A Day and a Night and a Day: A Novel (22 page)

So the moment had been lost. He'd got up, stood for a while watching the water, conscious of his flesh knitting where the sutures itched, then with great difficulty in the failing light inched and slithered back down the hill.

Out of boredom, he knows, she asks him about his life or tells him about hers.

“What's a proxy?”

“Someone who stands in for you when you're not there.”

“And that's what this Darlene does?”

The truth is Darlene could've cleared out by now for all he
knows. He hasn't spoken to her since coming to Calansay. I want someone who can run the show, he told his lawyer. Make all the decisions. I draw a salary. I'm out of it. That's all. Cardillo left six restaurants to Juliet, in which the mob had what amounted to a 50 percent stake. She made a deal, signed four of the restaurants over completely, kept two for herself. When she died in 1983 she had two more of her own places up and running. Augustus inherited.

“So you stopped being a journalist?”

“I became a restaurateur.”

It sounds, he realizes, like the result of deliberation. But by the time of Juliet's death it was simply that he couldn't stand what he was doing. El Salvador had made him sick, not with its corpses or its corruption or its crash course in U.S. moral bankruptcy, but by his own apathy. He didn't, in the end, care.
Fuoco dentro di te
, Juliet had said, the fire inside you. It means you're going to do something big in life. Fire, yes, but since he'd had (and lost) love it wouldn't burn in anything else. Love was the big thing. This was his deformity. His theorist rationalized it down to racial liminality, the rootlessness of being neither one thing nor the other, an inconvenient mix of black and white, ghetto and academe, no home in Faith thanks to Reason and no faith in Reason thanks to History, so where
would
he find shelter if not in love?—but he'd spent enough time with Selina to suspect himself. He was just like millions of others, a lazy selfish coward. The Golden Years of protest and argument at the end of the sixties—who or what had it all been for? the soldiers? the Vietnamese? the Peace Movement? the principles of justice? It had been for Selina, which was to say it had been for himself.

After Michael's death it took less than a week for Selina to end things with Augustus. Superstition feasted on her: she'd killed her brother. She kept saying: It's no use, it's no use. But there was love. He'd be endlessly patient and gentle. There was love. Yet the gentler he was the stonier she became. In the end she said: You don't understand. I can't
fuck
you any more. What I
see
. Thirteen years later he was still hollow from the loss. On a tip he went with a photographer to La Rancheria to look at the remains of an Atlacatl Battalion raid: a woman, a man, a boy and girl of maybe ten and twelve, all decapitated. There was the usual unreality, the mildly surprising availability of laughter or dreamy dislocation. This was normal. But also a sudden grasp of his abiding delusion, that all his experience would one day be shared with Selina. He moved through his life haunted not by the past but by the future. He disgusted himself, though as with all such seizures of the soul it passed. The photographer took shot after shot, Augustus made notes, they were both inured. But he knew he had to get out. The death squads were murdering hundreds every month and governing his experience of it was the image of a time when he'd tell Selina all about it. The belief was that his life was still for her. He was an offense, a retardation. He lingered for a couple of months. Then came the message that Juliet was in the hospital.

“Costcutter fella says there's gonnie be more snow tonight,” Morwenna says. It's evening. They've eaten canned kippers on toast, potato chips, a bar of Cadbury's Fruit and Nut chocolate. “Another foot they're sayin.”

The forecast's a momentary relief to Augustus, who's in no hurry to discover the consequences of his recent choices. Momen
tary because delusory. This is the twenty-first century: if the consequences want him snow's not going to stop them.

“Bring it on,” he says. He knows she's glad of the weather for the same reason he is. You open the door and day after day the white landscape says the lockdown's still in place. Nothing's required. Questions are about what to eat, when to put another log on the fire, whether you want a cigarette. Under its roof's frozen pelt the croft sits in a stillness that says this time is finite but pure. Relish it, each second.

“Time for a wee dram?” she says.

“Sure.”

“For the cold, you know, for the cold,” in a falsetto she says is an imitation of a bag lady she knew in London. As of her last trip to the village there are two plastic tumblers with “
CALANSAY
” printed on them. Since the disastrous drinking session she adds water to her whiskey.

“D'you not miss it just now, New York?”

“Just now?”

“Well anytime. But I mean, Christmas. Must be great at Christmas there. All the skyscrapers lit up.”

“I can't say I miss it,” Augustus says. “I haven't lived there for quite a while.” After quitting journalism he'd resided almost twenty years in Manhattan (in what used to be Cardillo's apartment) running the restaurants without ever regaining the Selinaera feeling of having his teeth in life's throat. His days had shape, content, challenge, conflict, no soul. No
passione per la vita
, as Juliet would've said, no
fuoco
. Naturally there were flings, affairs (two less fierce versions of love, which for the women involved
were
the fierce version—therefore wreckage) but as his thirties
gave way to his forties he began to be aware of a constant mild nausea at…(he pictured himself sitting opposite a shrink and having to come up with what was bothering him)…well,
every-
thing. He did nothing extraordinary, ran the business, watched TV, read the newspaper, surfed the Web, bought a new coat every now and then, dated women—black, brown, white—consumed pornography, smoked, met friends for dinner, dreamed, honed anecdotes, got minor ailments. He had a life. He had the sort of life meant by the phrase “get a
life
.” But year on year the silt thickened. The meta-nausea was knowing the nausea wouldn't lead to anything. There was no revolution gestating, no psychic crash or religious conversion in the offing. He'd live with it, but this was what it would be like, a state of tolerable vapidity overlaid with entertainment and fucking. It was nothing. It was the deal. He was the protagonist in a million creative writing class short stories, one more quiet sufferer lost in the American Dream. He took antidepressants and managed the restaurants perfectly well. A TV ad he'd seen countless times would suddenly irritate him—Have it your way at Burger King—and if he stayed with it irritation became disgust and if he stayed too long with that despair. You saw how, incredibly, you became someone who ought to avoid reflection. The unexamined life is not worth living. The examined life was not worth bearing. He supposed he should devote himself to macrobiotics or feng shui or Led Zeppelin memorabilia. People said of shows like
Seinfeld
, it's a religion, and thought they were speaking figuratively.

“Oh aye Barcelona, I forget,” she says. “D'you speak Spanish then?”

“Yes.”

“How d'you say: Hello, my name's Morwenna?”

“
Buenos días, me llamo Morwenna
.”

She repeats it, solemnly. Meeyarmmo Morwenna. Then a sad smile that says she'll never remember it. Or have cause to use it. Her experience is like this, bits of paper blowing past her, she grasps one for a moment, starts to look, then it's snatched by the wind and gone.

 

In the small hours something wakes Augustus, though the room's silent—or rather bears the not quite silence of falling snow. Huge flakes descend like an angelic invasion. He lies still and watches, lets the repetition take him. Is it that each snowflake's unique? Something about fractals. Mandelbrot? Either way he's aware of entering this drowse to fend off the question of the girl and the future. The future's in the vicinity, a perpetual threat. He used to have a recurring dream of himself and a wolf trapped in the apartment building on 128th Street. He never actually saw it, but it was there, a presence. The dream was one of knowing that sooner or later he'd open a door or round a stairwell and there it would be. The future's like this, a padding predator. Sooner or later.

Morwenna sniffs, suddenly, with a rattle of mucus and a swallow that says otherwise silent crying. The snow light will show her face wet with tears if he looks down from the cot, so he keeps still, fixes his eyes on the drifting flakes, lets them take him again, like counting sheep.

 

I
t's dusk when Augustus wakes up. He's wet himself in his sleep but since he's once again in the restraints there's nothing he can do but lie
in it. Thinking of Joyce:
When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold
. He'd dreamed he was back in his Manhattan apartment. The whole front of the building had been blown off so that his sitting room fourteen floors up was open to the elements. Bit by bit, starting with light things—pencils, socks, papers—the contents of his home were being sucked out and carried away on a wind that spiraled up into the sky. He'd held on for as long as he could, but eventually, clinging to the arm of his sofa, he'd followed the rest of his possessions irresistibly up into the freezing darkness above the city.

The door unlocks and Harper comes in with a Styrofoam cup and something wrapped in a paper napkin. Another change of clothes: combat trousers, pale T-shirt and light canvas bomber jacket, a getup that convinces Augustus he's leaving, maybe even tonight. Augustus's model now is that the existing thing gets replaced by something worse. Better the devil you know.

“You awake?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want this?”

He lets Augustus out of the hand restraints and gives him what he's brought, tepid sweet coffee and some kind of savory pastry. Augustus tastes mincemeat, thyme, potato, peas. The coffee allowed to go tepid so there'd be no point throwing it in Harper's face. Does Harper still think he's capable of doing something like that? If the coffee had been scalding would the idea of using it have occurred? Augustus concludes it wouldn't. They've retained the notion of his potential for autonomous action. He's let it go. You let things go so there's less to care for.

“Something I never asked you,” Harper says. “Were you ever tempted?”

“Tempted?”

“By the whole thing: Husain. The peace of submission. The alleviation of the burden.”

Augustus remembers the early days of paranoia, when he was so afraid of exposure he stuck to the prayer times even if he was alone in his apartment, even
fajr
and
isha
. Ritual wears away reason. Mere repetition's enough to wear it away, much quicker than you'd think.
Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!
It wasn't long before he
was
in a kind of madness addressing God, dreamily asking for strength to do what he knew must be done. Need breeds faith, the need for vengeance no less than the need for consolation or love. Sometimes he'd get up for
fajr,
imagining hurrying straight back to bed afterward, but end up on his prayer mat for hours.

“I had a contained disease of belief going on,” he said. “A thing between myself and the Mystery I knew wasn't there. But I'd have got it anywhere, the church, Transcendental Meditation, kabbalah, the Hare Krishna, probably just by sitting down and staring at myself in the mirror or repeating the word ‘moron' for several hours a day. You can let yourself be led by it knowing it's nothing. It's reason using faith to get a job done.”

“But Husain himself? The group?”

“Different species. I was never tempted by that.”

There's a gentle elation about Harper just now. He's lit up by something inside. Augustus wonders if
he
's tempted by it, supposes according to the law of antithetical attraction he must be: All extremists risk conversion by their opposites, and what is Harper if not an extremist of flexibility?

“I'm not tempted,” Harper says, reading Augustus's one eye,
“but I'm fascinated by its success. I don't mean the success of its alleged goals, I mean the success it's had in simply mesmerizing the West. Liberal relativists say nothing's black and white. Fanatics reply by blowing them up. How do the liberal relativists respond? Broadly, by sitting around saying, ‘Wow, I guess those guys really don't agree with us. That's kind of amazing.' It's like a superfeminist sitting there coyly transfixed by a guy with an enormous cock saying I'm going to rape you, cunt. And that's not mentioning the superfeminist who sits there thinking it must be something she's
done
. The Chomskyites and bleeding hearts took 9/11 as an opportunity to educate the world about America's atrocities. As if it's ever going to be anything other than choosing your atrocities. What's wrong with people?”

For the first time Harper seems slightly rattled. There's the surface incredulity—What's wrong with people?—but beneath, an irritation.

“It's a death wish,” Augustus says. “And a vacuum where the big things we believed in used to be. Hard to care about a way of life when your way of life is lifestyles. Also there's envy: the fundamentalists might be crazy but they're not anorexics or credit card junkies. They don't know the peculiar despair of trying to project their individuality through a personalized cell phone jacket.” He's finished the pastry but still nurses the coffee, stone cold now.

“Death wish is right,” Harper says. He gets up, takes the smokes out of his top pocket, lights two and hands one to Augustus. The room's dark but for a wedge of light from the latrine. Harper, on his feet, moves about the room aimlessly, as if merely stretching his legs.