"Look, the priest knows about the churches and she's screwing him, right?"
"Yeah, but..."
"And he 'comes here when things go wrong.' Why wouldn't he ask her to come, too? They'll know that as long as they stay in there we can't do anything. Maybe she knows, anyway. Who knows how long she's had the book? She could have been surfing MindSpace for years."
"I say the book's on its way to Leeds."
"Where is Leeds, anyway?"
I shrug. "Northwest? It's not close to here."
"Shit."
"We'll get the book."
"We didn't get it last time."
"We'll get it."
I'm ... Oh fuck. I'm in the mind of one of the blond men. Martin. Martin Rose. OK, Ariel. Don't let him know you're here. But how do you tiptoe around in someone's mind. Shhh. Do I stay or do I go? Console? The thing appears like a slide transparency and now, as I/ Martin look over at Ed, his face is busy with an overlay of images. Someone's baking something. Someone else is driving on a freeway. Another person is looking up at a blue sky. What are these images? I remember Apollo Smintheus's document:
You achieve Pedesis via proximity in
Geography (in the world)
Tropography (in the Troposphere)
Ancestry (in the mind)
OK. So if you get close to someone in the world you can get into their mind (but surely only via the Troposphere?) This kind of makes sense. These guys are right outside the priory, and I had to walk down a street to find them. I don't understand what Tropography might be. But Ancestry. Is that what I'm seeing now? Are these images something to do with Martin's parents and grandparents? There are only three of them. That's not much ancestry. In the mouse's mind there were hundreds of images. Come on, Ariel. Think ... But I don't want to think too loudly in case I alert Martin to the fact that I'm here. I am almost intrigued enough to try one of the images in the console to see what will happen, but something tells me that this would be a big mistake. When I last did this, with the mice, I managed to jump from the cupboard under my sink to the backyard. Who knows where I'd end up if I jumped here. Maybe somewhere in America. How would that translate in the Troposphere?
"Ed?"
"What?"
"If she just stays put in there there's not much we can really do."
"Right."
"Does she know that?"
Ed shrugs. (There's been a doorway hovering faintly over him the whole time, but now I can see another image in the console. It's an image of the interior of a car and a blond man.... It's me. It's Martin. So I could choose to be Ed now? Is that right? Shall I jump? Shall I do it? No. Stay safe.)
"We could burn it down," I say, not really meaning it. I didn't come here to burn down churches—or shoot priests. We've been given a second chance to take the book and OK, we've gotten a little crazy. But on the other hand we don't have much formula left and so this whole thing feels urgent. Our CIA cards will only get us so far; especially if someone chose to actually call the number and speak to our ex-boss. What would he say? No, haven't seen those boys since they joined Project Starlight. Haven't seen them since I signed the form re-leasing them from their duties. CIA? Not anymore.
"That's not a terrible idea," says Ed. "At least we'd warm up."
"It is a terrible idea. Forget I ever said it."
"Why? Smoke them out. It's a great idea."
I look out through the windshield. I'm thinking that I have a problem with shooting priests, but I could hurt her: Ariel Manto. I guess she'll be expecting it. That makes it easier. The first time it wasn't so easy: I remember vomiting into the toilet in some pale blue diner out West. I held on to the bowl and there was blood on it afterwards; blood from my hands. The next person I killed was a piece of scum anyway and was expecting it. That made me realize that there's the possibility of impersonality in doing these things, and after that I found I could do it without really being there. As though you're there but you're not there. You have a haze in your mind and afterwards you just wipe it. Then again, all this time in MindSpace makes you empathize with people more. But still, we need to get rid of the people who know the secret—once we know the secret ourselves. I kick the sandwich container again and Ed glares at me. Every so often the wipers go off and more snow accumulates in these minidrifts on the edges of the windshield. On the right, just in front of us, there's the priory: the little red-brick building. Could I get out of the car and set it alight? How do you set fire to something? Isn't it hard, especially in the snow? We'd need gas to do it, and some kind of kindling, and a lighter.
"I don't think it's that easy to set fire to a place," I say.
"So how in God's name are we going to get them out?"
"I don't know."
A long pause.
"I'm cold."
"So am I."
***
So how do I go into Martin's memories? That's what I want to know. The console's still there, and I recognize the "button" for Quit. I switch off the console, just by thinking it closed. Now I'm just sitting there in Martin's presence, haunting him without him knowing anything about it. I can't let him know I'm here. But I want his memories. I want to know what he knows. Mr. Y did it in the book, so I should be able to do it, too, now that fiction has become truth and my world is so closely connected to the world of the book.
Childhood! I think, experimentally. I try to give it the kind of jaunty, authoritative exclamation mark I give when I think Console! Nothing happens. I try to merge a little more with Martin. I feel what he feels. I stop trying to be me at the same time as I am him. I focus on all the shit in my gut, and how I'm not even sure if I want the formula as much as I want to be in a clean, air-freshened bathroom, with my bare feet on a cream shag-pile carpet, taking a dump, clearing all the waste from my system. I try it again. Childhood! And suddenly there it is: an image of a plastic toy; this thing that changes from a robot into a car and then back again. Project Starlight! I think...
Now I'm in a white room with electrodes on my head and chest. This is weird. This is different from the early parts of the study, where I had to hold pictures of triangles, circles, and squares and try to transmit them to Ed in another room. This feels more like the remote viewing experiment—not that I was any good at that. Other guys were travelling to Iraq in their minds and drawing out pictures of weapons dumps and biotech factories, deep underground. I couldn't find any of that shit when I went to Iraq in my mind. A couple of camels: They said I imagined them. But this is something completely different. They've given me some formula from a clear test tube, and now they've plugged me into this machine. I'm sitting on something that looks like an electric chair crossed with a dentist's chair. But ... Then I'm in another world.
When I come out and finish filling in the questionnaire, they tell me I've been to a place called MindSpace. I'm like, What the hell is MindSpace? No one wants to tell me. But pretty soon I'm running errands for them; taking trips to Iraq but not looking for weapons this time. Not that there are any to find—not according to Ash, the guy in charge of that part of the program. I remember he once said to me that the skill of remote viewing is twofold: 1) find what's there and 2) find whatever they tell you to find. So I don't look for weapons in Iraq. I read people's minds. No one lets me go close to Saddam, though. I'm not good enough for that. Plus, my security clearance is a little uncertain. After all, Ed and I were recommended for this after things got out of hand in New Orleans and we shot right to the top of the transfer list. And a transfer into a wacky paranormal project? There's no better way to relieve yourself of a couple of crooked agents. Anyway, once the project was in full swing, my missions involved people much farther down the pack of cards than Saddam. Two of Diamonds; Three of Spades. I'd go out there, come back, and then some guy would come in from the military to question me. That became my job. Ed and I joked that we should get new titles: Mind Agents—something like that.
The skill of operating in MindSpace is to be able to plan your journeys. That gave me pleasur
e; knowing that I could find the most efficient way of getting to Iraq and then back home, without having to navigate the whole of goddamn MindSpace to do it. Of course, this was a classified project, so no one told me anything about what I was doing, or how it worked. But it's a real thrill, surfing on minds: riding memories out to oblivion and then coming back. I wish I could have told my friends—but once you're on one of these projects you can forget about even talking to your mother anymore. Ed's more into the philosophical side than me; I think that's fair to say. And I guess I had my own questions about reality, dreams, the past, the future. But mostly we didn't dwell on that. We talked about pussy, mainly. Yeah—like the time I was in some lady's head, on a plane to Baghdad (it's kind of weird that you're given this power to travel around the whole world in people's minds and you still find that the most efficient way to go is on an airplane) and she suddenly went off to the lavatory and pleasured herself. At first I always chose to be women whenever I could, although after a time it stopped being so appealing. One time I had breast cancer, and I knew I was going to die. That was a headfuck. Another time I was in this reporter's head supposedly getting information on the gang who'd kidnapped her. I ended up getting raped by three of the men. Most times I'd come out of the trance and tell Ed about my latest tits-and-ass escapade. But it started getting old and in the end I just used men to surf through, and I just pretended to Ed that I'd stroked my own pussy, or done myself with a dildo or whatever. Maybe he was doing the same thing by then. Who knows?
I think the project was actually working when they brought in the KIDS. It would have carried on and who knows where we could have ended up. Although, to be honest, I'm sure it's still running somewhere, in someone's mind. Enough people must have known the formula when they told us we'd been decommissioned. But the KIDS were a bad idea (the acronym stands for Karmic Interface Delineation System but it's generally regarded as a load of crap and just an excuse for a neat acronym that spells "kids"). It all started when the head of the study put his semi-autistic kid into MindSpace. This kid was seven years old and he got in there way faster than most of us. Then they found out that this kid could stop a chimp eating an ice cream just by willing it. Then they did more studies on more autistic kids. They borrowed a few of them from the NSA—took them off the prime numbers study. It turns out that these kids can influence people's thoughts. They can actually change things. So then they got in a whole bunch of these kids and hooked us all up: one adult operative and one of the KIDS working together. The way it worked was pretty simple. First the kid got into your mind. Then you went into MindSpace. Wherever you went, the kid went, too. But the kid could actually manipulate reality or, at least, he could change people's minds. If no minds needed changing, the kid could do other things as well, such as retrieve your lost memories. All you had to do was look at a document once and it was recorded in your mind. OK—so not many people can retrieve documents from their minds like that, even after they've read them two or three times. But these kids could read them to you as if your mind was just an autocue.
We took our KIDS when we left. No one knew they'd stayed with us. They're dead, of course. All the KIDS are dead. That's why the project was decommissioned. Any project that kills a hundred children can't go on, either with government funding or without it. The KIDS simply stayed in MindSpace too long. No one thought it could kill you if you got lost in it. No one knew how to wake the poor little bastards up.
And now we have only one bottle of formula left from the twenty we took from the storeroom when we went. And what can I say? Surfing in MindSpace is something you just can't stop doing. So we need the recipe and the recipe's in the book. Of course, we don't just want it for ourselves. Can you imagine how much money there is in this? If we had the recipe we could sell it for thousands of times the amount they're planning on charging businessmen to fly to the moon. This is the only time I've ever been close to anything of any value. I have to get the book. I have to get the book....
I ... Actually, I have to take a dump. The urgency is like a voice in my head.
"Ed?"
"Yeah."
"I have to take a dump, man."
"For Christ's sake. Can't you hold on?"
"I've been holding on for a couple of hours and I really think I'm going to shit my pants. And how long are we planning to stay here, anyway? It's almost three A.M."
"Jesus Christ." Ed's hands are on the steering wheel even though we haven't been driving for hours. Now he moves it back and forth as if something is happening; as if we aren't just sitting here. The steering locks and he curses. "Fuck. Jesus."
"Sorry, but you know ... We could wait here forever and she might never come out."
Ed hunches his shoulders forward. "If she's in there."
"Yeah. If she's in there. I still think maybe Leeds."
"We can't lose the book."
"I know. I want it as much as you do."
Ed rubs his face. "OK. New plan."
My breath's coming out all ragged, like a shredded ghost. "Go on."
"How about we leave here now? Go get some sleep. But we'll give it to the KIDS as a mission. We'll send them to trail her."
I almost ask him how exactly he sees that working but I need him to agree to give this up now, so I just say, "OK." I think of the pale shag carpet in my imagination and the real chipped linoleum at the motel. Either way we have to go. I have to go. Something sure is insisting that I leave here now.
Part Three
In its factical Being, any Dasein is as it already was, and it is "what" it already was. It is its past, whether explicitly or not. And this is so not only in that its past is, as it were, pushing itself along "behind" it, and that Dasein possesses what is past as a property which is still present-at-hand and which sometimes has after-effects upon it: Dasein "is" its past in the way of its own Being, which, to put it roughly, "historizes" out of its future on each occasion.
Heidegger, Being and Time
A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle and an end. A beginning is that which itself does not follow necessarily from anything else, but some second thing naturally exists or occurs after it. Conversely, an end is that which does itself naturally follow from something else, either necessarily or in general, but there is nothing else after it. A middle is that which itself comes after something else, and some other thing comes after it.
Aristotle, Poetics
Chapter Nineteen
So how long have I got? Not long enough. I get dressed and fold up the priory nightdress and leave it on the bed. Oh well, I knew I wouldn't be able to stay in that costume for long. Of course, I don't want to go anywhere. I want to stay here in my brown dressing gown and eat hot food cooked by religious people. I want to see Adam again. But they know I'm here. They'll send those KIDS here first of all. Can they go into religious places? I don't know. But if those guys got desperate enough ... I just don't understand the system well enough to know what they would or would not do. I just have to go somewhere they wouldn't think of looking for me. I have to go where Burlem is. Wherever it is, he's been hiding out there for over a year now.
Unless he's dead, like those poor kids. But I'll have to take the chance that he's not. And there's a problem. I don't know what to do with the book. Once I am ready to leave, I take it out of my bag and touch it, perhaps for the last time. I can't take it with me: There's too good a chance that they'll catch up with me. No. This place; this is where they can't go. So I'll leave it here, and maybe one day I'll come back for it.
Can I actually do this?
I run my pale hand over the cream cloth cover. I can't take it with me.
But what if someone finds it?
I look again at the small bookcase. There's even dust on the silver key. No one reads these books. They are there for show. I remember some English lit. joke someone told me once about why it's so easy to be a theology student specializing in any Old- or New-Testament faith. I don't remember the whole joke, but I remember the p
unch line: Because they have to read only one book. I'm not sure it's true, but it got a laugh from us all in the bar. So, do I take my chances and leave The End of Mr. Y here with the pope's poetry? I don't see what else I can do. I don't even know if I'm still going to be alive tomorrow. With my heart hammering like a heavy piece of machinery, I unlock the case and put the book inside. You really wouldn't notice it in there. I shut the glass front. Then I lock it. Shall I take the key with me? No, they'll find it when they strip me down, after I am dead. I'll leave the key here. But where? There's nowhere else in this room to hide anything. Knowing I have to go, I just slip it under the bookcase in the end. It's not ideal, but it'll do for now.
When I get outside, the black car has gone. The freezing air scrapes my face like a thousand knives. It's almost dawn and I want to be in bed, in the warm. What the hell am I going to do now? I'm going to drive far away before those fuckers realize I've gone. I'm going to go and find Burlem and work out how I can stop these KIDS from messing with my brain. And ... Am I now so lost in a fantasy that I don't understand what's going on anymore, or is it possible that I made the blond men leave? That's what I was trying to do. I just focused on Martin, and his horrible, clenched feeling, and I told him he had to leave and find a toilet. Is it that simple? So why can't they do that? Is it just the KIDS who are supposed to be able to do that? So why can I do it, too?
Apollo Smintheus. Why did you desert me?
There's a part of the A2, just around Medway, where it looks as if you're driving into the sky. Most roads in Britain seem to be designed on the principle that they should be enclosed by something: hedges; fields; houses. But this road sweeps through the landscape like the broad stroke of an eraser tool on a computer, as if the pixel size has been set too high and too much has been rubbed out. It's pale gray and four lanes wide. The sky is still black and everything that isn't road or sky is covered with snow that glows in all the artificial white lights. For the second time this week I feel as though I'm living in a black-and-white photocopy. It's six A.M., and, apart from two gritter trucks, I'm on my own out here, driving towards Burlem's daughter's school, not knowing what I'm going to do when I get there. I need to try to find Apollo Smintheus as well. I have so many questions.
The End of Mr. Y Page 26
