by Glen Duncan
Harper said: I think that’s about it, don’t you? I don’t think you want us to do that to your other eye, do you? And Augustus jackknifing against the cuffs had screamed from the tossing waves obscenities and pleas, whirled between horror and pain and desperation and disbelief but in spite of this with another part of himself already curled around the loss, the specific degradation, a thing done to you that can’t be undone so that now whenever you say or think “I” or answer “me” it’s with a concession to them and the miracle of brutality they performed. You can’t believe the miracle—that a few small actions reveal the paltry thingness of even your eye—but there it is, and the universe continues breathing normally because these are nothing but the effects of certain causes and God has not yet said a word. Nor will he. Or these are his words, the small actions, the eye, the screams, the blood and Harper’s voice saying: I think that’s about it, don’t you? Either God speaks continuously or is nothing but silence.
The mustached guard had held Augustus’s blood-slippery head back by the hair so that the screams jammed in his throat. The spoon’s edge was placed at the corner of the remaining eye. Harper bent so close to Augustus’s ear that when he spoke his voice entered with a tympanic tickle: Do you want to tell us what you know? And Augustus had bellowed yes through his bent throat and as soon as the guard’s hand relaxed began giving up everything he had in disorderly sobbing chunks starting with Elise Merkete who even as he said her name was replayed in his head sitting up in her sleep and saying: Future generations will thank the elephant but he kept stalling and going back in searing misery and disbelief but they had done it, they had, a fire there now, a raging white heat in his head there was no going back you couldn’t reverse it had happened it had gone misery was a kind of filth, facts were filthy with innocence because what was this other than a fact what was this other than something that was the case Wittgenstein said the world is everything that is the case and there no matter what he said or yielded now was the pain, something on an alien scale, beyond negotiation.
He’d passed out, not, he thought afterward, from the pain (though the last thing he remembered was white flame filling his head and the intimate wet creep of blood) but from exhaustion. The last big adrenaline-spend pulled him under. When he came around he found they’d moved him. He was on a bed, wrists and ankles secured in leather restraints, in a room with a medicinal smell. His clothes had been replaced with a hospital smock. Two other beds and high up on the opposite wall a narrow horizontal strip of barred frosted glass letting in what he believed was natural light. He wondered if he’d died. Wasn’t this a likely afterlife? A deserted ward with the whiff of old antiseptic, the feeling of having been forgotten? But there was the pain, throughout his head but centered where his eye used to. Where his eye. Someone had applied a crude dressing. There was a furor under it, the nerves’ deep grieving and frantic damage control. The word socket intruded and he fought back the urge to vomit.
Thirst repeatedly derailed all other thoughts. He lay on his back staring at the blank ceiling, oscillating between caring and not caring about himself. It was very hard not to care, but caring forced him to keep replaying the violation. Replaying the violation drew him again into searing rage and crippling self-pity, and into an asphyxiating panic that there was some way of getting back to before it had happened but he couldn’t remember it. Horror was endlessly renewable. He knew the only solution was to stop caring but it was like turning your back on your own child and listening to its cries as you walked away. He went in and out of consciousness.
Eventually, Harper had come in alone and seated himself in the orange plastic chair next to the bed. He’d brought another bottle of Evian, at the sight of which Augustus lost everything but the need to drink. He swallowed two thirds before registering Harper’s hand supporting his head, and even then found without much surprise that he didn’t care, that a third option was to simply accept submission to and ownership by the other person. There were women who ended up in relationships with their rapists. Augustus saw it clearly: someone could put such a mark on you that it was easier to accept it as a brand of slavery than to spend the rest of your life trying to burn it off. He remembered his screaming and Harper’s calm.
In the hours that followed he’d told Harper everything. An atmosphere of conciliation formed, as if the two of them were for the first time working together toward a common civilized goal. Augustus suffered flash-fires of conscience but they blazed and died in a moment, no longer than it took Harper to run a hand through his fair hair, or light a cigarette, or shift his weight from one buttock to the other. When he needed to use the bathroom Harper put the handcuffs back on and helped him to his feet. There was a surprisingly clean windowless latrine off the ward. Augustus could barely walk, had to sit down to pee. Lifting an arm for toilet paper made him dizzy. The handcuffs were utterly redundant. If someone had given him a gun he wouldn’t have had the strength to raise it and pull the trigger.
There wasn’t in the end that much to tell. Four people, starting with Elise Merkete. Four people who’d be arrested, eventually, then either framed, recruited or killed. It was a profound unburdening for Augustus, also a final measurement of himself: he’d found his limit, wasn’t prepared to go through it again, no matter how short a time he had left. He had no increments; his capitulation was total. He didn’t care what they did to Elise or anyone else as long as they left him alone. Harper made notes. Sometimes Augustus heard himself as if from a distance sobbing as he spoke, a weird adult version of childhood distress, the old familiar chopped, breath-catching delivery. Before he’d passed out he’d seen through the blood-blur his eyeball on the floor next to one of the stubbed Winstons and the beneficent hand pushed him under, let the dark water close over his head. The guard had done everything with a heavy silent determination, let out one chuckle of surprise when.
Harper’s in fresh casuals looking as if he’s just showered and shaved. “It’s a beautiful concept,” he says. “You borrow the operational structure from terrorism but leave out its commitment to killing innocent people. I take it you really don’t know how it started?”
“No, I don’t. As a rumor, a myth.”
“No one person knows more than four others?”
“No.”
“Built-in circuit break. For situations like this.”
“For situations like this.”
Augustus, adrift, has no idea what day it is or how long he’s been here. The frosted glass is filled with gently growing light. That’s all he knows, that it’s the beginning of a day rather than the end. For perhaps the first time in his life the observation feels purely irrelevant. In love with Selina the weather was for them. It’s getting light, she’d say, turning to him from the window. Naturally the getting light, or dark, or cold, or warm was addressed to them. Naturally they appreciated it. They appreciated all of it. In the Barcelona hotel she’d peeped between the scandalously closed curtains and said: The balcony’s full of sun. He’d thought how the world had waited for them to come together again after all these years. Its fidelity caught in his chest, gave him a sort of panic so that he had to get up from the bed and go to Selina and put his arms around her.
“It would’ve been like one of those unexpected diseases that wipes out a species,” Harper says. “Kooky bacterium blindsides the whole human race.”
Not the whole human race, Augustus thinks, but can’t be bothered to point this out. “What’s in the drip?” he asks. Some time ago he woke up attached to an IV. He feels only mildly curious about it. They could be killing him or testing a new hallucinogen. Either’s all right by him.
“Good stuff only,” Harper says. “Antibiotics, painkillers. You’re feeling them, right?”
“Seems like a waste.”
“You know what the precious resource is around here?”
“What?”
“Conversation. You should see the guys I’m working with.”
“Whereas?”
“Whe
reas you. Substance. Do you want more water?”
“Yes.”
Harper’s gone a long time but returns with a tray on which are two more bottles of Evian, a sliced peach and a small carton of plain yogurt. “Can you handle this yourself?”
“What?”
Harper gets the pillows from the other two beds, lifts Augustus (the cracked ribs take his breath, scrunch his face so the muscles around the missing eye contract and find their object gone) and slips them in behind him. Then he unbuckles the restraints. For the first time since his arrest Augustus has his hands free. A moment of dizzying liberty, then dissonance, because it reminds him what he’s got to stop caring about. Since the loss of his eye he’s moved a long way from investment in himself, but now the freedom of his hands undoes all his hard work, gives him great swaths of his life back, asks him if he isn’t still a man, if he doesn’t still expect to walk down a street or taste snow or swim in the ocean or drink coffee on a station platform or go to bed with a woman.
Harper puts the tray on Augustus’s lap. “I’d go slow if I were you,” he says. “It’s been a while.”
Augustus is weaker than he thought and the first peach slice is heavy with life. You pick a piece of fruit up and lift it to your mouth, requires immense care, slow, like a crane or derrick, reverence for the math. His tongue touches the baizy skin briefly then he bites into the sweet flesh and feels tears well and fall—and burn. Where the other eye. Tear ducts carry your heartbreak out into the world. Now burns. You’ll feel better after a good cry.
“Doc’s coming to see you,” Harper says. “Ease that for you.”
“Why am I still alive?”
“You’re not.”
“What?”
“I’ve told them you’re dead.”
“Why?”
“Because they wouldn’t look favorably on you still being alive.”
“But why am I still alive? You think there’s something I haven’t told you?”
“No. I just wanted to talk to you. Do you mind?”
Augustus swallows the remainder of the first slice. Takes the second. Strange to be eating knowing you’re going to die. Some food will be the last food, the bon voyage cargo. Peaches. Yogurt. “What is this?” he says. “A script? I forgive you?”
“Curiosity only. I want to know what you held on to in there.”
“What I let go of.”
“Well it was a day and a night and a day.”
“Is that all?”
“It’s usually more than enough. I want to know how you do it without first principles. I mean I’m buying the absence of politics, the revenge story. You don’t have religion, I think we established?”
“No, no religion.”
“So I return to how it looks from my end: you accept there’s no God, no right and wrong, no meaning, no purpose, no afterlife, no natural justice, no court of appeal, no glorious revolution—you accept all that?”
“Yes.”
“From which it can’t possibly matter if you just give up the information at the start. So we arrest your friends, torture them, execute them. Shut down the operation. So what? You must have been working under the assumption you weren’t going to live anyway, so it’s not as if you could’ve worried about wandering around for another thirty years feeling lousy about what you’d done. The body dies, consciousness dies, finito. No soul, no moral indigestion.”
The peach is fibrous and juicy, the yogurt cold in his hot mouth. Anything from the old life’s a temptation back into caring for himself, especially sensuous pleasure. Fleetingly he goes into it, the purity of the taste; a peach was a big deal in Harlem back then, his mother laughing because the skin’s nap made him shudder and he said it felt like a bee. Eat it, dummy, it’s delicious. He’d bitten into it with such caution—then the sweetness like nothing he’d ever tasted and his mother eating her half with her hand cupped under her chin.
He’s ashamed to go to his memories disfigured. They’ll recognize him—there’s no doubt he’s recognizable—but they’ll pity him and he can’t allow that because it’ll release the flood of his pity for himself. I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. He’d recited the poem to Cardillo, drunk, at one of the restaurateur’s always excessive birthday dinners. That’s the fucking beauty of animals, Gianni, he’d said. You look at those goddamn gazelles, they don’t complain even when they’re being eaten, just lie there blinking, maybe try to get up once in a while. You love animals? You’ve got to…I mean you should…But he’d had to abandon it because with the drunk’s delay he’d realized where he was heading, to the accusation that Cardillo felt too sorry for himself the whole time. Cardillo, full of emotion, didn’t see it, was still winded from the poem—Jesus that’s right. Goddamn it, that’s right.
“Habits,” Augustus says. “I held on to habits.”
Harper nods, takes a sip of water from the open bottle. “It’s what it comes down to in the end,” he says. “The durability of the habits. That sounds like one of those terrible titles in spite of which something becomes a best seller. Although presumably since you were going to kill Husain and crew you must have broken yourself of quite a few? They’ve been arrested, by the way.”
“What?”
“Yesterday. Intelligence reaches saturation point. There wasn’t anyone else the cells could offer up. Your information confirmed players and parameters. We could have picked Husain up two years ago. Didn’t because by that time you were involved and we didn’t know what the relationship was between your people and theirs. This Sentinel thing’s been a headache for a long time.”
“Is he here?”
“No. A legitimate facility. We want the world to know we’ve got him, obviously. War on terror. So in case you were thinking of running around here trying to find him, don’t bother.”
“Will you kill him?”
“Is that a question or a request?”
Augustus is in slight shock from the solid food. Go slow, Harper had advised, but after the first slice he hadn’t. He’s surprised how unmoved he is at the thought that Husain might be in the building. For a while in the interrogation one of the habits he’d held on to was the belief he must stay alive to kill Husain. But it hadn’t proved, as Harper would say, durable. The truth was there was really only the one habit to sustain him—and that had been broken in the end too, in a day and a night and a day.
“You’re letting the Husain thing go,” Harper says. “I get that.”
“For the record, kill him. All of them.”
“I’m not handling it but I’ll do what I can.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do anything for me?”
“I told you, I’m an admirer. You’re a lone operator, like me.”
“You work for the government.”
“Sure, but only strategically. For my needs. There are no values here.”
“No habits?”
Harper takes a fresh pack of Winstons from his shirt pocket, tears off the cellophane. “Are you smoking?”
Augustus accepts a cigarette though he doesn’t really want one. Vestigial health aesthetics say not when you’re on a drip but he lets Harper light him up anyway. His hands whether he likes it or not can’t get enough of their freedom.
“They dropped away when I was a teenager,” Harper says. “I couldn’t help it. It was, to quote Malkovitch in Dangerous Liaisons, beyond my control. The only one that stuck was curiosity, and I’m not sure that was a habit. Habits are acquired. I was born curious. Anyway aside from wine women and song only curiosity gets me out of bed in the morning. I realize the consensus is there’s something wrong with me, but then what’s the consensus other than collective habit?”
“You have the deficiency in feeling.”
“I have the prodigious curiosity. I should’ve gone into science. Cosmology or genetics.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Well there’s all the grunt work before you get anywhere near the enig
mas, but the truth is I need action, in-the-world action, flesh and blood and physical movement. I must be one of the few people still gets a little excited boarding a plane or a train. There’s still something of a thrill getting behind the wheel of a car. Anyway I need the being in the game. I find I’m addicted to the times.”
In spite of himself Augustus realizes he’s looking for wrong notes when Harper speaks, anomalies, damage. But the calm alertness remains, the deep sanity. Why shouldn’t it? There was only the one thing separating them and in thirty-six hours it was gone.
“You’ve got the life you want,” Augustus says.
“Pretty much. Which means it’s only a matter of time before dissatisfaction creeps in. As it is I feel like the dark prestige is beginning to fade.”
“The dark prestige?”
“Of what I do. Of this element. It’s becoming respectable, like pornography. The doctorate in DP or fisting’s only a few years away. Ditto the master’s degree in torture. Somewhat I blame the Abu Ghraib pictures. We needed to know we could do that, still do that. Otherwise why’d we photograph it?”