A Clue to the Exit: A Novel (2 page)

When I was writing
Aliens with a Human Heart
(perhaps you were one of the fifty-three million people who paid to see it) I enjoyed pointing out to novelists struggling with a £3,800 advance spread over seventeen years that the novel is dead. Now that I’m about to join it I’m not so sure. Why should the novel die? Why should anybody die?

Arnie won’t be pleased that I want to write a novel. Too bad. I just need enough money to see me out. This house I bought near St Tropez is expensive to keep up.

It’s a pink house with white gates. At the front there are two palm trees, floodlit, so the burglars don’t fall flat on their faces. At the back, four minuscule cypresses, like self-conscious bridesmaids, accompany the concrete driveway to the garage. If you climb on the roof and jump, you can see the sea. Inside there are still-empty niches everywhere, and tiny flights of steps leading from one thing to another. Two steps up to the kitchen, three down to the living area, one onto the patio, two into the garden, and a final glissando of steps back to the entrance area.

It’s as if the builder had stumbled across the concept of a step and couldn’t believe his luck. Get a load of this thing that goes up and down.
C’est un petit miracle
. Imagine the atmosphere of excitement on the building site, the dawning of a new possibility, like
Homo habilis
bringing a stone down for the first time on the bones of a scavenged gazelle and sucking out the marrow. The world would never be the same again.

The strange thing about these discoveries is that they often happen simultaneously in quite different places. It makes you think that ideas might be ‘in the air’.

3

Is the oyster waiting for the lemon juice, or does the juice just fall? Who thought of bringing together elements from such remote worlds: oysters and lemons, ducks and oranges? It was you, you greedy thing. And so isn’t it natural, in our delirium, on the borders between waking and insomnia, that we should imagine our death as the culinary triumph of a careless superior being? The bitter white splash of some unsuspected fruit, the stubby prongs, the big swallow.

From the way he tucked into his lunch at Mi Casa Ti Casa, I can only assume that Arnie Cornfield was not afflicted by these reflections.

‘Nobody wants to hear about death,’ he said, loading a dripping cable of
spaghetti alle vongole
into his mouth. ‘It’s depressing. The audience have gotta leave the movie with a smile on their faces.’

‘But it’s my only subject: I live it, I breathe it, I eat death.’

‘Eat death, eat shit,’ said Arnie. ‘Gimme that feel-good factor, like you did in
Aliens with a Human Heart
.’ His face lit up again. ‘That was a beautiful deal.’

‘But I’m not in that space any more,’ I said. ‘I’ve had some very serious medical news; as you will, if you live long enough. I’ve got to communicate what’s happening – I mean,’ I suddenly saw my opportunity, ‘talk about “Wake up and smell the flowers”.’

‘
Smell the Flowers
, I like,’ said Arnie. ‘
Smell the Flowers
, there’s a market for. How about they get the files mixed up and he’s not really dying at all – it’s some other schmuck, a weirdo serial killer: someone who deserves to die.’

‘But they didn’t get the files mixed up, Arnie, this is happening to me. Don’t you get it? I’m dying.’

‘Who’s your executor?’ said Arnie. ‘It’s a dog-eat-dog world.’

‘When did you last see a dog eat a dog?’

‘Gimme a break, it’s an expression, like … eh, “The pursuit of happiness” it’s not meant to be taken literally, right?’ Arnie wiped some of the orange sauce from his chin. ‘Even after you die you gotta have representation, otherwise you’re yesterday’s news,
kaput, finito
.’

‘Will you be my executor?’ I simpered.

‘I’d be honoured,’ said Arnie. ‘Tony!’

Tony came over. He’s big in the theatre.

‘You know Charlie.’

Tony smiled.

‘We’re planning a big retrospective of Charlie’s work.
Boy Meets Girl
,
The Frog Prince
and, of course, the jewel in the crown,
Aliens with a Human Heart
. In about … how long is it, Charlie?’

‘Six months.’

‘Six months,’ said Arnie.

‘Congratulations,’ said Tony.

I looked suitably modest.

‘By the way, I’ve had a peep at your friend’s manuscript,’ said Tony, ‘and I think what he’s doing is very dangerous. One little rule we have in the theatre is
never
let the public into rehearsals. I don’t know what’s wrong with writers these days. I mean, why can’t he just establish some credible characters…’

Arnie started nodding his head vigorously. ‘Tell the fucking story.’

‘And by imagining their lives,’ Tony went on, ‘explore the themes he wants to bring to our attention.’

‘In other words, tell the fucking story,’ said Arnie. ‘Thanks for having a look at it, Tony. That’s what I figured, but this guy comes highly recommended, and sometimes I think maybe I’m outta touch. I see so much material, I think maybe there’s a market for this shit.’

Tony had to rush.

‘What are ya gonna call it?’ asked Arnie.

‘
Smell the Flowers
,’ I suggested.

‘Sounds great. Send me the treatment and I’ll get you the deal.’

4

It’s midnight. I am in the Westbury Hotel, sweating over the outline for
Smell the Flowers
. Arnie doesn’t even know that I want to write a novel yet, let alone the extent to which it will not be centred on a floral tribute. You would have thought that I could write a phoney outline for
Smell the Flowers
and then write the morbid novel I really have in mind, but I’ve made the fatal mistake of drawing a
cordon sanitaire
of honesty around the subject of my death.

Earlier today I started writing something a little magical. ‘Magical, there’s a market for,’ as Arnie might say. News travels slowly from Paris to Bogotá, but from that ingenious capital it has pulsed around the world at the speed of light.

Doña S was always very particular about attending confession, no easy matter given that she was permanently asleep and lived at the bottom of a well. The Jesuits from the seminary at San Sebastián refused to come over the mountains to our lonely little village, and so we chose my grandmother’s donkey to be our priest. To us simple folk, Eeh-Aw might as well have been the Pope. Once a week at noon we would follow our beloved confessor to the well in a candle-lit procession, give him a bucket of carrots and leave him to listen to Doña S’s seemingly chaotic but highly symbolical ramblings …

Charming as it might be to skip along in the Andean style, I’ve decided that whimsy is not the royal road to freedom, and that I have to return to the one fact I can rely on: that I, whoever I am, am dying.

The trouble is that when the mind is fixed on dying everything starts to spiral and to magnify. Have you noticed how many spirals there are? Double helixes, spiral galaxies, corkscrews. They are hints of the mental habits that dying brings. Maybe if I settle into the helter-skelter of my final thoughts, the sharp edges will start to curve, the oppositions start to flow into each other. I must let it happen, I must soften my gaze. Being sharp is just one thing. Why get hung up on it?

Imagine a very old, very lonely woman whose only wish is that somebody should really mind about her death. And then imagine her very reluctantly realizing that she’s going to have to go it alone on this one too. Join her for a moment. It doesn’t matter who she is.

That idea didn’t take either. Instead, at five-thirty this morning as the garbage trucks outside my window were grinding the detritus of Madison Avenue in their savage jaws, I wrote the following fragment.

Patrick climbed on board the two-forty-five for London Paddington. The pedantic emphasis on Paddington struck him as a rather shrill assertion of straightforwardness in a word-world grown too playful for its own good, as if the train might otherwise be hijacked by Doña S and, despite setting out from Oxford, dive under the metropolis and approach it from the east, terminating inconveniently at Liverpool Street station.

Patrick flicked past the notes he had taken at the consciousness conference, until he reached some more personal reflections recorded at the back of his notebook.

‘Like St Francis I am wedded to poverty, but in my case the marriage has not been a success.’

It was not true. He had enough money to be getting on with.

‘The night is young. I must try not to envy her too much.’

His own youth had been a nightmare from which he was grateful to be distanced.

He was exasperated by his craven need for elegance, disgusted by his own stylistic habits. Was it too late to change?

He only had six months to find out. Cirrhosis, of course. The reprimand of those young nights.

The truth was that he was desperate about everything and he would have to abandon his taste for aphorisms if he was going to get close to describing his feelings. Even the routine unhappiness of the strangers on the station platform devastated him. The feeling raged through him, like a burning rope he couldn’t hold on to, although someone he loved was falling at the other end of it; it ripped the skin from his hands. As he walked down the platform he had felt the pressure to drag bits of dead language over himself, like cardboard blankets on a freezing night. But he remained utterly exposed.

I was too tired to go on, but before I fell asleep I felt the relief of writing a third-person narrative. It is so much more personal than a first-person narrative, which reveals too flagrantly the imposture of the personality it depends on.

As I lay on the bed, spiralling into sleep, I realized that I couldn’t grab at anything any more. I couldn’t even grasp the simplest idea. Nothing would take hold. The chains of cause and effect were heaped uselessly at my feet. Maybe that’s what freedom is like, only less drowsy.

5

Yesterday I doubled the dose of Prozac and despite my unhappy situation I feel quite violently cheerful. My mind is busy, busy, busy. I just don’t see how I’m going to fit dying into my packed schedule. In December I’ll be writing a deathless work of art. January’s no good, I’m having a reconciliation with my ex-wife. The spring’s out – it’s the cherry season, for God’s sake. The summer’s not looking good either: my daughter is coming down to the coast to say a last farewell; I wouldn’t miss that scene for all the world. We’re going to have to reschedule this thing for next autumn. I know it’s a whole year, but what can I do? I’m sorry.

Busy, busy, busy.

This morning I realized that my true subject – at least, for the purpose of getting an advance – is not death, but consciousness. It was Patrick going to that conference that gave me the hint. I rang Arnie’s secretary and made an appointment for the next day, then I went to Brentano’s and bought all the books on consciousness I could lay my hands on.

Luckily, I’ve done a speed-reading course and by the time I arrived at Mi Casa Ti Casa I had been able to scan twenty-six books with the word ‘mind’ in the title, as well as a rogue volume called
Now and Zen
. Unluckily, I am only able to retain for a few hours an impression of the material I read at this punishing pace, and the first dozen books had already faded on the drive over. Still, I was unlikely to forget the central point: nobody has a clue how consciousness works. That’s why it’s such a fertile field for fiction, unlike the steam engine, for instance, which is relatively well understood.

I found Arnie ripping the shell off a lobster and pouring a little battered tin of melted butter over its quivering body.

‘This is better than sex,’ he commented. ‘You got that treatment for me?’

‘I’m not writing about death any more.’

‘You’re just like my wife,’ he said, and chuckled. ‘She goes to the doctor every day. It’s an illness: hypochondria. She thinks she’s dying. I have to work my ass off so she can afford to be hysterical. So what’s the new project?’ he asked, expertly lowering the entire lobster down his throat like a sword-swallower.

‘It’s a novel,’ I said.

Although he had a claw sticking out of each corner of his mouth, Arnie’s indignation allowed him no pause.

‘An ovel!’ The claws appeared to become animated as he mumbled. ‘What the fuck you writing an ovel fo? Ovelist is the schmuck gets aid peanuts for the wights if, ig if, he finds a poducer.’

‘It’s about consciousness,’ I persisted.

Arnie spat out the claws. They clattered onto the plate, the flesh sucked from their shattered exoskeletons.

‘What’s the story line?’ he mocked. ‘Consciousness meets consciousness, they become super-conscious and live consciously ever after?’

‘You must be psychic,’ I said.

‘Sure I’m psychic,’ said Arnie, reluctant to refuse a compliment. ‘Listen, Charlie, first you tell me you can’t get death off your mind; now you tell me you can’t get your mind off your mind. Sounds like you oughta sack your therapist and write a sequel to
Aliens with a Human Heart
. Don’t you have any sense of social responsibility? Fifty-three million people are waiting for that sequel. Now, Charlie,’ said Arnie, all avuncular, ‘I know consciousness is a hot topic on the campuses. Did you read
Mind Matters
?’

‘I must have done,’ I said, feeling the memory of another dozen books slide down Lethe’s greasy banks.

‘How about
Mind Your Language
?’

‘I … I think so.’

‘That was a nice deal. The man who represented that book is a personal friend of mine. You wouldn’t believe what some of these academic boys get paid. But a novel, Charlie, a novel. You gonna put synapses in a novel?’