A Day and a Night and a Day: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

places, codes, fronts, dummy operations. It had taken two years to get in, almost two years’ study before that, the claustrophobia of ostensible conversion. The Koran’s lulling music of tautology, then the obsessed bleating of Qutb and Maududi. You don’t fake conversion. You sign part of yourself over to it and hope it can be reclaimed. You acquire another optional reality. By the time of his arrest he was three days away from taking out Husain, Masood, Ali and Fawaz, the four behind the Barcelona department store bomb. He’s twice been involved in actions himself—abortive since he tipped off the authorities through Elise. This was the tightrope he walked every minute of every day. Elise had said: They’re going to kill you. They’re going to find out and they’re going to kill you. But they hadn’t. Three more days and it would’ve all been over. Then what? Elise had asked. Then nothing. The word “nothing” had emptied him, for maybe the first time showed him there really was nothing beyond killing them. His imagination stopped as if at the edge ofa flat earth. There was a life on autopilot in New York: his four restaurants, his proxy, Darlene; an apartment on the Upper East Side, a house in Vermont; people he’d abandoned; a way of life; a world. Elise had said, gently: I don’t think you’ll be able to go back. You have the disgust now. I had the disgust before, he told her. It’s just I was too lazy to do anything with it.
    Harper, pacing, makes notes, seems eventually oblivious of the guards, one of whom is soon frankly asleep. Augustus makes the information last because he knows what’s coming when it dries up. As kids it was the same with an ice-cream or candy bar: Sooner or later no matter your contortions it was gone.
    Harper returns to the chair facing him and places his hands on its back. “I’m a fan of yours,” he says. “Narcissistically. You remind me of myself. We’ve got a lot in common.”
    â€œApart from good looks?” The survival habit says talk, establish reason, humor, a basis for the appeal to compassion.
    â€œSure,” Harper says. “Mixed blood for a start. My father was half-Swiss half-English, my mother second-generation Russian-American. Not quite your cocktail but enough to make me impatient with categories.”
    One of the guards stretches his legs and his foot nudges the canvas bag. Augustus feels the muffled clink in his teeth, skull, kneecaps, sees televised surgery’s clamped open cavity and rubber gloved doctors rootling the organs, shoving a stomach out of the way or holding a satiny heart up to the camera. He wishes he could just for a moment wrap his arms around himself.
    â€œYour mother was Italian,” Harper says.
    â€œItalian-American.”
    â€œStraighten it out for me.”
    â€œHer father was from Dutch immigrants, her mother Italian. I never knew my father but obviously I know what color he was.”
    â€œThat’s some misbehavior for a white girl in the forties.”
    â€œShe got her marching orders for it.”
    â€œBut managed.”
    â€œShe was a resourceful woman,” Augustus says. Harper nods, concedes the bad taste of his allusion. Avoiding the hackneyed matters to him, Augustus perceives. The man’s been doing this long enough for an aesthetic to emerge.
    â€œSo I’m picturing it,” Harper says. “You grow up at the black end of East Harlem in the fifties. Next door the Italians are giving way to the Puerto Ricans. You’re not really Italian and you’re not really black. There’s your mother, but she’s white. Catholic, presumably.”
    â€œRegularly lapsed.”
    â€œSo that’s your shelter for a while until your own intelligence evicts you. You’re looking for a home. Passionate half-breeds always are.”
    Augustus says nothing.
    â€œI speak of home metaphorically,”