A Clue to the Exit: A Novel Read Free

assertion of straightforwardness in a word-world grown too playful for its own good, as if the train might otherwise be hijacked by Doña S and, despite setting out from Oxford, dive under the metropolis and approach it from the east, terminating inconveniently at Liverpool Street station.
    Patrick flicked past the notes he had taken at the consciousness conference, until he reached some more personal reflections recorded at the back of his notebook.
    ‘Like St Francis I am wedded to poverty, but in my case the marriage has not been a success.’
    It was not true. He had enough money to be getting on with.
    ‘The night is young. I must try not to envy her too much.’
    His own youth had been a nightmare from which he was grateful to be distanced.
    He was exasperated by his craven need for elegance, disgusted by his own stylistic habits. Was it too late to change?
    He only had six months to find out. Cirrhosis, of course. The reprimand of those young nights.
    The truth was that he was desperate about everything and he would have to abandon his taste for aphorisms if he was going to get close to describing his feelings. Even the routine unhappiness of the strangers on the station platform devastated him. The feeling raged through him, like a burning rope he couldn’t hold on to, although someone he loved was falling at the other end of it; it ripped the skin from his hands. As he walked down the platform he had felt the pressure to drag bits of dead language over himself, like cardboard blankets on a freezing night. But he remained utterly exposed.
    I was too tired to go on, but before I fell asleep I felt the relief of writing a third-person narrative. It is so much more personal than a first-person narrative, which reveals too flagrantly the imposture of the personality it depends on.
    As I lay on the bed, spiralling into sleep, I realized that I couldn’t grab at anything any more. I couldn’t even grasp the simplest idea. Nothing would take hold. The chains of cause and effect were heaped uselessly at my feet. Maybe that’s what freedom is like, only less drowsy.

 
    5
    Yesterday I doubled the dose of Prozac and despite my unhappy situation I feel quite violently cheerful. My mind is busy, busy, busy. I just don’t see how I’m going to fit dying into my packed schedule. In December I’ll be writing a deathless work of art. January’s no good, I’m having a reconciliation with my ex-wife. The spring’s out – it’s the cherry season, for God’s sake. The summer’s not looking good either: my daughter is coming down to the coast to say a last farewell; I wouldn’t miss that scene for all the world. We’re going to have to reschedule this thing for next autumn. I know it’s a whole year, but what can I do? I’m sorry.
    Busy, busy, busy.
    This morning I realized that my true subject – at least, for the purpose of getting an advance – is not death, but consciousness. It was Patrick going to that conference that gave me the hint. I rang Arnie’s secretary and made an appointment for the next day, then I went to Brentano’s and bought all the books on consciousness I could lay my hands on.
    Luckily, I’ve done a speed-reading course and by the time I arrived at Mi Casa Ti Casa I had been able to scan twenty-six books with the word ‘mind’ in the title, as well as a rogue volume called Now and Zen . Unluckily, I am only able to retain for a few hours an impression of the material I read at this punishing pace, and the first dozen books had already faded on the drive over. Still, I was unlikely to forget the central point: nobody has a clue how consciousness works. That’s why it’s such a fertile field for fiction, unlike the steam engine, for instance, which is relatively well understood.
    I found Arnie ripping the shell off a lobster and pouring a little battered tin of melted butter over its quivering body.
    ‘This is better than sex,’ he commented. ‘You got that treatment for