On the Edge A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

work.
    Why had she said that? Why had she introduced the further disturbance of pointing out that they were lost? Everything did look like everything else. They were in a fractal landscape: the smallest cracked pebble contained canyons that lay on the ground of canyons that branched off wider and wider canyons in a land of wide canyons. And those cracks led to gulleys that ran into streams that flowed into tributaries that disgorged into the churning ochre drain of the Colorado. Seen from above, he knew that this vascular system, contained within the echoing canyons, created another layer of resemblances to various anatomical, botanical, crystalline and zoological formations.
    There were star-shaped flowers and, no doubt, flower-shaped stars, but these multiplying resemblances which might at other times have spoken to him of an intricate design, or at least of an intelligible vocabulary, now crushed him by annihilating the space between what had become purely mental objects.
    A more primitive and chaotic collapse of space took place when he tried to make out where they were sitting. The pink and yellow rock shimmered and shifted like an exasperating piece of optical art, but instead of being able to step out of the pretentious gallery in which it hung and into the visual liberation of the street, he was installed in the centre of this little conceptual joke, caught like a loose hair from the paintbrush in the pigment that surrounded him on every side.
    Surrounded and invaded: his own flesh was also a pink and yellow landscape which he could not help imagining flayed in a butcher’s window, a few sprigs of sagebrush arranged at the base.
    These thoughts, which would have taken so long to formulate, took no longer to think than a wasp’s sting to sting.
    As if this weren’t enough, he seemed to be in a landscape crowded with debris from an era of reptilian giants. Its petrified iguanas, tortoises, lizards and dragons were swapping positions at high speed, receding and rushing forwards like the garish chariots of a funfair ride.
    ‘I see what you mean,’ he said.
    Each gasped word, particularly ‘I’, ‘see’, ‘you’ and ‘mean’, seemed to lead down hazardous mineshafts of communication designed by narrow conventions, held up by rotting props and filled with dead canaries. ‘What’ preserved a comparative innocence.
    He knew that the only way to gauge real time was to move through real space, that the only way he could stop the poisonous vine of malaise from strangling him completely was to pit his most fundamental resources against it. This was not an experience to relax into but an enemy to defeat at any cost.
    A low bank of earth rose nearby. If he could get to the top of it he might see something that would lead them back to base camp, to water, to food, to someone whose mind was not ravaged by psychedelic drugs, although he secretly believed that the disappointment of these consolations would tip him into permanant madness.
    Crystal hoped the trip wouldn’t get any stronger. The beauty of the psychedelic realm was eluding her right now. She felt she was being taken further away from her centre, not deeper into it. The truth was she had wanted something for Jean-Paul.
    When she had introduced him to Lama Surya Das at the New York Open Center he had said how many interesting questions he had about the nature of meditation. Surya Das silently made the gesture of unscrewing Jean-Paul’s head and throwing it away.
    ‘Ah, so you understand that I think too much,’ Jean-Paul said with satisfaction.
    ‘A lama understands everything,’ Surya Das replied with a self-mockery as gentle as everything else about him, except his passionate desire for full realization.
    She’d thought that Jean-Paul might get ‘out of his head’ in a constructive way but now she wasn’t sure, watching him sway on all fours like an infant on its first crawl.
    Jean-Paul clutched at the ground as if it was the last bush on the lip of