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

Harper says. “Something abstract to which your concrete self’s irrelevant. Anomalous hybrids are acutely susceptible to transcendent systems: creed religions, ideologies, pure logic, mathematics, the occult.”
    Because he’s had these thoughts himself Augustus can’t help feeling another surge of kinship with Harper. Until your own intelligence evicts you . It was true. He was “smart” by the time he was eight, reading at least two years ahead of his age, the flower in PS 122’s desert. By the time he was twelve, church and the Bible were places he fished for contradictions.
    Then one summer when he was fourteen Juliet brought home a battered single-volume encyclopedia. She was high on reefers, moved with slow precision and talked in the sleepy voice he’d started to hate. Puberty was upon him, messing everything up. He’d umpteen times fished out her underwear from the laundry hamper and jerked-off with his face pressed into it. Imperfectly erased the memory for days, sometimes weeks, then he was at it again. What he thought of as his degeneracy (contradictions notwithstanding, Sins of the Flesh and Fear of Hell endured) brought him closer to his mother, allowed the beginning of real forgiveness for what she’d let him walk in on all those years ago. They enjoyed periods of being in jaded cahoots, usually when she got a new job. But the jobs never lasted. There was always some stuck-up bitch or bullying asshole. She’d get depressed, go out dolled-up, come back high or drunk, sometimes not at all. Mornings after her excesses she went to church in spiteful penitence. Augustus refused to go with her. Very occasionally men visited the apartment and took her places. Once an Italian sailor moved in for a week and refused to leave, until a tall zoot-suited black man with a reddish conk came and very calmly pulled a gun out and used it to oversee the sailor’s departure. Nonetheless through all this she fed Augustus, erratically and indiscriminately, books. King Lear or The Lone Ranger . If it came within her means she grabbed it and took it home for him. Here, read this. And so the encyclopedia.
    â€œYou’re probably right,” Augustus says. “I always had the feeling of looking for something.”
    He remembers the afternoon he came across the entry for SYLLOGISM . He was sitting stewing in the apartment’s open window wearing only a pair of knee-length shorts. Practically every wordof the explanation was alien to him but there was an example: All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore: Socrates is mortal . The sounds of the kids playing in the street below tickled his bare soles. “Therefore” was a word he’d never considered before but suddenly he felt relieved, as if an inchoate suspicion about the way things were had been confirmed. If all men were mortal and Socrates was a man, then Socrates had to be mortal. There was no argument. That was the thing: There could be no argument . He looked up from the book and experienced in addition to the bladder-tingle of the four-story drop an icy rushing outward from himself, though into what he didn’t know, hope, maybe. Joy. The street welled with mute encouragement. It meant something that there were things you couldn’t argue with. It meant…he couldn’t say what it meant, but it was as if he’d been given a crucial clue. He felt a great fondness for Socrates, whoever the fuck he was.
    â€œTruth, certainty, first principles, all the big franchises,” Harper says. “I was reading a movie review the other day, Super-man Returns . It had the phrase ‘this tired franchise.’ Sometimes you get a big articulation from an absurd little context—because that’s what the world is now, a tired franchise. The whole business of being born and working and screwing and getting ill and dying. I’m not just talking about the west. Primitives with clay hair and