Edward Aubyn - At Last

No amount of stomach ache could make her stay now. Not that he wanted her to stay, but his body had a memory of its own which it continued to narrate without any reference to his current wishes. What was it that had driven Eleanor to furnish children for her husband and for Father Tortelli, and why was the drive so strong that, after the collapse of her marriage, she immediately replaced a father with a Father, a doctor with a priest? Patrick had no doubt that her motives were unconscious, as unconscious as the somatic memory that had taken him over in the last three days. What could he do but drag these fragments out of the dark and acknowledge them?

After a quiet knock, the door opened and the attendant leant into the room.

‘Just to make sure everything is all right,’ she whispered.

‘Maybe it is,’ said Patrick.

The journey back to his flat had a mildly hallucinatory quality, surging through the rainy night in a fluorescent bus, freshly flooded by so many fierce impressions and remote memories. There were two Jehovah’s Witnesses on board, a black man handing out leaflets and a black woman preaching at the top of her voice. ‘Repent of your sins and take Jesus into your heart, because when you die it will be too late to repent in the grave and you’ll burn in the fires of Hell…’

A red-eyed Irishman in a threadbare tweed jacket started shouting in counterpoint from a back seat. ‘Shut up, you fuckin’ bitch. Go suck Satan’s cock. You’re not allowed to do this, whether you’re Muslim, or Christian, or Satanic.’ When the man with the leaflets headed for the upper deck, he persisted, investing his accent with a sadistic Southern twang, ‘I can see you, Boy. How do you think you’d look with your head under your arm, Boy. If you don’t shut that bitch up, I’ll adjust your face for you, Boy.’

‘Oh, do shut up yourself,’ said an exasperated commuter.

Patrick noticed that his stomach pains had gone. He watched the Irishman sway in his seat, his lips continuing to argue silently with the Jehovah’s Witness, or with some Jesuit from his youth. Give us a boy till the age of seven and we’ll have him for life. Not me, thought Patrick, you won’t have me.

As the bus pushed haltingly towards his destination, he thought about those brief but pivotal nights in the Suicide Observation Room, unpeeling one sweat-soaked T-shirt after another, throwing off the sauna of the bedclothes only to shudder in the freezer of their absence; turning the light on and off, pained by the brightness, alarmed by the dark; a poisonous headache lurching around his skull like the lead in a jumping bean. He had brought nothing to read except The Tibetan Book of the Dead , hoping to find its exotic iconography ridiculous enough to purge any fantasies he might still cling to about consciousness continuing after death. As it turned out, he found his imagination seduced by a passage from the introduction to the Chonyid Bardo , ‘O nobly born, when thy body and thy mind were separating, thou must have experienced a glimpse of the Pure Truth, subtle, sparkling, bright, dazzling, glorious, and radiantly awesome, in appearance like a mirage moving across a landscape in springtime in one continuous stream of vibrations. Be not daunted thereby, nor terrified, nor awed. That is the radiance of thine own true nature. Recognize it.’

The words had a psychedelic authority that overpowered the materialist annihilation he longed to believe in. He struggled to restore his faith in the finality of death, but couldn’t help seeing it as a superstition among superstitions, no more bracingly rational than the rest. The idea that an afterlife had been invented to reassure people who couldn’t face the finality of death was no more plausible than the idea that the finality of death had been invented to reassure people who couldn’t face the nightmare of endless experience. His delirium tremens collaborated with the poets of the Bardo to produce a sensation of seething electrocution as he was goaded towards the abattoir of sleep, terrified that the slaughter of his rational mind would present him with a ‘glimpse of the Pure Truth’.

Memories and phrases loomed and flitted like fog banks on a night road. Thoughts threatened him from a distance, but disappeared as he approached them. ‘Drowned in dreams and burning to be gone’. Who had said that? Other people’s words. Had he already thought ‘other people’s words’? Things seemed far away and then, a moment later, repetitious. Was it like fog, or was it more like hot sand, something he was labouring through and trying not to touch at the same time? Cold and wet, hot and dry. How could it be both? How could it be other than both? Similes of dissimilarities — another phrase that seemed to chase itself like a miniature train around a tight circuit. Please make it stop.

A scene that kept tumbling back into his delirious thoughts was his visit to the philosopher Victor Eisen after Victor’s near-death experience. He had found his old Saint-Nazaire neighbour in the London clinic, still strapped to the machines that had flat-lined a few days earlier. Victor’s withered yellow arms emerged limply from an institutional dressing gown, but as he described what had happened his speech was as rapid and emphatic as ever, saturated by a lifetime of confident opinions.

‘I came to a riverbank and on the other side was a red light which controlled the universe. There were two figures either side of it, who I knew to be the Lord of Time and the Lord of Space. They communicated to me directly through their thoughts, without using any speech. They told me that the fabric of Time-Space was torn and that I had to repair it, that the fate of the universe depended on me. I had a tremendous sense of urgency and purpose and I was on my way to fulfil my task when I felt myself being dragged back into my body and I very reluctantly returned.’

For three weeks Victor was won over by the feeling of authenticity that accompanied his vision, but then the habits of his public atheism and the fear that the logical reductions enshrined in his philosophical work might be invalidated made him squeeze his new sense of openness back into the biological crisis he was suffering at the time. He decided that the pressing mission he had been sent on by the controller of the universe was an allegory of a brain running out of oxygen. His mind had been failing, not expanding.

As he lay sweating in that narrow room, thinking about Victor’s need to decide what everything meant, Patrick wondered if he could ever make his ego light enough to relax in not having to settle the meaning of things. What would that feel like?

In the meantime, the Suicide Observation Room lived up to its majestic name. In it, he saw that suicide had always formed the unquestioned backdrop to his existence. Even before he had taken to carrying around a copy of The Myth of Sisyphus in his overcoat pocket, making its first sentence the mantra of his early twenties, Patrick had greeted the day with the basic question, ‘Can anyone think of a good reason not to kill himself?’ Since he lived at the time in a theatrical solitude, crowded with mad and mocking voices, he was not likely to get an affirmative answer. Elaborate postponement was the best he could hope for, and in the end the obligation to talk proved stronger than the desire to die. During the next twenty years the suicidal chatter died down to an occasional whisper on a coastal path, or in a quiet chemist. When it returned in full force, it took the form of a grim monologue rather than a surreal chorus. The comparative simplicity of the most recent assault made him realize that he had only ever been superficially in love with easeful death and was much more deeply enthralled by his own personality. Suicide wore the mask of self-rejection; but in reality nobody took their personality more seriously than the person who was planning to kill himself on its instructions. Nobody was more determined to stay in charge at any cost, to force the most mysterious aspect of life into their own imperious schedule.