A Day and a Night and a Day: A Novel (11 page)
“I'll help you into the chair.”
During the interrogation Harper hasn't touched him but now he puts his hands under Augustus's arms from behind and with one smooth hike (so powerful it brings Augustus's infancy back for a moment) has him seated.
“Oh,” Harper says. “Wait.”
The soles of the feet. You wouldn't think it. But if you reflect there's really only one context in which you hear the phrase. Augustus sits with his legs lifted, as if (the mind goes about its associative business regardless) Harper's about to run a vacuum cleaner over the place. As a child Augustus couldn't bear it if he had to do this when his mother vacuumed, there was something in the gesture that made him feel corrupt, as if he were laughing at her, as if she were his slave!
Harper fetches one of the guards' chairs. “Stretch your legs out.”
Not easy, a surge of sweat and despair, but Harper slides the seat under his calves and Augustus lets himself go limp. Harper brings the Evian, opens it and hands it to him. It's cold enough to hurt, lightnings where the teeth are missing, goes down his throat in knots. Harper holds the bottle's plastic cap up.
“People hear that little hymeneal snap of the seal breaking on a bottle they feel safe. That's something, isn't it? Packaging as retroactive terrorism. A guy buys a bottle of Coke for his daughter turns out to be poisoned. She drinks it and dies. But it turns out too that the seal had been broken and he didn't check. What do people think? Guy
deserved
it. Idiot.”
Augustus finishes the water, wants more, much more though it's frozen his palate. The small refreshment makes him tearful, his body's readiness to go on, biology's dumb dedication.
Red blood cells rush to the site of injury
. As a kid he'd imagined them as fire trucks: sirens, manful determination, teamwork, sacrifice.
“Let me ask you something,” Harper says. “Does it seem crazy to you now that you thought you'd be able to do this?”
For Augustus the water's brought back the horror of hope. Before they'd broken off he'd been close to something, a space just before unconsciousness or insensibility in which, as Harper had said, there was pure awareness, observation without investment or concern. They can't let you enter that state. In that state you don't care, and if you don't care they've got nothing to work with. So they pause. Give you water. The body recouples itself to the soul.
Tears hurry out of his eyes then stop abruptly.
“To plan it,” Harper says. “To make the plan work. Feeling of absurdity never crept in?”
“No.”
“I'm glad you say that. It's one of the things I'm attracted to in you, this understanding of how easily within reach the extraordinary is, this faith in your own powers of execution. It happens we got the intelligence. We might just as easily not have. Next time maybe we won't. These things hang on threads. Hell of a way to make a living.”
“It's not how I make a living.”
“Right, I forgot. Front-line journalist turned chef.”
Augustus wants to correct himâ
restaurateur, not chef
âbut is forced by the idiom “to make a living” into a compressed vision, a split-second glimpse of a thousand human labors, from naked hominids loping with spears to lab-coated scientists at the Large Hadron Collider. History happened so fast and pointlessly, he thinks. And if the planet doesn't give up on us before we find a way of doing without, it will go on happening forever, one way or another. The hardest myth to let go of is the myth of ending.
“Do you think of it as capitulation?” Harper asks. For a moment Augustus thinks he means leaving journalism for the restaurant businessâbut Harper adds, “The embrace of violence?”
Augustus closes his eyes and again feels the dark curtain ready to drop. Knights wore armor so heavy that if knocked to the ground they couldn't get up. He tries to imagine getting up himself, tests his limbs for readiness but gets no response. The effort makes him want to vomit. He does in fact heave, but nothing comes up. The plastic bottle falls from his hand and rolls away across the floor.
“I don't think about it,” he says.
“Sure you do. Come on.”
“If the law goes, it's not capitulation,” Augustus says. “It's all that's left.”
“And you think the law's gone?”
“At the highest levels.”
“You were in Central America in the 'eighties, right?”
“El Salvador. The highest levels have always operated above the law. It's just that now it's open.”
“It's been open for years. The Nicaragua ruling was a public turning point, a coming to full self-consciousness; not just the administration, the whole country. An idea whose time had come, that the United States would judge all and be judged by none. The last inevitable flowering of manifest destiny.”
“I have to move,” Augustus says.
“Go ahead.”
With another queasy effort Augustus maneuvers himself partly onto his side in the chair, in careful increments gets his weight rearranged. The pain hierarchy's established; he knows what to favor, where pressure can be borne. Still the room spins for a moment.
“It's a real shame your guy's hit on Bush failed,” Harper says. “I'd love to have seen it. There's boredom gathered around the man now, that feeling of playing it out because there's still time on the clock. He's done what he's going to do, don't you think?”
“I'm not an optimist,” Augustus says. “There's plenty of time for more.”
“He's fascinating at close quarters.”
“I'll take your word for it.”
“There's an autism that comes with invulnerability.”
“I thought you said these things hung on threads?”
“They do, but he doesn't know that. The invulnerability's a delusion but you can't blame him for it. All the skeletons are outâimbecility, greed, corruption, hypocrisy, criminality, contempt for thinkingâand yet the sun still shines and water comes out the tap when he turns it.”
Augustus wants to ask for more water (partially slaked thirst is worse, gives righteous anger to what's left) but the risk of upsetting this balance holds him back.
“I would, actually, have liked to see it,” Harper repeats. “I've nothing against him except the obtuseness and the look like a huffy chimp. All my objections are aesthetic. But I'd have been curious to see what Americans would have done with the event.”
“It's not too late,” Augustus says. “You can shoot him yourself.”
Harper's smile is bright, concedes deep recognition. “Maybe I will,” he says. “I'm vulnerable to boredom.”
Augustus feels the subject in danger of closing, forces himself wider awake. “Can I ask you something?” he says.
“Anything.”
“What will you do if I don't have the information you want?”
“If you have it you'll give it. You know this is right. And you do have it. Or at least I believe you have it, which comes to the same thing.”
“Hypothetically. Say I die of a heart attack right now.”
“Hypothetically? If I didn't have the information I'd make it up. Which in the movie would be your cue to say: âMake it up anyway. I won't tell.'”
“You should work in Hollywood.”
“It's on the cards. Entertainment's the natural complement but very few make the transition. The really strong appeal for me right now is in icon management. You know about this?”
For a second Augustus thinks desktop iconsâknows it can't be. Then sees: “As in Madonna?”
“Yeah, but not just a pop star or a movie star or a sports star, although you'd want some of them to do those things. What we're looking at is the creation of icons, manufactured characters eventually forming a pantheon like the gods of antiquity. The product content is their traits, their maxims, their loves and hatesâeverything you get with current stars in an incidental way, except in this case it won't be incidental, it'll be designed and presented from the outset. Neopolytheism. You see it, right? Temples, symbols, rites, initiates. Merchandise across the spectrum.”
“There's a woman who prays to David Beckham.”
“I know! I saw that. The potential's there. Obviously you're not going to touch the existing religions, but what about the millions who don't have divinity in their life but want it? There's an immense opportunity but it requires a grasp of how needy and dumb people really are. So far we've only scratched the surface. Think of David Beckham if we'd got in on the ground floor. Kate Moss.
Britney
for Christ's sake. People need gods. Postmodern pluralism and the pick-and-mix mindset makes polytheism the obvious revival. Popular culture's been screaming for a new pantheon for decades.”
“You can't manufacture divinity like that.”
“We couldn't manufacture celebrity like that either in the past but we can now. This is
American Idol
. The transition between ob
scurity and fame used to be mysterious. Now it's transparent. The message is there's nothing special about this person but we're going to tell you there is and you're going to respond as if there is. Cut to a billion dollars later.”
Augustus knows Harper's right and it gives him a feeling of muscular relief to be leaving the world. His body gets a premonitory sense of itself shed like an overcoat. The people he loved are gone anyway. God's been burned up but the habit of imagining meeting the dead persists. A pleasant place of white stone floors and flowering jasmine, blue sky, the crowds of history milling as in a Roman forum, his mother somewhere among them. He knows it's a fantasy, which at this moment pierces him because it means never Selina again either. You live for years with beliefs you'd deny having then the end comes and takes even them away. For a second he doesn't care if the conversation diesâthen does. Riddled with life though you can barely move.
“I see you in P.R.,” Augustus says. “Illegal wars need good image-makers.”
“Right,” Harper says. “But I'm tired of dealing with the suits. These guys don't know how to relax. There's not enough music and dancing in my life.”
“Inside you're dancing.”
Harper chuckles, giddily. “It's a real shame we didn't meet under different circumstances,” he says. “You're a person of quality. We could have done good things together I think.”
“We don't see things the same way.”
“Sure we do. No God, life's meaningless, religions are fairy stories, morality's an illusion, political ideologies are the front men for brute force⦔ Delivered as lilting recitation. “It's all
force in the end. The most refined justice system on the planet's underwritten by force. You say if the law goes all there is left is violence. The law's just the violence of the weak majority. We're all the children of Achilles. You know this is right.”
“Okay let me go and I'll join you in the icon business.”
Harper laughs, again with genuine spontaneity. “Oh man, wish I could. But come on. This stuff you can't even have the conversation. Morality, meaning, truth, the terms are embarrassments. They're like bloated old aunts who should shuffle off and die. The prerequisite for intellectuals now is the acknowledgment of the absurdity of the intellectual life. Philosophy is to politics what boxing is to total war.”
It's so long since Augustus thought or spoke in these terms he can't hold them. He's desperate to ask for more water but the risk of checking Harper's flow outweighs his thirst.
“Without God or some other Absolute it doesn't matter what you do, except consequentially, strategically. You know this. People know this, they just can't stand it. Instead they go backwardâbackward into religion or backward into progressive humanism, which is just as much a myth as Christianity and the rest. Religion's doing so well these daysâwhy do you think that is? It's because it's taken this long for Nietzsche to sink in. God's been dead since
The Gay Science
but the collective psyche's only just got the news. People are flocking to Islam and Christianity in the biggest act of denied epiphany in historyâbelieving because they finally know it's not true. I have this vision of Jack Nicholson from
A Few Good Men
, a huge hologram of his head floating in the sky looking down at the world and going
The truth? You can't
hairndle
the truth!
”
The Barcelona hotel got British newspapers, erratically: an
Independent
the morning he and Selina had breakfast in bed. She'd read him the headlines.
Climate Change Sceptics Point to New Data
. Jesus, she'd said, who'd be young in this century? At least when we were kids we thought however much bullshit there was there was also really a way things were. Now there's no way things are, only claims about the way things are. For every position a counter-position and the positions themselves nothing to do with the way things are but with the way it's advantageous to say things are. There's information everywhere. It's like some godawful ubiquitous schizophrenia. I met a cosmologist the other week who told me it's statistically as likely that the universe is a computer simulation as that it's real.
“Don't you agree?” Harper says.
“Yes, I agree.”
“And yet here we are. You're holding out on me. You're protecting people.”
“It seems so.”
“Why?”
“I can't help it.”
“Without first principles.”
“I can't help it.”
Harper nods, lowers his eyelids: He's seen this before, understands. He fishes out the soft pack of Winstons. Maybe seven or eight left. Augustus supposes he, Augustus, will be dead before they've all been smoked, gets a foreboding of the world exactly the same but for the presence of his consciousness, knows too that lighting upâagain Harper leans closeâwill set the clock ticking. Nonetheless he inhales deeply. Cigarettes, kisses, cups
of coffee, fucks, candy bars, apologies, birthdays, dreamsâa certain number of each gone like motes passing through a shaft of sunlight. His mother said angels with ledgers kept track of these details but has gone herself now through the incinerator into nothingness.