A Day and a Night and a Day: A Novel by Glen Duncan Page A

moment it was just him and Augustus. “Information’s the map,” Harper said. “Disinformation’s a tracing of the map held over it in the wrong place. Right picture, wrong coordinates. You think I don’t knowthe difference?” Augustus couldn’t answer. He was still in the pain furnace where there was nothing but the paradox of knowing you couldn’t stand it and standing it, the extremity from which either annihilation or transcendence must follow yet neither did; only your loop of incredulity and no scream loud enough. “You’re a mystery,” Harper said, smiling. “I’ll give you that. I don’t know what you’re holding on to but whatever it is you’re going to let go. You know this is right.” No rancor, just the limber body calmly alert. After the cheerleader Augustus imagined Harper would have switched to less cooperative girls, since seduction better served contempt. There was a narrow rich margin of things girls didn’t want to do that you could with relentless coercion get them to do. The prize was their awkward mastery of disgust or fear. Someone Augustus couldn’t see came to the doorway, exchanged a few quiet words with Harper, then Harper left, closing the door behind him.
    Augustus lies on his side on the floor, hog-tied, his bare feet in a congealing puddle of blood. Pain sends its giant repeated signal from his beaten soles up through his shins and thighs and chest into his head where he can’t stop the futile frenzied attempt to make it something he can sidestep or shuck. A scream’s an attempt to open yourself wide enough to accommodate what’s happening. He remembers the day Clarence Mills got knocked off his bike and broke his arm. The snapped bone came through. There it was: bone , the thing dogs gnawed, in case you’d ever been in any doubt, your inside bits only God knew all about. Clarence screamed, but every few seconds stopped screaming and stared at his injury. The anesthesia of disbelief. Fleeting. These moments are just pain adjusting its grip.
    He feels sorry for his body that’s served him so well all his life. You forget the personality of your thumb, kneecap, ankle, until someone has them at his mercy. At the same time rage because what can a thumb or kneecap or ankle do but force on you in exhaustive detail the report of what’s happening to them? This is the soul’s bargain with the flesh: for kisses and handshakes, the taste of fresh strawberries, hot sand underfoot or a snowflake on the tongue it risks the worst that can be imagined. Does everyone, he wonders, feel the way he does now that this has happened, that he’s always known it would? The moment they laid hands on him in Barcelona (it was just that: one hand on his shoulder, one on his wrist, a dark car liquidly materializing alongside) his first thought was that the thing he’d been expecting all his life had finally come around. He’d known it would find him in the way he’d known someone like Selina would find him. Harper even looked familiar. He recognized him as he’d recognized Selina the first time he walked into Harry’s and saw her holding a drink and laughing sly-eyed at someone’s joke. You had these shadowy certainties from before birth, the dark inhabitants of Wordsworth’s clouds of glory. Your body arrived with its strands of DNA, your soul with its strands of myth. Or so he might have put it in the days when he believed in the soul.
    Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere , Rumi said. They’re in each other all along . When he’d first embarked on his fake conversion Augustus had looked forward to revisiting Rumi as a friendly face in a dour crowd—
    I am ashamed to
    call this love human
    and afraid of God
    to call it divine.
    He did revisit him, but in secret. His Islamist brothers had as much contempt for The Mevlana’s poetry as they had for Playboy bunnies and