On the Edge A Novel Read Online Free Page B

left Robert behind and taken the psychedelics.
    About an hour later, Jean-Paul’s legs started to shake uncontrollably and he collapsed on the ground. The light, he told Crystal, was flashing swiftly over the tops of the sagebushes, like helicopter blades catching the sun. Realizing that he’d fallen through a trapdoor into a realm in which anything could happen, he sank lower on the ground, retreating from the menace of the steely sun.
    When he turned to Crystal again and tried to speak he could only manage a solitary gasp.
    ‘Strong.’
    She nodded, speechless too.
    He pictured antechambers of unease starting to honeycomb the universe, each crowded with petitioners pushing one another aside to secure his attention.
    He was dying of cancer. He was going mad. He had never known and would never know the real meaning of love. The rotten floorboards of his pride gave way one after another and he fell through clouds of dust into a bottomless basement. Small hypocrisies cut into him like axe blows, and unacknowledged vanities rose up in all their monstrous plumage.
    Just as a man releases millions of sperm to fertilize one egg, Nature spawned millions of human beings for the glory of one breakthrough in consciousness, one watershed in the history of sensibility, one invention like the alphabet, that made a real difference, one song that might be remembered, one book that might be read in a hundred years. What was he but one of those doomed sperm, part of the numerical pressure of evolution, unable to step personally into history, unable to define the nature of its emergence, let alone to shape it? Knowing he could leave no vivid trace of his passage, and shocked by the absurdity and strength of his desire to do so, he writhed as he watched the part of him that had not accepted his own historical impotence accept it now.
    He spun as he sensed his own death encoded in the spirals of his DNA. It was his own cells and organs that would kill him, his own heart that would break him in the end.
    He longed for Nature to rise up and, with the cool precision of a lizard’s flickering tongue, eliminate an arrogant and parasitical human race, but at the same time he could not bear the thought of the smallest thorn scratching the thickest skin of the dullest person on earth.
    All these thoughts assaulted him instantly, and intensely, with the same aggressive rapidity as the blades of light that strobed across the landscape. He realized with white panic that each second contained a lifetime of horror, that the most intimate sadness could become universal and the most universal proposition intolerably personal, that the many winding paths between the mind and body had been blasted into thundering motorways. He did not relish watching his mind and body locked into each other’s decline, like a pair of pitbull terriers biting furiously into each other’s bleeding mouth as they spiralled down over the edge of a precipice.
    ‘ Oh, la vache ,’ he gasped.
    He had to take a break, the images were too strong. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply. Fluorescent dodecahedrons whistled past him in a thick meteor shower which was clearly about to smash apart the spaceship of his identity. Even geometry was out to get him, even Euclid could not cool the fever of his unhappiness. He opened his eyes again and burst into flame.
    Oh, fuck.
    Should he tell Crystal that he’d burst into flame? What was the etiquette of insanity? How could he ask her to save him when he had no idea who she was? He knew something about her back there in the other world, but now that he was on Pluto having his teeth examined by Dr Mengele, while the laws of physics were being redefined several times a second, whatever he had thought he knew meant absolutely nothing.
    ‘Where are we?’ asked Crystal with a breathtaking mastery of language. ‘It all looks the same.’
    ‘Whuh,’ he managed, dragging the water bottle out of his backpack. Being on fire was thirsty