The End of Mr. Y

by Scarlett Thomas

  Now Maria goes over to the range. "Vegetable stew and dumplings?" she says.

  "Yes. Thanks so much," I say.

  I've already started eating when Adam comes in and sits down opposite me. Maria puts a plate of the same stew in front of him, although I notice she gives him two more dumplings than she gave me. There's a jug of water on the table, and I refill my glass for the second time and drink. I need fluid and calories: Then I can spend all night in the Troposphere if I have to. I'm not sure when I'm going to sleep, though. Perhaps I should try to divide my night into half sleep and half Troposphere. But I still don't know how time works when you're in there.

  "Hi," says Adam. "How are you feeling?"

  "I'm OK," I say. "Sorry I fainted on you."

  "I tried to stop you, but you just went down," he says. "But you didn't bang your head or anything like that."

  Maria takes off her apron. "I'll be next door if you need anything," she says.

  The bruised part of Adam's face is exactly the same color as stewed blackberries. The eye on that side is almost entirely closed.

  "It's not as bad as what happened to you," I say. "I'm so sorry about that."

  He shrugs. "Oh, well. These things happen."

  "Yeah, but they don't, though. Not really." I breathe deeply and take another sip of water. "Things like this shouldn't happen. Not in real life."

  "Yeah, but what's real life? Honestly. It's fine. It's over."

  "But what if they come here? We'll be fucked." I realize I've sworn out loud in a priory. "I mean ... Sorry about my language. But you know what I mean."

  Adam smiles now. "It's only language," he says. "Just don't do it in front of the friars. They'll get confused." Smiling obviously hurts him a little. He winces now. "Ouch," he says.

  "So what exactly did happen?" I say. "I mean, they obviously beat you up. But why?"

  "I wouldn't tell them where you live."

  Shit. How guilty is it possible to feel?

  "But why were they asking you? I don't understand."

  "They'd interviewed Heather already, and when she couldn't answer their questions she sent them to find me. They seemed to assume that we knew a lot about you, even though Heather kept telling them we'd been sharing an office for a total of two days. So she told them I'd gone to show a new sessional teacher around the university, and they caught up with me at the chapel. The woman I was showing around—her children's school had phoned and said they were shutting because of the snow, and she'd left about five minutes before. When I walked out of the chapel I ran straight into these two blond men.

  "I asked if I could help them, then they asked me who I was and I told them.

  "'We'd like to ask you a few questions,' one of them said.

  "I agreed, obviously—there was no reason not to—and invited them into the chapel. It was absolutely freezing and snow was settling on their hair and eyebrows. I was going to suggest making them hot drinks in the chapel kitchen. One of them looked around, as if he wanted to find some other building to go into, but as you know, there's nothing around the chapel. Then they said that they'd rather talk to me outside. I remember wondering what was wrong with the chapel. For some reason I thought about bombs and terrorists, and I thought that maybe the men were here to evacuate the building or something. I asked them if everything was OK. Then it all got confusing.

  "'Since we've got to stand in the freezing cold, we'll make this quick,' one of them said. 'Where is Ariel Manto?'

  "'I don't have any idea,' I said. 'Why?'

  "'We need to find her. It's a matter of international security,' said the other one."

  I've been eating while Adam talks. Not the most dignified of responses to what he's telling me, I know, but I just have to keep forking in the calories. But this bit makes me stop and frown.

  "'International security'? What does that mean?"

  Adam sips his water. "I don't know," he says. "I didn't get the chance to ask. The next thing that happened was that I tried to invite them into the chapel again, and this seemed to make them angry. They swore at me and said to just tell them where you were or something bad would happen to me. They were saying, 'You fucked her and you don't know where she lives?' And I was thinking, What? Then I realized that Heather probably thought we'd gone off and had sex the other night. Anyway, they kept asking me really crude, sexually explicit questions about you. At that point I realized that these men were dangerous and I decided not to tell them anything. I realized as well that they didn't need to ask me where you lived: They could just go and look it up in Personnel. So I told them again that I didn't know anything. Then they threatened me. They said something like 'Tell us, or take the consequences.'" Adam shrugs. "I thought to myself that they couldn't do anything to me except hurt me, so I simply braced myself for what came next." He points at his face. "This is the result."

  "I can't apologize enough...," I begin.

  Adam now smiles, but mainly with the bottom half of his face. "Well, that's not even the strangest thing that happened, though. To begin with, they did start hitting me. One of them grabbed me and pinned my arms back while the other one punched me in the face, I don't know ... Three times? Maybe four. It reminded me of being at school on a lunchtime punishment, and this guy seemed to think he had all the time in the world to just keep on hitting me. He'd hit me, then pause, then blow on his hand because it was so cold, then hit me again."

  "My God," I say.

  "Then the man who was holding me said, 'This isn't working. This is some religious guy who probably thinks he's Jesus or something. We could crucify him and not get any fucking information out of him.' The other one then said something like 'Well, the Romans didn't have these, did they?' And then he took out his gun. I must admit that he was right: I did become a lot more frightened then. I struggled and the man holding me slipped on the ice and released his hold on me. Not knowing what else to do, I half ran, half fell into the chapel and shut the door behind me. I kept thinking of St. Thomas, and I tried to reconcile myself with the idea of death. It was easier than I'd thought. I knew I was probably going to die, although I was equally aware that it would be absurd to be shot dead in the university chapel. Instinct made me hide under one of the pews, but I knew that the next moment the door would open and they'd come in and shoot me. There was nowhere else for me to go."

  I have stopped eating now. This is insane. "Then what happened?"

  "The door opened—I think they kicked it—but they didn't come in. For about five minutes or so they stood outside calling in to me. They were just swearing, trying to get me to come out. They went into great detail about the things they'd do to you if I didn't come out—but I just blocked out what they were saying and, for the first time in years, I prayed. I heard them argue about their guns and about what they should do next. At one point one of them told the other to 'Just go in there and finish him off.' But the other one said he was crazy if he thought he was going to go in there and lose something ... Something I didn't understand." Adam sips some more water. "Anyway, this is why I thought you'd be safe here. I got the impression that they felt that they couldn't enter religious places."

  "But what happened after that? Did they just go away?"

  "Yes. Well, eventually. It felt like hours, but it must only have been about five more minutes or so. Neither of them was willing to go into the chapel, and I wasn't going to come out. I don't think they fancied a siege in which they had to stand in the snow for days while I lived on Communion wafers and wine inside."

  "I think this is probably the bravest thing I've ever...," I start.

  "Don't flatter me," he says, holding up his hands. "After they left I was shaking so much I couldn't stand up for about twenty minutes. Then, when I did get up, I drank all the Communion wine. I'm not brave."

  I should argue more about this. But something's bothering me.

  "That thing you said before. Something you didn't understand. What was that?"

  Adam has picked up his fork a
nd is now eating his stew as calmly as if he'd just told me the football scores, not a story about escaping from men with guns.

  "Sorry?"

  "You said that when one of them said the other should go into the chapel he then said he was going to lose something if he did. Can you remember what it was?"

  "Um ... Yeah. It was an acronym, I think. Three letters."

  "Sorry. There's no reason why you should remember what they are."

  "No, I do remember. The letters were KID. 'I'll lose my KID.' That's what he said. But it doesn't mean anything to me. Does it mean anything to you?"

  I shake my head. "No. I don't know why I thought it would."

  Chapter Seventeen

  After we've finished eating, Adam comes out to the cloisters with me so that I can have a cigarette. The cloisters here consist of a small grassed quad—currently iced with snow—contained within four thin gray stone walkways. As Adam explained, it's like being outside inside, or the reverse. When I asked, he said he wasn't sure if smoking was actually allowed in the cloisters but that no one really bothered the guests here, anyway. So now I'm standing here drawing toxic smoke into my lungs, thinking about the cloisters in Russell College, and how people only use them to smoke in: Most of the students wouldn't think cloisters were for anything else.

  "You're quiet," says Adam, leaning against a stone pillar.

  "I just feel so out of place here," I say. "As though I'm going to be struck down any minute for smoking or swearing. Or worse—for caring about stupid things like being struck down for smoking and swearing when really I should be feeling guilty about your face, and the fact that my being here puts you all in danger and ... And as well as all that, I've got to work out how to get away, and where to go."

  "You could just stay here," Adam says.

  "I can't," I say. "There's someone I need to find."

  But I don't tell him who, and I don't tell him how I'm planning to find him.

  "Is this connected with the book?" he asks.

  I nod. "Yeah."

  "I suppose I can't ask you about the book?"

  "No. It's probably better that you forget there ever was a book."

  Adam shrugs. "Oh. Well, I'm glad I saw you again, anyway."

  "You can't be," I say. "Look at what's already happened to you."

  "But I don't mind that," he says, looking away from me. "At least pain is real."

  "I know what you mean," I say, after a pause.

  "Do you?" says Adam.

  "Maybe not," I say, blowing smoke out into the cold air. "But I have ... I don't know. I have an odd way of looking at things. It's yet another reason I feel out of place here ... And with you, actually." I clear my throat, and it feels as if my words are being swallowed back along with all the phlegm and junk. Everything I want to say (and also don't want to say) contracts into one sentence: "I've done a lot of bad things."

  "Everyone's done a lot of bad things."

  "Yes, but there's a difference between forgetting to buy your grandmother a birthday card and the kinds of things I've done. I..."

  "Whatever you've done doesn't matter to me."

  I can't explain my sexual deviance to Adam, so I throw my cigarette butt into the snow in the quad, where it sinks like a monster's eye. "I'm a self-destructive person," I say. "Or at least that's what I am in magazine-speak."

  "Self-destructive," Adam says. "That's an interesting term. I suppose I'm self-destructive, but in a more literal way. It's what the Tao asks you to do: to destroy the self and get rid of the ego."

  "So being self-destructive can be a positive thing?" I say. "That is interesting."

  "Well, since I lost God..."

  "You lost God?" I say, half my face dimpling into a smile. "That was careless."

  Shit. This isn't the time to make jokes. Ariel, for God's sake, don't be offensive now. But Adam just looks at me for a second and then, suddenly, he walks the couple of paces towards me, pushes himself against me, and kisses me hard. I kiss him back, although I know we can't do this here. His lips press against mine with a cold urgency, and then he's using his teeth: biting my lip, almost tearing my flesh. I pull away.

  "Adam..."

  "Sorry. But you do things to me."

  I look at the ground. "I don't mean to."

  "Yes you do."

  "No. Look—I know what you mean. I usually do mean to do things with people or even, as you put it, to people; but not you. You're different."

  "What, because I managed to lose God? Or because I ever had God at all?"

  "I am sorry I interrupted. What were you going to say?"

  He sighs into the air: a frozen cloud of uncertainty. "I was going to say that I lost God, and then I lost myself. You know how religion usually helps people find themselves, and find God? I managed to lose everything. I thought that was the point. All the books I read about losing desire and losing the ego ... The whole thing was soul-destroying, literally. Nothing prepared me for it. Nothing prepared me for what it would be like to be aware, objectively, of religion without being a part of it. The Bible just became a book, like any other book. I could still read it and make opinions about what this or that bit meant, but I couldn't believe in it."

  "Soul-destroying. Like self-destructive."

  "Yes. I experienced being truly selfless and it was fucking terrifying."

  "Adam..."

  "Connecting with other people; losing yourself in them; becoming 'at one.' It's hell. Who said that hell is other people?"

  "Sartre."

  "He's right. I didn't realize: Ripping out your soul and offering to share it around isn't at all like giving Communion, or taking some old clothes to the charity shop. It's like going into the park at night and taking off all your clothes and waiting to be pissed on."

  I think about Wolf, and his useless attempts to get beaten up.

  "People can't be all bad," I say.

  "That's not what I'm saying. I ... I don't know what I'm saying. This is what I wanted to explain to you the other night, but I'm not doing a much better job now. I told you I've had a breakdown?"

  "Yes. I'm sorry. I..."

  "It's part of the same thing. The self destructs; the self breaks down. It's about exploding the self until there's nothing left anymore. But I couldn't do it. I completely failed. I broke down, sure, but then before I'd even had a chance to look into the abyss and see what it was like I started putting myself back together again. I tried being 'normal': drinking and swearing. It was quite fun. But now I'm not sure who I am. I use this word 'I' and I don't know what it means. I don't know where it begins and ends. I don't even know what it's made of."

  "Ah. Well, I can help you there," I say. "Everything in the known universe is made of quarks and electrons. You're made of the same stuff I'm made of, and the same stuff the snow is made of and the same stuff this stone is made of. It's just different combinations."

  "That's a beautiful idea," Adam says.

  "It's true." I laugh. "I don't usually say that. But it's as true as anything can be."

  Once I did a class with my students about working with meaning. It's supposed to be the little introductory session I do to get them thinking about Derrida. We do Saussure and all that basic stuff, and then I show them a photocopy of Duchamp's Fountain—the urinal that was voted the most influential piece of art from the twentieth century—and ask them if it's art or not. In this particular class most of the students started arguing that a urinal couldn't be art: Two or three of them became quite angry about it, and started talking about Picasso, and how their children could draw better pictures; and the recent Turner Prize-winning installation with the light going off and on ... I'd thought that it would be quite an easy class. All I'd wanted to demonstrate was that something that is called a "urinal," which we understand to be something that men piss in, is only different from something that is called a "painting," which we understand to be paint on canvas, because we make it different in language. And whether or not we choose to group either
of these things in the category "art" depends on how we define art. But the students were having trouble getting it and I became frustrated with them. I remember thinking, Fuck you. I'd so much rather be at home right now, drinking coffee in my kitchen. I explained to them that everything in the whole world is made up of exactly the same quarks and electrons. Atoms are different. Sure, there are helium atoms and hydrogen atoms and every other sort of atom, but they're only different in the number of quarks and electrons they have and, in the case of the quarks, which way up they are. I explained that, therefore, the urinal could, in a very real way, be said to be the same as, say, the Mona Lisa. I told them that what they thought was reality was all relative to the position from which they were looking at it. Under a powerful enough microscope, the urinal and the Mona Lisa would look identical.

  It's not just space and time that are fucked up. Matter is energy, but more than that: Matter is already gray sludge; we just can't see it. Now I think of the Troposphere and I wonder what that is made of and, even if it's only in my imagination, what my imagination is made of.

  Adam comes back to my room with me. I immediately get on the bed, but he paces around for a while, peeping out of the curtains, then picking up the Bible and putting it back down. I think he's going to sit on the wooden chair but eventually he comes and sits on the bed next to me, with his head resting against the headboard about two inches from mine.

  "So if we're all quarks and electrons...," he begins.

  "What?"

  "We could make love and it would be nothing more than quarks and electrons rubbing together."

  "Better that that," I say. "Nothing really 'rubs together' in the microscopic world. Matter never really touches other matter, so we could make love without any of our atoms touching at all. Remember that electrons sit on the outside of atoms, repelling other electrons. So we could make love and actually repel each other at the same time."

  I hear his breathing take on a slightly different rhythm as he puts his hand on my leg just where the material of the dressing gown is hanging slightly open.