I missed my exit.

Missed. Indeed. I'm still talking. I speak but nobody this morning does not hear me anymore, not even you, Arnold. Motorcycle accident. I, the nervous and tormented hero, I am almost smug. Unconscious. Ankylotic cervical, neurotic stupid. Steep lying on the pavement in this radiant Monday of May. Injured to death, or almost, bathing in my scarlet juice. So I spent all my life I miss him.
The week definitely begins badly.
This silence, outside! And inside me, the sound of gargoyle and pipes. Ropes and nerves pinched, filaments of copper and saliva, screeching tires, scrapes, rattles, and nothing, a big void all dull. Death in his vestibule. Cats, black as bad thought, cross my throat. Word already wrong. Living walled. Jail. Dry tongue. My dear lies finally sound hollow. I speak now only to myself.
Nothing to confess yet. I just wanted to shut up. Never say anything again. Not even goodbye. And here I am, alive! Do not smile, Arnold. You know it too well, I play hide and seek with the life. But I always recovered. The way interested me more than the goal. I have often regarded failure as the ultimate manifestation of beauty.
I have light blue eyes deep enough in the orbits, very thick blonde locks, a slightly nervous laugh and a low voice that lends itself to the most intimate confessions. I'm happy with women as well as men, but at forty-six, I have never had a good experience of the flesh. Although born under the sign of Leo, my physique is far from impressive. I measure only one meter sixty-eight and I weigh exactly sixty-three pounds and five hundred grams.
A pocket Hercules.
The debasement of my person is the end I have always pursued. The more I am taught, the more I despise myself. This end, so long awaited and provoked this morning, is a little too much ahead. I am in a hurry. So much in a hurry that a doubt seized me as I hurled my Brough Superior at the 100-year-old oak tree: I probably left Clouds Hill's house and let the phonograph spin with Elgar's Second Symphony. And I may have forgotten to ask my neighbor's son to shoot down that big, black, insolent blackbird that woke me up at dawn for a month.

At the foot of this tree, one night, ten years ago already, I wished to disappear. The charger has jammed. I gave up. I promised myself to come back. The oak was waiting for me. At his bark this morning, I wanted to burn my skin again. But I am a tough animal. The shock was terrible, the bike folded in two, me not. I have yet dreamed so much of this eternal night. Ink and velvet, the caressing night of the shroud.
I hardly dare to open the eye. Already through the eyelid, fine, pierces the fatal day, the light that warms my eye sockets, caresses the eyelashes, the cornea. Big sun. So I did not leave ...

To you, Arnold, to you, my indispensable brother, I dedicate these lamentable little last hours of a life just as derisory, for lack of being discreet. Arnold, the last of us, the five boys, the five worms, my younger Arnold. These eleven years that separate us, half a generation. I surrender to you. You know what to do. How to improvise, hasten agony. I did not foresee this sorry intermediate state. My disappearance was written word for word. Surviving this accident does not help me at all.
Here I am this morning, crucified and paralyzed, the torn leather suit, the bloody nose in the bushy grass of the aisle, the slashed skull, a shrub branch sunk into the cheek. I fainted in this turn of an English country road as twisted as me. Jehovah is distracted, as our mother would say, who herself, no doubt, has born me by distraction. Almost troubled by my appearance, why would it be more by my disappearance?
I dream now of a great eternal sleep on the fresh moss of the garden of our Oxford house. I dream, to tell the truth, to find Karkemish, in this distant East, where I knew my first happiness archeologist in search of a lost civilization. Where I discovered the taste of a manly friendship, a radiant young man, also gone.All this spun me through my fingers, like the sand of the deserts that enchanted me, like the dust particles in suspension that I observe in this ray of light that plays with the rearview mirror of my motorcycle. It is they, already, that I contemplated for hours when I was reproached for being an eternal dreamer. And it is this dust that I aspire to become again when, finally cremated, I will be scattered on my places of nostalgia.
Let's hurry up! I am still an anonymous casualty, you have to enjoy it. Nose on the ground, far from the magnesium flashes or caricatures in the newspapers, I have been enjoying for a few minutes the calm of the good people, fed or asleep. Relief does not come and that's good. The black van is gone, it's a good sign. I would like to speak, and a lot and a long time, but the words jostle, embarrassed. Tips from life come back to my mouth like pieces of tow, torn off by the tide of an old barcasse, while my motorbike, even lying down, docile after its loss, continues, indifferent, to moan and walk empty. My wheel is still spinning, not for very long, I hope so.

I will speak only of the interior. My brain, well shaken by the fall, is boiling: everything spills, congestion and then softens. The meninges open to memory and the bulb blooms in bloom, petal after petal.
In the smoke of one overheated tire and another, burst, I remember a name, a sentence. From someone. From his face. Torn in the fall and projected to me, the mirror serves me as revealing. The mirror placed itself before my eyes. I see him now, this someone. Here he is, this individual among us? we: I mean the small community of entangled ones of existence?, a being that I know well enough and that I ended up not considering any more so he played me tricks. Writer? Part-time. And so never taken seriously. Doing everything half, fortune like books, love like war. In the mirror, its reflection, my reflection. That ghost in the rearview mirror, it's me, just me. Just me.

One second, time stops. Stupefaction. I take this opportunity to catch my breath, salivate again and seek in the depths of me a remnant of courage. To continue talking. Only to you, Arnold, my last guide at this end of the road, on this abandoned road ... To you I love because you have never judged me, no more my absences than my duplication. You do not know anything about my hallucinations. I'm probably crazy in the eyes of the world but it's the world that went wrong, you know it, not me. Since childhood, I live awry, I walk in crab. An instinct of survival has prescribed flight, always escape, that of oneself, and a few flip-flops from time to time to scare me. To run away, for a yes, for a no, to erase the grammar of the world. Even my books, written quickly, sometimes forgotten on the platform of a station, rewritten from memory, were only accidents. I did everything in a hurry, including sleep, laziness, slowness, meditation ... I was so fast that, having reached a certain height of the military hierarchy, I came down all the way down, I liked it, hurried to stay there. I cultivated speed as one develops an antibody. Quick, death, quickly!
One day, I was caught by faster than me. Victim of the general curiosity. In great danger. Defenseless, I have been for fifteen years the advantageous product of a monstrous invention: I am famous! Popular ! Rhyme with zebra! End up looking like this! Animal! And scratched! From the register of the living, happy people. A legend ! Here, there, everywhere, always recognized. Hatred of self, need of erasure. I can not stand it any longer, I would like to scream for me to hear. But let me not look at you especially. Arnold, come quickly!

I did a couple of things from my life, nothing more, and I feel that the case is now over. The curtain can fall. No greeting, no applause. A reminder ? A bis? Never. I had some dreams with my eyes open.
The rest is time spent. Well ironed. Time spent spending time. Have I really lived? Wrong ! This beast, this infectious self has only lasted too long. A half-century to clutter the planet, from my mother's womb to the latrine of the lousy barracks of the Royal Air Force. Did I only love? Chastely. Twice, yes. Boy and woman. Arab and Jewish. Unable to choose. I am the accidental indeterminate! The hermaphrodite in the land of Eros. I have traveled, of course, with suitcases in exodus, I have seen some country, cold as hot, moor or desert.So much road traveled to return always to the same place, the chin in the bowl of the birth, with the medal printed hot in the flesh. Gold chain, chain all the same. A whole life to try to break free!

Sometimes in the middle of Hedjaz, in the company of my Bedouin friends and princes of the sands, I seemed to be there, in Dorset, in the Wales of my childhood, or in France not far from Dinard where we spent our holidays, my brothers and me. Without you, my dear Arnold ... you were not born yet. So you have not known that good old granite Celtic, pink, rough, ideal to hide the secrets of the living dead under gravestones. Everything was heavy in this childhood, like the sky that weighed on our souls. This is the lid I wanted to lift while fleeing towards the glare of a dazzling sun. The immensity of the desert, the total absence of chains: I thought I found my freedom there. But no doubt I was only talented for fleeting happiness. The light blinded me and today, it ends to burn me slowly.
At the time of the last call, I do not even know what my name is. So many surnames for one man ... It's my complexity, but it belongs to me. I have lied so much, changed my skin, that I do not know at the moment what name to answer. King of masks! And numbers in reinforcement. As many aliases, as many identities as randomness of happiness. I do not care what happens after my death. I have already said my refusal to be encelluloid by force, and yet, I may well end up, I know, as a hero of the obscure halls for desolate Westerners. After "The son of the sheikh", "The Arab revolt" on the big screen! "The king without crown of Arabia" in ten reels, "The prince of Mecca" in original version ...
When questioned, I blur the tracks, I throw verbal powder with full handles. I take a motorcycle in my old England or a young camel in my adopted Levant and I run as fast as possible, in front of where it's free. And that's how, in just three years of desert, I was transformed into a myth ... Like a shooting star that would have bitten its tail and choked with so much light coming from itself.

From my nostril now flows a pretty vermilion blood that stains the moss and lichens of the aisle. The country road is deserted. The bike is within reach. I will get up, wipe myself with the flat of my hand, go back to the saddle, leave again. Throw me again against my favorite tree and succeed this time the general crushing of the cranial box. Call my brother ... except that nothing else moves. Neither speak. From the ground, the mirror returns the image of a disabled person to life.
Arnold, come save me from so little of myself. I miss you, I want you by my side one last time. My double ! You are committed to it. Partner in crime. You'll come, I know it, you're talking, it's family. Double, half, three quarters, what do I know about you, except that I did not choose you? Fraternity, it goes without saying.
Help me to erase myself forever to forget this abominable American advertising that ruined me life. Invented me, made me another, me who was already nothing, painful and confused to myself. Forced me to change surnames, pseudonyms, addresses. To contradict me, to lie to myself as to others. I owe him to be what is called a legend. And ravaged with glory, devastated with gratitude, eaten away by ambiguity. He took advantage of my weaknesses, this dubious identity, he abused my congenital illness, flattered my tendencies. I owe it to him to be harassed by the tabloid press, despised by my hierarchy, treated here as an impostor and elsewhere as a thirst-quenching public. I am a legend who suffers to die but who does not finish to die.

And here I am this morning to contemplate the disaster of having arrived there after so many years, such an addition of work, effort, politeness, genuflexions. It has always been this way, from the first days, unable to know who my father is, if my mother is my mother, if my brothers are mine? to begin with you, Arnold ?, if I'm little Ned or already Thomas Edward Chapman-Junner, second lieutenant then colonel, or private second-class and if, soldier, my name is John Hume Ross, registration number 352087, or TE Shaw, serial number 7875698, or TE Smith, aka TES or T.E.L. What am I not finally? In the game of seven trades, I never knew which card to draw: archaeologist, spy, officer, cartographer, leader of revolt, writer-editor-translator, mechanic? Agonizing? And for how long ?
My biographers pretend to know. They are still alive or are about to be born.I am an excellent subject. I sell newspapers, magazines, books ... It's really time to spin in the English way as they say in Dinard. To take a french leave, in my language. It will be necessary, I fear, to wait a little. I am used to long wakes and sinuous meanders in Sinai. Days without drinking anything, my bump on the back full of a healthy fat. As a teenager, in Oxford, then an adult, in Arabia, I spent nights working without sleep, whole days without eating, while my feet were bleeding and my head was on fire. Solid, the beast!
To you, my essential brother, you, the last friend of the childhood that I have left, I would like to write what I already said to my good Mila, write it and then say goodbye to you: "Do you know what is to discover suddenly that one has completely missed his life All these obstacles, it is I who knotted them, deliberately, in the desire to tie me up to the point of losing all hope, all power to act. As long as I have a breath of lifemy strength will work to keep my soul in prison, since it can not feel safe anywhere else. At the root of the many renunciations I have experienced in recent years, there is the terror of being swept away in the race for liberating power. I was scared of myself. Is it madness? "
No, it's not crazy, Arnold, help me to persuade myself. This is only embarrassment to the one I have become. Too much difference between oneself, one's image and one's image of oneself. I can not stand being impressed, reproduced in photographs to millions of copies. I would have liked to leave this earth like a lay saint, levitating, evaporating by asceticism. I would have liked to be able to look at me from above, motionless at last, like a veiled cliché, unrecognizable. And disappear for good.

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