A Clue to the Exit: A Novel (4 page)

And so the Maestro has left, without leaving behind any more detailed instructions to shape my destiny. The countess is dead, depriving me of one of those rich friendships that two people, no longer in perfect health, strike up in a luxury hotel. An opportunity to look back on two lives and decide that, on balance, they were very much worth living: all that’s gone down the drain. And I’ve had sex with a stranger. I’m burning through my options fast. Soon there’ll be nothing left to do but write.

9

This morning I am certain that the last traces of Prozac have been exiled by my imperious sadness. Why not get some more? Why not be a little lenient? Why not go and play blackjack in Monte Carlo, or visit Luxor? Why not invite a friend to share my five-star decline?

I drive myself to the edge because it is where I already am, stranded on a narrow atoll between what is not worth saying and what cannot be said, dead language and lost love on one side, silence and death on the other. The people I love are already out of reach, guarded by a jealous mother, or married to somebody else. And my friends would only try to console me. As to death, the only thing everyone manages to agree on is that this particular body, through which I have registered everything I know, whether it was hard-wired or acquired, generated or received, by chance or by design, freely or not, this particular body will end. Even fans of the near-death experience need a central nervous system to experience their disembodiment. Whatever death brings, it will not be the
potage de légumes jardinières
I enjoyed on Monday night, or yesterday’s astonishing carnal adventure. Whatever may be left will be alien to the person I am now, and so only the part of me that is acquainted with strangeness will not be distracted by death. When he was dying, Molière asked for red wine and ripe cheese; Aldous Huxley, on the other hand, asked for mescaline. One can’t be too careful in such an extreme situation, and I intend to have a slap-up dinner followed by a strong dose of mescaline.

In the meantime, I will continue
On the Train
. I want to know what’s been going on all these years. I’ve thought that I was having consciousness and now it turns out I don’t know what that means. I think I’ll just introduce a new character. There’s no time for bridge passages with a five-month deadline.

Crystal sat down opposite Patrick. She still found it difficult to lower herself into a chair without wincing, and her neck brace made her feel like a collared ox dragging a plough through a paddy field. She had been told more than once that after a car accident like that she was lucky to be alive. Her transcendentally beautiful near-death experience – or NDE, as the members of her new club called it – made it even harder for her to hear this earnest platitude. Peter was still in a coma, and the drunken diplomat who had run into them by the simple device of driving on the wrong side of the road was using the moral vaccine of diplomatic immunity.

Crystal would not have forced her shattered body to Oxford for any other conference, but caught between the ethics of switching off Peter’s life support, the troubling status of her NDE, and the rage she still felt towards the diplomat, she figured that a consciousness conference was ‘just the ticket’, as Peter would have said.

Would she ever hear him say it again? Every detail of his voice, his tendency to mumble, his English accent, his pauses and sudden rushes, seemed more precious to her now that she might never hear them again. She felt guilty about leaving him for three days, but she rang the hospital between every lecture. No change. She had spent the last four weeks in Peter’s hospital room, talking to him as if he might reply at any moment, kissing his face, reading to him, meditating with his hand in her lap, and drawing his profile, telling him he was the best model she’d ever had.

Tracy, the prim English nurse who was sometimes on duty, and who already disapproved of Crystal’s constant presence in Peter’s room, as if it was akin to necrophilia, found her sketching his impassive face. She stood for a while next to the bed, fiddling with the sheets.

‘Do you think that’s really fair?’ she finally asked, with the air of someone defending the handicapped from exploitation.

Crystal realized that Tracy saw Peter as a quasi-corpse to whom a quasi-funereal respect was due, a proper silence, a few flowers and some make-up. Crystal was defiantly but also quite naturally treating Peter as if he was still there. She was drawing Peter because he was still Peter, not sneaking up on him now that he could no longer protest. She tried to communicate all of this with her steady gaze, but Tracy looked back at her with equally steady conviction that she knew kinky behaviour when she saw it.

All the fascinating speculative questions Crystal might have hoped to answer by attending the conference were subsidiary to this leading question, ‘Is Tracy right?’

The conference was not designed to answer her particular preoccupation. It revelled in all kinds of fringe experiences: the
petit mal
, the Korsakov’s syndrome, the neurological dysfunctions that Oliver Sacks had made into a middlebrow passion; the pets who knew their owners were coming home; the twins separated at birth and living in distant cities who purchased the same dress on the same day; the flight of homing pigeons; the astral journeys of psychotic patients; the minuscule but robust incidents of paranormal phenomena; the consciousness which civilization had gained and the consciousness it had lost. There were of course philosophers with their qualia and their Artificial Intelligence. And some doctors, mapping out brain function in a style no less convincing than medieval cartography.

I have to interrupt Crystal’s story because something absolutely extraordinary has just happened.

I was sitting in a cafe called Le Nautique, writing
On the Train
, when a woman at the next table asked me for a light. There was a gentle breeze, so I bunched three matches together and struck them, cupping my hand around the end of her Marlboro. Only then did I look up and notice her face. Her teeth were the colour of burnt oranges, and her dark-rose lipstick described a pair of lips at some distance from the ones that sucked on her cigarette. The swollen bags under her eyes trembled and twitched, but the eyes themselves stared resolutely into mine.

‘You are writing a novel,’ she said, in that cultivated French which is always such a pleasure to listen to.

‘Yes,’ I admitted.

‘You will have a great success with your novel, a worldwide success.’

‘How do you know?’ I asked, casual but far from indifferent.

‘You’ve heard of Henri Arnaud?’

‘No.’

‘He was the greatest psychic in France and he gave me his gift. I also do psychic surgery,’ she went on. ‘I learnt it from Dr Fritz in Brazil.’

‘The borders between different dimensions are more liquid there,’ I said encouragingly.

‘Yes,’ she said, giving me a burnt-orange smile. ‘I like Brazil.’

She was clearly a woman of many talents and I was hugely relieved by the news she gave me about my novel. I felt the deep sense of peace that came from knowing I was doing exactly the right thing with the little time I have left.

Tonight, I sat in the hotel restaurant and let everything fall away except that sense of peace. As I breathed in I could feel my consciousness expanding along a glistening spider’s web of total connectedness and as I exhaled it accordioned back into the tropical richness of my body, the streams and rivers of my blood. My breath rode untroubled across the huge intellectual divide that separates the primacy of sensation from universal consciousness.

I sat amazed in front of the burnt-sugar aviary of my
myrtilles Metternich
. Night-blue fruit caged in starlight.

Everything was utterly perfect.

10

This morning, I feel desperate again. Yesterday’s elation might as well have happened to an entirely different person. What depths of self-delusion could have made me believe that crazy old witch in Le Nautique?

I must get out of this hotel. Luxury is too superficial to touch the real causes of depression; it conjures up the mirage of consolation and adds the whiplash of betrayal to an already miserable situation. It may be that nomadic life is our natural condition and that possessions exhaust us. But reception desks exhaust us too. Of course I love hotels. They are a kind of alienated, postponed, provisional home that suits me perfectly. I hate them for the same reason. This hotel which charmed and liberated me for a few days now magnifies my agitation. A delivery truck has just made the windows of my bedroom shake. If the slow liquid of the glass is shaking, isn’t the quicker liquid of my blood shaking too?

I have now moved down to the bar to continue writing this note, but it’s impossible to concentrate with the muted music shimmering out of the speakers like pins and needles. Only an orchestra of terrified mice could scratch out a tune at this volume, and yet I wouldn’t want it any louder.

Should I move? Should I cultivate the nomad? It would be such a waste of time, even if I stayed on this coast. There are grand hotels all the way from Cannes to Italy, vanilla and strawberry palaces in their
vastes parcs fleuris
, sheltered by parasol pines and fountaining palm trees. What difference does it make which one I’m in?

The more fundamental problem is the sinister equation ‘time is money’. It held true when I was running out of both, but since I sold my house I have an abundance of money and with it an involuntary softening of my focus on the neck of the hourglass. I realize that the people who really belong in these hotels – not the honeymooners or the desperadoes like me, but people like that woman in the corner who has smoothed her lizard skin with surgery and the man next to her, his paunch guillotined by the expert cut of his double-breasted suit – are really buying the illusion of abundant time, meted out to them in canapés and logoed bath robes and the swirling sea scum of ‘Fingal’s Cave’ currently being disgorged by the mouse orchestra.

I must cut through this illusion; I must restore myself to a level of poverty commensurate with my medical condition. I must get back to the heart of the matter: nothing being other than it is, time utterly smooth, utterly innocent of any possible alteration. Down there, I couldn’t even choose the time of my death by committing suicide. It would just be another moment, utterly bald, innocent of all possible alteration. The horror of that and the bliss. The compacted contradictions. Meltdown.

The only way forward is to gamble. Tomorrow evening, when I’ve got the cash together, I will go to Monte Carlo with half my remaining funds, about 1.2 million francs, and throw them away on the roulette tables.

Now that I’ve made that decision, I have purchased enough calm to write. Even the strangled perkiness of this Mozart concerto cannot defeat me. I think I should put one more character on the train with Crystal and Patrick. I like to get my characters in one place at one time. The unities. I know it’s old-fashioned, but consciousness is complex enough without characters moving around all over the place, except of course in imagination and memory.

Jean-Paul had always been fanatically curious about the nature of his own mind. At his primary school he’d been punished for hanging upside down from the fire escape, but when he told the headmaster that he’d been testing the effects of more blood flowing to the brain Monsieur Jourdan had privately predicted that Jean-Paul would become a great savant. By the age of eleven, he was eating a plate of Roquefort before going to bed, in the hope of adding to the splendour of his dreams. He had a torch and notebook under his pillow and a chewed ballpoint tied to a string around his wrist. Jolting out of his rank and troubled sleep he would transcribe his dream images before they slipped beneath the horizon of consciousness. As he grew older, he plunged into philosophy and psychoanalysis and emerged from the usual succession of
hautes
French schools as an advocate of Lacan and the other giant
intellos
of his youth.

Meeting Crystal had returned him to experiment and disobedience. The loss of self engendered by the psychedelic voyage she had taken him on in Utah’s Canyonlands had been pivotal to his development. It destroyed his faith in the priority of linguistic structures. Of course generative grammar had a hard-wired, impersonal chic, it was the matrix for making sense, but it was neither what he experienced in consciousness nor did it seem to him the ground of being.

The egalitarian chaos of his psychedelic experience highlighted the roles of empathy and analogy. At first he tried to contain this chaos: surely there were choices behind these analogies, desires behind the choices, psychological structures behind the desires, and, underlying the psychology, the stainless steel of generative grammar. This analysis made him feel false, made him feel he was resisting an insight rather than having one. It was untrue to the quality of his experience, to the plasticity of his choices, the molten emergence and reabsorption of images. As he allowed the old order to be dismembered, a new erotic order arose in which there was an unceasing intercourse between sensation and conception, the mental blossoming of every sensation and the embodiment of every idea.

He concluded that only the tyranny of talk had made thought seem like an internal conversation. He was now reluctantly drawn into a pre-linguistic realm where sensations gave rise to images and images to empathy and empathy to analogy, with words attaching themselves quite late in the process, if at all, like advertising executives promising to promote a product. The images sometimes naively took them on. And even those late-coming words could turn into sensations as easily as any other idea. If he said ‘
colombe’
, for instance, he had a spherical sensation, like a marble rolling quietly round the groove on the rim of a solitaire board. The English word ‘crazy’, on the other hand, ripped through him like shrapnel.