The End of Mr. Y

by Scarlett Thomas

  A Guide to the Troposphere, it says on the cover. By Apollo Smintheus.

  Is this the message? I open the booklet.

  You now have no new messages, says the console.

  So the booklet is the message. OK. I sit down on the rocking chair and begin reading. The whole document is only about three pages long, but the script is large.

  The Troposphere is not a place.

  The Troposphere is made by thinking.

  (I am made from prayer.)

  The Troposphere is expanding.

  The Troposphere is both inside your universe and outside it.

  The Troposphere can also collapse to a point.

  The Troposphere has more than three directions and more than one "time."

  You are now standing in the Troposphere but you could call it anything.

  The thought is all thought.

  The mind is all minds.

  This dimension is different from the others.

  Your Troposphere is different from others'.

  You achieve Pedesis via proximity in

  Geography (in the world)

  Tropography (in the Troposphere)

  Ancestry (in the mind)

  The choices the Troposphere gives you relate to proximity alone.

  (Except when information is scrambled.)

  You can jump from person to person in the physical world (but only if the person is at that moment vulnerable to the world of all minds.)

  You can also jump from person to ancestor in the world of memory.

  This is all memory.

  The Troposphere is a different shape from the physical world to which it (loosely) corresponds. For this reason it is sometimes more efficient to travel in the Troposphere and sometimes more efficient to travel in the physical world (see diagram).

  Disclaimer: This diagram is a scaled-down version of a higher-dimensional calculation. It will be correct for journeys of a short or noncomplex nature. Pedesis that takes the ancestral route over many generations will (probably) lead to inaccuracies.

  Note: Units of distance/time in the Troposphere work out as roughly 1.6 times that of their equivalent in the physical world. An "hour" in the Troposphere will last for 1.6 physical-world hours, i.e., ninety-six minutes.

  Converting time to distance should be done in the usual way.

  Distance is time in the Troposphere.

  You cannot die in the Troposphere.

  You can die in the physical world.

  "You" are whatever you think you are.

  Matter is thought.

  Distance is being.

  Nothing leaves the Troposphere.

  You could probably think of the Troposphere as a text.

  You could think of the Troposphere that you see as a metaphor.

  The Troposphere is, in one sense, only a world of metaphor.

  Although I have attempted it here the true Troposphere cannot be described.

  It cannot be expressed in any language made from numbers or letters except as part of an existentiell analytic (see Heidegger for more details).

  The last point could have been clearer. What I mean to say is that experiencing the Troposphere is also to express it.

  End.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Back on my bed and it's only just gone midnight. I have to try to write down as much as possible of Apollo Smintheus's document before I forget it. I have to be able to think about it in the real world. What does it all mean? The thought is all thought. The mind is all minds. Is that what the Troposphere is? All minds? Perhaps I already knew that. Perhaps that's what I suspected. If that's the case, is the city in my mind so big that it has a little shop or house or, indeed, castle for every consciousness in the world? What were all those castles about, and why were they all shut? What is consciousness? Do worms have it? They must, if mice do. If I wanted to get in the mind of a worm in Africa, how would I go about that?

  One thing is clear. Time does work differently in the Troposphere. I don't quite understand what distance/time travelled in the Troposphere is, but it seems obvious that when you come out of it, more time has passed than when you were inside. The first thing I do is draw out the diagram as I remember it. It's basically Pythagorean theorem. It's Pythagorean theorem but applied to space and time. I struggle to recall all the popular science books I've read over the years. Gravity works in a similar way, doesn't it? Isn't that what Newton said: The force of gravity is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between two objects multiplied by their masses? But there's nothing in Apollo Smintheus's document about mass. It's all about distance and time. Indeed, he seems to be suggesting that, in the Troposphere, distance is the same thing as time. I know that's true in the "real" universe as well. It's called space-time. But you don't notice it in your normal life. You can't mess around with time by taking a trip to the shops, or even a trip to the moon. If you want to mess with time you have to fly away from Earth very fast in a spaceship, and keep travelling at something close to the speed of light without accelerating or decelerating. Then, if you come back, you'll find that "more" time has passed on Earth relative to you in your spaceship. What seems to happen in the Troposphere is the opposite of this. Or is it in fact the same? My stomach grumbles. I'm going to have to eat again soon.

  But I can't stop thinking about the castles and towers with their ornate spires and heavy drawbridges. As I write out the lines You could think of the Troposphere that you see as a metaphor. The Troposphere is, in one sense, only a world of metaphor, I wonder what the castles, if they are metaphors, represent. And then I also wonder: When you go into the Troposphere, do you immediately get access to the consciousnesses "closest" to yours? And if so, did all the castles belong to the religious people in this building? And who decided that they would be castles? Did they; or did I?

  I finish writing out the document. I think it's almost right. It's easier than I thought to remember, but then I think about what Apollo Smintheus has told me and it becomes clear that my Troposphere (because it's different for everyone) is in my mind. This document is now a memory. But then memory isn't that reliable and I do need this to be a document in the real world, a text I can go back to. Memory is already decaying it, though. I look at one line I've written: You can jump from person to person in the physical world. It doesn't look right. Have I left something out? I scrunch my forehead, as if this will make my memories rub together and create a kind of friction of remembrance. It works. You can jump from person to person in the physical world (but only if the person is at that moment vulnerable to the world of all minds). OK. I don't know what this means but at least it's there on paper.

  I yawn. My body wants to sleep—and eat—but my mind wants to keep doing this: to keep answering questions until there aren't any more questions. I glance back over my list. I have to smile when I see the reference to Heidegger. What's Apollo Smintheus doing thinking about Heidegger? But some instinct tells me that Apollo Smintheus knows how to explain things to people in their own personal language, and my language does include terms like existentiell and ontical, as well as their grander counterparts: existential and ontological. I've never forgotten what I read of Being and Time, although not finishing it is one of the big regrets of my life. I remember those terms because they're the ones I wrote so many notes about, all in the margins of the book.

  When I read Being and Time I always thought of it as Being and Lunchtime: It was my private joke with myself for the month it took me to read the first one hundred pages. It took that long because I read it only at lunchtime, over soup and a roll in a cheap café not far from where I was living at the time in Oxford. That house had no heating at all, and it was damp. I spent the winters with chest infections and the summers with a house full of insects. I tried to spend as little time there as possible. So every day I'd go to the café and sit there for an hour or two reading Being and Time. I think I managed about three or four pages a day. As I remember this, I can't help wondering: Does Apollo Sminthe
us know this, too? Does he know about the day the café closed for renovations and I stopped going there? Does he know that I started having an affair with a guy who wanted to meet me at lunchtimes, and that I left Heidegger for him?

  I wish I'd finished the book. I wish I'd brought it with me. But who takes Being and Time with them as an essential object when running away from men with guns? I get out of bed. There's a freestanding antique bookcase by the wall. It has a glass front and a little silver key. I look through the glass and see lots of texts written by Pope John Paul II, including a book of his poetry. There are thick brown Bibles and thin white Bible commentaries; all dusty. No thick blue books. No Being and Time. As if I thought there would be.

  My stomach makes another peculiar noise, as though it's a balloon being blown up. I need to eat. I need fuel. I also need to start trying to find Burlem. How the hell am I going to do that? I wouldn't even know where to start. Except ... Shit! Of course. I've still got the contents of his hard drive on my iPod. Does it need charging up? I walk away from the bookshelves and look through my bag. It's there, and it has almost a full battery. Fine. But I don't have a full battery: If I'm going to stay up doing this then I need to eat.

  The corridor is dark and cold. I can't believe I'm on my way to steal food from a priory kitchen. Is it actually stealing? I'm sure that if anyone else was awake and I could ask them they'd tell me to help myself. That's what people usually say to guests, isn't it? At least I haven't had sex here; I haven't had sex in the priory with an ex-priest.

  I wonder where Adam is. Is he in one of the other guest rooms? I imagine bumping into him in the corridor and taking back everything I said earlier on. But I'm not sure you can take back everything I said. My insides spiral into themselves as I briefly imagine touching him; touching him anywhere. It doesn't begin as a sexual thought, but it soon becomes one. I imagine licking his legs and scratching his back. As my mind spirals more tightly, everything falls away. There are no men with guns; there is no priory. In an impossible half hour with Adam, a half hour without context, what would I want to do? We could do anything. How far would I go? How far would be enough to smother this desire? Jagged, violent images dance in my mind like broken glass and I sigh as the fantasy breaks down. Perhaps nothing will ever really satisfy me.

  The kitchen door is closed but unlocked. Inside it is dark, but some heat is still coming from the range, and there's an orange glow of fuel burning in there. I don't switch on the light; the orange glow is just bright enough to see by. The smell of stew that was so savory before has lost intensity and become something more like a memory of a meal: that plasticy food smell you often get in institutions. I try a couple of cupboard doors before I find the pantry. There are large red and silver tins of biscuits, all stacked on top of one another. There are about twenty catering-sized tins of baked beans. There is powdered milk and condensed milk. There are several loaves of bread. What can I eat? What should I eat? What will actually give me energy I can use to stay in the Troposphere? I recall advice columns from several years' worth of my ex-housemates' women's magazines. Complex carbohydrates. That's the kind of thing I need. Whole wheat pasta, brown rice. But I can't cook anything. There are lots of cereals but, I'm guessing, no soya milk. There's a box of fruit. Bananas. I'm sure I remember that bananas are a good source of something or other. I take three and then, after thinking about it, I take the whole bunch. I can take some with me when I go. What else? Hurry up, Ariel, before you're caught raiding the bloody pantry. A small loaf of brown bread. A jar of Marmite. A bottle of lemonade. For Christ's sake. I'm going to travel to another world on Marmite sandwiches, bananas, and lemonade. The thought is absurd. Just before I close the pantry I see something else: several huge tubs of Hi-Energy meal replacer. I take one just in case. It's a brown cylinder, with pink, cheerful lettering.

  Back in my room I stash all the food items in the bottom of my bag, except for three slices of bread and three bananas and the lemonade. It doesn't take too long to set up my laptop and connect my iPod. I close iTunes as soon as it opens up and instead go to My Computer and scan through until I see the iPod showing as Removable Drive (E:). I transfer Burlem's files to my desktop and then unplug my iPod and hide it in the bottom of my bag with the food.

  Outside I can hear the wind picking up and I imagine a blizzard, something like the LUCA numbers gone viral, even though Adam said the snow had stopped. I eat three bananas, each wrapped in a slice of brown bread. I sip lemonade. I browse files. I learn that Burlem's CV is out of date, even though he seemed to go through a phase of applying for jobs in the States about three years ago. I learn that he was halfway through a novel when he disappeared (and, I wonder, did he take the file with him? Did he ever finish it?). The first chapter is quite good, but obviously doesn't have anything in it that will help me find him. I can't help reading the rough plan as well before I move on. It's only a page long. The novel is about a young academic who has an affair with a colleague who then gets pregnant by him. His wife finds out about the affair (but not the child) and divorces him, but the colleague's husband believes the child to be his. When he dies, the child is told the truth about her parentage and begins a tentative relationship with her biological father. The narrator lives alone with only books for company, and wishes he could see more of his daughter. After I close that document, I keep searching through the files. I find all the parts of the application process Burlem had to go through to get his professorship. I find letters to his bank manager. But there's nothing at all that suggests that he planned disappearing, that he planned to leave the university and never come back. There are more letters. There's one to a Sunday newspaper, complaining about a cartoon that mocked Derrida the weekend after his death. I smile at that, remembering seeing the cartoon and hoping someone would write in. There's a letter to someone I don't recognize. Molly. There's no surname. It's written in a strange style, the kind of style you'd use to talk to a child. Then I realize it is to a child. It's written to a child—or perhaps a teenager—at a boarding school. Burlem's promising to go and see her soon, and to give her money. What would Burlem be doing with a schoolgirl? My mind fills with unpleasant thoughts.

  Then I open the file of the novel again. The kid in the book is called Polly.

  I read the letter again. This is Burlem's daughter; of course it is. Shit. He never mentioned this to me. I just thought he was an unmarried—or, I guess, possibly divorced—guy in his fifties. I didn't know that he had a troubled past, although I should have realized. He certainly always looked like a man with a troubled past.

  There's no address on the letter apart from Burlem's. But now I find other letters—a whole list of them below the ones to the bank manager—that make sense. They are all to a Dr. Mitchell and are on subjects such as fees, bullying, and extra tuition. Then I look at the bank manager letters and find instructions to set up a direct debit to a school in Hertfordshire. The reference is Molly Davies. Now I get it. Burlem's paying for his daughter to go to boarding school. There's an address on these letters. The address of the school.

  My mind's buzzing. Could I get to Burlem through her?

  Now I need to go back into the Troposphere. I need to find Apollo Smintheus.

  When I get there I realize that the town square has more than four corners. The same castles are standing around with the same neon pink signs, still looking like impossibilities. The owl hoots again.

  "Apollo Smintheus?" I say.

  Nothing.

  I call up the console.

  You have no choices, it says.

  "Can I still use the Apollo Smintheus card?" I ask it.

  The Apollo Smintheus card has expired.

  Fuck. I thought he said I'd have it for a couple of days.

  I wander around the square but everything really is shut. There's a road leading out of the square and I take it. With each step I think of Apollo Smintheus's "rough calculation," that each unit of distance/ time in the Troposphere is worth 1.6 in the "real" world. So wh
at is a footstep? How much time does this take me? If I take a hundred steps, and it takes me, say, two minutes, when will I wake up in the priory? How far would I have to go to miss breakfast? How far would I have to go to be pronounced dead? I walk on, past a couple of car parks and a jazz club. On the other side of the road there's a run-down strip club with black oily streaks down its white façade, as if it recently caught fire. Neither of these places has a name, but the strip club has silhouettes of girls on poles, and the jazz club has a picture of a saxophone. The jazz club is on a corner, and there are concrete steps leading down towards an alleyway, at the end of which is a cinema and another car park. None of these buildings seems to be closed. There are no pink neon signs here. Without really thinking about it, I enter the jazz club. But there's no music and no smoke.

  You now have one choice.

  You ... I'm cold and I need to take a shit. But it looks like we're going to sit here all night. Ed's got the heat on full but my feet are still like blocks. There's snow on the ground outside and the wind's picked up, too. The sign on the church across the street rattles back and forth. Who is Our Lady of Carmel? The word makes me think of caramel; a lady made out of caramel or something. The car smells of coffee and junk food. There are sandwich wrappers all over the floor. I kick one of them and it makes a thin, plastic, broken noise.

  "What's that?" says Ed.

  "Sandwich wrapper," I say. "Sorry."

  Ed says nothing. His eyes are pure pupil.

  "Maybe she isn't in there," I say.