by Glen Duncan
“I’m not tempted,” Harper says, reading Augustus’s one eye, “but I’m fascinated by its success. I don’t mean the success of its alleged goals, I mean the success it’s had in simply mesmerizing the West. Liberal relativists say nothing’s black and white. Fanatics reply by blowing them up. How do the liberal relativists respond? Broadly, by sitting around saying, ‘Wow, I guess those guys really don’t agree with us. That’s kind of amazing.’ It’s like a superfeminist sitting there coyly transfixed by a guy with an enormous cock saying I’m going to rape you, cunt. And that’s not mentioning the superfeminist who sits there thinking it must be something she’s done. The Chomskyites and bleeding hearts took 9/11 as an opportunity to educate the world about America’s atrocities. As if it’s ever going to be anything other than choosing your atrocities. What’s wrong with people?”
For the first time Harper seems slightly rattled. There’s the surface incredulity—What’s wrong with people?—but beneath, an irritation.
“It’s a death wish,” Augustus says. “And a vacuum where the big things we believed in used to be. Hard to care about a way of life when your way of life is lifestyles. Also there’s envy: the fundamentalists might be crazy but they’re not anorexics or credit card junkies. They don’t know the peculiar despair of trying to project their individuality through a personalized cell phone jacket.” He’s finished the pastry but still nurses the coffee, stone cold now.
“Death wish is right,” Harper says. He gets up, takes the smokes out of his top pocket, lights two and hands one to Augustus. The room’s dark but for a wedge of light from the latrine. Harper, on his feet, moves about the room aimlessly, as if merely stretching his legs.
“Or maybe less a death wish than a wish for the possibility of ending. We’ve lost the biblical myths of Ending. Since the end of the cold war we’ve lost our myth of man-made ending, too, nuclear Armageddon. It used to be a remote consolation that the sun would die one day but now we know we’ll have cleared off by then, galactically emigrated or built a replacement that’ll last forever. Crucially, we didn’t get the cataclysm we were promised at the millennium. Y2K was supposed to punish our investment in science and technology. Planes were supposed to drop out of the sky and a new survivalist order emerge. But absolutely nothing happened. We were disappointed. Jesus, are we just going to keep going? Isn’t anything going to stop us? Granted there’s the prospect of environmental meltdown but we don’t really believe we won’t be able to deal with it. So, depressingly, we’re going on. It’s time to look at the future again. What’s that going to be like? What’s all the new science going to mean? Nothing new. Genetic engineering, space travel, bioweaponry, cyberspace—it’ll all pass through the same matrix of human power and human accident and human desire, wear man’s smudge and share man’s smell, and if history’s any guide the future will deeply resemble the past. We’ve come within a hairbreadth of losing the myth of a secular End of Days. But wait! Into the disappointment has walked apocalyptic anti-reason in the shape of a medievally misogynistic death cult that simply doesn’t want anything from us other than our destruction. Our thanatotic glands are juicing. We don’t want them to go, we want them to stay! We love these guys! Maybe they’ll wipe us out!”
Harper stops talking (and walking) as if suddenly embarrassed by how long he’s been talking, or by the uncharacteristic emotion he’s worked up. It’s surprised Augustus, and since it’s something he hasn’t seen in Harper before, brought a draft of fear. Harper tosses the cigarette butt and stubs it out.
“I have to do something,” he says. “I have to execute you.”
One lunchtime in the summer of 2002 Augustus stood at a kiosk on the broad central reservation of Las Ramblas, the tree-lined main thoroughfare in Barcelona. He’d just bought a pack of Marlboro Lights and was tearing off the cellophane.
“Oh my God,” Selina said.
There was a bar right there with outdoor sunshaded tables and Ice Cold Cerveza, also a ponytail-flicking young waitress he’d liked the look of from the kiosk now reduced to a nonentity. The sunshades were blue-and-white check. Leaf shadows twittered on the asphalt.
There was no pretense. The question from the second they looked at each other was whether this was going to be something, everything, do all the damage it could. Both of them supposed marriages, kids, an edifice of love and loyalty but at once felt their right to challenge it.
“I don’t like this layout,” Augustus said.
“What, the traffic on either side?”
“There’s a feeling of being marooned in the middle of a lava flow.”
He was ashamed of his twenty years of bearable misery. All the days and weeks of nothing in particular like a mountain of unrecyclable rubbish. He thought of the credentials he’d be lining up for anyone other than Selina. Affluence, polyglotism, El Salvador, the restaurants, the Upper East Side, the house in Vermont, characters. Naturally the usefully exotic mix of his blood.
“You look exactly as you should,” she said. “I think I do too.”
“We both have those faces that keep their look. Actually you look like someone for whom something this big is still small. But then you always looked like that.”
“This isn’t small. Trust me.”
“What is this?”
“It was weird. I saw you from across the street and thought, My God that’s Augustus—then immediately annihilated the idea, but slowly kept walking toward you waiting for it not to be you. But it is you.”
Unchanged mutual transparency made it easy and difficult. They stabbed awkwardly for the immediately relevant information, for parameters, for what room they might have to maneuver. He was on vacation, so was she as of yesterday but here with work, charity, international, too complicated, later. Their hotels were five blocks apart. It was as if they had only the time it took to drink one beer to decide. And it was too big a decision to be made with anything other than blind instinct. Either that or toss a coin. They both felt this. There was a silence.
“Well?” Selina said.
They went to his hotel because it was nearer. In fact it was also more luxurious. Floor-to-ceiling drapes (which she closed) and a sun-trap French-windowed balcony. There was a Bose music system and a marbled en suite and air conditioning.
When he put his hands on her waist she had a moment of hesitation, tensed slightly, then relaxed.
Afterward they lay side by side on the bed. What Augustus wanted to say was: Whatever your life is leave it and be mine. He imagined himself saying this looking not at her but at the ceiling, then closing his eyes and waiting for life or death.
“I don’t think I’m going to get away with just saying ‘Well?’ again, am I?” Selina said.
“I’ll tell you something,” Augustus said. “I have a house in Vermont. In this house are many books. Probably four or five thousand. Over the years I’ve had a repeated fantasy of you staying at the house when I’m not there. You’re lost and you chance on it, like Goldilocks. In fact that’s part of it, you coming out of the woods and seeing the house. It is near woods, by the way. You don’t know who the place belongs to but you know it’s perfectly safe and you can stay as long as you like. You know sometime the owner will show up, but not for quite a while, and anyway the thought pleasantly intrigues you. You feel calm, private and secure, and spend a long quiet season there reading whichever books take your fancy.”
“Then you come home?”
“No. It’s not a reunion fantasy. The pleasure’s in the image of you reading the books and making yourself incrementally at home in the house. I can’t tell you how often I run this footage. It gives me incredible peace and delight.”
The city, obliterated by their lovemaking, was returning. With it the world, time, consequences, the dreadful larger context.
“What sort of damage are we looking at?” Selina said.
Augustus felt the bliss begin to drain. What was the point of being given this if it was only going to be this? You think you’re
out of the habit of looking for the point.
“For me, none,” he said. “I’ve been saving myself for this.”
“Okay.”
“I’m serious. There’s no one. Not even a cat you’d have to win over.”
“Well,” she said. “That’s quite something.”
“Your turn.” No wedding ring but that didn’t mean anything. She’d get up from the bed, start dressing. He wouldn’t be able to move. The universe’s lights would go out again. His life, a bearable dull dream before, would become a searing boredom. The racket of emptiness would build, intrude, deafen, drive him to something.
“Am I really to believe there’s no one?” she said.
“Yes.”
“What about exes?”
“What about them?”
“Ex-wives.”
“Nil. Other than you, obviously.”
“Children?”
“No.”
A pause. Children? Mothers asked the question with smug musicality. She hadn’t. She didn’t have any. He realized he’d known it when they were having sex just now. There was something guilty and plaintive in the fucking of older childless women, a shame or sadness or fury at the cunt’s thwarted teleology. At the thought he felt the old reflex outrage that she should have to suffer anything, but also a surge of excitement: No children was another potential obstacle removed.
“Put me out of my misery will you?” he said.
“I’m not with anyone.”
He didn’t move.
“And as the superb condition of my body must have already made clear I don’t have any children either.”
He had a vision of them on a talk show, beaming, exuding indiscriminate generosity, a host saying in the mock-incredulous let-me-get-this-straight way And after thirty-two years. You guys mmmeet again…while the caption read: SWEETER SECOND TIME AROUND: WE MET AFTER MORE THAN THREE DECADES—AND WE’RE STILL CRAZY ABOUT EACH OTHER!!!
“You know what this means, don’t you?” he said.
“What?”
“We can call room service.”
“I want a Long Island Iced Tea.”
Selina’s father died of a heart attack two years after Michael was killed. Her mother, Meredith, now seventy-eight, lived in a huge apartment on the Upper West Side. She’d decided to be interested in art, and in the years since Jack’s death had made herself a presence on the New York scene. “There’s a gallery in SoHo,” Selina said. “She’s on various boards. We became friends. Christ knows how many lovers she’s had over the years. There was a terrible phase of young guys. She’s over it. Currently there are three beaux, a banker and two art dealers she makes a hobby out of tormenting. This is way better than the food at my hotel, by the way.” They’d ordered up champagne and tapas and were eating off the tray on the bed. Neither of them had quite accepted all that had just happened. As the minutes went by Augustus felt himself tensing for derailment. They daren’t look fully at each other, as if the trick to prolonging this was to keep a part of themselves in disbelief. He thought of the decapitated family at La Rancheria, all the places he’d carried her with him and now here she was. (What had Michael written? Don’t you know you’re what I carry between myself and death?) Being with her made him want to go back to every opportunity he’d had for doing the right thing and this time do it, unreservedly, so there’d be a better man to offer her now. As it was he kept catching inner glimpses of the mass of life he’d wasted. Hours and days and years of nothing being spectacularly wrong, long sessions of wondering whether to buy a new car or extend one of the restaurant dining rooms. Sundays spent doing nothing in the apartment, not even reading, dully yielding to television’s inanities. He’d alight on a sport he wasn’t remotely interested in then arbitrarily invest in the fortunes of one competitor or team. I’ve been saving myself for this. It was a lie. He’d been wasting himself. Now she was here again it was as if he’d just been told he had only a short time to live. That was the deal: the later in life love came the more clearly you saw the distance between you and your death. He was fifty-five. Maybe twenty more years, maybe not even that. Juliet after all was only three years older than this when she died. Before he could stop himself (surely this would hex it what was he fucking insane?) he vowed inwardly that if he was given this chance with Selina then not a single moment, by God not one single second—
“You’ve always been in my dreams,” she said. “In the mornings they’d say: What did you dream about? I’d have to make something up.”
“You’ve always been in mine too.”
“It’s a sad thing, the number of people still dreaming of their lost lovers. Think of it, all over the world, night after night.”
“Once I dreamed about Stevie and the Vaseline and woke myself up laughing.”
Selina laughed now, remembering. They’d babysat one night for a couple of friends from Harry’s, Laura and Jeff, whose regular sitter had let them down and whose son, Stevie, was not quite two. Augustus and Selina had been paranoid he was going to fall out of a window or spontaneously combust, but Laura and Jeff said he’d be fine if they put him in his rocking horse chair with some toys. This they did, and Stevie was content. For a while they remained anxious, but when it became obvious the kid wasn’t going to give them any trouble they relaxed and turned on the TV. They probably only took their eyes off him for five minutes. When Selina next looked down at him she gave a cry.
“He looked so pleasantly surprised,” she said now, laughing. “As if he’d just accidentally discovered something wonderful.”
“Well he had,” Augustus said.
Stevie had found himself within reach of an open economy-size jar of Vaseline and applied the entire contents to his head and face. One long twist of the stuff came off his nose like a ski jump.
“I dreamed about it a few years back,” Augustus said. “Woke up laughing my goddamned head off. I can’t tell you how crushed I was when I realized it was just a dream.” The feel of Selina laughing under his hands gave him a surge of panic because it was so clearly one of the things that would make the thought of death bearable and what would he do now if it was taken away?
Jack left her enough money so she didn’t have to work. “I became a volunteer. Worthy organizations. The ethics option. Turns out I’ve got a talent for troubleshooting. Now I work pro bono as a consultant telling charities what’s wrong with them and how they could be raising more money. I’ve got quite a reputation. You surprise yourself.”
It was evening. They’d had too much sex. Selina was in the bath, up to her neck in foam. Augustus, slightly faint, sat in the open doorway leaning against the jamb. They’d opened the drapes to find dusk, smoke-blue sky, the city stirring, people heading to restaurants and bars.
“But you left Manhattan.”
“I couldn’t stand the prospect of bumping into you. I moved to San Francisco that same year, finished my degree at Berkeley eventually.” Eventually because for two years after Michael was killed she lived in “a manageable hell.” “I’d been waiting my whole life to find out what the worst of myself was. Michael’s death gave me the chance. I won’t bore you with the details. Some people need to go to the dogs sooner or later. I was one of them. You want the details, I know.”
“Of course.”
“Well you can have them later. Let’s not spoil this. I don’t have HIV, by the way.”
Which condition the details he was to get later might be expected to have left her with. He had a clear image of her in a cold sweat getting sodomized by a pockmarked Latino drug dealer in a toilet cubicle, her hair swinging, a look of miserable concentration on her moist face.
“Good,” he said. “Neither do I. As far as I know.”
They lay in each other’s arms in the dark and listened to the nightlife through the open French windows. Augustus felt the muscles of his face at peace. Here after all these years was the reverence for the immediate world, the sounds of drinkers and diners, beeping traffic, teenagers and their scoo
ters. The kids here rode crazily, the girls never fearing for their bare legs, the boys with sunglasses and cigarettes. It was terrible to see beautiful young people when you were old. But now he had her it didn’t matter. Now he could bless the little bastards.
She didn’t have children because she couldn’t. During the manageable hell she’d got pregnant and had an abortion. You can have an infection without even knowing. Later it turns out your fallopian tubes are ruined. Scar tissue. Blockage. “We tried for four years,” Selina told him. “Did five IVF treatment cycles, spent thousands of dollars, became wraiths. Eventually I accepted defeat. Punishment for the abortion. God’s only consistency’s in his vindictiveness.” “We” were Selina and now ex-husband Louis, a San Francisco lawyer she met after Berkeley. She’d loved him, but without mythic force. “You know what I mean,” she said. “You and I could’ve sat down with Tristan and Isolde and held up our heads. It wasn’t like that with Louis. He was a good, smart, subtle, compassionate man but he didn’t call to anything essential in me. He’s so well put together I didn’t even ruin him. Now he’s married to a nice smart well-put-together interior designer, with two grown-up kids.”
They made love again just before dawn. Afterward he kissed her shoulders and hands and midriff and knees and shins and feet, Thank you, thank you. He’d sensed the strength she’d called on to haul her sexuality out from under the weight of infertility. In his experience childlessness in women either warped into a dedication to self-hating sexual expertise or formed a subsonic noise of sadness and loss. There was sadness here but forced to one side to accommodate a hard-won space for desire. It was typical of her that she’d refused to let it be killed in her. Augustus remembered how he used to imagine her soul—something like a yolk of pure light in God’s hands—getting its portion of courage before birth, God smiling and on a whim putting in three four five times the amount.
