On the Edge

by Edward St. Aubyn

  ‘It’s what Ralph Abrahams calls the “sunset effect”,’ said Kenneth. ‘While there’s a beautiful sunset, even if the optical effects are produced by pollution, people won’t understand the magnitude of the crisis.’

  ‘You see, you know so many interesting things,’ said Brooke, ‘even if you haven’t gone to the trouble of writing them down.’

  There was an appreciative silence.

  ‘Kenneth, do you think the seals know?’ asked Brooke, as their car flashed past the glittering sands of Andrew Molera beach.

  ‘Know what?’ asked Kenneth.

  ‘That it’s the end of the world.’

  ‘Oh, they know,’ said Kenneth. ‘They know.’

  * * *

  Karen lay on the bed in her pink tracksuit listening to her Waves at Sunset tape which always filled her with a unique sense of peace and wonder. Stan, with that literal-mindedness which sometimes challenged his wife’s patience, walked along the cliff’s edge looking at the sunset and listening to the waves.

  ‘Do the seals know the world is coming to an end?’ Stan found himself thinking.

  A seal barked from the kelp in what seemed to Stan an affirmative fashion. But affirmative of what? That they knew the world was ending or that, on the contrary, there was nothing to worry about? He wanted to plunge into the water with the seals and have a transpersonal experience. Now that would make a radical workshop.

  Stan felt the richness of his own imagination. Even Karen didn’t have crazy ideas like that. In a strange way, Karen was utterly sane; that was why he’d married her. It was just that she believed everything she was told, everything. That had been fine in New Jersey when the rumours had been the neighbourhood gossip, the milkfloats of the daily news, and the suburban consolation of horrifying crime statistics from New York City. Santa Fe rumours were a different matter.

  * * *

  Carlos, sitting on his balcony watching the reddening sky, dreamt of the unnecessary income that would come his way if his ear massage mufflers (patent pending) went into production and became one of those stress-appeasers that several million people find in their stockings one Christmas.

  The sea still looked pretty, but how many flecks of heavy metal and radioactive isotopes crowded its cubic kilometres? The waves beat themselves against the rocks like washing, and then collapsed back into their own suds. While money still had some meaning, he would buy himself a stretch of primary rainforest back home in Brazil, far from the mutant viruses ravaging the great cities. There he could relax a little longer than the rest of his guilty species, behind a veil of rabies, yellow fever and malaria which would by then have taken on the character of old friends.

  * * *

  Peter was resting after a revolutionary afternoon. He had moved on and let go of his workshop. That morning in the baths Martha had lectured them on the importance of nudity while she wore an unusually long T-shirt. In the afternoon she had picked on a particularly lost and unhappy woman and told her to choose her ‘mother’ among the group.

  ‘Tell her you hate her,’ she commanded.

  ‘I hate you.’

  ‘Tell her to stop trying to control your life.’

  ‘Stop controlling my life,’ echoed the hapless seminarian, stamping her foot.

  Martha then told the group to pile cushions on top of the woman and sit on her while she screamed, with increasing desperation and difficulty, ‘I want to live, I want to live.’

  ‘I can’t hear you,’ Martha kept saying.

  ‘I want to live! Let me out of here. Please!’

  ‘I can’t hear you.’

  ‘I want to live!’

  Peter, on the other hand, wanted to leave. He took the opportunity to switch to Crystal’s Tibetan workshop. It was technically too late, but the Tibetan chap, who turned out to be an American, and happened to come into the office at that very moment, was so relaxed about it that they let him do it anyway.

  They also told him that a message had just come through to call his mother. Slightly irritated, and slightly worried, Peter phoned England.

  ‘I’ve joined a group,’ said Mrs Thorpe.

  ‘You’ve done what?’ said Peter.

  ‘I’ve joined a group. It’s called Cult Busters. We’re all worried friends and parents. It’s been such a help, and I’ve stopped worrying because there’s no point and it doesn’t do the earthliest bit of good.’

  ‘I’m glad you’ve seen that, especially as I haven’t joined a cult.’

  ‘But what I find absolutely fascinating is my group. They’ve all had such extraordinary lives, if you put them in a novel nobody would believe it. And there’s a sort of thing that happens…’

  ‘A group dynamic.’

  ‘I suppose you could call it that. I prefer to think of it as wartime spirit. It’s not a bit like charity committees and the other groupie things I’ve done; because everybody is so revealing. I couldn’t talk at first, but then I thought I really must buck up and I told them my son had been kidnapped by the Moonies and I got tons of sympathy and at least twenty telephone numbers. I haven’t put them in my proper address book – I’m waiting to see which ones I like in that way.’

  Peter smiled.

  ‘That’s great,’ he said. ‘It sounds like they’re being really helpful.’

  ‘Well, watch out, or we’ll come and bust your cult,’ said Mrs Thorpe excitedly. ‘I went with Fiona, and I warn you that she’s met a man she’s rather taken with.’

  ‘Good,’ said Peter.

  ‘His girlfriend joined one of those dreadful suicide cults, and naturally he’s been down in the dumps for ages, but then Fiona said a great friend of hers had committed suicide and they became as thick as thieves.’

  ‘Gavin?’ said Peter. ‘She hardly knew him.’

  ‘It’s no use being jealous of our group,’ said Mrs Thorpe serenely. ‘We were told about that. You get very jealous because you’ve been feeding off our anxiety for years.’

  Peter didn’t bother to point out the flaws in this theory but congratulated his mother on her group.

  ‘It may not be my only group,’ said Mrs Thorpe. ‘I’m thinking of becoming frightfully green. What we’ve done to this planet is disgraceful. If you make a mess, you have to clean it up. I met a fascinating man in our group – he might well get into my proper address book – who said that all the animals are starting to behave differently. They can sense it, like fire on the wind, he said.’

  * * *

  Jason was amazed to find that he was obeying Martha and Carlos and writing down the dream he’d had the night before. He reassured himself that this collapse into conformity was only a feint in his dedicated subversion of the workshop. What had got him going was the woman they’d buried under the cushions that afternoon. It was just like his dream.

  ‘I dreamt I was buried alive by mistake. There was this really loud noise, like rain on a roof, and I thought, “Hang on, that’s too loud for rain,” and it turned out to be a shovelful of earth landing on the cheap pine box I was buried in. I punched my way out, and instead of a crowd of cheering friends, there was just this horrible old git with a roll-up in the corner of his mouth, earning a bit on the side by burying me alive. The sight of me standing there finished him off. He rolled in and I rolled out. I brushed the earth off my favourite leather jacket – the one I lost in Berlin – and swore I’d never play dead again. It felt good to be alive, but I knew it was only the contrast, and it was bound to wear off.’

  Was he going to tell them that he constantly fantasized about faking his own death in order to see who would turn up at the funeral? No need to ring Vienna to know that there was a bit of a question mark hanging over his sense of popularity. Should he admit to this? These bastards didn’t really teach you anything, they just activated the superstition that if you didn’t confess everything, you wouldn’t see the light of whatever they were peddling. Then if you didn’t get it, it was your own fault. Cunning. After you got caught in the mangle of your consci
ence, you couldn’t afford to do anything but come out the other side praising the system that had just wrung you dry.

  Bastards, with their essential oils and their pillow-bashing, and their colonic irrigations. What was all that about anyway? Even if you didn’t believe that we were made in God’s image, it seemed a bit iffy to think that the human body was so badly designed that it could only function properly with a pressure hose up its arse.

  Well, he certainly wasn’t going to tell them about the second half of his dream, the wet half. He hadn’t had sex for so long that he wasn’t surprised, but the trigger for his unsolicited discharge was a girl he’d only met at Monday lunch. God, was it only yesterday? He had thought about her so much that he felt he had known Angela for weeks. He even felt a song coming on. The only lyrics Haley could inspire were vicious and sterile. What rhymed with aromatherapist anyway? Twist, fist, pissed, cut your wrist …

  Angela was a workscholar, that’s what they called the people who paid to work here. Yes, paid to work here. He must get some workscholars in his band. He was going to meet Angela now in the baths. What a great place. You got to see someone naked straight away. What a crazy place where they got to see you naked straight away.

  The door of the room opened and Jason stooped studiously over the page.

  ‘Are you coming to dinner?’ asked Haley.

  ‘No, I’ve got to write my dream down for Jungos.’

  ‘Isn’t that rather goody-goody of you?’

  ‘Look, if I don’t write it down you criticize me, and if I do you criticize me.’

  ‘See you later,’ mumbled Haley, leaving the room.

  Gotcha, thought Jason.

  A blue jay (Angela had told him that’s what they were called) landed on a tree she hadn’t yet named for him outside his room. It was beautiful here. He wasn’t really the urban thug he pretended to be. Can the birds tell it’s apocalypse time? That might make a good first line. As they beat their way through the rich brown air of Hollywood, they might start to wonder, but on this untamed coast, while the sun played its classic solo in the storm-washed sky …

  Isn’t that what we’re all looking for? thought Jason, practising for Angela. Our own untamed nature. He felt another song coming on. What would we do if there was no untamed nature to guide us?

  She’d love that, she’d definitely love that.

  * * *

  Angela had prayed to the Goddess to bring a beautiful man into her life, she had handed it over and trusted, and now she’d met Jason, a rock star from England. Life was beautiful. And the timing was perfect too. Without having a boyfriend, she had told all her friends that she was going to the Tantric workshop that weekend. You had to be a couple to attend. She’d just handed it over and trusted. Jason had a girlfriend, but she had a beautiful feeling about that too. The Goddess had sent her a dream last night showing her that they weren’t really suited, and that Jason was meant for her.

  * * *

  Crystal didn’t quite know what to make of the long, disturbing letter Jean-Paul had sent her from Paris. At its core there seemed to be genuine confrontation with the horror he had felt in Canyonlands but been unable to embrace. A lot of his time on the Lakoda reservation had been spent acting out the fantasies he had stored up from his passion for Western films, ululating and waving his power shield at the once indifferent but now paternal sky. In addition to this lonely pursuit, and with a bravery she couldn’t help admiring, he had done several tepee ceremonies, swallowing nauseating doses of peyote and discovering in the fire at the centre of the tent the chaotic video of his own fears, as well as the healing messages that Great Spirit transmitted through the earnest and practical prayers of his new brothers.

  He described, in a surprisingly lyrical passage, how he had seen again the knotted balls of newborn vipers that rolled and writhed along the gravel paths of his aunt’s house in the Loire. As a child he used to watch them obsessively during the Easter holidays. His uncle put out poison and soon most of the vipers died, limp and scattered, like a burst bag of liquorice, around the fatal bowls. The flickering leaves of the poplar trees, the silvery ringing of his bicycle bell, all became vivid to Crystal as she sat beside the Esalen waterfall at sunset.

  The others forgot about the vipers but Jean-Paul could not forget. The mockery and the disapproval of his aunt silenced the ‘viper-mad’ boy, but also shaped the solitary confinement into which all his terrors were later thrust, and out of which his cleverness, for what it was worth, was born. And now, out of the burning coals of the tepee fire a new ball of vipers writhed and rolled, and Jean-Paul, with the unbearable poignancy of a scalded child, writhed and rolled around the tent as well.

  Snake medicine was powerful medicine, his new brothers told him. Whatever belief he was able to muster in the emblematic language of Great Spirit, he could not lose the sense that these were his vipers. This clinging to the uncollective unconscious drove him back to Paris, where they spoke his own dialect, but he returned irrevocably changed. Where was the subversive analysis of American culture he would have done better to write in the greenhouse of the Bibliothèque Nationale? His best friend said that it had been a grave mistake for him to leave France. ‘Nothing is more fatal to one’s judgement than evidence,’ he told Jean-Paul. Instead of being ludic he had become ludicrous, he told everyone else, who hastened to report back to Jean-Paul. His publishers told him that the French public’s love–hate relationship with American culture was crying out for his penetrating deconstruction. An old girlfriend found a pair of beaded moccasins in his cupboard when she quickly scanned his room for signs of a woman. His neighbours became grumpy about the monotonous drumming that issued from his apartment every evening.

  Here, Jean-Paul started to describe how he had struggled to come to his senses, and the tone of the letter changed. The vulnerability which Crystal had rather admired gave way to a more familiar voice, but one which was giving birth to a somewhat obscure insight.

  I remember attending a lecture by Jacques Derrida in which he described the ideal text as being ‘like a vagina, infolding and outfolding at the same time’.

  I admired his audacity and his eroticism, but I imagined they were at the service of plurality and indeterminacy, the gods of my intellectual pantheon. I never suspected that this infolding–outfolding was the only structural expression that could be given to the rhythms which I would see and feel as I hurtled through the infinite depths of my peyote purgatory. It charms me that this copulative and generative image should be at the heart of true structure. We must have known something when we were born. The truth was, as it were, staring us in the face but, never formulated, it was easily forgotten as we learned to live in a world ruled by that sick tyrant and his part-time nurse, absurdity and stoicism.

  How proud I was of my self-doubt, that bed of nails on which the existential yogi ostentatiously takes his rest. But if we do not doubt our doubt, if we are not sceptical about our own scepticism, it becomes the opposite of itself and is merely complacency wearing the mask of science. I doubted everything and then stood strangely pleased on the ground of my own doubt. What happened in Canyonlands is that the ground gave way, and I found, under the crust of my inadequate scepticism, a visionary realm where I stood in terror before the birth pangs of thought itself, the infolding and outfolding pulse of la pensée.

  When we look at the detailed physiology of the brain processes which ‘cause’ consciousness (even though qualia may be ‘emergent properties’ which are categorically different, etc. – sometimes the instrument panel of language tells us we are on the ground when the windows are stained with a stratospheric blue), we see that the boutons at the tips of the axions that fire into the cleft of the dendrites are making love before they make thought … Je fais l’amour donc je suis!

  Crystal had no precise idea of what Jean-Paul was saying. She must look into the riddle of consciousness one day. What the hell were axions? She realized that the synapses must look as if they were fucking – at
least something in her was getting laid. Jean-Paul’s own style of lovemaking had a surprising amount of what he would have called ‘eroticism’. He appreciated a holiday from the cerebral even more than a belligerent sensualist. In the end, though, she wanted sex as well as everything else to be a form of meditation.

  She watched the waterfall turning back into a stream and rushing to meet the waves of the sea. The ceaseless chatter of the stream was silenced by the booming chant of the sea. A wave disclosed a seam of cloudy emerald before it came in a white rush among the rocks. God, she was at it too. Maybe everything was making love.

  Looking at this scene, it was hard to believe an earlier passage in Jean-Paul’s letter.

  I announce the death of Nature. The ancient dialogue between Nature and Culture, and its reconciliations in the pastoral, the Arcadian and the romantic, are over. Culture stands alone on stage and, like a bereaved husband who has ‘let himself go’, no longer seeing any reason for restraint without his old partner and his old opponent, gorged on sleeping pills and junk food, bloated and self-regarding, shouts out his repetitious soliloquy to an audience of widows like himself.

  A seal popped up inquisitively. Those eyes that looked as if they had been swimming through their own tears.

  ‘Is it over?’ said Crystal out loud.

  The seal made no reply.

  12

  Some people said, ‘Be here now,’ but what Brooke said was, ‘You’re always missing something.’

  Here she was in an absolutely fascinating Rumi class, but she could be doing something else absolutely fascinating instead. She knew that Crystal Bukowski was at Esalen doing an exciting-sounding meditation workshop. Brooke was no stranger to meditation, she had built the most beautiful, completely authentic zendo in the garden of her summer place in Rhode Island. She even sent the architect to Kyoto to study the whole thing and get every detail right.