Maddoch cranes his neck, owl eyebrows raised.
“Here,” Augustus says. He takes her hand (the cold knuckles are prominent) and forces her fingers around the crumpled note.
He doesn’t want to look at her but she says, “Okay, thanks,” and lifts her head so he gets one glimpse of her face that suddenly looks exhausted before she turns and walks away.
They’ve left him alone. Harper sent the guards out for a break, followed them to the door but hung back. For 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 know the 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 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 to celebrate. 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—and the 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 dangerous ways.
“What are you thinking?”
He was thinking, as he kissed her buttocks and stroked her thighs, that the world was the kind of place where while one person was doing this another person somewhere else would be having his fingers cut off or his eye gouged out or his daughter raped and mutilated in front of him.
“Muhammad Ali,” he lied. In this they were older than their years.
For Christ’s sake let’s not tell each other the truth the whole time, Selina had said. Beauty trumps truth sometimes, that’s just the deal. We’ve got good enough instincts to know when, and if we haven’t we don’t deserve each other.
“About the conviction?”
Muhammad Ali had been indicted for draft evasion in May. Augustus was an English and philosophy freshman at NYU and as a student in pursuit of a degree qualified for draft deferral until his studies were over. A feast of guilt for him and Selina. Though she wrapped her arms and legs around him and said they’ll have to fucking kill me before I let them take you, he knew his being safe made her fear for her brother more acute. It won’t come to that, Augustus had said. I don’t graduate till ’seventy-one for Christ’s sake. That’s a whole different decade. The war’ll be over by then.
“About my mother’s take on him, aside from that she’d marry him if he asked her.” He had to ration mentions of his mother when they were intimate like this. Selina knew it served him as a mild blasphemous aphrodisiac (even now he couldn’t resist running his tongue gently over her anus) which was fine with her as long as it didn’t begin to feel like a fetish. I’ll do anything you like in the sack, she’d told him, as long as it’s part of everything else. Do you understand? Anything as long as it doesn’t become monolithic.
“And her take is? Other than her availability for marriage to him?”
“That his nobility embarrasses him into larger-than-lifeness.”
“You think this is a stunt?”
“No, I think it’s for real. But he’s jumping with a net. The lawyers know if it goes to the Supreme Court they’ll rule in his favor. I think this is the Nation asking its highest-profile son to give whitey the finger on the big stage.”
She thought about it, turned a page of the Times.
“Maybe,” she said. “God bless him anyway. I’d marry him myself, incidentally, so don’t get complacent. That air coming in is like an angel.”
Augustus was only half paying attention. The thought of what some other person somewhere else was going though while he was lying here sipping from the cup of bliss not only wouldn’t leave him alone but was stirring the blood in his cock. Somewhere back down his sexual line he’d discovered—with a feeling of coming deflatedly into his share of species inheritance—the link between cruelty and arousal. God’s lousy wiring or the Devil sneaking a hand in during a Divine nap.
“How come you never joined?” Selina asked him.
“The Nation?”
“Yeah.”
He laughed. “Oh, man.”
“What?”
“I’ll tell you something. I was there the night they arrested Johnson Hinton.”
“Get out of here.”
“I was maybe nine or ten. You know the story, right?
Selina twisted onto her side and got up on one elbow to look at him. “I know Malcolm X helped the guy sue the city for police brutality. Are you shitting me?”
“I was out on the street with three or four other kids, just mooching around doing nothing useful. Anyway there was a fight between a bunch of guys, God knows how it started, but two white cops broke it up and made a big deal of getting the bystanders to move on. Except some of the bystanders couldn’t move on because they lived there, right? Which left the cops feeling stupid. So they start getting heavy and this guy Hinton gets whacked over the head with a nightstick and taken away in a squad car. Turns out he’s one of the Fruit of Islam. Word gets back to Temple Seven and half an hour later there’s fifty of these motherfuckers soldiered up outside the police station.”
“Including Malcolm X.”
“Including Malcolm X. Us kids had followed the crowd that had drifted up to the precinct house. It was amazing. The cops were scared shitless. And Malcolm demands to see the prisoner then demands he gets proper medical care, and lo and fucking behold an ambulance comes and takes brother Hinton away!”
“And you were there?”
“I was there. We traipsed up to Harlem Hospital, too, all the way up Lenox Avenue. People came out of their houses and out of bars and joined the march. I’d never seen anything like it. There was a pretty big crowd by the time we got to the hospital. More police arrived and told Malcolm to break it up, and Malcolm cool as a fucking cucumber says he’ll cooperate when he’s confident brother Hinton’s getting proper medical attention. In the end they had to go and get the fucking doctor to come out and put his mind at ease.”
“You’re amazing. I can’t believe you never told me that.”
Augustus lifted her thigh and kissed her cunt, gently. (Each time he did something like this he knew he was taking a coin from their almost inexhaustible hoard of wealth.) In the whole time he’d known her he’d never seen her so at ease. Normally even stoned part of her kept vigil for her brother. But Michael had broken his leg and was not, for a while, going to get shot and killed. God bless the joker who tossed up the helmet.
“So how come it didn’t inspire you to become a member?” she asked. “Seeing Black Power in action.”
“Well I was only ten years old. But actually it must have put a seed in there because a few years later I went to hear Elijah Muhammad speak. I was still only in my teens.”
“But you weren’t convinced?”
“I wasn’t black. Not properly. I got some looks from the regulars—”
“Your beautiful magician’s eyes.”
“But in any case they kept talking about The White Man. Separating from the white man. My grandfather’s the white man. My grandmother’s the white man. My mother’s the goddamned white man.”
“And now your bitch is the white man. Come here.”
After they’d made love, Selina said: “We could marry him now.”
“What?”
“Me and your mother. Me or your mother I mean. Could marry Muhammad Ali now. In a storm of publicity.”
Now because the U.S. Supreme Court had that year ruled that any extant antimiscegenation law contravened the Fourteenth Amendment and thus subverted the Constitution. Harry had framed a newspaper picture of the groundbreaking couple from Virginia—the aptly named Perry Loving and his beloved, Mildred Jeter (he was white, she was mixed African and American Indian)—and hung it above the bar. Until the ruling interracial marriage had been illegal in seventeen states, though New York wasn’t one of them.
“You think he’d marry a skinny-legged thang like you?” Augustus said.
“Poor Seaborn must be turning in his grave,” Selina said. “Seaborn” was Seaborn Roddenberry, a Georgian Democrat in the House of Representatives in 1913 whose proposed bill against mixed marriage had been dug up and much quoted in the press during Loving v. Virginia. Selina had learned bits by heart. “‘Intermarriage between whites and blacks is repulsive,” ’ she recited now, in an approximate southern accent, “‘and averse to every sentiment of pure American spirit. It is abhorrent and repugnant to the very principles of Saxon government.’” Augustus kissed her bare armpits. “‘It is subversive of social peace. It is destructive of moral supremacy, and ultimately this slavery of white women to black beasts—’” Augustus kissed down the length of her, lingered between her legs—“‘will bring…’ umm ‘…this nation a conflict…a conflict as fatal as ever reddened the soil of Virginia or crimsoned the mountain paths of Pennsylvania. Let us—’ slower. Yes, like that—‘uproot and exterminate now this debasing, ultra-demoralizing, un-American and inhuman leprosy…’ Oh that’s nice. That’s really very nice.”
The door opens and Harper walks in, alone, carrying a plastic bottle of Evian, which he puts on the table. Its condensation says cold. He rights the chair next to Augustus then unfastens the cable between the two sets of cuffs. Augustus straightens his legs; jammed blood loosens, hurries into his thighs and calves. He thinks of a crowd pouring through a broken barrier.
“I’ll help you into the chair.”
During the interrogation Harper hasn’t touched him but now he puts his hands under Augustus’
s arms from behind and with one smooth hike (so powerful it brings Augustus’s infancy back for a moment) has him seated.
“Oh,” Harper says. “Wait.”
The soles of the feet. You wouldn’t think it. But if you reflect there’s really only one context in which you hear the phrase. Augustus sits with his legs lifted, as if (the mind goes about its associative business regardless) Harper’s about to run a vacuum cleaner over the place. As a child Augustus couldn’t bear it if he had to do this when his mother vacuumed, there was something in the gesture that made him feel corrupt, as if he were laughing at her, as if she were his slave!
Harper fetches one of the guards’ chairs. “Stretch your legs out.”
Not easy, a surge of sweat and despair, but Harper slides the seat under his calves and Augustus lets himself go limp. Harper brings the Evian, opens it and hands it to him. It’s cold enough to hurt, lightnings where the teeth are missing, goes down his throat in knots. Harper holds the bottle’s plastic cap up.
“People hear that little hymeneal snap of the seal breaking on a bottle they feel safe. That’s something, isn’t it? Packaging as retroactive terrorism. A guy buys a bottle of Coke for his daughter turns out to be poisoned. She drinks it and dies. But it turns out too that the seal had been broken and he didn’t check. What do people think? Guy deserved it. Idiot.”
Augustus finishes the water, wants more, much more though it’s frozen his palate. The small refreshment makes him tearful, his body’s readiness to go on, biology’s dumb dedication. Red blood cells rush to the site of injury. As a kid he’d imagined them as fire trucks: sirens, manful determination, teamwork, sacrifice.
“Let me ask you something,” Harper says. “Does it seem crazy to you now that you thought you’d be able to do this?”
For Augustus the water’s brought back the horror of hope. Before they’d broken off he’d been close to something, a space just before unconsciousness or insensibility in which, as Harper had said, there was pure awareness, observation without investment or concern. They can’t let you enter that state. In that state you don’t care, and if you don’t care they’ve got nothing to work with. So they pause. Give you water. The body recouples itself to the soul.