Edward Aubyn - A Clue to the Exit

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.

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.