The End of Mr. Y

by Scarlett Thomas

  Once he is back in London, Mr. Y becomes increasingly obsessed with the questions posed by his adventure. Had he, in fact, been given the ability to read minds (or, as he puts it, "to telepath"), albeit only briefly? Or did the doctor simply give him a strong sleeping draught? He doesn't know, and does not have any way of finding out. But he becomes inclined to believe that he did in fact read the mind of William Hardy. Indeed, he is able to locate and read the exact book from which Hardy learned of the Pepper's Ghost illusion, and finds that his "memory" of it (from reading it via Little Will) is exactly correct. Knowing that a man cannot have a memory of a book he has not read, he concludes that something supernatural happened to him that evening at the Goose Fair. But he simply does not know what this was. In the absence of any proper explanation, he does a good Victorian thing and starts labelling and classifying the parts of the new world he has encountered. The name he gives to this other world is the Troposphere, which he derives by taking the word "atmosphere"—a combination of the Greek words for "vapor" and "ball"—and replacing the unknown vapors with something more solid: the Greek word for character, tropos. It takes Mr. Y more time to conceive of a term for the journey itself, but eventually he names it Telemancy: tele from telos, meaning distant; and mancy from manteia, meaning divination. In his mind this was divination at a distance, and he badly wanted to do it again.

  At this point in the narrative we begin to learn something of Mr. Y's business affairs. His drapery shop, located in the East End of London, used to be a very successful enterprise but now it seems to be failing, and soon he has to let several of his assistants go. A rival has set up shop just around the corner from Mr. Y, and his business is booming. The proprietor of this rival business, Mr. Clemency, is roughly characterized in the novel as a shifty, spiteful individual who seems to enjoy the misery he heaps on Mr. Y, and believes that his method of making clothes—locking his workers in a small, hot back room and paying them hardly anything—is superior to Mr. Y's old-fashioned ways. Mr. Y soon has two obsessions: Telemancy and revenge, and he thinks that if only he knew what had been in the potion given to him by the doctor, he could concoct it himself and revisit the landscape of the Troposphere. Once there, of course, he would visit the mind of Mr. Clemency. He admits, with some shame, that he intends to blackmail his rival if he can find a way to do so.

  Meanwhile, his business continues to deteriorate. On top of this, his father is taken ill and his usually meek wife becomes vexed and anxious. Mr. Y can't cope with everything, and so neglects his father and shouts at his wife. He is clearly rushing headfirst down the slope of his own ruin, but he can't see this. Instead, he burns a lamp each night and reads Materia Medica and herbals that might give him some clue as to what the mysterious mixture was. He finds none. But the world of the Troposphere, particularly the calm landscape on which he rode the horse, beckons him like a drug to which he has become profoundly addicted.

  The light is fading outside my kitchen window and I look at my watch. It's just gone four o'clock. I've got a reading lamp in my bedroom, so I go and get that and plug it in behind the sofa and then place it on the windowsill. That's better. I can aim it directly at the pages of the book. One lamp can't use up too much electricity, surely?

  At about half past five I hear the sound of the door downstairs, and then the dissonant tinkle of Wolfgang's bicycle bell as it scrapes against the wall. Although I really want to finish reading my book, my eyes are hurting and I haven't spoken to another human being for hours. So when there's a faint tap on my door a few minutes later, I call out that it's open, and get up to make coffee.

  Wolfgang comes in and sits down awkwardly at the kitchen table.

  "Good day?" I say, although his posture should answer the question for me.

  "Ha," is all he says, putting his head in his hands.

  "Wolf?"

  "What is Sunday for?" he asks. "Tell me that."

  "Um ... church?" I suggest. "Family? Sport?"

  The coffee hisses and I take it off the gas ring. I pour a cup for each of us and sit down at the table facing Wolf. I offer him a cigarette and then light one myself. He does not respond to my suggestions, so I try to think of some more. Without meaning to, I effortlessly transport myself back to Mr. Y's 1890s world, and summon up half-finished coloring-book images of women walking through parks in hobble skirts, children playing with hoops, and vague dot-to-dot trips to the seaside involving parasols and slot machines, although I don't think they had slot machines until the turn of the century. It's an after-church, afternoon world that I can't even begin to understand. I try to think myself back out of the 1890s.

  "Sex?" I suggest instead. "Reading the papers? Shopping?"

  "Ha," says Wolf again, sipping his coffee.

  "What happened?" I ask.

  "A weekend with Catherine's family," he says, with some disgust.

  "It can't have been that bad," I say. "Where did you go?"

  "Sussex. Country house. And it was very bad..."

  "Why?"

  He sighs. "Where to begin?"

  I think of the Odyssey. "Try the middle," I suggest.

  "Ah. The middle. OK. In the middle, I run over the dog."

  I can't help but laugh, even though this is obviously not funny.

  "Is the dog OK?" I say.

  Wolfgang looks sad. "He is now lame."

  I sip my coffee. "How exactly did you run over the dog?"

  Wolfgang doesn't drive: thus the bicycle.

  "In a ... How would you say it...? What is the word...?"

  This is something of an affectation of Wolf's. He speaks English better than most of the literature students in the department, but sometimes he'll fish for a word like this, playing on his foreignness to add drama and, sometimes, melancholy, to whatever story he's telling. I don't dislike the affectation, in fact, I find it funny. But that doesn't mean I'm not familiar with its mechanics.

  He's still at it. "A ... like a little tractor"

  "You ran over your girlfriend's family dog in a 'little tractor'?"

  "No. Well, yes. But I mean what is the word for little tractor?"

  "I don't think there is a word for little tractor. What do you do with it?"

  "You cut the grass with it."

  "Oh! A lawnmower."

  Wolf looks at me as if I'm simple. "I know lawnmower," he says. "You push a lawnmower. This other thing you sit on."

  "Oh," I say. "Yeah, like a lawnmower you sit on. A ... Oh God. What do you call those things?" I think for a while. "I think they're just lawnmowers that you sit on. What did Catherine's family call it?"

  "I think they called it the 'mower.' But I was sure there would be another term."

  "I'm not sure there is. So, anyway, why were you on the mower?"

  "The father, Mr. Dickerson, he had got it stuck and he wanted a 'big strong lad' to drive it out."

  I laugh at the thought that anyone would call Wolfgang a "big strong lad." He isn't any one of those three things.

  "Yes," he says. "Ha ha."

  "Sorry. So, anyway, what were they like, the family?"

  "Rich," says Wolf. "From carpets."

  "And is there a future with Catherine?" I ask.

  "For me?" He shrugs. "Who knows?" He gets up and takes the bottle of slivovitz from the shelf. He pours himself a large glass, but when he offers some to me I shake my head. "Anyway," he says, when he has sat down again, "how is your curse?"

  "Hmm," I say. "Can you keep a secret?"

  "You know I can. And I've already said that I don't care if I become more cursed."

  "I don't think you'll become cursed just from hearing about it," I say.

  "So what is it? An object?"

  "A book."

  "Ah, the curse of knowledge," he says immediately.

  "I'm not sure if it is that," I say. "It's a novel. I think the curse might just be some superstition. But the book is very rare and potentially very valuable—although my copy is damaged, so it's probably actually worth no
thing."

  "And you bought this on Friday?"

  "Yeah. With, basically, all my money."

  "How rare is it?"

  "Very rare." I explain to him about there being no known copies anywhere in the world, apart from the one in the German bank vault. "Even with the damage, it's still a pretty amazing thing to have. It's by that author I'm studying: Thomas Lumas. I could be the only person in the world to write a paper on the actual book rather than the mysteries surrounding it. I must be one of the only people to have read it in the last hundred years." Just as I'm getting excited about it, Wolf interrupts.

  "And the curse is what?"

  I look down at the table. "The curse is that if you read it, you die."

  The book is still on the sofa where I left it, and I notice as Wolf's gaze travels around the room and then rests on it. He gets up and goes over to the sofa. But instead of picking up the book, he simply looks down at it as if it were an exhibit in a museum. For a moment I imagine that he's much more frightened of curses than he has let on, and this is why he doesn't touch it. But then I decide that it must be simply a respect for the age and rarity of the object. Wolf isn't scared of curses: He's said so.

  He comes back to the table. "What's the story about?"

  "It's about this man called Mr. Y, who goes to this Victorian fair-ground," I begin. I tell Wolf the story as far as I know it, ending with the last scene I read, where Mr. Y's wife has implored him to stop spending all night poring over medical textbooks. Mr. Y tells her to mind her own business and go to bed. This she does, and he resumes his reading.

  "What does he think the mixture might be?" Wolf asks me.

  "So far he has no idea," I say. "He thinks it might be based on laudanum, which is opium in alcohol, but isn't sure. He knows it's active as a liquid, so he has ruled out nitrous oxide—laughing gas—and chloroform, both of which you have to inhale. Other candidates include ether, a substance made from sulphuric acid and alcohol, and chloral. He's also trying to obtain more exotic herbals from further afield, and concocts a weird theory about some foreign witch doctor giving the information to the fairground doctor. But if this is true then the mixture won't be something he can concoct from ingredients to be found in any Victorian pharmacy. This basically throws him into total depression. But after a while he comes to the conclusion that it can't have been an exotic mixture. For two shillings it was unlikely to have included Peruvian tree bark, African snake venom, unicorn blood, or whatever. He works out that for two shillings, the mixture must have contained relatively cheap ingredients. But what?" I shrug. "Even if the ingredients aren't exotic, they could be anything."

  "And you have no idea yet?" Wolfgang asks.

  I shake my head. "No. But I'm looking forward to finding out, if you ever do get to find out, that is."

  Wolf lights a cigarette and falls into a deep contemplation of his glass of slivovitz. I consider telling him about the preface to the book, and the hint that there could be something "real" about it, but I don't. Instead, I get up and rinse the coffee cups while Wolf drains his glass and gets up to go.

  "I can do something gourmet tonight if you like," he offers.

  I am tempted. What I've got here is at best "very gourmet," but I do want to finish the book.

  "Thanks, Wolf," I say. "But I think I'm just going to keep reading."

  "And complete the curse?" he says, with a raised eyebrow.

  "I really don't think there is a curse," I say.

  By eight o'clock it's freezing and I have to switch on all the gas rings. I am nearing the end of the book and it seems clear that Mr. Y is well on his way towards bankruptcy and destitution as the result of his obsession with the Troposphere and the method by which he might return there. He has taken to experimenting with various drugs and potions and lying there on his couch gazing at a black dot, but none of the drugs he has tried have worked. At every corner he is assaulted by advertisements suggesting cure-all panaceas like Dr. Locock's Pulmonic Wafers, and Pulvermacher's Improved Patent Galvanic Chain-Bands, Belts, Batteries, and Accessories. What was in the wafers, and could the fairground doctor's vial of liquid have contained it? And what about Pulvermacher's electrical objects? Perhaps the fairground doctor had in some way electrified whatever fluid he had concocted. Mr. Y realizes that there is no way he'll be able to find the concoction by chance. The only way he will ever be able to revisit the Troposphere is by finding that doctor and persuading him to tell him how.

  By the beginning of chapter 12, Mr. Y has discovered that many of the people who travel the country with fairs in the summer end up in London in the winter, exhibiting their sideshow horrors in run-down shops and backstreet houses. As a last resort, Mr. Y has taken to spending his evenings, and much of his money, touring these establishments, trying to find some clue to lead him to the fairground doctor.

  My search continued into November. The weather had turned bitterly cold but I kept at it every night, even as I began to doubt that I would ever find my man. It seemed to me that London had become a sort of Vanity Fair, with many of the establishments in the back streets of the West End—and beyond—dressed up with gaudy crimson hangings and advertising, by way of vast painted representations and pictorial facsimiles, such unsavoury offerings as the Bearded Lady, the Spotted Boy, the Giantess of Peru and various other mutants, savages and freaks of nature.

  Although most of these establishments remained open all day, I had discovered that it was in the evening and nighttime hours that one should expect to encounter the fullest range of their offerings. And so it was that I would venture out after supper every evening and pay my penny at the doors of establishments both gaudy and drab, populated by crowds of people or empty. In every place I asked the same question, and in every place I received the same response. No one had ever heard of the fair-ground doctor.

  November grew older and greyer, and each night it snowed a little more. I decided to confine my investigations to my own locality until such time as the weather improved, although I confess that by that time there was barely a waxwork or living skeleton in London that I had not already seen. However, I had been told of a new premises on the Whitechapel Road, opposite the London Hospital, formerly the site of an undertaker's, and, previously to that, a drapery business with which I had been familiar. So, after a small supper of bread and dripping, I set off on foot towards Whitechapel Road. My journey took me past the Jews' Burial Ground and the back of the Coal Depot and then along the southern side of the workhouse behind Baker's Row. Not for the first time I experienced the direst of premonitions that, if I did not succeed in my undertaking, my own family would be forced inside such an establishment. I did not imagine worse, because I knew of no worse.

  I followed the railway line down towards the London Hospital, looking behind me all the time for the thieves who dwell in areas such as this. I was not carrying very much money with me but I had of course read the horrible stories of the new breed of East End thieves who, if they find you with only a few pence, will easily kick out one of your eyes—or worse—as thanks for it. The snow fell softly on me as I walked through the smoky air, with coal dust from the depot mingling with the smog already thick around me. I coughed a little, and rubbed my hands to keep warm. I thought then that if I were fully in possession of all my senses I would surely not have been out on a night such as this one. Yet on I walked.

  As I turned into Whitechapel Road, my eyes almost immediately fell upon the establishment of which I had heard. The upper part of the house was adorned with a large sheet of canvas, on which various entertainments and spectacles were depicted, including yet another Fat Lady, along with the World's Strongest Woman and various other oddities. It is alarming how one so quickly tires of these sorts of spectacles, especially when one visits these establishments with such regularity as did I over those months, and if one chances, as I did, to observe the dreary reality behind the lurid and gruesome teratology presented by the showmen. Once, early on a Saturday morning, I happened to w
alk past an establishment I had visited two or three nights previously. There, in an overgrown garden, I observed the 'amazing' bearded woman, who by evenings was a sombre, backlit, half-human spectacle, pegging out her washing and engaging in an argument with an African 'savage' who was to be found after sunset adorned with a straw skirt, golden tunic and hoop earrings, and who apparently made only the utterances 'Ug, ug', but was at that moment wearing the rather less exotic outfit of shabby stockings, corduroy britches and a grey cloth cap, and was demonstrating an advanced grasp not only of English, but of its myriad vernacular words and expressions. I also once chanced upon the Boy With the Gigantic Head, a child of perhaps twelve or thirteen years, outside of his darkened room, and removed from all costume, lime-light and painted advertisement. He was no longer a gaudy freak but clearly a sick child who required medical attention.

  Feeling rather half-hearted, I paid a penny to enter the Whitechapel establishment. On the ground floor, and requiring no further payment, were the usual trivial spectacles of ships-in-bottles, shrunken heads and the like. There were also various waxworks of prominent political figures, and a scene depicting the glories of Empire. There were also, seated at small card-tables, various scoundrels engaged in the dark art of hiding the 'Lady' from those gentlemen who would find her for a shilling, and other similar forms of petty embezzlement. As I left this room and made towards the stairs, a young girl attempted to entice me into a back-room in order that I might have my fortune told by a Madame de Pompadour. I assured the woman that all the possibilities of my fortune were already well-known to me and proceeded up the stairs. Here I found a troublesome display indeed : eleven waxworks, each depicting one of the victims of the Whitechapel Murders. I confess I had to avert my gaze after briefly regarding a mutilated copy of Mary Kelly lying on a bed in a chemise with thick wax blood coming out of her neck. However, something about this gruesome little scene—something beyond the basic horror of the spectacle—troubled me as I walked into the next room and beheld a red-headed young woman lifting weights with her long plait of hair. Presently I returned to the waxwork exhibition and regarded the scene of Mary Kelly's demise once again. And, sure enough, there it was. The gaudy red lamp that I had last seen in the fair-ground doctor's tent was now serving as a prop for this morbid tableau.