by Glen Duncan
Tears hurry out of his eyes then stop abruptly.
“To plan it,” Harper says. “To make the plan work. Feeling of absurdity never crept in?”
“No.”
“I’m glad you say that. It’s one of the things I’m attracted to in you, this understanding of how easily within reach the extraordinary is, this faith in your own powers of execution. It happens we got the intelligence. We might just as easily not have. Next time maybe we won’t. These things hang on threads. Hell of a way to make a living.”
“It’s not how I make a living.”
“Right, I forgot. Front-line journalist turned chef.”
Augustus wants to correct him—restaurateur, not chef—but is forced by the idiom “to make a living” into a compressed vision, a split-second glimpse of a thousand human labors, from naked hominids loping with spears to lab-coated scientists at the Large Hadron Collider. History happened so fast and pointlessly, he thinks. And if the planet doesn’t give up on us before we find a way of doing without, it will go on happening forever, one way or another. The hardest myth to let go of is the myth of ending.
“Do you think of it as capitulation?” Harper asks. For a moment Augustus thinks he means leaving journalism for the restaurant business—but Harper adds, “The embrace of violence?”
Augustus closes his eyes and again feels the dark curtain ready to drop. Knights wore armor so heavy that if knocked to the ground they couldn’t get up. He tries to imagine getting up himself, tests his limbs for readiness but gets no response. The effort makes him want to vomit. He does in fact heave, but nothing comes up. The plastic bottle falls from his hand and rolls away across the floor.
“I don’t think about it,” he says.
“Sure you do. Come on.”
“If the law goes, it’s not capitulation,” Augustus says. “It’s all that’s left.”
“And you think the law’s gone?”
“At the highest levels.”
“You were in Central America in the ’eighties, right?”
“El Salvador. The highest levels have always operated above the law. It’s just that now it’s open.”
“It’s been open for years. The Nicaragua ruling was a public turning point, a coming to full self-consciousness; not just the administration, the whole country. An idea whose time had come, that the United States would judge all and be judged by none. The last inevitable flowering of manifest destiny.”
“I have to move,” Augustus says.
“Go ahead.”
With another queasy effort Augustus maneuvers himself partly onto his side in the chair, in careful increments gets his weight rearranged. The pain hierarchy’s established; he knows what to favor, where pressure can be borne. Still the room spins for a moment.
“It’s a real shame your guy’s hit on Bush failed,” Harper says. “I’d love to have seen it. There’s boredom gathered around the man now, that feeling of playing it out because there’s still time on the clock. He’s done what he’s going to do, don’t you think?”
“I’m not an optimist,” Augustus says. “There’s plenty of time for more.”
“He’s fascinating at close quarters.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“There’s an autism that comes with invulnerability.”
“I thought you said these things hung on threads?”
“They do, but he doesn’t know that. The invulnerability’s a delusion but you can’t blame him for it. All the skeletons are out—imbecility, greed, corruption, hypocrisy, criminality, contempt for thinking—and yet the sun still shines and water comes out the tap when he turns it.”
Augustus wants to ask for more water (partially slaked thirst is worse, gives righteous anger to what’s left) but the risk of upsetting this balance holds him back.
“I would, actually, have liked to see it,” Harper repeats. “I’ve nothing against him except the obtuseness and the look like a huffy chimp. All my objections are aesthetic. But I’d have been curious to see what Americans would have done with the event.”
“It’s not too late,” Augustus says. “You can shoot him yourself.”
Harper’s smile is bright, concedes deep recognition. “Maybe I will,” he says. “I’m vulnerable to boredom.”
Augustus feels the subject in danger of closing, forces himself wider awake. “Can I ask you something?” he says.
“Anything.”
“What will you do if I don’t have the information you want?”
“If you have it you’ll give it. You know this is right. And you do have it. Or at least I believe you have it, which comes to the same thing.”
“Hypothetically. Say I die of a heart attack right now.”
“Hypothetically? If I didn’t have the information I’d make it up. Which in the movie would be your cue to say: ‘Make it up anyway. I won’t tell.’”
“You should work in Hollywood.”
“It’s on the cards. Entertainment’s the natural complement but very few make the transition. The really strong appeal for me right now is in icon management. You know about this?”
For a second Augustus thinks desktop icons—knows it can’t be. Then sees: “As in Madonna?”
“Yeah, but not just a pop star or a movie star or a sports star, although you’d want some of them to do those things. What we’re looking at is the creation of icons, manufactured characters eventually forming a pantheon like the gods of antiquity. The product content is their traits, their maxims, their loves and hates—everything you get with current stars in an incidental way, except in this case it won’t be incidental, it’ll be designed and presented from the outset. Neopolytheism. You see it, right? Temples, symbols, rites, initiates. Merchandise across the spectrum.”
“There’s a woman who prays to David Beckham.”
“I know! I saw that. The potential’s there. Obviously you’re not going to touch the existing religions, but what about the millions who don’t have divinity in their life but want it? There’s an immense opportunity but it requires a grasp of how needy and dumb people really are. So far we’ve only scratched the surface. Think of David Beckham if we’d got in on the ground floor. Kate Moss. Britney for Christ’s sake. People need gods. Postmodern pluralism and the pick-and-mix mindset makes polytheism the obvious revival. Popular culture’s been screaming for a new pantheon for decades.”
“You can’t manufacture divinity like that.”
“We couldn’t manufacture celebrity like that either in the past but we can now. This is American Idol. The transition between obscurity and fame used to be mysterious. Now it’s transparent. The message is there’s nothing special about this person but we’re going to tell you there is and you’re going to respond as if there is. Cut to a billion dollars later.”
Augustus knows Harper’s right and it gives him a feeling of muscular relief to be leaving the world. His body gets a premonitory sense of itself shed like an overcoat. The people he loved are gone anyway. God’s been burned up but the habit of imagining meeting the dead persists. A pleasant place of white stone floors and flowering jasmine, blue sky, the crowds of history milling as in a Roman forum, his mother somewhere among them. He knows it’s a fantasy, which at this moment pierces him because it means never Selina again either. You live for years with beliefs you’d deny having then the end comes and takes even them away. For a second he doesn’t care if the conversation dies—then does. Riddled with life though you can barely move.
“I see you in P.R.,” Augustus says. “Illegal wars need good image-makers.”
“Right,” Harper says. “But I’m tired of dealing with the suits. These guys don’t know how to relax. There’s not enough music and dancing in my life.”
“Inside you’re dancing.”
Harper chuckles, giddily. “It’s a real shame we didn’t meet under different circumstances,” he says. “You’re a person of quality. We could have done good things together I think.”
“We d
on’t see things the same way.”
“Sure we do. No God, life’s meaningless, religions are fairy stories, morality’s an illusion, political ideologies are the front men for brute force…” Delivered as lilting recitation. “It’s all force in the end. The most refined justice system on the planet’s underwritten by force. You say if the law goes all there is left is violence. The law’s just the violence of the weak majority. We’re all the children of Achilles. You know this is right.”
“Okay let me go and I’ll join you in the icon business.”
Harper laughs, again with genuine spontaneity. “Oh man, wish I could. But come on. This stuff you can’t even have the conversation. Morality, meaning, truth, the terms are embarrassments. They’re like bloated old aunts who should shuffle off and die. The prerequisite for intellectuals now is the acknowledgment of the absurdity of the intellectual life. Philosophy is to politics what boxing is to total war.”
It’s so long since Augustus thought or spoke in these terms he can’t hold them. He’s desperate to ask for more water but the risk of checking Harper’s flow outweighs his thirst.
“Without God or some other Absolute it doesn’t matter what you do, except consequentially, strategically. You know this. People know this, they just can’t stand it. Instead they go backward—backward into religion or backward into progressive humanism, which is just as much a myth as Christianity and the rest. Religion’s doing so well these days—why do you think that is? It’s because it’s taken this long for Nietzsche to sink in. God’s been dead since The Gay Science but the collective psyche’s only just got the news. People are flocking to Islam and Christianity in the biggest act of denied epiphany in history—believing because they finally know it’s not true. I have this vision of Jack Nicholson from A Few Good Men, a huge hologram of his head floating in the sky looking down at the world and going The truth? You can’t hairndle the truth!”
The Barcelona hotel got British newspapers, erratically: an Independent the morning he and Selina had breakfast in bed. She’d read him the headlines. Climate Change Sceptics Point to New Data. Jesus, she’d said, who’d be young in this century? At least when we were kids we thought however much bullshit there was there was also really a way things were. Now there’s no way things are, only claims about the way things are. For every position a counter-position and the positions themselves nothing to do with the way things are but with the way it’s advantageous to say things are. There’s information everywhere. It’s like some godawful ubiquitous schizophrenia. I met a cosmologist the other week who told me it’s statistically as likely that the universe is a computer simulation as that it’s real.
“Don’t you agree?” Harper says.
“Yes, I agree.”
“And yet here we are. You’re holding out on me. You’re protecting people.”
“It seems so.”
“Why?”
“I can’t help it.”
“Without first principles.”
“I can’t help it.”
Harper nods, lowers his eyelids: He’s seen this before, understands. He fishes out the soft pack of Winstons. Maybe seven or eight left. Augustus supposes he, Augustus, will be dead before they’ve all been smoked, gets a foreboding of the world exactly the same but for the presence of his consciousness, knows too that lighting up—again Harper leans close—will set the clock ticking. Nonetheless he inhales deeply. Cigarettes, kisses, cups of coffee, fucks, candy bars, apologies, birthdays, dreams—a certain number of each gone like motes passing through a shaft of sunlight. His mother said angels with ledgers kept track of these details but has gone herself now through the incinerator into nothingness.
“You have feelings,” Harper says.
The nicotine’s making Augustus dizzy. He wonders again how long he’s been here, tries to remember the last thing he ate. Someone on the plane before it landed gave him a cellophaned samosa. Inés’s junk email box will have something from Amnesty about western governments outsourcing interrogation. Occasionally she opens and skims these things but feels only another addition to the numberless messages adrift from their moorings. Outsourcing means call centers in Bangladesh.
“Can’t seem to shake them.”
“I see this. You’ve left the path of reason.”
“You find that you do.”
Again Harper acknowledges with a nod. He blows a shuddering smoke ring both of them watch to see how long it holds its form. Longer than Augustus thought it would but still in only a few seconds it’s gone. Which is his life and most likely Life. We love watching animals because they’re constitutionally incapable of metaphor.
“Or that you really don’t,” Harper says. “Maybe you still believe there’s a reward for self-sacrifice? Greater love hath no man. In which case obviously this is a golden opportunity.”
Augustus shakes his head, no, out of habit, but at the same time knows there remain moments of eclipse, intimations of being the object of something’s gaze, something that presents a surface of pure indifference but conceals a palpitating kernel of justice. When it happens he tells himself it’s just his consciousness compelled like everyone else’s to try to wriggle out of its own contingency. All good children go to heaven. Somewhere in the crenulations of his brain he knows this deep neural groove endures, but knows too that it was put there and might just as easily not have been. Whoever it was put God in your head it wasn’t God. And yet, as Harper says, here they are. With an inner start Augustus realizes it’s the first time he’s asked himself why he’s resisting—and in the asking simultaneously answers. The answer’s been with him the whole time but given so often it’s become like a word made meaningless by repetition. It would seem a laughably poor answer to Harper. It seems a laughably poor answer to Augustus too, since it’s no less absurd than the idea of piling up brownie points for the heaven that doesn’t exist.
One cold gray afternoon in November 1969 Augustus and Selina stood watching the ice skaters at the Wollman Rink in Central Park. The burgeoning commercial spirit of Christmas was a soft atmospheric murmur, storefronts beginning to glimmer, kids collectively coming awake. He stood behind her with his hands in the front pockets of her jeans, holding her pelvis. They’d been together more than two years and his thrill at proprietorially putting his hands on her was undiminished. Absurd to take the city’s cold air and concrete edges as wistful homage to her suppleness and warmth, but that’s what he’d been doing. No quarrel with absurdity if it gave him love. Held by him her hips whispered their bone-cradled secret, the potential for life like the flicker of a tiny fish. Since summer he’d known he wanted her to have his child, though he’d said nothing about it.
I really despise people, she said. Her left eye watered. Humans, I mean. Actual human beings in front of me. This woman took off her shoe on the subway the other day and started massaging her toes. Humanity in the abstract I’ll fight for, but actual people…Depressing, right? The fascist heart bound and gagged with liberal principles. But maybe if I wasn’t a monster at heart I wouldn’t do any good in the world? That’s somehow right isn’t it, that if the best people didn’t know the worthlessness of their own hearts they wouldn’t be the best people? In fact they’d be the worst people. Augustus said nothing. You could feel such collusion with someone it bordered disgust. Most of the rink spectators were watching them instead of the skaters, imagining, he thought, the profanity of him inside her; her sucking his cock. Might as well have been sodomizing Jesus. They were both used to it; if they stood still long enough hatred and fascination massed around them. At such moments the white faces acquired a look of gradual coming-to, a fresh perception that the times had cheated them of something. How had they let it happen? Woodstock, that nigger with the guitar profaning the national anthem, white girls with their tits out in the crowd, the whole lot stoned out of their minds. The fatalists turned away with happy disgust, content to have the degeneracy of the age confirmed. The rest began to look to one another with wounded urgency. At whic
h moments he’d whisper in her ear, I hear the hoofbeats of the Klansman’s horse….
He held her hips tighter and pulled her close against him. It was a thrilling new open space to step into, this certainty that he wanted to have a child with her. Now that he knew it he realized he’d been waiting for the knowledge for some time. Inglorious biology was the poetic contrast to the rarefied stuff of spirit; tubes and eggs and wriggling sperm, the monstrous umbilicus and the gory porn of delivery all to heave a new consciousness up into the world. Inter faeces et urinem nascimur it said on the wall in the john at Harry’s. Selina reluctantly translated: between shit and piss are we born. This was God’s aesthetic, Augustus saw, plaited polarities, divinity in a cowshed, new souls amid sewage. He’d let God go pretty much by the time his mother married Cardillo but Selina’s Catholicism (a mausoleum, she said, with satirical melodrama; I wander around it, visit the lovely sepulchres and the lovely dead) had brought some of his own back. As a myth only, he told himself, as an artwork, as a reading. He’d had two years of English and philosophy at NYU, long enough to have swallowed most of the postmodern pills. It’s like synthetic food, Selina said. It’ll keep you alive but it tastes like shit. That July Neil Armstrong had walked on the moon. An artist friend of Selina’s had thrown a “Landing Party” at a basement gallery in Soho for the televised event, half the guests dressed as aliens or astronauts. Despite grass and acid and booze the historic moment gathered them around the tube and for a few minutes gave them their childhoods back. Afterward Augustus and Selina admitted to each other that the renewed perception of the planet, the solar system, all those spheres clockworkishly revolving around one another had made them think, briefly, of God in the most ludicrously traditional way: genial old white-bearded überdesigner surrounded by star charts and astrolabes. But back at her apartment later that night when they lay in each other’s arms she’d said: There’s nothing. It’s just a massive accidental extravagance. The Apollo mission had sidelined the war in Vietnam, made negligible its tally of burned and mutilated and missing and dead. Augustus knew it felt to her as if Michael had been cut adrift. There was moonlight, astonishingly, on her bare shoulder and blond hair, which gave Augustus an intimate feeling of connection to the spacemen a quarter of a million miles away. As she floated nearer to sleep she said: I don’t like to think of how cold it is out there…the cold of space…She was disgusted with herself for getting a lump in her throat when Armstrong had uttered his “…one giant leap for mankind” line. Augustus had noticed. She’d looked at him and lit a joint and said, See? See what a fucking moron I am? Ten-cent grandeur. Mankind. Jesus, hit me will you? Hit me in the face. It filled him with urgent love for her, this war she had with what she thought of as the sentimental side of herself, reminded him of the effort she had to make to play by the head’s rules instead of the heart’s. By nature she was everything she’d nurtured herself to disavow: elitist, individualist, dualist, theist, emotionalist, capitalist, narcissist, absolutist. I’m a goddamned sadist, too, she’d said, whiskey-drunk one night, and the admission had ravished him. He’d felt the current of cruelty in her from time to time, a different strain of arousal, a deadness in her blue eyes and just before she came a look of barely mastered disgust. (At the Catholic school there had been a fat ugly girl whose life she and two of her friends made hell. They’d nicknamed her NOFAM, which stood for Not For Any Money, as in not for any money would a boy fuck her. The memory still tormented her now.) It excited him, and though he plucked up the courage to tell her they had it in common he did it under the shelter of a generalization. Come on baby, everybody’s got this shit in them. It’s as old as the species. He didn’t want to dwell on it because the difference between him and her was that she’d rejected it as a source of knowledge and he hadn’t, quite. She’d rejected it but talked as if she hadn’t. She told him her sexual fantasies made her ashamed but that she knew a time was coming when they wouldn’t. Outgrowing shame’s what we do, she said. Adam and Eve, look at them, the shame didn’t last. They wept as they walked away from Eden but within half a mile they were holding hands and thinking about a new place to live. They farmed and had kids and got on with it. God overestimated shame. That was God’s big mistake. She had these talismanic insights but suspected herself of sophistry, couldn’t look long in a mirror without pulling a mocking face. Augustus knew all this about her and that there was always more to know. No amount of her was enough. It gave him a foretaste of satiation that sickened him without stopping him wanting it. He could kill her. Not in any metaphorical sense, but literally, put an end to having to know her by putting an end to her. This was love, of which you had no idea until you were in it.