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

of my body, the streams and rivers of my blood. My breath rode untroubled across the huge intellectual divide that separates the primacy of sensation from universal consciousness.
    I sat amazed in front of the burnt-sugar aviary of my myrtilles Metternich . Night-blue fruit caged in starlight.
    Everything was utterly perfect.

 
    10
    This morning, I feel desperate again. Yesterday’s elation might as well have happened to an entirely different person. What depths of self-delusion could have made me believe that crazy old witch in Le Nautique?
    I must get out of this hotel. Luxury is too superficial to touch the real causes of depression; it conjures up the mirage of consolation and adds the whiplash of betrayal to an already miserable situation. It may be that nomadic life is our natural condition and that possessions exhaust us. But reception desks exhaust us too. Of course I love hotels. They are a kind of alienated, postponed, provisional home that suits me perfectly. I hate them for the same reason. This hotel which charmed and liberated me for a few days now magnifies my agitation. A delivery truck has just made the windows of my bedroom shake. If the slow liquid of the glass is shaking, isn’t the quicker liquid of my blood shaking too?
    I have now moved down to the bar to continue writing this note, but it’s impossible to concentrate with the muted music shimmering out of the speakers like pins and needles. Only an orchestra of terrified mice could scratch out a tune at this volume, and yet I wouldn’t want it any louder.
    Should I move? Should I cultivate the nomad? It would be such a waste of time, even if I stayed on this coast. There are grand hotels all the way from Cannes to Italy, vanilla and strawberry palaces in their vastes parcs fleuris , sheltered by parasol pines and fountaining palm trees. What difference does it make which one I’m in?
    The more fundamental problem is the sinister equation ‘time is money’. It held true when I was running out of both, but since I sold my house I have an abundance of money and with it an involuntary softening of my focus on the neck of the hourglass. I realize that the people who really belong in these hotels – not the honeymooners or the desperadoes like me, but people like that woman in the corner who has smoothed her lizard skin with surgery and the man next to her, his paunch guillotined by the expert cut of his double-breasted suit – are really buying the illusion of abundant time, meted out to them in canapés and logoed bath robes and the swirling sea scum of ‘Fingal’s Cave’ currently being disgorged by the mouse orchestra.
    I must cut through this illusion; I must restore myself to a level of poverty commensurate with my medical condition. I must get back to the heart of the matter: nothing being other than it is, time utterly smooth, utterly innocent of any possible alteration. Down there, I couldn’t even choose the time of my death by committing suicide. It would just be another moment, utterly bald, innocent of all possible alteration. The horror of that and the bliss. The compacted contradictions. Meltdown.
    The only way forward is to gamble. Tomorrow evening, when I’ve got the cash together, I will go to Monte Carlo with half my remaining funds, about 1.2 million francs, and throw them away on the roulette tables.
    Now that I’ve made that decision, I have purchased enough calm to write. Even the strangled perkiness of this Mozart concerto cannot defeat me. I think I should put one more character on the train with Crystal and Patrick. I like to get my characters in one place at one time. The unities. I know it’s old-fashioned, but consciousness is complex enough without characters moving around all over the place, except of course in imagination and memory.
    Jean-Paul had always been fanatically curious about the nature of his own mind. At his primary school he’d been punished for hanging upside down from the fire escape, but when