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

every lecture. No change. She had spent the last four weeks in Peter’s hospital room, talking to him as if he might reply at any moment, kissing his face, reading to him, meditating with his hand in her lap, and drawing his profile, telling him he was the best model she’d ever had.
    Tracy, the prim English nurse who was sometimes on duty, and who already disapproved of Crystal’s constant presence in Peter’s room, as if it was akin to necrophilia, found her sketching his impassive face. She stood for a while next to the bed, fiddling with the sheets.
    ‘Do you think that’s really fair?’ she finally asked, with the air of someone defending the handicapped from exploitation.
    Crystal realized that Tracy saw Peter as a quasi-corpse to whom a quasi-funereal respect was due, a proper silence, a few flowers and some make-up. Crystal was defiantly but also quite naturally treating Peter as if he was still there. She was drawing Peter because he was still Peter, not sneaking up on him now that he could no longer protest. She tried to communicate all of this with her steady gaze, but Tracy looked back at her with equally steady conviction that she knew kinky behaviour when she saw it.
    All the fascinating speculative questions Crystal might have hoped to answer by attending the conference were subsidiary to this leading question, ‘Is Tracy right?’
    The conference was not designed to answer her particular preoccupation. It revelled in all kinds of fringe experiences: the petit mal , the Korsakov’s syndrome, the neurological dysfunctions that Oliver Sacks had made into a middlebrow passion; the pets who knew their owners were coming home; the twins separated at birth and living in distant cities who purchased the same dress on the same day; the flight of homing pigeons; the astral journeys of psychotic patients; the minuscule but robust incidents of paranormal phenomena; the consciousness which civilization had gained and the consciousness it had lost. There were of course philosophers with their qualia and their Artificial Intelligence. And some doctors, mapping out brain function in a style no less convincing than medieval cartography.
    I have to interrupt Crystal’s story because something absolutely extraordinary has just happened.
    I was sitting in a cafe called Le Nautique, writing On the Train , when a woman at the next table asked me for a light. There was a gentle breeze, so I bunched three matches together and struck them, cupping my hand around the end of her Marlboro. Only then did I look up and notice her face. Her teeth were the colour of burnt oranges, and her dark-rose lipstick described a pair of lips at some distance from the ones that sucked on her cigarette. The swollen bags under her eyes trembled and twitched, but the eyes themselves stared resolutely into mine.
    ‘You are writing a novel,’ she said, in that cultivated French which is always such a pleasure to listen to.
    ‘Yes,’ I admitted.
    ‘You will have a great success with your novel, a worldwide success.’
    ‘How do you know?’ I asked, casual but far from indifferent.
    ‘You’ve heard of Henri Arnaud?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘He was the greatest psychic in France and he gave me his gift. I also do psychic surgery,’ she went on. ‘I learnt it from Dr Fritz in Brazil.’
    ‘The borders between different dimensions are more liquid there,’ I said encouragingly.
    ‘Yes,’ she said, giving me a burnt-orange smile. ‘I like Brazil.’
    She was clearly a woman of many talents and I was hugely relieved by the news she gave me about my novel. I felt the deep sense of peace that came from knowing I was doing exactly the right thing with the little time I have left.
    Tonight, I sat in the hotel restaurant and let everything fall away except that sense of peace. As I breathed in I could feel my consciousness expanding along a glistening spider’s web of total connectedness and as I exhaled it accordioned back into the tropical richness