A Clue to the Exit: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

feel you in my cunt,’ she said. ‘I can feel your passion and your intelligence.’
    At least I think that’s what she said. French is not a language I claim to understand perfectly. For all I know she was saying, ‘For God’s sake get off me, I’ve got to get home and make dinner for my husband.’
    And so the Maestro has left, without leaving behind any more detailed instructions to shape my destiny. The countess is dead, depriving me of one of those rich friendships that two people, no longer in perfect health, strike up in a luxury hotel. An opportunity to look back on two lives and decide that, on balance, they were very much worth living: all that’s gone down the drain. And I’ve had sex with a stranger. I’m burning through my options fast. Soon there’ll be nothing left to do but write.

 
    9
    This morning I am certain that the last traces of Prozac have been exiled by my imperious sadness. Why not get some more? Why not be a little lenient? Why not go and play blackjack in Monte Carlo, or visit Luxor? Why not invite a friend to share my five-star decline?
    I drive myself to the edge because it is where I already am, stranded on a narrow atoll between what is not worth saying and what cannot be said, dead language and lost love on one side, silence and death on the other. The people I love are already out of reach, guarded by a jealous mother, or married to somebody else. And my friends would only try to console me. As to death, the only thing everyone manages to agree on is that this particular body, through which I have registered everything I know, whether it was hard-wired or acquired, generated or received, by chance or by design, freely or not, this particular body will end. Even fans of the near-death experience need a central nervous system to experience their disembodiment. Whatever death brings, it will not be the potage de légumes jardinières I enjoyed on Monday night, or yesterday’s astonishing carnal adventure. Whatever may be left will be alien to the person I am now, and so only the part of me that is acquainted with strangeness will not be distracted by death. When he was dying, Molière asked for red wine and ripe cheese; Aldous Huxley, on the other hand, asked for mescaline. One can’t be too careful in such an extreme situation, and I intend to have a slap-up dinner followed by a strong dose of mescaline.
    In the meantime, I will continue On the Train . I want to know what’s been going on all these years. I’ve thought that I was having consciousness and now it turns out I don’t know what that means. I think I’ll just introduce a new character. There’s no time for bridge passages with a five-month deadline.
    Crystal sat down opposite Patrick. She still found it difficult to lower herself into a chair without wincing, and her neck brace made her feel like a collared ox dragging a plough through a paddy field. She had been told more than once that after a car accident like that she was lucky to be alive. Her transcendentally beautiful near-death experience – or NDE, as the members of her new club called it – made it even harder for her to hear this earnest platitude. Peter was still in a coma, and the drunken diplomat who had run into them by the simple device of driving on the wrong side of the road was using the moral vaccine of diplomatic immunity.
    Crystal would not have forced her shattered body to Oxford for any other conference, but caught between the ethics of switching off Peter’s life support, the troubling status of her NDE, and the rage she still felt towards the diplomat, she figured that a consciousness conference was ‘just the ticket’, as Peter would have said.
    Would she ever hear him say it again? Every detail of his voice, his tendency to mumble, his English accent, his pauses and sudden rushes, seemed more precious to her now that she might never hear them again. She felt guilty about leaving him for three days, but she rang the hospital between