by Glen Duncan
“We?”
“Collective consciousness. America—in fact the entire non-Islamic western world—is only just waking up to what its enemy wants. It’s taken such a long time because what its enemy wants is so bizarre, so unreasonable. Its enemy wants to wipe it off the face of the earth, and has evolved a psychotic death cult to get the job done. You’ve got to love the jihadis’ candor: ‘We’re not fighting so that you’ll offer us something. We’re fighting to eliminate you.’ You know this. This is famous, Hezbollah. This is Hassan Massawi. Your man Husain’s coming out with the same shit right now. You don’t fight that with reason, you fight it with contempt and brutality. We needed to know we could count on ourselves to get down and dirty. The soldiers are the moral fingertips. We’ve got democracy and civil rights and women’s studies and hug-a-homo day and fear’s been creeping in we’ve turned sissy. There’s the froth of outrage from the intelligentsia but the truth is the Abu Ghraib pictures were a relief: That’s right, we’re bad motherfuckers. Let the towel-heads know what they’re dealing with. What was the real feeling for ordinary Americans when the photographs came out? Déjà vu, recognition, confirmation. Why did the MPs take the photos? Because everyone back home, in a collective surge of self-doubt, had asked them to. It’s one of the reasons they look so happy. Look at Sabrina Harmon giving the thumbs-up over the dead body. Look at her smile. She’s sending home the picture she knows they’ll love. We get the news we need, the stories we’re desperate to hear.”
“I don’t care about any of this,” Augustus says, though as with much of what Harper’s said he has to admit he’s had similar thoughts himself. Newsreaders intoned their horror headlines as if mastering revulsion in order to deliver the facts—the savagely mutilated body of a 23-year-old woman was found in a park in Queens early this morning. Stunned local police have admitted the victim had been dismembered and had its head partially severed…An invitation to righteous incredulity but also deep reassurance; the networks were happy to tell us all the worst things were happening in the world because they knew the worst things were already happening in our heads, and so did we. In Barcelona, between lovemaking and shameless assaults on room service he and Selina had watched snippets of Spanish television. She’d said: The sinisterness of newsreaders is now global. Jesus go back to that thing with the twin sisters.
“It’s not just me,” Harper says. “Other guys are feeling the dulling of the edge, the mainstream opening and letting us in.”
“Maybe you should become pedophiles,” Augustus says. “Not much prestige but it’s dark.” The morphine’s wearing off. His body’s pain centers are stirring. Conversation implies a future he refuses to imagine he has. A future he doesn’t want.
“Fifteen, maybe, twenty years to mainstream for pedophiles,” Harper says. “Obviously the law’ll prosecute flesh-and-blood offenders but the conceptual horror’s already gone. It’s an inconvenience. We’ll get these guys hooked up to something virtual. Another fifty to seventy-five years you’ve got the Blade Runner solution: genetically engineered kids who’ll respond any way you want. Is it live or is it Memorex? You’re going to see a shift in the pedophile demographic because initially only the superrich will be able to afford the product. It’ll be an earning incentive for blue-collar child-molesters. Okay, here’s the doc.”
“The doc” is a small, stocky, hawk-faced man with nutmeg brown skin and close-cropped snow-white hair and mustache. Augustus reinvents him as a melancholy headwaiter in an Old Europe restaurant dying on its feet. These imaginings are involuntary, as if the loss of his normal eye’s opened a third that springs parallel universe glimpses on him whether he wants them or not.
“What’s the story, doc?” Harper says, after the doctor’s taken a look under Augustus’s dressing.
“Local anesthetic,” the doctor says. Very slight eastern European accent. Polish, maybe. Croatian? An old reflex in Augustus sifts possibilities but after a moment peters out. It doesn’t matter where the guy’s from. It doesn’t matter where they are.
“It’s not going to win any awards,” the doctor says.
“Long job?” Harper asks.
“Fifteen, twenty minutes after the local kicks in.”
It takes, Augustus guesses, less time than that. After the injection they tape the remaining eye shut and he feels nothing. The smell of the doctor’s latex gloves makes him queasy. Soon there’s a new deftly applied dressing. The doctor’s very careful removing the tape from the good eye. Augustus, sensing it in the man’s touch, has to override the right it seems to give him to care for himself. This is a danger: the slightest humanity has the power to open the floodgates. When he’s blinked sufficiently for clarity he watches the doctor removing the gloves and changing the drip. Harper’s by the window talking on the phone. Without looking at him the doctor says, “I’ll have another look at you later. May be able to do something for your feet.” A moment later he’s gone.
Augustus wakes in his clothes in the early hours with a thudding whiskey thirst. It’s dark outside, silent now that the rain’s stopped. He’s had broken sleep, crowded dreams, violent starts awake. Too late with the disinfectant and dressings, he’s pretty sure. The leg wounds are hot and busy. No doubt his temperature’s up. No doubt the whiskey hasn’t helped.
The girl, Morwenna, lies curled up asleep in a survival bag in front of the hearth, also fully clothed except for her shoes, with her sweater folded for a pillow. There’s a short radius of warmth from the fire’s embers but cold’s retaken the rest of the room. He should put a couple of logs on but there’s no way without waking her and he doesn’t want that. With the help of his stick he goes barefoot to the sink and with great concentration manages to fill the tin mug and drink without her stirring. In fact now that he listens he can hear her snoring very lightly. He gathers his boots from beside the bed, goes quietly to the door, takes his coat and slips outside.
The air’s cold and smells of waterlogged land. Darkness glimmers where pools and puddles have formed. He hurries into his coat and boots but it’s obvious the walk down to the beach is out of the question. In these conditions he’ll be over within a dozen paces. Instead he picks his way to the edge of what he thinks of as the front yard (though it’s not demarcated by anything other than a few bits of junk and the remains of the barbed wire covered in brambles) and stops, leaning on his stick.
He’s oscillating between deriding himself and giving himself up to the bare fact of having done it. Not that he’s done anything. He wasn’t aware of doing anything. The whiskey’d given him a comfortable indifference and there was another quarter bottle it turned out. Halfway through her mugful she started talking. The gun was for when Paulie finds her. He’s like clairvoyant. Won’t matter where you go I’ll find you. She went to London when she was fifteen. Lucky in a way because if she hadn’t met him she’da gone on smack. Paulie’s first rule is no smack. Catches you with needles you’re in deep shite. Grass okay, coke, speed, E, acid, ketamine, fine. Smack you’re in deep shite. It was good at first. You were like a princess.
Augustus had said: You don’t need to tell me this. I don’t need to know any of this. As soon as she’d started he’d felt gathering tiredness but at the same time noticed the absence of pity for herself, the severance from ordinary self-care. Meanwhile through his own golden veil of whiskey the movie trailer voice (the by now presumably digitally generated mixture of honey and gravel full of American humanity’s precariously balanced hope) kicks in with Their lives couldn’t have been further apart. Now, in a world of bleak beauty…Harper had said: The truth is we can go into anything. The world really is our oyster. Here’s Jesus and self-sacrifice, all the blood and the chalices and candles—maybe I should go into that? Stamp collecting, archaeology, particle physics. Or what about the Buddha and the dissolution of desire? Gardening. Rare books. Marxism. Husain and his crew, all these self-exploding terrorists—it’s a laughable failure to make the next step after nihilism, which is just to find something
and go into it. These guys blowing themselves up are like titanic crybabies: if we can’t have God we don’t want anything—and just in case, we don’t want you to have anything either. It’s supposed to be a profound demonstration of belief. It’s the baldest demonstration of existential panic. The West’s superiority’s in its refusal to panic. It’s in its cathedrals and Monty Python and psychotherapy and the Genome Project and the NFL and The Catcher in the Rye. You find something you like and go into it. What’s a meaningless universe other than infinite opportunities to make meaning?
Augustus had felt like saying to the girl: It’s okay, I can go into this. I can see the shape and I can go into it—but knew she wouldn’t understand and he’d drain himself trying to explain. The bare bulb of the croft’s overhead light had been on, which gave their drinking a stark feel. He’d said: What makes you think he’ll find you all the way out here? And she’d said: He just will. You have to know him. He’s like that, he can do things. Augustus didn’t doubt it, had felt the spring and stretch of clairvoyance in love and in the cell with Harper, in the Barcelona synchronicities, Selina, Elise Merkete.
He’d got up and gone to pee and in the freezing bathroom had his drunkenness brought home to him. In the old life of parties you went to pee and took stock, something of which remained because standing swaying over the bowl he found himself adding up and hypothesizing: runaway at fifteen so no proper parents presumably abusive and her in this case good intuition says I’m no danger dead in the male part but what other than the gun can she want she doesn’t seem scared only tired.
When he’d gone back into the other room the light had been turned off and she wasn’t at the table where he’d left her.
What’s going on?
Don’t put the light on.
What is this?
Here.
She moved to stand in front of him but he couldn’t see more than a lump of darkness. He didn’t think but reached back for the switch, which movement she must have discerned because she said, Don’t put the light on, but he couldn’t stop himself and felt a sudden panic at how many hours she’d been here already and even the beginning of anger as the light flicked on.
She covered her bare breasts and spun to get her back to him. It rushed him up through the whiskey. Neither of them said anything. He turned the light out and the darkness was an immediate relief.
I was gonnie say: if you let me stay here f’ra bit. You know? I don’t mind. You weren’t supposed to see.
Augustus had put his back against the wall and closed his eyes to the revolving room. For what seemed a long time neither of them moved. The fire’s chirpy soliloquy continued.
Put your shirt back on.
He’d stepped outside to give her the now redundant privacy and sober himself with the cold. He heard her throwing up in the bathroom. When he went back in she was fully dressed, lying on the cot in the fetal position.
Sorry, she slurred.
It’s okay.
I didn’t make a mess.
Don’t worry about it.
She shuddered. He’d been an idiot to let her drink so much. He sat down on the chair and rested his arms on the table. The bit of moving about without the stick had set his hip off.
Did he do that to you?
She didn’t answer. Blinked a few times, slowly. He knew words became diseased. He. That. You. They were diseased for him too. Stupid to use them. He’d known anyway. Why ask and put her through it? One big bruise on her arm like a dark jellyfish.
Do you think you got it all up? he said.
She drew her knees closer to her. Shivered. Think so. I’ll be all right ’n a minute. Sorry.
He’d got up and washed the tin mug, filled it with cold water, put it next to the cot. There were half a dozen logs left, enough till morning. The fire had made itself indispensable though he’d managed so long without it, all those days huddled next to the stove.
Eventually she’d said: major embarrassment.
Her voice was hoarse. He got up and poked the fire with the blade of an old file he’d found. When I was fifteen. Her body was dead to her, had been made dead to her, that was why she had no pity for it. If you let me stay here f’ra bit. Her breasts small and turgid as little water balloons, full of young womanhood. Something had got through to him. Not desire (there was nothing, a splinter of absence he curled around) but a sense of her body compelled by its youth to raging renewal, physical wealth so immense it could hemorrhage for decades without apparent decrease. Beauty hurts, Selina said, years ago, by being unable to help itself. The idiot fidelity of crocuses coming up every spring, unable to help themselves, clueless. So this girl’s body, Augustus thought. Major embarrassment. She meant both his rejection and the marks of what had been done to her. By the clairvoyant Paulie whose rule was no smack and at first you were like a princess.
Don’t take it personally, Augustus had said. I can’t do anything like that.
How come?
Too old.
Get out.
He hesitated. Considered telling her he was gay. Knew he wouldn’t be able to maintain it.
It’s an injury. (He didn’t know if this was true. There were very occasional morning erections, but the two or three times he’d tried to masturbate, he’d been unable to maintain them.)
Seriously?
Seriously.
What about your eye?
Same thing.
A strange little meditative time passed, neither of them speaking. The rain subsided to a faint exhalation. Augustus rolled another cigarette. She said she’d puke (“boke” was the word she used but he got it) again if she tried smoking just then. He poured himself the last of the Scotch and drank it quickly. Balanced between accepting and denying this was something he could go into he needed the booze to pitch him one way or another. After the interrogation, in the first dream-edged hours of survival he’d tried to get word to the compromised contacts. Two of them, Jacques Dertier and Elise Merkete, were already dead. Future generations will thank the elephant.
At last sneering slightly at himself he’d said: You can stay here tonight if you want.
She’d insisted on not having the cot. Got ma bevvie bag in there. He was flummoxed, then saw: bevvie bag was bivvie bag was bivouac bag was survival bag. Produced from the shoulder bag and unrolled. Also a soft clattering purse of toiletries that made her seem older. He listened to her brushing her teeth in the bathroom, wondered how many weeks or months she’d been lugging her minimal accoutrements around. Bus shelters and shopping malls and car parks and stations, the special exhaustion you get from being repeatedly moved on. She came out smelling of toothpaste and he went in, feeling as they crossed that he was giving himself over to corruption. In the bathroom he stretched his two-minute routine to ten, stood toothbrush in hand staring at the half boarded-up window. By the time he came out she was lying in her plastic bag by the fire. He got into bed. Watch that doesn’t melt, he said. She said, Okay.
Now, after four hours of twitchy sleep and chiseled sobriety he stands at the bottom of his front yard thinking it all went too fast. His cynic’s available, asking in a voice like Harper’s whether she hadn’t seen his scars that first morning with Maddoch. Don’t put the light on. Which is an instruction to do the opposite. Young girls are always smarter than you think.
He doesn’t care. This is something he can go into for a while whether she’s ingenuous or arch. The conclusion doesn’t matter. That feeling of corruption when he passed her on the way to the bathroom, what was it if not the acknowledgment that in spite of everything there remain traces of loneliness in his bloodstream?
Selina and Augustus got married in secret at City Hall, a brisk civic ceremony presided over dyspeptically by a registrar who looked like Edward G. Robinson. I can’t deal with them freaking out right now, Selina said, “them” being her parents. I know we’re going to have to go public sooner or later but I just want to get through the first trimester without having to duck crockery. It’ll fuck
the kid up. With an effort Augustus managed not to sulk about it. Pretty soon she was going to start showing, at which point the precious parents would have to accommodate the monstrous fact whether they liked it or not. Get that nigger brat out of here, his grandfather had said. No doubt they’d be hearing the like again. They’d made no other decisions. Selina was still taking classes at NYU though she’d established that deferring her final year wouldn’t be a problem. Augustus too only had a year to go. With Selina’s permission he’d taken his mother and Cardillo into his confidence. After their marriage Juliet had moved into the restaurateur’s Upper East Side apartment. To everyone’s surprise and Cardillo’s chagrin she’d insisted he teach her the business, and within a year she was a familiar face to suppliers, chefs, wait-staff and regulars—not to mention Cardillo’s connections, who had “an interest” in all six restaurants. I like working, she told Augustus. Who would’ve thought? All those years living like a slob. Jeez, I’m sorry I was such a lousy mom, kiddo. Yeah that’s great, Augustus said. Just make sure you don’t get shot. Augustus still gave Cardillo a hard time, but with an air of self-satire and an increasing understanding of how much his mother cared for her husband—The Comedy Husband as they referred to him. Cardillo didn’t try too hard with Augustus but chose his moments. Her old man going to give you two trouble? he’d asked one night at the 14th Street restaurant. (A rare dinner foursome. Selina and Juliet had never been close but the imminent baby had inclined them to make an effort. Hence dinner together. The women were in the ladies’ room.) Some, Augustus said. He’s a big wheel. You know Northrop Aircraft? Cardillo wasn’t impressed. You want this guy leaned on it’s not going to matter who he works for. Augustus smiled, shook his head. I’m just sayin’, Gianni said, he’s a man, right? He likes his ankles better when he can walk on them, right? Am I right? Augustus couldn’t keep a straight face. Neither could Cardillo. It was the way they played his Mafia connections, as if they were a harmless fantasy, indulged occasionally but never taken seriously. It was part of the man’s charm, Augustus had come to see, the clownish front with behind it real power. Gianni, believe me, if we need to apply pressure you’ll be the first to know—then when he saw Cardillo needed to know the offer was understood as genuine—I promise, seriously. I know we can count on you. I appreciate it. Here come the girls.