On the Edge

by Edward St. Aubyn

  * * *

  Crystal Bukowski was in fact on board a delayed flight from New York and had no chance of making it to Brooke’s dinner. Not that she was going to California to hang out with Brooke, but to attend the Dzogchen meditation retreat at the Esalen Institute.

  She knew she was headed for the right place when she started fantasizing about sliding a chainsaw through the thick trunk of her neighbour’s neck. With a face of unfathomable stupidity which could only have emerged from the most deeply inbred valleys of Kentucky, perfected by generations of blood feuds and wood alcohol, with a haircut that had just come out of a Marine shearing shop, and a pair of jeans so tight they offered every hope that he would be the last of his line, this hillbilly from hell had writhed in his seat, scratched his balls and tugged at his trousers from the moment the plane left New York. At other times she might have taken refuge in a pair of headphones and a cool chanting tape, but he nudged her with his elbow each time he had a scratch, and now she was obsessed.

  What was her anger telling her? That she was feeling hostile towards men right now? That she wanted to scratch her own genitals? That she was feeling dumb about the way things had turned out with Jean-Paul? That she was guilty about being so restless, about burning up her father’s surprise legacy to continue her mother’s soul-searching migrations? Yes, yes, yes, yes. So her mind was projecting again – left to its own devices that was pretty much all it ever did – but she was so bored with catching herself out, she just wanted to go with the aggression today, give in to the hatred she felt for the Caliban beside her.

  Crystal closed her eyes and breathed deeply, concentrating her attention on her hara, her navel chakra.

  She tried to quiet the part of her mind that kept flashing little analytic mirrors. It had been bad enough having an absent father who had been an analyst without falling for a French philosopher who was training to become one.

  Last month she had persuaded Jean-Paul to take psychedelics with her in the wilderness, figuring he needed a rocket launch to lift him into the dimensions beyond his busy intellect. Psychedelics cut through the analytic tic which was currently wasting her time, and took her into the zone where meaning was immanent, tangible and numinous. Unfortunately the mescalin and the magic mushrooms seemed to have the opposite effect on Jean-Paul.

  The worst part was what had happened afterwards. Somewhere below the plane Jean-Paul was galloping across the wastes of a North Dakota reservation pretending to be a Lakoda brave, something even the Lakoda had trouble doing. He was living in one of those Third World rubbish dumps which the Federal government had offered the Native Americans, like a mugger tossing a subway token at his bleeding victim. He had even written to the passport authorities in France to say that he wanted to change his name to Little Elk. They had not complied.

  It was no use blaming their guide, Robert, he was just a suburban kid from Sausalito who thought he was the reincarnation of a Hopi elder. In any case he said that the Hopis came ‘originally’ from Tibet, so he had all the options covered.

  In the end she blamed herself for giving Jean-Paul the psychedelics. He had been enthusiastic, of course, as an anthropologist. He had read Huxley and Leary and so forth; he’d done a lot of reading in his life, he just hadn’t done much else.

  Jean-Paul had even started lecturing her on the value and function of psychedelics in primitive and developed societies, on their way from Moab to Canyonlands in their Cherokee four-wheel drive – no doubt Robert would have hired a Hopi four-wheel drive had there been one, although he had said that he ‘honoured the Cherokee Nation’ when she had made a mild joke to that effect.

  With her eyes still closed and her arms pressed to her sides, out of range of Caliban, Crystal reluctantly replayed the movie of her trip with Jean-Paul. She had gone over it before, but like a tongue nagging at a fragment of trapped food, her memory returned again and again to those events in the hope of dislodging the truth of what had happened.

  Almost immediately Crystal’s thoughts were interrupted by another violent nudge from her neighbour. Caliban had just had a particularly vigorous tug at his jeans. She opened her eyes angrily and scowled at his apparently unconcerned profile. Part of her was relieved to be interrupted. Perhaps she had made him nudge her.

  ‘I’m sorry to be so moving in my seat,’ said her neighbour in broken English.

  He wasn’t a hillbilly at all, he was a Swede or a German.

  ‘I have, um, problem with the skin. I come to California for doctors.’

  ‘Oh, God, I’m sorry,’ said Crystal, as much in apology as sympathy. ‘I hope you get the help you need.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he smiled. Really, he had very nice eyes, and she seemed to see in them a glint of pained intelligence, showing that he’d picked up what she’d been thinking about him.

  What a teaching, thought Crystal, as the plane landed at San Francisco airport. ‘What a teaching,’ she murmured in the baggage-claim area. What an incredible teaching, she mused contentedly in the taxi, nodding her head in gratitude, incredulity and embarrassment.

  * * *

  Brooke had relaxed a little about her dinner party. Moses was taking the herb tea around, and everyone was evidently having a marvellous time. They were mostly a little drunk or high and agreeing with each other about things they already knew they agreed about, and planning fresh opportunities to discuss saving the world at each other’s seminars, conferences, workshops and performances. Brooke was talking to Dave, the marine biologist. She had just delivered her list of plagues bursting from their ‘natural reservoirs’ – she was very proud of that phrase – on to the human scene. Unfortunately, with so many new names to remember, she had included the Irish environmentalist.

  ‘Isn’t it dreadful about Ebola, Marburg and O’Hara?’ she had said, shaking her head sadly.

  Dave didn’t seem to notice the mistake.

  ‘There’s a symmetry there,’ he said, looking at her from within the parentheses of his sunbleached blond hair. ‘We have a viral relationship with our habitat and we become the habitat of the viral.’

  ‘But isn’t that like saying that AIDS is divine retribution?’ said Brooke, who knew it wasn’t but felt like beating up some fundamentalist white trash.

  ‘Not really,’ said Dave politely. ‘It’s just like saying that what goes around comes around. Karma is not retribution, it’s just the way things are. At another level, the reality we inhabit is a function of the paradigms we use to describe it. Most of those paradigms are way too reductionist.’

  ‘But isn’t there something real underneath it all?’ said Brooke, fascinated.

  ‘Sure, there’s the energy which takes the form of matter, light and everything else.’

  ‘But I don’t want to think of this table as an energy field,’ said Brooke, removing her elbows in mock alarm.

  ‘Why not?’ said Dave. ‘It’s cool.’

  Why not? thought Brooke. She smiled at Dave. Dave smiled at her. She was learning so much.

  Adam rose to his feet, tears streaming down his cheeks. Everyone fell silent.

  ‘The whales have AIDS,’ he sobbed. He had only learned this from Dave half an hour before, speaking across the gap of Crystal’s absence, but he had already appropriated it as his own tragedy. ‘What are we doing to this beautiful planet?’

  He paused and made a visible effort to remain calm.

  ‘The people in this room, gathered here by…’ Part of him wanted to say ‘the Madame Verdurin of the New Age’ but the wine and the fire won over and he said, ‘our Eleanor of Aquitaine…’

  Brooke, who had been expecting Guidobaldo, was lost for a moment, but could tell from the smiles that the comparison was flattering. She must get a research assistant to deal with Adam’s conversation, her poor secretary had enough to do already.

  ‘The people in this room,’ Adam shrieked, ‘are the only people who can save the world from utter destruction. This is the most important gathering that could take place at this m
oment in history. We are witnessing a new mystical Renaissance that is struggling to be born against terrible odds in the rubble of our dying civilization, and it’s up to us, scholars, poets, scientists, public figures, dharma teachers, to go out there and wake people up.’

  And then he started to sing, pushing his thick hair back with the fingertips of one hand, and touching his heart with the palm of the other.

  ‘O just one word from Shams and I would gladly give my life,’ Adam warbled.

  ‘His life is before me, and through his

  love my heart has become pure, my breast has imbibed every virtue.

  One smell of his perfume and I walk light-headed on this path.’

  Adam suddenly thrust his hand aside with a gesture of contempt.

  ‘O cupbearer, enough of your wine, I am drunk on the wine from his cup.’

  Moses stood by, unsure whether to offer Adam some herb tea. He’d heard plenty of singing in his day and he felt that Mr Frazer needed lessons, as well as new material.

  ‘I hope I’m in good voice tonight,’ said Adam, audible over the small patter of applause.

  ‘Rumi is the supreme guide to our age,’ he continued with a new pedagogic calm. ‘He has a literary genius equal to Shakespeare’s, and a spiritual genius as powerful as Christ’s. He brings us eternal news of perfect being, and of the fire of transfiguring love. And,’ he concluded with a disconcerting rush of colloquialism, ‘he reminds us to get off our fat arses and sing.

  “I’m tired of cowards, I want to live with lions,

  With Moses, not whining teary people.

  I want the ranting of drunkards,

  I want to sing like the birds sing,

  Not worrying who hears or what they think.”’

  Moses, whose loyalty to Miss Brooke was unfathomable, nevertheless drew the line at being propositioned in public, and left the dining room with subdued indignation.

  Adam sat down and smiled modestly, but soon resumed the luxury of his new torment.

  ‘The whales,’ he said to Kathleen O’Hara, like a child whose adored puppy has just been run over and is offering his inconsolable torment to his mother.

  ‘There,’ said Kathleen, instinctively maternal. What a lovely sensitive man, she thought, so in touch with his feminine side.

  ‘It’s terrible what we’re doing to the oceans,’ she said. ‘They’re our natural filter systems, the kidneys of the planet.’

  Everyone was embarrassed by Adam’s speech. The idea of being the most important gathering in the world, and the excessive responsibility it brought with it, made them anxious to return home. Crystal’s arrival could only act as a small counter-current to the tide of departures. When Moses showed her into the dining room, Adam was talking excitedly to Yves, Brooke and Kathleen about the vividness of his spiritual life. He was feeling charming, as he often did once he had discharged the anguish and hysteria which haunted his nature.

  ‘Crystal, darling, we missed you over dinner,’ said Brooke.

  ‘And you missed a wonderful dinner,’ said Adam, getting up.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Crystal to Brooke. ‘By the time I knew the plane was delayed, your number was in the hold with my baggage.’

  Brooke introduced her to the other guests.

  ‘You must have been the empty space on my right,’ said Adam.

  ‘Form is emptiness and emptiness is form,’ said Crystal in her Indian guru voice. Adam Frazer was a minor celebrity on the alternative scene and she wanted him to think she was interesting. There she was again, she reproached herself, still looking for approval from a powerful man. ‘The two are really one,’ she warbled.

  Adam laughed. ‘Not being completely enlightened, I prefer this delightful illusion to the more austere one I had over dinner.’

  ‘You are tossed on the restless sea of samsara,’ said Crystal, shaking her head sadly. ‘Just turn your mind back to the source,’ she urged him, quoting the great Poonjaji.

  ‘Adam,’ said Yves, who thought that Adam might be having fun with somebody else, ‘it’s getting late.’

  ‘Oh, my love, are you tired?’ asked Adam. ‘We’ll go home this instant.’

  ‘Brooke, it’s been a wonderful evening,’ said Kathleen.

  ‘Here’s that thing we talked about,’ said Brooke, half-discreetly, giving Kathleen an envelope. ‘For the Foundation.’

  ‘For the lungs of the planet,’ said Kathleen compulsively.

  When the others had left, Brooke took Crystal up to a guest room. It was so much cosier than sending her up with Moses. She sat on the small sofa at the foot of the bed and told her how welcome she was and to treat the house as her home while she was in San Francisco.

  Crystal was touched and a little saddened at the same time, because the places where she had lived had been her homes for such fleeting periods, often under the precarious conditions of hospitality. Of course she had long inhabited the paradox of feeling at home with no home, and she tried to think of the glutinous satisfactions of property as a bribe it was noble to refuse. Instead of a memory oppressed by the tropical air of nostalgia, her memory had a swifter quality, as fugitive as the shadows of starlings flitting across the ground, but capable of delivering high notes; whole cities, whole atmospheres, whole passages of thought and feeling, as vast and suddenly present as the smell of the sea.

  Brooke’s own wounded sense of home made her almost excessive in her hospitality, but the two women ended up both feeling moved by the rituals of welcome.

  ‘As you know, I’m going to Esalen on Sunday,’ said Crystal. ‘So I’m only really here tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh, I should have told Adam,’ said Brooke. ‘He’s teaching Rumi there next week. He’s teaching Rumi everywhere every week,’ she laughed. ‘Make sure you contact him now that you’ve met. I don’t think I could bear to have two friends in the same place who weren’t in touch.’

  2

  Crystal couldn’t sleep. Interrupted on the plane, and by her arrival at Brooke’s, her thoughts returned compulsively to Utah and to the events which seemed to have tipped Jean-Paul into madness. They had talked in almost hallucinatory detail about that trip.

  He had told her afterwards that he had found the landscape of Canyonlands overwhelmingly strange even before they had taken the psychedelics. Everything had been all right at first, driving through a semi-arid landscape of rolling hills and Ponderoso pines familiar to Jean-Paul from the countless Western movies he had devoured as a child.

  It was only when he got out of the Cherokee and walked to the edge of the canyons that he was thrown by the complete strangeness of his surroundings. His first reaction was incomprehension and nervous laughter. From that height the wind seemed to have caressed the pink and yellow sandstone into sinuous and elliptical shapes, flying saucers and waves and mushroom caps. More than the vast scale and the exotic colour, he was overwhelmed by the fact that he had never seen or imagined such a landscape before. Without the consolations of history or analogy he was unable to make anything of it and so he resisted letting it make anything of him.

  He realized that he had come in a predatory frame of mind. Like the trappers and the miners after whom the West was so often named, he had come to pillage. He was looking for echoes of the American codes he had already deciphered, fresh troops of imagery to enforce his arguments and observations, and ‘typical’ American experiences, such as the cult of the wilderness, which he could deconstruct, exhume and subvert with his tireless intellectual audacity. Ideally, he would have written the book in Paris, as Fredric Prokosch had written The Asiatics in Chicago, but Crystal had persuaded him to get a pair of hiking boots.

  Every millimetre of Europe had been drained, ploughed, terraced, built on, fought on, named, hedged or written about, but this American ‘wilderness’ was the site of irony and scandal. To begin with, it was inaccessibly expensive. By the time planes had been caught, a Cherokee, tents and sleeping bags hired, permits acquired, new clothes bought, three hotel rooms take
n at the Ramada Inn on the way in and the way out, and a guide engaged at three hundred dollars a day, he worked out that they could have stayed in the Plaza Hotel in New York for the same number of nights. Instead of sleeping in stinking clothes under a swirl of snow in the company of Robert, the would-be extinct Native American white boy, they could have been channel-surfing in matching dressing gowns, searching for the Westerns whose Oedipal substructure he had written about in some of his most magisterially impertinent paragraphs.

  Jets and smaller planes flew over constantly. The ‘wilderness’, he reflected, had no vertical extension, it was only a thin layer of the biosphere, a symbol of freedom subject to more prohibitions and regulations than Parisian traffic. The most ordinary acts – cooking, drinking, excreting – were subject to detailed methodologies enforced by a special bureaucracy of rangers. Walking around freely was fiercely discouraged. A trail scarred the canyon and along it they must trudge.

  When they had gone to collect their permits, the rangers at the station, immigration officers for this land of harrowing novelty, had warned them not to walk on the ‘kryptobiotic soil’, a living soil which took eighty years to grow and could be destroyed by the brush of a boot. The true lover of the wilderness would avoid visiting it altogether. Once wilderness turned into ‘The Wilderness’ it became the most officious and fragile aspect of nature. Even Robert referred to his business as the ‘wilderness industry’.

  On the third day of camping in this controversial landscape, they’d left Robert behind and taken the psychedelics.

  About an hour later, Jean-Paul’s legs started to shake uncontrollably and he collapsed on the ground. The light, he told Crystal, was flashing swiftly over the tops of the sagebushes, like helicopter blades catching the sun. Realizing that he’d fallen through a trapdoor into a realm in which anything could happen, he sank lower on the ground, retreating from the menace of the steely sun.

  When he turned to Crystal again and tried to speak he could only manage a solitary gasp.