The End of Mr. Y

by Scarlett Thomas

  "Fantastic, thanks. Sorry it was so much," the girl says to me.

  "No problem," I manage to say back. "I need a lot of these for my Ph.D., anyway."

  I place The End of Mr. Y in my rucksack, safe, and then I pick up the box and walk out of the shop, clutching it to me as I make my way home in the dark, the cold stinging my eyes, completely unable to make sense of what has just happened.

  Chapter Two

  By the time I get to my flat it's almost half past five. Most of the shops on the street are starting to close, but the newsagent opposite glows with people stopping for a paper or a packet of cigarettes on their way home from work. The pizza restaurant underneath my flat is still dark, but I know that the owner, Luigi, will be somewhere in there, doing whatever needs to be done so that the place can open at seven. Next door the lights are out in the fancy-dress shop, but there's a soft light upstairs in the Café Paradis, which doesn't close until six. Behind the shops, a commuter train clatters slowly along the brittle old lines and lights flash on the level crossing at the end of the road.

  The concrete passageway that leads to the stairs up to my front door is cold, as usual, and dark. There is no bicycle, which means that Wolfgang, my neighbor, isn't in. I don't know how he gets warm in his place (although I think the huge amount of slivovitz that he drinks probably helps) but in mine it's a struggle. I've no idea when the two flats were constructed, but they are both too large, with high ceilings and long, echoey corridors. Central heating would be wonderful, but the landlord won't put it in. Before I take my coat off, I put the box of books and my rucksack down on the large oak kitchen table, switch on my lamps, and then drag the space heater down the hall from the bedroom and plug it in, watching its two metal bars blush dimly (and, it always seems to me, apologetically). Then I light the gas oven and all the rings on the cooktop. I close the kitchen door and only then take off my outdoor things.

  I'm shivering, but not just from the cold. I take The End of Mr. Y carefully out of my bag and put it down on the table. It seems wrong, somehow, sitting there next to the box of other books and my coffee cup from this morning, so I move the box of books and put the coffee cup in the sink. Now the book is alone on the table. I pick it up and run my hand over it, feeling the coolness of the cream cloth cover. I turn it over and touch the back, as if it might feel different from the front; then I put it down again, my pulse going like ticker tape. I fill my little espresso maker and put it on one of the blazing gas rings, and then I pour out half a glass of the slivovitz Wolfgang gave me and down it in two gulps.

  While the coffee heats up I check the mousetraps. Both Wolfgang and I have mice in our flats. He talks about getting a cat; I have these traps. They don't kill the mice; they just hold them for a while in a small plastic oblong until I find them and release them. I don't think the system works: I put the mice outside and then they come straight back in, but I couldn't kill them. Today there are three mice looking bored and pissed off in their little see-through prisons, and I take them downstairs and release them into the courtyard. I didn't think I'd mind having mice in the flat but they do eat everything, and one time one ran over my face while I was lying in bed.

  When I get back upstairs, I take four large potatoes from the box in the vegetable rack and wash them quickly before salting them and putting them in the oven on a low heat. That's about as much cooking as I can cope with now; and I'm not even hungry. My sofa is in the kitchen, since there's no point having it in the empty sitting room, where there is no heat. So, as the room starts to steam up and fill with the smell of baking potatoes, I finally take off my trainers and curl up on it with my coffee, a packet of ginseng cigarettes, and The End of Mr. Y. And then I read the opening line of the preface, first in my head, and then aloud, as another train rattles along outside: The discourse which follows may appear to the reader as mere fancy or as a dream, penned on waking, in those fevered moments when one is still mesmerised by those conjuring tricks that are produced in the mind once the eyes are closed.

  I don't die. But then I didn't really expect to. How could a book be cursed, anyway? The words themselves—which I don't take in properly at first—simply seem like miracles. Just the fact that they are there, that they still exist, printed in black type on rough-cut pages that are brown with age; this is the thing that amazes me. I can't imagine how many other hands have touched this page, or how many pairs of eyes have seen it. It was published in 1893, and then what happened? Did anyone actually read it? By the time he wrote The End of Mr. Y, Lumas was already an obscure writer. He'd been notorious for a while in the 1860s, and people had known his name, but then everyone lost interest in him and decided he was mad, or a crank. On one occasion he turned up at the place in Yorkshire where Charles Darwin was receiving what he called his "water cure": He said something rude about barnacles, and then punched Darwin in the face. This was in 1859. After that, he seemed to retreat into ever more esoteric activities, visiting mediums, exploring paranormal events, and becoming a patron of the Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital. After about 1880, he seemed to stop publishing. Then he wrote The End of Mr. Y and died the day after it was published, after everyone else who'd had something major to do with the book (the publisher, the editor, the typesetter) had also died. Thus the rumored "curse."

  But there may have been other reasons for the idea of the curse. Lumas was an outlaw. He favored the evolutionary biologist Lamarck (who said that organisms pass on learned characteristics to their offspring) over Darwin (who said they don't), when even people like Samuel Butler—once described by someone as "the greatest shit-stirrer of the nineteenth century"—were coming around to the idea that we are all, actually, Darwinian mutants. He wrote letters to the Times criticizing not only his contemporaries, but every major figure in the history of thought, including Aristotle and Bacon. Lumas became very interested in the existence of a fourth spatial dimension and wrote various supernatural stories about it, somehow managing to upset people who did not believe in the existence of another dimension. His response was: "But they are merely stories!" although everyone knew that he used his fiction mainly as a way of working out his philosophical ideas. Most of his ideas were about the development and nature of thought, particularly scientific thought, and he often described his fictional works as "experiments of the mind."

  One of his most interesting stories, "The Blue Room," tells of two philosophers who attend a party in a mansion. Somehow they get lost on their way to play billiards with the host, and end up in a blue room in the (supposedly) haunted wing of the house. This room has two doors, on its north and south walls, and a spiral staircase in the middle. One of the philosophers says they should go up the stairs, but the other thinks they should leave via one of the doors. They can't reach an agreement, and instead end up speculating about the existence of ghosts. The first one argues that, as there are no such things as ghosts, they have nothing to fear. The second agrees that there is nothing to fear: He has never seen a ghost, and therefore has concluded that they don't exist. Satisfied that there are no ghosts, and enthused by their agreement, the philosophers leave the room via the door they came in and try to make their way back to the party. However, the blue wing of the house seems to be arranged in a peculiar way. Once they leave the room they find a corridor leading to a spiral staircase. When they go down it, they end up back in the blue room. When they try the other door, the same thing happens. But when they go up the staircase, they simply find one of the doors. Whichever way they go, they end up back in the blue room.

  There have been a few academic papers written about Lumas as a historical figure, and maybe ten about his novel, The Apple in the Garden. There have been no biographies. Back in the 1990s, a couple of Californian queer theorists claimed him, or at least his Journals, in which one can find, among other things, half-finished homoerotic sonnets about some of Shakespeare's male characters. But I don't know what happened to the queer theorists. Perhaps they lost interest in Lumas. Most people do. As far as I k
now, hardly anything has ever been written about The End of Mr. Y. What has been written has all been by Saul Burlem.

  "The Curse of Mr. Y" was the subject of Burlem's paper at the conference in Greenwich eighteen months ago, delivered to an audience of four people, including me. Burlem hadn't then read The End of Mr. Y, but instead talked about the probable invention of the "curse" story. He had a rough, sandpaper voice, and a slight stoop that somehow wasn't unattractive. He talked about the idea of the curse as if it were a virus, and discussed Lumas's body of work as if it were an organism attacked by this virus, destined, perhaps, to become extinct. He talked about information becoming contaminated by unpopularity, and eventually concluded that Lumas's book had indeed been cursed, not in a supernatural sense, but by the opinions of people who wanted him discredited.

  There was a reception afterwards, in the Painted Hall. It was packed in there: A popular scientist had been giving a talk at the same time as Burlem, and he was holding court in the large Lower Hall, underneath an image of Copernicus. I had considered going to his talk instead, but I was glad I'd chosen Burlem's. The other people from Burlem's talk—two guys who looked a bit like a pair of tax inspectors except for their almost white-blond hair, and a fiftyish woman with pink-streaked gray hair—hadn't hung around, so Burlem and I started on the red wine, drinking too fast, hiding away in the far corner of the Upper Hall. Burlem was wearing a long gray wool trench coat over his black shirt and trousers. I can't remember what I was wearing.

  "So would you read it, then?" I asked him, referring, of course, to The End of Mr. Y.

  "Of course," he said, with his odd smile. "Would you?"

  "Absolutely. Especially after this."

  "Good," he said.

  Burlem didn't seem to know anyone in the Lower Hall, and neither did I. Neither of us attempted to leave our corner and mingle: I'm not very good at it and often offend people by accident; I don't know what Burlem's reason was—maybe he just hadn't been offended by me yet. The whole time I was in the Painted Hall I felt a bit like part of a huge box of chocolates, with the browns, creams, golds, and reds of the vast paintings seeming to melt around me. Perhaps Burlem and I were the hard centres that no one was interested in. No one else came to the Upper Hall the whole time we were there.

  "I can't believe more people didn't come to your talk," I said.

  "No one knows Lumas exists," he said. "I'm used to it."

  "I suppose you were up against Mr. Famous, as well," I said.

  Burlem smiled. "Jim Lahiri. He's probably never heard of Lumas, either."

  "No," I agreed. I'd read Lahiri's best-selling popular science book about the end of time, and knew he wouldn't approve of Lumas even if he had heard of him. Popular science can say some pretty wild things these days, but the supernatural is still out, as is Lamarck. You can have as many dimensions as you want, as long as none of them contains ghosts, telepathy, anything that fucks with Charles Darwin, or anything that Hitler liked (apart from Charles Darwin).

  Burlem picked up the bottle of wine, refilled both our glasses, and then frowned at me. "So why are you here? Are you a student? If you're working on Lumas I should probably know who you are."

  "I'm not working on Lumas," I said. "I write these little articles for a magazine called Smoke. You may not have heard of it. I'll probably write one on Lumas after this, but I don't think that counts as 'working on' in your sense." I paused, but Burlem didn't say anything. "He's a great person to write about, though, even on a small scale. His stuff's pretty compulsive. I mean, even without the controversies and the curse it's still amazing."

  "It is," said Burlem. "That's why I'm working on a biography." After he said the word "biography," he looked first at the ground, and then up at the painted ceiling high above our heads. I must have been frowning or something, because when he looked back at me he smiled in a crooked, apologetic way. "I hate biography," he said.

  I laughed. "So why are you writing one?"

  He shrugged. "Lumas got me hooked. The only way to write about his texts seems to be to write a biography of his life. It might sell. There's a vogue for digging up these nineteenth-century eccentrics at the moment and I might as well cash in on it. The department could do with some funding. I could do with some bloody funding."

  "The department?"

  "Of English and American Studies." He told me the name of the university.

  "Have you started on it?" I asked him.

  He nodded. "Yeah. Unfortunately there's only one biographical detail about Lumas that really does it for me."

  "The punch?" I suggested, thinking of Darwin, imagining, for some reason, a huge splashing sound as he fell over after Lumas hit him.

  "No." He looked up at the ceiling again. "Have you read Samuel Butler at all?"

  "Oh yes," I nodded. "Yes—that's actually how I came to read Lumas. There was a reference in Butler's Note-books."

  "You were reading Butler's Note-books?"

  "Yeah. I like all the stuff about the sugared Hamlets."

  Actually, what I like about Butler is the same thing I like about Lumas: the outlaw status and the brilliant ideas. Butler's big thing was consciousness; he thought it was very likely that machines would become conscious and, probably, take over the world. He said that since we evolved from organic, unconscious vegetable matter, our consciousness must at some point have emerged from nothing. If we had become conscious out of nowhere, then why couldn't machines? I'd written about that in the magazine only a couple of weeks before.

  "Sugared Hamlets?" said Burlem.

  "Yeah. These sweets they were selling in London. Little sweets in the shape of Hamlet holding a skull, dipped in sugar. How great is that?"

  Burlem laughed. "I bet Butler thought that was hilarious."

  "Yeah. That's why I like him. I like his sense of the absurd."

  "So presumably you know the rumors about him and Lumas?"

  "No. What rumors?"

  "That they were lovers; or at least that Lumas was infatuated with Butler."

  "I had no idea," I said. Then I smiled. "Does it matter?"

  "Probably not. But it leads to the biographical detail I'm most interested in."

  "Which is?"

  "Have you read The Authoress of the Odyssey?"

  "No." I shook my head. " The Authoress ...?"

  "You must read it. It's Butler arguing that the Odyssey was written by a woman. It's fucking brilliant." Burlem ran his hand through his hair and went on: "Butler published his own translation of the Odyssey alongside it, with some black-and-white plates showing photographs he took of old coins, and landscapes relevant to the Odyssey. One of the landscapes, supposedly the basis for the tidal inlet up which Ulysses swam, has a man and a dog in the distance. In the introduction to the book, Butler goes out of his way to apologize for this, and to say that they only appeared when he developed the negative; that they weren't supposed to be there."

  "Wow," I said, not sure where this was leading. "So..."

  "The man in the picture is Lumas. I'm sure of it."

  "How do you know?"

  "I don't know. I don't even know if they travelled together. But the way the man appears in the developed photograph, previously unseen ... You can't see the figure well enough to tell who it is but ... What if it was Lumas? What if it was even his ghost, but before he was dead? I may be a little drunk. Sorry. He had a dog, though, called Erasmus."

  At this point Burlem did a jerky thing with his head, as if he was trying to get water out of one of his ears. He frowned, as if considering a difficult question, and then made another face, suggesting that maybe the question didn't matter, anyway. Then he raised an eyebrow, smiled, walked over to the table, and got another bottle of wine. While he did that, I looked at the vast image beyond him, painted on the back wall. The scene showed what seemed to be a king descending from heaven, alighting on some reddish, carpeted stairs. The stairs almost appeared to be part of the room rather than the painting, and the figures in the ima
ge looked like they might be using them to step into reality; into the present.

  "Lumas can drive you a bit crazy," he said, when he returned.

  "I like the idea of the photograph, though," I said. "It reminds me of that story of his, The Daguerreotype."

  "You've read that?"

  I nodded. "Yeah. I think it's my favorite."

  "How on earth did you get hold of it?"

  "I got that one on eBay. It was in a collection. I've got almost all of Lumas's books apart from The End of Mr. Y. I found a lot of them on secondhand book sites."

  "And this is all for a magazine article?"

  "Yeah. I do it pretty intensively. For a month I'll live and breathe, say, Samuel Butler. Then I'll find some link from him to take me to the next piece. The column is called Free Association. I started with the big bang about three years ago."

  Burlem laughs. "And what did that lead to?"

  "The properties of hydrogen, the speed of light, relativity, quantum mechanics, probability theory, Schrödinger's cat, the wavefunction, light, the luminiferous ether—which is my personal favorite—experiment, paradox..."

  "So you're a scientist? You understand all that stuff?"

  I laughed. "God no. Not at all. I wish I did. I probably shouldn't have started with the big bang, but when you do, that's what you get. At some point I went from artificial intelligence to Butler, and now here I am with Lumas. While I'm working on him I'll probably decide on what link I'm going to follow through next so I can order all the books. I might do something about the history of photography, actually, following through from The Daguerreotype. Or I might follow it through to the fourth dimension, and that Zollner book, although that takes me back to science again."

  In The Daguerreotype, a man wakes up to find a copy of his house in a park across the road, with a large group of people gathered around it. Where has the house come from? People immediately accuse the man of losing his mind and arranging to have a copy of his house built in the park overnight. He points out that this is impossible. Who could have a whole house built overnight? Also, the house in the park does not seem new. It is in fact an exact copy of the "real" house, down to some scuffing on the door panels, and some tarnish on the brass knocker. The only thing that's different is that his key doesn't work, and the keyhole seems to be blocked by something. The man initially tries to ignore the house, but soon it takes over his life and he has to try to work out where it has come from. Because of the house in the park he loses his job as a teacher, and his fiancée runs off with someone else. The police also become involved and accuse the man of all sorts of crimes. The house has some strange properties as well, the main one being that no one can get into it. It is possible to look through the windows at the things inside: a table, a vase of flowers, a bureau, a piano; but no one can smash the windows or break down the door. The house behaves like a solid shape, as if it had no space inside.