Bad News

Surely: the adverb of a man without an argument.

How could he think his way out of the problem when the problem was the way he thought...

No, he mustn't think about it, or indeed about anything, and especially not about heroin, because heroin was the one thing that really worked, the only thing that stopped him scampering around in a hamster's wheel of unanswerable questions. Heroin was the cavalry. Heroin was the missing chair leg, made with such precision that it matched every splinter of the break. Heroin landed purring at the base of his skull, and wrapped itself darkly around his nervous system, like a black cat curling up on its favourite cushion. It was as soft and rich as the throat of a wood pigeon, or the splash of sealing wax onto a page, or a handful of gems slipping from palm to palm.

People think they are individuals because they use the word ''I'' so often.

This was it, the big moment: the corpse of his chief enemy, the ruins of his creator, the body of his dead father; the great weight of all that was unsaid and would never have been said; the pressure to say it now, when there was nobody to hear, and to speak also on his father's behalf, in an act of self-division that might fissure the world and turn his body into a jigsaw puzzle. This was it.

Try as one might to live on the edge, thought Patrick, getting into the other lift, there was no point in competing with people who believed what they saw on television.

Observe Everything. Always think for yourself. Never let other people make important decisions for you.

He hated happy families with their mutual encouragement, and their demonstrative affection, and the impression they gave of valuing each other more than other people.

And nothing gave him more faith in the existence of an afterlife than the inexorable sarcasm of fate .

He had to have her, he definitely had to have her. She was not merely the latest object on which his greedy desire to be saved had fixed itself; no, she was the woman who was going to save him. The woman whose fine intelligence and deep sympathy and divine body, yes, whose divine body would successfully deflect his attention from the gloomy well shaft of his feelings and the contemplation of his past.

Capital erosion was another way to waste his substance, to become as thin and hollow as he felt, to lighten the burden of undeserved good fortune, and commit a symbolic suicide while he still dithered about the real one. He also nursed the opposite fantasy that when he became penniless he would discover some incandescent purpose born of his need to make money.

Eating was only a temporary solution. But then all solutions were temporary, even death, and nothing gave him more faith in the existence of an afterlife than the inexorable sarcasm of Fate.

And then the old exhortations would come out: observe everything…trust nobody…despise your mother…effort is vulgar…things were better in the eighteenth century.

Og likevel kjente Patrick at han var trukket mot sin fars død av en sterkere tilbøyelighet til å ta etter ham, enn han var i stand til å holde ut. Døden var selvsagt alltid en fristelse; men nå virket den som en fristelse han måtte adlyde. I tillegg til kraften den hadde til å overgå en dekadent eller opponerende sinnstilstand i den endeløse og dramatiske ungdommen, i tillegg til den velkjente tiltrekningen mot rå vold og selvdestruksjon, hadde den fått et aspekt av konformitet, som å overta familieforretningen. Den dekket virkelig alle valgmuligheter.