install them. Several false starts and adjustments, then bhup and the sour smell of ignited gas; eventually a savage expectoration of first warm then scalding water from the kitchen tap. The engineer had manifestly been told to glean what facts he could but went away with not much to report. Most of the time Augustus left him in the croft alone, and when he was there answered monosyllabically. The old one-eyed black Yank was living all alone and doddery and the place stinkin like a toilet and if he didn’t get that roof fixed soon it was gonnie come down on his fuckin heed.
After his first hot bath in three weeks (he’d filled the tub, eased himself in, let the heat reduce him to animal blankness) Augustus sits wrapped in his overcoat on a rock twenty feet above the sea with a half bottle of Oban whiskey. The bath heat has lasted and these sips go into him with a different heat that joins it in his chest, belly, loins, creeps into his bones. This is good, the warm inside and the cold out. Like God, he sees that a thing is Good, goes into it, lets it be, without thoughts or complications. If nothing else what he’s been through has freed sensual pleasure from mental interference.
If one of the islanders should pluck up courage to ask him directly: What the fuck are you doing here?—(imagination puts these words into the mouth of cotton candy-haired Mrs. Carr, who’s most likely never said “fuck” in her life)—what would he tell them?
He knows how it’s supposed to be, a triumph of the human spirit. He can hear the movie trailer voice-over, picture the blurb on the novel. The story of a man’s spirit destroyed…and of the love in which it’s reborn. A shy friendship with the postmistress. Laconic fraternity with Maddoch. Now, on an island at the edge of the world, he must learn to live again…. What’s happened to him hasn’t killed him so it must have made him stronger. (Selina said: If you don’t believe the Nietzschean maxim when you’re eighteen there’s probably something wrong with you. If you still believe it when you’re twenty-eight there’s definitely something wrong with you.) He knows art’s job in God’s absence, to make beauty out of ugliness, good out of evil, meaning out of chaos. Suffering, yes, brokenness, yes, despair, yes—but survival, healing, hope. The movie trailer will use a sequence of single-shot fades, each accompanied by a heartbeat: a prison door opening; a bare lightbulb; his terrified face covered in sweat; Harper smiling; Selina slipping her robe off; an explosion; a lone figure in silhouette on a darkened beach.
Harper had said: We’re suffering representational saturation. We’ve written too many books, made too many movies. By the time you’re eighteen you’ve already encountered representations of everything important, you already know the scripts. It’s no wonder we’re so limp. The twenty-first century’s the century of the definite article. You don’t need to describe or evoke, you just name it and put “the” in front of it. It’s like compressed data files: The suburban nightmare. The dirty war. The mom who knew.
The torture victim who…one way or another transcends, finds God or love or the violin or forgiveness of his torturer. That’s what art’s complacency expects of him, Augustus knows. That’s how it’s supposed to be but that’s not how it is. How it is is an assortment of facts: He wakes up drenched in sweat. He’s come here randomly. He has no hunger for life beyond immediacies. He spends hours in the fetal position. He assumes someone’s coming for him. He thinks of death constantly. Despite which his own triviality’s a perpetual tinnitus. Despite which he suffers stretches of boredom, the image of his life as a heap of dirty clothes that’ll never, now, get laundered.
As a child Augustus believed huge revelation awaited him. He and Juliet were the protagonists in a mystery, two adventurers lost in a world of tantalizing clues. But at the same time she was the mystery. There was a secret to which he wasn’t admitted, the dark lipstick and her going out. This wounded him, but no matter how much he hardened his heart to her she always drew him back. Hey kiddo, what shall we do today? I’ve got a headache like the end of the world but if you could climb up and reach me that Alka-Seltzer…Deep down he believed it was because they weren’t the same color. Yes, this is my son, he kept hearing above his head. The weary emphasis was damning, gave him a vision of himself and Juliet hand in hand in outer space after death, her suddenly torn from him and pulled upward toward milky light while he drifted on alone. Many nights he fell asleep praying he’d wake up white. Sometimes in his dreams he was white; there was his astonished and delighted face in the mirror, same mouth and nose and eyes but with her fair skin and the relief of having come at last into his inheritance. Hope for this transformation drove his relationship with God, Jesus, Mary, even the unne
rving Holy Ghost. Water was turned into wine, wine into blood, bread into body. Jesus could miracle anything into anything, so why not a brown boy into a white one? Ask, and ye shall be given. Yes, but he knew there was more to it than that. To get what you prayed for you had to be good. Whomsoever striketh thy left cheek, offer unto him the other also. This was how God spoke, Juliet explained. It meant if someone hit you on one side of your face, you shouldn’t hit them back but let them…but instead you should…She wavered. I guess it means if you offer them the other side of your face they’ll feel lousy and ashamed and you’ll have won because they won’t want to hit you again. Is it being good? he asked. Juliet chewed her lip a little. Well it’s what Jesus did, she told him. Augustus was determined to do whatever it took. He began meticulously behaving himself.
Then, on the summer afternoon Clarence Mills obligingly whacked him across the face with a rolled-up comic book, everything changed.
It had been a lousy day for Augustus from the start. Juliet had left him with Mrs. Garner and wouldn’t be back till six. All morning her attention had been elsewhere. It wasn’t her going out he hated but her mind giddily on something else before she left. Jeez, kiddo where’s my purse? You seen my purse? Her dark ringlets bounced. He was peripheral, something like a cushion or a coat hanger. Nothing crushed him like seeing her not really seeing him. At Mrs. Garner’s she’d forgotten to hug him, hurried back, administered a distracted embrace, then gone.
And now Clarence. Whack. Fuck are you lookin at, Wogger? (He ain’t no wop an he ain’t no nigger…) Weeks of writhing virtue had made Augustus a neighborhood figure of fun. Secretly he believed he’d amassed an enormous amount of Jesus-like behavior and was close to being granted his desire. Therefore, molten but resolute, he offered Clarence the other cheek. The half-dozen kids went quiet.
Clarence, amazed, was shamed. It made him furious. Laughing, he belted Augustus again, harder. The other kids fell about. Augustus turned and walked away, eyes hot crescents. Fuckin pussy, Clarence called after him. Fuckin momma’s boy pussy!
128th Street smelled of stale pee and baking asphalt but grief made it a soft dream. The brownstones loomed over him like consoling uncles. Love your enemy. His enemy was Clarence, but love was the kisses his mother gave him and his arms around her, which thought provoked an unsettling vision of kissing Clarence that made his scalp shrink and his private parts tighten. That couldn’t be it. Jesus couldn’t mean that.
Disobeying orders he traipsed back to the apartment and tried the door. It wasn’t locked. There was the living room, but with a tension in its contained sunlight that made him not call out. Instead, in slow motion, he went on sneakered tiptoes with a feeling of swollenness and gathering recognition (hadn’t he dreamed this?) to the bedroom he shared with her.
This door was already wide open. There was the bed and on it was a colored man, naked, with his muscled back to Augustus. He seemed enormous. The sight of his bare butt with the bedclothes pulled down around it hurt Augustus in his heart. He stood very still, the blood in his cheeks singing of Clarence’s two whacks and the warm feeling of kissing love when he wrapped his legs around Juliet and the man’s bottom with its awful dark crack which he’d wipe after he went to the bathroom and the tiny yellow flowers of his mother’s sheets right there.
All he could see of Juliet was her arm draped over the man, her long fingernails doodling on the bare back. What do you want, mister? she’d say, whenever Augustus flopped down on his belly across her lap to invite this. Oh no, I’ve got better things to do thank you very much. But she always did it. Two minutes, you hear? I’m timing. Not a second more. You’re like one of those Roman emperors, do you know that?
When the man rolled onto his back Juliet came with him, smiling—then saw Augustus. “Oh, no. Baby? Are you all right? What are you doing here?”
She was naked too, shoved herself off the man’s body and with compressed violence got into her dressing gown. “Caro mio, stai bene?”
Augustus felt space filling up around him with a soft invisible force, in spite of which he also felt two hot tears leave his eyes. Ducking Juliet’s outstretched arms he darted with raised fists toward the man on the bed, who had a slender long-eyelashed face and prominent cheekbones, fingernails of pearly whiteness, and who caught Augustus’s wrists with infuriating giant ease and said, “Whoa, little brother, easy now, eeezy.”
“Sweetheart come here, let me talk to you—let him go, Leonard.”
That stung additionally, “him,” a terrible precise degradation. When the man released his wrists Augustus flung himself past his mother and ran as fast as he could from the apartment.
“There’s a big obstacle for you,” Harper says. He takes a last drag on the Winston, drops the butt, concentrates on crushing it with the toe of his shoe. “Which is…”; he looks up, meets Augustus’s eye with the calm friendly alertness, “that we know you have the information we want. Probably all of it.”
The eye contact tells Augustus Harper’s not afraid of his prisoner’s humanity, or is merely curious about it, hasn’t yet stopped being pleasantly confounded by not feeling what he’s supposed to feel. The guards already have the air of giddy self-distraction and Augustus knows how it’ll be with them: They’ll require jokes, infantile euphemism. Let’s give him the helicopter! Buckle up now. They’ll laugh when they gouge his eye out and leave it hanging on its nerve (he feels the sudden hot bloom of urine in his lap) because if they don’t laugh how can they have done such a thing? Appeals to their humanity will move them to greater excesses because in here it’s their humanity they’re afraid of.
Harper’s different. “We’re often dealing with people who may or may not know what we think they know. Naturally that leaves open the possibility of them convincing us that they actually don’t know.”
The interrogator’s eyes flick down, register that Augustus has wet himself, flick back. Augustus imagines Harper thinking if he shits himself we’ll hose him because it’ll stink and I don’t need that.
“Obviously in your case we know you know.”
From which it follows that there’s room for resistance but not dissemblance. Either way he’ll end up dead. His skin feels the logic of this in a million pinpricks but there’s a spark of euphoria at the certainty of death—gone in an instant because it’s not death he’s afraid of.
“Let’s establish the knowns to save time,” Harper says. He selects one of two manila folders from the table. “We know there’s an international organization that operates under at least a dozen names, Sentinel, Rogue, The Watch, POFV, RJO, Outcast, etc. You’d think we’re far enough into self-consciousness to stop naming secret organizations so humorlessly. The po-facedness is one of the things that depresses me about this set-up. They should’ve called it The Nippy Nubbles, something like that. Think of the intel briefings, everyone trying to keep a straight face. Anyway we know it targets individuals deemed criminal by internal consensus. Vigilante democracy, I love this. We know it has members of the administration on its hit list as well as Third World tyrants and Russian slavers. Good bad guys as well as bad bad guys. We also know that you, a Sentinel operative recruited by Elise Merkete, have, as Yousef Saleem, spent two years forming an attachment to a terrorist cell in Spain. I love this too: because you want the guys behind the Barcelona department store bomb in ’02. This is not John Walker Lindh. This is the vendetta script. We like this. This is personal. We see this. Who’d you lose in the explosion?”
Augustus hadn’t had much hope they wanted the faux convert. Now he knows they don’t. Now he knows the information they want is the information he doesn’t want to give them. “Does it matter?” he says.
“No. Just curious. A Loved One, we can assume. Maybe we’ll come back to it later.”
Augustus’s scalp tingles. He hadn’t realized he wasn’t fully alert. This is what happens: You forget where you are. Despite everything you forget where you are then without warning remember. There are those times driving a ca
r when without realizing your mind’s been elsewhere you suddenly come to and wonder how long you’ve been gone and whether if someone had stepped into the road you’d have hit them.
“Six months ago,” Harper says, “we foiled an assassination attempt on the president but the Sentinel operative was killed. That is, we’re pretty sure it was Sentinel. Either way Washington’s had enough watch-and-wait. A Mugabe that’s one thing. The commander in chief? No. Obviously I see where you’re coming from. But what I see’s irrelevant.”
Augustus thinks of his half-dozen fake passports and driver’s licenses. You send backups wherever you’re going. That’s fine until you’re smuggled from the country you’re picked up in. His genuine passport’s with Darlene in New York. The Carl Garvey he flew in on is in a safe house in Rabat. The Yousef Saleem was in the Barcelona apartment but they’ll have cleared that. Elise has the Lewis Carlson in Paris.
“I’m not going to insult your intelligence,” Harper says. “I’ll ask you questions and you’ll have the opportunity to answer.”
They both know there’s no need to expand. Instead Harper gets to his feet and puts his hands in his pockets. The movement again releases the scent of clean cotton. Augustus thinks: Jakartan workers at the Gap factory get a dollar a day—then almost laughs at the smallness of this injustice among the horrors he has to choose from. The thought takes him away for a moment, sends him lightly flying over the headquarters of the World Bank, then a green sunlit river, a forest, the roofs of East Harlem—but most vividly to the hotel room in Barcelona four years ago, Selina saying, Are we really to be given this, now, after all these years? They’d lain for what seemed like days (but was in fact less than forty-eight hours) in the giant bed with a feeling of truancy from the city’s bright afternoon. A maid had knocked and Selina had called out: “Por favor vuelve más tarde,” Please come back later, and it was only in the foreign language he heard her voice thirty-two years older. You love someone then lose them. Decades pass. You have other lovers, other versions of love. Then one day you’re at a kiosk buying cigarettes and a voice beside you says: Oh my God. And you admit in that instant that this is what you’ve been waiting for all along. The lost thing found.