Read Online A Day and a Night and a Day: A Novel by Glen Duncan - Free Book Online

imagining Harper feeling a slightly above average level of irritation when browsing in a microelectronics store and finding two models of something both of which do almost all the things he wants but neither of which does all. (In Augustus’s vision Harper’s accompanied by an equinely beautiful young woman who with constant low-level annoyance is one of his mistresses. Though mildly aphrodisiacal the experience depresses her these days since like everything else it’s become self-conscious, situated, ironic. It reminds her that she sits on a nest of things she knows about herself—the exact formidable degree of her beauty, the exact formidable degree of her intellect, the exact formidable degree of her corruption—and isn’t likely to shift from it now. Shopping, with the ample resources she has, outlines the dimensions of her unsatisfactory life, alternatives to which she knows she’ll never explore.) Augustus sees all this because a version of Harper’s consumer irritation is familiar to him. He lived for years in Manhattan with the urban malaria of precision dissatisfactions. But whereas for Harper the condition segues into a feeling of well-being, for Augustus it was always a failure, proof of vague yet giant loss. The part of him in mourning for all that was gonerequired ceaseless distraction: television; work; doomed affairs; fine-tuned consumer preferences—despite which the mourning went on, in dreams, in the small hours, sitting on the can or waiting for the kettle to boil. At moments his own face in the bathroom mirror conceded the worst, that he was still suffering from the loss of the old gods and stories, that he was still, with the confused center of himself, looking back. Harper doesn’t look back. He’s something different, a new type that can turn nihilism into buoyancy. As he moves forward the past drops away behind him like a crumbling bridge.
    â€œListen,” Harper says, leaning forward to reforge the earlier intimacy. “You’re still a man. Don’t make me take that away from you.”
    The sincerity and reason of this hurt Augustus in his heart. Tears well and fall, which he knows is the first hairline fracture. He thinks again of all the people crucified before Christ. The demand they’d made was for his recognition of how alone they’d been. Any second this interlude with Harper will end and he’ll be alone again. He starts to construct a comfort—that the murdered millions of history will be with him—but it dissolves into nothing.
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    B ecause he can’t face Maddoch and the builder Augustus kills daylight in Marle. In Costcutter he picks up supplies he doesn’t need—soap, toothpaste, a can of tuna, a small packet of rice, disposable razors and at the checkout ambushed by a sugar-craving a bar of Galaxy milk chocolate—then spends two hours over three large whiskies in the Heathcote Arms, shivering between swallows, some sort of blood noise bothering not just his ears but histeeth as well, as if his fillings are picking up radio. The dog lies by the fire, raises its head from time to time but doesn’t get up. At the bar someone’s showing Eddie the landlord the latest thing, an i-phone. Not on sale here yet; this one’s from America, retails at $600. It does everything. Augustus’s skin prickles: Harper had one, demonstrated it during the hours in the medical unit. You see what this means, right? he’d said in a tone of neutral enquiry. Augustus’s morphine was wearing off. They’d had him swimming in drugs, all fathom of hours and days gone. It means not having information on demand’s no longer acceptable, Harper continued. There’s no standing on the street wondering what year Kevin Spacey won the Oscar, it’s there in your hand, instantly. It’s going to shut down a big neural chunk. Memory’ll go. The optimists’ corollary will be that it’ll