A Day and a Night and a Day: A Novel (16 page)

“Michael and I slept together the summer I was fifteen,” Selina said, when they lay together afterward. “We knew it was going to happen. You reach a point of inevitability. It went on all through the vacation. I wish I could tell you it felt momentously disgusting but it didn't.”

“Was it your first time?” Augustus asked.

“Yes—Jesus what kind of child slut do you think I was?”

“Hey, you were the one told me you'd been diddling yourself since you were three.”

“Five—and that's nothing for heaven's sake, a little girl finding solace in her clitoris. Are you made of stone?”

Augustus could feel what a relief it was to her to have delivered the central dark fact and here he still was. He rubbed the top of his foot against the soft sole of hers. But they both knew the central dark fact alone wasn't enough.

“I knew it was a mess,” Selina said. “But you have to understand I had to dig very deep to find the little fleck of wrongness. I don't know that I ever really did find it. It's like imagine you're eating this huge delicious cake and someone tells you that somewhere in it there's a spot of mold, that it's started to go bad. You can't taste it but you know it's there. You find yourself chewing every mouthful forensically. That was an unpremeditated metaphor, by the way.”

Augustus pushed upward with his foot against her sole. He liked to feel the force communicated through the ankle, knee, femur, hip. He liked the feeling of lifting her weight slightly with just his foot. “I see it,” he said, though he wished he didn't.
Delicious
cake, she'd said. And what was
every mouthful
other than the obvious?

“Eventually I couldn't stand it,” Selina said. “I don't want to lie to you. I never quite found the wrongness. It was just that compulsive searching for it began to feel claustrophobic. That and the secrecy, which of course is enriching to start with but becomes toxic. Also, Michael has this insistence, this will. He makes you feel nothing's enough, even everything's not enough. He could kill you and eat your remains and it wouldn't be enough. I began
to see it, the giantness of his demand. I began to feel something of how furious he was with everything. I think that's why the army's been good for him, weirdly. The fury's gone into the discipline. Plus I think he's been looking for something bigger than being in love with his sister.”

“There isn't anything bigger than being in love with his sister,” Augustus said. Among many other things he was wondering if Michael had fucked her in the ass. Possibly this was what her look had been trying to tell him, that if he needed something of her Michael hadn't had, it was this.

“Well, maybe killing and risking being killed,” Selina said. “I'm a tough act to follow but I imagine seeing your buddy step on a mine or cutting off a Vietcong's head would do it.”

Which images cost her, Augustus knew. Once you force yourself into saying a difficult thing many other difficult things become sayable.

“Anyway,” she said, “I stopped it. For a while I thought he was going to kill me, or himself. You break up with someone you don't have to see them. You break up with your brother he's right there across the landing. I don't want you to think this was me suddenly discovering it was wrong. It wasn't. It was me understanding what a mess it was going to be if we didn't stop. Michael made it easier by being ugly to me. It was a horrible time, wake up feeling sick, go to bed feeling sick, every day the same carnage to stare at. But we ground out the weeks and months and eventually a year had passed and it was time for him to go to Brown.”

They lay still and listened to someone down the hall taking a UPS delivery, then the delivery guy's footsteps down the stairs, then the building's main door opening and closing. It gave Au
gustus the feeling of precarious truancy. The world eventually nosed you out and started making demands.

“I don't want you to have any illusions. I'll never sleep with Michael again. That's over for me. But it was a huge thing in my life and it's probably sown the seeds of craziness. Also, I'm in love with you so much it hurts my heart. Also, I feel cursed and on borrowed time and full of lousy karma. Anyway that's what you wanted to know so I've told you.”

What
she
wanted to know, he now understood, was whether it made a difference to him. It did: it made him want her more. Partly, stupidly, because he saw it as a project of heroic reclamation, an attempt to get her back to who she'd been before it happened, and partly because her survival of it proved her strength. Like her, he didn't buy the Nietzschean line that whatever didn't kill you made you stronger. Sometimes whatever didn't kill you disfigured and debilitated you for the rest of your life instead of killing you. Mere survival was neither here nor there. It was the manner of survival, what you
did
with whatever it was that didn't kill you. She'd taken her relationship with Michael as inoculation against human strangeness, made it the source of her compassion.

“I want to ask you something,” he said. They were lying side by side, not touching, his brown arm next to her white one. There was an aesthetic wrongness to the heating being on while there was so much sunlight in the apartment, further dissonance when he thought of how crisply cold it was outside. He wanted coffee and a chocolate doughnut.

“What?” she said.

He got up on one elbow to look at her. She kept her eyes closed.
With her hands still and one knee very slightly bent she looked like someone tanning. For a moment he had a profound sense of her corporeality, felt a tenderness for her hair follicles, teeth, knees, arteries, her guts snugly hidden under all that beauty. He asked himself if he wanted her for the rest of his life, a question from which his mind ran forward some way, ten years, twenty, then flagged into an enticing desert darkness.

“Will you marry me?” he said.

 

H
arper's cell phone rings and seduces Augustus out of semi-consciousness. You struggle up from under heavy soft folds and too late realize you should have stayed where you were. Same trickery every time. His memory's in chaos. He knows he's given up information but can't remember what. Instead other bits of his past are vivid, as if his life's been exploded and all its moments surround him in floating fragments.

He doesn't hear what Harper says, indeed slaloms in and out of deafness. The mustached guard's absent but his colleague's on the chair in the corner, cigarette in one hand, the other hand massaging his neck. The guard eases his head forward, turns it slowly as if searching for a particular alignment. Augustus imagines the wife at home later with her fingers on him in the dark, pressing and asking: There? Is that it?

The room's wadded with heat. Inés had kept saying: It's not too cold for you, is it? Because there was his thin-skinned chest and scribble of gray hair. Poor thing, she couldn't disguise what an old man she thought him!

Harper gets off the phone, pockets it, approaches the guard
and speaks quietly to him. Augustus goes under again, resurfaces. It's as if a hand gently pushes his bobbing consciousness under dark water, holds it, lets it up. He's come to see it as a last beneficence, this force that gently dunks him out of time. But here's Harper's face again, close. Somewhere in the darkness they lowered him back into the chair only now his hands are cuffed behind him.

“I'm genuinely curious,” Harper says. “What are you holding out for?”

Augustus can't sit up. The guard has him by the shoulder to keep him face to face with Harper. Pain's no longer something that happens to him; it's a dense mass in which what's left of him forms a small suffocated kernel. Individual pains need distinctive personalities to make it through. A punch now would be like someone knocking on a door half a dozen rooms away.

“Didn't think I was,” Augustus says, but his speech is full of interference.

“What?” Harper says. “Say again?”

“Not. Holding. Out.”

“Elise Merkete,” Harper says, lifting up the headshot. “
Elise Merkete
. Come on.”

When Elise walked up to him on Las Ramblas in Barcelona he hadn't seen her in twenty years. It was two weeks after the department store bombing. He'd spent the days since it happened wandering the city or lying curled up on the floor of the hotel room. He drank himself into warm numbness, a salving inability to form thoughts. Then in the shade of a beech tree on the street's pedestrian spine a shadow falling on him and Elise saying, in a surreal echo of Selina: My God, I thought it was you. (It was a measure of his de
railment that this second synchronicity didn't register. He'd entered a continuum of absurdity. It wasn't that the bizarre was more likely, it was that the bizarre had taken over.) He told her everything that had happened and she stayed with him that night. There was no desire between them, not even the kind that rises as an amoral palliative to grief. They lay in silence and she stroked his hair until he fell asleep. In the morning she said: Last night you said you couldn't stand to do nothing. If you still feel that way in a month, call me at this number. There are things you can do. Not overnight, but eventually. He hadn't imagined he would, not because he doubted the durability of his feelings but because he doubted there was anything he
could
do. But the month passed, and he called her. I belong to an organization, Elise had said. We can't discuss it over the phone. I'll leave a message for you at the hotel desk. Go down and pick it up in twenty minutes.

They'd met in a bar converted from a wine cellar, oak casks, candled alcoves, bare brick, cool to the touch.
I belong to an organization that believes in justice
. It was what she was doing in Barcelona in the wake of the bombing.
When something like this happens the people closest to it see the world afresh, what it's become, what's not being done, what needs to be
. She said it without passion, as if continuous exposure to the truth of the proposition had exhausted her. Through the deadening blaze of his purpose Augustus saw she'd acquired a patina of ghoulishness, recruiting from carnage, turning trauma into agency, saw too that this was the latest mutation of the rape, the shape it had long-windedly assumed. He didn't care, or at any rate could ignore the remnant of himself that did.

“Look at the picture,” Harper says. “Elise Merkete. You're saying you don't know this woman?”

Augustus is very tired. Selina said that when she was about thirteen the Crucifixion acquired in her imagination an awful realism, the length and heat of the afternoon, the accrual of seconds to minutes, minutes to hours, a centurion removing his hot helmet, the static sky, the relentless sordid violence from which at any moment the victim could have extricated himself. She said it was around then she started to be disgusted by it.

“Don't know her,” he slurs. All he wants now is the benevolent hand to dunk him under again. The night in the safe house in Washington, D.C., Elise had talked in her sleep. She'd sat up in the dark and said, quite seriously: “Future generations will thank the elephant,” then lain back down in silence. He'd had to stifle his laughter not to wake her; but also it brought her loneliness home to him. She was dreaming, and as far as she knew that was reality. It was awful for him to know she'd have to wake up, that
this
was reality. Hearing her talk in her sleep he'd wanted to put his arms around her, cherish her however clumsily, but he was afraid of waking her. She murmured, turned over and slept deeply again.

He senses rather than sees Harper make a quick gesture to the guard—then suddenly there's cold metal pressing the corner of his left eye.

 

A
ugustus had two theories about Selina's pregnancy. The first was romantic: she'd felt greedy love demanding it of them, more life through which it, greedy love, could maraud. The second was pragmatic: it was the last act in the drama of cutting loose from
Michael. Either way it was officially “an accident,” a phrase neither of them could utter without subliminally conceding its falsehood. Selina had “forgotten” to take her pill. She and Augustus went through the disaster motions—What the fuck are we going to do? What about school? Your parents are going to fucking
freak
—but caught themselves exchanging looks of reckless delight. It
was
a disaster, but it was also their generation wrenching the future away from their parents. There were moments—opportunities—for forcing the world forward quicker than it would otherwise go. But more than that a new version of themselves, a thing of weird unignorable authenticity, had established itself. Now it was in them—now it
was
them—there was no going back. They were calm, euphoric, scared and certain. They were going to disastrously have a disastrous baby and make a sort of glorious calm disaster and in spite of everything the world would make room for it. None of this was spoken aloud. They were still getting used to it as the truth, as the way things were going to be.

Selina said: “My dad'll want me to get an abortion.” The word had to be admitted and got out of the way. She and Augustus were sitting opposite each other at a table in the window of a Second Avenue coffee shop. Winter sunlight bounced off the morning traffic, giving Augustus a feeling of the world's hurry and himself a part of it. The coffee shop too was full of urgency, chrome and Formica and the doorbell
tang
ing and people getting things to go. The espresso machine sounded like a thing being throttled. Selina's eyes had met his for “abortion” then flicked away. Her hair was pulled back into a high ponytail, which revealed the delicacy of her skull and jaw. A capillary showed faintly at her temple. Augustus felt for the first time the precise degree of her strength,
the finite wealth of weapons, defenses, energies, strategies with which she could go up against the world. She was great but not indestructible and since she had a child growing inside her now that fact introduced a new level of realism and fear. He was afraid too, but thrilled at the change in her, the sudden different womanhood, her mix of embarrassment and pride. He studied her as she stared out of the window and felt the familiar inarticulable urgency and desperation—for what? For her. There was no other way of saying it. He wanted her without reservation, would forgo everything and endure anything. He had these moments of romantic overflow, was capable of recognizing the absurdity of his own excess but powerless to avoid it. Do you love me? she'd ask him sometimes, when out of nowhere fear of losing him gripped her. The genuineness of her uncertainty gave him a feeling of sweet panic that she should have to ask. He had to control himself, make a joke of it: I love you
madly
. But she'd make him look at her, force him to see she was really crazily afraid—which frightened
him
. You're my life, he said to her once, surprised at the vast simple truth of this.