The End of Mr. Y

by Scarlett Thomas

  I rent a parking space from the Chinese restaurant around the back of my flat and luckily today no one else has parked in it by mistake. After I've had some soup, I go and get in the bath with two of the homoeopathy books: Kent's Lectures on the Materia Medica and a rather strange-looking volume called Literary Portraits of the Polychrests. I'm going to read about Carbo Vegetabilis, then I'm going to go and buy some. It doesn't matter how dirty I am, or that I want to pretend there's nothing wrong with me, or that I desperately want to see Adam's face again, or that I should think about getting back to my thesis and my new piece for the magazine. This is my mission. This isn't real life. Real life is letting men fuck you over their desks (and enjoying it, which is somehow the worst thing). Real life is regularly running out of money, and then food. Real life is having no proper heating. Real life is physical. Give me books instead: Give me the invisibility of the contents of books, the thoughts, the ideas, the images. Let me become part of a book; I'd give anything for that. Being cursed by The End of Mr. Y must mean becoming part of the book; an intertextual being: a book-cyborg, or, considering that books aren't cybernetic, perhaps a bibliorg. Things in books can't get dirty, and real life is, well, eventually it's dust. Even books become dust, like the crumbled remains H. G. Wells's Time Traveller finds in the museum. But thoughts are clean.

  Before I start reading I think an experimental thought, just for a second. What if this is real life? What if I am cursed and I'm going to die, just like Lumas and everyone who read The End of Mr. Y in the 1890s? If I really thought this was real, some survival instinct would make me stop doing it, surely? But if it's not real, why am I bothering? I pick up the first book, Kent's Lectures, and start to read about Carbo Vegetabilis.

  We will take up the study of Vegetable Charcoal—Carbo-veg. It is a comparatively inert substance made medicinal and powerful, and converted into a great healing agent, by grinding it fine enough. By dividing it sufficiently, it becomes similar to the nature of sickness and cures folks.

  The Old School use it in tablespoonful doses to correct acidity of the stomach. But it is a great monument to Hahnemann. It is quite inert in crude form and the true healing powers are not brought out until it is sufficiently potentized. It is one of those deep-acting, long-acting antipsoric medicines. It enters deeply into the life, in its proving it develops symptoms that last a long time, and it cures conditions that are of long standing—those that come on slowly and insidiously.

  What follows is basically a long list of symptoms that can be cured by this medicine in homoeopathic doses. Not much of it seems particularly interesting or gives any indication as to why this would be the "special" medicine chosen for Lumas's concoction. I read of sluggishness, laziness, and vomiting of blood. Then I read down the page and learn that people who need Carbo-veg are also cold and cadaverous. I close this book and pick up Literary Portraits of the Polychrests. The flap informs me that it should be possible to "read" or decode characters in literature in the same way as one reads a person with an illness. I can see how that would work: all those little symptoms I read about before, all the emphasis on knowing whether someone feels worse at eleven A.M. (sulphur) or four P.M. (lycopodium). I open the Portraits book and read the following:

  Carbo-v is known as the corpse-reviver—and any practicing homoeopath will tell you why. When a patient appears to draw his last breath, this is the remedy that must be given in the highest possible potency. iM or 10M is usually sufficient to bring about a revival, or, indeed, to aid the patient in his passing.

  After an introduction, this chapter then lists the various famous literary personages who, in the author's opinion, would require this remedy. Mina Murray and Jonathan Harker get a few pages to themselves, and the author spends a long time considering the dying character in Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Mesmeric Revelation." Then, of course, there's a section on Elizabeth Lavenza from Frankenstein. The section ends with this:

  Is it any wonder that it is carbon that holds this mystique? Carbon is nothing less than the compression of life itself, which becomes the fuel for our furnaces and machines that themselves provide the fuel for life. Carbon, to which all living things eventually return (ashes to ashes, dust to dust), must be the most mysterious of all substances and in that respect the alignment with death is unavoidable. But carbon is also life. It is the beginning of life and its end. In potency it retains not physical substance but energy, which is meaning. And the meaning of carbon is both simple and complex. Life. Death. The limit of all things.

  As I get out of the bath, damp and clean but not perceptibly warmer, I feel my mind tick-ticking like the screen on Heather's computer. The corpse-reviver. Now that at least does sound interesting. And all that stuff about carbon being the essence both of life and death. I remember there was something interesting about carbon in Jim Lahiri's popular science book, so, with my dressing gown on, I go into the kitchen and put on some coffee while I search my shelves for the book. Eventually I find it and it tells me what I remember reading. In the furnace of the big bang, hydrogen was the first element to form from the hot plasmic soup of electrons and protons. It's a bit of a no-brainer: All you need for hydrogen is one electron and one proton. The mass of this hydrogen isotope is one—because it has one proton (electrons don't really have any mass). In the incredible heat, hydrogen isotopes with masses two (deuterium—one proton and one neutron) and three (tritium and trialphium) also formed. Then helium, with mass four. But there is no stable atom with mass five. Because there is no atom with mass five, no one understood how carbon could ever have been made. Each new element is made from fusing the elements that came before it, but you can whiz hydrogen and helium around in a cosmic blender for as long as you want and you won't make carbon.

  That is a problem, because if you can't make carbon in this way, then the rest of the periodic table looks impossible as well. But because the most usual mass of carbon is twelve, you'd have to get three helium atoms to collide at exactly the same time, at a vast temperature, in order to create it. It looked like it was impossible that this ever happened. Then the cosmologist Fred Hoyle reasoned that carbon had to exist since he was made of it, and worked out exactly how the "mass-five crevasse" could be jumped. In response to all this, George Gamow wrote a spoof of Genesis, in which he had God creating all the possible chemical masses but forgetting to create mass five in his excitement.

  God was very much disappointed, and wanted first to contract the Universe again, and to start all over from the beginning. But it would be much too simple. Thus, being almighty, God decided to correct His mistake in a most impossible way. And God said: "Let there be Hoyle." And there was Hoyle. And God looked at Hoyle ... and told him to make heavy elements in any way he pleased.

  Now, of course, carbon is the basis for life and, as the homoeopathy book pointed out, the inevitable outcome of death. So if you were going to create a mysterious concoction of any sort, carbon wouldn't be a strange inclusion at all—especially if you diluted it so that it didn't even exist anymore; so it was simply a memory.

  I get to the health food shop at around half past four but although Patrick was right and they do have a homoeopathy section, there's no Carbo Vegetabilis. After trying Boots and Holland & Barrett I am feeling less confident about this mission. Boots didn't have Carbo Vegetabilis at all, and Holland & Barrett only had it in a 6C potency, about 994 times less dilute than I need it. It's gone five by the time I drift into the little shop by the Odeon cinema. I've never been into this place before, and I don't even know what it sells. When you walk past, it looks as if it is simply a door with no shop behind it, but if you look more closely there's a glass display built into the wall next to it. Inside the glass display are a couple of jars of what look like herbs, a copy of the Tao Te Ching, and a pack of tarot cards. The name of the shop— Selene, Greek for "moon"—is on the door, along with a faded sign in an ornate script inviting you to "come in and browse." I am hopeful that the shop may have homoeopathic medicines, tho
ugh, since the woman in Holland & Barrett told me to come here.

  As I open the door, something inside tinkles feebly. Beyond the door is a thin wooden staircase, and I walk up in the semidarkness. At the top of the stairs I find another door, this one with frosted glass panels, and I open this and walk into the tiny shop where I find a thin bald man sitting behind a desk reading a book. The shop smells strongly of sandalwood incense and is arranged in a small rectangle with the desk on the near left-hand side. The desk looks like something a nineteenth-century architect might have used: It's large and broad with what seem to be many drawers in it; each is only a couple of inches high, but about three feet wide. There's no cash register. Behind the desk is a frayed and curling poster in a script I can't understand, and next to that there's a wooden purple door covered with an orange bead curtain.

  The man doesn't acknowledge me but I start drifting around the displays, anyway. The far left-hand side of the shop has a wobbly set of wooden shelves containing little brown bottles of homoeopathic remedies. I find Carbo Veg, but this time it's in the potency 30C. I sigh and walk around to the right, past plastic tubs containing crystals, and rows and rows of big penny-sweet jars of herbs. Underneath the herbs there's a small, dusty display of glass jars and vials, some stoppered with cork; others with simple screw-tops. I pick up a glass vial to use for the holy water. I can't see any other homoeopathic medicines anywhere. I walk over to the counter and wait for the man to look up.

  "I'm looking for a homoeopathic medicine," I say.

  "Over in the corner," he says, and goes back to his book.

  "I know," I say. "I need it in a higher potency, though."

  "Oh," he says. He looks at his watch. "We're actually about to close, so..."

  "So you don't have any higher potencies?"

  "We do," he says. "But we can't sell them over the counter."

  I frown. "What, do I need a prescription or something?"

  He shakes his head. "You pay for a consultation." He sighs. "Which remedy did you want?"

  "Carbo Vegetabilis," I say, blushing as the unfamiliar word comes out.

  "Sorry?" he says.

  "Carbo Vegetabilis. The corpse-reviver. At least, that's what people seem to call it. I found it in one place but not in a strong enough potency."

  "The corpse-reviver? Where did you get that?"

  "Oh, a book," I say.

  So much for trying to sound like I know what I'm talking about.

  "Well, I've got it in everything up to 10M," he says.

  "I want 1M," I say. "The thousandth potency. That's right, isn't it?"

  He frowns again. "You know that higher potencies can be dangerous if you don't know what you're doing?"

  I don't say what I'm thinking, which is: But it's just water.

  "Yes," I say. "I know. It'll be fine."

  "All right," he says. "But I'll have to give you some sort of consultation. What seems to be the problem?" He yawns while I say something about a headache. He lets me go on for a while and then, while I'm still talking, he opens up one of the big drawers and takes out a brown bottle.

  "Yeah, yeah. OK. I prescribe Carbo-v," he says. "That'll be eight pounds. That's for the consultation. The remedy is free."

  "Thanks," I say, taking the bottle. I pay for the "consultation" and the glass vial I picked up before. Then I leave.

  Chapter Eleven

  Somehow it's gone six o'clock by the time I'm back out on the freezing street. The light from car headlamps hangs mournfully in the thin mist and people are walking along wearing thick hats and gloves and carrying briefcases, or plastic bags full of lumpy shopping, or both. I decide to go home now and try to pick up the holy water on my way to Heather's instead. The cathedral is on my way to her house, anyway.

  Wolfgang's bicycle is in the hallway when I get home. My hands are frozen, even though I kept them both clenched in my pockets all the way back, one holding the glass vial, the other holding the Carbo Vegetabilis. The first thing I do is hide the remedy in an old sugar tin at the back of one of my cupboards; I'm not entirely sure why. Then I put the glass vial on the table and run both my hands under warm water, trying to wash away the cold. I put some coffee on the stove and then go into the bathroom. I try brushing my hair but it's too tangled, so I stick it up in a band instead. I look at myself in the mirror and, as usual, wonder to what level I am cursed. Common sense says that curses don't exist. But then I think that later tonight I am going to make Lumas's concoction, drink it, and see what happens. My reflection doesn't seem to react to this thought, except I think I can sense a mild disappointment in my eyes. When the concoction fails to have any effect, then what? Then it's back to real life and real work without even an office to myself anymore. I put some face powder on my already pallid face and then apply some pale pink lipstick. I don't think I'll get changed again. The jeans I put on earlier are clean, if a bit washed-out and frayed, and all my jumpers look more or less the same, anyway.

  After I've had my coffee, I wander down the hallway and bang on Wolfgang's door. He answers it almost immediately and invites me in to his kitchen. Neither of us has a fitted kitchen, just a couple of shelves and cupboards. Wolfgang's shelves are all crammed with nuts, seeds, and dried fruit in clear packets. His cupboards only contain alcohol, and that's why I'm here. As I walk in I realize that the kitchen smells cleaner than usual. Usually it only contains one Formicatopped table and one chair, and if I come to eat here I have to bring my own chair. This evening, however, there are two chairs and there is a little pot of flowers in the center of the table.

  "Do you think this is an inviting space?" he asks me.

  "Yes, of course," I say. "Especially with two chairs. Is Catherine coming round?"

  "Catherine? No. I have finished with Catherine. I'm expecting someone much more special than Catherine."

  "Your love life moves quickly," I say.

  "Ha! Yes. Quickly and unexpectedly."

  "OK. Well in that case I won't keep you..."

  "You were not coming for dinner? Because as you know, any other night..."

  "No," I say. "Don't worry. Although I wish I was looking for somewhere to have dinner. I'm actually about to go and meet the people who've taken over my office." I shake my head. "I don't know why I'm going, really."

  "Ah," he says. "Then, if it is not one of my gourmet dinners, presumably you want something else?"

  "Mmm. Yeah. I was wondering if you had any more of that dodgy wine."

  Just before Christmas Wolfgang acquired about thirty bottles of Bulgarian red wine from person or persons unknown and he was selling it to me at a pound a bottle. I haven't bought any for a couple of weeks but I need to take a bottle over to Heather's and I don't want to pay a fiver in the supermarket when I've now only got about ten pounds left in the world.

  He shakes his head. "Dodgy? How can you say my wine is dodgy?"

  I laugh. "OK, then. Your totally legal wine."

  His eyes flit horizontally to one of the cupboards. "I have a few bottles left."

  "Can I have one?"

  "Of course." He pulls one out of the cupboard. The label is written in Bulgarian, which does make it look pretty authentic and, dare I say it, expensive. "So how is life?" he asks, handing it over.

  "OK," I say, giving him a pound coin. "Weird. Oh—did I tell you I finished the book?"

  "The cursed book?"

  "Yeah."

  "And this recipe was there? You have the ingredients?"

  I don't ask why on earth Wolf would make the accurate assumption that, once I knew these ingredients, the next thing I would do would be to track them down.

  "No," I lie. "Sadly, it wasn't there."

  "So what happens to Mr. Y?"

  "Pretty much everything he feared would happen. There is one good thing: He makes up the concoction and takes it, and it does transport him back to the Troposphere. But it's all horrible. He enters his wife's mind and discovers how unhappy he has made her. Then he enters his business rival's
mind and realizes he will never defeat him. Just before it becomes clear that he and his wife are going to have to go to the workhouse, he discovers a bit more about how the Troposphere works. You can in fact jump from one person's mind to another, just as Mr. Y thought. And by doing that you can travel across memories.... It's a bit like surfing, although Mr. Y gives it his own term: Pedesis."

  "Across memories...? So perhaps like time travel?"

  "I think that was the implication."

  I remember the penultimate paragraph of the book.

  I had not found happiness, or, indeed, my fortune, within the shadows of the Troposphere. Yet within it I felt something of what a bird may feel skimming in the air : for the time I roamed within this new world I knew I was free. And although in the world of flesh I had failed, in the world of minds I flew, perhaps not as a bird flies, but as a man moving fast over an infinity of stepping stones, each new stone providing a platform from which to jump to many others. As I became accomplished at this method of leaping further inside the world of minds, moving with the lightest and quickest of steps, with the ease of the surf on moving water, I decided to call this movement Pedesis, from the Greek . This river with its stones, like the landscape with its dwellings, flowed forwards—yes—but also backwards. And so I have decided to take flight, pedetically, into the mists of time. Thus I arrive at my story's end, for, this evening, at midnight, I plan to embark on this journey into the very depths of the Troposphere. I doubt that I will ever return to complete my story, so far will I be from its beginning.