On the Edge A Novel (5 page)

Just as the vapour trails of jets criss-crossed overhead in the lost wilderness of the sky, the traffic of analogy moved from one object to another, plundering every language, every culture, every landscape, and creating an ever more opaque web of connections, a mirror increasingly scratched. But out of this apparent reduction of resources, hybrids would arise, increasingly complex combinations of increasingly exhausted elements. Would these images constitute novelty or merely decadence?

Crystal watched the low white clouds beginning to flow into the canyons. Although the weather had been extreme and unseasonal, scorching for an hour and then snowing heavily, these clouds had a decorative innocence. Near the camp there was a large round cactus that reminded her of a geodesic dome made of tightly packed segments. She had seen it the morning before, beads of dew clinging to its steely spikes, and in the seams between its segments, the buds of red flowers gleaming like drops of blood. Two of the flowers were open and blazed with astonishing intensity against the grey-green of the cactus’s skin. When she returned from her hike these blood-red cups were filled with crystals of snow. It was so beautiful.

God, she could feel the mushrooms starting to come on. The urgent luminosity of the mescalin was giving way to the more sumptuous eruptions, the hesitating fountain of the psilocybin. An iridescent sheen played over the mother-of-pearl surface of a cloud. She watched it shifting lazily from a baby’s sleeping face – it was her own face, how peaceful she looked – to a team of heavily maned white horses kicking up a cloud of mauve dust with their galloping hooves. Oh, yes, it was like a slow fuck, this erotic divulgence of Proteus to her fervent imagination. The unfurling leaves of the cottonwood trees were now a few yards to the right, the slender branches pulsing with spring, leaves like unclenching fists surrendering to the warmth and generosity of life.

Another jet flew overhead and she remembered Thich Nhat Hanh saying how you could use the ring of the telephone like a meditation bell to cut through to mindfulness, and so she imagined the passage of the jet through the sky like a blade cutting through the canvas of a tent and opening outwards on to the sparkling darkness.

Yes, that sound was her mantra. The mushrooms contained such extraordinary teaching. She was deep into the sacred nature of psychedelics which revealed the sacred nature of everything else. They were one of the gateways into the luminous field.

‘The mushrooms are coming on,’ she called quietly to Jean-Paul.

‘Mushrooms!’ said Jean-Paul. The word alone was enough to infuse his bloodstream with the spoors of a deeper paranoia. ‘This trip will get stronger?’

‘Different,’ said Crystal. ‘Sexier.’

‘Sexi
er
? You mean the first part was sexy for you? For me it’s not so sexy to have an angry man with a blowtorch trying to dismantle the structure of my identity! Even le Marquis de Sade, with an unusual but imperative continence, would have resisted the concept of sexual excitement on this occasion.’

‘Don’t use so many words,’ smiled Crystal, ‘just look at stuff.’

‘But when I look at stuff I see “stuff”.’

Crystal walked over to him and kissed him on the mouth. ‘
Calme-toi
,’ she whispered.

Jean-Paul smiled back. He was far too anxious to think of making love to her. Besides, rangers were no doubt on the ridge with their government binoculars, ready to shoot them for rolling around in the kryptobiotic soil. He pretended to be persuaded by her kiss and resumed his homeward march.

Where was the eternally derailed train of his thought? Oh, yes, this landscape, this obligation to be in awe. If he fell to his knees, what would he be worshipping? Wind erosion? Sandstone? The weather? The relative scale of human and inhuman phenomena? No, he would be worshipping the spirit which Rousseau had marketed so cunningly for the Western mind, the spirit of egotistical sublimity. But surely the essence of this landscape was its inhumanity, its harshness, the way in which it stood just out of range of the eager reach of pathetic fallacy. The civilized landscapes of Europe, the Alps, Provence, Tuscany and so forth, were the nymphomaniacs of the sublime, constantly accommodating the sensitivities and reflections of every visitor, lying down and gasping as one after another they brought their intimations of immortality, their sighs of appreciation, or their easy conviction that, as Rosanov had said, happiness consists of picking one’s nose while watching the sunset.

Canyonlands, on the contrary, was the coldest of virgins who could only be approached on her own terms, through a grille in the convent wall. She was not interested in one’s longings, only in one’s worship, and in the end she was not interested in that either. She simply embodied something so strange and extravagant that the road of Rousseauesque communion with Nature forked towards incomprehension on the one hand and self-annihilation on the other.

How would one ‘surrender’, what mental act was involved in that ‘awful daring’? Was it something to do with humility, a subject on which he was no expert, or was it, on the contrary, a sense of special destiny which filled one with universal awe?

He tried to force himself again to look at his surroundings rather than read them, and then to feel them rather than look at them. He only had to make these decisions for them to be fulfilled, but he found himself feeling something other than universal awe. He and it, subject and object, inside and outside, seemed to be superimposed on each other, as if he were looking at a glazed painting through a shop window on a sunny day, but instead of the vitreous ghosts being effects which he witnessed from a known centre, he felt that there was no part of the ghostly scene that was not animated by his presence. By the same token this dispersal of himself into the shimmering fabric left him utterly lost, as if the echoed flash of sunlight caught on the bumper of a passing car and reflected in the window could steal his soul, so dangerously thinned by being interfused with everything.

Was the problem that he needed to describe what was happening and the description contained the very terms, like ‘subject’ and ‘object’, that were abolished by the experience he was attempting to describe? He must know the answer now!

‘It’s called “Don’t know mind”,’ said Crystal, pausing on the trail. ‘Sometimes you have to stay with the position of not knowing. I don’t know why I said that … I guess I have to stay with the position of not knowing. God, it’s one of those loops.’

‘But it’s incredible,’ said Jean-Paul. ‘I was thinking how I
must
know what things mean when they are happening.’

‘I guess I picked that up.’

‘What does it mean to “pick that up”? We are having telepathic communication?’

‘Don’t know,’ Crystal had said, hearing the scepticism and alarm in his voice.

Contemplating the changes that had swept over Jean-Paul after that day, Crystal had often wondered if it was the idea of telepathic communication and the permeability of his own mind which had disoriented him beyond recovery.

She sat up in bed. It was three in the morning in San Francisco, and she had to see a bunch of people the next day. She crossed her legs and breathed out deeply, trying to dispel a feeling of guilt and abandonment. Eventually she relaxed into meditation, and from there into exhausted sleep.

3

‘Is there any chance of your going back to Kleinwort’s?’ sighed Mrs Thorpe.

‘I don’t know,’ said Peter, to whom it seemed rather less likely than an invasion from Sirius. Kleinwort’s was utterly remote to him at the moment. Over the last few days the rest of the world had receded like clouds melting in the heat of an atomic blast. He didn’t dare tell his mother that he’d forgotten her telephone number.

‘You must be running out of money,’ she said hopefully.

‘Not yet.’

‘You can’t just say you don’t know,’ said Mrs Thorpe.

‘Even if it’s the truth?’

‘But I don’t think it is true, not deep down.’

‘You mean the deepest thing about me is my potential re-employment by a merchant bank?’

‘You sound so different,’ said his mother. ‘You used to plan for the future.’

‘Well, just now I’m trying to live in the present.’

‘That’s what animals do, darling,
we’ve
got minds.’

‘And what are they for? Buying life insurance?’

‘I can’t make out whether they’ve turned you into a socialist or a Moonie,’ said Mrs Thorpe.

Peter looked out of the telephone booth. The Pacific, sparkling among the dark branches of a cedar tree, made him pause long enough to disarm.

‘You’re probably right in a way. I don’t really know what I’m up to,’ he said. ‘We’re all so fragmented, perhaps we can never know ourselves as a whole.’

‘Are you all right?’ said Mrs Thorpe, her opposition replaced for a moment by maternal concern. ‘You’re not cracking up, are you?’

‘No, I mean, I had this strange feeling the other day. Maybe I felt whole then, or maybe it was just a new bit of me emerging.’

‘You
are
cracking up,’ said Mrs Thorpe, no longer in any doubt.

They fell silent for a moment and then Mrs Thorpe bravely resumed.

‘Fiona rang. I had to admit that I had no idea how to get hold of you. I don’t think she believed me, which is absolutely maddening because as you know I think she’s perfect for you. She blames that Findhorn Foundation. What I can’t understand is why you went there in the first place.’

‘To get away from Fiona for one thing,’ said Peter.

‘Well, you didn’t have to go to a Moonie place, you could have gone on one of my Serenissima Tours. They’re such fun. We’re going to look at castles on the banks of the Danube next month.’

‘If you really want to know, I was also pursuing another woman.’

‘
Cherchez la femme!
’ said Mrs Thorpe.

‘That’s exactly what I was trying to do. We only spent three days together but I’ve never been so happy in my life. Then she just disappeared saying nobody owned anybody else.’ Peter watched Brad lolloping past the phone booth in a faded pink T-shirt.

‘Hey, Peter,’ said Brad.

Peter waved at Brad. ‘I had no desire to own her,’ he went on explaining to his mother. ‘I just wanted to hang with her.’

‘Hang?’ said Mrs Thorpe, vaguely remembering a disgusting article about American adolescents who hanged themselves in the shower for sexual titillation.

‘Oh, it’s just an expression they use here, an abbreviation for hanging out – you know, spending time with someone.’

‘Well, it should be abolished,’ said Mrs Thorpe. ‘How long do you propose to go sleuthing after this inveigling woman? Sex isn’t everything, you know. I learned that from your father. If you went back to Kleinwort’s you could get a private detective to find her. When he succeeds you’ll be able to pop out and join her. Frankly, she doesn’t sound that keen anyway.’

‘She was very keen at the time, that’s the puzzle. Anyhow I haven’t got a photograph of her and I don’t know her last name, so the detective would have to be a psychic.’

‘I’m sure there’s no shortage of those in the circles you move in these days,’ said Mrs Thorpe, pronouncing the word ‘circles’ with cool irony. ‘Do you make a habit of going to bed with women whose last names you don’t know? As you know I’m not easily shocked…’

‘But you’re easily shocked…’

‘No, no, I realize that standards change, I just wish they sometimes changed for the better.’

‘Listen, I’m running out of money,’ said Peter, ignoring the heaps of change scattered on the wooden ledge under the phone.

‘Are you going to tell me where you are?’

‘At Esalen.’

‘What’s that?’

‘A personal growth centre. I know…’

‘It sounds like something a doctor should have a look at,’ giggled Mrs Thorpe.

‘Ah, there goes my last coin,’ said Peter. ‘I’ll call you soon.’

He was not surprised that his mother found it hard to understand the changes he’d been through in the last four months; he found it even harder, despite the advantage of having lived through them himself. She at least rested in the certainty of her disapproval, whereas he was at once disapproving and overwhelmingly grateful, flooded with a new sincerity and convinced, sometimes by the same sincerity, that he must be deceived.

His life had been a forced march through the Cotswolds of English respectability, interspersed with periods of equally brutal idleness among the same irreproachable hills. Now everything was in doubt. His pursuit of Sabine seemed to have translated him to a Himalayan landscape where the sublime and the ridiculous alternated with horrifying suddenness. His feet could freeze while his face burnt. He sometimes found himself gasping beyond the tree line of everything reassuring and familiar, but the view from those rocky slopes made him reluctant to accept the bribes of homecoming, those dripping oaks and bleating sheep, the gusts of warm stale air in the underground on his way to work, the reiterated sense of belonging. Without knowing what it would mean to look on the world nakedly, he knew that he had never done so. The cataracts of habit and conditioning clouded his eyes; the world he looked on seemed to have been wrapped by a demented florist in swirl after swirl of noisy and distorting cellophane.

He had always been too busy to daydream, except about unexpected sex and unexpected promotion. Everyone had time for that. Peter heaved himself up, stepped out of the phone booth and ambled down to the Pacific with his hands in his trouser pockets.

When he’d met Sabine on a banking trip to Germany, and actually had some unexpected sex, he’d made the mistake of telling Gavin about it, in Gavin’s terminology.

‘Met a really stunning German girl, physically, apart from anything else, really stunning.’

‘Jammy bastard,’ said Gavin.

Gavin was an acquaintance of his from school who had been so struck by twice belonging to the same institution as Peter that he’d prophesied they would become ‘bloody good mates’ at the bank. Although Gavin’s dinner parties in Parson’s Green, with their smoked-trout mousses, and the weekends playing Monopoly for real money left Peter cold, he had fallen in for a while with Gavin’s fantasy of friendship, through the same combination of resignation and vague reluctance to cause offence which had determined most of his social life.