On the Edge A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

great, culture is fantastic,’ he’d said. ‘Also, it’s all we have.’
    Jean-Paul half rolled and half crawled back down to Crystal’s side, and with the awful defiance of a dying king heaving himself from his bed to sign the orders for a last batch of executions, staggered to his feet. The price he paid for this effort was to burst again into clear yellow flame. His skin prickled with pinpricks of sweat and he stumbled forward, supported by unreliable knees, his arms outstretched to catch a fall. He imagined his blackened flesh peeling like curled butter and falling softly to the ground. He felt everything false and shallow and cunning falling away with that burning flesh, and wondered nervously what was left.
    Crystal resigned herself to following Jean-Paul’s wavering return. He obviously needed to be going home in some sense, even if home was a tent where he’d only spent one night. Guilty about the pleasure she’d taken in his speechlessness, Crystal started chanting to the female Buddha, OM TARE TUTARE TURIE SOHA, and immediately felt a downpour of reassurance, falling like a pelting rain of honey into the starving mouths of humanity. OM TARE, she imagined it falling onto Jean-Paul, TUTARE, she imagined it falling onto her, TURIE SOHA, their blood turned to liquid gold.
    Jean-Paul’s flesh burnt away again and again. What was left? What was essential? He longed for a diamond body, an incorruptible and incombustible diamond body, but he could see only a charred corpse, a black-and-white war photograph as banal as it was hideous. In the burning ghats of Benares, beside the Ganges, the only other time he’d travelled exotically, he’d seen the bandaged corpses sit up as they burnt, sit up and burst from their bandages, resurrected by the medium that consumed them, but that was just a moment when fact and symbol made an amusing marriage. It meant nothing, nothing.
    Sinking deeper into scepticism he started to contemplate with fresh anxiety the substructure of language, hidden like the submerged section of an oil rig under the opaque and frothing sea that separated the conscious from the unconscious mind. The garrulous and busy platform was language itself, the site of visible industry, but underpinning it was Chomsky’s deep grammar, the web of relations that made the acquisition of language possible. In the beginning was not the word but the grammar, a skeleton waiting for semantic flesh and giving it order. If the eye socket was not waiting for the eye, the eye might turn up on a kneecap or in an armpit. He’d too often glibly equated thought and language by expanding the term ‘language’ to include all patterns of imagery, but there could certainly be no thought without grammar. It was the hard wiring of the subject–object relation, and the thinker was always a subject even if, or perhaps especially when, he was the object of his own thoughts.
    The reason Jean-Paul found these otherwise familiar reflections disturbing was not only that he experienced his own analogies with complete conviction, feeling his eyeball sliding down to his kneecap, or squinting out of the steamy and hirsute darkness of his armpit, but also because he felt his own deep structure being exposed to the danger of alteration. If his grammatical core was being corroded, if some fundamental girder was being removed or replaced, then a sense of self that went far beyond education, nationality, personal history or sexuality could be disrupted and he would lose not just himself but his opportunity to regain himself by reading the world in a way that made sense.
    He had taken a drug, his body would metabolize it and everything would be all right. He had taken a drug, his body would metabolize it and everything would be all right.
    Crystal felt engulfed in the golden cascade of her first mantra and, just as an espresso can be welcome after a rich meal, for those who still eat rich meals and haven’t given up caffeine, she chose to switch