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

The Rolling Stones. Heretical Sufi delusions of becoming one with God, rampantly erotic language, music, dance, contemplation—nothing but insidious distraction from the real job in hand: militant revolution and the establishment of Islamism worldwide. Love (like humor, like art, like sex) fed imagination, induced play, swelled ambiguity. To Husain and the literalist crew it was worse than useless, it was subversive.
    What are you thinking? Selina had asked him one night in the small hours. They were at her apartment, in bed. It was winter and the city was under three feet of snow. The building’s thermostats were awry; it was too hot to cover even with a sheet. Augustus had got up and opened the window. Now puffs of snow-flavored air came in. Earlier that evening Selina had heard from her mother who’d had a call from Michael. He was in a military hospital with a broken leg. One of his buddies had snatched his helmet and thrown it up into a tree, where it had stuck. They’d tried everything, including shooting, to bring it down. In the end Michael had climbed up. A branch snapped and he fell. Selina was high on relief. On the phone with her mother she’d laughed—oh thank God, Mom, thank God (it was the first time Augustus had ever heard her address her mother with anything other than suppressed contempt)—then when she’d put the phone down stood with her arms wrapped around herself. When he moved toward her she waved him away. Go and get some champagne. I want tocelebrate. No let’s go out. Let’s go to Harry’s and get wasted. How long does a broken leg last?
    They’d gone out, spent the evening in the bar with most of the usuals then sobered up with cheeseburgers, fries and vanilla shakes at the Cooper Square Diner. The snow and cold air had reinvented the city as an innocent thing. Selina bought the early edition of the New York Times on the way home. We’ll just read the sports and the books. Just for one day we’ll pretend everything’s okay—okay?
    What are you thinking? She was lying on her belly perusing the paper by the light of the bedside lamp. Augustus lay halfway down the bed, propped up on one elbow, caressing her ass, occasionally bending to kiss the sweat in the small of her back. In the eight months they’d been together he’d discovered the insufficiency of the flesh. Love demanded expression and the flesh did everything it could but it wasn’t enough. Naturally: the flesh was of this world whereas the current that connected them came from whatever was beyond this world, flowed through them and back to its mysterious source. He’d stopped being surprised that he thought in these terms. They were ludicrous and inevitable. Love turned out to be the thing his life had been waiting for, the place for the fuoco to rage. It had taken them five or six encounters after that first day of the Central Park rally to step forward and accept the intensity. An alternative would have been to step slightly to one side of it, this remarkable phenomenon of being in love, to walk it among their friends like a pet panther in a diamond collar. They were both furnished superficially with enough precocious cynicism. But more compellingly they were cursed with a sense of entitlement—not to wealth or power but to epic experience—andthe sort of elitism that in the end asked what, if people like them weren’t going to wreck themselves on it, was the point of love? So they’d given themselves to it, begun within days to enjoy casual telepathy, exclusively erotic at first but soon serviceable beyond the bedroom. And to both of them even this seemed a preliminary stage. Called alert clairvoyantly he’d turn to see her looking at him across a crowded room and both of them would feel beyond the thrill dread because however much of this they had they’d always want more and love being love would always give them more in strange and