On the Edge

by Edward St. Aubyn

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Haley, ‘but it’s a real pain in the arse.’

  ‘I don’t want to make judgements,’ said Panita, ‘but I think you two have a really sick relationship.’

  ‘Well, at least we’re in a relationship,’ said Haley slamming the door. ‘You stupid wanker,’ she said to Jason, ‘you can carry my fucking case.’

  ‘I’m being abused!’ cried Jason facetiously.

  ‘You think you’re really clever, don’t you?’ said Haley. ‘You get us stranded in the middle of Hammersmith Broadway and all you can do is make stupid jokes.’

  They struggled to the Underground station together, Haley’s indignant voice battling like a furious swimmer against the roar of the traffic.

  6

  Stan and Karen Klotwitz had made the move to Santa Fe because they wanted the dry climate of the south-west without the geriatric belligerence of a retirement community in Arizona. Neither of them was interested in joining the Grey Panthers and they both loved having young people in their lives. Stan had been in the insurance business in New York and Karen had been ‘just an average American housewife’, as she said with true modesty, but also in the hope that folks would find it hard to believe when they saw what an Awakened Being she’d become. They’d settled in their new home seven years ago and they thanked God every day that they had chosen Santa Fe because they had such an incredibly rich life there, and had made so many incredibly special friends.

  Stan said that life began at seventy and that you were only as old as you felt; Karen, who was more mystically inclined, said she was not attached to her ‘earth suit’. Stan wasn’t particularly attached to it either and that was why he and Karen were going on a Tantric sex workshop at a unique resource centre in California.

  ‘Get some of the old fire back,’ said Stan with a wink, as he barbecued a couple of steaks in the patio area. Somewhere along the line, Stan had got the idea that mental health consisted of talking about his sex life to complete strangers.

  ‘Spring will return to the mountain,’ said Walking Eagle, who had only met Stan and Karen the night before at the Omega Center. He had led an incredibly unique, ancient, secret ceremony which he claimed the elders of his tribe had said he could share with other nations because the Dark Times were approaching.

  Ever since he contracted arthritis, Stan had refused to wear anything but sportswear. Many of his friends also dressed as if they were about to take part in the Olympics, although they often had trouble getting out of a soft armchair. Walking Eagle was decked in silver and turquoise jewellery which set off his thick silver hair and his faded jean shirt in a way that Karen really appreciated. Karen herself was a pastel swirl, as if a watercolour study of candyfloss had been left out in the rain.

  Stan and Karen’s home was very unique. All their friends had unique homes as well, but theirs was perhaps especially unique. The ceiling of the living room rose thirty-five feet in a ‘cathedral effect’, and if you included the patio area, there was a sixty-five-foot sweep of open space from the front door to the back wall of the garden. Somewhere further along the line Stan had gotten the idea that hospitality consisted of behaving as if you were trying to sell your house to a prospective buyer. After softening up his guests with some statistics, it was time to move on to his mental health.

  ‘I’ll be honest with you, Walking Eagle, I’ve been impotent for the last eight years,’ said Stan, flipping a steak expertly with a giant fork.

  ‘My people have a ceremony to help with that,’ said Walking Eagle gravely, over the sizzling sound made by the scorched meat.

  ‘They do?’

  ‘It’s a secret ceremony, but for a friend…’

  ‘Well, God, that would be a really unique privilege. We’re going to go with this Tantric thing first, but when we get back we’ll get right on to you about that.’

  ‘You’re such a caring person,’ said Karen, who couldn’t help thinking that Walking Eagle didn’t look as if he had any problems with impotence.

  ‘How long will you be away?’ said Walking Eagle, taking out his diary.

  ‘Well, we’re going to sort of a Gestalt thing first to get us mentally prepared,’ said Stan.

  ‘Mind, body and spirit,’ said Karen, ‘you can’t separate them.’

  ‘There are ways,’ hinted Walking Eagle.

  Ding-dong went the doorbell. Walking Eagle offered to go, seeing how Karen had broken her ankle, and Stan was preoccupied with the steaks.

  Karen had broken her ankle in one of the most unique car accidents – she preferred to call it a car destiny – that anybody could possibly imagine.

  She had been on the corner of Hacienda and Aztec completely lost in the magic of Deepak Chopra’s Quantum Healing tape. Anything with healing in the title captured Karen’s curiosity, and who could resist ‘quantum’, surely one of the most mystically mysterious words in the English language? Wasn’t it Einstein who had said that God wouldn’t play dice with the universe? Even if God had wanted to play dice, Karen suddenly reflected, who would he have played with? She couldn’t bear the thought of anybody being lonely, but it was the uniquely sad thought of God’s utter loneliness which had paralysed Karen’s reflexes as she drifted into the side of a Jeep Cherokee.

  Then an even more incredible thing happened. The young man in the Jeep got out and apologized. It turned out that he had been listening to a tape of Scott Peck’s unbelievable Further Along the Road Less Travelled (which happened to be one of Karen’s most unique tapes) and he felt responsible for the accident.

  And that was the story of how she had met Robert, who was now walking through the exquisite pastel shades of her living room, with his arm in a sling.

  ‘Karen!’ he greeted her.

  ‘Robert! My meant-to-be-accident,’ said Karen, shaking her head at the wonder of the universe. ‘I guess you met Walking Eagle.’

  ‘Hey waka jo hada,’ said Robert.

  ‘Hey what?’ said Stan.

  ‘Hey waka jo hada,’ said Robert. ‘It means “May you walk in beauty” in the language of the Cherokee nation.’

  ‘Hey waka jo hada,’ said Walking Eagle.

  ‘Isn’t that…’ Words failed Karen. ‘I love the way you two have just – excuse my language – cut through the crap and gotten right to the heart of things. “May you walk in beauty”, oh, that’s, oh.’ She put her hand on her heart and caught her breath. ‘I can’t tell you what that does for me. I feel all tingly in my fingers … Can you write that down for me? You guys are just so amazing … Can you believe that, Stan?’

  Stan put his hands on his hips and shook his head as if he’d completed a long run and was too breathless to speak.

  Gradually Stan and Karen’s patio area filled up with as many unique people as anyone could reasonably hope to fit in one place at one time.

  ‘He’s not just some New Age Indian,’ said Stan in a loud whisper, indicating Walking Eagle with his giant fork, ‘he’s the real thing.’

  Walking Eagle looked a little nervous, cornered by Robert who seemed to know a disturbing amount about Native American language and mythology.

  ‘A lot of the nations are worried about having their culture co-opted by white people,’ said Robert. ‘What d’ya think of that?’

  ‘I think that the white people need our wisdom,’ said Walking Eagle. ‘To walk in beauty means to give from the heart.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said Robert, ‘but the power mustn’t fall into the wrong hands.’

  ‘I try not to be political,’ said Walking Eagle. ‘So what kinda business are you in, Robert?’

  ‘Oh, I’m in the wilderness industry.’

  ‘Man’s an omnivore, right?’ said Stan, dangling a steak at Walking Eagle. ‘I like to tease the vegetarians. Many of our friends are vegetarian but I’m too old to change.’

  ‘We must accept the animal’s sacrifice,’ said Walking Eagle, holding out his plate.

  ‘That’s a nice attitude,’ said Stan.

 
‘It’s the animal that has to accept his own sacrifice,’ said Robert.

  Stan moved over to another part of the patio where Karen was discussing Princess Dux, a local celebrity, with Gary, one of the most spiritual hairdressers in Santa Fe.

  ‘Whether she’s an ambassador from the court of Lemuria or not,’ Gary was saying, ‘she’s one powerful lady.’

  ‘I think she’s a phoney,’ said Stan. ‘I don’t believe she’s three hundred years old.’

  ‘Stan is still learning,’ said Karen, apologizing for her husband’s backwardness. ‘I believe that Princess Dux is here to show us the future of the human body.’

  ‘Obesity?’ asked Stan.

  ‘What is it that Chris Griscom says?’ Karen went on, slapping Stan on the forearm for being flippant. ‘Until you can bilocate, until you can levitate, until you can astral travel, don’t talk to me about the limitations of the human body?’

  ‘I’d be satisfied with a reliable erection,’ said Stan candidly.

  Gary looked at him astonished, but Karen persevered.

  ‘I think that Princess Dux is here to prepare us for the Great Change. Evidently, we’re soon going to be capable of ten thousand simultaneous telepathic communications. I read a book which said that people who weren’t prepared were going to think they were going insane.’

  ‘I think I’m going insane already,’ said Stan. ‘Sometimes the old insurance broker comes out in me and I think, what kind of rating am I going to give a three-hundred-pound, three-hundred-year-old princess from an underground civilisation that most people think has been extinct for thousands of years?’

  Stan still had one or two knots in his otherwise flawless learning curve.

  ‘I’m married to a conservative,’ Karen wailed affectionately. ‘Wasn’t it William Shakespeare who said that there are more things under heaven and earth than are dreamt of by philosophers? He believed in Lemuria.’

  ‘Is that right?’ said Stan, prepared to bow to a greater authority. ‘My wife’s a great reader,’ he added proudly.

  ‘With my schedule I haven’t got the time,’ complained Gary.

  ‘They’re mostly audio books,’ admitted Karen.

  Karen’s literary tendencies were plainly displayed for anybody who cared to use the bathroom.

  On the wall was a list called ‘A hundred things I’ll try to remember every day’. It ranged from the practical, ‘Drink peppermint tea to cleanse my auric field’, through the ethical, ‘Try to achieve psychic calmness in my sendings and remember that every being, whoever he or she may appear to be, has his or her unique part to play in the great mystery we call life’, and upwards to the metaphysical, ‘Aside from the rarest exceptions, humanity came to our planet from the Moon.’

  Beside the lavatory itself was something simply entitled ‘Poem’.

  I walk with Great Spirit through the dew

  He makes me feel so shiny and new

  I am happy as a child

  In his embrace so firm yet mild.

  Everyone agreed that, as usual, Stan and Karen’s barbecue was a unique success. Karen asked Walking Eagle if he would help them close with a blessing. Walking Eagle, who felt constrained by Robert’s presence, made the closing ceremony almost indecently abrupt.

  ‘Mother Earth, Father Sky,’ he called out, raising his palms to the stubborn blue patch above the patio. ‘We ask your blessing as Stan and Karen go on their Tantric workshop. May spring return to the mountain.’

  ‘I appreciate that,’ said Stan, raising his glass and giving Karen a squeeze.

  A murmur of approval rose from the guests and dissipated in the dazzling light of the afternoon.

  7

  During Saturday lunch Brooke had again urged Crystal to get in touch with Adam Frazer when she arrived at Esalen. Kenneth allowed his forbidding composure to be punctuated by sarcasm when Adam came up in conversation.

  ‘Like all very brilliant people he can be difficult sometimes,’ Brooke admitted to Crystal.

  ‘Like all very difficult people he’s difficult the whole time,’ Kenneth corrected her.

  ‘I’ve noticed dumb people being difficult too,’ Crystal pointed out, in the hope that they could all find some common ground.

  Now that she was driving down Route One, only a couple of hours from Esalen, Crystal started to wonder what she should do about Brooke’s suggestion.

  There was no doubt that Adam was clever and charismatic, with rows of mystical medals shining on his chest, but he had publicly turned his back on Mother Meera, one of the gurus he had earlier publicized with unbridled eagerness. Once trapped in the supreme truth of his latest enthusiasm, he was forced to tear up yesterday’s manifesto with a screech of renunciation, or face the unpleasant prospect of keeping his mouth shut. Apart from uncomfortably recalling her mother’s pendulum of devotion and disappointment, Crystal was uneasy because of her own more hesitant but respectful relationship with the avatar of Thalheim.

  The most consistent thread in all Adam’s work was the conviction that whatever happened to him was of global significance. Had he operated in the 1930s, he might well have written a book called ‘Why I’m a Communist’, followed, hotfoot, by a book called ‘Why I’m not a Communist’. Now, in the portentous shadow of the millennium, he pursued the same tango on the mystical plane. He experienced the Divine as a series of compliments paid to his sensitivity, and if he ever lapsed into humility it was the most extraordinary humility the world had ever seen and was immediately turned into a book or a film. Crystal had seen a film about his conversion to Mother Meera in which he often seemed to be on the verge of tears at the thought of what he’d been through in order to become so special. Even his laughter was lachrymose, like the giggling of a child who has been tickled for too long.

  Whoever he was announcing or denouncing, taking up or dropping, Oedipus and Narcissus were two figures who commanded his unquestioning loyalty. Exiled from his magical Indian childhood by the treachery of his adored mother, he was installed in frigid England where he developed that prancing, bucking intellect with which he hoped one day to kick down the stable door.

  At heart he remained unconsoled, even by his own brilliance, and when he met an Indian woman calling herself Mother Meera he was powerless to resist the rumour of her omnipotence and resumed his magical communion with the subcontinent. She was bound, by the same somnambulant logic, to betray him, as his own mother had done. This she did, or so Crystal had heard, by failing to share Adam’s excitement about his forthcoming marriage to Yves.

  Again he retreated from devotion to scholarship, but Rumi, despite his intoxicating emphasis on the wine and fire of Divine love, could not last for ever. A friend of his had told Crystal that Adam’s attention was being drawn towards the Virgin Mary, the mother of all mothers, who had the advantage of already being elaborately mythologized and, thanks to being dead, was less likely than her predecessors to let him down or tell him how to run his life.

  Or was she?

  The race was on. Would Adam at last find in the Mother of God a parent adequate to his special needs, or would he end up staring into the glamorous pool of his own personality with an ever more candid admiration?

  Crystal liked people to be fascinating, but she didn’t want them to be charismatic – charismatic meant that they expected other people to find them fascinating. Adam, having led the charge towards Mother Meera, was no less charismatic in retreat. Some of his plodding followers might be forgiven their sprained ankles and their spinning heads.

  As usual his personal experience contained a message it would be mad for the world to ignore. He’d squabbled with Mother Meera, and so the age of the guru was over. With Yves’s approval and support, he was prepared to strike a posture of total independence from any mediated experience of the Divine. Gurus were fallible human beings like the rest of us, and it was dangerous to attribute magical powers to them. Of course it was, thought Crystal, but they still might know something worth finding out.

&nbs
p; Adam had become the anti-guru guru, teaching his listeners to turn their backs on all their teachers (except himself) and strut about in garrulous self-sufficiency. This desire to abandon the people who’d helped him, driven by the deep conviction that in the Dodge City of maternal betrayal you have to shoot first, was not to everyone’s taste. It was all very well to kick away the ladder once he was on the roof, but what about those who had not yet run through most of the star rinpoches and avatars currently crowding the planet?

  No doubt the transition from external authority to inner conviction was an important passage in spiritual life, but of all revolutions it must be the most bloodless; nothing could falsify it more conspicuously than the need to stab. Any real awakening embraced a past which appeared to have led with newly unveiled precision to a higher perspective. Whereas ordinary well-being always dragged along its gloomy companions, ‘How long can this possibly last?’ and ‘If only I’d known this earlier’, awakening divulged the secret of ripeness, redeeming time as well as understanding, promising that every drop of suffering had been purposeful and that things would never be the same again.

  If only it happened more often.

  The past contained implacable enemies of liberation, from the most general unnegotiable conditions, like the structure of the human brain, or the karmic chain of cause and effect which seemed to enslave every incident to a deep and eventually unknowable set of causes, down through the genetic codes inherited by each individual, and finally in the distracting drama of personal history. It was only by appreciating the asphyxiatingly conditioned nature of each thought and action that Crystal had developed that passion for freedom which might enable her to punch her way through the icecap of conditioning. She was well aware that this passion and the moments of spaciousness which it sometimes gave her might also be determined. Until these tricky questions were settled more precisely by science and philosophy, every choice might be contained in the invisible prison of another category of determinism.

  However irrational it might seem, she felt instead that there was collaborative impulse at work, as if her passionate refusal to inhabit this frozen domain was being answered by a pitying Nature, which stooped down and lifted her from the ice with the same impersonal tenderness with which she sometimes lifted a struggling insect from a swimming pool. And then an idea like ripeness would descend on her with utter conviction and, like the insect opening its wings again in the sun, everything was perfect just as it was.