A Day and a Night and a Day: A Novel (12 page)

“You have feelings,” Harper says.

The nicotine's making Augustus dizzy. He wonders again how long he's been here, tries to remember the last thing he ate. Someone on the plane before it landed gave him a cellophaned samosa. Inés's junk email box will have something from Amnesty about western governments outsourcing interrogation. Occasionally she opens and skims these things but feels only another addition to the numberless messages adrift from their moorings. Outsourcing means call centers in Bangladesh.

“Can't seem to shake them.”

“I see this. You've left the path of reason.”

“You find that you do.”

Again Harper acknowledges with a nod. He blows a shuddering smoke ring both of them watch to see how long it holds its form. Longer than Augustus thought it would but still in only a few seconds it's gone. Which is his life and most likely Life. We love watching animals because they're constitutionally incapable of metaphor.

“Or that you really don't,” Harper says. “Maybe you still believe there's a reward for self-sacrifice? Greater love hath no man. In which case obviously this is a golden opportunity.”

Augustus shakes his head, no, out of habit, but at the same time knows there remain moments of eclipse, intimations of being the object of something's gaze, something that presents a surface
of pure indifference but conceals a palpitating kernel of justice. When it happens he tells himself it's just his consciousness compelled like everyone else's to try to wriggle out of its own contingency.
All good children go to heaven
. Somewhere in the crenulations of his brain he knows this deep neural groove endures, but knows too that it was put there and might just as easily not have been. Whoever it was put God in your head it wasn't God. And yet, as Harper says, here they are. With an inner start Augustus realizes it's the first time he's asked himself why he's resisting—and in the asking simultaneously answers. The answer's been with him the whole time but given so often it's become like a word made meaningless by repetition. It would seem a laughably poor answer to Harper. It seems a laughably poor answer to Augustus too, since it's no less absurd than the idea of piling up brownie points for the heaven that doesn't exist.

 

O
ne cold gray afternoon in November 1969 Augustus and Selina stood watching the ice skaters at the Wollman Rink in Central Park. The burgeoning commercial spirit of Christmas was a soft atmospheric murmur, storefronts beginning to glimmer, kids collectively coming awake. He stood behind her with his hands in the front pockets of her jeans, holding her pelvis. They'd been together more than two years and his thrill at proprietorially putting his hands on her was undiminished. Absurd to take the city's cold air and concrete edges as wistful homage to her suppleness and warmth, but that's what he'd been doing. No quarrel with absurdity if it gave him love. Held by him her hips whispered their bone-cradled secret, the potential for life like the flicker of a tiny
fish. Since summer he'd known he wanted her to have his child, though he'd said nothing about it.

I really despise people, she said. Her left eye watered. Humans, I mean. Actual human beings in front of me. This woman took off her shoe on the subway the other day and started massaging her toes. Humanity in the abstract I'll fight for, but actual people…Depressing, right? The fascist heart bound and gagged with liberal principles. But maybe if I wasn't a monster at heart I wouldn't do any good in the world? That's somehow right isn't it, that if the best people didn't know the worthlessness of their own hearts they wouldn't be the best people? In fact they'd be the worst people. Augustus said nothing. You could feel such collusion with someone it bordered disgust. Most of the rink spectators were watching them instead of the skaters, imagining, he thought, the profanity of him inside her; her sucking his cock. Might as well have been sodomizing Jesus. They were both used to it; if they stood still long enough hatred and fascination massed around them. At such moments the white faces acquired a look of gradual coming-to, a fresh perception that the times had cheated them of something. How had they let it happen? Woodstock, that nigger with the guitar profaning the national anthem, white girls with their tits out in the crowd, the whole lot stoned out of their minds. The fatalists turned away with happy disgust, content to have the degeneracy of the age confirmed. The rest began to look to one another with wounded urgency. At which moments he'd whisper in her ear, I hear the hoofbeats of the Klansman's horse….

He held her hips tighter and pulled her close against him. It was a thrilling new open space to step into, this certainty that he wanted to have a child with her. Now that he knew it he realized
he'd been waiting for the knowledge for some time. Inglorious biology was the poetic contrast to the rarefied stuff of spirit; tubes and eggs and wriggling sperm, the monstrous umbilicus and the gory porn of delivery all to heave a new consciousness up into the world.
Inter faeces et urinem nascimur
it said on the wall in the john at Harry's. Selina reluctantly translated:
between shit and piss are we born
. This was God's aesthetic, Augustus saw, plaited polarities, divinity in a cowshed, new souls amid sewage. He'd let God go pretty much by the time his mother married Cardillo but Selina's Catholicism (a mausoleum, she said, with satirical melodrama; I wander around it, visit the lovely sepulchres and the lovely dead) had brought some of his own back. As a myth only, he told himself, as an artwork, as a
reading
. He'd had two years of English and philosophy at NYU, long enough to have swallowed most of the postmodern pills. It's like synthetic food, Selina said. It'll keep you alive but it tastes like shit. That July Neil Armstrong had walked on the moon. An artist friend of Selina's had thrown a “Landing Party” at a basement gallery in Soho for the televised event, half the guests dressed as aliens or astronauts. Despite grass and acid and booze the historic moment gathered them around the tube and for a few minutes gave them their childhoods back. Afterward Augustus and Selina admitted to each other that the renewed perception of the planet, the solar system, all those spheres clockworkishly revolving around one another had made them think, briefly, of God in the most ludicrously traditional way: genial old white-bearded überdesigner surrounded by star charts and astrolabes. But back at her apartment later that night when they lay in each other's arms she'd said: There's nothing. It's just a massive accidental extravagance. The Apollo mission had
sidelined the war in Vietnam, made negligible its tally of burned and mutilated and missing and dead. Augustus knew it felt to her as if Michael had been cut adrift. There was moon
light
, astonishingly, on her bare shoulder and blond hair, which gave Augustus an intimate feeling of connection to the spacemen a quarter of a million miles away. As she floated nearer to sleep she said: I don't like to think of how cold it is out there…the
cold
of space…She was disgusted with herself for getting a lump in her throat when Armstrong had uttered his “…one giant leap for mankind” line. Augustus had noticed. She'd looked at him and lit a joint and said, See? See what a fucking
moron
I am? Ten-cent grandeur.
Mankind
. Jesus, hit me will you? Hit me in the
face
. It filled him with urgent love for her, this war she had with what she thought of as the sentimental side of herself, reminded him of the effort she had to make to play by the head's rules instead of the heart's. By nature she was everything she'd nurtured herself to disavow: elitist, individualist, dualist, theist, emotionalist, capitalist, narcissist, absolutist. I'm a goddamned sadist, too, she'd said, whiskey-drunk one night, and the admission had ravished him. He'd felt the current of cruelty in her from time to time, a different strain of arousal, a deadness in her blue eyes and just before she came a look of barely mastered disgust. (At the Catholic school there had been a fat ugly girl whose life she and two of her friends made hell. They'd nicknamed her NOFAM, which stood for Not For Any Money, as in not for any money would a boy fuck her. The memory still tormented her now.) It excited him, and though he plucked up the courage to tell her they had it in common he did it under the shelter of a generalization. Come on baby, everybody's got this shit in them. It's as old as the species. He didn't
want to dwell on it because the difference between him and her was that she'd rejected it as a source of knowledge and he hadn't, quite. She'd rejected it but talked as if she hadn't. She told him her sexual fantasies made her ashamed but that she knew a time was coming when they wouldn't. Outgrowing shame's what we do, she said. Adam and Eve, look at them, the shame didn't last. They wept as they walked away from Eden but within half a mile they were holding hands and thinking about a new place to live. They farmed and had kids and got on with it. God overestimated shame. That was God's big mistake. She had these talismanic insights but suspected herself of sophistry, couldn't look long in a mirror without pulling a mocking face. Augustus knew all this about her and that there was always more to know. No amount of her was enough. It gave him a foretaste of satiation that sickened him without stopping him wanting it. He could kill her. Not in any metaphorical sense, but literally, put an end to having to know her by putting an end to
her
. This was love, of which you had no idea until you were in it.

Now he wanted her to have his baby. He felt this too had been precipitated by the moon landing. Armstrong's “mankind” had heightened everyone's sense of species membership. That long look back at suddenly poignant Earth—“the Earth is a beautiful blue!”—evoking for Augustus geological time, dinosaurs, the systole and diastole of coming into being and passing away, had released in him the basic male seed-scattering imperative and a fascination with physical creation. He'd lain awake long after Selina had fallen asleep imagining her pregnant. It was revolting (a fetal version of himself in her womb, red-lit, claustrophobic, an eggy odor and warm blood feeding him the ghost flavors of her
lunch) but beneath the revulsion were calm and certainty: this was what we did, why we were the envy of angels. The revelation matter-of-factly closed his adolescence and opened his manhood. It was a curious thrill to realize you were a man, that you could legitimately add your portion to the world's clamor. Almost a disappointment, how easily you made the transition.

He wanted to tell her but couldn't. She wasn't allowing herself the idea of the future while Michael was still in Vietnam. Once he was home intact she could return to her journey away from him but while death hung over him she felt entitled to nothing. Being in love with Augustus was already a concussive wrong under which she staggered and crawled, sick with guilt half the time. Michael never wrote to her. Does he even know about us? Augustus asked. Oh yeah, she said. My mom'll have poured it all over him like a liqueur. That's
why
he doesn't write me.

There had been two encounters with Selina's parents. The first was accidental and brief. Selina and Augustus were on their way to a meeting of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and her parents were on their way to an evening show of
Funny Girl
. Selina's father wrong-footed Augustus by shaking hands and saying it was a pleasure to meet him at last. Selina got them away but not before her father had invited them to dinner the following weekend. There's no way, she said as they hurried down Broadway. It's a scheme. We're not going. But they did go. Augustus's curiosity and her own compulsive combativeness made it irresistible. The evening, at the five-floor house in Gramercy Park (the official family seat—The Confected Mansion, as Selina called it—was an hour upstate) was surreally volatile. Oh, Mom you've given Ruthie the night off, Selina said, when a pretty Latina
maid came to take their coats. What a shame! She and Augustus could've Lindy Hopped or sung the blues after dinner. Ruthie's the regular maid, she told Augustus in an exaggerated aside, but she's cata
strophically
negro. It would've been indelicate. Mom you didn't
fire
her just so we could come to dinner did you? Selina's mother, Meredith, a striking blonde in her mid-forties with Selina's sly eyes and high cheekbones, lifted her chin and addressed Augustus across her daughter: Our housekeeper, Ruthie, has been off all week because her grandson's ill with glandular fever. Darling you're not going to succumb to predictability by making tonight unpleasant are you? Selina breezed away, saying I doubt tonight'll need any help from me. Augustus entered the sitting room (modern Italian furniture presided over by an asymmetrical chandelier of buttery yellow orbs that pulsed as if with jovial awareness) wishing he'd had the sense to smoke a joint in preparation. Selina's father, Jack, officiated at the room's wet bar. Augustus, what's your poison? He was a tall dark-eyed man whose close-cropped silver curls you could picture a laurel wreath on. Oh I guess bourbon, thanks, Augustus said, just ice. That was the last of the evening's uncomplicated exchanges. Laughably benign remarks led in seconds to trouble, though Jack had a marvelous facility for defusing them with a joke or funny story. By dessert Selina was drunk and dangerous. Give up, Dad, she said. I already warned him you'd be charming. You're wasting your time. Your baby girl's banging a jigaboo and the entire Trent ancestry's turning in its overornamented grave. You're homicidal when you think about it so let's not have
charm
, shall we? Augustus, half-drunk himself, felt the room fill with ironish energy. Meredith closed her eyes and clamped her jaws together. It was apparent to Augustus
that despite their consumption Jack still glittered with sobriety. Selina got up from the table. I'm going to the Mario Bellini, she said. The Mario Bellini's got my name on it. One of the elephantine red leather armchairs. She crossed the floor with immense high-heels concentration then collapsed into it and glared back at them all. Augustus felt the room revolving: Jack's generous bourbons, white wine with the meal (tiny soufflés, a beetroot salad, sea bream with saffron sauce, profiteroles), port with the cheese and now a balloon of brandy. He had to stop drinking
right now
. Maybe Augustus would like to see the space stuff, Meredith said to her husband. Hon? Augustus had imagined there might be something like this, a quiet word. He glanced at Selina but she'd closed her eyes.