The End of Mr. Y

by Scarlett Thomas

  Then a couple of weeks later, or maybe a bit more: an e-mail from Lura. She is/was a scientist. She was at the same university as Lahiri. But she'd seen the title of my paper and been intrigued. She enjoyed it. She wanted to meet me.

  And I was thinking: Two chances of sex in a month?

  And then realizing that as usual one of them is (potentially) a student and the other is too old.

  Or: I'm too old. That's the main thing. And I know that they can't really want me; not now. Although Dani did. Bland Dani wanted me. That was the last time: me, shirtless, with my gray chest hair shining awkwardly under the fluorescent office lights, and Bland Dani, the weakest of all the MA students, saying, "I want to see you," with her dull eyes pointing at my trousers. Of course, when she said "you" she meant my cock. Why is it that women do that? I want you inside me. No. You just want my cock, and you may as well ignore the large lump of flesh attached to it, the man who has a brain that will never be "inside you," and that you'll never understand. It was supposed to be a tutorial. I suggested blindfolding her, not because it turns me on but because I didn't want her to see me. It ended badly, of course. What's wrong with not seeing? Then it's all in the mind, and perhaps not even against the university regulations. But she threatened to report me anyway when I (literally) stopped seeing her. I didn't even desire her: She looked like a slab of melting butter.

  I arranged to meet Lura at a café in a gallery in London. What she said almost floored me. She owned a copy of The End of Mr. Y; perhaps the only known copy: the one in Germany. That's actually why she'd come to hear my paper. The book had been her father's. He had been one of the first scientists involved in the theory of quantum mechanics, she explained. She clearly didn't want to talk about him very much, but she outlined the basics: that he had been a contemporary of Erwin Schrödinger and Nils Bohr, but had refused to follow many European Jewish physicists to America to work on the atom bomb and other, similarly diabolical projects. Instead he stayed in his university and continued constructing his earth-shattering theory—details of which are now lost. The week before he was sent to the concentration camp he had written a note in his diary about The End of Mr Y. He was very excited to have ordered it from London and believed it to be one of very few remaining copies. One of his last diary entries talked about the possible "Curse of Mr. Y." Lura had been shocked, she said—but also intrigued—to see the title of my paper. She said she hadn't ever come across that phrase before except in her father's diary.

  She explained all this to me without changing her facial expression once. But she kept running her hand through her hair, and pausing for a long time between parts of the story. Then, when our coffees arrived, she gave up on the hair and started on the handle of the cup, moving it back and forth and pushing her thin finger through the hole.

  "So that's it," she said. "I thought you'd like to know some of the history of the book; or, at least, that particular copy."

  "I'm very grateful," I said. "Thank you so much for taking the time to come and meet me."

  Her eyes looked as though she was going to smile but she didn't.

  "The book was important to my father," she said.

  I didn't know what to say to that, so I simply asked, "Have you read it?"

  "No." She shook her head. "But I know it's important—after all, people keep trying to buy it from me."

  "But you won't sell?"

  "No."

  "Why not?"

  She sighed. "Much as I hate that book, I can't sell it. I haven't sold any of my father's books. Plus I don't particularly like the people who are trying to buy it. They've become a little threatening lately. But they can't do anything about a book in a bank vault. Perhaps they're planning a heist?" Now she did smile. "Well, I shouldn't think they'll have much luck."

  "Who are they?"

  She shrugged, and sipped from her café crème. "Americans." There was a long pause. "Well," she said. "I expect you'd like to see it, wouldn't you?"

  "Really?" I must have sounded like a little boy excited over someone else's collection of rare comics. But I couldn't stop myself. "I mean..."

  "Of course. It will be of some intellectual value to you. I can see that. My father would have approved, and I think that's a good enough reason."

  "Has anyone else seen it?"

  "No. I've looked at it briefly, but I couldn't touch it..."

  "Why not?"

  She looked at the table. There was a minute speck of demerara sugar by her saucer and she squashed it with her finger. Then she looked up at me again and laughed weakly.

  "Family superstition?" Her laugh shrank into a sigh. "I'm a scientist and of course I know that Hitler killed my father, not some cursed book. But even so ... It was the day after he received it that they got him. The last thing he did as a free man was to put that book in a bank vault."

  We talked a little more, and she explained that she was going out to Germany the following month and invited me for a long weekend. Of course I wanted to go: to see the book, to touch the book. But I made some polite objections—would she want all those memories brought up again? Would she want some stranger intruding on her family business, etc., etc.—and she politely rebuffed them all as I'd known she would. So I went. It was the first week of term and I welcomed getting away from all the admin and e-mails and meetings for a few days. I tend to work when I'm at home, and I am terrible at taking holidays. We spent the Thursday evening watching an absurd play, and then we went to the bank vault on the Friday. It was supposed to be summer, but the air was gray and damp, and everything around me seemed as though it was being slowly smothered by everything else. When I had the book in my hands she looked at the floor and almost immediately said, "I want you to take it. Take it away from here."

  "You're selling it?" I said.

  "No," she said. "Just take it away."

  We had a sad kind of sex on the last night I spent with her. There was a mundane inevitability about it, like flu in winter. I didn't think I'd ever see her again. She hated the book and she'd given it to me. I wasn't even sure whether or not she wanted it back. I didn't really understand anything about what was happening, but I didn't question any of it. I needed that book: I wanted it more than I've ever wanted anything.

  Then came the strange events that I wrote off at the time as a kind of self-undermining parapraxis. First I forgot to pack the book; then I forgot to collect my bag from the carousel in the airport. Somehow I did get home without misplacing it. That afternoon I had to attend a university event at the cathedral—but it passed in no time. I sat next to my research student, Ariel Manto, and I think I even managed to flirt with her a little (harmless, harmless). Then I made my excuses and rushed home. I sat there in my ancient conservatory, and, as the sun set and then rose again outside, I finished the book. Afterwards I couldn't sleep, so I drank a vintage bottle of wine and wept several times, just because of the utter beauty of the experience: of holding the book, of being able to read it at last. No one bothered me and all I could hear was birdsong.

  And I immediately resolved to make up the mixture from the book and try going to the Troposphere myself. I did some fast, blurred research, and found out that I could buy some Carbo-Veg in the right potency from a shop in Brighton. I drove there and back that afternoon and, after taking some holy water from St. Thomas's, had my first experience in the Troposphere that night. Most of what I can remember of my first few experiences is a blur. I remember travelling through the tunnel, so familiar to me now, and arriving in what appeared to me to be a nostalgic-postcard version of nineteenth-century London, full of dark slums and fog and abandoned hansom cabs. And I explored, of course, and started understanding some of the rules of this place. I tried Pedesis on the milkman. I attempted—and failed—to enter the mind of the university's vice chancellor.

  I got the first e-mail on the Saturday evening. It seemed to be from a university student at Yale, despite the Yahoo e-mail address, asking me if I would be willing to enter into e-mail
correspondence about The End of Mr. Y. I politely declined. The e-mail was poorly written and my own students take up enough of my time. I thought it was a coincidence that this person had got in touch just as I had obtained the book, but at the time I thought it was genuine. The second e-mail came on the Sunday, at roughly the same time of day.

  Please forgive this intrusion. I am the director of Project Starlight, a significant interdisciplinary study into the activities and potentials of the Human mind. We have been recently studying a method outline in the book The End of Mr. Y. Or, I should say my predecessor was doing this? Since I have taken over this study I am interested in pursuing this study but unfortunately all our systems have gone down and I have lost everything.....including the instructions for making the formula. This also explains why I am using a Hotmail account right now! Our systems will not be running again for another week but I do need that formula ASAP. Since you own a copy of the book I hope you will not mind sparing a few minutes to write it up for us.

  I called Lura on Monday.

  "Project Starlight?" she repeated, after I had explained.

  "Yes."

  "They're the people who offered to buy the book from me."

  "Do you know anything about them?"

  She paused. "Well, I did check them out."

  "And?"

  "Project Starlight closed almost a year ago. There is no Project Starlight anymore."

  "What is—or was—it?"

  Now she sighed. "It was a highly classified American project. I found out about it through a friend of a friend—a physicist at MIT. He had only heard rumors about the project—that it had started as a simple telepathy study and then mutated into something else. He mentioned a highly secretive desert facility, remote viewing, staring at goats, and the quest for the 'ultimate weapon.' He said he'd heard that something catastrophic had caused the study to close down, and warned me not to get involved in asking any questions about it. It certainly sounded sinister."

  "So if the project is closed, why are people going around saying they're a part of it?"

  "I don't know. I think I already said that they soon became threatening."

  "And how do they know I have the book?" I didn't ask if she'd told them.

  "I don't know," she said.

  I paused. "Do you think they are actually dangerous?"

  "I really have no idea. Do you know why they want the book? I assume you've read it by now?"

  "Yes. I've read it."

  "And...?"

  "I have no idea why they'd want it."

  Why was I lying? Of course I knew they wanted the formula, and I also knew why: because it worked. All I could conjecture was that these people were some kind of breakaway group who had been given the formula but never knew what it contained. And I was already familiar with the sensation of needing to go back into the Troposphere. Imagine needing it and not being able to go there? I imagined something of what a drug addict might feel.

  "Well," she said.

  "Lura, I really think..."

  "What?"

  "I think I should return the book to you now. I think it should go back in the bank vault where they can't get it."

  "But if there's nothing in it that they'd find useful...?"

  "I think it should go back," I said.

  After our conversation finished, I walked into the conservatory and looked at my own reflection in the glass. It was dark outside and I could only see a couple of stars, hanging in the sky like a halfhearted attempt at decoration. An American classified study. Goat staring. The ultimate weapon. That sounded military to me. I walked back into the house and picked up the book. Of course I would send it back to Lura; I'd do it tomorrow. But I also knew that the men from Project Starlight—or people like them—would get it in the end. And then what would happen? My mind filled with unpleasant thoughts of world domination and thought-control. If a repressive regime—or any regime—got hold of this mixture then ... What? I found I could imagine exactly what such an "ultimate weapon" would look like. I sent back an e-mail to the Hotmail address given my the last correspondent saying that although I had seen the book, it was already on its way back to its owner in Germany. I apologized and assured him that he must be mistaken: There was no recipe in the book. And I put it on the table, ready to go.

  But I didn't really want to post it. What if it got lost? Damaged? On the other hand, I had no time to go to London to meet Lura to hand it over in person until the weekend. And would she even want to see it? Perhaps she'd suggest sending it straight to the bank and asking them to put it in the vault. There were too many possibilities and I'd had no more e-mails. I did nothing. I spent the Tuesday and Wednesday in meetings, including Max Truman's annual Health and Safety presentation—compulsory; although Ariel Manto simply didn't go. I've always quite enjoyed Max's eccentric annual presentations. This one was entitled "When Things Go Wrong." It was a tongue-in-cheek history of the old railway tunnel under campus, ending with a dramatic account of its collapse in 1974. Max had obtained lots of PowerPoint slides of gruesome images of the Newton Building crumbling and people running around looking confused. He made various connections between the collapse of the university and the collapse of student-staff relations in the mid-'70s. While the tunnel was collapsing, he said, some demonstrating students had stormed the Registry and were busy drinking the vice chancellor's port. We learned that our own building had been constructed in 1975—right over the newly reinforced tunnel. Max told us that there was still a maintenance route into the tunnel from our building. We needed to know this, he said, so we could take the necessary precautions. At this point Mary asked what the necessary precautions would be.

  "Just don't fall into it," said Max.

  "How would we fall into it?" she said.

  "Well, you can't," he said. "But new Health and Safety advice says I have to warn you about it, anyway."

  "But it's been there for almost thirty years," said someone else. "And no one's fallen into it yet..."

  "Where is it?" asked Mary.

  "Photocopying room," said Max. "Next to the machine."

  "You mean that sort of hatch thing that we all stand on every time we do any photocopying?" said Lisa Hobbes.

  "Yep."

  "So we could actually fall into it?"

  "No, don't be daft. This isn't Alice in bloody Wonderland. It's well secured."

  "What's it like in the tunnel?" asked Laura, the creative writing tutor.

  "Don't even think about it, Laura," said Mary.

  "What?" she said. "I think we should go down there and investigate."

  Everyone groaned.

  "OK, OK. I'm only joking."

  Laura had been in trouble the previous year for sending all her students on some kind of psychogeographical project in which they'd had to use maps of Berlin in order to walk around the city center. Three of them had ended up walking along the motorway and were arrested.

  While the questions and answers continued, I simply sat there thinking about the Troposphere. I thought I already had a fairly good idea of how it worked. In fact, I hadn't got too much sleep in the preceding few days because of it, and while the others kept on talking about the railway tunnel and whether or not Laura was going to lead a search party down the hatch, my eyes started to close. I dreamed of a world in which everyone had access to everyone else's minds, until some government recruited men in deep blue uniforms to go around and brainwash everyone so they didn't know how to do it anymore. When I woke up, everyone had gone. It was a good thing: I'd been sweating in my sleep and my shirt was almost wet through. Even though I was on my own, I had a profound sense of being watched. I knew I had to give the book back to Lura, so I went straight home to ring her to arrange it for the weekend. As I drove through the heavy rush-hour traffic I wondered if it might be better to burn the book altogether, or at least destroy the page with the recipe on it.

  But I am a professor of English literature. I couldn't destroy a book if my life depended on it. At l
east, that's what I thought then.

  I got the last parking space on my street and walked the last twenty yards to my house. Then I went inside and considered what I had to do. I had it all planned out by then. My idea was that I'd remove the page with the instructions on it—but I certainly wasn't going to destroy it. I planned to keep it or hide it....I wasn't sure quite what I was going to do with it. Perhaps it was clear to me that I would have to destroy it at some point, but for then I thought removing it would be enough. I'd remove the page, give the book back to Lura, and then feign ignorance if she ever asked me about it.

  It was at exactly the moment that I had opened the book to the correct page that I saw the car headlights sweep up outside. Then I heard the steady throb of a diesel engine, and I simply assumed someone had called a taxi. But I was jumpy and noticing everything, so I went to the window to look, still holding the book in my hands. And then I saw them: the two blond men I'd last seen when I gave my paper in Greenwich. They were trying to find somewhere to park in my street.

  They wanted the book. It was them.

  And worse: One of them was driving—looking for somewhere to park—but the other one? Well, he seemed to be asleep.

  I couldn't think quickly enough. If one of them was in the Troposphere, then he was one or two jumps away from my mind and everything I knew about The End of Mr. Y. I looked at the book and quickly ripped the page from it. My thoughts almost collapsed then, but what I did next took on the clarity and focus of a bullet-point list. I had to leave the book behind but I'd take the page with me. By the time I'd decided that, I'd already folded up the page and put it in my shoe. By the time I'd done that I realized I had to get away before the men either came in here and beat me up or—worse—jumped into my mind and took my knowledge, anyway. They were still trying to park. I hid the book behind the piano; then I grabbed my coat, wallet, and keys and left via the back door. Over the neighbors' fence, through their garden, down their driveway, and into my car. I thought I was going to have a heart attack. The conscious man didn't even look over when the car door slammed. I imagined a car chase, but no one looked at me as I drove past. And I drove—faster than I've ever driven—to the university. My thoughts were racing ahead of me at a speed I've never experienced before. And in the jumble of strategy, fear, and conjecture, one thought stood out. I realized that I would be the target of those men for as long as I had my memories. It wouldn't matter if I destroyed The End of Mr. Y. It wouldn't matter if I shredded the page concealed in my shoe. If they could get into my mind, they could get the instructions for making the mixture, just as Mr. Y had learnt the secrets of Will Hardy's Ghost Show. It would be as simple as that. They couldn't get it from Lura, who hadn't read the book. But as long as I remained alive and sane, they could get it from me.