A Clue to the Exit: A Novel (5 page)

I must suspend the writing of
On the Train
for a moment in order to go to Monte Carlo and throw away half my remaining capital in the Salles des Jeux. I expect to be able to accelerate my production once I’ve reduced my income to a more uncomfortable level. It was rather a business getting hold of all that cash but I now have it in a small suitcase. I have to admit that I find the whole situation rather enthralling.

11

Gambling is wonderful. It breaks my heart that I’ve taken so long to discover it. On the other hand, ripeness is all, and there could be no more perfect moment to become addicted to this exhilarating new vice. It’s all very well to cultivate pure Being, but in order to become a well-rounded person one must also cultivate pure Chance.

I had never been to the casino in Monte Carlo before. The passport formalities warned me that I was entering another country, with its own dialect, its own currency of lustrous plastic counters and, above all, its own sense of time, sealed off from natural light and measured in spins and deals. If time is money, I was entering an eternity where all its other aspects were carefully falsified. I was at the heart of the delusion which I could only escape by penetrating more deeply.

I explained my predicament: the inconvenience of walking around all evening with a suitcase. The management obligingly took my suitcase and gave me two yellow and white chips with 500,000 written on them in large gold numbers, and two smaller green and white chips with 100,000 written on them in smaller gold numbers.

‘That’s better.’ I smiled, admiring the snug way they fitted into the four pockets of my jacket.

A man with the understanding eyes of a confessor said apologetically that he hoped I could produce documentation for such a large sum of cash. I was unknown to the establishment and sometimes criminal elements tried to use the casino to launder their money. I explained that I was faced with the prospect of premature death and saw no reason not to liquidate my assets and gamble. He seemed entirely satisfied, not to say excited, by my situation. I spared him my literary ambitions; I didn’t have all night to chat about the meaning of life.

Privately, I was obsessed with the logic of my decision. If I could cast off the heavy cloak of luxury, I would be able to write with that passionate concentration I need in order to say something true before I die. I would be embedded in the trickling sand of the hourglass. I would become as intimate with my own experience as a neck with a noose. I would strip my life down to a whitewashed room, a chair, a desk, a page, a pen. And the birth canal to this proud simplicity was the Salle d’Europe; cliffs of gold, azure shields, garlanded nymphs, and roulette tables, themselves arranged like the spokes of a wheel under the circular golden grid of the ceiling. I became so caught up in this paradox that I had to walk round the room again and again, trying to tune my mood to the great act of intensification I was about to perform.

As I circled the tables I started to notice that not only the
belle
époque
decoration but the physiognomies of the staff and gamblers were devices for arresting time. There was a haughty tail-coated footman with white hair and a Roman nose. And a heavy-lidded corrupt waiter who gave available-for-flogging glances. There was a gambler with long curly hair and a musketeer’s zip of black beard in the cleft of his chin. He had a diamond earring, a yellow silk tie and a half-oriental girlfriend with white make-up and purple half-moons of exhaustion under each glittering black eye. There was a crowd of powder-caked, chain-smoking old women weighed down with jewellery. I saw an oriental man with a scar down the left side of his face and a bored tart in tow, smoking, chipless, on the stool next to him. He was also wearing a thick gold bracelet studded with diamonds. I saw jewellery everywhere, and realized that what looked like financial confidence was in fact the sign of how little these gamblers trusted themselves with money. When they had nothing left in their pockets, at least they still had thousands of pounds squeezed around their fingers, wrists and necks.

I couldn’t help noticing that most people were playing with twenty- and fifty-franc chips. There were some pink five hundreds and blue thousands, but I knew that my 100,000-franc block was bound to be noticed and so, shy as a virgin, when a virgin is shy, I walked over to an empty table where an idle croupier sat alone. I placed the green and white counter on the red diamond and looked at him pleadingly, hoping he would take it away before it attracted any curiosity. A couple of tourists drifting by immediately glued themselves to the table and watched the ivory ball bounce its way into a slot. My prayers were answered. It was black. I met their commiserating expressions with a smile of subtle satisfaction. One hundred thousand francs in under two minutes. What lightness. What clarity of purpose.

I resumed my pacing, hoping to ditch the spectators, and the moment they were on the other side of the room I returned to the empty table and quickly dropped a second counter on ‘Manque’. I had no idea what it meant in casinoland, but its ordinary French meaning of ‘lack’ seemed fitted to my purpose, and indeed I was soon lacking a second 100,000 francs. The satisfaction that accompanied this second loss was tainted by a hollow feverishness, an accelerated pulse, a longing to repeat the act. I was displeased by this impurity. I wanted to taste freedom, not burden myself with some new set of suspect pleasures. I retreated to the casino restaurant, Le Train Bleu, in order to dispel this trace of confusion and prepare myself for an absolutely calm abandonment of my last million francs. I would have to go deeper into the bowels of the casino, to the Salle Privée, where my 500,000-franc counters would be in their natural habitat.

In the meantime, I sat in the fake train compartment of the restaurant, entombed in buttoned-leather padding. Beside me was a glass case filled with old tin toys, and a hand-written card saying:
WE BUY OLD TIN TOYS
. Here in the kingdom of old tin toys, it was all right to be an old tin toy oneself, or an old tin toyboy for that matter. The grandest toy of all was a great big Italian gunboat. What bliss to be behind those portholes, in the ultimate sealed-off chamber, in the boat, in the case, in the train, in the casino, with great big guns to stop anyone interrupting you – doing what? – playing, of course.
Les jeux sont fait
, never mind the torpedo in the engine room.

The two women at the neighbouring table spoke in Russian. Hearing that sibilant and barbaric tongue undulating once more through the Salle d’Europe, I reflected on the opportunities for portraying the sickness of a continent through the gaping metaphor of a great casino: the confluence of nations, the teasing combination of formality and mental illness and, above all, the trick of chasing the whore of Fortune while ignoring the fact that time is running out. Naturally, I thought of Thomas Mann’s cosmopolitan morbidity, Dostoevsky’s compulsive gambling, and the Grand Duke Dmitri, exiled to the South of France for helping to murder Rasputin, and missing the excitement of the Russian roulette back home.

With only five months to live, I hardly had time to embark on such an ambitious narrative. I must content myself with carving the cherry stone of consciousness. And so I ordered a
risotto di aspergi e gamberoni
, which I can unhesitatingly recommend to anyone who is halfway through throwing their capital down the green-felt drains of Monte Carlo, and wrote the following fragment.

Perfect, thought Patrick, she’s come to sit opposite me. He had seen her at the conference and was immediately drawn to this bruised and beautiful woman in a neck brace. Besides the sexual attraction, he felt an obscure but strong affinity with her, as if they were different aspects of the same intention. It was hard to explain, but as she sat down opposite him, closing her eyes while she shifted into a tolerable position, he felt the weight of his desperation become more widely distributed. This was not a vague impression, it had the distinctness of a broken table acquiring another leg.

Crystal smiled at him painfully. ‘You were at the conference, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you like it?’

‘I liked this morning’s Alzheimer doctor,’ said Patrick. ‘The one who said that if you treated the patient as if he were there, “the whole manifestation changed”.’

‘Oh, yes, I liked him too,’ said Crystal enthusiastically. ‘You see, I’ve been treating Peter as if he was there. I ought to explain that I had a car accident with my husband. I had an NDE and he’s still in a coma. We really should have been hanging from the ceiling in a perspex cage during this conference, we’ve become such an ideal consciousness-studies couple.’

‘God,’ said Patrick, ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ He could tell that this strain of humour was not quite natural to her.

‘Oh, thank you. We were lucky to survive.’ Crystal sighed. ‘I have to say that, because I couldn’t bear hearing someone else saying it again.’

‘It’s not my kind of line,’ said Patrick.

‘Forgive me, but I wasn’t going to take the risk. Yeah,’ she resumed, ‘the Alzheimer doctor was good. That film interview was wonderful and terrifying at the same time. His patient was losing the memory of language without losing the sense of who he was. It suggests that the witness is more fundamental than the executive. When the one who acts collapses, there’s still one to feel him collapse.’

‘Absolutely,’ said Patrick. ‘And the people we treat as absent are in fact desperately frustrated, like a dream where you scream and nobody hears.’

‘Except that you may not wake up,’ said Crystal. ‘In my NDE, I was in the operating theatre listening to the doctors talk about my poor prospects of survival and screaming at them to get the glass out of my neck. They just ignored me. So I try to listen to Peter.’ Crystal’s eyes filled with tears. ‘Try to imagine what he might be wanting to say…’

Patrick could think of nothing to say. He smiled at Crystal, but she stared blindly through the windows of the train. Faced with the pressing prospect of premature death, Patrick felt that he could have been – that he would quite like to have been – in that perspex cage with Crystal, and if necessary the comatose Peter, dangling from the ceiling of the conference room.

He was reminded of Pierre, his old drug dealer from New York. The Ancient Mariner of Lower Manhattan, Pierre compulsively described his bizarre suffering to anyone who came within range. ‘For eight fucking years I thought I was an egg,
je croyais que j’étais un oeuf
. But I had total consciousness,
une conscience totale
. I knew
everything
.’ Unable to crack the ovular self-sufficiency of his body, his awareness left the hospital where he was being treated as a catatonic patient, and sped through a universe bathed in intelligence. From time to time he would return to the scene of his desertion and look down with a stranger’s pity at the frozen body on the bed, at the nurses who came and went, carrying flannels and plates of food. But even Pierre, who was so fascinated by his ecstasy, refused to let go entirely of his body. Recognizing that it was dying of neglect, he forced himself back inside, squirming with reluctance, like a child who has to climb back into a wet bathing suit. ‘I was totally disgusted, man.
J’avais un dégoût total.
’

Should Patrick tell Crystal the half-inspiring story of Pierre’s return to animation? Pierre had been catatonic, Peter was in a coma, and neither of them had Alzheimer’s. Still, there were analogies. If an Alzheimer’s patient could go blank and yet know that he was going blank, and if the catatonic Pierre had total consciousness when he appeared to have none, who could confidently say that Peter had no idea what was happening to him?

As Patrick wondered how to revive his conversation with Crystal, a tap on the window drew his attention to a man waving at her from the platform. He recognized the Frenchman who had made a challengingly opaque presentation at the conference the day before.

I was forced to stop writing at this point. The waiter asked me for the fourth time whether there was anything more I wanted and I conceded a request for the bill. There was an atmosphere of insulation in that restaurant which Proust would have envied. A good casino is the perfect place to write: isolated without being lonely, single-minded and yet sophisticated, exclusive and welcoming at the same time; sealed off from the distractions of the world and sealed in a world of distraction, it has that oxymoronic tang that keeps one from falling asleep. I looked through the internal window of the restaurant at the gamblers drifting past like fish in an aquarium, drank the last of my coffee, closed my notebook, and plunged into the florid scene beyond the glass.

As I stepped into the Salle Privée, I immediately felt the uplift of its higher ceilings and the downpour of its weightier luxury. Two giant nymphs, representing Dawn and Dusk, reinforced the effort to arrest time by being interchangeable. Whether the sun rose or the sun set, nothing could interfere with their delicate self-absorption. Another night and several fortunes may have swirled down the plughole, and vast herds of human cells thrown themselves off the precipice of time, but nothing had really changed, because the evening’s twin was there to greet the haunted gambler, still loitering in a rosy-fingered landscape, still dressed in the semi-diaphanous nymphwear she had borrowed from her sister the night before. Although I had to refuse their gentle invitation to pretend that time was not cutting my throat, I was delighted to be among people who had decided to come to their endless party so decoratively dressed.