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

remains stationary, doors open, engine running. The driver looks down at Augustus, nods, then turns his attention to a newspaper folded against the steering wheel. For a few moments this stasis feels dreamily hellish to Augustus, as if he’s died and been assigned a mild damnation. Then he understands: This is the terminus; the driver goes by the clock.
    â€œYou go up near Maddoch’s farm?” Augustus asks.
    â€œUp to Marsh Hill,” the driver says. “You can swim across from there.”
    Augustus’s left hand in his pocket feels as if it’s melting. Swim? What the fuck? Then he gets it: a joke; the rain. He knows where Marsh Hill is. From there a mile on foot back to the croft. This mile fever-filled with mischievous presences. He sees himself, clothes sodden, flailing at shadows. So be it. He has his stick. He glances at the girl, who’s made no move toward the bus, finds her intent upon the rolling of a cigarette, which he reads as a little self-consolation for their abortive exchange. In the back of his mind, habit’s been intuiting her history: too full of life, an indiscriminate force that should have been trained into athletics or math or the cello instead left to drive her into wrong adventures. Consciousness without structure, energy without direction. She’s many times found herself sitting amid wreckage trying to understand how such good impulses and generous hungers bring down such catastrophe. Lonely, he thinks; still carrying the ruby of her genuine self no one wants—then feels lonely himself since such thinking’s only habit and leads nowhere.
    She looks up with a smile, which he after a moment of dizziness returns. It’s obvious she’s not getting on this bus, or any other bus. He plants his stick on the step, grabs the handrail and hauls himself onboard.
    Â 
    Y ou hold out for a length of time so disinformation will feel like a genuine yield. That you can hold out for a length of time is the central humorless assumption. Augustus doesn’t know how long he’s been holding out, or, with certainty, that he’s been holding out. Time’s been showing a schizophrenic side, rushing, stretching, pooling, freezing, doing the opposite of whatever he wants. He’s kept trying to make out the hands on Harper’s wristwatch (the guards have removed theirs and left them on the table) but it’s no use. In any case what good would it do? If the watch said ten o’clock he wouldn’t know if it was night on the first day or morning on the third.
    â€œI don’t think you’ve been honest with me,” Harper says, easing himself onto his haunches and bobbing there for a moment until one of his knees ticks. “You’ve got the detachment method down.” The guards have been nodded back to their corner. One of them mops his face with a pale blue hanky so large it’s hard to believe it fitted in his pocket. The other guard whispers something Augustus is convinced is a joke about the size of the hanky and which evokes for him a vision of the man at home with his wife and noisy indulged young sons, a ceiling fan above the dining table, bowls of spicy stew, large rosemary-flecked breads, a wall calendar, a TV with satellite channels. This is the betrayal: you want them to be other, monstrous, in forfeiture of love and humor, but commonality persists. The people who do this are people. Which truth is like a spirit of boredom in the room. Harper straightens up. “You make yourself the object of your own study,” he says. “As with meditation employ value-neutral awareness: now I’m breathing in, now I’m breathing out, now here’s distraction—an ad jingle, a sexual image—now a pain in my left side, now the resonance of pain, now pain subsiding, now fear of more pain etc., keeping all the while separate from yourself.”
    Augustus remains silent only because it’s all he can do to