‘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 taken 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.
‘Strong.’
She nodded, speechless too.
He pictured antechambers of unease starting to honeycomb the universe, each crowded with petitioners pushing one another aside to secure his attention.
He was dying of cancer. He was going mad. He had never known and would never know the real meaning of love. The rotten floorboards of his pride gave way one after another and he fell through clouds of dust into a bottomless basement. Small hypocrisies cut into him like axe blows, and unacknowledged vanities rose up in all their monstrous plumage.
Just as a man releases millions of sperm to fertilize one egg, Nature spawned millions of human beings for the glory of one breakthrough in consciousness, one watershed in the history of sensibility, one invention like the alphabet, that made a real difference, one song that might be remembered, one book that might be read in a hundred years. What was he but one of those doomed sperm, part of the numerical pressure of evolution, unable to step personally into history, unable to define the nature of its emergence, let alone to shape it? Knowing he could leave no vivid trace of his passage, and shocked by the absurdity and strength of his desire to do so, he writhed as he watched the part of him that had not accepted his own historical impotence accept it now.
He spun as he sensed his own death encoded in the spirals of his DNA. It was his own cells and organs that would kill him, his own heart that would break him in the end.
He longed for Nature to rise up and, with the cool precision of a lizard’s flickering tongue, eliminate an arrogant and parasitical human race, but at the same time he could not bear the thought of the smallest thorn scratching the thickest skin of the dullest person on earth.
All these thoughts assaulted him instantly, and intensely, with the same aggressive rapidity as the blades of light that strobed across the landscape. He realized with white panic that each second contained a lifetime of horror, that the most intimate sadness could become universal and the most universal proposition intolerably personal, that the many winding paths between the mind and body had been blasted into thundering motorways. He did not relish watching his mind and body locked into each other’s decline, like a pair of pitbull terriers biting furiously into each other’s bleeding mouth as they spiralled down over the edge of a precipice.
‘Oh, la vache,’ he gasped.
He had to take a break, the images were too strong. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply. Fluorescent dodecahedrons whistled past him in a thick meteor shower which was clearly about to smash apart the spaceship of his identity. Even geometry was out to get him, even Euclid could not cool the fever of his unhappiness. He opened his eyes again and burst into flame.
Oh, fuck.
Should he tell Crystal that he’d burst into flame? What was the etiquette of insanity? How could he ask her to save him when he had no idea who she was? He knew something about her back there in the other world, but now that he was on Pluto having his teeth examined by Dr Mengele, while the laws of physics were being redefined several times a second, whatever he had thought he knew meant absolutely nothing.