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    As the bus pushed haltingly towards his destination, he thought about those brief but pivotal nights in the Suicide Observation Room, unpeeling one sweat-soaked T-shirt after another, throwing off the sauna of the bedclothes only to shudder in the freezer of their absence; turning the light on and off, pained by the brightness, alarmed by the dark; a poisonous headache lurching around his skull like the lead in a jumping bean. He had brought nothing to read except The Tibetan Book of the Dead , hoping to find its exotic iconography ridiculous enough to purge any fantasies he might still cling to about consciousness continuing after death. As it turned out, he found his imagination seduced by a passage from the introduction to the Chonyid Bardo , ‘O nobly born, when thy body and thy mind were separating, thou must have experienced a glimpse of the Pure Truth, subtle, sparkling, bright, dazzling, glorious, and radiantly awesome, in appearance like a mirage moving across a landscape in springtime in one continuous stream of vibrations. Be not daunted thereby, nor terrified, nor awed. That is the radiance of thine own true nature. Recognize it.’
    The words had a psychedelic authority that overpowered the materialist annihilation he longed to believe in. He struggled to restore his faith in the finality of death, but couldn’t help seeing it as a superstition among superstitions, no more bracingly rational than the rest. The idea that an afterlife had been invented to reassure people who couldn’t face the finality of death was no more plausible than the idea that the finality of death had been invented to reassure people who couldn’t face the nightmare of endless experience. His delirium tremens collaborated with the poets of the Bardo to produce a sensation of seething electrocution as he was goaded towards the abattoir of sleep, terrified that the slaughter of his rational mind would present him with a ‘glimpse of the Pure Truth’.
    Memories and phrases loomed and flitted like fog banks on a night road. Thoughts threatened him from a distance, but disappeared as he approached them. ‘Drowned in dreams and burning to be gone’. Who had said that? Other people’s words. Had he already thought ‘other people’s words’? Things seemed far away and then, a moment later, repetitious. Was it like fog, or was it more like hot sand, something he was labouring through and trying not to touch at the same time? Cold and wet, hot and dry. How could it be both? How could it be other than both? Similes of dissimilarities – another phrase that seemed to chase itself like a miniature train around a tight circuit. Please make it stop.
    A scene that kept tumbling back into his delirious thoughts was his visit to the philosopher Victor Eisen after Victor’s near-death experience. He had found his old Saint-Nazaire neighbour in the London clinic, still strapped to the machines that had flat-lined a few days earlier. Victor’s withered yellow arms emerged limply from an institutional dressing gown, but as he described what had happened his speech was as rapid and emphatic as ever, saturated by a lifetime of confident opinions.
    ‘I came to a riverbank and on the other side was a red light which controlled the universe. There were two figures either side of it, who I knew to be the Lord of Time and the Lord of Space. They communicated to me directly through their thoughts, without using any speech. They told me that the fabric of Time-Space was torn and that I had to repair it, that the fate of the universe depended on me. I had a tremendous sense of urgency and purpose and I was on my way to fulfil my task when I felt myself being dragged back into my body and I very reluctantly returned.’
    For three weeks Victor was won over by the feeling of authenticity that accompanied his vision, but then the habits of his public atheism and the fear that the logical reductions enshrined in his philosophical work might be invalidated