A Day and a Night and a Day: A Novel (25 page)

It was just after eight when they left the church. The lamp-lit streets were warm and busy. (Until now Augustus had been Americanly baffled at how bad so many European cities smelled. In Barcelona as in Rome as in Marseille as in Athens there was a ubiquitous double act of blocked drains and ammoniacal cleaner that could hit you like a karate chop to the gullet. The sidewalks frequently stank of urine and dog shit. Now—how not?—the reek was honest and human, a celebration of messy life.) They walked up to the pedestrianized Avenida Portal de l'Angel, halfheartedly perusing restaurant menus along the way.

“Let's go and see something dumb,” Selina said. They'd stopped outside a theater showing American movies.

“That's not going to be hard. Look at the selection.”

“Oh wait. El Corte Inglés. I should go here.” Opposite the movie theater was a large department store.

“For the Satchel.”

“For the Satchel. I can feel it. You choose a movie and get tickets. I'll meet you back here in ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. Pick the dumbest one.”

Yes. You let her go briefly for the pleasure of her coming toward you out of the crowd. Revenge on all those times you thought it was her but it wasn't.

“Hey.”

She turned. “What?”

There was nothing he could say that wouldn't have the sound of tempting fate. She saw it.

“Don't go anywhere,” she said.

He watched her and she turned back several times to see him watching her. A few yards from the store, turning back from giving him another look, she walked straight into a litter bin, stumbled and almost fell over. It looked like a finely tuned bit of slapstick, but it was an accident. Immediately she turned again, laughing, waving him back. He was laughing too. It's okay, she mouthed. I'm fine. I'm fine. There was an old guy selling flowers there next to her and
he
was laughing, one arm extended to her as if steadying her aura. Augustus watched her exchange a few words with him. The bin had left a smudge on her skirt. She brushed at it a couple of times, gave up, waved to him, grinning, then turned and went into the store.

 

“I
have to execute you.”

Augustus, still holding the Styrofoam cup, feels how far he's traveled from the wanting-to-die of the interrogations. That wasn't a wish to die but a wish to stop suffering. It was just that he couldn't imagine anything other than death with the power to grant it. Since they took his eye he's worked hard (or so he'd thought) at not caring, letting the fragments of self swirl but not
cohere. Now, when Harper steps into the latrine's wedge of light with a gun in his right hand the fragments rush back together and there's nothing he can do but yield to the fear that he really is going to die right now and the hope that somehow he isn't.

Your hands are free
. The brain can't help it. The brain's compelled to throw in whatever might be useful. He has no strength, no weapons, nowhere to go. Harper moves out of the light then stops again. “I'm finding it difficult,” he says.

If you're not in extreme pain you don't want to die. You're a disfigured prisoner who could be shot any time but you want life right up until the end. Light still comes and goes in the frosted glass. There's still a cigarette, cold coffee, disgorged memories. There's still speculation and the margin of anesthetic bliss just before sleep. The blanket still feels good around you. There remains your poor body asking if it's still a deal between you.

“Children who don't have rules and boundaries become hyperactive and irritable,” Harper says. “This is the current thinking. They want dos and don'ts, discipline, parameters. Without restraints their own potential's like vertigo.”

For a surreal moment (although all these moments are surreal) Augustus thinks Harper's about to start talking about his
own
childhood, with what would be laughable belatedness begin looking for explanations in his distant past. But no. It's an analogy.

“I find myself irritable,” Harper says. “It's the freedom. Like wealth or sex or cocaine. This is a basic wisdom I'm only just acquiring: too much of what you want leads to irritation, an impatience with yourself. I'm often late in my insights.”

Augustus is alert with every cell. All aspects of himself have
pooled resources to make sure he doesn't say or do anything that will nudge Harper from holding the trigger to pulling it. He's rushing up an incline that will end in a sheer drop into the great empty answer, that there's nothing beyond this life. The last moments' urgent message is that they are the last moments, precious bright beautiful granules of time, but the last. You want time to sift them, to raise them up to the light, to enjoy them, but they're all the time you have. In El Corte Inglés Selina was one of the people nearest the blast. Despite what had been done to her body her face was wholly recognizable. At the morgue Meredith had insisted on seeing her daughter's remains, though Augustus had offered to go in alone. There was Selina's face, one large cut in an almost perfect diagonal from left to right but otherwise absolutely her. The little silver scar under her bottom lip testified, as if this was what it had come into her life for. He remembered the footage he'd imagined, her running, laughing with the glass jar of nickels and pennies across a green lawn in warm sunshine, the trip, the smash, the hot pain and shocking taste of her own blood. She'd told him it was the first time the world shifted for her, showed her it could open under her feet or block out the sun. She'd said, I was such a little monster, I was
out
raged that the world would suddenly turn on me like that. On
me
, its darling, its
point
. Augustus had stood next to Meredith and felt rather than seen the old woman taking in the wrongness of the shape under the white sheet, the declivities and gaps, a landscape of terrible absences. He'd thought of horror movie corpses, shark attack victims, afterward told himself it would have been better to see everything, to leave his imagination nothing to work with. Outside the building in Barcelona's crisp morning sunlight Meredith had said: Your
generation's weighed down with all this idiotic chatter about what to do about these maniacs. This slew of tolerance, it's like the sewers have ruptured and no one's noticed they're swimming in shit. Don't you know wretched stupid ignorant evil when you see it? My daughter was a force of beauty in the world and now…She'd been unable to finish, fractured against the word “beauty.” Augustus had said nothing, watched her turn and get into the waiting car. After she'd gone he'd stood on the steps smoking a cigarette, remembering Juliet telling him that in heaven people who'd lost limbs would have them back again, the blind would be able to see, the crippled to walk, the deaf to hear. The wrongness of Selina's shape under the death sheet was giant, an error he couldn't imagine the universe—the mere continued existence of things—failing to put right. There must be a heaven because there
couldn't
be only the hell of such subtraction. It wasn't that he couldn't bear never seeing her again, it was that he couldn't bear her never being herself again.

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.