A Clue to the Exit: A Novel (13 page)

‘I don’t know. I don’t like to set my plans in concrete.’

‘I’m up to my mouth in concrete,’ I said, ‘and it’s pouring in through every vent.’

‘Oh, God, you’re such a drama queen,’ said Heidi. ‘Anyhow, I’m not going to argue with you. I know how to set my boundaries these days and you can’t make me feel guilty.’

‘Why don’t I come over and see you both tomorrow?’

‘I don’t think that would be very appropriate,’ said Heidi.

Since then I’ve been lying on my bed. Through the warped windowpanes, the torn mosquito net and the half-closed shutters, I can see the corner of a plane tree, the seagulls drifting through a slit of sky, and some shivering bushes on the hillside, shining in the north wind, as if they had been splashed with cold water.

I could say that it is death that frightens me, but that would be too reassuring. It would give the impression that I know what is going on. Every day, it’s true, I wake to the winning image of a revolver fired into my temple. It’s true that my brains splash onto white tiles and my body slides down and slumps at the foot of a wall. I can’t deny that it’s upsetting, but why would my imagination go to so much trouble if suicide wasn’t less upsetting than this limitless white terror, bleaching every object in its universe? I marvel at the optimism of suicide, expecting to bring torment to an end. Not to mention the executive elan, the rush of impatience that comes at the end of a long history of failed delegation – everybody employed to console you has let you down, and so you sigh and load the gun and say, ‘It’s always the same story: if you want something done properly, you have to do it yourself.’

The allure of suicide is to avoid the white terror and the allure of everything else is to avoid suicide. Reactions react to reactions like worms impaling themselves more deeply on the hooks they try to escape. If I refuse to elaborate this feeling, maybe it will fold in on itself. An infinity of unease, given no trade, might shut up shop and turn out to be as small and fleeting as happiness and love and vitality. Why should fear have any more substance than the rest of them, unless I sustain its life with evasion and credulity? Yes, I accept it all, the shame, the cirrhosis, the stupid and unkind things I’ve said, the boredom of this fucking personality which has stopped me doing anything I don’t regret. The unacceptable has finally found its natural dumping ground. Truckloads of hospital waste rain down on me and I wait imperturbably for more. The white terror folds up like a sheet, corner to corner, crease to crease. It can’t stand being recognized for what it is: just another feeling. But what a feeling. I think I’d better go for a walk.

21

It was late afternoon by the time I set out for my walk. Restless a few moments before, my limbs turned to coffins at the garden gate. If death is the end, terror. If it’s not the end, terror too. Terror if nothing matters. Terror if it all matters absolutely. I haven’t murdered anyone. I haven’t raped anyone. I haven’t stolen, or committed acts of arson. But I have had thoughts, and that’s been more than enough.

I persevered and set off towards the southern coast. Everything was oppressively symbolic. I was chained to a rock having my liver eaten by vultures. If I had gone to the trouble of stealing fire from the gods, it might have seemed worthwhile. How could Heidi cocoon herself in frivolity and pettiness, while those sharp beaks tore at the last shreds of my life? It isn’t achievement that makes our actions immortal, it’s death. Whatever we’ve done when we die lasts for ever. If we’ve failed, we’ve failed for ever. There is so little time to pass on my love to my daughter, and when I die the catastrophe will be incorruptible. A spasm of loathing for Heidi suddenly animated my body and I stormed towards the Gorge du Loup, breathless with fury and panic. No human sounds distracted me from my state of mind, just the wind combing the pines and the sporadic clocking of the pheasants in the wood.

The path forked, both branches leading to the coast. I tried to gild my mood by taking the high road, but it turned out to curve towards the village. I doubled back and took the other path. The cheap symbol of the high road usurped by the cheap symbol of the wrong path. A lifetime of choosing the wrong path, I thought grandly.

I struggled to the clifftop, the sweat drying icily on my chest. The waves boomed in the Gorge du Loup. The wind was solid enough to support my leaning body and loud enough to make my screams inaudible. Although I was shouting, I couldn’t quite make out what I was saying. I realized how little substance any of my feelings had without the loop of listening to myself think and speak. Better to stay on this clifftop having my thoughts ripped from me by a gale.

As the sun bled into the sea, the full moon surged out of the forest, stained red by the dying light. I fell silent, my mood shattered like the waves exploding on the coast below. Soon enough the colour drained from the moon and it turned back into sizzling white rock, making its arching progress over the island.

After this hammer blow of awe, I started to look suspiciously at what had happened. If terror was just another feeling, why was the sense of beauty any different? Wasn’t it a ‘quale’ among ‘qualia’? It was easy to prefer it to terror, but that didn’t make it any more essential. From the point of view of consciousness, the fact that it derived from something out there in the world didn’t alter the situation either. Consciousness was my total present awareness, whatever its content or the origin of its content.

I struggled to find something essential in the beauty itself, to give it some absolute independence. The moon rising opposite the setting sun, their perfect opposition turned into perfect intercourse, the sun and the moon mingling blood, the poignant clash of scales, an effect with a lifespan even shorter than mine, acted out on a celestial plane.

There were rules to these pleasures, I thought irritably, as I pounded down the silvery track to the Calanque de la Bréganconnet, where I intended to hide from the wind and the mesmeric curiosity of the lighthouse beam which had started to sweep the eastern end of the island. Under the wrapping paper of individual occasions there were always the same characteristics to aesthetic success, the stale surprises of conflict and reconciliation, variety and unity, symmetry and asymmetry. This and that were sometimes thrillingly supplemented by The Other. The Other was probably something Jean-Paul should think about. Not a bit of the other, but The Other, the French philosopher’s d’Artagnan, always ready to leap from the rooftops and create a diversion. My thoughts were all over the place; even my own characters weren’t safe.

The wind started to subside as I walked downhill. The
calanque
itself was almost still. I found a hollow in the rock and watched the frantic sea calmed and confused as it was funnelled towards the beach, sometimes crashing in, sometimes bobbing up indecisively. The moon was not yet shining into the creek, but I saw it whitening the waves further out to sea. Lines of seaweed were stranded on the sand, some dry, some lolling in the surf.

I seemed to have completely lost the conviction, which had come to me so triumphantly when I first arrived on the island, that beauty was the natural order of things. The first time I saw this coast I was blown away by its visual brilliance. Was I misled this evening by the lure of symbolic thinking? The sun and moon mingling blood – wasn’t it enough that the moon was briefly reddened by the setting sun? And yet the idea that they were mingling blood had been the content of my thoughts at the time. The sexual, the tragic and the symbolic registers were as much part of my consciousness as the optical. Beauty could not depend on an allegedly direct encounter with the thing that seemed beautiful. No such directness was possible. The sun and the moon, even if I landed on them, would come to me in the form of knowledge. There could only be more or less intimacy with the mental reality in which they made their appearance. There might be a primordial encounter with that knowledge but not with the object itself. I was not being solipsistic. I didn’t want to deny that the sun and the moon were out there, with a lifespan of their own, somewhat longer than mine, and that some kinds of knowledge referred to the facts of the case whereas others did not. But whether it was Phoebus, skin cancer, a small yellow star, the bleeding sun or entropy that appeared in consciousness, real beauty could only come from this intimacy with mental reality, whatever it might contain, and not from the inherent beauty of the thing or the thought. Who has not noticed a mood swing turn the petal-coaxing sun into the maggot-breeding sun? Sometimes I am delighted by things being as they are, sometimes by their resemblance to something else. Sometimes understanding how things work weakens my desire for metaphor, sometimes the desire is sharpened by understanding how things work.

The moonlight had reached the creek by now and made it look like boiling mercury. Sandflies, celebrating a warm human presence, left the banks of seaweed and danced ecstatically on my body. As I sat in the hollow slapping my face and neck, the dichotomy between appearance and reality seemed to infold and disappear. One appearance was being replaced by another. Reality might be the sum of all possible appearances, some generated by science, some by art, some by psychosis; some known, some unknown, some unknowable. In that case it was forever out of reach. Or it might be an unbroken awareness of the content of consciousness, and of its nature, with one appearance being replaced by another: this was what I now meant by intimacy.

The oxymoronic violence I’d been subjected to since my fatal visit to the doctor had distracted me from pursuing this intimacy. At first, I glimpsed that my only chance of reconciling myself to the undistinguished heap of incidents which made up my life lay in that direction. But then I got caught up in Prozac and New York and gambling and Angelique and the mirage of love and money. Not to mention my scholarly efforts to understand the current consciousness debate, a debate which happens to contribute nothing to the resolution of the question.

I wondered again whether I should give up writing
On the Train
. It didn’t seem likely to bring me any closer to my objective. Maybe Patrick – who, strangely enough, also has cirrhosis – should carry the burden of some of the things that have started to take shape for me on the beach. When writers imagine a character who is dying, or condemned to die, they all too often make him ruminate about the past, worrying that he may not have led a good life, or being haunted by some forking in the road when he ran away from true love, or failed to save a friend’s life. Something with tons of flashbacks, and a big violin section. Either the character claims to have a few regrets but, then again, too few to mention after page 300, or he has the incredible courage and honesty to regret everything and wish he had not done it his way. In either case, the main feeling about dying, namely that it’s happening too soon, is blurred by a preoccupation with the past.

Well, those of us who are dying – as opposed to those who are lounging around in their studies making dinner engagements, and then reluctantly disconnecting the phone for twenty minutes in order to browse through a medical textbook and look up some realistic details – those of us who are really dying haven’t got time to ponder the past. The present is scintillating with horror and precision. The past is a luxury for people who think they have a future. Does my life have subtle connecting threads, strange coincidences, uniting themes? You’d better believe it. Things can’t help repeating themselves, can’t help colliding. That’s not meaning, it’s where the search for meaning begins.

I was beginning to feel cold and hungry, and tempted to return to the farmhouse, but I stayed crouched in the hollow, feeling there was something I had overlooked. And then I realized that beauty had seemed fundamental to me when I thought I was going to see my daughter. Now that I was not going to see her the conviction had deserted me. Sometimes the closest things are the hardest to see. I was shattered by the stupidity of not noticing that my whole outlook pivoted on my daughter. That feeling of panic and self-reproach when you realize, at exactly the moment you slam the front door closed, that you’ve left the keys inside, if it could be magnified a thousand times, would dimly resemble the electrocuting shame that rushed through me on the beach. Ton Len, I had forgotten Ton Len. When I saw her a year ago, she was lying on the sofa and I held her small feet completely in my hands and she smiled and looked at me with utter trust. She knew I’d always be there to look after her. That’s the picture that comes back to me again and again. The smile, the trust. I haven’t written about it, but then again there’s no mention of camels in the Koran. Some things are too flagrant to point out until they’ve shown a talent for hiding or getting lost. Last night I doubled my betrayal by losing sight of her. I will almost certainly die too soon to see her again and I am powerless to do anything about it.

And so I sat in the hollow, pinned down by the fascination of the way that everybody hurts each other by trying to make themselves happy. The pursuit of happiness is not so much an inalienable right as an inevitable disaster. I seemed to understand, without needing to formulate it, how things had come to be as they were, with my four-year-old daughter a thousand miles away, the memory of her father’s love drifting into the fog banks of early childhood and infancy, her mother in a tangle of hatred and spiritual ambition, and her hysterical and gloomy father fixed on a strangely academic obsession. All the players without any recourse to freedom. Locked.

I was stung by the irony of pursuing something I was calling intimacy, some relationship with mental reality which I hadn’t yet defined but was already invoking like a mantra, when the ordinary intimacy of contact with the person I loved most was absent from my life. I could sense a chain-mail landscape receding infinitely in every direction. Each generation linked by steel. Everyone acting under the duress of circumstance and personality. What did it mean to be free in this situation? Did I have to content myself with
amor fati
, the love of fate, doing willingly what I must do anyway? Was that it? I noticed that I was not breathing and started again hastily. I stopped slapping my face and neck. My hands dropped to my side. If I wanted intimacy I could have it with the sandflies.