A Day and a Night and a Day: A Novel (26 page)

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 with
out 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.

 

O
n 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 he
donism. 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 abso
lute 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.

 

He's lucky. First in that it's his habit to move quietly and second in that he hears the unfamiliar voice while he's still outside.

“Look at the fucking
state
of this place. How can you stand it?”

“Don't wreck it, Paulie, please.”

“Jesus Christ it's a
shit
-hole.”

Augustus keeps very still, surprised in the detached part of
himself at how you forget this level of alertness, this hypersensitivity of skin and hair. The body, as he's learned, supplies effects on causal demand. Adrenaline rushes to the sites of action. There in his knees is the feeling of pooled weakness that is in fact sprung readiness.

The question is: the front door or the back door? He can see himself doing it, one hand holding the gun steady at just below chest height, the other flinging the door open. The front door involves a step up. The back door involves creeping and ducking two windows. And in any case it's irrational to suppose that just because it's the back door he'll have his back to it. He. Him. Paulie, whose rule is no smack and at first it's like you're a princess.

Augustus shifts the weight to his good leg. The gun's a thing of humming sentience against his chest, sensing proximal destiny, the call to its function. Even without relinquishing the stick he should be able to get a good grip on the—

Suddenly the door flies open. Augustus doesn't have much time to take Paulie in—registers artfully chopped dark hair, bony good looks, maroon leather jacket—before he's grabbed by his coat collar and yanked stumbling over the threshold into the croft. The stick gets away from him and he crashes to his knees.

Morwenna's on her side on the floor, struggling to get up. Her mouth's bleeding. She's got one elbow under her but keeps the other arm wrapped around her abdomen.

“Oh this is great, this is. Please tell me this rancid old coon's not sticking it in you?”