Chapter One
The room he wakes up in has the fraught stink of a phone
booth, which in spite of everything evokes escort ads
and brings a pang of loss, not for sex but for
tenderness. The last woman was a young dark-haired
prostitute in Barcelona he’d paid extra to lie with him
for an hour postcoitally, his nose in her downy nape.
Just lie here? Yes, if that’s okay. She’d been palpably
uneasy, as if affection was an edgy perversion, but what
could he tell her? He was astonished himself.
Dry-mouthed, he lifts his head off his chest and feels a
granular crunch in his neck. No idea how long he’s been
out. The handcuffs look brand-new, glamorous against his
dark skin. Sikh men wear those steel bangles and often
have showgirl eyelashes yet appear superbly masculine.
He wouldn’t have minded being a Sikh. Selina years ago
said the turban had deep phallic allure-which was the
sort of thing she came out with apropos of nothing.
Naturally non-sequiturial, by the time he met her she
was exploiting the trait having learned it charmed
-people. Their friends regarded her as someone enviably
at ease in her own skin. He, privy offstage and after
hours, knew her hung about with superstitions and fears,
all the trinkets and bogeymen of her half-shucked
Catholicism. Nonetheless she glimmered in the crowd:
women knew to be at the top of their game, men made
adjustments, maximized themselves. Standing at the bar
he’d watch her and remind himself he was the one going
home with her. What the women objected to, aside from
the standard injustice of random beauty, was her
intelligence. Intelligence on top of the long legs and
natural blond was sheerly immoral. That and having the
guts to do what they stopped short of: publicly date a
negro. Or half-negro. Or whatever he was. He’d stand at
the bar and let the warmth of sexual ownership flow
through him. Harry, languidly drying a highball glass
said: You two are a profane enchantment, you know that?
He did know it. Manhattan’s streets met them with a
murmur of outrage. Imperious amusement, Selina said. We
return them imperious amusement and benign disdain.
That’s easy for you to say, he said. You’re not the one
they’re going to beat the shit out of. You’re not the
one they’re going to lynch. This was 1967. With her he
thought the biggest thing his life could offer had
arrived.
And since here he is almost forty years later it turns
out he was right.
His wristwatch is gone. They removed it when they
brought him in. Carry nothing of sentimental value, so
he never does. An airport Swatch, $75. He’s always loved
the harried polyglotism of airports. Transit lounges
suggest the great subversion: there aren’t countries,
only -people, the secret everyone suspects and
governments live in fear of. He remembers the brownstone
doorway of his childhood in East Harlem, darkness
framing the blistered stoop, the blinding asphalt, the
smell of garbage cans and urine. You stood on the
threshold and felt the world right there like the hot
flank of an animal. There was one never-repeated visit
to his grandfather ten blocks away, a straw-colored
Santa Clausy man with a plump nose and huge sour pants
who said get that nigger brat out of here.
Which thought turns out to be the last fluttering
postponement. He strains against the handcuffs until his
skull thuds, stops when the pain gets too much. Any pain
now is an outrider for the pain coming. -People use the
phrase “the worst-case scenario,” it’s always
contextual. Not here: This is the worst-case scenario,
the Platonic Form, of which all others are imperfect
instances.
He can’t remember which fake name he’s been using, for a
yawning second can’t remember his real name-then it
comes to him with his mother’s face and a feeling of
nearness to her. She was a supple dark-haired woman with
green eyes and what he now realizes was a mouth so
sensuous as to amount to a destiny. Juliet. The crazy
wop broad with the nigger kid. In Capitals of the
Western World Italy was Saint Peter’s Square and the
Trevi Fountain, white statues against a blue sky, but
she’d never been there, she said. Born here. I’m an
American. You’re an American. When he took his childhood
miseries to her she’d doodle gently on his bare back
with her fingernails, her attention somewhere else.
Along with the green eyes she gave him English, Italian,
a handful of Dutch words and her own wrecked
Catholicism, which naturally didn’t survive his
education’s dismantling of dear things. Where the house
of many mansions used to be is pointless space,
scalloped by physics, not even infinite any more.
Somewhere in this simmer he’s busy with the problem of
getting out of his body. There’s a simple but horribly
elusive equation if only he can remember it. Elsewhere
he’s accepting the room’s details as the last of itself
the world can give him. You imagine it’ll be a lover’s
face or an evening sky. Instead bare concrete, a
shivering fluorescent, four plug sockets, stains on the
floor.
The door opens and three men walk in, two olive-skinned
in combat fatigues, one white in pastel Gap casuals.
He wishes he still believed in God, checks the pliable
air for His presence, but of course there’s nothing.
Considering he’s Calansay’s first black or even
semi-black man-an American with jewelish green eye and
piratical eye-patch to boot-the islanders have
assimilated him without much fuss. A few days of aphasic
shock when he walked into the Costcutter, the warmth of
stares when his back was turned, then they made the
shift. Collective intuition says he’s come to die among
them so curiosity overrides: they want his story. The
teenagers call him Captain Mandela, a handful of
enlightened souls Mr. Rose, the majority That Black
Chap, a tiny minority matter-of-factly The Nigger or The
Coon.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from A Day and a Night and a Day
by Glen Duncan
Copyright © 2009 by Glen Duncan.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Ecco
Copyright © 2009
Glen Duncan
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-06-123999-1
