A Clue to the Exit: A Novel (17 page)

I make it up the last few yards to the peak and look out at the lower dunes. The rippling gold sinks into shadow. I wait for my reward. I’m in the Sahara, still gambling, still making deals. The sun slides down fast, leaving a white nimbus around the edges of the large dune opposite. There is no time to reflect. I have to hurry back to camp. In the desert, still keeping busy.

25

Moonless night, stars down to the ground. Clouds of breath streaming past my cheek. My feet swishing through the cold heavy sand. Walking to calm down. Stopping to calm down. Starting again to calm down. Everything is work, everything has to be earned. My watering eyes bring down a rain of needles from the feeble stars, stitching me into the night. How can I sleep in this silence, the blood hissing in my ears like a hostile crowd? I patrol twenty yards of frigid sand, working to exhaust myself.

I try the tent. Huggermugger in plastic dereliction. The floor covered in used handkerchiefs, empty bottles, dirty clothes, ripped packaging, a torch with a flickering yellow bulb. Outside, no limits; inside, no room. Then no limits inside, then none inside me. Agoraphobia on the bone, agoraphobia in the marrow. I struggle into my sleeping bag and, after half an hour of writhing, my arms pinned to my side and a cold zip in my mouth, imagine I’d be better off outside. And so I burst out of the tent like a swimmer coming up for air, and find myself back under the covered dish of stars, under the dazzling rain of diamond and sapphire needles, a prisoner of too much space.

26

Today a veil of sand is swaying unreliably over the ground. From the edge of this dune it pours into the air like an inverted waterfall. Sparkling and smoky, it snakes through the hollows, hissing against my boots. Most things change by falling apart, but the restlessness of the desert is a renovation. The landscape is priming its canvas again and again, like an amnesiac living on the shining cusp of oblivion. I can see the footsteps I made yesterday being blunted, buried and obliterated, and I feel the exhilaration of still being here to witness the brevity of the traces I’ve left behind.

A man in my position might easily head for the mountains and try to find consolation in their perseverance – never mind the rock slides, the sinking plateaux and erupting islands – or, at the opposite extreme, he might extort some pleasure from knowing that he will outlast the flies spinning on the windowsill, but neither of these strategies can match the sinister joy of watching the dunes replacing themselves with each other, as if the world could be destroyed and renewed by the same gesture, as if my sense of death could melt into a universe of change, like ice slipping from a tilted glass into a summer lake.

And then the wind died and the stars were at their steeliest. Morbidly swaddled in my sleeping bag, an electric shock of panic kept me from unconsciousness; I was like a sentry who stabs himself awake to avoid the capital crime of sleeping on his watch.

27

The next day I lay dozing in the tent all morning in a pool of sweat. I woke up fuddled and airless and dehydrated. After drinking a pint of warm water with a taste of baked plastic, I climbed a small dune and tried to clear my mind.

What struck me was the spontaneous transparency of consciousness. Consciousness and experience are synonymous. When I feel the sun warming my face I know it for what it is, nothing needs to be added. I don’t have to tell myself a story: ‘The sun is warming my face.’ It is not a linguistic act. I don’t have to observe myself to know the content of my consciousness, that is precisely what I know already. I may not understand my experience because I am confused, but then the experience I am having is confusion. Understanding may require analysis, knowledge requires facts, but this knowing is given. In its essence consciousness cannot be reduced to anything more fundamental.

Having no argument with my experience, there was no such thing as a non sequitur. I was just watching the pattern unfold, like a child playing cat’s cradle with a piece of string. I was driven by local emotions into a freewheeling lateral association, or downwards in a potentially endless search for the anchor at the end of some chain of thought, or upwards into more and more denuded categories of categories.

And then, because this search can only find arbitrary resting places, it was the whole process, accepted with complete permissiveness, which became fundamental; its endlessness was its resting place: thoughts seemed to radiate from and collapse into the same source, as if the whole history of a star could be compressed into a single unimaginable image, a black hole as bright as the sun. This image disappeared into itself (because it was a thought within the process) and reappeared (because it was the image of the process in which it disappears) and there was no succession any more (because of its self-effacing appearance) and I was outside time (because there is no succession) and inside time (because I am a dying animal who has no reason to believe that he could have this experience without a living body).

And yet when I really accepted that I couldn’t be outside time if I wasn’t inside time, my whole being, and not just my identification with a particular aspect of my thoughts, was this speechless eloquence of still moving alpha omega part whole black light and I felt that I was participating in reality for once and not just hoping and moping, and all the oxymorons turned into paradoxes, all the watersheds into figures of eight, and I was as helpless as sand dancing on a beaten drum, but I was helpless from the strangeness of reality, not from some suburban despair induced by the insult of circumstance, and this helplessness was the greatest freedom I could know.

28

Six weeks have passed since I left the desert. My visionary moment curdled into loneliness and terror. I found myself cracking up, persecuted by all the little voices that were silenced by what I’d seen. Perhaps it’s inevitable that the wave which flings itself highest up the beach should make the noisiest retreat. But what had I seen? Without the feeling of insight there was nothing left, nothing portable. I couldn’t stay where I was, let alone go any further. All I wanted was to warm myself by the fake fire of reassurance. I didn’t care if it was fake. I didn’t want to think any more. I wanted to die in England. I wanted to see the crocuses in Hyde Park. I wanted to see my daughter one more time and hold her hand in mine.

Soon after arriving in London, I made an appointment with Dr Turner. I was hoping to get some painkillers that would catapult me into the only paradise for which there are any reliable witnesses. Instead, he greeted me with the disturbing announcement of an experimental treatment for my condition. If I volunteered for a trial at the King’s Liver Unit I could start using it straight away. Nobody knows the long-term effects, but the initial signs are promising. I felt my perfect despair prised open by this oyster knife of good news. I had been so set on the certainty of death that I couldn’t separate my tentative relief from some less obvious emotions. The luxury of knowing when I was going to die, unknown to the athlete and the health-store freak, was surprisingly hard to give up.

After leaving Turner’s surgery I stood on the corner of Pont Street, holding my breath so as not to absorb more than half the cloud of diesel pumped into my face by an accelerating taxi, opposite the hotel where Oscar Wilde was arrested, and a few hundred yards from the prep school which first taught me to hate education, searching for the secret glamour which is only vouchsafed to the reprieved, but I did not find it in the stony face of the jogger who hopped beside me at the zebra crossing, a mouse squeak of rock music leaking from the headphones clamped to his skull, or in the shimmering pelt which tottered across the road with the wrong animal inside it, the quick and the wild replaced by the contemptuous pallor of a powdered stick insect; and I began to suspect that it was not gratitude for extra time, but the incisiveness of approaching death which could cut through to the heart of the matter, and I felt the bathos of survival, the loss of dramatic tension, the disappointment of watching the pristine violence of a mountain torrent thicken into a bloated yellow serpent glittering its way slowly through the crowded plain.

Now I would have to start again, writing silly screenplays, negotiating a mortgage, fighting with my ex-wife, struggling to secure a place in the world. I dragged myself across Cadogan Square, under the nervous buds of the plane trees, feeling the nausea of spring. No wonder Henry James, falling down after a stroke, thought he heard a voice saying, ‘So, here it is at last, the Distinguished Thing.’ He was expecting to be released from the triumphant mediocrity of life, its vulgar insistence on the inessential.

Today I finally called Heidi, my nerves sliding over sandpaper as I dialled her number. She took the news pretty well and after some hesitation suggested I pick up Ton Len from school this afternoon. We agreed on the details and signed off more tenderly than we have for years. After our conversation I felt such a tangle of excitement and weariness that it was impossible to do anything practical, and so I wandered into the street, killing time until Ton Len’s school day ended. It was – is – one of those staccato spring days, sunburst and cloudshadow speeding overhead and underfoot, and in perfect harmony, simmering beatitude interlaced with the horror of watching the future wreathe itself around my attention.

I saw an advertisement for the Monet exhibition on the side of a bus and, with an impulsiveness I knew I would soon have to renounce, leapt on board and rode along Piccadilly to the Royal Academy. I hadn’t realized that Monet had become as popular as a Cup Final, and I had to buy a triple-face-value ticket from an art-lover loitering by the gates.

I could hardly see the early canvases through the thrusting crowd, but when I reached the final room the scale of the
Grandes Decorations
acted as a forcefield, holding the viewers at bay. I shuffled to the front and scanned the unframed lilac expanse of clouds hanging in water and waterlilies hanging in the sky. It drew me to its light-flooded centre only to diffuse me into the lilac pool, the pulse of ambiguity dilating into stillness. The water was a natural mirror for the mirror of art: once that dialogue of reflecting surfaces was set up, everything else – depth and surface, abstraction and representation, paint and painted – could enter into it, and when these compacted reflections reached their highest concentration there was a burst of freedom, the flashing moment when the eye perceives itself.

Monet said he wanted to paint the air, a task not unlike writing about consciousness, the medium for seeing which can’t itself be seen. I have failed to paint the air or to write about consciousness, but it’s enough to know that there are states of mind and works of art which deliver this paradox: that the thing which is closest to us is the most mysterious. Something I’d glimpsed in the desert was now in front of me, already made. The pleasure of recognition shimmered through my bloodstream. Obsessive reflection, which had sent my own mind falling and flailing over the last few months, stood before me like a serene piece of nature, and I felt like a walker on a cliff path who is met by a perfect gale and can lean effortlessly into the slope with outstretched arms.

I hurried out of the gallery, trying to protect this decaying impression. My attention was locked on to my imagination and I was almost run over as I crossed the street. Passing the window of Hatchard’s bookshop, I saw the latest cluster of books to emerge from the great consciousness debate:
Emotional Intelligence
,
The Feeling Brain
,
The Heart’s Reasons
. I felt the giddy relief of knowing that I wasn’t going to read any of them. The fact that science has decided to include emotion in its majestic worldview seems about as astute as an astronomer discovering the moon.

In five minutes I must go and fetch my daughter from her school. How will I tell her where I’ve been? My novel, thank goodness, is abandoned, and the sequel to
Aliens with a Human Heart
is unlikely to deliver any aesthetic charge, other than the stunned incredulity which sometimes sells fifty-three million tickets. Life is coming to get me, like the latest model of the sea monster in
Phèdre
, no longer the agent of divine cruelty but of pointless information, squelching down the beach, dragging its tail in the sea; it will soon crush me, downloading its scaly mass of triviality into my frail mind, but I am going to go down fighting, fighting for the flash of freedom at the heart of things.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

E
DWARD
S
T.
A
UBYN
lives in London with his two children. He is the author of
The Complete Patrick Melrose Novels
(
Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mothers Milk,
and
At Last
).
Mother’s Milk
was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2006. His novel
On the Edge
was published in the United States for the first time by Picador in 2014. His latest novel is
Lost for Words
. You can sign up for email updates
here
.