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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