A Clue to the Exit

by Edward St. Aubyn

  Oh, for God’s sake, let’s stop being so cerebral; let’s daub our bodies in mud and stomp around on the ground, inviting Gaia to join in our revels; let’s knock back a pint of ayahuasca with some authentic tribal persons, hurtle down the tunnel of psychedelic consciousness to the dawn of time, and drown our egos in the white waters of the unavoidable truth. Then what? Chant? Pray? Interpret our shamanic journeys? Write a book pissing on Descartes? For myself, I’m grateful that thousands of years of trouble have gone into making sense of language, especially when I’m writing.

  This casino coffee certainly makes one opinionated. I’d better get on with the story.

  Quite apart from an unreasonable possessiveness towards Crystal, Patrick felt some alarm at the prospect of Jean-Paul’s conversation. His performance at the conference, simply entitled ‘Being’, took the audaciously tentative form of an ‘exploration’. Jean-Paul’s claim that he would ‘attempt to speak from, and not merely about, the place I wish to explore’ had produced long pauses in which his rapidly nodding head suggested an impressively spontaneous review of his alternatives, but also contained a hint of insanity, of the rocking chair in the back ward of the asylum. He had played with this open form by saying, after a long pause, ‘So, what’s next?’ And then, after another pause, ‘What is “next”?’

  At this point some people had walked out, tactfully or indignantly, but others had stayed, feeling the desert plains of the future dropping away, and the bracing mental sensation of standing upright on the edge of a perpetual cliff.

  Patrick realized that the latter effect could not have occurred without Jean-Paul holding himself at the point where he invited his listeners to join him. On the other hand, he sympathized with those who had come to learn something other than the impossibility of speaking accurately about what really mattered. He wondered if he could ask Crystal whether Jean-Paul was always ‘like that’, but she still seemed preoccupied and he hesitated for too long.

  Crystal ached to be beside Peter again, or, rather, beside his body, the one place she could be sure not to find him at the moment. She couldn’t have gone to Oxford if she didn’t believe that her connection with him was infinitely extendable and, as the Quantum fans at the conference liked to say, ‘non-local’. Two particles which had once been joined continued to influence each other after they were separated. Few people understood the physics of non-locality, but many were thrilled by its metaphoric potential.

  Non-local or not, she continued to hope that consciousness would return to Peter’s body, preferably while Tracy dropped a tray in the doorway, like a Victorian maid who has seen a ghost, or a bare ankle. Perhaps she could cry ‘Lawksamercy’ at the same time. Crystal was reluctant to deprive herself of any Pinewood effects for this moment of beneficent revenge. She quite wanted to ask Jean-Paul about non-locality, and not just for educational purposes. She didn’t exactly regret going to bed with him last night – for what it was worth with her body in its current state – but she didn’t want to go to bed with him tonight, and so she favoured a general conversation, possibly including this unhappy but quite intelligent man opposite.

  ‘By the way,’ she said, ‘I’m Crystal.’

  ‘Patrick.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Crystal. ‘That was Jean-Paul at the window.’

  ‘I know,’ said Patrick. ‘I went to his challenging lecture. Is he always like that?’

  ‘No. Usually he’s pretentious without the long pauses,’ said Crystal. ‘I’m sort of joking. He’s an old boyfriend of mine.’

  She knew she was being unfair to Jean-Paul. He had been so sweet to her last night, selflessly stroking her broken body, his fingertips drifting back and forth gently, like an abandoned trapeze, or tracing tortuous rivers among her cuts and bruises. He cradled the back of her head, gazing kindly into her eyes and saying, to her amazement, nothing. She hardly recognized the argumentative intellectual she had driven to psychedelic insanity in the Utah desert five years ago, the man who declared the ‘scandal’ of pure Being, and ‘announced the death of Nature’.

  ‘He’s become much kinder,’ she added, more for herself than Patrick; ‘that’s the main thing.’

  Something horrible has just happened. I looked up from my notebook and instead of seeing Angelique in her usual rapt communion with the wheel I saw her chatting to a party of sixty-year-olds. As if this wasn’t bad enough, they started to bear down in my direction.

  There was an olive-brown Spaniard in an olive-green suit, who followed the inefficient policy of chuckling continuously just in case somebody made a joke. He needn’t have worried. The party was led by an Italian whose rheumatic courtesies were like getting stuck behind a vintage-car rally in a narrow country lane.

  A white-haired Englishwoman sighed theatrically. ‘John was so silly not to come,’ she said. ‘He kept saying, “What will I do all day in La Réserve?” and I said, “What you always do: read your book and lose your cufflinks.”’

  ‘“Lose your cufflinks”,’ said the Spaniard. ‘Maravilloso! Maravilloso!’

  ‘But you must remember,’ said the Italian, ‘for the English gentleman the cufflinks are objects of religious veneration.’

  ‘“Religious veneration”,’ said the Spaniard (chuckle, chuckle).

  ‘It is very sad that John has not been able to come on this occasion,’ said the gallant Italian. ‘Next time we will not let him get away so easily,’ he added, duelling the air with his index finger.

  A depressingly chic Frenchwoman turned to me and said, as if she were quoting Pascal, ‘Je trouve qu’il fait affreusement froid ce soir. Absolute-lay throwzen.’

  ‘Who the fuck are these people?’ I asked Angelique, dragging her aside. ‘How could you let them stop you from gambling, and stop me from writing about death?’

  ‘They’re friends of mine,’ she said.

  ‘Friends?’

  ‘Sometimes I blow all my money on the first of the month. Then I go to their dinner parties. They feed me and keep me going until the next payment arrives. Alessandro is very sweet to me.’

  ‘Couldn’t you keep some fish fingers in the deep freeze to see you through the hard times?’ I sputtered.

  ‘Fish fingers?’ said Angelique, who, like so many foreigners, hadn’t heard of that wonderful food. She clearly preferred Alessandro’s steamed asparagus and grilled sea bass.

  ‘Alessandro understands my little weakness. Sometimes he gives me jetons. I find them in my handbag after I leave. It’s sweet, no?’

  ‘It’s…’ I almost used the word prostitution, but, given that I was paying one million francs a day for her company, thought better of it. But it was not the same in my case, I was mad about her … maybe Alessandro was too.

  Angelique said that Alessandro’s party had invited us to join them in a nightclub after they had celebrated Xavier’s birthday. The chuckling Spaniard is sixty today. What the hell do I care? I felt utter disgust but knew that I couldn’t bear to be separated from Angelique for even a few hours.

  I collapsed on a chair, knotted with jealousy.

  Why is life so unsatisfactory, so disappointing? Angelique suddenly seemed ordinary and compromised, but as my general admiration for her failed, my sexual longing grew more stubborn. Jealousy was the child of this divorce: I had to possess what I was about to lose, the secret of forgetfulness, the illusion of purification.

  The great thing about writing is that these troublesome emotions can just go straight onto the page. The atmosphere of imminent death is like a time-lapse movie, a slow-motion speed, pullulating with blossoms. Everything is too much. Death and writing go so well together because the unbearable everything – the chalk squealing on the blackboard, the Albinoni at full volume, the Othello-felling jealousy – can all be vaporized on the hotplate of wild indiscretion. And, at the same time, nothing changes: the chalk squeals on, the violins scrape our heartstrings, Othello dies in a pool of green blood, worrying about his reputation.

  I’d better ge
t on with the story before I’m hauled off to a nightclub.

  Patrick could see Jean-Paul working his way towards them down the corridor, a wrinkled black bag on a shoulder strap, a yellow anorak with a corduroy collar, a big murky, speckled, purplish sweater, black jeans and bulbous caramel-coloured shoes. He had a hawkish face which he clearly hadn’t shaved since his lecture. Just too busy having pensées, eh? What did Crystal want with an old boyfriend when she could have a new one? Patrick had always prided himself on not being jealous. Now he could see that he would have to throw the pride overboard and haul in the jealousy. The last thing he needed was a Lear-like eruption of self-knowledge, a busy traffic of deadly sins just as he might have expected to sink back onto the pillow in a legitimate stupor.

  ‘Ah, just in time,’ said Jean-Paul, as the train shuddered into motion. He hoisted his bag into the overhead rack and sat down next to Crystal. She introduced him to Patrick, and the two men greeted each other cautiously.

  ‘I enjoyed your “exploration” on Saturday,’ said Patrick.

  Jean-Paul bowed his head. ‘It was really nothing,’ he said. ‘At least, I hope so!’

  Patrick smiled politely.

  ‘I tried to keep it, as the English say, “short and sweet”.’

  ‘I’ve never understood,’ Patrick drawled, ‘how “short and sweet” has become a cliché when short and bitter has so much more reason to be popular.’

  ‘But it’s the shortness of the sweetness that’s bitter,’ said Crystal. ‘So, why not stay at the source?’

  ‘Well, thanks for clarifying that point for me, Crystal,’ said Patrick, feeling the excitement and the presumption of using her name for the first time.

  ‘I was saving you from the in-depth perspective,’ said Crystal. ‘You should never begin a sentence with the words “I’ve never understood” when you’re with Jean-Paul. He’s a natural-born teacher. Which reminds me,’ she said, looking at Jean-Paul teasingly, ‘I’ve never really understood non-locality.’

  ‘Ah, non-locality,’ said Jean-Paul, as if he’d been presented with a favourite dish. ‘I’m no expert, but I know a little about the territory. The traditional argument against non-locality playing any part in consciousness is that the brain is too hot and too wet for coherent quantum events to occur there. There are two ways out of this dismissal of our interesting friend. One, advanced by Penrose and Hameroff – a mathematician and an anaesthetist – is that “microtubules”, the component structures of the synapses, are quantum environments sealed off from the rest of our tropical brains. These microtubules are constructed in a Fibonacci series – for a Platonist this mathematical elegance is the signature of Ideal Form. For such a temperament, it becomes irresistible to imagine a nested hierarchy linking the smallest to the greatest through the most fundamental. You can understand the temptation: the reconciliation of mysticism and science through the impersonal perfection of mathematics.

  ‘The only other way out of the physicalist impasse is to plunge deeper into the immaterial, and lay claim to various forms of discarnate mind – the collective unconscious of Jung, or the inherent memory of Sheldrake’s “morphogenetic fields”. In such a model, the brain is not just the generator of consciousness but the recipient of consciousness. This lonely organ, which has appeared to be imprisoned in the skull, tormenting intellectuals throughout history,’ said Jean-Paul merrily, ‘may after all be a transceiver, tuning into various types of extra-physical mind, and contributing to them with its own broadcasts.’

  Just as Patrick was beginning to marvel at Jean-Paul’s willingness to ramble on in his survey of the field, the Frenchman fell abruptly silent.

  ‘Well, that gets my vote,’ said Crystal: ‘a transceiver. It ties in with my most fundamental experiences. I don’t think that ultimately we have consciousness, I think we just become part of it. In fact, the more we try to pretend it’s ours, the less of it we have,’ she went on, realizing as she voiced it that she might be overimpressed by the symmetry of this idea.

  ‘Hang on…’ said Patrick.

  To my fury, when I finally felt that things were beginning to hot up on the train, Angelique came to tell me that it was time to go to Jimmy’s nightclub with Alessandro and his party.

  There I was one moment, struggling with a matter of intense personal importance, which also happens to be one of the great scientific questions of the age – the other being the origins of the universe – and the next I was in the back of Alessandro’s limousine, trying not to drown in the billows of inanity which splashed over me from every direction.

  ‘Hang on,’ Patrick had said, and I could remember that he was about to make a key point, to take us further into the labyrinth, but I could no longer remember what he was going to say. I sat staring hysterically at this hiatus. ‘What’s next?’ I might have asked, but without Jean-Paul’s playfulness. What the fuck was next? Hang on … Hang on … Hang on for what? I had to hang on until I was back in the casino tomorrow.

  I noticed that I had, incidentally, turned into a tangential gambling addict, unable to pursue my life’s vocation except in a casino, watching Angelique play. What had happened to Patrick’s thought? Where do thoughts come from when they ‘pop up’, and where do they go when they ‘disappear’?

  I looked at Angelique with a vehement sense of betrayal; she looked back at me with the innocent cruelty of a baby panther. I realized that I had attributed all kinds of passionate and tormented reflections to her which she would never dream of having. She really knew the trick of living in the present, from one splash of pleasure to another. Perhaps her sexual intensity derived from her shallowness and not from the depths of tragic knowledge I had projected on her, or perhaps this superficiality was itself profound, born of the knowledge that everything is surface. I no longer knew what to think, but I needed to be in her bed, to see if I could find freedom again in her treacherous embrace.

  ‘After you, after you,’ said Alessandro.

  ‘I haven’t been to a nightclub in yonks,’ said the Englishwoman.

  ‘“Yonks”,’ chuckled Xavier. ‘Maravilloso!’

  On the dance floor, tame tax exiles tried to look wild. Big-boned boys in blazers lassoed the air above carefully cropped heads. Old men with tinted lenses and years of syphilis under their belts consorted with frigid models. Sharp-faced blonde girls kept their favours for the sons of Industry, and big-nosed Greek girls sat around gloomily being chaperoned by whoremongering brothers. They didn’t let just anybody in.

  I sat down on a velvet bench and through all the smoke and the bad music and the undesirable desire I suddenly allowed myself to become relaxed. Even here there was no need to posture. The essential question remained the same. Where could I find freedom in this situation? I looked around and felt reconciled with all the people in Alessandro’s party and all the people in the room. I could spray adjectives at them for the rest of the evening, but in the end they were just people struggling to be happy with only the most unpromising material at their disposal.

  ‘Maravilloso,’ said Xavier.

  ‘Si,’ I said. ‘Es maravilloso.’

  Angelique looked at me, and I could see in her eyes that she understood the breakthrough I had made. She is not only dead sexy, but probably the wisest person I’ve ever met.

  13

  ‘But why would a morphogenetic field have to be discarnate?’ asked Patrick. ‘Why couldn’t it be a genetic inheritance?’

  ‘The rapid accumulation of cultural and behavioural habits cannot be explained genetically,’ said Jean-Paul, ‘because the geneticists insist that behaviour does not modify the genome. Adaptation can only occur through the slow, blind process of natural selection, shaped by the accidental mutations which give a slight reproductive edge to their carriers.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Crystal, ‘the extension of the theory into “morphic resonance” completely blows the genetic connection. After the first crystallization of a solution, which may be very long and difficult, the process gro
ws easier and easier, even in laboratories remote from each other, where no exchange of information or crystals has taken place. The solution exists in a field that is becoming increasingly grooved and tilted towards crystallization.’

  ‘These grooves of habituation,’ said Jean-Paul, ‘are what Sheldrake calls “creodes”.’

  While Jean-Paul and Crystal tried to establish the reality of this phenomenon for Patrick, he was already preoccupied with its implications at another level. When the world was read in terms of habits, time lost its bald authority. It consisted of endlessly, organically altering textures: of crystals which formed faster and faster but, as they did so, formed more and more conservative fields, of islands of novelty erupting and then, as related habits formed around them, becoming archipelagos, stretching back towards continents of deep habit. Time itself was in an evolutionary frame. This idea pressed in on him confusedly as he tried to map it over his own subjective sense of change.

  ‘Time looks very different,’ he managed to say incoherently.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Jean-Paul with an appreciative smile. ‘Our insistence that a second is a second is a second is a formality which may be useful for making lunch appointments, but not for understanding the true nature of reality.’

  ‘It’s not even that useful for making lunch appointments,’ said Crystal.

  I had to stop working to have dinner with my adorable Angelique.

  The only creode I’m helping to establish is casino writing, and I hope I can make a modest contribution to literature by preparing a morphogenetic field for the next dying novelist who tries to push his plot forward in this gilded setting. Perhaps I can do more, and all over the world, to the despair of their managers, casinos will start to fill with coughing authors, stooped over their notebooks or holding X-rays up to the chandeliers and neon flamingos to remind themselves why they can’t afford to stop working.

  Before we had dinner, Angelique lost another half million. Ten of our twenty-five million is gone, and if her luck doesn’t change we only have another fifteen days together. Some people might think it pedantic not to carry on after the money has run out, and for a while I found myself wavering on this point, but Angelique is right to be adamant. There might seem to be something touchingly human about spending the last four months of my life with the woman I love, being reassured, being nursed (when she’s not at the casino), introducing her to fish fingers; but imagine the mediocrity of such a resignation after we have strapped ourselves to the wheel, after we have distilled time in the retort of our unbreakable contract, so that each moment we spend together falls, drop by drop, like liquid fire on to our outstretched and writhing tongues.