A Day and a Night and a Day

by Glen Duncan

  Now, as Harper moves closer with the raised gun pointed directly at his head and the speed of these last moments makes him think of atoms in a particle accelerator, he knows it was both, that the dumb belief in being with her again has never entirely gone, that it takes the genuine imminence of death to blow away the last cobwebs of habit. The Gospels talked of Jesus in the final moment of the Passion “giving up his spirit.” This is what he should do now, consign himself with whatever grace to whatever power—except there is no grace and there is no power, only his consciousness desperately grabbing every detail and even now, even now rifling every file for a strategy, something, anything that will make Harper—

  “The truth is,” Harper says, “I don’t think I’ll be doing this much longer. It’s become boring. As I said, I’m susceptible to boredom. My curiosity’s been shifting away. I think the guys who can keep going with this year after year are secretly waiting for God, for comeuppance. As trajectories toward belief go it’s pretty radical but still…” He chuckles. “In the end it’s because they want faith. Do you remember that scene in Cool Hand Luke? Paul Newman in the rain shouting up into the sky for God to do whatever it takes—love me, hate me, kill me, anything, just let me know you’re up there! Same thing with these guys. Faith by provocation.”

  Augustus feels stretched, as if his consciousness is a length of elastic, one end fixed to the here and now, the other pulling into the space where the afterlife should be, straining for the faintest sign of his mother, Selina, Cardillo, even poor Harry the bartender who died, painfully, of lung cancer back in the early nineties, anyone from history’s billions of dead who can say yes, there’s something, don’t panic, it’s not the end.

  “It’s not impossible I’ll become a saint,” Harper says. “Morality, like the planet, is round. I’ve traveled so far from virtue I must be very close to reaching it again, and from the other side this time, the inside I like to think. It’s like, there’s this girl I’ve been seeing. She’s insatiably curious too, but only in the sack. We spent probably three or four months doing all the perversions, as many as we could think of, pretty much everything. You know what we do now, what we’ve arrived at? Penetrative sex, naked, in the dark, usually in the missionary position. Kissing. We do a lot of kissing, like teenagers.”

  “Mr. Harper?”

  Unseen and unheard by Augustus and Harper, the doctor has come in and is standing in the shadows. Harper, having started at the voice, laughs. “Jeez, doc, you scared the shit out of me.”

  Augustus has just time to begin willing the doctor to mean somehow not death, just that, no details but a gush of raw need, before something extraordinary happens.

  At the sound—the discharge of a single shot from a silencered handgun—Augustus becomes weirdly aware of his mouth, his whole face locked in a grimace. He’s wondered what getting shot would feel like, imagined the entry line white-hot, searing, a smell of burned flesh and the bullet’s instant raging dictatorship in a smashed bone or punctured organ. Whatever he’s imagined it’s not this warm numbness and heightened consciousness of his face and scalp, his face and scalp pulled in terror. There’s no pain, only an acute awareness of his particular dimensions, where his fingernails and hairs and lips meet empty space. He hears himself making small sounds, then is somehow deafened by the sight of Harper (who’s dropped his weapon) raising with peculiar slow care both hands to a darkly bleeding wound in his throat, swallowing, hugely, lifting one leg in a bizarre loss of balance. Augustus finds himself sitting up. He’s unfastened the first of the leg restraints. The doctor steps out of the shadow with his right hand raised, holding a silencered gun at the level of Harper’s face. Harper drops to one knee, still swallowing as if struggling to get a lump of food down, his hands and shirt dark with blood. The doctor fires again, missing completely, then a third time straight into Harper’s forehead. The shots sound as they do on television but crisper, with in the bare-walled room a little resonance.

  Augustus goes on with the second leg restraint while the doctor checks Harper’s pulse. They move together in silence, as if all this has been rehearsed, Augustus with compressed urgency, the doctor with the same professional calm Augustus sensed during the surgery on his eye.

  “Is he dead?”

  “Yes. Get into his clothes, quick.”

  “Are you Sentinel?”

  “What? No. Move fast if you want out of here.”

  Despite everything it’s agony for Augustus to stand. His feet send violent signals as soon as he puts weight on them. For a second he thinks he’s going to pass out, has to grab the bed until he can make room for the pain. His ribs knife his heart getting the hospital gown off and Harper’s clothes on. The Timberland boots are a size too big but he slides his screaming feet into them. He helps the doctor roll Harper’s body under the bed. Questions swarm but he asks none. He keeps the bigger part of himself in disbelief. He hasn’t accepted Harper’s dead, will never move or speak again. Nonetheless there’s this moment of his appearing to be dead. The room’s dark space and wedge of light from the latrine are sympathetic, suddenly, as if they’ve been waiting for this too.

  “Agree to do exactly as I say or I’ll shoot you myself,” the doctor says, quietly.

  “Whatever you say,” Augustus says.

  The doctor goes out of the room and returns with a gurney. On it, an unzipped body bag. “Hurry up,” he says. “Get in. Once you’re in, don’t move at all. You move, we both die. Understand? No matter what, you don’t move.”

  Augustus gets up and slides into the bag. The doctor zips it not quite completely closed. Within seconds the heat’s stifling, but they’re on the move. Augustus’s memory is innocently trying to make a connection, some game they must have played as kids in Harlem, a shopping cart…The gurney goes bone-shakingly over something, a cable maybe. Augustus has no idea of the place’s layout but they seem to move unaccosted for hours. In reality maybe two minutes. Then a man’s voice asking in Moroccan Arabic: Which one? And the doctor replying: The American. Who’s on duty in C-Block?

  Augustus doesn’t catch the reply. Doors slam. They move down a slight incline. Morocco? Which means if he can get to the safe house in Rabat—but no. It’s compromised. He probably gave Harper the address. More doors, cell doors by the sound, steel bolts sliding. Sweat trickles down the left side of his face. Several men’s voices away to his left and the sound of a television or radio. Two more sets of doors. The heat of the bag’s like the inside of a boxing glove.

  Then, suddenly, the smell of outside. Dust and petrol and concrete and wild thyme. A rougher surface under the gurney’s wheels. They stop. Augustus desperately wants to move his head, to see if he can catch a glimpse of the world through the gap in the zip, but you move, we both die.

  He keeps still, decodes the sounds: a van door opening. Do you want any help? No, I can manage. Again Moroccan Arabic. Every moment now is incredible, his time is an incredible blooming into mystery.

  The doctor’s reply has been ignored because the other male voice says suddenly close to Augustus’s head in Arabic: Got a cigarette, doc? Augustus closes his eyes, imagining the zipper being pulled down, the fresh air against his face. If the guard opens the bag and looks in he won’t be able to pretend death. Something will give him away.

  But of course the guard doesn’t open the bag. Why would he? Instead between him and the doctor Augustus feels himself lifted briefly and deposited on a firm cushioned surface. He smells antiseptic. An ambulance? Someone fastens straps across him. The doctor says, in Arabic: Three left. Take these. I’ve got a fresh pack. Thanks. See you tomorrow. Augustus expects Inshallah. If Allah wills it. It’s what he’d say, what it’s become second nature to say, in his pidgin Arabic, but the door slams and one set of footsteps recedes. The driver door opens, closes, the vehicle rocks slightly.

  “Don’t move or speak until I tell you,” the doctor says. All Augustus’s hard work toward not caring about anything has been wiped out. How much time since
he gave them his contacts? Future generations will thank the elephant. Please God please God please God but he knows it’s been days. He remembers falling asleep with his head in Elise’s lap in the hotel room in Barcelona, the clean denim smell of her jeans. If you still feel this way in a month, call me on this number. Can this really be his life? Is there really a series of moments reaching all the way back to East Harlem, the first roachy apartment, Clarence hitting him in the face, his mother’s fingernails on his bare back, his monumental grandfather saying get that nigger brat out of here?

  Checkpoint. Lights revolving, Augustus thinks. A brief pause. Then through. The doctor’s been driving slowly but now speeds up. They’re traveling uphill.

  The explosion, when it comes, hammers on the walls of the ambulance. Augustus in the boxing-glove heat of the bag jackknifes but is held by the straps. A second detonation, louder than the first, seems to lift the vehicle’s back wheels off the ground. Augustus struggles but his arms are pinned. He twists his head but the tiny gap in the zip shows only darkness. He hears the driver door open and close, feels the doctor’s jump down. The back doors open. The doctor unzips the bag and unfastens the straps. “You’re out,” he says. “You’ll want to see this.”

  Augustus wriggles out of the bag, crashes to his knees and looks back.

  The camp, the detention center, the prison (he’s never thought of it as anything other than “the place” or “in here”) is ablaze. Cumulus-thick smoke expands in what looks like time lapse spasms. Cicadas, silenced by the explosion, are starting up again. There are no sirens, no sounds or signs of movement. Only the oranged darkness and convulsing smoke.

  “We have to move,” the doctor says. “Get back in.”

  “Who are you?”

  “No one. It’s personal. Not you. Him.”

  “Harper?”

  “Yes. Get in or I’ll leave you here.”

  They switch from the ambulance to a Peugeot and from that to a two-seater van that belongs to a drain cleaning company. “I don’t have a plan for you,” the doctor says. “You can’t come with me. I can give you medicine and some cash but that’s it.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I can take you as far as Rabat. Then we separate.”

  “Why did you—”

  “He hurt someone close to me.”

  “The other prisoners?”

  “That’s on my conscience. They were dead anyway. See if there’s any money in his pockets. Can you walk?”

  “I need a phone. You have a cell phone?”

  Augustus calls the numbers. No answer from Elise. No answer from Jacques Dertier. He gets through to Marie, has time only to tell her they’re all compromised, get underground—before the battery dies.

  “Rabat’s no use to me,” Augustus says. “I need an out.”

  “A what?”

  “I need the means to get out. I have to get to a phone. Where are we?”

  The next filling station is closed but has a phone on the forecourt. Augustus calls Darlene collect in New York.

  It takes him a moment, hearing her voice (and what he believes is the background noise of one of his restaurants) to find his own. His throat knots as Darlene, hearing nothing, says Hello? a second time, with calculated impatience. Nothing’s changed. Darlene’s a Manhattanite. Her meter’s running. You’re wasting her time. In two seconds a whole way of life he left behind is brought to the other end of a phone. Somehow he manages to speak—and in speaking remembers why he picked her for this job in the first place. “Darlene, it’s Augustus. I need you to listen very carefully and do exactly as I tell you. This is an emergency, a matter of life and death. Do you understand?”

  It takes a long time, even with Darlene’s unnatural composure and efficiency. Waiting for her call back he rests his head against the metal plate behind the phone. The doctor sits with the van door open, smoking a cigarette. The man’s reservoir’s empty. Augustus understands: Certain actions use up your last power without you realizing it was all you had left. No doubt there’s a plane ticket, a plan, an out. But it’s just as likely that if Augustus doesn’t rouse him he’ll simply sit here in the drain cleaners’ van and wait for the security forces to pick him up. He hurt someone close to me. This is the risk the Harpers run, the Husains. Provoke someone into being prepared to die as long as you die too and you’re never safe again.

  Darlene calls back. She can be in Casablanca at five-thirty tomorrow afternoon, Delta to Paris, Air France to Morocco.

  On a blue-skied afternoon four days before Christmas Augustus stands on the hill in the snow, thinking of something Selina said in the hotel room just before dawn. The two of them had been lying on the bed, unstrung from too much sex and alcohol, drifting in and out of conversation. I used to think it was just the kids today who were infatuated with emptiness, Selina had said, but it’s bigger than that. I’ve got friends, smart, educated, grown-up people, who suddenly find the alleged fakeness and corruption of everything exhilarating. Why is that? After a pause, she’d slurred: I don’t expect you to answer that, by the way. I know I’ve fucked you practically to death. Augustus had kissed her knees and said, I think I’ve got at least one more in me. What do you say, white girl? Then he’d fallen asleep.

  They never went back to the subject, but he knows what he’d say to her now: They find the alleged fakeness and corruption of everything exhilarating because it frees them from having to do anything about it. If the world’s a lost cause you’re at liberty to think of nothing but your own pleasure. Cynicism licenses hedonism. He’d sensed this drift in his last years in Manhattan, a cold delight in the unmasked bankruptcy of everything, the entire human project. Harper had been right about the millennium. The failure of the world to end, or at least suffer a transformation, had forced the species into a status report. The status report in the West was that the Enlightenment had failed, or rather had succeeded in leading us to its logical extremity, nihilism. Augustus had subscribed to it himself, living his life of new overcoats and casual sex and consumer preferences and movies and continual irritation. If he thinks back to the time just before he met Selina in Barcelona he remembers feeling constantly tired, not physically, but, underlyingly, of everything. He was a good example: it took the millennium, the great Non-Ending and the willingness of time to go on indefinitely to make the whole western world realize how tired it was of itself, its ways, its projects, its values, its beliefs. This also is the tired franchise, Harper had said, the Future. Exhaustion was everywhere, some of it manic, some of it urbane, some of it brutish, but all nausea at the prospect of Carrying On. He supposes, though he’s too far gone from the world to check, that optimists will regard the rise of Islamism as a blessing in disguise. It’ll take the threatened destruction of Enlightenment values to remind us they’re perhaps not so laughably shitty after all, spawn a humanist renaissance, produce a new Leonardo Da Vinci or Shakespeare, wake the West up to what it’s got and what it stands to lose. It’s just the latest version of absolute certainty, Selina had said, when channel-surfing had turned up footage of self-proclaimed jihadis burning a U.S. flag and firing automatic weapons into the air. Absolute certainty beyond the need for conversation. Beyond tolerance of conversation. I’m against absolute certainty everywhere except in pure mathematics. It had reminded Augustus of Juliet’s version of the Crucifixion, in which a great, heartbreaking meal was made of Jesus’s moment of doubt: My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Can you imagine what horrible agony that must have been for poor Jesus? Juliet would ask, rhetorically. To think that after all he’d been through, all that suffering, his father had abandoned him? In later years she and Augustus laughed at how she could bring him to tears with this performance—but the meaning of the story stayed with him. Doubt was written in. Doubt, sanctioned by Christ himself, was human. God had a soft spot for doubt. But the yelling and gun-waving young men in the news footage admitted no doubt. They looked as if doubt was punishable by death.

  Augustus’s
eye waters as he lets the memory dissolve. The air’s a purged element between the snow and the blue sky, offers a dizzying clarity, suggests ghosts—or else he’s going mildly nuts. Several times lately coming out of a reverie he’s seen—or half-seen, or imagined, or glimpsed with the eye that’s no longer there—Selina or Juliet or Harper whisking away just a moment before he can get a perceptual grip. Initially he explained it as his own doing, an effort to put something into the world worth staying alive for. But if he’s honest he must admit that while he’s thought of himself since his escape as a man waiting to die, he’s never more than fleetingly considered actually killing himself. It was a shock to realize this and it came with a feeling of failure. How could what he’s been through have been that bad if he’s still here? Colloquially he knows this would be the will to live. But that rings false, too. It’s really that since his escape he’s been convinced that if he just hangs around for a while the world will do him the favor of finishing him off. On the one hand he knows he’s entitled to end his own life; on the other, when he contemplates the practicalities, the how and the where and the when, an invisible collective headed by Juliet (but somehow including himself) weighs in with withering scorn. Absurd melodrama. Incredibly, this is the judgment: yes, you can have your eye gouged out, be reduced to a whimpering baby, beg for mercy, offer up your friends to save yourself—but still, it’s absurd melodrama to let all that drive you to kill yourself. Perhaps that’s what the will to live really is, the intimation that suicide’s bad art.

  Morwenna was still asleep when he left the croft. These mornings when he gets up he wakes her and she takes his place on the camp-bed, sometimes completing the maneuver without once opening her eyes. She sleeps for hours. Epic cellular recouping is going on. The jellyfish bruise has faded. Augustus keeps asking himself what he’s going to do when the snow melts. The thought of spring, blowing apple blossom or shivering forget-me-nots—or worse, summer, warmth enough to sit with your bare feet in the sun, brings him to a rolling boil of panic so rapidly that he has to move, create the distraction of physical challenge to calm himself. He turns and starts down the hill for the croft.