by Glen Duncan
Augustus struggles to his feet, pain sheet-lightning his hip, and has to clamp his jaws together to keep his teeth from chattering. Flu, maybe. And the two-mile walk back to the croft still to come. He imagines lying down at the cliff edge to die, damp turf tickling his nose and fingers, hallucinations swirling in from the sea.
The girl stops outside the Belle Vue Hotel and looks up at its Georgian façade.
“She’s after a job,” Mrs. Carr says to Augustus. “Not much chance here.” In this as in many of the postmistress’s remarks is the question of where Augustus’s money comes from. Calansay has an HSBC from which he draws cash with an ATM card. Beyond that his financial arrangements are a mystery. Left to him they’ll stay that way.
The girl takes a last drag of her roll-up, tosses and stubs it underfoot, then goes up the three steps of the hotel’s porch and disappears inside.
“Now what can I do for you Mr. Rose?” Mrs. Carr says.
When there could be no argument that was philosophy. In his early teens he embraced it as if it was a lover from a previous life, acquired concepts—entailment, necessity, contradiction, sufficiency—and with them clarity and impatience. Everyone thought they had an argument for what they believed. But mostly they weren’t arguments, just ignorance and chaos and things they’d got into the habit of repeating because someone else had said them. He showed his mother the Socrates example, which she got and which opened a little flower between them, but she couldn’t understand why he was so lathered up about it. Don’t you see what it means? he said. Don’t you get it? She’d been sitting at the kitchen table peeling him an orange—under normal circumstances something he could watch her do all day. What? she’d asked him. What does it mean? It means you can…It means…What it means is…Jesus! What it means is that there’s a way of knowing what’s true. The unexpected difficulty of getting this out had made him physically squirm and his mother laugh. He laughed too now that he had got it out. Well there’s a monkey boy in here who hasn’t washed his hair in five days, Juliet said. I know that’s true.
They were becoming people to each other, beyond mother-and-son. Six months after Socrates a little money had come (from her sister, who’d married into it) and they’d moved to a slightly better apartment. She was waitressing at a chichi Italian restaurant, Ferrara, on the Upper East Side and making good tips. There was talk of taking classes. What about bookkeeping? She said. I’m pretty good with numbers. Maybe I’ll learn to type. Can’t you see me in a big office at the top of a skyscraper?
Augustus had acquaintances but no real friends, lived his life through books. After the first flush of joy—all S’s are M’s; all M’s are P; therefore: all S’s are P—he’d begun to see the scale of the effort that would be required. Required for what? He didn’t know, but something big still awaited him. The passione endured. He read, daydreamed, read, walked the streets, read, became known as The Professor. A shocking discovery was how many fiercely held beliefs he had—that there was a point to being alive; that some things were absolutely right and others absolutely wrong; that he had a soul; that life was a mystery to be solved; that it didn’t end with death—shocking because philosophy revealed these as mere articles of faith, assumptions, hunches, instincts. Belief was inferior to knowledge. A truth wasn’t something you believed in, it was something you knew, and a truth wasn’t a truth unless it could be proved. It astonished him that those around him went about their business as if the world—as if being alive—was uncomplicated and unmysterious. An old white-haired black guy went door to door with a little foot-pedaled grinding machine to sharpen knives. How long had he been doing that? What was the point? He looked eighty. Had he ever wondered if his whole life was an illusion created by some wicked scientist, a dream from which he’d one day wake up on an operating table in shock? How could people not wonder these things? One evening in the kitchen slicing an apple, Augustus visualized himself turning and sticking the knife through his mother’s throat. No reason; they were talking about Cassius Clay. There’s something princely about that man, Juliet said. It’s like he’s embarrassed by his own nobility so has to do all that swaggering and clowning. I’d marry him tomorrow if he asked me. Augustus was seduced by the idea (for him too Cassius Clay rang with the force of The Other Realm) but in the middle of it had this vision of himself turning and knifing her in the neck. What would happen if he did that? Obviously he’d go to jail, but what would it really mean? And why in God’s name would he ever think of doing something like that? Was he crazy? Where did evil come from?
He read his way through the bulk of the school library in a year. His mother held down the job at Ferrara. Then a big change: She started seeing the restaurant owner, Gianni Cardillo.
“It doesn’t have to be like this,” Harper says. “And other clichés. But what’s the alternative?”
Pain leaves room for nothing other than the wish for it to stop. If Augustus had the information Harper asked for he’d have delivered it. It’s absurd that he genuinely doesn’t have it. Harper could have started practically anywhere else and got something of what he wanted. Ironic gods are running the show.
“Come on,” Harper says. “Get your breath.”
Augustus remembers the day he discovered crucifixion had been a common method of execution. The Illustrated Roman World in the 112th Street library. What was he, ten or eleven years old? In his chest he’d felt the expanding heat of injustice; he had a vision of all the people who’d been crucified before Christ had made it famous. Naked, they thronged a hellish landscape, wailing and holding their wounds. It was as if he was the first person who’d noticed them and now that he had they were demanding something of him.
Harper uncouples the cuffs from the loop in the chair again, lights another Winston and passes it to Augustus. Augustus thinks he’ll vomit if he tries to smoke but it’ll mean respite the length of a burning cigarette. The first drag tells him his mouth’s swollen. He has to deduce and infer since discrete neural signals are lost in the conflagration.
“What’s your method?” Harper asks, resuming his seat opposite Augustus.
“What?”
“What you hold onto for this.”
“I’m not holding on to anything,” Augustus slurs. “I just don’t know the answers to those questions.”
Harper pushes his shoulders back, holds them for a moment as if to ease tension, then slumps forward. “I imagine going the Hemingway route,” he says. “The old man and the sea. Hold on for just five more seconds, then five more, then five more and so on. Break it down further—one second, half a second, quarter of a second—eventually you get to the Zen thing of inhabiting the now. Get that down and there’s neither the pain you just felt nor the pain you’re going to feel.”
“Just the pain you’re feeling.”
“No, you slip it. Pain’s a reaction, every reaction takes time. Eliminate time, you eliminate the reaction. Remember the Buddhist who set fire to himself in Saigon, burned to death without making a sound? He wasn’t feeling any pain. It’s the only explanation.”
Irony, Augustus knows, refuses to lie down and die. His instructor at the first halaqah, Saeed, had been obsessed (erotically, Augustus thought) with the likelihood of torture and death in the prosecution of jihad.
“I’ll bear it in mind,” he says to Harper. “Don’t think I’m there yet.” He hasn’t taken more than three drags but already the cigarette’s halfway to the filter. Harper leans back in his chair and laces his fingers behind his head. In the movies this calm would have rage just beneath it. Modernity demands such psychologies derive from breakage, trauma, delusion. The closest Augustus can get is imagining Harper feeling a slightly above average level of irritation when browsing in a microelectronics store and finding two models of something both of which do almost all the things he wants but neither of which does all. (In Augustus’s vision Harper’s accompanied by an equinely beautiful young woman who with constant low-level annoyance is one of his mistresses. Though mildly a
phrodisiacal the experience depresses her these days since like everything else it’s become self-conscious, situated, ironic. It reminds her that she sits on a nest of things she knows about herself—the exact formidable degree of her beauty, the exact formidable degree of her intellect, the exact formidable degree of her corruption—and isn’t likely to shift from it now. Shopping, with the ample resources she has, outlines the dimensions of her unsatisfactory life, alternatives to which she knows she’ll never explore.) Augustus sees all this because a version of Harper’s consumer irritation is familiar to him. He lived for years in Manhattan with the urban malaria of precision dissatisfactions. But whereas for Harper the condition segues into a feeling of well-being, for Augustus it was always a failure, proof of vague yet giant loss. The part of him in mourning for all that was gone required ceaseless distraction: television; work; doomed affairs; fine-tuned consumer preferences—despite which the mourning went on, in dreams, in the small hours, sitting on the can or waiting for the kettle to boil. At moments his own face in the bathroom mirror conceded the worst, that he was still suffering from the loss of the old gods and stories, that he was still, with the confused center of himself, looking back. Harper doesn’t look back. He’s something different, a new type that can turn nihilism into buoyancy. As he moves forward the past drops away behind him like a crumbling bridge.
“Listen,” Harper says, leaning forward to reforge the earlier intimacy. “You’re still a man. Don’t make me take that away from you.”
The sincerity and reason of this hurt Augustus in his heart. Tears well and fall, which he knows is the first hairline fracture. He thinks again of all the people crucified before Christ. The demand they’d made was for his recognition of how alone they’d been. Any second this interlude with Harper will end and he’ll be alone again. He starts to construct a comfort—that the murdered millions of history will be with him—but it dissolves into nothing.
Because he can’t face Maddoch and the builder Augustus kills daylight in Marle. In Costcutter he picks up supplies he doesn’t need—soap, toothpaste, a can of tuna, a small packet of rice, disposable razors and at the checkout ambushed by a sugar-craving a bar of Galaxy milk chocolate—then spends two hours over three large whiskies in the Heathcote Arms, shivering between swallows, some sort of blood noise bothering not just his ears but his teeth as well, as if his fillings are picking up radio. The dog lies by the fire, raises its head from time to time but doesn’t get up. At the bar someone’s showing Eddie the landlord the latest thing, an i-phone. Not on sale here yet; this one’s from America, retails at $600. It does everything. Augustus’s skin prickles: Harper had one, demonstrated it during the hours in the medical unit. You see what this means, right? he’d said in a tone of neutral enquiry. Augustus’s morphine was wearing off. They’d had him swimming in drugs, all fathom of hours and days gone. It means not having information on demand’s no longer acceptable, Harper continued. There’s no standing on the street wondering what year Kevin Spacey won the Oscar, it’s there in your hand, instantly. It’s going to shut down a big neural chunk. Memory’ll go. The optimists’ corollary will be that it’ll free up the brain à la Einstein never memorizing anything so as not to take up space. Maybe we’ll all become geniuses. What do you think? Augustus couldn’t answer. The remnants of the drugs and his mouth plump from the beating. Some of his teeth were gone; his tongue had given up confirming their absence. It was no surprise to him that he didn’t hate Harper. Once you saw there was no escaping the relationship you brought to it whatever gave it bearable shape. At moments Harper had been a father he’d disappointed or a lover he’d betrayed, once or twice a primitive deity seeking vengeance for all the gods abandoned by history. Imagination was condemned to make something of things. There was a narrow strip of barred glass just below the room’s ceiling letting in what Augustus believed was natural light, the first he’d seen in a long time, which soothed him, or rather which had been soothing him until he began to feel the morphine wearing off. These days, Harper said, unwrapping a peppermint and popping it into his mouth, technology’s realized it can’t surprise us any more. When a woman realizes she’s given you all the sex tricks in her repertoire and now it’s only ever going to be more of the same, panic sets in. All she’s got left is quantity so she throws more and more at you knowing it’s diminishing returns. Technology’s got the same problem. It’s getting desperate. There’s the fusion of hardware and organic life coming but that’s not going to surprise anyone. We’re there already with pacemakers and all the optical stuff for the limbless. He held up the i-phone for Augustus to see, dexterously with the lightest touch of thumb and forefinger drag-enlarged a photo of a smiling blond girl on the little screen. You show teenagers one of these gizmos and they go, Yeah, does it come in any other colors? Microelectronics was the last revolution and we’re antsy for the next one. Mass clairvoyance maybe, alien invasion. It’s hard to imagine. This is why we’re crazy for climate change: Give us something new and big. Melting ice caps, Biblical floods, anything as long as we haven’t seen it before. Genetics is the thing, I guess.
Eddie the landlord, having worked out the punter is trying to sell him this device, is shaking his head and laughing. Och no I’ve had mine from MI5 a week ago. Jesus Christ. Charlie, c’meer an look at this wee gadget.
Augustus swallows the last of the whiskey, grips the head of his stick and pushes himself to his feet, feels the gun swing and bump like a giant pocket watch. There’s a dip in the pub’s murmur to accompany his exit. He’s on nodding terms with Eddie, who this time incorporates a give-me-strength eye-roll to mark the hopelessness of the i-phone pitch. The landlord’s one of the few islanders who’s accepted the black chap’s story’s not for sale. It’s established something between them which in Augustus’s old life might have become friendship.
Outside, surprised by a lash of cold rain and a sky darker than he’d expected he stops to button his coat. Street lamps are on in their first peach phase. The air tastes of the just gone ferry’s steel handrails and diesel. He thinks of all the silvery fish that have been hauled out of these waters, creatures wrenched from their element suddenly naked under the sky. Vikings raided here, a thought which evokes a world so much less cluttered with people. Buttoning takes a long time. His hands aren’t on form and his face feels as if it’s wearing a beard of bees. A droplet of water falls from the pub sign and spends its little personality in a trickle down his neck. He decides the Costcutter carrier bag’s redundant, transfers the items to his pockets. Not the gun pocket. Only the gun in the gun pocket. Safety’s on but there’s a recurring vision of accidentally shooting himself in the foot or shin. Whether his life will flash before his eyes is one of the things he still wonders about, though he tells himself that even if it does it’s just the brain superheroically rifling its files for anything that might help.
The fever’s no joke now. He’s let it romance him among the whiskey blooms for two hours but out in the cold and these skirls of rain he can’t imagine it allowing him home without trouble. The sky’s low and soft and the hills beyond the village are dark. Black water chocks at the jetty. The road back follows the coast before turning inland. Two miles and most of it uphill. Some miscellany to be found dead with: soap, toothpaste, tuna, rice, razors, a gun. He realizes he needn’t have waited so long: the rain would have sent Maddoch and the builder back to the farm.
Marle’s ferry port is also its bus terminus, a tarmac turning circle called for a reason he can’t be bothered to discover “the banjo.” Buses on Marle are erratic and he’s never inquired which one, if any, goes his way. There’s a timetable in the bus shelter.
“Fuck!”
The girl’s in there and he startles her—disproportionately it seems to him until she plucks her earphones out. The light in the shelter’s broken. She’d been sitting in the dark bent forward with her head bowed.
“God almighty.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
&nbs
p; One hand’s spread over her heart. In her young face he sees shock at how lost in herself she’d been but also light-speed threat assessment that takes in everything from his possibly bogus bad leg to the nearness of Costcutter’s lights and the half-dozen fishermen seeing to their boats in a dour trance. Factors flare around the core calculation—black man; eye-patch; not local—but she keeps them out until the priority work’s done: no immediate danger. Her shoulders relax—then tense again: she mistrusts all her conclusions. The world shows you okay then lashes out.
“No, it’s me,” she says, laughing not genuinely. “Miles away.”
“Just wanted to check the schedule,” Augustus says. “I’m sorry.”
Consulting the timetable’s impossible without the light, and in any case someone’s sprayed graffiti over half of it. The girl stuffs the earphones in a pocket. Used to be if someone had gadgets they weren’t homeless or broke. Now anyone can be anything. Impatient with categories, Harper had said. Augustus billows and shrinks hot and cold, wrists maddeningly sensitive to the coat’s cuffs. The thought of all the land between here and the croft empties his legs. The track down’ll be waterlogged. Maybe just curl up on the bench here. Go out, go out, quite go out.
“Can’t see a damn thing,” he says. “Guess I’ll walk.”
“You American are you?”
The “guess I’ll walk” was so he could turn and do just that but she got the question in. Nothing to stop him ignoring it except he finds himself wondering what “American” means to her, supposes rippling stars-and-stripes, limousines, Coke, the prongs of Lady Liberty’s crown. He thinks of these images as a layer of cellophane spread over a dark sea.
“Yeah, I’m American,” he says.