A Clue to the Exit Read online

  I couldn’t help noticing that most people were playing with twenty- and fifty-franc chips. There were some pink five hundreds and blue thousands, but I knew that my 100,000-franc block was bound to be noticed and so, shy as a virgin, when a virgin is shy, I walked over to an empty table where an idle croupier sat alone. I placed the green and white counter on the red diamond and looked at him pleadingly, hoping he would take it away before it attracted any curiosity. A couple of tourists drifting by immediately glued themselves to the table and watched the ivory ball bounce its way into a slot. My prayers were answered. It was black. I met their commiserating expressions with a smile of subtle satisfaction. One hundred thousand francs in under two minutes. What lightness. What clarity of purpose.

  I resumed my pacing, hoping to ditch the spectators, and the moment they were on the other side of the room I returned to the empty table and quickly dropped a second counter on ‘Manque’. I had no idea what it meant in casinoland, but its ordinary French meaning of ‘lack’ seemed fitted to my purpose, and indeed I was soon lacking a second 100,000 francs. The satisfaction that accompanied this second loss was tainted by a hollow feverishness, an accelerated pulse, a longing to repeat the act. I was displeased by this impurity. I wanted to taste freedom, not burden myself with some new set of suspect pleasures. I retreated to the casino restaurant, Le Train Bleu, in order to dispel this trace of confusion and prepare myself for an absolutely calm abandonment of my last million francs. I would have to go deeper into the bowels of the casino, to the Salle Privée, where my 500,000-franc counters would be in their natural habitat.

  In the meantime, I sat in the fake train compartment of the restaurant, entombed in buttoned-leather padding. Beside me was a glass case filled with old tin toys, and a hand-written card saying: WE BUY OLD TIN TOYS. Here in the kingdom of old tin toys, it was all right to be an old tin toy oneself, or an old tin toyboy for that matter. The grandest toy of all was a great big Italian gunboat. What bliss to be behind those portholes, in the ultimate sealed-off chamber, in the boat, in the case, in the train, in the casino, with great big guns to stop anyone interrupting you – doing what? – playing, of course. Les jeux sont fait, never mind the torpedo in the engine room.

  The two women at the neighbouring table spoke in Russian. Hearing that sibilant and barbaric tongue undulating once more through the Salle d’Europe, I reflected on the opportunities for portraying the sickness of a continent through the gaping metaphor of a great casino: the confluence of nations, the teasing combination of formality and mental illness and, above all, the trick of chasing the whore of Fortune while ignoring the fact that time is running out. Naturally, I thought of Thomas Mann’s cosmopolitan morbidity, Dostoevsky’s compulsive gambling, and the Grand Duke Dmitri, exiled to the South of France for helping to murder Rasputin, and missing the excitement of the Russian roulette back home.

  With only five months to live, I hardly had time to embark on such an ambitious narrative. I must content myself with carving the cherry stone of consciousness. And so I ordered a risotto di aspergi e gamberoni, which I can unhesitatingly recommend to anyone who is halfway through throwing their capital down the green-felt drains of Monte Carlo, and wrote the following fragment.

  Perfect, thought Patrick, she’s come to sit opposite me. He had seen her at the conference and was immediately drawn to this bruised and beautiful woman in a neck brace. Besides the sexual attraction, he felt an obscure but strong affinity with her, as if they were different aspects of the same intention. It was hard to explain, but as she sat down opposite him, closing her eyes while she shifted into a tolerable position, he felt the weight of his desperation become more widely distributed. This was not a vague impression, it had the distinctness of a broken table acquiring another leg.

  Crystal smiled at him painfully. ‘You were at the conference, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you like it?’

  ‘I liked this morning’s Alzheimer doctor,’ said Patrick. ‘The one who said that if you treated the patient as if he were there, “the whole manifestation changed”.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I liked him too,’ said Crystal enthusiastically. ‘You see, I’ve been treating Peter as if he was there. I ought to explain that I had a car accident with my husband. I had an NDE and he’s still in a coma. We really should have been hanging from the ceiling in a perspex cage during this conference, we’ve become such an ideal consciousness-studies couple.’

  ‘God,’ said Patrick, ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ He could tell that this strain of humour was not quite natural to her.

  ‘Oh, thank you. We were lucky to survive.’ Crystal sighed. ‘I have to say that, because I couldn’t bear hearing someone else saying it again.’

  ‘It’s not my kind of line,’ said Patrick.

  ‘Forgive me, but I wasn’t going to take the risk. Yeah,’ she resumed, ‘the Alzheimer doctor was good. That film interview was wonderful and terrifying at the same time. His patient was losing the memory of language without losing the sense of who he was. It suggests that the witness is more fundamental than the executive. When the one who acts collapses, there’s still one to feel him collapse.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Patrick. ‘And the people we treat as absent are in fact desperately frustrated, like a dream where you scream and nobody hears.’

  ‘Except that you may not wake up,’ said Crystal. ‘In my NDE, I was in the operating theatre listening to the doctors talk about my poor prospects of survival and screaming at them to get the glass out of my neck. They just ignored me. So I try to listen to Peter.’ Crystal’s eyes filled with tears. ‘Try to imagine what he might be wanting to say…’

  Patrick could think of nothing to say. He smiled at Crystal, but she stared blindly through the windows of the train. Faced with the pressing prospect of premature death, Patrick felt that he could have been – that he would quite like to have been – in that perspex cage with Crystal, and if necessary the comatose Peter, dangling from the ceiling of the conference room.

  He was reminded of Pierre, his old drug dealer from New York. The Ancient Mariner of Lower Manhattan, Pierre compulsively described his bizarre suffering to anyone who came within range. ‘For eight fucking years I thought I was an egg, je croyais que j’étais un oeuf. But I had total consciousness, une conscience totale. I knew everything.’ Unable to crack the ovular self-sufficiency of his body, his awareness left the hospital where he was being treated as a catatonic patient, and sped through a universe bathed in intelligence. From time to time he would return to the scene of his desertion and look down with a stranger’s pity at the frozen body on the bed, at the nurses who came and went, carrying flannels and plates of food. But even Pierre, who was so fascinated by his ecstasy, refused to let go entirely of his body. Recognizing that it was dying of neglect, he forced himself back inside, squirming with reluctance, like a child who has to climb back into a wet bathing suit. ‘I was totally disgusted, man. J’avais un dégoût total.’

  Should Patrick tell Crystal the half-inspiring story of Pierre’s return to animation? Pierre had been catatonic, Peter was in a coma, and neither of them had Alzheimer’s. Still, there were analogies. If an Alzheimer’s patient could go blank and yet know that he was going blank, and if the catatonic Pierre had total consciousness when he appeared to have none, who could confidently say that Peter had no idea what was happening to him?

  As Patrick wondered how to revive his conversation with Crystal, a tap on the window drew his attention to a man waving at her from the platform. He recognized the Frenchman who had made a challengingly opaque presentation at the conference the day before.

  I was forced to stop writing at this point. The waiter asked me for the fourth time whether there was anything more I wanted and I conceded a request for the bill. There was an atmosphere of insulation in that restaurant which Proust would have envied. A good casino is the perfect place to write: isolated without being lonely, single-minded and yet sophisticated, exclusive
and welcoming at the same time; sealed off from the distractions of the world and sealed in a world of distraction, it has that oxymoronic tang that keeps one from falling asleep. I looked through the internal window of the restaurant at the gamblers drifting past like fish in an aquarium, drank the last of my coffee, closed my notebook, and plunged into the florid scene beyond the glass.

  As I stepped into the Salle Privée, I immediately felt the uplift of its higher ceilings and the downpour of its weightier luxury. Two giant nymphs, representing Dawn and Dusk, reinforced the effort to arrest time by being interchangeable. Whether the sun rose or the sun set, nothing could interfere with their delicate self-absorption. Another night and several fortunes may have swirled down the plughole, and vast herds of human cells thrown themselves off the precipice of time, but nothing had really changed, because the evening’s twin was there to greet the haunted gambler, still loitering in a rosy-fingered landscape, still dressed in the semi-diaphanous nymphwear she had borrowed from her sister the night before. Although I had to refuse their gentle invitation to pretend that time was not cutting my throat, I was delighted to be among people who had decided to come to their endless party so decoratively dressed.

  Giving in to a childish ambition to get rid of one million francs in under five minutes, I asked one of the croupiers to place half a million on 14 – the date of my birthday – and then walked over to the neighbouring table to place my second half million on red. An individual number seemed absurdly unlikely to come up and I’d already had some luck losing on red. Returning to the first table, I heard an ominous murmur of astonishment and was appalled to find thirty-six half-million franc counters stacked up for me like building blocks in a children’s game. Needless to say I was the centre of attention as I tried to stuff the unfortunate winnings into my pockets. I really needed a shopping bag, but I was too shy to ask. At the neighbouring table I found that red, at least, had not let me down, but the loss of one counter hardly made up for the burden of gaining so many more.

  I was too shaken by my failure to carry on gambling. Instead of unloading all my money, I was now fifteen times richer than when I came in. With the money I still had in the bank, my total wealth had risen to nearly twenty million francs. One million francs a week for the rest of my life! Unless I gave up writing in order to bounce around in speedboats feeding caviar to the fish, I was never going to get rid of the wretched stuff.

  I drifted into the bar, thoroughly depressed. At the same time I detected the return of that hollow acceleration, that dry-mouthed excitement, that I had noticed earlier in the evening. I wished I could just give the whole lot away, but a tramp is far harder to find in Monte Carlo than a roulette wheel. My situation was truly hopeless. Perhaps if I gambled again … no, that’s what all the desperadoes think.

  Unable to drink alcohol, which now leaves me feeling sick for days, I celebrated my defeat with Vichy water. My gloomy financial reverie was interrupted by a half-familiar voice. Turning round I saw the woman I had ravaged on the afternoon of the countess’s death. The loose spirals of her golden-brown hair entangled me in nostalgia. No longer naked, we went through the introductions which our furious appetites had vaulted over. Her name, it turns out, is Angelique.

  ‘Why don’t you sit down?’ she said.

  ‘Well, it’s funny you should ask,’ I replied, emptying my trouser pockets, and stacking the counters up on the bar.

  At least I could now move my legs freely. Only my top half felt as if I was wearing a flak jacket.

  ‘You’re having good luck tonight,’ she said admiringly.

  I struggled to explain how badly things were going from my point of view, but although she seemed to grasp the principle of what I was saying there was a stubborn incomprehension in her eyes each time they came to rest on the five million francs stacked up in front of us.

  ‘I don’t think you get free until you die,’ she said, half-heartedly trying to participate in my preoccupations.

  ‘If only it were that easy.’ I smiled.

  She had lost all her money earlier in the evening and, drawn by the inverted symmetry of our disappointments, I slid the counters along the mahogany and offered them to her.

  ‘Lose them for me,’ I said. ‘I’ll probably just win more.’

  ‘You’re not serious,’ said Angelique.

  ‘Absolutely serious.’

  She leant over and kissed me on the mouth. ‘Do you want to watch me play?’ she asked, looking at me intently.

  ‘Sure.’

  Her elegant evening bag was too compact to accommodate her new fortune and, after looking around discreetly, she slipped some of the counters into her underwear, a turmoil of lace and silk, straps and buttons.

  ‘You’re so great,’ I said, biting her earlobe. ‘You drive me crazy.’

  Now that I’d learned her name and was watching her play with the desires we had merely caved into on our first meeting, I felt my passion tinged with gold, like raw liquor matured in oak. The potential for true feeling bared its teeth.

  ‘I could fall in love with you,’ I said anxiously.

  ‘This is just the beginning,’ she replied, running her nails over my unencumbered pockets.

  ‘If I became your slave, would you set me free?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘but you wouldn’t want to be free.’

  Walking back to the gambling tables, our interlocked fingers eagerly grinding each other’s knuckles, I felt the charge from her warm palm throbbing through my whole body. My imagination usurped the visual field: shotguns exploding in a paint factory, wrinkled rainbows thick as cream rippling across the floor, starbursts of wet colour climbing the walls.

  ‘Can you feel it?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘yes.’

  She kissed me a second time. The crowd churned around us, animated by a duller force.

  And then she unlocked her fingers and turned to concentrate on the wheel. I was left transfixed by the shattering of my loneliness. I stood in a rushing stillness, which was like the smooth curve of a once turbulent soon turbulent waterfall. There could be no more violent and perfect contradiction than the agony of my relief, like the sting of blood returning to a frostbitten limb it is already too late to save.

  As I write this I am in Angelique’s apartment on the Avenue Princesse Grace. She is asleep in the bedroom, while I’m sitting out on the balcony, naked under my overcoat, washed in winter sunlight. She inherited my luck last night and there are about twenty-five million francs in gambling chips scattered around the drawing room.

  The fire of our love, which was like a blowtorch the first time we met, is now a burning forest, leaping rivers and consuming landscapes. She knows that I’m always thinking about death and I know that she’s always longing to gamble. We reprieved each other, with every touch. With momentary impersonations, we flicked through the index cards of all our identities, and then burnt the file. There was nobody left for us to be except exactly who we are, doubly naked on an unprecedented dawn.

  We didn’t forget to be practical either. I am beginning a new chapter in my life. Today I am too elated to sleep, but normally we will get up in time for a late lunch at the Hôtel de Paris, and then go to the casino when it opens at four o’clock. She will take one million francs each day and gamble; I will sit in the blissfully sealed bars and restaurants of the casino, writing. Even if she loses every day, we have twenty-five delirious days together. She will make sure that I write and I will make sure that she doesn’t spend more than a million francs a day. At midnight we will return and burn away our sickness in the incinerator of her bed. What more could we ask for? I feel almost religious.

  12

  I checked out of the Grand Large today. They told me that the hotel was dead at the moment but should revive around Easter. I’ll be checking out for good by then, slipping away before un monde fou bears down on this strip of coast which is still beautiful enough to explain why it has been destroyed.

  Even
an hour’s separation from Angelique dragged me into melancholy, but now that I’m back in the bar of the Salle Privée I’m in a holiday humour. I can see her through the doorway, stalking one wheel after another with a touchingly fanatical expression on her face. I am determined to continue On the Train, despite the fact that I feel fulfilled simply watching her move around, cocooned in the sweet oblivion of her single-mindedness, alluring in a way that only someone unconscious of being watched can be. I realize now the headlong rush into intimacy of last night’s offer to let me watch her play. Gambling is what’s really private for her, and she might with comparative casualness have offered to let me watch her masturbate.

  At first I thought it was death, then consciousness; now I’m not sure it isn’t time that really fascinates me. (I read somewhere that the deep etymology of ‘fascination’ is the Hittite – always useful when there’s a gap in the archaeological record – word for vagina.) In any case they all seem tantalizingly related to one another. Identity is in there too, disappearing. There’s something that keeps changing shape but remains the same. Ways of putting it dance before me in a nervous congregation, like a cloud of gnats at sunset, made visible by the dying light, the reddening sky.

  Who wants to hear a writer complain about his impossible, his hopeless, his indissoluble, his medieval, his shotgun marriage to words? Words distance us from the world, except of course when they don’t. Dreams are wordless, except when they aren’t. We can have a vision of the structure of the Benzene ring, or a vision of Kubla Khan. Intuition circumvents words, unless it lands on them. One moment we’re complaining that our very means of thought are linguistically determined, the next that there’s no language for what we’ve just thought.